What Is Yoga?
Facebook archive. First published on 2015-03-30.
I will draw Your attention to the fact that this textual creation is not a well-balanced article grown on the fertile soil of authorities and gurus. Just thoughts, or simply a post on fb. Yoga - translated from Sanskrit, union, unification, unity, or joining. In the philosophical aspect, any identification of ahamkara (ego, personality, or one's own I) with an object or subject is yoga. Yoga is not a set of exercises, yoga is not a method for stopping the mind.
Yoga is an alien term borrowed from the Hindus; it is not easy for a person with a Western mindset to understand what yoga is. Trips to India, as I can judge by numerous posts on the internet, stories, and much other experience, only worsen the misunderstanding of Yoga. Guru - translated from Sanskrit, this is a teacher or spiritual mentor; essentially anyone who teaches or instructs is a guru, but not every guru is called a Guru.
Usually a Western person is used to the idea that a Guru is an enlightened yogi possessing numerous siddhis (superpowers), who leads his disciples to enlightenment. With enlightenment everything is even worse; enlightenment is an almost unattainable state of the yogin, about which much has been written, but there is no modern precise data either about the enlightened or about those who have approached enlightenment.
Very often nirvikalpa samadhi - the highest degree of spiritual purity, is described as a brain hemorrhage, suicide, or liberation from the body. I will not list all the nonsense; the point should already be clear. As soon as something becomes popular, consider that knowledge lost. In reality, or in my interpretation of this very reality, the higher being(Brahman) wanted to study itself, and in the process of this study, without the help of motivated desire, created the universe, i.e. accidentally.
It itself scattered into countless numbers of itself, got tangled in itself, and in order to somehow understand what was happening, built a hierarchical system of beings. Supreme deities, deities, demons, people, animals, minerals, molecules, the simplest particles, etc. The process of enlightenment is a situation in which a part of Brahman, a mineral will do perfectly well, i.e. not necessarily a human being or a deity, enters the original state of emptiness and loneliness, i.e. nirvana, and realizes the whole picture created by it.
The need of any being to unite with another being for study is the natural need of Brahman; in fact, everything was started for self-study. Yoga is the process of unity with Brahman, and since everything is Brahman, in essence, Brahman is trying to gather pieces of itself. That is, it wants to unite into one whole; it even knows when this will happen, at the moment of the destruction of the universe.
Exercises for stopping buddhi(the inner dialogue), controlling manas(the bodily intellect), subjugating chitta(consciousness or obsessive thoughts), and renouncing ahamkara(personality or ego) are preparation for unity with Brahman. A set of exercises, reading mantras, breathing practices, a special kind of diet(vegetarianism) - all this is a tool for renouncing ahamkara, but without subjugating chitta, controlling manas, and stopping buddhi, it is impossible to give up ahamkara.
Purely theoretically, any part of Brahman can attain enlightenment without all of the above. In the case of minerals, it is hard to imagine how they would perform asanas and read mantras, but there is an answer to this too: minerals can do all of it in the mind. That's all, I will not confuse You any further. As a result, everything that is so fashionable now, what is called schools of yoga, and those teachers whom everyone calls Guru - all of this is the religious tradition of India. In short, yoga is prayer to God in the Western understanding.
One can pray aloud, one can pray silently; for prayer an icon may be needed, or it may not be needed. One can go to a church service, or gather in a circle of believers in a semi-abandoned movie theater. There are very many ways of prayer; among the Hindus this prayer is more complex, deeper, and has a metaphysical meaning. Just as Muslims have infidels, and Christians have pagans and heretics, so for the Hindus, everyone who did not get into their caste system is mleccha, i.e. outcasts or out-of-caste people. This is my point: there will be no Guru.
No one is going to reveal siddhis before a Western person, and what is really there and how it works will have to be understood either independently or by waiting for the corresponding incarnation in the Brahmin caste. This post was prompted by an entry in the LiveJournal of a former intelligence officer, which, according to him, got 230 thousand views in four days. Since he is an intelligence officer, most likely Mars is in his 12th house. The note is written aggressively, which is not surprising for a military person.
And as I understood it, over 15-odd years of veganism and practicing "all" types of yoga, the man did not attain enlightenment and became disillusioned with the whole system, so he calls for eating meat and drinking whiskey. In the Wachowski brothers' Matrix, as I recall, there was such a dissatisfied character who wanted to exchange the real world for a virtual copy. This officer has enough trolls under the note in LiveJournal, so I found no point in my participation. And even more so, I do not have 15 years of vegetarianism and yoga practice, nor do I have a photo against the background with a Guru in Rishikesh India.