Yoga and other ancient beliefs
See what this computer science professor has to say about Yoga
http://www.cs.huji.ac.il/~doria/yoga.html
See over 500 research papers on the effects on Meditation
http://www.mum.edu/tm_research/tm_biblio/welcome.html
I have now begun to feel that ancient Indians were smart people. Their thoughts, techniques, religion, culture are quite remarkably developed.
Only thing is that their knowledge and understanding of the natural world was quite limited, and hence they incorrectly tried to give purpose and meaning to this meaningless universe (more in a later post) by imagining a God who created this world for a purpose and has control/influence over all this. Then they made temples to worship the Gods, the concept that I just cannot stop laughing at.
Our knowledge about the world has certainly changed but our body hasnt.
Hence their thoughts on mind and body are still valid - like meditation and Yoga.
Anyway, maybe the concept of God, faith, and worship was invented just for people to be emotionally stronger and be more moral - after all they empirically knew how the human mind behaves.
But I am of the opinion that they came out with the concept of God out of their curiousness and when they saw their belief in God resulting in the positive effects of morality and psychological strength, that concept just got ingrained stronger in their minds.
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