A historic and comparative learn grounded in shut readings of vital works, this publication explores the dynamics of the idea and perform of yoga in Hindu and Buddhist contexts. writer Stuart Ray Sarbacker explores the interesting, contrasting perceptions that meditation ends up in the attainment of divine, or numinous, energy, and to accomplish break out from worldly life, or cessation. Sarbacker demonstrates that those dimensions of religious event have affected the doctrine and cultural value of yoga from its origins to its modern perform. He additionally integrates sociological and mental views on spiritual adventure right into a greater phenomenological version to deal with the multifaceted nature of spiritual adventure. talking to a extensive variety of methodological and contextual matters, Samadhi presents quite a few insights into the speculation and perform of yoga which are proper to either students of non secular stories and practitioners of up to date yoga and meditation traditions.

“Stuart Sarbacker has written a big publication for the learn of yogic and meditative phenomena, considered one of few that advances the dialogue from the place Eliade left off in his personal work.” — Philosophy East & West

“One of the main fruitful points of Sarbacker’s research is his comparability among Classical Yoga and Buddhism, which underscores the yogic roots of Buddhism at the one hand and the Buddhist effect on Classical Yoga at the other.” — conventional Yoga Studies

“Sarbacker tackles a tremendous swath of fabric and accompanying secondary literature and manages to do whatever really inventive with all of it, that's, increase his personal phenomenology of meditative adventure through his critical different types of the numinous and cessative.” — Jeffrey J. Kripal, writer of Roads of extra, Palaces of knowledge: Eroticism and Reflexivity within the research of Mysticism

Stuart Ray Sarbacker is Lecturer in faith at Northwestern University.