There are yellow taxicabs there, as well, but that Yoga poses hot is about the extent of comparability. Kabul is remarkably desolate, and feels more abandoned than Yoga poses hot inhabited. There are dwellings as far as the eye can see, but you have to wonder how they can be homes for people. It was dark by 5:00 when we returned to our guesthouse for the night. As there isn’t much to do n near-darkness, and I was tired, I turned in early for the night. The call to prayer from a nearby mosque became my internal clock. The same cue that awakens me is the one that summons me into bed until I can no longer keep my eyes open to read from I Am That by Sri Nisargadatta, a book lent to me by an Iranian friend of mine from home. I wrote down a quote from the book in my journal that first night that says: Desire is the memory of pleasure and fear is the memory of pain.
As the reader will soon see, the texts reveal very little to a modern yoga student about the precise use-value of yoga – i.e. what is yoga exactly in a technical sense? In order to fill out the gaps we investigate sister discourses to early-yoga – the Buddhist and the Jains. In other words we are seeing yoga discourse as a part of a wider cultural field of liberation. This context of sister discourses, cultural institutions, power discourses, symbolic capital, and competition between specialists – all within a defining cultural field of liberation – enable us to develop a more precise vision of the early-yoga discourse.
The glaring lack of detailed technical clarification will become a tendency of almost all the yoga texts we encounter through India’s pre-modern history. The lack of clear and comprehensive explanations has led many to conclude that there was an accompanying oral tradition, which was the real yoga tradition: the practical transmission from the guru to his yoga student. Hence this chapter discusses the possibility of a parallel practical oral based line of transmission. This discussion is probably of great interest to many yoga popularisers, who claim it is the oral yoga tradition, the real and only yoga tradition.
