From: K
| "With yoga, I discovered that the wisdom of Torah was also inside me," writes Bloomfield, who moved from the United States to Jerusalem in 1984. "I experienced Torah teachings as a reality that I could know and feel within myself, within my body. ... Every yoga posture was a gateway to greater Torah consciousness." Here's Koenraad Elst clarifying Yoga's real threat to the prophetic monolatrous revelatory religions: 4.3. Prophetic monotheism and Sanatana Dharma ..... In fact, prophecy is radically different from yoga: it means allowing an outside entity, which in the case of monotheism is called Yahweh/God/Allah, to blow certain consciousness contents into your mind. Consciousness is not turned inward, but is (or believes it is) communicating with another Being. Moreover, the mind is not being emptied of its contents and made to rest in itself, as it is in yoga; on the contrary, it is being filled with a message beyond one's control. The prophet receives a certain information: prophecy is like talking, though with an unusual partner via an unusual channel; but yoga is silence. Lastly, if it is correct that prophethood is a mental aberration and a delusion, then that makes it the very antithesis of yoga, which is an undisturbed and realistic awareness of pure consciousness. Yoga is not an erratic and disturbing experience which befalls you and drives you to tirades of doom and to outbursts against your fellow men. It is a systematic discipline and makes the practitioner calm and serene. The word yoga means discipline, control (it is also translated as "uniting": not the soul with an outsider called God, but the mind with its object, (i.e. concentration). Since its field of working is consciousness, it is not interested in outward experiences such as recognition and glorification, or martyrdom. There is nothing dramatic about yoga, in stark contrast to the dramas enacted and encountered by the prophets. The most remarkable difference between the prophets' discourse and that of the rishis, is certainly this. The prophets all talk about themselves a lot. They think they are very special, this one person in this one body is different from the rest and has an exclusive relationship with the Creator. But the rishis talked about a universal way, a world order in which we all participate, a state of consciousness we can all achieve. If God is defined as that which transcends all worldly differences, the One above the Many, then this universalism is far more divine than the prophets' exclusivism. |
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