PHILOSOPHY AND LONGEVITY

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 94, 15 January 1935, Page 8

PHILOSOPHY AND LONGEVITY

We have it on the authority of two disciples of Yoga who recently passed through Canada that there are in Tibet 260 Yoga philosophers each more than 200 years old. Any philosophy which can thus accomplish what Professor Voronoff has not yet done must be a very remarkable philosophy indeed. And that this should be accomplished in a country like Tibet where the science of health has progressed less than in probably any other country in the woild is still more extraordinary. It is not related how the Yoga discin es verified their observations. Are there such things as birth certificates in Tibet ? To the sceptical West, the more probable explanation of the alleged phenomenon will be that this philosophy, which ca ls tor a “diversion of the senses froth the external world and concentration of thought within,” has made its devotees insensible to such things of time and sense as the mere age of man. For by its practices ai hypnotism and self mortification the Yogi are said to attain miraculous powers and control over Nature itself. , , ir • -i- , The philosophy which has influenced and made Western civilisation cannot claim any like feat in propagating longevity. Aristotle lived to be 62 only, and Socrates about 71; but the world has not yet heard the last of them. Even Epicurus, whose teaching has been associated by the vulgar with the ideal of a short life and a meiry one, reached three score years and eleven, but cannot hope for at least some centuries yet to pass into oblivion. Among modern philosophers Kant reached the comparatively venerable age of 80, and although to the Yogi he would be a mere child, he wrote and taught enough in those years to shake the world ever since. Who would not prefer to be an Aristotle, a Socrates, an Epicurus or a Kant and die young knowing that men for succeeding centuries would hold disputations over his works, than live in oblivion for even 200 years with the philosophers of Yoga?