Meaning of Yoga

Source: Sahaja Yoga, UK Website

The Word 'Yoga' is a word derived from the Sanskrit word 'Yukte' , which means 'to join' or 'to yoke together'. It is a concept that goes to the very heart of human potential and destiny.

The concept is that it is the birth-right of every human being to have their individual consciousness merged into an all-pervading Universal Consciousness, in the way that a drop of water merges into the ocean. This merging would be such a fundamental change to habituated human awareness that it would manifest changes at all grosser levels below it, including mental, emotional and physical and on a larger scale, human society and the world itself. This is the evolutionary destiny of human beings. This is Yoga.

Yoga is the goal. However, any means used in an endeavour to achieve that goal has also been termed yoga. The result is that there are different types of yoga and there is an ages-old tradition of the practice of yoga in India as well the manifestation of an esoteric tradition in some of the world religions, such as the Sufis of Islam and the Gnostics of Christianity which can also be called yoga.

Such knowledge however would have remained in the province of the learned Brahmins and Sanyasis, had it not been for the Saints, Sat-Gurus and Realised men and women in India and elsewhere who transmitted the essence of the knowledge to the masses usually in the form of surmons and verse. This was the beginning of the Bhakti Cult in India, which was to show that the goal of yoga could be reached not only by knowledge but also by devotion to the Divine, usually through Music and Art.

In modern times, in fulfilment of the prophecy of the ancient books of India, The Puranas,(the word is derived from 'Pura', meaning 'Old' and 'Nava', meaning 'New'), it is said that 'what has gone will come again'. This lays down that cosmological time is not linear as conceived by science, but actually travels in an evolutionary spiral and can be broken down into four cyclical Yugas or Ages. Each Age being characterised by a gradually deteriorating state of existence of human beings. At the present time the world is in transition between the fourth yuga, Kaliyuga and the first yuga, Satyayuga. In Satyayuga human beings are in a state of yoga; in Kaliyuga they are not. Since the process that transforms the human beings of Kaliyuga into the human beings of Satyayuga is a natural, en masse, evolutionary one, it is beyond human beings conscious effort to achieve. In 1970, Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi, began Her Work of showing how that evolutionary mechanism can be triggered by the spontaneous awakening of the Kundalini energy in people,irrespective of their cultural or religious background. This is the Sahaja Yoga of modern times. The innate, spontaneous yoga for the masses, which requires no effort but just happens. Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi has remarked that if people had to be given an instruction manual to show them how to breathe, how many people would survive?