New paperback edition. A historical and comparative study exploring yoga and yogic meditation in Hindu and Buddhist contexts, incorporating psychological and social aspects of these practices. Sarbacker explores the fascinating, contrasting perceptions that meditation leads to the attainment of divine, or numinous, power, and to complete escape from worldly existence, or cessation. He demonstrates that these two dimensions of spiritual experience have affected the doctrine and cultural significance of yoga from its origins to its contemporary practice.
Speaking to a broad range of methodological and contextual issues, Samadhi provides numerous insights into the theory and practice of yoga that are relevant to both scholars of religious studies and practitioners of contemporary yoga and meditation traditions.
"Sarbacker tackles an immense swath of material and accompanying secondary litearture and manages to do something genuinely creative with it all, that is, develop his own phenomenology of meditative experience via his central categories of the numinous and cessative." Jeffrey J.Kripal.
