Yoga and Religion
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 3 years before Nov 29, 2016
MiBeloved 3 years ago
Yoga is not religion. This means that one can be a yogi and be a Christian or be a Hindu or be a Muslim. No genuine yoga teacher will insist on a religion being followed but that does not mean that the teacher may not adhere to a religious belief or religious experience from which a belief was derived.
Some yoga teachers are Shivites. Some are Advaita Vedantists. Some are Vaishnava. Some are atheists. Some are theists. Some feel that the universe came about from nothing and will return to nothing. Some think there is a Supreme God, whose action caused this to exist.
Patanjali for instance believed in a Supreme Lord, an Ishvara whom he described precisely in the Yoga Sutras but there were other masters of yoga who did not attest to a deity and who felt that God cannot be.
There were cases of theist students learning yoga from atheistic teachers. There were cases to the contrary.
Srila Yogeshwarananda took his highest instructions and assistance from a Vaishnava yogi but Srila Yogeshwarananda did not convert to Vaishnava ideas and stuck it out as an extreme Arya Samaji.
Arya Samajis do not accept the Puranas, Mahabharata and Ramayana as being primal authoritative texts. They only accept the Vedas without any accessory literatures.
The point is that to learn yoga, one might have to go to a teacher of a different religious persuasion. It is not always possible to find a teacher who is of the same philosophical or religious frame of mind.
devaPriya Yogini 3 years ago
I kind of get what you are saying, but I still can't quite make it fit into my understanding of religion.
If we follow Patanjali, Krishna, Siva, the Vedas... how do we in any way manage to not regard yoga as being religious?
A long time ago, when I first started Yoga and I had just emerged from the Catholic stupor and wanted nothing to do with religion, I made this claim as well because I didn't want it to be religious.
But in no time and just a little study and distance between myself and my former religion, I came to a personal understanding that yoga was actually the ultimate religious path meant for very few. The rest of the masses could claim what they wanted, but I could no longer deny to myself that Yoga was religious even though it would have been more convenient to do so and would have attracted more new age types.
When at the Sivananda ashram I was witness to a small group of offended Americans who were questioning the top swami of the organization as to why there was all this prostrating and chanting to hindu gods. They were not expecting this, they felt yoga should be non religious and some of them stamped their feet and left the ashram because they wanted yoga to be the way they had thought when they arrived...for 'everyone'. Swami was annoyed and said that Americans have no idea what yoga really is and that they have to understand that its origins are in the Vedic religions which require religious observances, nothing less.
Claiming yoga is not a religion seems to be one of the methods by which it has been so greatly exploited. By claiming it isn't religion and lacking in fundamentally sacred objectives, it's become ok to attach it to anything and everything ie aerial yoga, tree climbing yoga, holy yoga, vino yoga (where students are offered alcohol after class)
Can you site an atheist yogi from the past and one from modern times?
I've heard so called yoga teachers who don't know the sutras or gita exists, claim that yoga has nothing to do with religion which seems preposterous to me.
Without insisting on an exact dogma, (but like you said even patanjali sites ishwara) yoga still seems like the ultimate religious undertaking. Almost but not quite beyond religion to a certain degree, but it's hard for me to understand how or why an atheist would take on Yoga when the final stage is samadhi. What's the point of Samadhi for an atheist?
I didn't think that the Christian form of yoga was of much approval, "Holy Yoga"
Here are some standard definitions of religion: How do we remove these from Yoga?
1. The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, esp. a personal God or gods.
2. Details of belief as taught or discussed
Synonyms: Faith, belief, creed, denomination.
MiBeloved 3 years ago
Can you site an atheist yogi from the past and one from modern times?
MiBeloved's Response:
Hiranyakashipu was a first class Mahasiddha whose accomplishments in yoga could not be surpassed by any other limited being for the time cycle he lived in.
Krishnamurti, who did yoga privately and pretended that he was not interested in yoga. I began doing yoga without a teacher but my first teacher was Arthur Beverford who did not believe that the universe was sourced from a person. His view was that there was a Primal Creative Cause which was just energy.
Special Note:
Yoga was developed in a philosophical and religious environment but yoga is neither a philosophy nor a religion. Anything which was developed in a certain cultural medium has to be transplanted carefully into any other cultural environment, because the culture influenced the original development.
Since yoga was developed in particular medium, one has to be careful in using it without reference to its native environments.
If we transplant a maple tree from Maine to Utah, there will be some disappointments because Utah is dry and dusty and the maple tree may not like that soil. Similarly yoga may not do as well as it did in its original cultural mediums. So in that sense yoga is closely related to a particular philosophy and medium.
In the Ramayana there is the story of the yoga success of Ravana and his son Indrajit. Indrajit was a master yogi, so much so that even the supernatural people were scared of him. He also mastered Vedic religious rituals, to such an extent that Rama, the Personality of Godhead, was warned by Indrajit’s uncle, Vibheeshan, not to allow Indrajit to complete a certain religious ceremony. And actually Indrajit was an atheist.
You may contest that it is not possible for an atheist to do a religious ceremony. Still that argument does not hold up because some atheists are religious and do have very firm beliefs just as theist stand up for what they believe in.
Alfredo 3 years ago
I don't agree fully with all you said.
Why? All the examples you used are within the realm of Hinduism, but then you bring in Christianity and Islam.
Not to criticize these 2 religions, as I respect their adherents.
But yoga is within Hinduism or Sanatana Dharma, and not outside it.
MiBeloved 3 years ago
I agree because I stated it developed in a particular culture, so its transplant into any other, religious or otherwise, should be done carefully since transplants often go awry.
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In my opinion strictly speaking the practice of religion is not linkable to that of inSelf yoga as it by definition a pragmatic discipline for direct consciousness elevation by individual personal efforts, also called works in some denomination.
Religious precepts require that the believers have faith in an upcoming ambiance of some paradisiac environment presided by their deity or god in return for some general set behaviors, which would be positively rewarded.
With inSelf yoga the proper perspective of the practitioner is to accept the process as also the end result. Fantasies regarding upcoming attractions can be detrimental distractions. And, overall religiously favored behaviors are considered karmically binding and not preferred.
Most precepts of religiosity are not applicable to inSelf yoga even if generally speaking yoga fits within Hinduism, the practice of the discipline may still be considered as an individual endeavor regardless of religious fellowship.
However, I do see a religious aspect in the practice of inSelf yoga, and that goes only as far as considering the regiment of inSelf yoga as a ritual. But on a closer look inSelf yoga routines (using that term very candidly) cannot be assessed and accepted as an outer observation but an internal or inner psyche activity.
Purification and absolution take place by dint of psyche purification which is the backbone of the process and not some other end product or state of being. In that sense the inSelf yogi can truly aspire to perfection of their existence simply by total reliance and dependence on the process alone.
Another rift from religiosity is the total satisfaction from just the inspiration or words alone of prophets, the existence of whom may be a distant past. In inSelf yoga, it is fundamental to understand that assistance from such individuals must and will be directly available for any level of significant access to the techniques.
In this sense and in my humble opinion it is only by naivety and ignorance that I may mistake the contemporary illustrious yogi Michael Beloved for anything less than my prophet, or the main gate to the process in this personal and current context.
It only by such mercy that a mere bottom feeder all the way within the deep depth of the ocean is getting life giving sun elements trickled down all the way from the glorious sun star beyond the sky. So, he actually makes it all possible, this is assessed on experiential connection and development, not blind faith reinforced by sentimental aspirations and convictions.
Ultimately, the inSelf yogi must rely and strive for direct experience of what they may perceive and factually transmute to a particular level of consciousness, as part of their practice. Their faith is manifest in accepting that they will achieve a higher level of consciousness as blueprinted by their antecedents.
Religiously inclined persons naturally rely on their faith to bypass the exigence of such contrived precepts. Their process typically begins and ends in the pillar of faith. A faith that is primarily based in those other aspects outside of oneself, and one that leery of personal experience.
