Yoga doctrines is practiced in most settings in a completely secular way. However, for many, yoga is spiritual. Others use yoga in conjunction with their religious practices without conflict. Yoga philosophy can be applied in a way that respects, and even enhances, your beliefs and practices.
Yoga recommends the ethics and values of life as a way to bring calm and stability to the mind and well-being to the body. Yoga philosophy is an extension of your psychology and practices.
Yoga does not consider any particular religious belief as a requirement for practice, and one does not need to renounce any faith to benefit from yoga. The only requirement is to defend the values of ethics and inner tranquility.
Yoga doctrines as philosophy
Yoga is a philosophy that combines a set of ethics with ways to connect the head, hands and heart. Ethics are common to most major religions. Some people feel that the practice of yoga is considered a religion. In fact, the practice of yoga offers a set of tools that anyone can use to cultivate their sense of wonder, wherever they find it.
If you don’t have faith in God, you can follow the procedures mentioned there (in the Yoga Sutras, which they provide), for that you should: do your pranayama (breathing), your meditation, try to develop concentration, and then try to understand the Being True. None of them require belief in God. But if you believe in God, you have extra support, extra help.
Is yoga a religion?
The confusion about whether Yoga doctrines is a religion arose in our culture because the practices evolved over thousands of years in the context of the spiritual and religious traditions of India. When these teachings were first transmitted in the West, they were often taught by teachers who also practiced one of the many forms of Hinduism, Sikhism, or Buddhism.
Yoga is a science aimed at understanding the mind-body relationship, as well as calming the mind so that it incurs less mental/emotional suffering. In their original contexts, the yoga teachings are not theologically oriented.
Yoga practices, when properly taught, will help anyone from any religious tradition deepen their own faith; It is often said that the practice of yoga can make a Catholic a better Catholic, a Muslim a better Muslim, a Buddhist a better Buddhist, etc. For this reason, we find practicing Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, atheists and non-theists among the countless yoga enthusiasts around the world.
Concentration in Yoga doctrines
Concentration means the state of being in a center (con and centrum). Applied to thought, it is the act of bringing the mind to a single point. Every human being should practice concentration subjectively and objectively. In other words, each human being aims more or less precisely to concentrate on a point inside and a point outside his own world.
«Without» concentration is illustrated when you devote your full attention to Nature, such as learning a trade, a profession, a science, an art, or some form of business.
This is Evolution, extroverted or positive mental energy. This is called objective concentration. Concentration «within» involves withdrawing attention from the external world and putting the mind on «God», «Spirit», «Heaven», «Religion», «Peace», «Nirvana», «Eternity», etc. it is Involution, that is, incoming or negative energy.
Personal magnetism
Personal magnetism is the individual expression of a subtle, irresistible and dynamic force in man, which allows him to exert an unusual influence on others. All people have come into contact with men of this type. They are endowed with marvelous, almost miraculous, powers of influencing, persuading, attracting, alluring, ruling, and subjecting to their own Will-Force men of widely varied mental peculiarities and temperaments.
Men actually go out of their way to please them. They attract others without any visible effort and others are attracted to them in spite of themselves. There are several examples of that power that history offers.
This power is by no means the special and peculiar possession of some divinely gifted individuals. Everyone can grow it. It is in you and needs vigorous agitation as a condition for its awakening.
There are some men who are born great; others do so due to certain unforeseen circumstances; a third kind becomes great through conscious and intelligent effort.
The mystery of willpower
Willpower is the power of reaction. It can make all other mental functions active or passive. It is the determinative faculty and is affected especially for the trial. On the lower plane of mind, Willpower manifests as Desire and is reciprocally influenced by both external attractions and repulsions. On this plane, the Will is not free.
But when it attracts volition to externalize itself from within in the light of the Superior Reason, then it is indeed Will. in the material, the human will is a slave; on the spiritual plane he is the sovereign. Then it can be called the «awakened» will.
The eternal crossing of swords between determinists and libertarians can only be stopped by a correct understanding of the spiritual structure of man; otherwise, the arguments of both groups of thinkers are equally strong.
Each side has got hold of half the truth, but it requires the reconciling light of transcendental psychology to enable us to see the whole truth for what it is.
However, the point is that your will is free only when it is self-determined, that is, when you have risen above the impulses of the Lower Personal Self and act under the direction of the Impersonal Higher Self. To fix this all-important truth in your mind, you must have knowledge about the ‘I am’.
Don’t let this go by so much dry rot. No one ever can or will ever manifest genuine Willpower of a distinctly spiritual kind that does not comprise the «I am» consciousness.
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