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TOTAL APPROACH TO YOGA AS DERIVED FROM THE TAITTIRIYA UPANISHAD AND THE YOGA VASHISHTHA
Dr. H. R.Nagendra
Greetings to you all from Vivekananda Kendra, Kanyakumari, the southernmost tip of this land. We are extremely happy that this wonderful conference has been organized by the Bihar School of Yoga, under the guidance of Paramahamsa Niranjanananda.
In this presentation I would like to bring to you the basis of the total approach to yoga that we have been using to make yoga a socially relevant science for modern man. We are all aware of the grand contributions of science and technology in the modern era. The breakthrough in research science during the last four centuries has brought us to the level today where we understand everything about this physical universe. Those students of science may recall that it was four centuries ago that Newton and Descartes started the ball rolling. They said. that this world is so infinite, so sophisticated, that we cannot understand the reality behind it in one stroke.
So, let us start with things that are very, very simple, down to earth, concrete physical things of this universe. Once we complete that, then probably we can advance to more subtle things. It took us four hundred years to reach the state where we understand that this entire physical universe is nothing but energy. Probably thirty years back, we thought that there are two building bricks of this physical universe, energy and matter. Thanks to Einstein we know that it is energy and today we consider matter as bottled up energy. Having understood the structure of this physical universe, we also understand the laws that govern it.
For normal, usual speeds we have the Newtonian mechanics, the three laws of Newton, which all of us have studied at high school. However, when we are dealing with ex
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