Victor A. van Bijlert (ret.) was a lecturer in the Department of Beliefs and Practices, Faculty of Religion and Theology, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The nineteenth-century Hindu modernity, it is argued, sought both individual flourishing and collective emancipation from Western domination. For the first time Hinduism began to be constructed as a religion […]
The term yoga suffers quite a bit from “meaning expansion”. This is also true for other similar concepts from the East – Tao, Zen, karma, and nirvāna. The original meaning of these words seems to have been somewhat lost. Conceptions are shifting. In our time of opulence, busyness and threat, we usually associate yoga with […]
How I see spirituality I think I’ve always considered myself a spiritual person (without knowing the word). As a child, I would carry ants out of the camping tent, explaining to them in earnest “How lucky you are to have met me, go free now”. At 13, I interviewed a local professor to quench my […]
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