Integral Yoga Psychology - an intro

Transcript

integral yoga as a modern yoga movement started by Sri Aurobindo has some features in it that are also part of modernity in that sense one may consider it a continuous continuation or part of the continuity of the entire stream of yoga that we've been talking about and in this lecture we'll see the traditional continuity of the yoga stream in integral yoga but at the same time it is also a yoga which responds to and answers some of the problems of modernity which is an international phase in human development so we can start off by asking this question in what ways the integral yoga differs from the entire tradition of yoga and then move on to talk about integral yoga in terms of the yoga tradition one of the principal ways in which the integral yoga is a modern yoga and differs from the tradition of yoga is that it gives a a lot of credence to evolution it is an evolutionary yoga and we've talked about how that responds to or affects the place of position of integral yoga within the stream of the yoga tradition as an evolutionary yoga integral yoga believes that yoga can play a part in the evolutionary advance of mankind along with this there is the notion that yoga can bring the human being to a point where a transformation of conscious this occurs in which the human becomes a higher consciousness expressing in waking consciousness so in other words the goals of integral yoga are not achieved in trans as is the case with most of the yoga's that we've studied so far but the goal of integral yoga is a waking life and a heightened capability and consciousness expressing in waking life so that's another way in which the integral yoga differs from the traditional yoga so these kinds of features air down to a third which has to do with the transformation of society so this again is a modern feature of integral yoga in sri aurobindo said at a certain point in his own yogic development that a liberation that left the world as it was was felt by him to be distasteful and this relates to the fact that sri aurobindo z-- entire entry into the yoga tradition occurs first and foremost via his response to colonialism the sri aurobindo was educated in the West in some of the best Institutes of the modern knowledge Academy st. Paul's High School in London and Cambridge University where he worked on what is called a tri Foss and the classics the classic languages Latin Greek and to some extent Sanskrit is what he studied there and after coming back to India he found that India was under British rule he came back to India in 1893 and finding India under British rule he launched into an anti-colonial movement and so this anti-colonial movement coupled with his self tutoring in indian culture and literature brought him to question whether the tradition of yoga could play some part in helping to free the nation so this is what actually brought him into engagement with the yogic tradition so that brought him to an understanding of yoga but gave him goals which were not restricted by the traditional understanding of the goals of yoga this is the reason why we talked about the integral yoga as a modern yoga and having certain goals which respond to the question of modernity the questions of the position of the human in the evolutionary stream of the world the question of the power of waking consciousness in transforming our existence and the question of the perfectibility of society not merely the perfectibility of the human being so these are some of the important features that one has to keep in mind when one thinks about the integral yoga now with this we can look at how sri aurobindo formulates the integral yoga in with respect to the yogic tradition