Four more questions on yoga

Is it actually possible to reach a state of freedom through yoga, in addition without infringing the freedom of others?

Which exercises are exercises of yoga and which are not? Who can check if the exercise is done with the inner harmony?

Who invented yoga?

Yoga exists for so long that we even do not know the names of all the people who were involved in self-exploration. They formed this teaching in antique times. Also this is caused by the fact that in the East, where yoga has been preserved the best, it was considered indelicate to attract attention to your personality. The ancient monks (or sadhu) believed that they only make this teaching available to others as they got it from the higher spheres of the Universe. Now we know the names of relatively late followers of yoga such as Patanjali, Vyasa, Gheranda and others. It is considered that in a human life yoga is a practical expression of the ancient knowledge of the Vedas - the knowledge which is comprised in the Vedas such as Rigveda and others. Generally, we know nothing about the life of those ancient monks who gave us the Vedas (in Vedic language they are called Rishis).

Is Yogi a materialist or an idealist? Is Yoga a materialistic or idealistic teaching?

Yoga believes that materialism and idealism are not an edifices (or systems of views), which are able to describe completely such a complicated phenomenon as a human being and the life of the Universe. It means that our world is much more complicated and mysterious than a simple attempt to present the Universe and ourselves in these polar implacable systems. Our world and all of its inhabitants can appear and be described at the same time as extremely idealistic and as extremely material objects, subjects, and events. It means that life is more complicated and at the same time much more simple than these dogmas which we can find among the followers of one or another system of views. The whole world with all its processes and phenomena and the humanity itself are the connecting elements between idealism and materialism, and they are a self-existent reality. Materialism and idealism are just about two projections of higher ultraboundry reality. And manifestation of Higher Reality is the whole Universe and the man (or us).

We need to understand clearly the fact that yoga is not a conformist system trying to bring together these two diametrically opposite systems artificially. Yoga is an independent system, it is independent both from materialism and idealism. Neither the concept of materialism nor the idealism ideas influence the formation of the philosophical views and beliefs of yoga. Yoga always has been based only on the theory and practice which resulted from experience of real yogis and yoginis. Every theory has a right to exist only in one case: if it confirms with real practice, experience and life itself. Otherwise, it is self-deception for all of us.

Ancient yogis and yoginis have made a giant jump in the perception of the world, human nature and self-awareness. The philosophical systems of the world still are unable to understand and can’t apply it in the life of mankind. In the best case all the well-known systems came to some extremes or even marginal methods and efforts to describe the nature of man and the Universe. The philosophies of idealism and materialism are one-sided efforts to describe the nature and essence of the phenomena of the Universe and of a human. That’s why it’s no wonder that all social, political and economic models of human development which were based on these systems, sooner or later got crushed. It refers to all ideas starting from Marxism where overall materialism of views combine with overall idealism of belief in consciousness and responsibility of every society member and it’s doesn’t matter how long a soul lives in the body ending by modern apologists of capitalism (imperialism), which hold on to the abstract ideas of idealism, that they call democracy. But on the other hand there are short-term pragmatism and irresponsibility in relation to the rest of the world. In this way humanity still doesn’t have the philosophical foundation on which we could build a life of our civilization.

Unfortunately, yoga has reached us in small crumbs of knowledge, and most of the people do not know that. So, yoga also is not able to become the philosophical foundation for the society where we could create a new society of people very fast without wild capitalism and abstract Marxism. Probably the crises in our world are inevitable. And we could hope only for the Higher power of the Universe to help us to become wise and to guide the civilization. Ordinary people, who don’t participate in politics or financial events, can only study philosophy (axioms) of yoga by themselves, to avoid unpleasant situations and try not to suffer from the next non-viable social, political or another system.