Is Yoga an Indian Thing?

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Is Yoga an Indian Thing?

When I spoke with the United Nations, I said, the yoga is not an Indian thing. Some people who believe they are more Indian than me … I think I look very Indian. Do I? I’m dressed Indian and I look Indian, and I’m Indian, all right? But they think they are more Indian than me, so they’re really offended I said, “Yoga is not an Indian thing,” and I said, “Yoga is a gift from India to the world, but it cannot belong to India. If yoga is Indian then somebody will claim gravity is European. Then what will you do? Will you float?”

A particular science might have been discovered and explored in a certain culture. That doesn’t make a science into your culture. For all these people who are tweeting a lot about yoga, I hope they’ll get up in the morning and do their yoga, because if you really want to make yoga Indian, the one billion Indians must get up in the morning and do yoga. Then it will become Indian. Anybody who walks into India and to see the entire country is doing yoga, people would say, “Wow, this is an Indian thing, an Indian phenomena,” then they may also pick it up. It may become an international phenomena.

No, they’re not doing yoga, they’re just tweeting about yoga. Our honorable prime minister is lying down on the street and doing yoga with children, with common people, with the police, with the army. He is doing yoga lying down on the street. Which world leader is doing anything like that in the interest of the well being of the citizens of the nation? But they’re not inspired to do yoga. They’re sitting and tweeting against me, heaping abuse on me. I am working 7 days of the week. Thousands of our volunteers are working 7 days of the week to make sure every person in India does yoga.

Around the world we’re doing, but in India, it’s much more concentrated, the work. Town to town, village to village, our volunteers are traveling tirelessly, trying to bring yoga to every human being. Many things are not settled in the lives of people in that part of the world, but at least they must know [inaudible 00:03:14], so we are working towards that. The very fact that United Nations declared international yoga day because they recognized it is beyond cultural boundaries, it is beyond national identities, it is beyond religious identities, it is a science for human well being. Only because they identified that, they declared international yoga day, so all the tweeting birds, I want you to understand, if you really want people to look up to India for this contribution that India has made to the world, what you should do is you must make sure the 1 billion Indian people are doing yoga every day.

If we do this, then slowly it will generate a few, at least a handful, of truly profound beings. Profoundness of experience and profoundness of knowing. When such beings come up, the entire world will look up to India for sure. Why would they not? If you don’t do it soon enough, they may come up elsewhere and people will look up. Wherever there is profound experience, wherever there is profound knowing, people will look in that direction. Before it happens in America, you better do it in India.