Ramanisblog

Category: Hinduism

  • Haunted Campus Buildings.My experience with the Paranormal.

    One can not dismiss these things totally untrue.

    I have two experiences .

    It was in 1968 -69 in Chennai,India where I completed my Graduation and i was a hostel student.

    One of my friends, who had a house near by vacated his house and joined the hostel.

    On being asked why he replied that his house was haunted and that his parents have shifted to Bangalore and   to continue his studies he had joined the hostel.

    About four of us went to the said House along with the one who said his house was haunted after watching a late night movie.

    Around 1 am, (Ido not recollect the exact time), we had all the glass panes of the windows closed and had the doors of the house locked( we were in the first floor room of the house).

    After about 15-30 minutes Jasmine Scent wafted through the air.

    It was followed by the figure of a lady floating through the glass pane.

    Needless to say we ran to the hostel for cover and one my friends had an attack of Fever for several days.

    Another instance.

    I went to Sabarimala,Kerala, as a Pilgrimage.

    This place is revered to be Abode of Lord Ayyappa and one has to undergo strict  Discipline( non-Hindus also visit the place) before embarking on the pilgrimage.(1970)

    We stayed in a place ,Pampa.After morning rituals we noticed that an elderly man of about Eighty  in a small temporary shelter( every one has to make one) ,sitting in front of the photo of Lord Ayyappa,exhorting and crying that he be allowed to visit the sanctum sanctorum(which is about 2 km up the hill) for he was informed in the dream that he need not come to the sanctum sanctorum.

    After about 15 – 20 minutes, a man from the people around us stood up and stood in front of the crying man and informed him “I shall give my Vision here for you’

    The crying man asked him as to who he was and what authority he had to speak to him thus.

    The man straightened and said”if it is true I am God ,I shall show my Vision in my true form here this evening at 6-40( the time the Vision in the form of a Light appears every year).

    Then he started running through the river up-stream towards the sanctum.

    We were instructed by our Guru to chase him.

    Five or  six of us(those who followed him were by no means ardently devout or deeply religious and are practical men from fields like marketing,Accountancy),chased him and found it difficult to catch up with the man who was around fifty years and we  were in the age group of 20 -30.

    Eventually we caught up with him, caught his hands and asked him to come with us to meet our Guru.

    He straightened and said ‘Who can call Me?”-

    Next ,

    Our hands were clutching thin air and the man simply vanished.

    I am qualified in Philosophy and Psychology and a hard-core Management Professional with a Skeptic outlook on Spirituality.(only of late I have become an Advaitin by conviction)

    Till date I am unable to comprehend what took place around 40 years ago with all my Analytical Skills and logic)

    Story:

    Plenty of college campuses have creepy spots. Desolate library stacks, bathrooms that no one uses, and dark pathways have been giving college kids the willies for years. But there are some spots that are bona fide haunted, with a history to prove it. Read on to learn about 10 campus buildings that are more than just a little creepy.

    1. Jennings Hall, Bennington College: This building now houses the music department of Bennington college, and students have often witnessed paranormal activity. It was the inspiration for The Haunting of Hill House, a Shirley Jackson novel. Strange voices, footsteps, and instruments that play themselves have been heard. The area Bennington College is located in is known as “Bennington Triangle” where many people went missing between 1920 and 1950.
      1. Strayer College: The Strayer College building in Bensalem, Pennsylvania is the former site of Eastern State School and Hospital. The building is rumored to be haunted by patients who were killed or treated unfairly. Figures follow people, doors slam shut to trap people inside, and the former morgue is cold and breezy even without windows. The 4th floor is believed to be especially treacherous, so much so that it’s life threatening.
      2. Pemberton Hall, Eastern Illinois University: At Pemberton Hall, a girl was brutally murdered and raped by a psychotic janitor. The hall is now haunted, with doors mysteriously locking after young girls enter, bloody footprints, and clocks that turn back in time. Music plays from the piano the victim played on, even though the entire floor is boarded up.
      3. Alpha Theta House, Dartmouth College: The Alpha Theta fraternity house experienced a boiler explosion and fire, killing fraternity brothers and their female companions. These spirits are said to haunt the house, particularly in the house basement, which is the remaining original structure.
      4. Alpha Omicron Pi Sorority House, Ohio University: This sorority house was once a private residence and a stop on the Underground Railroad. It was stormed when locals found out that the owner was harboring fugitive slaves, and a slave named Nicodemus was shot there. He has since haunted the house, which has passed hands among several Greek groups in the university, presumably due to the disturbances.
      5. Sage College of Albany Fine Arts/Graphic Design Building: Sage College of Albany’s Graphic Design building is located in a former children’s orphanage, and has ghosts from the children who died in a fire set by the caretaker. Numerous ghosts can still be heard in the building.
      6. Baylor University Library: Baylor University’s library has some original works from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with a statue in her likeness in front of the building. The statue’s arms are said to move, and she has been seen peering inside the top floor window. She may also be seen walking the halls at night in a white gown holding a candle.
      7. Graceland House, Davis & Elkins College: In the Graceland House, a slave was beaten to death and buried in the dirt floor basement, and may still be there. This house has noises and feelings of being watched or followed, so badly that a prom held there had to be shut down.
      8. Shelton Hall, Boston University: This dorm was once a Sheraton Hotel overlooking the Charles River and Fenway Park. Before it became a dorm, playwright Eugene O’Neill lived and subsequently died in room 401. He now haunts that floor, which the school reserves for writing students.
      9. Texas Tech University Water Tower: On the coldest night of the year in Lubbock, 5-6 young men can be seen on the top catwalk going around the water tank. They will stay up all night as if spending the night. This sighting has happened each year from around 1949 on.

                  http://www.matchacollege.com/blog/2011/10-campus-buildings-that-are-totally-haunted/


  • We, Aliens from Mars? Additional Proof, Hinduism.

    It’s possible that the family tree of all life on Earth has its roots on Mars — and a new device could put that theory to the test in a few years, researchers say.

    Researchers are developing an instrument that would search through samples of Martian dirt, isolating any genetic material from microbes that might be present — bugs that are living or that died relatively recently, within the last million years or so. Scientists could then use standard biochemical techniques to analyze any resulting genetic sequences, comparing them to what we find on Earth.

    It’s a long shot,” said MIT researcher Chris Carr, who’s working on the life-detecting device, in a statement. “But if we go to Mars and find life that’s related to us, we could have originated on Mars. Or if it started here, it could have been transferred to Mars.” [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]

    Either way, Carr added, “we could be related to life on Mars. So we should at least be looking for life on Mars that’s related to us.”

    Ancient Martian life?

    The idea that all Earth life could be descended from Martian organisms may not be fully mainstream — but it’s not too crazy to dismiss, either. While the Martian surface appears to be cold, dry and lifeless today, there is plenty of evidence that the planet was much warmer and wetter in the distant past, billions of years ago.

    Here on Earth, life almost invariably occupies any niche that contains liquid water. So ancient Mars may have once supported some form of life — perhaps even before Earth did, researchers said.

    http://www.space.com/11209-mars-earth-life-origins-evolution.html

    Erich von Daniken had theorized that we are descended from The Stars.

    He quotes extensively from mythologies,legends and Monuments that remain unexplained fully.

    His postulates that Stonehenge, other marks in Polynesia and Crop circles are markers for Aliens to identify and land.

    He refers to the Pushpaka Vimana of Ravana in The Ramayana as  one of the types of Alien Crafts used to land  in Earth.

    He also states that our Genetic codes were altered and we are evolving in the way we have been programmed.

    I would also state that the First Test Tube Baby  was Mandatha as enunciated in The Vishnu Purana, where by mistake the King drinks the pot of Water powered by mantras instead of his wife;he begets a child;as he could not breast feed the child Indra, Chief of Devas,(Beings on a higher plane than Human Beings)  feeds the Child,The Nectar  with fingers.

    Description Brahmastra.

    ..it was a single projectile
    Charged with all the power of the Universe.
    An incandescent column of smoke and flame
    As bright as the thousand suns
    Rose in all its splendor…

    …it was an unknown weapon,
    An iron thunderbolt,
    A gigantic messenger of death,
    Which reduced to ashes
    The entire race of the
    Vrishnis and the Andhakas.

    ..The corpses were so burned
    As to be unrecognizable.
    The hair and nails fell out;
    Pottery broke without apparent cause,
    And the birds turned white…

    …After a few hours
    All foodstuffs were infected…
    …to escape from this fire
    The soldiers threw themselves in streams
    To wash themselves and their equipment..”

    http://www.quora.com/Vijayendra-Mohanty/Description-of-the-Brahmastra

    Hiroshima Nagasaki Atomic Bombing.

    Nagasaki before and after bombing.

    Description of the effects of Atomic Bombing.

    The damage to man-made structures caused by the bombs was due to two distinct causes: first the blast, or pressure wave, emanating from the center of the explosion, and, second, the fires which were caused either by the heat of the explosion itself or by the collapse of buildings containing stoves, electrical fixtures, or any other equipment which might produce what is known as a secondary fire, and subsequent spread of these fires.

    The blast produced by the atomic bomb has already been stated to be approximately equivalent to that of 20,000 tons of T.N.T. Given this figure, one may calculate the expected peak pressures in the air, at various distances from the center of the explosion, which occurred following detonation of the bomb. The peak pressures which were calculated before the bombs were dropped agreed very closely with those which were actually experienced in the cities during the attack as computed by Allied experts in a number of ingenious ways after the occupation of Japan.

    The blast of pressure from the atomic bombs differed from that of ordinary high explosive bombs in three main ways:

    A. Downward thrust. Because the explosions were well up in the air, much of the damage resulted from a downward pressure. This pressure of course most largely effected flat roofs. Some telegraph and other poles immediately below the explosion remained upright while those at greater distances from the center of damage, being more largely exposed to a horizontal thrust from the blast pressure waves, were overturned or tilted. Trees underneath the explosion remained upright but had their branches broken downward.

    B. Mass distortion of buildings. An ordinary bomb can damage only a part of a large building, which may then collapse further under the action of gravity. But the blast wave from an atomic bomb is so large that it can engulf whole buildings, no matter how great their size, pushing them over as though a giant hand had given them a shove.

    C. Long duration of the positive pressure pulse and consequent small effect of the negative pressure, or suction, phase. In any explosion, the positive pressure exerted by the blast lasts for a definite period of time (usually a small fraction of a second) and is then followed by a somewhat longer period of negative pressure, or suction. The negative pressure is always much weaker than the positive, but in ordinary explosions the short duration of the positive pulse results in many structures not having time to fail in that phase, while they are able to fail under the more extended, though weaker, negative pressure. But the duration of the positive pulse is approximately proportional to the 1/3 power of the size of the explosive charge. Thus, if the relation held true throughout the range in question, a 10-ton T.N.T. explosion would have a positive pulse only about 1/14th as long as that of a 20,000-ton explosion. Consequently, the atomic explosions had positive pulses so much longer then those of ordinary explosives that nearly all failures probably occurred during this phase, and very little damage could be attributed to the suction which followed.

    http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/mp12.asp

    Read  the Link below(Copy right material).

    http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/poldocs/a-ww2.pdf

    .

    Time Travel, Clairvoyance, Clair-audience,Kinetasis,Telepathy,quantum Theory are described in Hinduism.Some of them are blogged by me under Astrophysics.

    Chariots of the Gods -The Series is based on the books of Erich von Däniken who more than twenty years ago first presented his theory of extraterrestrial contact with the ancient world – a theory so incredible yet so logical that it has become part of a wide ranging debate that continues stronger today.

    His examination of ancient ruins, forgotten texts, and other archeological anomalies points to evidence of extraterrestrial intervention in human history. Most incredible of all are von Däniken’s claims that we ourselves are descendants of these galactic pioneers and that the evidence is out there to lead us to them. Chariots of the Gods follows the adventures of the team who will attempt to do just that.

    http://www.world-mysteries.com/pex_3.htm

    Many planetary scientists say it’s conceivable that all life on Earth is descended from organisms that originated on Mars and were carried here aboard meteorites. And if that’s the case, an instrument being developed by researchers at MIT and Harvard could provide the clinching evidence. In

    order to detect signs of past or present life on Mars – if it is in fact true that we’re related – then a promising strategy would be to search for DNA or RNA, and specifically for particular sequences of these molecules that are nearly universal in all forms of terrestrial life.

    That’s the strategy being pursued by MIT research scientist Christopher Carr and postdoctoral associate Clarissa Lui, working with Maria Zuber, head of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), and Gary Ruvkun, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, who came up with the instrument concept and put together the initial team.

    Lui presented a summary of their proposed instrument, called the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Genomes (SETG), at the IEEE Aerospace Conference this month in Big Sky, Montana.

    The idea is based on several facts that have now been well established. First, in the early days of the solar system, the climates on Mars and the Earth were much more similar than they are now, so life that took hold on one planet could presumably have survived on the other.

    Second, an estimated one billion tons of rock have traveled from Mars to Earth, blasted loose by asteroid impacts and then traveling through interplanetary space before striking Earth’s surface.

    Third, microbes have been shown to be capable of surviving the initial shock of such an impact, and there is some evidence they could also survive the thousands of years of transit through space before arriving at another planet.

    So the various steps needed for life to have started on one planet and spread to another are all plausible. Additionally, orbital dynamics show that it’s about 100 times easier for rocks to travel from Mars to Earth than the other way. So if life got started there first, microbes could have been carried here and we might all be its descendants.

    If we are descendants from Mars, there might be important lessons to be learned about our own biological origins by studying biochemistry on our neighbor planet, where biological traces erased long ago here on Earth might have been preserved in the Martian deep freeze.

    http://www.hindustantimes.com/Are-we-all-Martians/Article1-677080.aspx

  • Organized Religion to Be Extinct?

     

    Religion is to provide an answer to the inner craving of Man,to find out whence he is,where he is and where does he go from here.

    He can not comprehend that one day he will cease to be.

    He is afraid of the pain at the time of Death and anxious about where he shall go after Death.

    He sees, in day-to-day Life ,that things and events are not in his control,most of the time.

    He is unable to fight against things that seem unknown.

    Religion was born out of fear and Curiosity.

    When man seems to know and control some Forces of Nature( which he does not), this fear subsides.

    Then something new strikes.

    He is torn between Faith and Doubt.

    As doubt increases faith wanes.

    Organised Religion does not help Man.

    It takes the essentials ,organise it with known data and propagates,forgetting that Religion is highly individualistic and personal

    it propagates dogmas.

    It dooms other systems of thought as unworthy and followers of that system.

    But Religion should be unorganised.

    It should have no dogmas.

    It should have flexibility.

    It must allow the individual to choose his/her path.

    Whatever the system is, if it is to help individuals it has to respect them, even if it is Atheism.

    Hinduism follows all these parameters.

    It has survived, despite onslaught from other systems of thought and in fact has embraced whatever it thought was to the benefit of the individual.

    Organized religion ‘will be driven toward extinction’ in 9 countries, experts predict

    By Richard Allen Greene, CNN

    Organized religion will all but vanish eventually from nine Western-style democracies, a team of mathematicians predict in a new paper based on census data stretching back 100 years.

    It won’t die out completely, but “religion will be driven toward extinction” in countries including Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, they say.

    It will also wither away in Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland and Switzerland, they anticipate.

    They can’t make a prediction about the United States because the U.S. census doesn’t ask about religion, lead author Daniel Abrams told CNN.

    But nine other countries provide enough data for detailed mathematical modeling, he said.

    “If you look at the data, ‘unaffiliated’ is the fastest-growing group” in those countries, he said.

    Organized religion ‘will be driven toward extinction’ in 9 countries, experts predict

    By Richard Allen Greene, CNN

    Organized religion will all but vanish eventually from nine Western-style democracies, a team of mathematicians predict in a new paper based on census data stretching back 100 years.

    It won’t die out completely, but “religion will be driven toward extinction” in countries including Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands, they say.

    It will also wither away in Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland and Switzerland, they anticipate.

    They can’t make a prediction about the United States because the U.S. census doesn’t ask about religion, lead author Daniel Abrams told CNN.

    But nine other countries provide enough data for detailed mathematical modeling, he said.

    “I became interested in this because I saw survey data results for the U.S. and was surprised by how large the unaffiliated group was,” he said, referring to a number of studies done by universities and think tanks on trends in religion.

    Studies suggest that “unaffiliated” is the fastest-growing religious group in the United States, with about 15% of the population falling into a category experts call the “nones.”

    They’re not necessarily atheists or non-believers, experts say, just people who do not associate themselves with a particular religion or house of worship at the time of the survey.

    Abrams had done an earlier study looking into the extinction of languages spoken by small numbers of people.

    When he saw the religion data, his co-author “Richard Wiener suggested we try to apply a similar technique to religious affiliation,” Abrams said.

    The paper, by Abrams, Wiener and Haley A. Yaple, is called “A mathematical model of social group competition with application to the growth of religious non-affiliation.” They presented it this week at the Dallas meeting of the American Physical Society.

    Only the Czech Republic already has a majority of people who are unaffiliated with religion, but the Netherlands, for example, will go from about 40% unaffiliated today to more than 70% by 2050, they expect.

    Even deeply Catholic Ireland will see religion die out, the model predicts.

    “They’ve gone from 0.04% unaffiliated in 1961 to 4.2% in 2006, our most recent data point,” Abrams says.

    He admits that the increase in Muslim immigration to Europe may throw off the model, but he thinks the trend is robust enough to withstand some challenges.

    “Netherlands data goes back to 1860,” he pointed out. “Every single data that we were able to find shows that people are moving from the affiliated to unaffiliated. I can’t imagine that will change, but that’s personal opinion, not what the data shows.”

    But Barry Kosmin, a demographer of religion at Trinity College in Connecticut, is doubtful.

    “Religion relies on human beings. They aren’t rational or predictable according to the laws of physics. Religious fervor waxes and wanes in unpredictable ways,” he said.

    “The Jewish tradition that says prophecy is for fools and children is probably wise,” he added.

    And Abrams, Wiener and Yaple are not the first to predict the end of religion.

    Peter Berger, a former president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, once said that, “People will become so bored with what religious groups have to offer that they will look elsewhere.”

    He said Protestantism “has reached the strange state of self-liquidation,” that Catholicism was in severe crisis, and anticipated that “religions are likely to survive in small enclaves and pockets” in the United States.

    He made those predictions in February 1968.

    http://current.com/18scp4c

  • Birth Date of Lord Rama,Route taken by him to Sri Lanka-Map.

    Birth Date of Lord Rama,Route taken by him to Sri Lanka-Map.

    Philosophy and Hinduism are so intermingled with a Man’s life in India that it becomes difficult to separate Philosophy, Myths ,Legends,History and work of fiction.

    Lord Rama at Rameswaram
    Lord Rama  worshipping at Rameswaram

    How ever the evidence provided in the Ithihasas (meaning ‘it happened thus’) can not be wished away.

    Normal to procedure to validate the authenticity of the work is to check both internal and external evidence.

    Internal evidence is provided in the text we are studying ,while external evidence consists of references to the event in Contemporary and post -the work in discussion.

    As for as The Ramayana goes, external evidence is provided in the Puranas(means ‘ very old’) , Eighteen in Number( in Sanskrit) and in regional Languages of India, be it Tamil,Telugu,Kannada, Malayalam,Hindi,Bengali,Oriya,other languages .

    In addition Dialects of India have this spread through word of mouth.

    Though the versions vary in embellishments, the basic fact that there was a King called Rama , he had been sent to forest with his wife called Sita by his father who wanted to appease his wife(not Rama’s mother),she was abducted by a Chieftain called Ravana of Sri Lanka and he was killed by Rama , never varies.(History of The Tamils by P.T.Srinivasa Iyengar)

    Reference to the Ramayana has been made in Mahabharata, which is posterior to The Ramayana.

    One of the characters in The Mahabharata is Lord Krishna, whose palace has been unearthed off Gujarat coast , India.(please see my blog filed under(‘Videos)

    External evidence needs the corroboration of the internal evidence supplied by Valmiki in The Ramayana.

    Based on this ,research has proved the Date of birth of Sri Rama, which is explained here below.

    In addition the route taken by Lord Rama is traced at the beginning of the article.

    Excerpts&(The following document is the ‘MOST’ authentic scientific work that does not need further scientific verification. )

    The story of Shri Ram’s life was first narrated by Maharishi Valmiki in the Ramayana, which was written after Shri Ram was crowned as the king of Ayodhya. Maharishi Valmiki was a great astronomer as he has made sequential astronomical references on important dates related to the life of Shri Ram indicating the location of planets vis-a-vis zodiac constellations and the other stars (nakshatras) . Needless to add that similar position of planets and nakshatras is not repeated in thousands of years. By entering the precise details of the planetary configuration of the important events in the life of Shri Ram as given in the Valmiki Ramayan in the software named “Planetarium” corresponding exact dates of these events according to the English calendar can be known.

    Mr Pushkar Bhatnagar of the Indian Revenue Service had acquired this software from the US.. It is used to predict the solar/lunar eclipses and distance and location of other planets from earth. He entered the relevant details about the planetary positions narrated by Maharishi Valmiki and obtained very interesting and convincing results, which almost determine the important dates starting from the birth of Shri Ram to the date of his coming back to Ayodhya after 14 years of exile.

    Maharishi Valmiki has recorded in Bal Kaand sarga 19 and shloka eight and nine (1/18/8,9) that Shri Ram was born on ninth tithi of Chaitra month when the position of different planets vis-a-vis zodiac constellations and nakshatras (visible stars) were: i) Sun in Aries; ii) Saturn in Libra; iii) Jupiter in Cancer; iv) Venus in Pisces; v) Mars in Capricorn; vi) Lunar month of Chaitra; vii) Ninth day after no moon; viii) Lagna as Cancer (cancer was rising in the east); ix) Moon on the Punarvasu (Gemini constellation & Pllux star); x) Day time (around noon).

    This data was fed into the software. The results indicated that this was exactly the location of planets/stars in the noon of January 10, 5114 BC. Thus Shri Ram was born on January 10, 5114 BC (7123 years back). As per the Indian calendar it was the ninth day of Shukla Paksha in Chaitra month and the time was around 12 to 1 noontime. This is exactly the time and date when Ram Navmi is celebrated all over India.

    http://www.funonthenet.in/forums/index.php?topic=152243.0#ixzz1GUIzShqY

    Featured image from

    https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/33771/lord-ramas-path-to-exile-from-ayodhya-in-todays-india

    Places visited by Sri Rama, as described in Valmiki Ramayana.

  • Yoga is not Hinduism.Yes and NO.

    This Statue of Shiva is Approximately 65 feet ...
    Image via Wikipedia

     

    Hinduism is for every one.

    It is away of Living.

    It applies to every one.

    Very term Hindu is an invention of the West to indicate people living by river Sindhu,the Indus.

    Real name of so-called Hinduism is Sanatana Dharma,that is ancient, that which is without a beginning.

    Systems were developed to uplift mankind by Seers who found certain paths that were useful and they have been conveyed to us through the Ages.

    Vedas are self-evident and have no beginning and end.

    They are Eternal Truths.

    Those that follow the authority of the Vedas are called Astikas(Orthodox); those that don’t are Nastikas(heterodox).

    Of the Astikas there are six systems

    Nyaya,Vyseshika,Samkya,Yoga,Poorva mimamsa,and Uttara Mimamsa or Vedanta.

    Of this the path of Action is enunciated in Yoga for with Active disposition(Rajas)

    Theoretical aspect is enunciated in Samkya and practical is Yoga.

    Yoga is defined by Patanjali as ‘Cessation of the modification of the Mind (Chitta‘)

    _Yogah; Chitta vritti norodhithha.

    Yoga has eight steps

    Yama,Niyama,Aasana,Pranayaama,Prathyaahara,Dhyana,Dharana and Samadhi.

    All these eight steps are be followed in that order.

    Important point is that is You should have a personal God(Iswara);it might be anything.

    Without that Yoga will do more harm than Good.

    Yoga is not a physical exercise , but a Spiritual Discipline.

    Unless these these eight steps are followed in order and you have a personal God Yoga will not be effective.

    What is now being taught by so called Gurus is nothing but a fraud on Yoga.

    Read Patnjali’s Yoga Sastra.

    Yoga in this sense belongs both to Hindus and non Hindus if they follow it correctly.

    Hinduism does not need labels;it does not need some one’s certification.

    It is for your benefit.

    Take it as it is.

    Forward Received by me..

    Sheetal Shah, an official with the Hindu American Foundation, hears a lot about the physical practice of yoga these days – but not much about its religious roots.

    So her group, which seeks to provide what it calls “a progressive voice for American Hindus,” recently mounted a “take back yoga” campaign, including appearances at conferences and attempts to raise media awareness of the practice’s Hindu origins.

    For Shah, who is the Hindu American Foundation’s senior director, yoga is primarily a moral and spiritual philosophy, a fact she says has been lost as the popularity of physical yoga has boomed in the West. “There has been a conscious De-linking between Hinduism and yoga,” in the United States and elsewhere, she says.

    Yoga is mentioned in many of the ancient Indian texts that form the basis of the religion now known as Hinduism, which claims to be the world’s oldest religion – and which is the third most-practiced faith on the planet.

    One main source of yoga philosophy is the sage Patanjali, who lived in the 2nd century B.C. and whose Yoga Sutras describe a philosophy comprising 8 limbs, one of which is the physical poses, or asanas, which are commonly referred to as yoga in the West.

    Other elements of Patanjali’s yogic philosophy are concepts like the yamas, moral vows that include chastity and nonviolence.

    Sheetal Shah of the Hindu American Foundationpractices yoga asanas in her home. She tries to incorporate yogic concepts like nonviolence into her life.

    In a yoga class offered by the Hindu Temple Society of North America in a New York temple, yoga is taught as a spiritual practice in which the physical asanas are an essential component. But the practice is supposed to lead to meditation.

    “Yoga is really a spiritual discipline,” says Uma Mysorekar, the Hindu Temple Society of North America’s president. “From its origin in Hinduism, yoga really originated from a Sanskrit word yuj, which means union.”

    That union is supposed to happen, she said, “between individual being or the soul with Paramatman,” or cosmic being.

    According to a 2008 study commissioned by Yoga Journal, there are roughly 16 million yoga practitioners in the United States. Those people spend $5.7 billion dollars a year on yoga classes and gear.

    Most of that yoga is marketed as physical exercise as a health practice. Some Sanskrit terminology is usually used, and many practitioners in a non-religious context say they sense a vaguely spiritual aspect in the activity.

    But most American practitioners wouldn’t go nearly so far as to label yoga as a religious act or even to relate it to a specific religious tradition.

    “Yoga is a great thing, no matter what style you do, how you come about it, why you come about it, what you end up with spiritually from it,” says Donna Rubin, the founder of Bikram Yoga NYC, a New York chain of yoga studios offering yoga in the style of Bikram Choudhury, a contemporary Indian yogi who now lives in Los Angeles. “So to start nitpicking or criticizing this type of yoga or that type of yoga or what it’s not doing or what it should be doing, I don’t really see the point of that.”

    Bikram yoga involves a set series of postures performed in a heated room.

    “Bikram has developed this specific series so that it’s more accessible,” said Christopher Totaro, a Bikram Yoga NYC instructor. “It’s more palatable to a wider demographic of people by pulling that religious part or separating that religious part from it.”

    Yoga students exercise at an Atlanta Hot Yoga class in Atlanta, Georgia. Classes are conducted in a room heated to around 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

    Among those that have taken up yoga in the United States are devout followers of Western religions.

    Atlanta, Georgia’s Northside Drive Baptist Church holds a weekly yoga class.

    Amanda Gregg, who instructs the class, says that she is respectful of Hinduism but argues that yoga didn’t “come from” Hinduism as much as it developed alongside the religious tradition.

    “Although Hinduism and yoga grew out at the same time of the Indian subcontinent and there are references to yoga in the Upanishads and in the Bhagavad Gita, that doesn’t mean that Hinduism has the exclusive hold on yoga,” she said, referring to sacred Hindu texts. “Sort of like Jews don’t have the exclusive hold on prayer.”

    Some churches attempt to “Christianize” yoga by adding Bible verses to the practice, but Northside Drive Baptist Church does not.

    Related.

    Is Yoga a Form of Hinduism?
    Is Hinduism a Form of Yoga?

    – Wendy Doniger

     

    Debates about these questions have been making headlines lately. Some American Hindus have argued that American yoga is not Hindu enough, that Hindus should “Take Back Yoga” (the label of a campaign by the Hindu American Foundation). Other Americans agree that the Hindus should take back yoga—but because yoga is too Hindu: R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, advises Christians to abandon yoga if they value their (Christian) souls, for “yoga, as a spiritual practice, runs directly counter to the spiritual counsel of the Bible.” The problem should not have been breaking news; a spoof in 2003, “Yoga: A Religion for Sex Addicts,” depicted a Christian minister who was asked, “Should Christians practice Yoga?” He replied, “Are we going to have to bring this whole thing up about Yoga again? I thought our Sunday school curriculum included lessons about the evils of everything Oriental, including Yoga!”
    But the issues involved are not trivial. Is yoga, in fact, “a spiritual practice”? More particularly, is it a Hindu spiritual practice? The word “yoga” originally meant “yoking” horses to chariots or draft animals to plows or wagons (the Sanskrit and English words are cognate). Though many yoga practitioners, particularly but not only Hindus, insist that their practice can be traced back to the Upanishads (c. 600 BCE) and Patanjali (c. 200 CE), the word “yoga” in these texts designates a spiritual praxis of meditation conjoined with breath-control, “yoking” the senses in order to control the spirit, and then “yoking” the mind in order to obtain immortality.
    Buddhist sources in this same period also speak of techniques of disciplining the mind and the body, and the word “yoga,” owing as much to Buddhism as to Hinduism, soon came to mean any mental and physical praxis of this sort. (Similar disciplines arose in ancient Greece and, later, in Christianity, a subject on which Pierre Hadot and Michel Foucault had a great deal to say). This is the general sense in which the word “yoga” is used in the Bhagavad Gita, a few centuries later, to denote each of three different religious paths (the yoga of action, the yoga of meditation, and the yoga of devotion). But these texts say nothing about the physical “positions” or “postures” that distinguish contemporary yoga. The postures developed much later, some from medieval Hatha Yoga and Tantra, but more from nineteenth-century European traditions such as Swedish gymnastics, British body-building, Christian Science, and the YMCA, and still others devised by twentieth-century Hindus such as T. Krishnamacharya and B. K. S. Iyengar, reacting against those non-Indian influences.
    So there is an ancient Indian yoga, but it is not the source of most of what people do in today’s yoga classes. Contemporary yoga traditions are a far cry both from the Upanishads and from Hatha Yoga. Most twenty-first century American yoga practitioners have more in common with a jogger than with a meditating sage; they want to relax after a hard day at the office, tighten up their abs, and reduce their cholesterol and their blood pressure; their yoga of relaxation and stretching may also involve regular enemas, a cure for back pain, a beauty regime, a vegetarian diet with a lot of yogurt (which is not etymologically related to “yoga”)–oh yes, and a route to God.
    Is yoga, then, for the mind or for the body? Is it like going to church or like going to the gym? Is it a spiritual praxis or an exercise routine? To all these questions, the answer is: yes. For some people (both in India and in America) it has been one, for others, the other, and for many, both.

    http://pastorbobcornwall.blogspot.com/2010/12/is-yoga-form-of-hinduism-is-hinduism.html