Yogic Yang Spiral: Encyclopedia II - Yogic Yang Spiral - General context

Yogic Yang Spiral - General context

Yogic Yang Spiral - Group meditations in yoga

The practice of group meditation and prayer is nothing new. From time immemorial in yoga and other religious practises people have come together to worship, pray or meditate. Paramahansa Yogananda said "Why shouldn’t you strengthen your own vibrations through fellowship with people seeking Self-realization, and by group meditation with them? This practice will fortify your own spiritual convictions; you will find that many seemingly insuperable barriers in your life will crumble and dissolve in the waters of meditation. Your devotion and love for God will commingle with the devotion and love of others. Divine bliss will radiate from you, helping all persons you meet."

Yogic Yang Spiral - The group effect

The premise of the group meditation: "the group is greater than the sum of its parts" is a concept present in many cultures around the world. Thus, in a group every participant is supposed to meditate better than alone, having invested the same personal effort.

Yogic Yang Spiral - Large groups can arguably have measurable effects

The "Maharishi effect" has been studied in a scientific manner with repeated experiments over the years. Their sometimes contested results tell that there is a measurable effect of the group meditation on society as a whole. The test consisted of intense meditations over a determined period of time in a large city or geographical zone, aimed at reducing the criminality rate in that area. Results of over 20% have been achieved with just 1% of the population participating in the experiment.

The Global Consciousness Project has a different approach, trying to measure a so called "Global Consciousness Field" by the use of multiple random number generators as sensors. Over the years they claim that global events and group meditations had the power to skew the perfect balance of the random number generators, sometimes even in anticipation of an unknown event like 11 September 2001. The Global Consciousness Project of course has his detractors and is an experiment in progress.

Yogic Yang Spiral - The occurrences and symbolism of the spiral shape

The spiral is one of the fundamental forms present in nature, art, science and religion. In nature it is seen at all the levels, in the double helix of the DNA, a hurricane or typhoon, a finger print (whorl), hair growing from the crown on our heads, a sunflower's seeds, the inner ear (cochlea) and up to the macro scale, the galaxy itself.

The spiral might be one of the oldest of symbols, occurring in thousands of years old cave paintings, houses and graves. In art and religion it is related to the cycles of nature and human life, evolution, the concept that everything emanates from a center point (source) and the possibility of expansion into infinite, because the spiral is always open ended. It is a circle in motion, with every complete cycle also advancing one step on another level, adding a new layer. In math the spirals are an object of study: the Archimedian spiral, the logarithmic spiral and the golden spiral are just the most famous. The Mandelbrot spiral which spans from the infinitely small to the infinitely large, forking new spirals at all levels, has become famous for its beauty.

In yoga the spiral is connected to the kundalini energy, the fundamental energy of the human being and universe. The Ida and Pingala nadis are said to be spiraling around susumna nadi. The force centers are sometimes drawn as spirals of energy. The matrika concept in Kashmir Shaivism represents the whole universe as a wheel (spiral) of energies emanating from the Supreme Transcendence, God, represented by the spiral's center.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "General context", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki