Free Hell-Bent by Benjamin Lorr Page A

several-century migration down from Russia, navigating their oxen-drawn carts over the foothills of the Himalayas into the Indian subcontinent. Most of what we know about them comes from their early religious texts, the Vedas. The earliest of these, the Rig Veda (circa 1500 B.C.E.), depicts a yoga largely practiced by warriors either prior to charging off into battle (as they hitched up horses to their chariots), or more metaphorically, at death (when driving the horses on a holy chariot “upward through the barrier of the sun”).
    This emphasis on the practical yoke behind our esoteric yoga is not to belittle it. The ability to control a horse, an animal then only a few generations away from wild, was a radical technological advance. To practice yoga was an act that invoked the snort and bristle of breaking an animal, as well as dominance over a powerful other. When the wagoneering proto-Sanskrit invaders rolled into the Indus Valley, they confronted a civilization more advanced than anything they had encountered before. The people of the Indus Valley were urbanites: They lived in dense cities; they appreciated sculpture; they cleaned themselves using an aquaduct-driven bathing system of a sophistication that wouldn’t resurface until the Romans. But they had no horses, they had no chariots, and they had no agricultural draft. And thus as the proto-yogi, master of his vehicle, lord of his chariot, rolled into town, it was with reverence, terror, and respect that they greeted his arrival.
    In the same way the neuroscientific sages of our day draw on the language of the computer to describe their findings, the ancient philosophers borrowed from the radical new technology of their day, the yokeand chariot. The yuj/yoga/yoke conglomeration appears often in their writings in a wide variety of allusions: the connection between words in a couplet, the link between a visionary thinker and his vision, a union at death with the divine. At the same time these images were creeping into scripture, the merger between the Sanskrit and Indus Valley civilizations initiated a metaphysical renaissance. The primordial verses of the Vedas were reinterpreted, their stories translated into teachings or Upanishads that began to systematically address the major stargazing themes that make up man’s quest for knowledge. The limits of the universe. The nature of perception. The origins of life. And most obsessively, the fabric of ultimate reality.
    While contemplative meditative states have probably been around as long as humans have been taking idle walks, the Upanishads began detailing techniques for inducing and cultivating this awareness. When practiced, these techniques—such as breath control, appetite control, and sustained focus on objects, ideas, and vibratory sounds—allowed a person to strengthen control of their mind, in ambition, not unlike the crossword puzzling of today’s seniors. The Upanishadic philosophers believed that acquiring a heightened mental focus was a necessary first step to accurately contemplating the larger questions of existence.
    Exactly how and when these practices became linked with a system of thought called yoga is currently the subject of tens of thousands of pages of academic debate. I wouldn’t dare delve into it even I could. It is the stuff that instantly slams me into the meditative state of a nap. However, what pretty much everyone can agree upon is that over the course of approximately one thousand years—from, say, 1500 to 500 B.C.E.—these philosophic ideas evolved while the imagery coalesced. Until, finally , during a discussion on the possibility of immortality, a text known as the Katha Upanishad bursts forth with the first mention of yoga as a spiritual discipline.
    In the Katha Upanishad, a young boy asks the Lord of Death, Yama, the type of innocent question that only young boys can ask Lords of Death:What happens to people when they die? Instead of answering directly, the god decides that