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EVOLUTION

In his "yoga sutras" Maharishi (the great sage) Patanjali defines yoga with these words: "yoga citta vrtti nirodah", that means that yoga is the restraint of mental fluctuations.
Mental fluctuations, such as stubbornness, misconception and illusions are the roots of human's lack of awareness and thus of ignorance and sufferance.
According to Patanjali yoga can help us in two way: with practice and detachment (Abhyasa - Vairagya). About yoga practices there are lots of scripts, books, articles, talks... Much less is written and said about detachment.
First of all we must underly that the two concept are strictly bound: there can't be be an efficient practice without the ability to avoid compulsion or addiction and it's quite hard to learn detachment without the practice of yoga.
But detachment (or non-attachment) is much more and, especially in our times, it plays a determinant role for our future and evolution.
We live in times of great changes. When we look at the world it seems that everything has accelerated. Not only on the plan of communication (cellphones, Internet...), but also on the social, economic, political and even spiritual plan. It's like time has been compressed or, better, it's like we have less space between cause and effect. It seems that there is no time anymore to eventually fix the cause before the effect manifests.
From one hand this is good because it calls us to take more care and responsibility, but from the other hand it's not so easy to adapt ourselves to these new conditions.
It is said that all this is happening due to a planetary shift from a lower dimension (the third) to a higher (the fourth). It seems that the Earth (intended as a conscious being) has already done the shift and now it's up to humans to shift as well.
It's important to say that, when we speak about dimensions, we are not talking about parallel worlds from some science fiction book, but about states of consciousness.
I think that is obvious that plants have a certain state of consciousness, animals another, average man another one and someone who is considering life something more than working, sleeping, eating, someone that considers that life as a possibility to give answers to primeval questions such as "who am I" or "where I come from", well, this person has another (a fourth) state of consciousness.
Now, if the Earth has reached a state of consciousness where there is no space anymore for violence, war, hate and similar, it's clear that a sensible person feels that but is still often in contact with such heavy stuffs and can't avoid hard feelings and heavy thoughts. That's why in my experience and in the experiences of many students, teachers and friends which whom I'm in contact to, we now feel the need to invest more effort in the spiritual practices (yoga) and, at the same time, the need to give less and less energy to heavy emotions and negative thoughts.
Detachment is just that. To succeed to separate ourself from those thoughts and emotions while we are still involved in a dimension where those thoughts and feelings rule.
The effort to the practice is therefore mandatory in order to develop the inner strength that we need to properly face these times and to transcend (to go beyond) the standardized way of thinking that belongs to a dimension and to a society that has aged, that is not in harmony with the Earth and therefore doomed to extinction.
More than ever is now important not only to practice but to understand that yoga is not a religion, not a sport, not only a physical practice but a means to rise in consciousness, to evolve... together. Therefore is not important which kind of yoga are you practicing, no one is better than another, the important is the common effort, the unity (remember that yoga means unity), unity in diversity, in order to manifest together a new golden age. It is possible but under the condition that we have to understand that revolution, evolution and future of humanity is not to fight against the old system but to jump to another state of consciousness, in harmony with the new Earth, and to finally manifest the dream of all the spiritual generations of all times: a world of global peace. OM shanti, shanti, shanti.