âHe is not dead,â spokesman Swami Vishalanand told the BBC. âMedical science does not understand things like yogic science. We will wait and watch. We are confident that he will come back.â
This Swami sounds like a real oxymoron.
So, âyogic scienceâ, do you have any comment on why the totally-not-dead-at-all-no-siree guy needs to be frozen? Was the yogic stench of yogic decomposition becoming a problem?
Come on here, even penny-ante saints with no shot at bodily reincarnation manage alleged miraculous incorruptibility from time to time (especially when conditions favor natural mummification, curiouslyâŚ) Surely a guy who isnât even dead can take it?
After a week, is there even a point to cryonics anymore? I guess if your expected means of return is mystical rather than technological, then degradation of the brain may be less important?
Bro. BRO. This is yogic science weâre talking about hereânot your puny medical science with all its research and its drugs and its concepts and whatnot.
Clearly your aura is not the right color today.
Sounds like they stuck him in a (food) freezer, not any kind of fancy cryonics set-up. They apparently did that rather than embalm him, because they supposedly figured he could come back to life more easily (but heâs not dead!) if he was just frozen. Either that, or itâs all some sort of weird maneuver to try to keep hold of his property by not officially acknowledging that heâs dead dead.
They claim he wasnât decomposing. That they were trying to decide between embalming and freezing, however, tells a different story.
Iâd stake a nontrivial percentage of my net worth on âsorry, no nerd rapture, even for the corpsiclesâ; but I donât know that we actually know enough about the brain to say for certain. Thanks to lesion studies, we have a (modestly) good sense of what catastrophic damage to localized areas does, and with various degenerative conditions we know, at varying levels of detail, that some widespread but relatively subtle changes are Bad; but âpeople who suffer no localized massive damage but increasingly serious subtle damage across their entire nervous systemâ are a test group that has, to date, been notably unhelpful about waking up so we can study them.
Assuming biotechnology/nanites/stem cells indistinguishable from handwaving, you grew that nervous system once, so I donât see why you canât grow a replacement; but unless the neural structure that made you âyouâ is in storage somewhere, itâs overwhelmingly more likely that youâll regrow a functional, human-spec, but not particularly âyouâ nervous system.
Itâs like trying to restore a bit-rotted medium. You want the damaged file to be restored to full compliance with whatever format it used to be? No problem, we have the spec and the technology. You want it to be the same as it was before? Well, thatâs a brute-force search of nigh-unimaginable size through a massive set of candidates, and with no way of identifying when weâve hit the right one. Good. Luck. With. That.
The only hope for the freezer squad is that, (contrary to what things like âmajor personality changes, usually for the worse, from blast injuries you can only detect with specialized microscopyâ would suggest), âyou-nessâ is actually remarkably stable, and an extraordinarily large percentage of the possible reconstructions of a somewhat damaged system lead to an acceptably close outcome.
Iâve heard of hot yoga. Cryoga is a new concept to me.
'eâs not dead, 'eâs restin
With beef and game, the term is âseasoning.â
Bhaga & Vitaâs Frozen Yogi Crunch?
Well thatâs one way to avoid a likely autopsy - claim heâs going to be resurrected, then pop him in the freezer when he starts to smell.
âWe are confident that he will come back.â
Well . . . good luck . . . with that.
Maybe itâs phase one of a Stranger in a Strange Land scenario. There are a lot of preparations to make for something like that, and you donât want the guest of honor to spoil in the mean time.
If they end up eating him, it will all make sense.
FroYogi.
I heard that he was a strict vagitarian.
Meanwhile, Christians everywhere murmur a single disgusted word - ââŚamateurs.â 
(To be fair, a lot of major religions believe various figures will âreturnâ. Thereâs the âBuddha To Beâ, thereâs the âMahdiâ of Islam, thereâs the Zoroastrian âfrashokeretiââŚ)
