Baba Rampuri speaks about the difference between the traditional and the post modern in terms of knowledge, authority, and the yogi.
“Language and the World became disconnected. Language began to express man’s ideas about the world rather than being an articulation of the world itself. A new mapping process began. Words got lost, they no longer marked anything and were condemned to live only on the pages of books, from which they were borrowed to colonize people’s speech.”
“What has become important is identities and differences, no longer resemblances. The consumer age is built on marketing. The age of resemblance has been left behind, and it leaves in its wake, games, whose enchantment grows out of the new kinship between resemblance and illusion, and the distorted memory of an oral tradition in which all the things in the world could be linked indiscriminately to man’s experiences, theatre, or credulities.
The noble, rigorous, and restrictive figure of the Yogi is to be forgotten.
The signs that mark him are to be thought of as the fantasies and charms of a knowledge that had not yet attained marketability.”
