Pantanjali's 10 Necessary Elements for Yoga

1. Ahimsa: non-violence, non-injury, harmlessness.

2. Satya: truthfulness, honesty.

3. Asteya: non-stealing, honesty, non-misappropriativeness.

4. Brahmacharya: sexual continence in thought, word and deed as well as control of all the senses.

5. Aparigraha: non-possessiveness, non-greed, non-selfishness, non-acquisitiveness.

6. Shaucha: purity, cleanliness.

7. Santosha: contentment, peacefulness.

8. Tapas: austerity, practical (i.e., result-producing) spiritual discipline.

9. Swadhyaya: introspective self-study, spiritual study.

10. Ishwarapranidhana: offering of one’s life to God.

***

So apparently that's just the beginning. The path of liberation is hard, to put it lightly. Yoga has nothing to do with attaining a perfectly-toned butt.

“‘Brahman may be realized while yet one dwells in the ephemeral body. To fail to realize him is to live in ignorance, and therefore to be subject to birth and death. The knowers of Brahman are immortal; others, knowing him not, continue in the bonds of grief.’” (Brihadaranyaka
Upanishad 4:4:13,14)

On Modern "Stoicism"

I've been around a few people who have claimed to be practicing "Stoicism" let's just say I wasn't very impressed; to put it rather lightly. Back when I still had Facebook I poked around in a few groups that were ostensibly devoted to Stoic practice. There I noticed a lot of virtue-signalling and plenty of parroting of currently-fashionable ideologies (various regressive-progressive liberal and SJW talking points), of course under the guise of being "stoic." What a hoot.

Problem #1 is that so-called "Modern Stoicism" is rather wishy-washy on the topic of metaphysics. It's most popular promoters, which are life coaches of the typical contemporary character, tend to avoid the fact that the classical/traditional Stoics of Hellenistic antiquity nearly all subscribed to a spiritual worldview of one sort or another. The Moderns however are just fine with letting their students cling into whatever nihilistic and relativistic modern and postmodern views they wish. Enforcing spiritual discipline among students is, ya know, bad for business and stuff. Who wants to chase away customers when there's so much $$$ to be made?? On a more grounded note, it's quite possible that many of these "teachers" are themselves ignorant of traditional spiritual doctrines. So even if they aren't necessarily money-grubbing opportunists, they are still a shining example of the blind leading the blind.

The bitter truth is that most modern, secular, educated people (this comprises the vast majority of those who identify as stoics today) here in the West now base their morality solely on utilitarian presuppositions and believe in one or another "humanist" doctrines which place no principle higher than that of the individual human ego. In absence of a higher or divine principle, human existence is little more than a battle of egocentric wills and this battle can only be framed realistically though the lens of Machiavellian game theory analysis. So we have people **using** stoic methodology for the purpose of **appearing** more virtuous (what they envision virtue to be) than the next guy. There's no Good in and of itself. What's passed off as "stoic" virtues is little more than mere utility. The purpose of the whole endeavor is to use a "stoic" toolkit to prove one's ego as **appearing** to be more pure/clean or advanced/evolved than other egos. Of course I don't think most modern stoic practitioners see their own use of stoicism as being anything like those attributes. But if/when they sit down and ponder the ultimate purpose for their study of this knowledge then they may in fact come to a similar conclusion as to what I laid out above. The long and short of it is that without a consistent Physics* (metaphysical weltanschauung), Stoicism is nothing more than a methodology without a clearly-defined end goal.

*remember that classical/traditional Stoicism consists of three parts: Physics, Logic/Rhetoric and Ethics. Most modern practitioners tend to omit the first two parts and are thus practicing a massively-incomplete system.

Hebrew Bible = Grand Cosmic Myth

Great little comment I just spotted today:

The Bible from creation to the crowning of Solomon is a grand cosmic myth, a story book of the constellations. YHWH is the moon god. The Akkadians deified their kings, combined them with gods and placed them in the constellations. The text was expanded like the Gilgamesh epic through expansion by parallelism and resumptive repetition. Scholars have yet to figure out the original text and it is not that hard to do. The stories went from Akkadia to the Amorites, Hittites, and finally the Assyrians who changed the name from Sin to YHWH, Marduk to Moses.

I will have to look more into the Sin/Yahweh association. But let's run with it for now, if just for the purpose of hypothetical games. Sin was an old Akkadian moon god that became especially revered by the Imperial Assyrian regime that dominated the Iron Age Near East. The Egyptian name for Moon was "Iah" (pronounced, "Yah" and of course one of the top Sumerian-Akkadian gods was "Ea" (also pronounced "Yah"). Yahweh as a major Hebrew god may have came about as a play on words, so to speak.

It seems as if the Jerusalem priesthood the came to be during the Persian period (right after the fall of the Assyrians and Babylonians) created a new national god that in function was an amalgamation of other gods of the time. It would have made much sense to use a god-name that was familiar in the broader region. As evidenced by the Elephantine papyri, the Persian rulers may have stationed a group of Semitic-speaking scribes in Egypt to assist with administering the newly-annexed territory. These scribes may have been the founding element of the later Jerusalem priesthood. If these scribes were Sin-worshippers they may have adapted the local (in this case Egyptian) Iah for their moon-worship.

If the proto-Jewish priests were indeed Sin worshipers then their origins may have been among the scribal ruling element of the old Assyrian regime! The Persians were quite known for their mercy and tolerance, in sharp contrast to their Assyrian predecessors. So instead of wholesale- massacring the old regime, they may have very well retained the useful elements (like scribes) and relocated them to a faraway part of the empire where they wouldn't have the opportunity to stir up any local revolts or be a general nuisance. Egypt would have been quite a safe distance from Northern Mesopotamia. But the Persians weren't able to hold Egypt for very long after the initial conquest due to a series of local revolts. The Persian administration would have been bounced right out of there and the southern Levant would have been the closest Persian-run area to Egypt to resettle in, where their next job would have been helping the Persian crown conduct administrative affairs over groups of Phoenician/Canaanite subjects. Jerusalem would have been the new abode for the Sin/Iah scribes. The peoples to the area to the north of them, in Israel/Samaria would have been following the old Canaanite pantheon, i.e. the pantheon of El, known as the Elohim. Yah(weh) would have been a minor or nonexistent god to these people. Eventually, through a series of events we don't really know the true nature of yet, the Yahweh priests in Jerusalem eventually came to dominate the religious affairs of the whole region all the way from northern limits of the Sinai border up the border with Phoenicia proper.

I'll have to further explore this thought-stream in more detail in the future.