For Eliade, classical Yoga was a “living fossil, a modality of archaic spirituality that has survived nowhere else.”[1] Integral to that spirituality was an ancient form of psychoanalysis and a thoroughgoing investigation into the rôle of the subconscious. This theme, which we see in the title of Eliade’s dissertation, is one that he returned to repeatedly in his writing on Yoga.[2] Yoga was a path of self-analysis, but one whose goals transcended those of psychoanalysis inasmuch as it led not only to an understanding of the contents of the unconscious mind, but also to the mastery over them, and ultimately to their destruction.

This was samadhi.

From David Gordon White’s The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali: A Biography, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014, pp. 188-189.

Footnotes

1. Eliade, M., Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, translated by Willard R. Trask, New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1958, p. 361.

2. Eliade, M., “The Psychology of Indian Meditation,” Doctoral Dissertation, University of Bucharest, 1933.