It is impossible to disregard one of India’s greatest discoveries: that of consciousness as a witness, of consciousness freed from its psychophysiological structures and their temporal conditioning, the consciousness of the “liberated” man, of him, that is, who has succeeded in emancipating himself from temporality and thereafter knows the true, inexpressible freedom. The conquest of this absolute freedom, of perfect spontaneity, is the goal of all Indian philosophies and mystical techniques; but it is above all through Yoga, through one of the many forms of Yoga, that India has held that it can be assured.

From Mircea Eliade’s Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009 (first published in 1954), p. xxxiv.