“son salutations” – s-o-n, instead of s-u-n – you’ve now repurposed the practice and dedicated it to Jesus. You’re no longer doing pranayana but you’re breathing in the Holy Spirit.
One time this evangelical Christian group of University students were videotaping me as I sat in full lotus - they were documented me being possessed by Satan - in their view of course. I just gave them my pineal gland smile - the possession of Satan of course. This was back around 2007 - and so now things have changed. Evangelical Christians are assimilating Yoga - to the consternation of Hindus.
you actually find that there are still a lot of the same claims that this is, for instance, a “Vedic victory” when yoga gets into public schools, or this is “stealth Buddhism”, when mindfulness gets into the schools. So those are the kinds of claims that are made when talking to Hindu or Buddhist sympathiser audiences. But a lot of the people who are interested in doing practices for health or wellness, they really don’t know where these practices come from and they really haven’t thought that much about how intentions may change through their participation in these practices.
So the idea with Qigong (a term popularized by the Communist China regime) - is that it's not religious. But on the other hand being religious can help the training. So it's not necessary but it does help the training become sufficient.
So instead of a mystical experience being dismissed as a psychological pathology (dissociative syndrome or whatever) - Hood is trying to assimilate mysticism based on the "fruits" of the experience.
So some Hindu critics of the Christianisation of yoga will basically say, the prayers are actually the bodily practices. Doing the sun salutation with your body is a form of devotion to Surya the sun god. And so there are actually some warnings by Hindu spokespersons, saying that ultimately Evangelicals are going to find their faith corrupted, by their own standards, and they’re going to be led into the true way of enlightenment. And it may not be so easy just to re-label practices and make them Evangelical.
So in mysticism, as Hood emphasizes, the mystical experience can be from drugs or meditation or various other causes as "symptom substitution" but it will often lead to some sort of faith tradition as an
"ontological wonder that occurs when the self dissolves and is made to merge into the Greater Reality."
So I relayed to an NDEr when she said she never is alone - she never has the experience of being alone - and I said that when I made that same claim then someone told me they had never had that "feeling."
I said to the NDEr - I don't think not being alone is a "feeling."
But then again we can not describe the mystical experience - because it's inherently based on logical inference as an internal process of investigation.
https://www.utc.edu/psychology/profiles/faculty/hood.php
https://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/podcast-ralph-hood-on-mysticism/
podcast
Hood, R.W., P.C. Hill, and B. Spilka. (2009). The psychology of religion: An empirical approach. 4th ed. New York, NY: The Guilford Press.
For Hood, my cynical interpretation only proves his point: the consequence of the experience is all that matters; the religious among us will interpret it religiously, and the non-religious among us will interpret it non-religiously. A spiritual world exists because people continue to experience it. It is a post-modern and pragmatic philosophy, and it serves him well.
https://www.hinduamerican.org/projects/shakti-initiative
In his conversation with her on the adoption of yoga and metaphysical healing practices by evangelical Americans, we get little indication that Brown has already written on this subject at length for her book The Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America, published in 2013 by Oxford University Press. More significantly, although the interview does mention an important court case regarding the legality of yoga-teaching in Encinitas, California public schools, there is no reference to Brown’s significant role in the case.
Brown’s argument in The Healing Gods uses the work of scholars of religion in a cursory fashion that casts them as supporting pieces of evidence without truly engaging with them at length or in depth. Similarly, in her chapter on yoga, Brown extracts evidence from scholarly and historical works on modern and pre-modern yoga, and on American metaphysical traditions generally, in ways that are decidedly at odds with the spirit and conclusions of those same works.
In keeping with Bender’s assessment that Brown “exemplifies the ‘caveat emptor’ genre of popular writing about CAM,” I would argue that Brown’s writings on yoga are most similar to the genre of Christian-based criticism of yoga.
“Yogaphobic” and “Hindu Origins” positions on yoga in current cultural debates— respectively belonging to evangelical Christian opposition to modern yogic practice and Hindu claims to the same— both depend on many of the same assumptions for the arguments of either side to be valid: yoga needs to be ancient, Indian, and religiously Hindu. It makes sense, then, that Brown would need to look to the self-advancing works of yoga teachers and groups like the Hindu American Foundation, frequently over and above scholarship, to buttress her claims of yoga as Hinduism full-stop.
Professor Ralph W. Hood:
The two big sides you need to look at is one, the social constructionists, starting with Katz and Proudfoot and what really is the main focus of modern psychology, which is rooted in a neoKantian notion that all experiences are mediated and there are no such things as an unmediated experience: And therefore the sociologists and psychologists are supreme in looking at how culture, history, individual psychology constructs experience.
And then look at the counter to that: read Stace, read Hood, read Foreman, who argue that all experience is not constructed; the experience, in the language of Hood, is expressed by culture, language and history but not determined by it. And then focus upon empirical research that always hovers around and is influenced by a serious commitment to the possibility that mystical experience reveals something ontological basic about reality.
Dr. Ralph Hood: Don't Discriminate Against Students with Religious Beliefs
You can't support Freedom of Belief unless there's someone that believes something. Are you for Freedom of Belief? then somebody's got to belief something that you don't believe in. I mean it's well-documented The APA takes essentially anti-religious stances. And it's well documented that psychologists, among the population, are the least religious people of all. So what happens is that they can't handle religious issues very well. And then what they try to do is put it into a psychological, pathological framing. It's our requirement to enlightenment these people to get rid of their naive superstitious beliefs... be spiritual and not religious and religion is a problem and religious exemptions don't count, because these are rooted in pathological tendencies. It's just a horrendous problem.
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