Idea of structured religion came from the West: Sadhguru

People turn to science and technology to make their lives more effective, but do not have a "user manual" to the most sophisticated machine that nature has created -- the human body, spiritual thinker Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev says.
"The struggles people face today are because while people have a super computer as a human body, they refuse to read the user manual," he said while talking about his recently launched book "Adiyogi: The Source of Yoga".
Adiyogi is approaching this complexity with a certain format in a scientific way, he said.
Speaking about religions, the thinker stressed that Indian culture was more influenced by dharma than the religion.

"We talk about religions but we need to understand that the idea of structured religions essentially comes from Abrahamic religions," he said.
The preacher, awarded the Padma Vibhushan this year, said people describe religion as dharma, which are laws that refer to different aspects of people's lives.

"Because of the economic success of several cultures everybody in the world believes that there are religions. The Buddha's ways of teachings may have become Buddhism. But these are all western interpretations of the beliefs which came from the East," he said.
His book chronicles Shiva as Adiyogi, the progenitor of yoga, but he stressed that he did not associate Shiva or Adiyogi with any particular religion.

"Shiva does not spell religion," he said.
Published by HarperCollins, the book captures the essence of Shiva as "emptiness and presence, history and myth and creator and destroyer" for a modern audience.