The book "Yoga: Immortality and Freedom" by Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), a distinguished historian and phenomenologist of religion, has long been a classic in the study of such a fundamental and unique phenomenon as Indian yoga. The author presents yoga as a holistic, multifaceted, and comprehensive spiritual universe, the various elements of which correspond to different cultural levels, states of consciousness, and even strata of traditional society. Eliade traces the origins of yoga among the indigenous, pre-Aryan population of India, focusing primarily on its "pre-classical" and "non-classical" branches, touching on the connection between yoga and shamanism, which is important in the context of his scholarly work, and draws parallels between Indian yoga and the spiritual traditions of other regions of the world. Yoga, a specific school of Hindu philosophy, becomes for him an initiatory space in which the adept, through trials, embraces the values ​​of immortality and freedom and attains the status of jivanmukta—"liberated in life."
For all those interested in the spiritual traditions of India.