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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm going to share some insights that I learned from my master.

Yoga was brought west slowly by various Hindu monks, in stages, as was meditation. The most famous of these Hindu monks was Paramahamsa Yogananda, the man who founded the Self-Realization Fellowship and wrote "Autobiography of a Yogi", Steve Jobs' favorite book.

Yogananda had a daunting task when he came to America in the early 20th century. He wanted to teach the techniques of self-realization and yoga, but whenever he tried to teach it the authentic way that he had been trained in by his guru Sri Yukteswar, he found he wasn't getting any enthusiasm.

Traditional kriya yoga invokes the Hindu gods, especially Shiva and Shakti. Yogananda's own preferred conception of God was as the Divine Mother Kali.

He found a lot of resistance to this when he tried to bring authentic kriya yoga teachings to the US in the 1920s. He also got physically attacked by hostile fundamentalist Christians.

Slowly, he stripped religion away from his teachings. He stopped wearing saffron robes and rudraksha malas, cut his long hair, and deliberately, consciously, made a calculated effort to change his theological language from Hinduism to Christianity, invoking Jesus Christ as a supreme guru and avatar of God.

In many ways, Yogananda's efforts to "dilute" Hinduism for the West is where modern New Age thinking comes from.

In order to teach yoga, Yogananda even changed the mantras. For kundalini pranayama meditation, for example, the mantra "va-shee" is used to denote Lord Shiva. This had to be changed to "Ah-eee" to avoid offending Christians who viewed Shiva as the devil or whatever. Ancient kriya techniques were boiled down to "self-energizing" exercises, which is a pretty big (and inaccurate) simplification of how prana (or chi, as the Chinese call it) works.

This is kind of how we ended up where we are today.
[/quote]

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had to do the same thing when he taught Transcendental Meditation in the 1960s and 1970s. His method is based on classic Hindu mantra meditation, which I was taught by my parents when I was seven years old. But Maharishi Mahesh Yogi couldn't teach Transcendental Meditation in the West without stripping Hinduism out of it. Even today, TM centers insist that the mantras are "meaningless words" just to be used for concentration. They're not meaningless words, they're tantric seed mantras that invoke the gods. I was taught those exact same mantras by my parents when I was elementary school, and I was taught to invoke the gods in my heart chakra when I mentally do japa (mantra repetition).[/quote]

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