The Shiva Samhita opens with a premise that most yoga philosophy quietly avoids: the world is real, and you are in it. Where the Advaita tradition treats the householder's life as a provisional stage to be outgrown, and where the forest-renunciant traditions treat the city as noise to be escaped, the Shiva Samhita, a Sanskrit tantric text composed somewhere between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, addresses itself to the practitioner who is not going anywhere. The spouse is there. The children are there. The landlord will come on the first of the month. What does the text say to this person?
