| Yoga today: Trying to join what has been hopelessly confused | 2 comments |
 19 Nov 2009 @ 13:12, by Max SandorReflecting on the impact of Indian philosophy on the occidental world: Witnessing what is being 'sold' as Yoga in the Western world is quite a sorry thing. Yoga means 'union' but what exactly should be UNITED has been forgotten or is being ignored: Shiva and Shakti, Spirit and Soul, in their eternal dance, confused, melted together, a total chaos within most people's lives. Today's yoga teachers should teach how to recognize and separate spirit, soul, and body BEFORE trying to do the UNION (yoga)!!! There is only one major current that is reflecting the original wisdom of the Vedas in the West, the Ayurvedic system, and even there most of the practitioners in speaking and writing about it are confusing the qualities ("gunas") with their deficiencies ("doshas") and fail to perceive its global and universal importance beyond an oily 'massage'. The recognition that there are three minds, one each for the spirit, soul, and the body itself is a major step in itself but the separation of them to re-join them as a new unit is quite a different task. In all the years I encountered only one 'school' (cult?) of the original Patanjali line buried in a suburb of Mumbai (back then Bombay) that was teaching in that direction. Patanjali, the author of the famous 'Yogasutram', was so afraid that his teachings could be abused that he 'cloaked' the deeper aspects of his teachings, especially that what was called 'reversed gunas' in Polar Dynamics 1 [link] , a book still unparalleled in its importance. On a positive footnote, mainstream thinking is evolving towards a clearer view of things: even 'official psychology' is starting to recognize the significance of archetypes beyond Jung's rough sketches and the fractionalization of the human identities beyond Freud's ID and SUPER-ID. More on that coming soon.. |