 Through the mystic eye, eminent personalities from various walks of life in conversation with Sadguru. This week, one of India's most prominent image management experts, Dilip Charyan, joins Sadguru to discuss the origin of yoga and its significance. Mr. Charyan is the co-founder of Perfect Relations, South Asia's largest image management and public affairs consentancy group. He began his career as the economic consentant to the Bureau of Industrial Costs and Prizes, Ministry of Industry. Later, he became the editor of Business India, one of India's leading business magazines. Watch as Mr. Charyan and Sadguru speak about human evolution, the difference between religion and spirituality, and yoga's significance to the 21st century human being. In some senses, the tragedy that has just happened in Uttarakhand, natural tragedies of this kind make one think about one, why do they happen? Two, is it part of a much greater divine mystery? And to what extent is human degradation responsible for natural calamities? Human being is not the center of this universe. He can rise to a state where he can imbibe the universe. He can contain the universe within himself in terms of his experience. Such a possibility is there for one who explores, but the making of the universe, the making of the solar system and even the planet is not human-centric. That is every other life on the planet and everywhere else, every other form of life, not necessarily physical. All of them have a role to play. What is being construed as calamity is not really a calamity. A cloudwurst is not a calamity. A mega wave in the ocean which you call a tsunami is not a calamity. An earthquake is not a calamity. Mother Earth just stretches herself a little bit and a thousand people die and we think it's a calamity. Right now the wind blows hard. The mosquito population here in the garden thinks it's a calamity because all the relatives got blown away, understand? So our state is not any different. So there is no such thing as natural calamity because everything has a certain lifespan. Whether it's an individual human being or the planet or the solar system or the universe has a lifespan, maybe not comparable to our lifespan so we think it's eternal, but it all has a lifespan so it is going through a certain cyclical process. In this process, if an earthquake happened a thousand years ago, people would have just felt the tremors and they thought God is angry and they would have kept quiet. Not too many would have died because somewhere an earthquake happens, we did not span across the planet as we do today. Today we are too many. We're nice but we're too many. Because we're too many, if one wave comes, twenty-five thousand people will die, one cloudburst close to twenty-thousand people die, it is just we are a calamity, we are in the way of everything without understanding anything. We're trying to live on the planet without having a clue about what is the nature of the planet, how it functions, what are its requirements, without any of this understanding or making an accommodation for that, we just simply... We're too overjoyed with our own ability to do a few petty things. We're too enamored with our own petty intellect. I think this is an evolutionary problem. The religions of the book, the religions which have come thereafter, have in many senses, either deliberately or because of design, by the people who designed them, lost that fundamental tenet of the belief in the self. Because all the religions of the book go away from the more earlier forms of animism, the understanding of rocks, of stone, of mystic places, all those have in some senses been lost. Is that therefore devolution instead of evolution in modern thinking and religion, religious thinking? Definitely not evolution. Devolution is not a strong enough word because it is a complete backward step in the sense, this whole idea that the existence is human-centric comes from this. Yes, comes from these religions. Before these religions came, if you look at any other form of spiritual processes happening anywhere in the world, whether it's the Australian Aborigines or India for that matter, or Africa or North America or South America, wherever you see, everybody recognized the significance of every other life on level with human life. Yes, whether it is an ant or a bird or an insect or a rock or anything was recognized as significant as a human being because its simple sense to understand what the soil that you walk upon is, what you carry as your body right now. This simple sense is completely taken away because everything that is universe is, you know, sitting in a book. Yes. And you've got to agree with the book, otherwise you're dead. That's it. When certain structures are made in the making of a civilization, in the making of a future for human beings or a set of human beings or the whole humanity whichever way, either you can bank on human intelligence and create those things or you can bank it on human consciousness and do those things or you can bank on human baseness and fear and insecurity and do those things. Unfortunately, most religions have chosen to address the baseness and fear in the human being rather than is all inclusive consciousness or even is intellect for that matter. So the prayers in India were never asking. There was no such thing as prayer, actually, invocations and methods of worship, scientific methods of doing things and invocations. So the only prayer was, let me be destroyed the way I am so that the bigger possibility manifests within me. You just look at it today, 99% of the prayers are just this. Give me this, give me that, save me, protect me. Does it look like survival or does it look like spiritual process or religion to you? Just survival. You're rooting your survival through heaven. It's a very inefficient way of doing it. But every religion has succumbed to this. You know, half the pujas, half the stones people wear, half the processes they conduct in temples are all fundamentally part of an ask. An ask is the cornerstone of religion's survival because you ask, you give. I want you to look at this, this can become a major study. If you walk into any ancient temple, you will see none of the processes are about asking. There's no room to ask. There is no room for odulation nor for asking. Just scientific processes. One thing that you must see, Dilip is, there is something called as Saptarishi Pooja in the… in Kashi. This happened when Adiyogi gave this knowledge to the Saptarishis. It went on for a very long time. Then he told them to go across the world and spread it. See, when Saptarishis were leaving Adiyogi, having been with him, having shared this phenomenal science, having experienced it, they were not very eager to leave him and go. So they said, if we go away, how do we again see you? You're sending us off that we will never come back. How do we do? Then he told them, you do this, I am with you. So he taught them Saptarishi Pooja. It's today called Saptarishi Pooja, I don't know what he called it. These ordinary priests who are doing it probably for money today, maybe not entirely, probably they respect the tradition that's offered them this. But money has become an important part of that. They are just doing the procedure in a certain way. You will be amazed, the stacks and stacks of energy that they build up there. See, we can do this in a different way. If the necessary protected atmosphere is there, I'll build it up in a certain way. In our programs and things, we do things like this. But these are not people who have any internal capacity. They're just doing a process, outside process, which is so absolutely amazing that though the individual performing it, this is pure technology. You don't know one thing about your cell phone, but you know how to use it, you can speak to America, it's just like that. These guys themselves know nothing, but they're just sticking to the procedure and it's working miraculously. Miraculously means I was just flabbergasted, I couldn't believe. I always have a certain disdain for temple priests and the way things are conducted. I suddenly bow down to them, I said, okay, this is great. If you kept it for fifteen thousand years without distorting it, we have to bow down to you, whoever you may be right now. What yoga means, which is the whole concept of unity, unfortunately, both in India and elsewhere, even this concept is getting diluted, you will say, and I'm hesitant to use it. Distorted. It's distorted and distorted to an extent where it is almost unrecognizable. A lot of so-called yoga gurus have partitioned the whole compartmentalized it as to a form of physical exercise and have lost out the core of the whole concept of it. But do you think that this breaking up is again an expression of where we are, consciousness, humanity, togetherness, all of that? Just ignorance. Okay. No, but what happens to yoga, since this is an area which you are… Now the California court ruled that if yoga has to enter the schools, you must remove all the Indian names. So Padmasana is being renamed as Criss Cross Applesauce. You're joking? I'm not joking. Criss Cross Applesauce? Yes. To teach the children, Criss Cross Applesauce… looks like Padmasana. I must cry, but I'm laughing. I know this is vipwadi. In terms of yoga getting all distorted, it is a serious concern because the type of yoga that is going on, particularly, you know, I… though I come from the stables of hatha yoga, I never thought I should teach hatha yoga because I didn't want to put people through such long processes because I have other ways of doing things. I thought we will never really teach hatha yoga except as a preparation for some long meditation programs, just forty days, sixty days kind of preparation. But in the last five, six years, I've seen many… I think I've taken off at least… at least two dozen reasonably popular yoga teachers in America to stop teaching because I just pointed out what they were doing and how it is impacting their lives. See, doing improper yoga is not just that they're going to hurt their body, they will bring calamities into their life because what you… what you need to understand is, hatha yoga, the simple physical form of yoga is a way of aligning your system with the cosmic geometry. So if you do it wrong, it's dangerous. If you do it wrong, you not just may cause physical damage, you will bring situations in your life which are completely disastrous for you. Whether your life works smoothly and constantly successfully or constantly you're in a pit, depends on how well aligned or you're disaligned with the whole process. So hatha yoga is one way of aligning. It is a more physically probably in today's world more difficult way of doing it, but there is a certain beauty to it because it gives you health, it gives you well-being. At the same time, it gives you success and focus and a different level of blissfulness in the body, which very few people experience. If you just sit here, how am I… my body feels right now, I won't exchange this for anything. So why you don't go for a drink or a drug or something else which is physically whatever is simply because you're in a better state than all those things. If I was miserable, maybe I would also drink. If there's something going to elevate you for some time, why don't you do it? But when everything is so fantastic, why do you want to mess it up with something? That's a question, it's not a moral decision. It is just a question of… Physical need. No. If you're living in a better place, why do you want to come down to a more gross and basic kind of thing? So when you're able to manage your own chemistry the way you want it, why would you want to throw chemicals into the system, it's as simple as that. So when I saw these yogic systems which are growing and becoming popular in America, I would like to name people and whatever because for many reasons. For example, these days it's become a fad for people to do yoga in forty-two degree centigrade temperature. The classical yoga always prescribes, if you do any yogic process, you must either do it before eight-thirty or nine in the morning or after four-four-thirty in the evening because you must do it in the cooler hours. When you do any yogic practice, particularly hatha yoga, you will develop an enormous amount of Ushna. Ushna is not to be understood as temperature alone. It causes temperature, but it is not temperature by itself. The whole Ayurvedic system functions on Ushna, Sita and Pitta. So Ushna is one aspect because the yogi always wants to keep his Ushna slightly above the normal. He wants to be hot because for various reasons, if your body, because the yogi's main concern is his perception that he wants his perception to be unhindered. So anything that comes in its way, he wants it to be burnt out in the system. He doesn't want any excess mucus in the system. He does not want any excess fluids in the system. He wants to keep it slightly hotter than what is normal. So when you practice hatha yoga, the whole system is created to generate that Ushna. So always you must do it in the cooler hours, otherwise it'll go and cause cellular damage. So now they're doing yoga at forty-two degrees centigrade. When I saw this, this is insanity. If you allow these things to happen for a period of time, one day medical research will come and show you how doing yoga destroys your system. It's not far away. Already some articles in York Times have come and they become… they've been circled all over. How yoga is damaging to the system. If you allow this kind of yoga to flourish, that will be the conclusion in another five to ten years and immediately everybody will drop it. Right now it's rising without any papacy anywhere. Simply by its sheer efficacy, it's just rising all over the world. You will kill that. So that's the reason I decided we must train hatha yoga teachers in classical hatha yoga. Twenty-one weeks, a dedicated focused time. They've never been through any training in their life like this. They think being a yoga teacher means dressing up in a certain way and you know using a few Indian words, this makes them into… And producing a video. Yeah. So now we're really putting them through works, twenty-one weeks. And this will produce definitely more stable teachers who will take yoga in its right format. So that tomorrow if somebody is doing yoga, any kind of scientific study you conduct on them should be an absolute thumbs up for sure, on all levels. Physically, psychologically, emotionally and in ways that they don't understand.