As I have shown in great details elsewhere, Vivekananda imbibed the occultist, spiritualist and Theosophical currents that were quite fashionable in the United States during the years he spent there after his address to the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. In his lectures on Raja Yoga, delivered before admiring audiences in New York, Vivekananda interpreted Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras as providing a “scientific” method for “seeing God,” -- indeed, “becoming God” and acquiring “absolute power” over all of nature. His interpretation of Yoga Sutras by no means reflected the mainstream of Hindu thought in India at that time, but was tailor-made to provide a practical guide to Western seekers of spiritual wisdom. Very much in tune with the scholarly fashions of his day, Vivekananda looked down upon hatha (postural) yoga, calling it “nothing but a kind of gymnastics” which can help “a man live long, but only [as] a healthy animal.”
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/international/the-ludicrousness-of-taking-back-yoga
