With a little help from Amazon, I stumbled upon a series of books about yoga published simultaneously in Nashville, Tennessee, and London, England, of all places. The series is a creature of our age, as is its website (www.advancedyogapractices.com). The author is a certain Yogani, a shadowy American yogi concerned with the dissemination of knowledge about yoga assembled since time immemorial by yogis all over the world. The pseudonym is thus all-inclusive. Each book in the series is prefaced with the same words. It is an experiment to see how much about yoga can be conveyed in writing: “Can books provide us the specific means necessary to tread the path to enlightenment, or do we have to surrender at the feet of a guru to find our salvation?” This is an experiment quite to my liking. More, it is very much my own. Now that I have ordered the whole series from Amazon, I am a most willing guinea pig, as well. Yogani, I surrender at your feet here and now!

Addendum (July 18, 2015)

More than eight years later, I still feel no less than fortunate about my unexpected discovery. I am at Yogani’s feet to this day. Although I now rarely consult any of the books from his series, which has grown considerably in the meanwhile, they are always by my side. As I write, the whole series is within my reach. In other words, the experiment is still on. Which is why Yogani is among the few included in my recipe for foolproof subversion that has been at the center of my attention the last couple of years (“A Recipe for Foolproof Subversion,” May 14, 2013). Yoga is very much a part of it. Even more, it is central to it, for it provides the spiritual backbone to the recipe. As years go by, I am ever more convinced that yoga has been subversive since its inception more than a couple of millennia ago. What we call civilization has always needed an escape hatch for the select few. And what better escape hatch than the path to enlightenment?!