Spiritual Authenticity in a Secular Context: How Modern Postural Yoga is Searching for Legitimacy in All the Wrong Places
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the historical origins and spiritual context of contemporary yoga practice in the West. In an attempt to assess the spiritual significance of this somatic practice, this essay explores the way in which both critics and promoters of postural yoga frame their arguments for the value of contemporary yoga practice by showing either its disconnect from, or homogeneity with ancient Hindu traditions. By tracing the evolution of yogic practice from its scriptural origins to its contemporary manifestations, this paper argues that yoga has never been a static or perfectly defined entity. Rather, yogic practice has a long history of being re-interpreted to meet the specific spiritual needs of practitioners. Modern Postural Yoga (MPY) represents a continuation of this tradition of adaptation. Rather than being an inadequate replication of an ancient tradition, I argue that MPY is a distinctly modern practice that has been transformed to fit the contemporary spiritual needs of a secularizing and body-conscious Western society.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".