Yoga and the Return to Infinite Consciousness
The field of yoga has existed since—and even brought about the beginning, the origins, of culture—since the beginning of Dwapar Yuga, since the beginning of the fall from divine consciousness to human consciousness. Yoga was the effort to return to that original, primordial state, of absolute Presence, absolute knowing, absolute power, absolute goodness, that is our real nature.
And through time, we have fallen further from it, and have required more extreme forms of yoga (in the sense of more gross forms) because the mind in its fall was no longer able to receive the subtler forms of yoga, and harness the energies that they enabled one to access, in order to uplift oneself back to the original vibrational frequency.
And so, through the course of time, yoga itself has devolved to its current state of very commercialized hatha yoga—that’s basically a system of physical exercise, that had nothing to do with original yoga.
Now, original yoga is not ashtanga yoga. It’s not Patanjali’s yoga, as most people think—that’s actually a fairly late occurring form of yoga, around the second century A.D. already.