What is Yoga ?

By admin · Friday, April 23rd, 2010

YOGA

Introduction

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Yoga, has been and is still an enigma to a large number of people. One should admit that people have learned to consider the Yoga to be something great and at the same time to be something reserved for the sages only. This is the reason for which men and women maintain some awful distance from it. They claim their innocence to own such attitude towards Yoga as they have been taught that persons with expertise in Yoga are generally anything more than extraordinary and that they are beyond the reach of the common human beings. Still one can notice that the government of India have been considering to request a person like Swami Ramdev to impart lessons of Yoga to the paramilitary personnel, that is, to thousands of persons in the security and defense in order to free them from stress and strain.

Definition

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Yoga is a Sanskrit word and this particular word means union. A section of people of the ancient India has a strong metaphysical bending of mind. They have an idea that with a specific set of mental and physical practices a man can be united with his creator, that is, with the eternal self. They had a belief that a man must motivate himself for this end. The philosophy of Yoga states that final and the greatest human wisdom may be achieved by an collective insight on physiology, ethics, psychology and spirituality which is possible to earn only through sincere, proper and regular practices of Yoga.

History of yoga

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It is hardly possible to determine how old this practices are. The Harappan people(3300 to 1700 BC) might have such experiences because some seals found in the sites of the Indus Valley Civilization have engravings of male figures in meditation-like posture.

The Vedic period is also based on anticipation. In the Vedas, for the first time in the earliest religious scripture of India, that is in the Rik Veda prescription of Yoga has been noticed. The concept of Yoga has been well-exhibited in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishada, (one of the earliest religious and philosophical texts in India). This philosophical exercises of the Upanishadas have been anticipated to be sometime in 400BC. References of Yoga have been marked in the Indian Epics, that is, in the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, which are works of 5th to 2nd century BC. In the Bhagabat Gita (200 BC) and in the Yoga-Sutra of Patanjoli (200 to 100 BC) the Yoga has been referred and discussed as one of the most important subjects.

Amritakunda (meaning Pool of nectar)

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