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K. C. BHATTACHARYYA
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ligible only as freedom of the will, and this is yoga (1 287). Yoga philosophy reduces the mystical consciousness of spiritual activity to a practical psychology (1 286). Freedom is first known as freedom from evil (1 284), but it is not necessary to begin at the lowest step (1 306). The first two steps constitute the ethical and religious setting of the yoga activity (I 309); the next three are the process of energizing the body as an organ of the spirit; the last three are purely spiritual willing (1 311).108 In religion freedom from the body may come through grace, but in yoga it must be achieved by the will. The outgoing assertive bodily willing is replaced by ingoing retractive bodily willing leading to tranquil posture, equitable vital flow, and the reversal of sense activity (1 289, 312).
Samadhi, the goal of Yoga, is not knowing but "freedom beyond knowledge” (1 304). Conscious awareness of self as free from mind, which is realized by God, is only faith for man (1 322). God is a postulate, not an object, of the yogi's spiritual realization (1 318).109 He is not known or intuited in samadhi (1 320); he is silent, abstaining from revealing himself, as in pralaya, the divine sleep where all things cease (I 324). Neither is samadhi feeling (1 297). Samadhi is the culmination of willing, or rather an alternation of willing and not-willing, where the willing is the negative willing of withdrawal and the notwilling is contemplation110 of the mystery of absolute Freedom or God (1 227). Yoga realizes freedom of the will as an end or good achieved by right, not as an imperative obeyed by grace, and so is nowise religious but supersedes religion (1 288). It also supersedes ethics, beyond good and evil (1 305).111 Relapse from superconscious freedom to knowledge of mind as distinct from self has its full maturation in "the four-fold knowledge of evil, cause of evil, freedom from evil, and means to freedom" (I 304).112 But in the supreme samadhi, where the identity of self and mind is taken not as mind but as self (1 296), reality emerges as the “mystery of absolute freedom"
108 Abstention from vice, practice of virtue, body control, breath control, introversion, concentration, meditation, samadhi.
109 We know that God must exist but not that he does exist (1 320).
110 Not to be confused with intuition. God is "a postulate of the contemplative attitude and not the content of knowledge."
111 It may presuppose a moral and religious discipline, and religious activity may be an alternative procedure, coordinate with Yoga procedure, either leading to samadhi (1 305).
112 The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism. If I interpret this difficult paragraph correctly, it would seem, though the author does not say so, that Buddhism and Yoga propose alternative forms of absolute Freedom.
