Directions: Read the passage carefully and answer the questions that follow. Some words are highlighted for your attention.
The word yoga was first mentioned in the Rigveda, but its philosophy, science, and grammar were first provided by Patanjali in his magnum opus, Patanjali Yoga Sutra. It is heartening to note that yoga has been widely accepted across the world today. The Polish government celebrates International Yoga Day.
Yoga is something beyond physical health and material wealth. The human persona is not only a body; it is also a mind, an intellect, and a soul. Yoga attempts to harmonize all of them. In the process, one attains a healthy body, a sharp intellect, and a focused mind capable of realizing the unity between ‘I’, generally defined as personal consciousness, and ‘I’, the universal or cosmic consciousness.
Yoga means to join. Its ultimate goal is to experience the unity of individual and universal consciousness. Yoga teaches us to recognize the fundamental unity between human beings and humankind, humans and the environment, and ultimately recognize a total interconnectedness of everything. The essence of this realization is to experience that all is one. There is no ‘us’ and ‘they’ — everything is us. This is an integral or holistic approach.
There is today a new vision of reality emerging from new physics. As we know, old physics was mechanistic; we had then the great figure of Isaac Newton. But a hundred years ago, a brilliant Indian physicist, Jagadish Chandra Bose, demonstrated to the scientific world that there was no fundamental division between plants, animals and human beings.
When Darwin discovered the process of evolution, a series of new philosophies came to be developed. This is extremely refreshing, and one feels a kind of rejuvenation of thought and life.
Globalization based on the mechanistic world view also attempts to integrate nations through the concept of the world as one market. The recent experience of attempts to integrate the economies and technologies of nations instead of creating any global consciousness leading to oneness has turned out to be divisive, exclusivist, fragmentary and has not helped in resolving any of the conflicts. The market forces, instead of harmonizing conflicts, have further deepened the fault lines.
Former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said, “We should do this [yoga] before every negotiation so that we can work with a calm mind”. This indicates that some meaningful thinking has set in. It can be argued that if international negotiations could be held on the basis of holistic tenets, along with a calm mind, perhaps the UN would be able to use its time for good purposes. If such and other practices of holistic behavior are pursued, possibly a new culture of conducting world affairs and international relations might evolve in the future.
Can an alternative world view for transforming human society into a non-violent, eco-friendly, non-dogmatic, egalitarian, all-inclusive, secular world family be evolved through the harmonization of yoga and science? Enlightened global minds should seriously ponder on such a probability. Apart from emphasizing the normal benefits of yoga, International Yoga Day should be utilized to think about how a peaceful transition can be achieved for peace, harmony, and happiness.