to find food in order to survive, to nourish ourselves; we have to protect ourselves from danger; we are constantly in a state of freeze, fight, or flight. We are seeking things and avoiding things. Yoga is a process by which the knots are untied, enabling us to align ourselves with the true nature of the world, not what we imagine it to be. With this insight, we can break free from hunger and fear, and eventually the cycle of rebirths. We can mystically unite with the cosmos or develop occult powers that help us solve human problems.
What Is Mythology? A fact is everybody’s truth, based on measurable evidence. Fiction is nobody’s truth, based on fantasy. Myth is somebody’s truth, and establishes a culture’s worldview. The words myth and mythology are controversial only if one sticks to their nineteenth-century definitions, where myth is a synonym of fiction and fantasy. This simplistic binary world has long since collapsed. In the twenty-first century, our understanding of the world is far more nuanced. It must be kept in mind that the meaning of words changes with time. The word gay today refers to homosexuality and does not mean carefree, as it did a century ago; for the Greeks, justice meant the natural order of hierarchy, not equality, as it does today. Myth, therefore, has to be seen in the modern context, not the colonial one. The Age of Enlightenment was also the Age of Colonization, a fact that is rarely pointed out. During this age, whatever the European colonizers believed in was the truth, and whatever
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