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YOGA CHARTER BLUEPRINT FOR THE FUTURE
Paramahamsa Niranjanananda
We have come here on the eve of the Tyag Golden Jubilee of our guru, Paramahamsa Satyananda. It has been an honor for the organizers to welcome the six hundred delegates from thirty two countries of the world, and the six thousand delegates from the twenty states of the Republic of India, under the canopy of this yogic environment, the yogic vision, the yogic mission.
What is yoga? How did it begin? And where does it end? The answers to these questions are important to understand. The origin of yoga is lost in the mists of time, but we can just infer that it began when the first man to walk on this planet earth looked around and started asking himself the questions: What is all this? Who am I? How does my body function and work? How am I motivated to search for shelter, happiness, and food? Is there something greater than me which has created all the stars and the moon and the sun which I. perceive. It was at that time that the seed of yoga was planted in the personality of an individual. That seed, in the form of samskara, has been handed down from the first person to walk on this planet, to all of us who are present here today. In this process he went through many changes in life, changes which inspired him to discover new things about himseif, new things about the universe, new things about the relationship that an individual has with the entire cosmos. That was the beginning of yoga.
This world is a very peculiar place, because life as we know it is guided by our ambitions, aspirations, desires and other things which have to be fulfilled. It is the fulfillment of those ambitions and aspirations which makes us a wordly person. The moment we are able to recognize that these aspirations and ambitions are just ways and means to keep our consciousness and awareness restricted to the manifest world, to the
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