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In this book, we analyze the psycho-social consequences faced by Indian American children after exposure to the school textbook discourse on Hinduism and ancient India. We demonstrate that there is an intimate connection—an almost exact correspondence—between James Mill’s colonial-racist discourse (Mill was the head of the British East India Company) and the current school textbook discourse. This racist discourse, camouflaged under the cover of political correctness, produces the same psychological impacts on Indian American children that racism typically causes: shame, inferiority, embarrassment, identity confusion, assimilation, and a phenomenon akin to racelessness, where children dissociate from the traditions and culture of their ancestors.


This book is the result of four years of rigorous research and academic peer-review, reflecting our ongoing commitment at Hindupedia to challenge the representation of Hindu Dharma within academia.

Parakāyapraveśa

From Hindupedia, the Hindu Encyclopedia

By Swami Harshananda

Parakāyapraveśa literally means ‘entering into another’s body’.

The Yogasutras[1] of Patañjali[2] describes parakāya praveśa or ‘entering’ into the body of another person dead or alive as one of the yogasiddhis or occult powers gained by a yogi who has succeeded in attaining samādhi.[3] Every person is imprisoned as it were in the physical body due to the prārabdha-karma. A yogi who has attained the saiyama state[4] has developed enough power to detach his mind from his own body and enter into the body of another person, dead or alive, and work through it. This is called parakāyapraveśa.

For this he should also have a knowledge of the various nādis[5] through which the prāṇic energy flows or works. When the yogi thus works through another living person’s body, the latter’s soul or mind is kept in a temporarily suspended state. The yogi always uses this power for the good of other people or to exhaust his own prārabdhakarma. Śaṅkarācārya[6] is said to have had and used this power once.


References[edit]

  1. ↑ Yogasutras 3.38
  2. ↑ He lived in 200 B. C.
  3. ↑ Samādhi means the superconscious state.
  4. ↑ It is the power of concentration culminating in samādhi.
  5. ↑ Nādis means the tubular structures.
  6. ↑ He lived in A. D. 788-820.
  • The Concise Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Swami Harshananda, Ram Krishna Math, Bangalore

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