Nirvana in the Context of Yoga

The word “nirvana” must be familiar to every more or less educated person living. It has been assimilated by every language – this is what also happened to the word “guru” (for we have all heard about IT-gurus and marketing-gurus…) - and has just the same way changed its meaning more than once. 

Most probably – in the vein of the afore given ad – a philistine considers nirvana to be a kind of very pleasant state that occurs during one’s doing nothing on a divan-bed, and connotes it to the word keif (by the way another interesting word of Turkish origin worthy of a separate article). Maybe some of the lay audience even have certain associations between the word nirvana and something oriental, for instance yogis that ‘get high’ in lotus pose… Maybe on nails…

To the Origin of the Word “Yoga”

Inspired by watching a nice Indian series about relations between Shiva and Sati.

This article for sure comes as the off-top in this part of the blog, but now I can’t be bothered to find some other place to speak out, thus I will take the liberty of doing this prank.

And so, the word “yoga” is well known to have originated from the verbal root “yuj” meaning “to join / unite”. The only question is – what is this united. There are traditional answers to this question, like: the body is united with the spirit, the “cart of feelings” (the metaphor from Svetasvatara Upanishad and Bhagavad-Gita) is put under control, in the context of hatha yoga they are the parts of bodies, and so on. In general, it all deals with “internal” conjugation. However, I have another one, rather unusual, hypothesis that has occurred to me. The series that I saw yesterday and the image of Shiva spelled out there has reminded me of a theory about shamanistic origin of this image that is obvious to most of culture experts.