7 'Ancient' Forms of Mysticism That Are Recent Inventions Read more: 7 'Ancient' Forms of Mysticism

DaltheJigsaw

http://www.cracked.com/article_19283_7-ancient-forms-mysticism-that-are-recent-inventions.html

Ask anyone wearing a leotard and staring off into the middle distance how long yoga has been practiced, and chances are they'll tell you that it's around five thousand years old. In other words, people were stretching and posing serenely several hundred years before aliens secretly built the Egyptian pyramids.

Getty

"Shit, I've been on this thing all day. Time for some yoga."
The Reality:
Yoga as we know it today -- a set of postures (asanas) combined with breathing techniques -- dates back to around the grand old year of 1960.


Read more: 7 'Ancient' Forms of Mysticism That Are Recent Inventions | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_19283_7-ancient-forms-mysticism-that-are-recent-inventions.html#ixzz1SFOWg1fA

compassionate_warrior

This isn't true that yoga dates back only to 1960. It goes back hundreds, if not thousands of years in India. It's the secularized version that was "invented" in the West, divorced of any spiritual elements.

genkaku

Dating (Hatha) yoga to 1960 is just facile, lookit-me thinking... sort of the way many of the Beat Generation writers popularized/watered down Zen Buddhism. It's not bad (it happens all the time in all sorts of arenas), but it is sloppy and, often, self-serving. The only people who get upset about it are the ones who imagine there is an 'authentic' (Hatha) yoga or an 'authentic' Zen Buddhism or an 'authentic' anything-else. It's all a great invitation to the rest of us ... just don't be any stupider than you have to.

DaltheJigsaw

This isn't true that yoga dates back only to 1960. It goes back hundreds, if not thousands of years in India. It's the secularized version that was "invented" in the West, divorced of any spiritual elements.

Got any links on this?

DaltheJigsaw

Dating (Hatha) yoga to 1960 is just facile, lookit-me thinking... sort of the way many of the Beat Generation writers popularized/watered down Zen Buddhism. It's not bad (it happens all the time in all sorts of arenas), but it is sloppy and, often, self-serving. The only people who get upset about it are the ones who imagine there is an 'authentic' (Hatha) yoga or an 'authentic' Zen Buddhism or an 'authentic' anything-else. It's all a great invitation to the rest of us ... just don't be any stupider than you have to.

Yea! Watered down Zen! Love it!

Mr_Serenity

The original Ouija spirit medium game is actually pretty old. It originated in a town with a similar name to "Ouija" (I think in Europe) with gypsies who used to trace letters in the sand and put down a live cobra as the medium for the spirit to use. Then the spirit would "posses" the cobra to make it move to the proper letters to make the statement. Sounds like a really crazy sight to see. Eventually it got adapted to paper, and then a board game, which some people would argue is just as dangerous as the original.

Mr_Serenity

The information about Ninjutsu not being legit is also a bit false. The actual proper term for actual Japanese Ninjutsu is usually "Ninpo". One of my martial art teachers lived in Japan with his father during a war in the 1950s or 60s, he was a military brat that traveled with his father.

During this time he actually had the chance to run into a real Ninpo school in Japan. He told me some crazy stories of how they trained people in that school. It was a clan that descended from farmers that needed to learn what they learned to kill the samurai without actually fighting. They had traps everywhere. Even the school was in a building that was built so they could escape a siege from the samurai without ever getting caught. There were trap doors everywhere, on the ceilings on the floors that led to underground passage ways etc.

Everything was very secret. They trusted him with some of these secrets because he was black, and they considered him different from most the other Americans. The techniques themselves too were not used for fighting, they were used for killing. Lots of poison was involved in the real Ninpo techniques. These were farmers after all not warriors. So some of these Ninpo disciplines still got passed down even after the samurai age was over. It's rare, but it exists.

This martial arts teacher of mine actually ended up being one of the prominent black panthers, and the identity of the ninja he learned in Japan very much influenced himself and the black panthers. He taught me a few Ninpo techniques among the kung fu I learned from him that involved easily disarming blades and breaking necks. He was a very dear teacher to me.