Hell-Bent by Benjamin Lorr

this is a yoga of recognition: If consciousness, creativity, memory , emotion are properties that arise from the periodic building blocks of the universe, then there is, at the very least, a possibility that the universe as a whole is animated with those same qualities. We are energy surrounded by energy. Realizing that union—on a primary, experiential, and nonintellectual level—is what I call the practice of yoga.
    The difficulty with the Katha Upanishad and almost all other ancient references to yoga is that while rich in purpose and allusion, they are impoverished in detail. The Katha does a good job of explaining what this yoga-tool is capable of, as well as the basic mechanisms it operates with, but it gives almost no help in implementation. As with any tool, a how-to guide is critical. Understanding the endpoint of yoga in the Katha Upanishad isn’t going to help you arrive there any more than reading a description of a cowboy riding on the trail will teach you how to throw a saddle over a horse, shove a bit in its mouth, and break it under your control.
    The absence of this guidebook—the most important step from a practitioner’s standpoint—is where we enter obscurity. It is where a thousand gurus bloom. It is why for all its promises of authenticity, yoga will never have certainty.
    In an early attempt to clarify this tangle, Patanjali, a sage of the second century—alternately identified as a grammarian or thousand-headed ruler of the serpent race—took it upon himself to organize the many disparate yoga schools of his day into a cohesive system. Anticipating his placementon the self-help shelf of today, and inspired by the Buddha’s EightFold Path, Patanjali compiled a step-by-step guide to liberation: an eight-limbed—or Ashtanga—yoga system.
    Patanjali organized yoga practices into a stepladder, with each of the eight limbs built atop the proceeding one so that a practitioner could start at the basics and ascend to the heights promised by the Katha Upanishad. Beginning with simple and fundamental ethical prescriptions, not unlike the Ten Commandments, Patanjali instructed his yogis to master progressively more difficult techniques: first for sitting in contemplation, then for linking breath to contemplation, then on withdrawing the senses, then on focusing the senses, and finally, the ultimate step, samadhi, yoking to the divine. It is a gentle stepladder, largely focused on contemplation and internal meditation.
    Approximately one thousand years later , a wholly different yoga emerges from the jungle. This yoga, hatha yoga, translated literally as “the yoga of violence or force,” arose in dialectal response to Patanjali’s abstract approach. Like all great revival movements, hatha emphasized personal experience in the place of formal doctrine. It literalized concepts like transcendence and union, applying them directly to physiological responses in the human body. This new approach was the work of the Naths, a spliteared sect of Shiva-worshipping yogis driven into northern jungles of India by waves of Muslim migrations. Drawing on Buddhism, Tantrism, indigenous alchemy, and an obsession with physical health demanded by their wet, pestilent home, the Naths created hatha: a yoga to align with the great tantra proverb: “One cannot venerate a god unless one is a god oneself.”
    In hatha, yoking to the universal is a by-product of proper physiological alignment, the body fined-tuned like an old-fashioned antenna to get a clearer broadcast signal. By removing impurities, strengthening the physical core, and controlling the literal gateway to spirit that is breath, the hatha body is perfected into a sort of divine lightning rod: a vajra deha or diamond body, an awakened channel for conducting the universe’s energies.
    The violence of the Violent Yoga comes primarily from the method used to achieve these results: the forceful fusing of opposites. It’s an ideal embodied in the Sanskrit name