without desire, and Karma Yoga, the yoga of action: acting to carry out
one’s responsibility without attachment to the good or bad results of the
action, thus serving divine will rather than one’s own. Surrender to Î ́svara
may also take the form of Bhakti Yoga, the yoga of devotion, where
union is achieved through love of God. Whether accomplished by the
yoga of action or the yoga of devotion, surrender to God produces disso-
lution of the ‘I’ or asmita ̄ and thus supports sam ̄adhi, enlightened con-
sciousness devoid of the traps of egoism.
Yoga’s prescriptions for reconditioning the body and mind widen
the range of their adaptability, making the practitioner’s body, mind, and
senses less vulnerable to the “pairs of opposites” (e.g., heat and cold, joy
and sorrow) that keep one mired in physicality and separated from one’s
true nature. Crawford notes that matter is not equated with evil in Yoga,
for “both the design and function of prakÓrtiare aimed at the liberation of
puruÓsa.”^39 Yet one of Yoga’s vital concerns is self-understanding in rela-
tion to the material aspects of oneself and the world. The eight limbs of
Yoga map out a progressive journey of subduing one’s subjugation to ma-
teriality and its accompanying physical distractions, mental fragmenta-
tion, and emotional ups and downs. The foundation of Yoga as a reli-
gious therapeutic is a system of ethics that governs relations among
persons, but whose basis is the individual’s mastery of physical and men-
tal dispositions and actions that interfere with stilling the mind.
Physical Practice
The Soteriological Role of Body and Health in Yoga
The soteriological role of the body in Yoga concerns refining, disciplin-
ing, and utilizing the body/mind complex to make it a less obstructive
factor and more suitable instrument for the spirit’s purer expression of
itself.
Spiritual awareness is invariably preceded by physical health and men-
tal hygiene. The latter are the means for the former. So Yoga may be de-
scribed as a science of spiritual healing. Yoga methods are superior to
other methods in so far as they take man in his totality and do not deal
with him superficially.^40Health of the body and non-attachment to physicality are cultivated for
spiritual progress. Practice of Yoga’s ethics, psychophysical disciplines,
and procedures for meditation spontaneously promote health, but health
is a help to spiritual attainment, and is not itself the goal. The physically
112 religious therapeutics