Yoga- the dravidian descent

Even after the advent of Aryans with their multi-purpose divinities the practice of Yoga did not disappear completely from India. Time and again there was a resurgence of yoga. The Buddhist philosophy is indebted to the Samkya system to a great deal.Later day Budhism resorted to yoga, especially to Tantra yoga to a great extent.Though this could be considered as a fall as far as the Bhudhist ideal is concerned, it nevertheless emphasizes the fact that Dravidian influence retained its hold on the populace, even during the fierce onslaught of Aryanism.It had to submerge
Again after the Buddhist period for some time. Intellectually sharp adversaries like Sankaracharya had emerged and with the added stength of the invincibility of Vedas treated the Dravidian heritage with contempt.

Then again during the middle ages yoga in another form surfaced.Hatha yoga was the basest form of yoga of all.It turned away from the exalted ideal of rediscovering ones real self to the enhancing of the capabilities of the outer vehicle of consciousness-the body and the subtle blue-print from which, supposedly,the outer shell of the human being is created.This ,whatever its advocates say, was really a lopsided effort to enhance the life span by a system of body conditioning.Granted that any practice of yoga needs a minimum level of physical well being, but that is supposed to be the outer limb of yoga as was stated by Pathanjali In his famous aphorisms.To make it an end in itself defeats the grand aim with which the system was devised.It is said that Hatha Yoga is attempting to do this.
Yet all these different methods of yoga is supposed to have originated from Siva himself.There are innumerable instances in the Tantra literature where Siva is called the disguiser of truth.Siva is said have been responsible for concealing truth by creating a multiplicity of gods and forms of worship. Why this was so has never been explained.
This constant mention of Siva in connection with all the literature in India brings another aspect of the god head before us. Disguise is only possible were there is diversity.Thus siva operates in everyone, making life complicated.This aspect of Siva is not the all encompassing one of which we were concerned about before-hand.This is more in the line of Jiva, the individual consciousness.
Thus the myth of Siva operates in both ways.As the cause of everything and as individual specimen of conscious action.This grants enough ground for ascribing any special property to siva.On a very limited scale Siva could be considered as one with consciosness. This defenition provides many advantages.The most important being the lucidity accorded to the subject matter.The term consciousness is familiar to us.May be not in the same sense as it was used in the old Texts.Not in the sense of Jiva the individual soul.In the modern meterialist context consciousness is a by product of the evolution of nature.Meterialism is thus monistic in its present day formulation.To the ancients especially Kapila, consciousness (in its limited sense of course) is inherently separate.It is a whole entity by itself.And what is more the Samkya philosophers goes further by stating that consciousness is not single but many, and has been so from the beginning itself.this is a very useful tool to comprehend some of the older texts as well as their theorems
However, we cannot ascribe the conception of Siva entirely to the philosophical foundation of reality of the ancient Indians.Because the samkhyans did not propound a theory of godhead. Their view contained many entities acting in isolation to each other.The vaiseshika and Nyaya Schools also decried the belief in god head .The Mimaamsakas laid emphasis on action rather than the ultimate entity.Pathanjali and Badarayana,also did not stress the primariness of a single mover of the universe.Later day commentators on the Vedanta theory of Badarayana were mostly in favour of the concept of godhead.This appears to be a deviation rather than progress in the evolution of the thought process.
But the cult of Siva and Devi seems to be of primordial origin in the land.This aspect of belief appear to be a motive force for all the people in the subcontinent as far as the individual worship is concerned.According to the Anthrapologists the cult of the Mother Goddess is the natural evolution 9in the human cultural process.It is intimately connected with female physiological properties like menstruation and conception.The outer portions of the human generative organs acts as motifs of fertility and creativity.The physical acts corresponding to the universal acts of creation are symbolized This may have emanated from either a crude attempt at super imposing the most familiar aspects of human life on nature by way of comparison.Or by lucid deductive logic,by arriving at the process of distribution of energy in the universe. The belief that human progress is always in a linear form may not be taken for granted.This stems from our experience in the past few millenniums.But as is evident,human beings existed on the face of the earth for tens of thousands of years prior to that.Cultures more advanced than the present one may have been wiped out by natural calamities.If the story of the civilization of the Atlantis has any truth in it,our advances lays far behind them in many spheres.Their experiments did not concern the physical aspect of human life alone.By surpassing the physical realm they are said to have discovered the hidden truths behind life. If such is the case, the belief in our own unimpeachable status as the only progressive civilization which have made inroads into nature would hardly hold water.In this background the old and existing sects could be a true or erroneous representation of the beliefs which were in vogue at one timeAnd in this sense the percept of Samkya’s that “nothing comes out of nothing” is believable.Every idea man now has is not new and pristine.They could have been in existence all along.They are being re-disvovered anew by man.