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Title: An Introduction to Yoga
Author: Annie Besant
Release date: July 1, 2003 [eBook #4278]
Most recently updated: July 18, 2025
Language: English
Credits: JC Byers
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AN INTRODUCTION TO YOGA ***
An Introduction to Yoga
["Besant, Annie"]
1908
2025-07-18
Unknown
en
"An Introduction to Yoga" by Annie Besant is a series of lectures that delves into the philosophy and practice of Yoga, presented in the early 20th century. The work outlines the foundational concepts of Yoga, connecting them with broader Theosophical ideas. The author aims to convey complex spiritual principles, particularly the interplay between inner consciousness and external reality, guiding students toward a deeper understanding of self-realization and enlightenment through practical applications. The opening of the text introduces the theme of Yoga as a systematic discipline focused on the unfolding of consciousness and the realization of the Self. Besant begins by discussing the nature of the universe and its relationship to the Self, emphasizing that the world exists to serve the Self’s evolution. She highlights the cyclical nature of consciousness and the role of Yoga in accelerating this process, ultimately establishing Yoga as a science grounded in the study of consciousness rather than mere mystical experience. The text establishes a framework for understanding Yoga's significance, setting the stage for further exploration in the subsequent lectures. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
An Introduction to Yoga
FOUR LECTURES DELIVERED AT THE
32ND ANNIVERSARY OF THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY,
HELD AT BENARES, ON DEC. 27TH, 28TH, 29TH,
30TH, 1907.
BY
ANNIE BESANT,
_President of the Theosophical Society_.
Theosophical Publishing Society,
Benares City; and London, 161, New Bond Street,
_Theosophist_ Office, Adyar, Madras, S.
1908.
Contents
Lecture I. The Nature of Yoga
1. The Meaning of the Universe
2. The Unfolding of Consciousness
3. The Oneness of the Self
4. The Quickening of the Process of Self-Unfoldment
5. Yoga is a Science
6. Man a Duality
7. States of Mind
8. Samadhi
9. The Literature of Yoga
10. Some Definitions
11. God Without and God Within
12. Changes of Consciousness and Vibrations of Matter
13. Mind
14. Stages of Mind
15. Inward and Outward-turned Consciousness
16. The Cloud
Lecture II. Schools of Thought
1. Its Relation to Indian Philosophies
2. Mind
3. The Mental Body
4. Mind and Self
Lecture III. Yoga as Science
1. Methods of Yoga
2. To the Self by the Self
3. To the Self through the Not-Self
4. Yoga and Morality
5. Composition of States of the Mind
6. Pleasure and Pain
Lecture IV. Yoga as Practice
1. Inhibition of States of Mind
2. Meditation with and without Seed
3. The Use of Mantras
4. Attention
5. Obstacles to Yoga
6. Capacities for Yoga
7. Forthgoing and Returning
8. Purification of Bodies
9. Dwellers on the Threshold
10. Preparation for Yoga
11. The End
ForewordForeword
These lectures are intended to give an outline of Yoga, in order to
prepare the student to take up, for practical purposes, the _Sūṭras of
Paṭañjali_, the chief treatise on Yoga. I have on hand, with my friend
Bhagavān Ḍās as collaborateur, a translation of these Sūṭras, with
Vyāsa’s commentary, and a further commentary and elucidation written in
the light of Theosophy. To prepare the student for the mastering of
that more difficult task, these lectures were designed; hence the many
references to Paṭañjali. They may, however, also serve to give to the
ordinary lay reader some idea of the Science of sciences, and perhaps
to allure a few towards its study.
ANNIE BESANT.
Lecture I THE NATURE OF YOGALecture I
THE NATURE OF YOGA
Brothers:
In this first discourse we shall concern ourselves with the gaining of
a general idea of the subject of Yoga, seeking its place in nature, its
own character, its object in human evolution.
The Meaning of the Universe
Let us, first of all, ask ourselves, looking at the world around us,
what it is that the history of the world signifies. When we read
history, what does the history tell us? It seems to be a moving
panorama of people and events, but it is really only a dance of
shadows; the people are shadows, not realities, the kings and
statesmen, the ministers and armies; and the events—the battles and
revolutions, the rises and falls of states—are the most shadowlike
dance of all. Even if the historian tries to go deeper, if he deals
with economic conditions, with social organisations, with the study of
the tendencies of the currents of thought, even then he is in the midst
of shadows, the illusory shadows cast by unseen realities. This world
is full of forms that are illusory, and the values are all wrong, the
proportions are out of focus. The things which a man of the world
thinks valuable, a spiritual man must cast aside as worthless. The
diamonds of the world, with their glare and glitter in the rays of the
outside sun, are mere fragments of broken glass to the man of
knowledge. The crown of the king, the sceptre of the emperor, the
triumph of earthly power, are less than nothing to the man who has had
one glimpse of the majesty of the Self. What is, then, real? What is
truly valuable? Our answer will be very different from the answer given
by the man of the world.
“The universe exists for the sake of the Self.” Not for what the outer
world can give, not for control over the objects of desire, not for the
sake even of beauty or pleasure, does the Great Architect plan and
build His worlds. He has filled them with objects, beautiful and
pleasure-giving. The great arch of the sky above, the mountains with
snow-clad peaks, the valleys soft with verdure and fragrant with
blossoms, the oceans with their vast depths, their surface now calm as
a lake, now tossing in fury—they all exist, not for the objects
themselves, but for their value to the Self. Not for themselves because
they are anything in themselves but that the purpose of the Self may be
served, and His manifestations made possible.
The world, with all its beauty, its happiness and suffering, its joys
and pains, is planned with the utmost ingenuity, in order that the
powers of the Self may be shown forth in manifestation. From the
fire-mist to the LOGOS, all exist for the sake of the Self. The lowest
grain of dust, the mightiest deva in his heavenly regions, the plant
that grows out of sight in the nook of a mountain, the star that shines
aloft over us-all these exist in order that the fragments of the one
Self, embodied in countless forms, may realize their own identity, and
manifest the powers of the Self through the matter that envelops them.
There is but one Self in the lowliest dust and the loftiest deva.
“Mamamsaha,” “My portion,” “a portion of My Self,” says Sri Krishna,
are all these Jivatmas, all these living spirits. For them the universe
exists; for them the sun shines, and the waves roll, and the winds
blow, and the rain falls, that the Self may know Himself as manifested
in matter, as embodied in the universe.
The Unfolding of Consciousness
One of those pregnant and significant ideas which Theosophy scatters so
lavishly around is this—that the same scale is repeated over and over
again, the same succession of events in larger or smaller cycles. If
you understand one cycle, you understand the whole. The same laws by
which a solar system is builded go to the building up of the system of
man. The laws by which the Self unfolds his powers in the universe,
from the fire-mist up to the LOGOS, are the same laws of consciousness
which repeat themselves in the universe of man. If you understand them
in the one, you can equally understand them in the other. Grasp them in
the small, and the large is revealed to you. Grasp them in the large,
and the small becomes intelligible to you.
The great unfolding from the stone to the God goes on through millions
of years, through aeons of time. But the long unfolding that takes
place in the universe, takes place in a shorter time-cycle within the
limit of humanity, and this in a cycle so brief that it seems as
nothing beside the longer one. Within a still briefer cycle a similar
unfolding takes place in the individual—rapidly, swiftly, with all the
force of its past behind it. These forces that manifest and unveil
themselves in evolution are cumulative in their power. Embodied in the
stone, in the mineral world, they grow and put out a little more of
strength, and in the mineral world accomplish their unfolding. Then
they become too strong for the mineral, and press on into the vegetable
world. There they unfold more and more of their divinity, until they
become too mighty for the vegetable, and become animal.
Expanding within and gaining experiences from the animal, they again
overflow the limits of the animal, and appear as the human. In the
human being they still grow and accumulate with ever-increasing force,
and exert greater pressure against the barrier; and then out of the
human, they press into the super-human. This last process of evolution
is called “Yoga.”
Coming to the individual, the man of our own globe has behind him his
long evolution in other chains than ours—this same evolution through
mineral to vegetable, through vegetable to animal, through animal to
man, and then from our last dwelling-place in the lunar orb on to this
terrene globe that we call the earth. Our evolution here has all the
force of the last evolution in it, and hence, when we come to this
shortest cycle of evolution which is called Yoga, the man has behind
him the whole of the forces accumulated in his human evolution, and it
is the accumulation of these forces which enables him to make the
passage so rapidly. We must connect our Yoga with the evolution of
consciousness everywhere, else we shall not understand it at all; for
the laws of evolution of consciousness in a universe are exactly the
same as the laws of Yoga, and the principles whereby consciousness
unfolds itself in the great evolution of humanity are the same
principles that we take in Yoga and deliberately apply to the more
rapid unfolding of our own consciousness. So that Yoga, when it is
definitely begun, is not a new thing, as some people imagine.
The whole evolution is one in its essence. The succession is the same,
the sequences identical. Whether you are thinking of the unfolding of
consciousness in the universe, or in the human race, or in the
individual, you can study the laws of the whole, and in Yoga you learn
to apply those same laws to your own consciousness rationally and
definitely. All the laws are one, however different in their stage of
manifestation.
If you look at Yoga in this light, then this Yoga, which seemed so
alien and so far off, will begin to wear a familiar face, and come to
you in a garb not wholly strange. As you study the unfolding of
consciousness, and the corresponding evolution of form, it will not
seem so strange that from man you should pass on to superman,
transcending the barrier of humanity, and finding yourself in the
region where divinity becomes more manifest.
The Oneness of the Self
The Self in you is the same as the Self Universal. Whatever powers are
manifested throughout the world, those powers exist in germ, in
latency, in you. He, the Supreme, does not evolve. In Him there are no
additions or subtractions. His portions, the Jivatmas, are as Himself,
and they only unfold their powers in matter as conditions around them
draw those powers forth. If you realize the unity of the Self amid the
diversities of the Not-Self, then Yoga will not seem an impossible
thing to you.
The Quickening of the Process of Self-unfoldment
Educated and thoughtful men and women you already are; already you have
climbed up that long ladder which separates the present outer form of
the Deity in you from His form in the dust. The manifest Deity sleeps
in the mineral and the stone. He becomes more and more unfolded in
vegetables and animals, and lastly in man He has reached what appears
as His culmination to ordinary men. Having done so much, shall you not
do more ? With the consciousness so far unfolded, does it seem
impossible that it should unfold in the future into the Divine?
As you realize that the laws of the evolution of form and of the
unfolding of consciousness in the universe and man are the same, and
that it is through these laws that the yogi brings out his hidden
powers, then you will understand also that it is not necessary to go
into the mountain or into the desert, to hide yourself in a cave or a
forest, in order that the union with the Self may be obtained—He who is
within you and without you. Sometimes for a special purpose seclusion
may be useful. It may be well at times to retire temporarily from the
busy haunts of men. But in the universe planned by Isvara, in order
that the powers of the Self may be brought out—there is your best field
for Yoga, planned with Divine wisdom and sagacity. The world is meant
for the unfolding of the Self: why should you then seek to run away
from it? Look at Shri Krishna Himself in that great Upanishad of yoga,
the Bhagavad-Gita. He spoke it out on a battle-field, and not on a
mountain peak. He spoke it to a Kshattriya ready to fight, and not to a
Brahmana quietly retired from the world. The Kurukshetra of the world
is the field of Yoga. They who cannot face the world have not the
strength to face the difficulties of Yoga practice. If the outer world
out-wearies your powers, how do you expect to conquer the difficulties
of the inner life? If you cannot climb over the little troubles of the
world, how can you hope to climb over the difficulties that a yogi has
to scale? Those men blunder, who think that running away from the world
is the road to victory, and that peace can be found only in certain
localities.
As a matter of fact, you have practised Yoga unconsciously in the past,
even before your self- consciousness had separated itself, was aware of
itself. Sand knew itself to be different, in temporary matter at least,
from all the others that surround it. And that is the first idea that
you should take up and hold firmly: Yoga is only a quickened process of
the ordinary unfolding of consciousness.
Yoga may then be defined as the “rational application of the laws of
the unfolding of consciousness in an individual case”. That is what is
meant by the methods of Yoga. You study the laws’ of the unfolding of
consciousness in the universe, you then apply them to a special
case—and that case is your own. You cannot apply them to another. They
must be self-applied. That is the definite principle to grasp. So we
must add one more word to our definition: “Yoga is the rational
application of the laws of the unfolding of consciousness, self-applied
in an individual case.”
Yoga Is a Science
Next, Yoga is a science. That is the second thing to grasp. Yoga is a
science, and not a vague, dreamy drifting or imagining. It is an
applied science, a systematized collection of laws applied to bring
about a definite end. It takes up the laws of psychology, applicable to
the unfolding of the whole consciousness of man on every plane, in
every world, and applies those rationally in a particular case. This
rational application of the laws of unfolding consciousness acts
exactly on the same principles that you see applied around you every
day in other departments of science.
You know, by looking at the world around you, how enormously the
intelligence of man, co-operating with nature, may quicken “natural”
processes, and the working of intelligence is as “natural” as anything
else. We make this distinction, and practically it is a real one,
between “rational” and “natural” growth, because human intelligence can
guide the working of natural laws; and when we come to deal with Yoga,
we are in the same department of applied science as, let us say, is the
scientific farmer or gardener, when he applies the natural laws of
selection to breeding. The farmer or gardener cannot transcend the laws
of nature, nor can he work against them. He has no other laws of nature
to work with save universal laws by which nature is evolving forms
around us, and yet he does in a few years what nature takes, perhaps,
hundreds of thousands of years to do. And how? By applying human
intelligence to choose the laws that serve him and to neutralize the
laws that hinder. He brings the divine intelligence in man to utilise
the divine powers in nature that are working for general rather than
for particular ends.
Take the breeder of pigeons. Out of the blue rock pigeon he develops
the pouter or the fan-tail; he chooses out, generation after
generation, the forms that show most strongly the peculiarity that he
wishes to develop. He mates such birds together, takes every favouring
circumstance into consideration and selects again and again, and so on
and on, till the peculiarity that he wants to establish has become a
well-marked feature. Remove his controlling intelligence, leave the
birds to themselves, and they revert to the ancestral type.
Or take the case of the gardener. Out of the wild rose of the hedge has
been evolved every rose of the garden. Many-petalled roses are but the
result of the scientific culture of the five-petalled rose of the
hedgerow, the wild product of nature. A gardener who chooses the pollen
from one plant and places it on the carpers of another is simply doing
deliberately what is done every day by the bee and the fly. But he
chooses his plants, and he chooses those that have the qualities he
wants intensified, and from those again he chooses those that show the
desired qualities still more clearly, until he has produced a flower so
different from the original stock that only by tracing it back can you
tell the stock whence it sprang.
So is it in the application of the laws of psychology that we call
Yoga. Systematized knowledge of the unfolding of consciousness applied
to the individualized Self, that is Yoga. As I have just said, it is by
the world that consciousness has been unfolded, and the world is
admirably planned by the LOGOS for this unfolding of consciousness;
hence the would-be yogi, choosing out his objects and applying his
laws, finds in the world exactly the things he wants to make his
practice of Yoga real, a vital thing, a quickening process for the
knowledge of the Self. There are many laws. You can choose those which
you require, you can evade those you do not require, you can utilize
those you need, and thus you can bring about the result that nature,
without that application of human intelligence, cannot so swiftly
effect.
Take it, then, that Yoga is within your reach, with your powers, and
that even some of the lower practices of Yoga, some of the simpler
applications of the laws of the unfolding of consciousness to yourself,
will benefit you in this world as well as in all others. For you are
really merely quickening your growth, your unfolding, taking advantage
of the powers nature puts within your hands, and deliberately
eliminating the conditions which would not help you in your work, but
rather hinder your march forward. If you see it in that light, it seems
to me that Yoga will be to you a far more real, practical thing, than
it is when you merely read some fragments about it taken from Sanskrit
books, and often mistranslated into English, and you will begin to feel
that to be a yogi is not necessarily a thing for a life far off, an
incarnation far removed from the present one.
Man a Duality
Some of the terms used in Yoga are necessarily to be known. For Yoga
takes man for a special purpose and studies him for a special end and,
therefore, only troubles itself about two great facts regarding man,
mind and body. First, he is a unit, a unit of consciousness. That is a
point to be definitely grasped. There is only one of him in each set of
envelopes, and sometimes the Theosophist has to revise his ideas about
man when he begins this practical line. Theosophy quite usefully and
rightly, for the understanding of the human constitution, divides man
into many parts and pieces. We talk of physical, astral, mental, etc.
Or we talk about Sthula-sarira, Sukshma-sarira, Karana-sarira, and so
on. Sometimes we divide man into Anna-maya-kosa, Prana-maya-kosa,
Mano-maya-kosa, etc. We divide man into so many pieces in order to
study him thoroughly, that we can hardly find the man because of the
pieces. This is, so to say, for the study of human anatomy and
physiology.
But Yoga is practical and psychological. I am not complaining of the
various sub-divisions of other systems. They are necessary for the
purpose of those systems. But Yoga, for its practical purposes,
considers man simply as a duality—Mind and Body, a Unit of
consciousness in a set of envelopes. This is not the duality of the
Self and the Not-Self. For in Yoga, “Self” includes consciousness plus
such matter as it cannot distinguish from itself, and Not-Self is only
the matter it can put aside.
Man is not pure Self, pure consciousness, Samvid. That is an
abstraction. In the concrete universe there are always the Self and His
sheaths, however tenuous the latter may be, so that a unit of
consciousness is inseparable from matter, and a Jivatma, or Monad, is
invariably consciousness plus matter.
In order that this may come out clearly, two terms are used in Yoga as
constituting man—Prana and Pradhana, life-breath and matter. Prana is
not only the life-breath of the body, but the totality of the life
forces of the universe or, in other words, the life-side of the
universe.
“I am Prana,” says Indra. Prana here means the totality of the
life-forces. They are taken as consciousness, mind. Pradhana is the
term used for matter. Body, or the opposite of mind, means for the yogi
in practice so much of the appropriated matter of the outer world as he
is able to put away from himself, to distinguish from his own
consciousness.
This division is very significant and useful, if you can catch clearly
hold of the root idea. Of course, looking at the thing from beginning
to end, you will see Prana, the great Life, the great Self, always
present in all, and you will see the envelopes, the bodies, the
sheaths, present at the different stages, taking different forms; but
from the standpoint of yogic practice, that is called Prana, or Self,
with which the man identifies himself for the time, including every
sheath of matter from which the man is unable to separate himself in
consciousness. That unit, to the yogi, is the Self, so that it is a
changing quantity. As he drops off one sheath after another and says:
“That is not myself,” he is coming nearer and nearer to his highest
point, to consciousness in a single film, in a single atom of matter, a
Monad. For all practical purposes of Yoga, the man, the working,
conscious man, is so much of him as he cannot separate from the matter
enclosing him, or with which he is connected. Only that is body which
the man is able to put aside and say: “This is not I, but mine.” We
find we have a whole series of terms in Yoga which may be repeated over
and over again. All the states of mind exist on every plane, says
Vyasa, and this way of dealing with man enables the same significant
words, as we shall see in a moment, to be used over and over again,
with an ever subtler connotation; they all become relative, and are
equally true at each stage of evolution.
Now it is quite clear that, so far as many of us are concerned, the
physical body is the only thing of which we can say: “It is not
myself”; so that, in the practice of Yoga at first, for you, all the
words that would be used in it to describe the states of consciousness,
the states of mind, would deal with the waking consciousness in the
body as the lowest state, and, rising up from that, all the words would
be relative terms, implying a distinct and recognisable state of the
mind in relation to that which is the lowest. In order to know how you
shall begin to apply to yourselves the various terms used to describe
the states of mind, you must carefully analyse your own consciousness,
and find out how much of it is really consciousness, and how much is
matter so closely appropriated that you cannot separate it from
yourself.
States of Mind
Let us take it in detail. Four states of consciousness are spoken of
amongst us. “Waking” consciousness or Jagrat; the “dream”
consciousness, or Svapna; the “deep sleep” consciousness, or Sushupti;
and the state beyond that, called Turiya[1] How are those related to
the body?
[1] It is impossible to avoid the use of these technical terms, even
in an introduction to Yoga. There are no exact English equivalents,
and they are no more troublesome to learn than any other technical
psychological terms.
Jagrat is the ordinary waking consciousness, that you and I are using
at the present time. If our consciousness works in the subtle, or
astral, body, and is able to impress its experiences upon the brain, it
is called Svapna, or in English, dream consciousness; it is more vivid
and real than the Jagrat state. When working in the subtler form—the
mental body—it is not able to impress its experiences on the brain, it
is called Sushupti or deep sleep consciousness; then the mind is
working on its own contents, not on outer objects. But if it has so far
separated itself from connection with the brain, that it cannot be
readily recalled by outer means, then it is, called Turiya, a lofty
state of trance. These four states, when correlated to the four planes,
represent a much unfolded consciousness. Jagrat is related to the
physical; Svapna to the astral; Sushupti to the mental; and Turiya to
the buddhic. When passing from one world to another, we should use
these words to designate the consciousness working under the conditions
of each world. But the same words are repeated in the books of Yoga
with a different context. There the difficulty occurs, if we have not
learned their relative nature. Svapna is not the same for all, nor is
Sushupti the same for everyone.
Above all, the word samadhi, to be explained in a moment, is used in
different ways and in different senses. How then are we to find our way
in this apparent tangle? By knowing the state which is the
starting-point, and then the sequence will always be the same. All of
you are familiar with the waking consciousness in the physical body.
You can find four states even in that, if you analyse it, and a similar
sequence of the states of the mind is found on every plane.
How to distinguish them, then ? Let us take the waking consciousness,
and try to see the four states in that. Suppose I take up a book and
read it. I read the words; my eyes arc related to the outer physical
consciousness. That is the Jagrat state. I go behind the words to the
meaning of the words. I have passed from the waking state of the
physical plane into the Svapna state of waking consciousness, that sees
through the outer form, seeking the inner life. I pass from this to the
mind of the writer; here the mind touches the mind; it is the waking
consciousness in its Sushupti state. If I pass from this contact and
enter the very mind of the writer, and live in that man’s mind, then I
have reached the Turiya state of the waking consciousness.
Take another illustration. I look at any watch; I am in Jagrat. I close
my eyes and make an image of the watch; I am in Svapna. I call together
many ideas of many watches, and reach the ideal watch; I am in
Sushupti. I pass to the ideal of time in the abstract; I am in Turiya.
But all these are stages in the physical plane consciousness; I have
not left the body.
In this way, you can make states of mind intelligible and real, instead
of mere words.
Samadhi
Some other important words, which recur from time to time in the
Yoga-sutras, need to be understood, though there are no exact English
equivalents. As they must be used to avoid clumsy circumlocutions, it
is necessary to explain them. It is said: “Yoga is Samadhi.” Samadhi is
a state in which the consciousness is so dissociated from the body that
the latter remains insensible. It is a state of trance in which the
mind is fully self-conscious, though the body is insensitive, and from
which the mind returns to the body with the experiences it has had in
the superphysical state, remembering them when again immersed in the
physical brain. Samadhi for any one person is relative to his waking
consciousness, but implies insensitiveness of the body. If an ordinary
person throws himself into trance and is active on the astral plane,
his Samadhi is on the astral. If his consciousness is functioning in
the mental plane, Samadhi is there. The man who can so withdraw from
the body as to leave it insensitive, while his mind is fully
self-conscious, can practice Samadhi.
The phrase “Yoga is Samadhi” covers facts of the highest significance
and greatest instruction. Suppose you are only able to reach the astral
world when you are asleep, your consciousness there is, as we have
seen, in the Svapna state. But as you slowly unfold your powers, the
astral forms begin to intrude upon your waking physical consciousness
until they appear as distinctly as do physical forms, and thus become
objects of your waking consciousness. The astral world then, for you,
no longer belongs to the Svapna consciousness, but to the Jagrat; you
have taken two worlds within the scope of your Jagrat consciousness—the
physical and the astral worlds—and the mental world is in your Svapna
consciousness. “Your body” is then the physical and the astral bodies
taken together. As you go on, the mental plane begins similarly to
intrude itself, and the physical, astral and mental all come within
your waking consciousness; all these are, then, your Jagrat world.
These three worlds form but one world to you; their three corresponding
bodies but one body, that perceives and acts. The three bodies of the
ordinary man have become one body for the yogi. If under these
conditions you want to see only one world at a time, you must fix your
attention on it, and thus focus it. You can, in that state of enlarged
waking, concentrate your attention on the physical and see it; then the
astral and mental will appear hazy. So you can focus your attention on
the astral and see it; then the physical and the mental, being out of
focus, will appear dim. You will easily understand this if you remember
that, in this hall, I may focus my sight in the middle of the hall,
when the pillars on both sides will appear indistinctly. Or I may
concentrate my attention on a pillar and see it distinctly, but I then
see you only vaguely at the same time. It is a change of focus, not a
change of body. Remember that all which you can put aside as not
yourself is the body of the yogi, and hence, as you go higher, the
lower bodies form but a single body and the consciousness in that
sheath of matter which it still cannot throw away, that becomes the
man.
“Yoga is Samadhi.” It is the power to withdraw from all that you know
as body, and to concentrate yourself within. That is Samadhi. No
ordinary means will then call you back to the world that you have
left.[2] This will also explain to you the phrase in The Secret
Doctrine that the Adept “begins his Samadhi on the atmic plane” When a
Jivan-mukta enters into Samadhi, he begins it on the atmic plane. All
planes below the atmic are one plane for him. He begins his Samadhi on
a plane to which the mere man cannot rise. He begins it on the atmic
plane, and thence rises stage by stage to the higher cosmic planes. The
same word, samadhi, is used to describe the states of the
consciousness, whether it rises above the physical into the astral, as
in self-induced trance of an ordinary man, or as in the case of a
Jivan-mukta when, the consciousness being already centred in the fifth,
or atmic plane, it rises to the higher planes of a larger world.
[2] An Indian yogi in Samadhi, discovered in a forest by some ignorant
and brutal Englishmen, was so violently ill used that he returned to
his tortured body, only to leave it again at once by death.
The Literature of Yoga
Unfortunately for non-Sanskrit-knowing people, the literature of Yoga
is not largely available in English. The general teachings of Yoga are
to be found in the Upanishads, and the Bhagavad-Gita; those, in many
translations, are within your reach, but they are general, not special;
they give you the main principles, but do not tell you about the
methods in any detailed way. Even in the Bhagavad-Gita, while you are
told to make sacrifices, to become indifferent, and so on, it is all of
the nature of moral precept, absolutely necessary indeed, but still not
telling you how to reach the conditions put before you. The special
literature of Yoga is, first of all, many of the minor Upanishads, “the
hundred-and-eight” as they are called. Few of these are translated.[3]
Then comes the enormous mass of literature called the Tantras. These
books have an evil significance in the ordinary English ear, but not
quite rightly. The Tantras are very useful books, very valuable and
instructive; all occult science is to be found in them. But they are
divisible into three classes: those that deal with white magic, those
that deal with black magic, and those that deal with what we may call
grey magic, a mixture of the two. Now magic is the word which covers
the methods of deliberately bringing about super-normal physical states
by the action of the will.
[3] Dr. Otto Schräder, Director of the Adyar Library, is now engaged
on these, and is busy with the laborious task of constructing a
critical text, to be followed by a complete translation, copiously
annotated. A great boon will have been bestowed on all interested in
Samskrt literature, when this work is completed.
A high tension of the nerves, brought on by anxiety or disease, leads
to ordinary hysteria, emotional and foolish. A similarly high tension,
brought about by the will, renders a man sensitive to super-physical
vibrations Going to sleep has no significance, but going into Samadhi
is a priceless power. The process is largely the same, but one is due
to ordinary conditions, the other to the action of the trained will.
The Yogi is the man who has learned the power of the will, and knows
how to use it to bring about foreseen and foredetermined results. This
knowledge has ever been called magic; it is the name of the Great
Science of the past, the one Science, to which only the word “great”
was given in the past. The Tantras contain the whole of that; the
occult side of man and nature, the means whereby discoveries may be
made, the principles whereby the man may re-create himself, all these
are in the Tantras. The difficulty is that without a teacher they are
very dangerous, and again and again a man trying to practice the
Tantric methods without a teacher makes himself very ill. So the
Tantras have got a bad name both in the West and here in India. A good
many of the American “occult” books now sold are scraps of the Tantras
which have been translated. One difficulty is that these Tantric works
often use the name of a bodily organ to represent an astral or mental
centre. There is some reason in that because all the centres are
connected with each other from body to body; but no reliable teacher
would set his pupil to work on the bodily organs until he had some
control over the higher centres, and had carefully purified the
physical body. Knowing the one helps you to know the other, and the
teacher who has been through it all can place his pupil on the right
path; but it you take up these words, which are all physical, and do
not know to what the physical word is applied, then you will only
become very confused, and may injure yourself. For instance, in one of
the Sutras it is said that if you meditate on a certain part of the
tongue you will obtain astral sight. That means that if you meditate on
the pituitary body, just over this part of the tongue, astral sight
will be opened. The particular word used to refer to a centre has a
correspondence in the physical body, and the word is often applied to
the physical organs when the other is meant. This is what is called a
“blind,” and it is intended to keep the people away from dangerous
practices in the books that are published; people may meditate on that
part of their tongues all their lives without anything coming of it;
but if they think upon the corresponding centre in the body, a good
deal—much harm—may come of it. “Meditate on the navel,” it is also
said. This means the solar plexus, for there is a close connection
between the two. But to meditate on that is to incur the danger of a
serious nervous disorder, almost impossible to cure. All who know how
many people in India suffer through these practices, ill-understood,
recognize that it is not wise to plunge into them without some one to
tell you what they mean, and what may be safely practiced and what not.
The other part of the Yoga literature is a small book called the sutras
of Patanjali. That is available, but I am afraid that few are able to
make much of it by themselves. In the first place, to elucidate the
Sutras, which are simply headings, there is a great deal of commentary
in Sanskrit, only partially translated. And even the commentaries have
this peculiarity, that all the most difficult words are merely
repeated, not explained, so that the student is not much enlightened.
Some DefinitionsSome Definitions
There are a few words, constantly recurring, which need brief
definitions, in order to avoid confusion; they are: Unfolding,
Evolution, Spirituality, Psychism, Yoga and Mysticism.
“Unfolding” always refers to consciousness, “evolution” to forms.
Evolution is the homogeneous becoming the heterogeneous, the simple
becoming complex. But there is no growth and no perfectioning for
Spirit, for consciousness; it is all there and always, and all that can
happen to it is to turn itself outwards instead of remaining turned
inwards. The God in you cannot evolve, but He may show forth His powers
through matter that He has appropriated for the purpose, and the matter
evolves to serve Him. He Himself only manifests what He is. And on
that, many a saying of the great mystics may come to your mind:
“Become,” says St. Ambrose, “what you are”—a paradoxical phrase; but
one that sums up a great truth: become in outer manifestation that
which you are in inner reality. That is the object of the whole process
of Yoga.
“Spirituality” is the realisation of the One. “Psychism” is the
manifestation of intelligence through any material vehicle.[4]
[4] See _London Lectures_ of 1907, “Spirituality and Psychism”.
“Yoga” is the seeking of union by the intellect, a science; “Mysticism”
is the seeking of the same union by emotion.[5]
[5] The word yoga may, of course, be rightly used of all union with
the self, whatever the road taken. I am using it here in the narrower
sense, as peculiarly connected with the intelligence, as a Science,
herein following Patanjali.
See the mystic. He fixes his mind on the object of devotion; he loses
self-consciousness, and passes into a rapture of love and adoration,
leaving all external ideas, wrapped in the object of his love, and a
great surge of emotion sweeps him up to God. He does not know how he
has reached that lofty state. He is conscious only of God and his love
for Him. Here is the rapture of the mystic, the triumph of the saint.
The yogi does not work like that. Step after step, he realises what he
is doing. He works by science and not by emotion, so that any who do
not care for science, finding it dull and dry, are not at present
unfolding that part of their nature which will find its best help in
the practice of Yoga. The yogi may use devotion as a means. This comes
out very plainly in Patanjali. He has given many means whereby Yoga may
be followed, and curiously, “devotion to Isvara” is one of several
means. There comes out the spirit of the scientific thinker. Devotion
to Isvara is not for him an end in itself, but means to an end—the
concentration of the mind. You see there at once the difference of
spirit. Devotion to Isvara is the path of the mystic. He attains
communion by that. Devotion to Isvara as a means of concentrating the
mind is the scientific way in which the yogi regards devotion. No
number of words would have brought out the difference of spirit between
Yoga and Mysticism as well as this. The one looks upon devotion to
Isvara as a way of reaching the Beloved; the other looks upon it as a
means of reaching concentration. To the mystic, God, in Himself is the
object of search, delight in Him is the reason for approaching Him,
union with Him in consciousness is his goal; but to the yogi, fixing
the attention on God is merely an effective way of concentrating the
mind. In the one, devotion is used to obtain an end; in the other, God
is seen as the end and is reached directly by rapture.
God Without and God WithinGod Without and God Within
That leads us to the next point, the relation of God without to God
within. To the yogi, who is the very type of Hindu thought, there is no
definite proof of God save the witness of the Self within to His
existence, and his idea of finding the proof of God is that you should
strip away from your consciousness all limitations, and thus reach the
stage where you have pure consciousness—save a veil of the thin
nirvanic matter. Then you know that God is. So you read in the
Upanishad: “Whose only proof is the witness of the Self.” This is very
different from Western methods of thought, which try to demonstrate God
by a process of argument. The Hindu will tell you that you cannot
demonstrate God by any argument or reasoning; He is above and beyond
reasoning, and although the reason may guide you on the way, it will
not prove to demonstration that God is. The only way you can know Him
is by diving into yourself. There you will find Him, and know that He
is without as well as within you; and Yoga is a system that enables you
to get rid of everything from consciousness that is not God, save that
one veil of the nirvanic atom, and so to know that God is, with an
unshakable certainty of conviction. To the Hindu that inner conviction
is the only thing worthy to be called faith, and this gives you the
reason why faith is said to be beyond reason, and so is often confused
with credulity. Faith is beyond reason, because it is the testimony of
the Self to himself, that conviction of existence as Self, of which
reason is only one of the outer manifestations; and the only true faith
is that inner conviction, which no argument can either strengthen or
weaken, of the innermost Self of you, that of which alone you are
entirely sure. It is the aim of Yoga to enable you to reach that Self
constantly not by a sudden glimpse of intuition, but steadily,
unshakably, and unchangeably, and when that Self is reached, then the
question: “Is there a God?” can never again come into the. human mind.
Changes of Consciousness and Vibrations of MatterChanges of Consciousness and Vibrations of Matter
It is necessary to understand something about that consciousness which
is your Self, and about the matter which is the envelope of
consciousness, but which the Self so often identifies with himself. The
great characteristic of consciousness is change, with a foundation of
certainty that it is. The consciousness of existence never changes, but
beyond this all is change, and only by the changes does consciousness
become Self-consciousness. Consciousness is an everchanging thing,
circling round one idea that never changes—Self-existence. The
consciousness itself is not changed by any change of position or place.
It only changes its states within itself.
In matter, every change of state is brought about by change of place. A
change of consciousness is a change of a state; a change of matter is a
change of place. Moreover, every change of state in consciousness is
related to vibrations of matter in its vehicle. When matter is
examined, we find three fundamental qualities—rhythm, mobility,
stability—sattva, rajas, tamas. Sattva is rhythm, vibration. It is more
than; rajas, or mobility. It is a regulated movement, a swinging from
one side to the other over a definite distance, a length of wave, a
vibration.
The question is often put: “How can things in such different
categories, as matter and Spirit, affect each other? Can we bridge that
great gulf which some say can never be crossed?” Yes, the Indian has
crossed it, or rather, has shown that there is no gulf. To the Indian,
matter and Spirit are not only the two phases of the One, but, by a
subtle analysis of the relation between consciousness and matter, he
sees that in every universe the LOGOS imposes upon matter a certain
definite relation of rhythms, every vibration of matter corresponding
to a change in consciousness. There is no change in consciousness,
however subtle, that has not appropriated to it a vibration in matter;
there is no vibration in matter, however swift or delicate, which has
not correlated to it a certain change in consciousness. That is the
first great work of the LOGOS, which the Hindu scriptures trace out in
the building of the atom, the Tanmatra, “the measure of That,” the
measure of consciousness. He who is consciousness imposes on his
material the answer to every change in consciousness, and that is an
infinite number of vibrations. So that between the Self and his sheaths
there is this invariable relation: the change in consciousness and the
vibration of matter, and vice versa. That makes it possible for the
Self to know the Not-Self.
These correspondences are utilised in Raja Yoga and Hatha Yoga, the
Kingly Yoga and the Yoga of Resolve. The Raja Yoga seeks to control the
changes in consciousness, and by this control to rule the material
vehicles. The Hatha Yoga seeks to control the vibrations of matter, and
by this control to evoke the desired changes in consciousness. The weak
point in Hatha Yoga is that action on this line cannot reach beyond the
astral plane, and the great strain imposed on the comparatively
intractable matter of the physical plane sometimes leads to atrophy of
the very organs, the activity of which is necessary for effecting the
changes in consciousness that would be useful. The Hatha Yogi gains
control over the bodily organs with which the waking consciousness no
longer concerns itself, having relinquished them to its lower part, the
“subconsciousness.” This is often useful as regards the prevention of
disease, but serves no higher purpose. When he begins to work on the
brain centres connected with ordinary consciousness, and still more
when he touches those connected with the super-consciousness, he enters
a dangerous region, and is more likely to paralyse than to evolve.
That relation alone it is which makes matter cognizable; the change in
the thinker is answered by a change outside, and his answer to it and
the change in it that he makes by his. answer re-arrange again the
matter of the body which is his envelope. Hence the rhythmic changes in
matter are rightly called its cognizability. Matter may be known by
consciousness, because of this unchanging relation between the two
sides of the manifest LOGOS who is one, and the Self becomes aware of
changes within himself, and thus of those of the external words to
which those changes are related.
MindMind
What is mind? From the yogic standpoint it is simply the individualized
consciousness, the whole of it, the whole of your consciousness
including your activities which the Western psychologist puts outside
mind. Only on the basis of Eastern psychology is Yoga possible. How
shall we describe this individualized consciousness? First, it is aware
of things. Becoming aware of them, it desires them. Desiring them, it
tries to attain them. So we have the three aspects of consciousness—
intelligence, desire, activity. On the physical plane, activity
predominates, although desire and thought are present. On the astral
plane, desire predominates, and thought and activity are subject to
desire. On the mental plane; intelligence is the dominant note, desire
and activity are subject to it. Go to the buddhic plane, and cognition,
as pure reason, predominates, and so on. Each quality is present all
the time, but one predominates. So with the matter that belongs to
them. In your combinations of matter you get rhythmic, active, or
stable ones; and according to the combinations of matter in your bodies
will be the conditions of the activity of the whole of these in
consciousness. To practice Yoga you must build your bodies of the
rhythmic combinations, with activity and inertia less apparent. The
yogi wants to make his body match his mind.
Stages of MindStages of Mind
The mind has five stages, Patanjali tells us, and Vyasa comments that
“these stages of mind are on every plane”. The first stage is the stage
in which the mind is flung about, the Kshipta stage; it is the
butterfly mind, the early stage of humanity, or, in man, the mind of
the child, darting constantly from one object to another. It
corresponds to activity on the physical plane. The next is the confused
stage, Mudha, equivalent to the stage of the youth, swayed by emotions,
bewildered by them; he begins to feel he is ignorant—a state beyond the
fickleness of the child—a characteristic state, corresponding to
activity in the astral world. Then comes the state of preoccupation, or
infatuation, Vikshipta, the state of the man possessed by an idea—love,
ambition, or what not. He is no longer a confused youth, but a man with
a clear aim, and an idea possesses him. It may be either the fixed idea
of the madman, or the fixed idea which makes the hero or the saint; but
in any case he is possessed by the idea. The quality of the idea, its
truth or falsehood, makes the difference between the maniac and the
martyr.
Maniac or martyr, he is under the spell of a fixed idea. No reasoning
avails against it. If he has assured himself that he is made of glass,
no amount of argument will convince him to the contrary. He will always
regard himself as being as brittle as glass. That is a fixed idea which
is false. But there is a fixed idea which makes the hero and the
martyr. For some great truth dearer than life is everything thrown
aside. He is possessed by it, dominated by it, and he goes to death
gladly for it. That state is said to be approaching Yoga, for such a
man is becoming concentrated, even if only possessed by one idea. This
stage corresponds to activity on the lower mental plane. Where the man
possesses the idea, instead of being possessed by it, that one-pointed
state of the mind, called Ekagrata in Sanskrit, is the fourth stage. He
is a mature man, ready for the true life. When the man has gone through
life dominated by one idea, then he is approaching Yoga; he is getting
rid of the grip of the world, and is beyond its allurements. But when
he possesses that which before possessed him, then he has become fit
for Yoga, and begins the training which makes his progress rapid. This
stage corresponds to activity on the higher mental plane.
Out of this fourth stage or Ekagrata, arises the fifth stage, Niruddha
or Self-controlled. When the man not only possesses one idea but,
rising above all ideas, chooses as he wills, takes or does not take
according to the illumined Will, then he is Self-controlled and can
effectively practice Yoga. This stage corresponds to activity on the
buddhic plane.
In the third stage, Vikshipta, where he is possessed by the idea, he is
learning Viveka or discrimination between the outer and the inner, the
real and the unreal. When he has learned the lesson of Viveka, then he
advances a stage forward; and in Ekagrata he chooses one idea, the
inner life; and as he fixes his mind on that idea he learns Vairagya or
dispassion. He rises above the desire to possess objects of enjoyment,
belonging either to this or any other world. Then he advances towards
the fifth stage— Self-controlled. In order to reach that he must
practice the six endowments, the Shatsamapatti. These six endowments
have to do with the Will-aspect of consciousness as the other two,
Viveka and Vairagya, have to do with the cognition and activity aspects
of it.
By a study of your own mind, you can find out how far you are ready to
begin the definite practice of Yoga. Examine your mind in order to
recognize these stages in yourself. If you are in either of the two
early stages, you are not ready for Yoga. The child and the youth are
not ready to become yogis, nor is the preoccupied man. But if you find
yourself possessed by a single thought, you are nearly ready for Yoga;
it leads to the next stage of one-pointedness, where you can choose
your idea, and cling to it of your own will. Short is the step from
that to the complete control, which can inhibit all motions of the
mind. Having reached that stage, it is comparatively easy to pass into
Samadhi.
Inward and Outward-Turned ConsciousnessInward and Outward-Turned Consciousness
Samadhi is of two kinds: one turned outward, one turned inward. The
outward-turned consciousness is always first. You are in the stage of
Samadhi belonging to the outward-turned waking consciousness, when you
can pass beyond the objects to the principles which those objects
manifest, when through the form you catch a glimpse of the life. Darwin
was in this stage when he glimpsed the truth of evolution. That is the
outward-turned Samadhi of the physical body.
This is technically the Samprajnata Samadhi, the “Samadhi with
consciousness,” but to be better regarded, I think, as with
consciousness outward-turned, i.e. conscious of objects. When the
object disappears, that is, when consciousness draws itself away from
the sheath by which those objects are seen, then comes the Asamprajnata
Samadhi; called the “Samadhi without consciousness”. I prefer to call
it the inward-turned consciousness, as it is by turning away from the
outer that this stage is reached.
These two stages of Samadhi follow each other on every plane; the
intense concentration on objects in the first stage, and the piercing
thereby through the outer form to the underlying principle, are
followed by the turning away of the consciousness from the sheath which
has served its purpose, and its withdrawal into itself, i.e., into a
sheath not yet recognised as a sheath. It is then for a while conscious
only of itself and not of the outer world. Then comes the “cloud,” the
dawning sense again of an outer, a dim sensing of “something” other
than itself; that again is followed by the functioning of the nigher
sheath and the Recognition of the objects of the next higher plane,
corresponding to that sheath. Hence the complete cycle is: Samprajnata
Samadhi, Asamprajnata Samadhi, Megha (cloud), and then the Samprajnata
Samadhi of the next plane, and so on.
The CloudThe Cloud
This term—in full, Dharma-megha, cloud of righteousness, or of
religion—is one which is very scantily explained by the commentators.
In fact, the only explanation they give is that all the man’s past
karma of good gathers over him, and pours down upon him a rain of
blessing. Let us see if we cannot find something more than this meagre
interpretation.
The term “cloud” is very often used in mystic literature of the West;
the “Cloud on the Mount,” the “Cloud on the Sanctuary,” the “Cloud on
the Mercy-Seat,” are expressions familiar to the student. And the
experience which they indicate is familiar to all mystics in its lower
phases, and to some in its fullness. In its lower phases, it is the
experience just noted, where the withdrawal of the consciousness into a
sheath not yet recognised as a sheath is followed by the beginning of
the functioning of that sheath, the first indication of which is the
dim sensing of an outer. You feel as though surrounded by a dense mist,
conscious that you are not alone but unable to see. Be still; be
patient; wait. Let your consciousness be in the attitude of suspense.
Presently the cloud will thin, and first in glimpses, then in its full
beauty, the vision of a higher plane will dawn on your entranced sight.
This entrance into a higher plane will repeat itself again and again,
until your consciousness, centred on the buddhic plane and its
splendouis having disappeared as your consciousness withdraws even from
that exquisite sheath, you find yourself in the true cloud, the cloud
on the sanctuary, the cloud that veils the Holiest, that hides the
vision of the Self. Then comes what seems to be the draining away of
the very life, the letting go of the last hold on the tangible, the
hanging in a void, the horror of great darkness, loneliness
unspeakable. Endure, endure. Everything must go. “Nothing out of the
Eternal can help you.” God only shines out in the stillness; as says
the Hebrew: “Be still, and know that I am God.” In that silence a Voice
shall be heard, the voice of the Self, In that stillness a Life shall
be felt, the life of the Self. In that void a Fullness shall be
revealed, the fullness of the Self. In that darkness a Light shall be
seen, the glory of the Self. The cloud shall vanish, and the shining of
the Self shall be made manifest. That which was a glimpse of a far-off
majesty shall become a perpetual realisation and, knowing the Self and
your unity with it, you shall enter into the Peace that belongs to the
Self alone.
Lecture II SCHOOLS OF THOUGHTLecture II
SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT
Brothers:
In studying psychology anyone who is acquainted with the Sanskrit
tongue must know how valuable that language is for precise and
scientific dealing with the subject. The Sanskrit, or the well-made,
the constructed, the built-together, tongue, is one that lends itself
better than any other to the elucidation of psychological difficulties.
Over and over again, by the mere form of a word, a hint is given, an
explanation or relation is suggested. The language is constructed in a
fashion which enables a large number of meanings to be connoted by a
single word, so that you may trace all allied ideas, ,or truths, or
facts, by this verbal connection, when you are speaking or using
Sanskrit. It has a limited number of important roots, and then an
immense number of words constructed on those roots.
Now the root of the word yoga is a word that means “to join,” yuj, and
that root appears in many languages, such as the English—of course,
through the Latin, wherein you get jugare, jungere, “to join”—and out
of that a number of English words are derived and will at once suggest
themselves to you: junction, conjunction, disjunction, and so on. The
English word “yoke” again, is derived from this same Sanskrit root so
that all through the various words, or thoughts, or facts connected
with this one root, you are able to gather the meaning of the word yoga
and to see how much that word covers in the ordinary processes of the
mind and how suggestive many of the words connected with it are,
acting, so to speak, as sign-posts to direct you along the road to the
meaning. In other tongues, as in French, we have a word like rapport,
used constantly in English; “being en rapport,” a French expression,
but so Anglicized that it is continually heard amongst ourselves. And
that term, in some ways, is the closest to the meaning of the Sanskrit
word yoga; “to be in relation to”; “to be connected with”; “to enter
into”; “to merge in”; and so on: all these ideas are classified
together under the one head of “Yoga”. When you find Sri Krishna saying
that “Yoga is equilibrium,” in the Sanskrit He is saying a perfectly
obvious thing, because Yoga implies balance, yoking and the Sanskrit of
equilibrium is “samvata—togetherness”; so that it is a perfectly
simple, straightforward statement, not connoting anything very deep,
but merely expressing one of the fundamental meanings of the word He is
using. And so with another word, a word used in the commentary on the
Sutra I quoted before, which conveys to the Hindu a perfectly
straightforward meaning: “Yoga is Samadhi.” To an only English-knowing
person that does not convey any very definite idea; each word needs
explanation. To a Sanskrit-knowing man the two words are obviously
related to one another. For the word yoga, we have seen, means “yoked
together,” and Samadhi derived from the root dha, “to place,” with the
prepositions sam and a, meaning “completely together”. Samadhi,
therefore, literally means “fully placing together,” and its
etymological equivalent in English would be “to compose” (com=sam;
posita= place). Samadhi therefore means “composing the mind,”
collecting it together, checking all distractions. Thus by
philological, as well as by practical, investigation the two words yoga
and samadhi are inseparably linked together. And when Vyasa, the
commentator, says: “Yoga is the composed mind,” he is conveying a clear
and significant idea as to what is implied in Yoga. Although Samadhi
has come to mean, by a natural sequence of ideas, the trance-state
which results from perfect composure, its original meaning should not
be lost sight of.
Thus, in explaining Yoga, one is often at a loss for the English
equivalent of the manifold meanings of the Sanskrit tongue, and I
earnestly advise those of you who can do so, at least to acquaint
yourselves sufficiently with this admirable language, to make the
literature of Yoga more intelligible to you than it can be to a person
who is completely ignorant of Sanskrit.
Its Relation to Indian PhilosophiesIts Relation to Indian Philosophies
Let me ask you to think for a while on the place of Yoga in its
relation to two of the great Hindu schools of philosophical thought,
for neither the Westerner nor the non-Sanskrit-knowing Indian can ever
really understand the translations of the chief Indian books, now
current here and in the West, and the force of all the allusions they
make, unless they acquaint themselves in some degree with the outlines
of these great schools of philosophy, they being the very foundation on
which these books are built up. Take the Bhagavad-Gita. Probably there
are many who know that book fairly well, who use it as the book to help
in the spiritual life, who are not familiar with most of its precepts.
But you must always be more or less in a fog in reading it, unless you
realise the fact that it is founded on a particular Indian philosophy
and that the meaning of nearly all the technical words in it is
practically limited by their meaning in philosophy known as the
Samkhya. There are certain phrases belonging rather to the Vedanta, but
the great majority are Samkhyan, and it is taken for granted that the
people reading or using the book are familiar with the outline of the
Samkhyan philosophy. I do not want to take you into details, but I must
give you the leading ideas of the philosophy. For if you grasp these,
you will not only read your Bhagavad-Gita with much more intelligence
than before, but you will be able to use it practically for yogic
purposes in a way that, without this knowledge, is almost impossible.
Alike in the Bhagavad-Gita and in the Yoga-sutras of Patanjali the
terms are Samkhyan, and historically Yoga is based on the Samkhya, so
far as its philosophy is concerned. Samkhya does not concern itself
with, the existence of Deity, but only with the becoming of a universe,
the order of evolution. Hence it is often called Nir-isvara Samkhya,
the Samkhya without God. But so closely is it bound up with the Yoga
system, that the latter is called Sesvara Samkhya, with God. For its
understanding, therefore, I must outline part of the Samkhya
philosophy, that part which deals with the relation of Spirit and
matter; note the difference from this of the Vedantic conception of
Self and Not-Self, and then find the reconciliation in the Theosophic
statement of the facts in nature. The directions which fall from the
lips of the Lord of Yoga in the Gita may sometimes seem to you opposed
to each other and contradictory, because they sometimes are phrased in
the Samkhyan and sometimes in the Vedantic terms, starting from
different standpoints, one looking at the world from the standpoint of
matter, the other from the standpoint of Spirit. If you are a student
of Theosophy, then the knowledge of the facts will enable you to
translate the different phrases. That reconciliation and understanding
of these apparently contradictory phrases is the object to which I
would ask your attention now.
The Samkhyan School starts with the statement that the universe
consists of two factors, the first pair of opposites, Spirit and
Matter, or more accurately Spirits and Matter. The Spirit is called
Purusha—the Man; and each Spirit is an individual. Purusha is a unit, a
unit of consciousness; they are all of the same nature, but distinct
everlastingly the one from the other. Of these units there are many;
countless Purushas are to be found in the world of men. But while they
are countless in number they are identical in nature, they are
homogeneous. Every Purusha has three characteristics, and these three
are alike in all. One characteristic is awareness; it will become
cognition. The second of the characteristics is life or prana; it will
become activity. The third characteristic is immutability, the essence
of eternity; it will become will. Eternity is not, as some mistakenly
think, everlasting time. Everlasting time has nothing to do with
eternity. Time and eternity are two altogether different things.
Eternity is changeless, immutable, simultaneous. No succession in time,
albeit everlasting—if such could be—could give eternity. The fact that
Purusha has this attribute of immutability tells us that He is eternal;
for changelessness is a mark of the eternal.
Such are the three attributes of Purusha, according to the Samkhya.
Though these are not the same in nomenclature as the Vedantic Sat,
Chit, Ananda, yet they are practically identical. Awareness or
cognition is Chit; life or force is Sat; and immutability, the essence
of eternity, is Ananda.
Over against these Purushas, homogeneous units, countless in number,
stands Prakriti, Matter, the second in the Samkhyan duality. Prakriti
is one; Purushas are many. Prakriti is a continuum; Purushas are
discontinuous, being innumerable, homogeneous units. Continuity is the
mark of Prakriti. Pause for a moment on the name Prakriti. Let us
investigate its root meaning. The name indicates its essence. Pra means
“forth,” and kri is the root “make”. Prakriti thus means
“forth-making”. Matter is that which enables the essence of Being to
become. That which is Being—is-tence, becomes ex-is-tence—outbeing, by
Matter, and to describe Matter as “forth-making” is to give its essence
in a single word. Only by Prakriti can Spirit, or Purusha, “forth-make”
or “manifest” himself. Without the presence of Prakriti, Purusha is
helpless, a mere abstraction. Only by the presence of, and in Prakriti,
can Purusha make manifest his powers. Prakriti has also three
characteristics, the well-known gunas—attributes or qualities. These
are rhythm, mobility and inertia. Rhythm enables awareness to become
cognition. Mobility enables life to become activity. Inertia enables
immutability to become will.
Now the conception as to the relation of Spirit to Matter is a very
peculiar one, and confused ideas about it give rise to many
misconceptions. If you grasp it, the Bhagavad-Gita becomes illuminated,
and all the phrases about action and actor, and the mistake of saying
“I act,” become easy to understand, as implying technical Samkhyan
ideas.
The three qualities of Prakriti, when Prakriti is thought of as away
from Purusha, are in equilibrium, motionless, poised the one against
the other, counter-balancing and neutralizing each other, so that
Matter is called jada, unconscious, “dead”. But in the presence of
Purusha all is changed. When Purusha is in propinquity to Matter, then
there is a change in Matter—not outside, but in it.
Purusha acts on Prakriti by propinquity, says Vyasa. It comes near
Prakriti, and Prakriti begins to live. The “coming near” is a figure of
speech, an adaptation to our ideas of time and space, for we cannot
posit “nearness” of that which is timeless and spaceless—Spirit. By the
word propinquity is indicated an influence exerted by Purusha on
Prakriti, and this, where material objects are concerned, would be
brought about by their propinquity. If a magnet be brought near to a
piece of soft iron or an electrified body be brought near to a neutral
one, certain changes are wrought in the soft iron or in the neutral
body by that bringing near. The propinquity of the magnet makes the
soft iron a magnet; the qualities of the magnet are produced in it, it
manifests poles, it attracts steel, it attracts or repels the end of an
electric needle. In the presence of a postively electrified body the
electricity in a neutral body is re-arranged, and the positive retreats
while the negative gathers near the electrified body. An internal
change has occurred in both cases from the propinquity of another
object. So with Purusha and Prakriti. Purusha does nothing, but from
Purusha there comes out an influence, as in the case of the magnetic
influence. The three gunas, under this influence of Purusha, undergo a
marvellous change. I do not know what words to use, in order not to
make a mistake in putting it. You cannot say that Prakriti absorbs the
influence. You can hardly say that it reflects the Purusha. But the
presence of Purusha brings about certain internal changes, causes a
difference in the equilibrium of the three gunas in Prakriti. The three
gunas were in a state of equilibrium. No guna was manifest. One guna
was balanced against another. What happens when Purusha influences
Prakriti? The quality of awareness in Purusha is taken up by, or
reflected in, the guna called Sattva— rhythm, and it becomes cognition
in Prakriti. The quality that we call life in Purusha is taken up by,
or reflected, in the guna called Rajas—mobility, and it becomes force,
energy, activity, in Prakriti. The quality that we call immutability in
Purusha is taken up by, or reflected, in the guna called Tamas—inertia,
and shows itself out as will or desire in Prakriti. So that, in that
balanced equilibrium of Prakriti, a change has taken place by the mere
propinquity of, or presence of, the Purusha. The Purusha has lost
nothing, but at the same time a change has taken place in matter.
Cognition has appeared in it. Activity, force, has appeared in it. Will
or desire has appeared in it. With this change in Prakriti another
change occurs. The three attributes of Purusha cannot be separated from
each other, nor can the three attributes of Prakriti be separated each
from each. Hence rhythm, while appropriating awareness, is under the
influence of the whole three-in-one Purusha and cannot but also take up
subordinately life and immutability as activity and will. And so with
mobility and inertia. In combinations one quality or another may
predominate, and we may have combinations which show preponderantly
awareness-rhythm, or life- mobility, or immutability-inertia. The
combinations in which awareness-rhythm or cognition predominates become
“mind in nature,” the subject or subjective half of nature.
Combinations in which either of the other two predominates become the
object or objective half of nature, the “force and matter” of the
western scientist.[6]
[6] A friend notes that the first is the Suddha Sattva of the Ramanuja
School, and the second and third the Prakriti, or spirit-matter, in
the lower sense of the same.
We have thus nature divided into two, the subject and the object. We
have now in nature everything that is wanted for the manifestation of
activity, for the production of forms and for the expression of
consciousness. We have mind, and we have force and matter. Purusha has
nothing more to do, for he has infused all powers into Prakriti and
sits apart, contemplating their interplay, himself remaining unchanged.
The drama of existence is played out within Matter, and all that Spirit
does is to look at it. Purusha is the spectator before whom the drama
is played. He is not the actor, but only a spectator. The actor is the
subjective part of nature, the mind, which is the reflection of
awareness in rhythmic matter. That with which it works—objective
nature, is the reflection of the other qualities of Purusha—life and
immutability—in the gunas, Rajas and Tamas. Thus we have in nature
everything that is wanted for the production of the universe. The
Putusha only looks on when the drama is played before him. He is
spectator, not actor. This is the predominant note of the
Bhagavad-Gita. Nature does everything. The gunas bring about the
universe. The man who says: “I act,” is mistaken and confused; the
gunas act, not he. He is only the spectator and looks on. Most of the
Gita teaching is built upon this conception of the Samkhya, and unless
that is clear in our minds we can never discriminate the meaning under
the phrases of a particular philosophy.
Let us now turn to the Vedantic idea. According to the Vedantic view
the Self is one, omnipresent, all-permeating, the one reality. Nothing
exists except the Self—that is the starting-point in Vedanta. All
permeating, all-controlling, all- inspiring, the Self is everywhere
present. As the ether permeates all matter, so does the One Self
permeate, restrain, support, vivify all. It is written in the Gita that
as the air goes everywhere, so is the Self everywhere in the infinite
diversity of objects. As we try to follow the outline of Vedantic
thought, as we try to grasp this idea of the one universal Self, who is
existence, consciousness, bliss, Sat-Chit-Ananda, we find that we are
carried into a loftier region of philosophy than that occupied by the
Samkhya. The Self is One. The Self is everywhere conscious, the Self is
everywhere existent, the Self is everywhere blissful. There is no
division between these qualities of the Self. Everywhere,
all-embracing, these qualities are found at every point, in every
place. There is no spot on which you can put your finger and say “The
Self is not here.” Where the Self is—and He is everywhere—there is
existence, there is consciousness, and there is bliss. The Self, being
consciousness, imagines limitation, division. From that imagination of
limitation arises form, diversity, manyness. From that thought of the
Self, from that thought of limitation, all diversity of the many is
born. Matter is the limitation imposed upon the Self by His own will to
limit Himself. “Eko’ham, bahu syam,” “I am one; I will to he many”;
“let me be many,” is the thought of the One; and in that thought, the
manifold universe comes into existence. In that limitation,
Self-created, He exists, He is conscious, He is happy. In Him arises
the thought that He is Self-existence, and behold! all existence
becomes possible. Because in Him is the will to manifest, all
manifestation at once comes into existence. Because in Him is all
bliss, therefore is the law of life the seeking for happiness, the
essential characteristic of every sentient creature. The universe
appears by the Self-limitation in thought of the Self. The moment the
Self ceases to think it, the universe is not, it vanishes as a dream.
That is the fundamental idea of the Vedanta. Then it accepts the
spirits of the Samkhya— the Purushas; but it says that these spirits
are only reflections of the one Self, emanated by the activity of the
Self and that they all reproduce Him in miniature, with the limitations
which the universal Self has imposed upon them, which are apparently
portions of the universe, but are really identical with Him. It is the
play of the Supreme Self that makes the limitations, and thus
reproduces within limitations the qualities of the Self; the
consciousness of the Self, of the Supreme Self; becomes, in the
particularised Self, cognition, the power to know; and the existence of
the Self becomes activity, the power to manifest; and the bliss of the
Self becomes will, the deepest part of all, the longing for happiness,
for bliss; the resolve to obtain it is what we call will. And so in the
limited, the power to know, and the power to act, and the power to
will, these are the reflections in the particular Self of the essential
qualities of the universal Self. Otherwise put: that which was
universal awareness becomes now cognition in the separated Self; that
which in the universal Self was awareness of itself becomes in the
limited Self awareness of others; the awareness of the whole becomes
the cognition of the individual. So with the existence of the Self: the
Self-existence of the universal Self becomes, in the limited Self,
activity, preservation of existence. So does the bliss of the universal
Self, in the limited expression of the individual Self, become the will
that seeks for happiness, the Self-determination of the Self, the
seeking for Self-realisation, that deepest essence of human life.
The difference comes with limitation, with the narrowing of the
universal qualities into the specific qualities of the limited Self;
both are the same in essence, though seeming different in
manifestation. We have the power to know, the power to will, and the
power to act. These are the three great powers of the Self that show
themselves in the separated Self in every diversity of forms, from the
minutest moneron to the loftiest Logos.
Then just as in the Samkhya, if the Purusha, the particular Self,
should identify himself with the matter in which he is reflected, then
there is delusion and bondage, so in the Vedanta, if the Self,
eternally free, imagines himself to be bound by matter, identifying
himself with his limitations, he is deluded, he is under the domain of
Maya; for Maya is the self-identification of the Self with his
limitations. The eternally free can never be bound by matter; the
eternally pure can never be tainted by matter; the eternally knowing
can never be deluded by matter; the eternally Self-determined can never
be ruled by matter, save by his own ignorance. His own foolish fancy
limits his inherent powers; he is bound, because he imagines himself
bound; he is impure, because he imagines himself impure; he is
ignorant, because he imagines himself ignorant. With the vanishing of
delusion he finds that he is eternally pure, eternally wise.
Here is the great difference between the Samkhya and the Vedanta.
According to the Samkhya, Purusha is the spectator and never the actor.
According to Vedanta the Self is the only actor, all else is maya:
there is no one else who acts but the Self, according to the Vedanta
teaching. As says the Upanishad: the Self willed to see, and there were
eyes; the Self willed to hear, and there were ears; the Self willed to
think, and there was mind. The eyes, the ears, the mind exist, because
the Self has willed them into existence. The Self appropriates matter,
in order that He may manifest His powers through it. There is the
distinction between the Samkhya and the Vedanta: in the Samkhya the
propinquity of the Purusha brings out in matter or Prakriti all these
characteristics, the Prakriti acts and not the Purusha; in the Vedanta,
Self alone exists and Self alone acts; He imagines limitation and
matter appears; He appropriates that matter in order that He may
manifest His own capacity.
The Samkhya is the view of the universe of the scientist: the Vedanta
is the view of the universe of the metaphysician. Haeckel unconsciously
expounded the Samkhyan philosophy almost perfectly. So close to the
Samkhyan is his exposition, that another idea would make it purely
Samkhyan; he has not yet supplied that propinquity of consciousness
which the Samkhya postulates in its ultimate duality. He has Force and
Matter, he has Mind in Matter, but he has no Purusha. His last book,
criticised by Sir Oliver Lodge, is thoroughly intelligible from the
Hindu standpoint as an almost accurate representation of Samkhyan
philosophy. It is the view of the scientist, indifferent to the “why”
of the facts which he records. The Vedanta, as I said, is the view of
the metaphysician he seeks the unity in which all diversities are
rooted and into which they are resolved.
Now, what light does Theosophy throw on both these systems? Theosophy
enables every thinker to reconcile the partial statements which are
apparently so contradictory. Theosophy, with the Vedanta, proclaims the
universal Self. All that the Vedanta says of the universal Self and the
Self- limitation, Theosophy repeats. We call these Self-limited selves
Monads, and we say, as the Vedantin says, that these Monads reproduce
the nature of the universal Self whose portions they are. And hence you
find in them the three qualities which you find in the Supreme. They
are units, and these represent the Purushas of the Samkhya; but with a
very great difference, for they are not passive watchers, but active
agents in the drama of the universe, although, being above the fivefold
universe, they are as spectators who pull the strings of the players of
the stage. The Monad takes to himself from the universe of matter atoms
which show out the qualities corresponding to his three qualities, and
in these he thinks, and wills and acts. He takes to himself rhythmic
combinations, and shows his quality of cognition. He takes to himself
combinations that are mobile; through those he shows out his activity.
He takes the combinations that are inert, and shows out his quality of
bliss, as the will to be happy. Now notice the difference of phrase and
thought. In the Samkhya, Matter changed to reflect the Spirit; in fact,
the Spirit appropriates portions of Matter, and through those expresses
his own characteristics—an enormous difference. He creates an actor for
Self-expression, and this actor is the “spiritual man” of the
Theosophical teaching, the spiritual Triad, the Atma-buddhi-manas, to
whom we shall return in a moment.
The Monad remains ever beyond the fivefold universe, and in that sense
is a spectator. He dwells beyond the five planes of matter. Beyond the
Atmic, or Akasic; beyond the Buddhic plane, the plane of Vayu; beyond
the mental plane, the plane of Agni; beyond the astral plane, the plane
of Varuna; beyond the physical plane, the plane of Kubera. Beyond all
these planes the Monad, the Self, stands Self-conscious and
Self-determined. He reigns in changeless peace and lives in eternity.
But as said above, he appropriates matter. He takes to himself an atom
of the Atmic plane, and in that he, as it were, incorporates his will,
and that becomes Atma. He appropriates an atom of the Buddhic plane,
and reflects in that his aspect of cognition, and that becomes buddhi.
He appropriates an atom of the manasic plane and embodies, as it were,
his activity in it, and it becomes Manas. Thus we get Atma, plus
Buddhi, plus Manas. That triad is the reflection in the fivefold
universe of the Monad beyond the fivefold universe. The terms of
Theosophy can be easily identified with those of other schools. The
Monad of Theosophy is the Jivatma of Indian philosophy, the Purusha of
the Samkhya, the particularised Self of the Vedanta. The threefold
manifestation, Atma-buddhi-manas, is the result of the Purusha’s
propinquity to Prakriti, the subject of the Samkhyan philosophy, the
Self embodied in the highest sheaths, according to the Vedantic
teaching. In the one you have this Self and His sheaths, and in the
other the Subject, a reflection in matter of Purusha. Thus you can
readily see that you are dealing with the same concepts but they are
looked at from different standpoints. We are nearer to the Vedanta than
to the Samkhya, but if you know the principles you can put the
statements of the two philosophies in their own niches and will not be
confused. Learn the principles and you can explain all the theories.
That is the value of the Theosophical teaching; it gives you the
principles and leaves you to study the philosophies, and you study them
with a torch in your hand instead of in the dark.
Now when we understand the nature of the spiritual man, or Triad, what
do we find with regard to all the manifestations of consciousness? That
they are duads, Spirit-Matter everywhere, on every plane of our
fivefold universe. If you are a scientist, you will call it
spiritualised Matter; if you are a metaphysician you will call it
materialised Spirit. Either phrase is equally true, so long as you
remember that both are always present in every manifestation, that what
you see is not the play of matter alone, but the play of Spirit-Matter,
inseparable through the period of manifestation. Then, when you come,
in reading an ancient book, to the statement “mind is material,” you
will not be confused; you will know that the writer is only speaking on
the Samkhyan line, which speaks of Matter everywhere but always implies
that the Spirit is looking on, and that this presence makes the work of
Matter possible. You will not, when reading the constant statement in
Indian philosophies that “mind is material,” confuse this with the
opposite view of the materialist which says that “mind is the product
of matter”—a very different thing. Although the Samkhyan may use
materialistic terms, he always posits the vivifying influence of
Spirit, while the materialist makes Spirit the product of Matter.
Really a gulf divides them, although the language they use may often be
the same.
MindMind
“Yoga is the inhibition of the functions of the mind,” says Patanjali.
The functions of the mind must be suppressed, and in order that we may
be able to follow out really what this means, we must go more closely
into what the Indian philosopher means by the word “mind”.
Mind, in the wide sense of the term, has three great properties or
qualities: cognition, desire or will, activity. Now Yoga is not
immediately concerned with all these three, but only with one,
cognition, the Samkhyan subject. But you cannot separate cognition, as
we have seen, completely from the others, because consciousness is a
unit, and although we are only concerned with that part of
consciousness which we specifically call cognition, we cannot get
cognition all by itself. Hence the Indian psychologist investigating
this property, cognition, divides it up into three or, as the Vedanta
says, into four (with all submission, the Vedantin here makes a
mistake). If you take up any Vedantic book and read about mind, you
will find a particular word used for it which. translated, means
“internal organ”. This antah-karana is the word always used where in
English we use “mind”; but it is only used in relation to cognition,
not in relation to activity and desire. It is said to be fourfold,
being made up of Manas, Buddhi, Ahamkara, and Chitta; but this fourfold
division is a very curious division. We know what Manas is, what Buddhi
is, what Ahamkara is, but what is this Chitta? What is Chitta, outside
Manas, Buddhi and Ahamkara? Ask anyone you like. and record his answer;
you will find that it is of the vaguest kind. Let us try to analyse it
for ourselves, and see whether light will come upon it by using the
Theosophic idea of a triplet summed up in a fourth, that is not really
a fourth, but the summation of the three. Manas, Buddhi and Ahamkara
are the three different sides of a triangle, which triangle is called
Chitta. The Chitta is not a fourth, but the sum of the three: Manas,
Buddhi and Ahamkara. This is the old idea of a trinity in unity. Over
and over again H. P. Blavatsky uses this summation as a fourth to her
triplets, for she follows the old methods. The fourth, which sums up
the three but is not other than they, makes a unity out of their
apparent diversity. Let us apply that to Antahkarana.
Take cognition. Though in cognition that aspect of the Self is
predominant, yet it cannot exist absolutely alone, The whole Self is
there in every act of cognition. Similarly with the other two. One
cannot exist separate from the others. Where there is cognition the
other two are present, though subordinate to it. The activity is there,
the will is there. Let us think of cognition as pure as it can be,
turned on itself, reflected in itself, and we have Buddhi, the pure
reason, the very essence of cognition; this in the universe is
represented by Vishnu, the sustaining wisdom of the universe. Now let
us think of cognition looking outwards, and as reflecting itself in
activity, its brother quality, and we have a mixture of cognition and
activity which is called Manas, the active mind; cognition reflected in
activity is Manas in man or Brahma, the creative mind, in the universe.
When cognition similarly reflects itself in will, then it becomes
Ahamkara, the “I am I” in man, represented by Mahadeva in the universe.
Thus wee have found within the limits of this cognition a triple
division, making up the internal organ or Antahkarana—Manas, plus
Buddhi, plus Ahamkara—and we can find no fourth. What is then Chitta?
It is the summation of the three, the three taken together, the
totality of the three. Because of the old way of counting these things,
you get this division of Antahkarana into four.
The Mental BodyThe Mental Body
We must now deal with the mental body, which is taken as equivalent to
mind for practical purposes. The first thing for a man to do in
practical Yoga is to separate himself from the mental body, to draw
away from that into the sheath next above it. And here remember what I
said previously, that in Yoga the Self is always the consciousness plus
the vehicle from which the consciousness is unable to separate itself.
All that is above the body you cannot leave is the Self for practical
purposes, and your first attempt must be to draw away from your mental
body. Under these conditions, Manas must be identified with the Self,
and the spiritual Triad, the Atma-buddhi-manas, is to be realised as
separate from the mental body. That is the first step. You must be able
to take up and lay down your mind as you do a tool, before it is of any
use to consider the further progress of the Self in getting rid of its
envelopes. Hence the mental body is taken as the starting point.
Suppress thought. Quiet it. Still it. Now what is the ordinary
condition of the mental body? As you look upon that body from a higher
plane, you see constant changes of colours playing in it. You find that
they are sometimes initiated from within, sometimes from without.
Sometimes a vibration from without has caused a change in
consciousness, and a corresponding change in the colours in the mental
body. If there is a change of consciousness, that causes vibration in
the matter in which that consciousness is functioning. The mental body
is a body of ever-changing hues and colours, never still, changing
colour with swift rapidity throughout the whole of it. Yoga is the
stopping of all these, the inhibition of vibrations and changes alike.
Inhibition of the change of consciousness stops the vibration of the
mental body; the checking of the vibration of the mental body checks
the change in consciousness. In the mental body of a Master there is no
change of colour save as initiated from within; no outward stimulus can
produce any answer, any vibration,ùin that perfectly controlled mental
body. The colour of the mental body of a Master is as moonlight on the
rippling ocean. Within that whiteness of moon-like refulgence lie all
possibilities of colour, but nothing in the outer world can make the
faintest change of hue sweep over its steady radiance. If a change of
consciousness occurs within, then the change will send a wave of
delicate hues over the mental body which responds only in colour to
changes initiated from within and never to changes stimulated from
without. His mental body is never His Self, but only His tool or
instrument, which He can take up or lay down at His will. It is only an
outer sheath that He uses when He needs to communicate with the lower
world.
By that idea of the stopping of all changes of colour in the mental
body you can realise what is meant by inhibition. The functions of mind
are stopped in Yoga. You have to begin with your mental body. You have
to learn how to stop the whole of those vibrations, how to make the
mental body colourless, still and quiet, responsive only to the
impulses that you choose to put upon it. How will you be able to tell
when the mind is really coming under control, when it is no longer a
part of your Self? You will begin to realise this when you find that,
by the action of your will, you can check the current of thought and
hold the mind in perfect stillness. Sheath after sheath has to be
transcended, and the proof of transcending is that it can no longer
affect you. You can affect it, but it cannot affect you. The moment
that nothing outside you can harass you, can stir the mind, the moment
that the mind does not respond to the outer, save under your own
impulse, then can you say of it: “This is not my Self.” It has become
part of the outer, it can no longer be identified with the Self.
From this you pass on to the conquest of the causal body in a similar
way. When the conquering of the causal body is complete then you go to
the conquering of the Buddhic body. When mastery over the Buddhic body
is complete, you pass on to the~conquest of the Atmic body.
Mind and SelfMind and Self
You cannot be surprised that under these conditions of continued
disappearance of functions, the unfortunate student asks: “What becomes
of the mind itself? If you suppress all the functions, what is left?”
In the Indian way of teaching, when you come to a difficulty, someone
jumps up and asks a question. And in the commentaries, the question
which raises the difficulty is always put. The answer of Patanjali is:
“Then the spectator remains in his own form.” Theosophy answers: “The
Monad remains.” It is the end of the human pilgrimage. That is the
highest point to which humanity may climb: to suppress all the
reflections in the fivefold universe through which the Monad has
manifested his powers, and then for the Monad to realise himself,
enriched by the experiences through which his manifested aspects have
passed. But to the Samkhyan the difficulty is very great, for when he
has only his spectator left, when spectacle ceases, the spectator
himself almost vanishes. His only function was to look on at the play
of mind. When the play of mind is gone, what is left? He can no longer
be a spectator, since there is nothing to see. The only answer is: “He
remains in his own form.” He is now out of manifestation, the duality
is transcended, and so the Spirit sinks back into latency, no longer
capable of manifestation. There you come to a very serious difference
with the Theosophical view of the universe, for according to that view
of the universe, when all these functions have been suppressed, then
the Monad is ruler over matter and is prepared for a new cycle of
activity, no longer slave but master.
All analogy shows us that as the Self withdraws from sheath after
sheath, he does not lose but gains in Self- realisation.
Self-realisation becomes more and more vivid with each successive
withdrawal; so that as the Self puts aside one veil of matter after
another, recognises in regular succession that each body in turn is not
himself, by that process of withdrawal his sense of Self-reality
becomes keener, not less keen. It is important to remember that,
because often Western readers, dealing with Eastern ideas, in
consequence of misunderstanding the meaning of the state of liberation,
or the condition of Nirvana, identify it with nothingness or
unconsciousness—an entirely mistaken idea which is apt to colour the
whole of their thought when dealing with Yogic processes. Imagine the
condition of a man who identifies himself completely with the body, so
that he cannot, even in thought, separate himself from it—the state of
the early undeveloped man—and compare that with the strength, vigour
and lucidity of your own mental consciousness.
The consciousness of the early man limited to the physical body, with
occasional touches of dream consciousness, is very restricted in its
range. He has no idea of the sweep of your consciousness, of your
abstract thinking. But is that consciousness of the early man more
vivid, or less vivid, than yours? Certainly you will say, it is less
vivid. You have largely transcended his powers of consciousness. Your
consciousness is astral rather than physical, but has thereby increased
its vividness. AS the Self withdraws himself from sheath after sheath,
he realises himself more and more, not less and less; Self-realisation
becomes more intense, as sheath after sheath is cast aside. The centre
grows more powerful as the circumference becomes more permeable, and at
last a stage is reached when the centre knows itself at every point of
the circumference. When that is accomplished the circumference
vanishes, but not so the centre. The centre still remains. Just as you
are more vividly conscious than the early man, just as your
consciousness is more alive, not less, than that of an undeveloped man,
so it is as we climb up the stairway of life and cast away garment
after garment. We become more conscious of existence, more conscious of
knowledge, more conscious of Self-determined power. The faculties of
the Self shine out more strongly, as veil after veil falls away. By
analogy, then, when we touch the Monad, our consciousness should be
mightier, more vivid, and more perfect. As you learn to truly live,
your powers and feelings grow in strength.
And remember that all control is exercised over sheaths, over portions
of the Not-Self. You do not control your Self; that is a misconception;
you control your Not-Self. The Self is never controlled; He is the
Inner Ruler Immortal. He is the controller, not the controlled. As
sheath after sheath becomes subject to your Self, and body after body
becomes the tool of your Self, then shall you realise the truth of the
saying of the Upanishad, that you are the Self, the Inner Ruler, the
immortal.
Lecture III YOGA AS SCIENCELecture III
YOGA AS SCIENCE
Brothers:
This afternoon, I propose now to deal first with the two great methods
of Yoga, one related to the Self and the other to the Not-Self. Let me
remind you, before I begin, that we are dealing only with the science
of Yoga and not with other means of attaining union with the Divine.
The scientific method, following the old Indian conception, is the one
to which I am asking your attention. I would remind you, however, that,
though I am only dealing with this, there remain also the other two
great ways of Bhakti and Karma. The Yoga we are studying specially
concerns the Marga of Jnanam or knowledge, and within that way, within
that Marga or path of knowledge, we find that three subdivisions occur,
as everywhere in nature.
Methods of YogaMethods of Yoga
With regard to what I have just called the two great methods in Yoga,
we find that by one of these a man treads the path of knowledge by
Buddhi—the pure reason; and the other the same path by Manas—the
concrete mind. You may remember that in speaking yesterday of the sub-
divisions of Antah-karana, I pointed out to you that there we had a
process of reflection of one quality in another; and within the limits
of the cognitional aspect of the Self, you find Buddhi, cognition
reflected in cognition; and Ahamkara, cognition reflected in will; and
Manas, cognition reflected in activity. Bearing those three
sub-divisions in mind, you will very readily be able to see that these
two methods of Yoga fall naturally under two of these heads. But what
of the third? What of the will, of which Ahamkara is the representative
in cognition? That certainly has its road, but it can scarcely be said
to be a “method”. Will breaks its way upwards by sheer unflinching
determination, keeping its eyes fixed on the end, and using either
buddhi or manes indifferently as a means to that end. Metaphysics is
used to realise the Self; science is used to understand the Not-Self;
but either is grasped, either is thrown aside, as it serves, or fails
to serve, the needs of the moment. Often the man, in whom will is
predominant, does not know how he gains the object he is aiming at; it
comes to his hands, but the “how” is obscure to him; he willed to have
it, and nature gives it to him. This is also seen in Yoga in the man of
Ahamkara, the sub-type of will in cognition. Just as in the man of
Ahamkara, Buddhi and Manas are subordinate, so in the man of Buddhi,
Ahamkara and Manas are not absent, but are subordinate; and in the man
of Manas, Ahamkara and Buddhi are present, but play a subsidiary part.
Both the metaphysician and the scientist must be supported by Ahamkara.
That Self-determining faculty, that deliberate setting of oneself to a
chosen end, that is necessary in all forms of Yoga. Whether a Yogi is
going to follow the purely cognitional way of Buddhi, or whether he is
going to follow the more active path of Manas, in both cases he needs
the self-determining will in order to sustain him in his arduous task.
You remember it is written in the Upanishad that the weak man cannot
reach the Self. Strength is wanted. Determination is wanted.
Perseverance is wanted. And you must have, in every successful Yogi,
that intense determination which is the very essence of individuality.
Now what are these two great methods? One of them may be described as
seeking the Self by the Self; the other may be described as seeking the
Self by the Not-Self; and if you will think of them in that fashion, I
think you will find the idea illuminative. Those who seek the Self by
the Self, seek him through the faculty of Buddhi; they turn ever
inwards, and turn away from the outer world. Those who seek the Self by
the Not-Self, seek him through the active working Manas; they are
outward-turned, and by study of the Not-Self, they learn to realise the
Self. The one is the path of the metaphysician; the other is the path
of the scientist.
To the Self by the SelfTo the Self by the Self
Let us look at this a little more closely, with its appropriate
methods. The path on which the faculty of Buddhi is used predominantly
is, as just said, the path of the metaphysician. It is the path of the
philosopher. He turns inwards, ever seeking to find the Self by diving
into the recesses of his own nature. Knowing that the Self is within
him, he tries to strip away vesture after vesture, envelope after
envelope, and by a process of rejecting them he reaches the glory of
the unveiled Self. To begin this, he must give up concrete thinking and
dwell amidst abstractions. His method, then, must be strenuous,
long-sustained, patient meditation. Nothing else will serve his end;
strenuous, hard thinking, by which he rises away from the concrete into
the abstract regions of the mind; strenuous, hard thinking, further
continued, by which he reaches from the abstract region of the mind up
to the region of Buddhi, where unity is sensed; still by strenuous
thinking, climbing yet further, until Buddhi as it were opens out into
Atma, until the Self is seen in his splendour, with only a film of
atmic matter, the envelope of Atma in the manifested fivefold world. It
is along that difficult and strenuous path that the Self must be found
by way of the Self.
Such a man must utterly disregard the Not-Self. He must shut his senses
against the outside world. The world must no longer be able to touch
him. The senses must be closed against all the vibrations that come
from without, and he must turn a deaf ear, a blind eye, to all the
allurements of matter, to all the diversity of objects, which make up
the universe of the Not-Self. Seclusion will help him, until he is
strong enough to close himself against the outer stimuli or
allurements. The contemplative orders in the Roman Catholic Church
offer a good environment for this path. They put the outer world away,
as far away as possible. It is a snare, a temptation, a hindrance.
Always turning away from the world, the Yogi must fix his thought, his
attention, upon the Self. Hence for those who walk along this road,
what are called the Siddhis are direct obstacles, and not helps. But
that statement that you find so often, that the Siddhis are things to
be avoided, is far more sweeping than some of our modern Theosophists
are apt to imagine. They declare that the Siddhis are to be avoided,
but forget that the Indian who says this also avoids the use of the
physical senses. He closes physical eyes and ears as hindrances. But
some Theosophists urge avoidance of all use of the astral senses and
mental senses, but they do not object to the free use of the physical
senses, or dream that they are hindrances. Why not? If the senses are
obstacles in their finer forms, they are also obstacles in their
grosser manifestations. To the man who would find the Self by the Self,
every sense is a hindrance and an obstacle, and there is no logic, no
reason, in denouncing the subtler senses only, while forgetting the
temptations of the physical senses, impediments as much as the other.
No such division exists for the man who tries to understand the
universe in which he is. In the search for the Self by the Self, all
that is not Self is an obstacle. Your eyes, your ears, everything that
puts you into contact with the outer world, is just as much an obstacle
as the subtler forms of the same senses which put you into touch with
the subtler worlds of matter, which you call astral and mental. This
exaggerated fear of the Siddhis is only a passing reaction, not based
on understanding but on lack of understanding; and those who denounce
the Siddhis should rise to the logical position of the Hindu Yogi, or
of the Roman Catholic recluse, who denounces all the senses, and all
the objects of the senses, as obstacles in the way. Many Theosophists
here, and more in the West, think that much is gained by acuteness of
the physical senses, and of the other faculties in the physical brain;
but the moment the senses are acute enough to be astral, or the
faculties begin to work in astral matter, they treat them as objects of
denunciation. That is not rational. It is not logical. Obstacles, then,
are all the senses, whether you call them Siddhis or not, in the search
for the Self by turning away from the Not-Self.
It is necessary for the man who seeks the Self by the Self to have the
quality which is called “faith,” in the sense in which I defined it
before—the profound, intense conviction, that nothing can shake, of the
reality of the Self within you. That is the one thing that is worthy to
be dignified by the name of faith. Truly it is beyond reason, for not
by reason may the Self be known as real. Truly it is not based on
argument, for not by reasoning may the Self be discovered. It is the
witness of the Self within you to his own supreme reality, and that
unshakable conviction, which is shraddha, is necessary for the treading
of this path. It is necessary, because without it the human mind would
fail, the human courage would be daunted, the human perseverance would
break, with the difficulties of the seeking for the Self. Only that
imperious conviction that the Self is, only that can cheer the pilgrim
in the darkness that comes down upon him, in the void that he must
cross before—the life of the lower being thrown away—the life of the
higher is realised. This imperious faith is to the Yogi on this path
what experience and knowledge are to the Yogi on the other.
To the Self Through the Not-selfTo the Self Through the Not-self
Turn from him to the seeker for the Self through the Not- Self. This is
the way of the scientist, of the man who uses the concrete, active
Manas, in order scientifically to understand the universe; he has to
find the real among the unreal, the eternal among the changing, the
Self amid the diversity of forms. How is he to do it? By a close and
rigorous study of every changing form in which the Self has veiled
himself. By studying the Not-Self around him and in him, by
understanding his own nature, by analysing in order to understand, by
studying nature in others as well as in himself, by learning to know
himself and to gain knowledge of others; slowly, gradually, step by
step, plane after plane, he has to climb upwards, rejecting one form of
matter after another, finding not in these the Self he seeks. As he
learns to conquer the physical plane, he uses the keenest senses in
order to understand, and finally to reject. He says: “This is not my
Self. This changing panorama, these obscurities, these continual
transformations, these are obviously the antithesis of the eternity,
the lucidity, the stability of the Self. These cannot be my Self.” And
thus he constantly rejects them. He climbs on to the astral plane and,
using there the finer astral senses, he studies the astral world, only
to find that that also is changing and manifests not the changelessness
of the Self. After the astral world is conquered and rejected, he
climbs on into the mental plane, and there still studies the
ever-changing forms of that Manasic world, only once more to reject
them: “These are not the Self.” Climbing still higher, ever following
the track of forms, he goes from the mental to the Buddhic plane, where
the Self begins to show his radiance and beauty in manifested union.
Thus by studying diversity he reaches the conception of unity, and is
led into the understanding of the One. To him the realisation of the
Self comes through the study of the Not-Self, by the separation of the
Not-Self from the Self. Thus he does by knowledge and experience what
the other does by pure thinking and by faith. In this path of finding
the Self through the Not-Self, the so-called Siddhis are necessary.
Just as you cannot study the physical world without the physical
senses, so you cannot study the astral world without the astral senses,
nor the mental world without the mental senses. Therefore, calmly
choose your ends, and then think out your means, and you will not be in
any difficulty about the method you should employ, the path you should
tread.
Thus we see that there are two methods, and these must be kept separate
in your thought. Along the line of pure thinking—the metaphysical
line—you may reach the Self. So also along the line of scientific
observation and experiment—the physical line, in the widest sense of
the term physical—you may reach the Self. Both are ways of Yoga. Both
are included in the directions that you may read in the Yoga Sutras of
Patanjali. Those directions will cease to be self-contradictory, if you
will only separate in your thought the two methods. Patanjali has
given, in the later part of his Sutras, some hints as to the way in
which the Siddhis may be developed. Thus you may find your way to the
Supreme.
Yoga and MoralityYoga and Morality
The next point that I would pause upon, and ask you to realise, is the
fact that Yoga is a science of psychology. I want further to point out
to you that it is not a science of ethic, though ethic is certainly the
foundation of it. Psychology and ethic are not the same. The science of
psychology is the result of the study of mind. The science of ethic is
the result of the study of conduct, so as to bring about the harmonious
relation of one to another. Ethic is a science of life, and not an
investigation into the nature of mind and the methods by which the
powers of the mind may be developed and evolved. I pause on this
because of the confusion that exists in many people as regards this
point. If you understand the scope of Yoga aright, such a confusion
ought not to arise. The confused idea makes people think that in Yoga
they ought to find necessarily what are called precepts of morality,
ethic. Though Patanjali gives the universal precepts of morality and
right conduct in the first two angas of Yoga, called yama and niyama,
yet they are subsidiary to the main topic, are the foundation of it, as
just said. No practice of Yoga is possible unless you possess the
ordinary moral attributes summed up in yama and niyama; that goes
without saying. But you should not expect to find moral precepts in a
scientific text book of psychology, like Yoga. A man studying the
science of electricity is not shocked if he does not find in it moral
precepts; why then should one studying Yoga, as a science of
psychology, expect to find moral precepts in it? I do not say that
morality is unimportant for the Yogi. On the contrary, it is
all-important. It is absolutely necessary in the first stages of Yoga
for everyone. But to a Yogi who has mastered these, it is not
necessary, if he wants to follow the left-hand path. For you must
remember that there is a Yoga of the left-hand path, as well as a Yoga
of the right-hand path. Yoga is there also followed, and though
asceticism is always found in the early stages, and sometimes in the
later, true morality is absent. The black magician is often as rigid in
his morality as any Brother of the White Lodge. Of the disciples of the
black and white magicians, the disciple of the black magician is often
the more ascetic. His object is not the purification of life for the
sake of humanity, but the purification of the vehicle, that he may be
better able to acquire power. The difference between the white and the
black magician lies in the motive. You might have a white magician, a
follower of the right-hand path, rejecting meat because the way of
obtaining it is against the law of compassion. The follower of the
left-hand path may also reject meat, but for the reason that be would
not be able to work so well with his vehicle if it were full of the
rajasic elements of meat. The difference is in the motive. The outer
action is the same. Both men may be called moral, if judged by the
outer action alone. The motive marks the path, while the outer actions
are often identical.
It is a moral thing to abstain from meat, because thereby you are
lessening the infliction of suffering; it is not a moral act to abstain
from meat from the yogic standpoint, but only a means to an end. Some
of the greatest yogis in Hindu literature were, and are, men whom you
would rightly call black magicians. But still they are yogis. One of
the greatest yogis of all was Ravana, the anti-Christ, the Avatara of
evil, who summed up all the evil of the world in his own person in
order to oppose the Avatara of good. He was a great, a marvellous yogi,
and by Yoga he gained his power. Ravana was a typical yogi of the
left-hand path, a great destroyer, and he practiced Yoga to obtain the
power of destruction, in order to force from the hands of the Planetary
Logos the boon that no man should be able to kill him. You may say:
“What a strange thing that a man can force from God such a power.” The
laws of Nature are the expression of Divinity, and if a man follows a
law of Nature, he reaps the result which that law inevitably brings;
the question whether he is good or bad to his fellow men does not touch
this matter at all. Whether some other law is or is not obeyed, is
entirely outside the question. It is a matter of dry fact that the
scientific man may be moral or immoral, provided that his immorality
does not upset his eyesight or nervous system. It is the same with
Yoga. Morality matters profoundly, but it does not affect these
particular things, and if you think it does, you are always getting
into bogs and changing your moral standpoint, either lowering or making
it absurd. Try to understand; that is what the Theosophist should do;
and when you understand, you will not fall into the blunders nor suffer
the bewilderment many do, when you expect laws belonging to one region
of the universe to bring about results in another. The scientific man
understands that. He knows that a discovery in chemistry does not
depend upon his morality, and he would not think of doing an act of
charity with a view to finding out a new element. He will not fail in a
well-wrought experiment, however vicious his private life may be. The
things are in different regions, and he does not confuse the laws of
the two. As Ishvara is absolutely just, the man who obeys a law reaps
the fruit of that law, whether his actions, in any other fields, are
beneficial to man or not. If you sow rice, you will reap rice; if you
sow weeds, you will reap weeds; rice for rice, and weed for weed. The
harvest is according to the sowing. For this is a universe of law. By
law we conquer, by law we succeed. Where does morality come in, then?
When you are dealing with a magician of the right-hand path, the
servant of the White Lodge, there morality is an all-important factor.
Inasmuch as he is learning to be a servant of humanity, he must observe
the highest morality, not merely the morality of the world, for the
white magician has to deal with helping on harmonious relations between
man and man. The white magician must be patient. The black magician may
quite well be harsh. The white magician must be compassionate;
compassion widens out his nature, and he is trying to make his
consciousness include the whole of humanity. But not so the black
magician. He can afford to ignore compassion.
A white magician may strive for power. But when he is striving for
power, he seeks it that he may serve humanity and become more useful to
mankind, a more effective servant in the helping of the world. But not
so the brother of the dark side. When he strives for power, he seeks if
for himself, so that he may use it against the whole world. He may be
harsh and cruel. He wants to be isolated; and harshness and cruelty
tend to isolate him. He wants power; and holding that power for
himself, he can put himself temporarily, as it were, against the Divine
Will in evolution.
The end of the one is Nirvana, where all separation has ceased. The end
of the other is Avichi—the uttermost isolation—the kaivalya of the
black magician. Both are yogis, both follow the science of yoga, and
each gets the result of the law he has followed: one the kaivalya of
Nirvana, the other the kaivalya of Avichi.
Composition of States of the MindComposition of States of the Mind
Let us pass now to the “states of the mind” as they are called. The
word which is used for the states of the mind by Patanjali is Vritti.
This admirably constructed language Sanskrit gives you in that very
word its own meaning. Vrittis means the “being” of the mind; the ways
in which mind can exist; the modes of the mind; the modes of mental
existence; the ways of existing. That is the literal meaning of this
word. A subsidiary meaning is a “turning around,” a “moving in a
circle”. You have to stop, in Yoga, every mode of existing in which the
mind manifests itself. In order to guide you towards the power of
stopping them—for you cannot stop them till you understand them—you are
told that these modes of mind are fivefold in their nature. They are
pentads. The Sutra, as usually translated, says “the Vrittis are
fivefold (panchatayyah),” but pentad is a more accurate rendering of
the word pancha-tayyah, in the original, than fivefold. The word pentad
at once recalls to you the way in which the chemist speaks of a monad,
triad, heptad, when he deals with elements. The elements with which the
chemist is dealing are related to the unit-element in different ways.
Some elements are related to it in one way only, and are called monads;
others are related in two ways, and are called duads, and so on.
Is this applicable to the states of mind also? Recall the shloka of the
Bhagavad-Gita in which it is said that the Jiva goes out into the
world, drawing round him the five senses and mind as sixth. That may
throw a little light on the subject. You have five senses, the five
ways of knowing, the five jnanendriyas or organs of knowing. Only by
these five senses can you know the outer world. Western psychology says
that nothing exists in thought that does not exist in sensation. That
is not true universally; it is not true of the abstract mind, nor
wholly of the concrete. But there is a great deal of truth in it. Every
idea is a pentad. It is made up of five elements. Each element making
up the idea comes from one of the senses, and of these there are at
present five. Later on every idea will be a heptad, made up of seven
elements. For the present, each has five qualities, which build up the
idea. The mind unites the whole together into a single thought,
synthesises the five sensations. If you think of an orange and analyse
your thought of an orange, you will find in it: colour, which comes
through the eye; fragrance, which comes through the nose; taste, which
comes through the tongue; roughness or smoothness, which comes through
the sense of touch; and you would hear musical notes made by the
vibrations of the molecules, coming through the sense of hearing, were
it keener. If you had a perfect sense of hearing. you would hear the
sound of the orange also, for wherever there is vibration there is
sound. All this, synthesised by the mind into one idea, is an orange.
That is the root reason for the “association of ideas”. It is not only
that a fragrance recalls the scene and the circumstances under which
the fragrance was observed, but because every impression is made
through all the five senses and, therefore, when one is stimulated, the
others are recalled. The mind is like a prism. If you put a prism in
the path of a ray of white light, it will break it up into its seven
constituent rays and seven colours will appear. Put another prism in
the path of these seven rays, and as they pass through the prism, the
process is reversed and the seven become one white light. The mind is
like the second prism. It takes in the five sensations that enter
through the senses, and combines them into a single precept. As at the
present stage of evolution the senses are five only, it unites the five
sensations into one idea. What the white ray is to the seven- coloured
light, that a thought or idea is to the fivefold sensation. That is the
meaning of the much controverted Sutra: “Vrittayah panchatayych,” “the
vrittis, or modes of the mind, are pentads.” If you look at it in that
way, the later teachings will be more clearly understood.
As I have already said, that sentence, that nothing exists in thought
which is not in sensation, is not the whole truth. Manas, the sixth
sense, adds to the sensations its own pure elemental nature. What is
that nature that you find thus added? It is the establishment of a
relation, that is really what the mind adds. All thinking is the
“establishment of relations,” and the more closely you look into that
phrase, the more you will realise how it covers all the varied
processes of the mind. The very first process of the mind is to become
aware of an outside world. However dimly at first, we become aware of
something outside ourselves—a process generally called perception. I
use the more general term “establishing a relation,” because that runs
through the whole of the mental processes, whereas perception is only a
single thing. To use a well-known simile, when a little baby feels a
pin pricking it, it is conscious of pain, but not at first conscious of
the pin, nor yet conscious of where exactly the pin is. It does not
recognise the part of the body in which the pin is. There is no
perception, for perception is defined as relating a sensation to the
object which causes the sensation. You only, technically speaking,
“perceive” when you make a relation between the object and yourself.
That is the very first of these mental processes, following on the
heels of sensation. Of course, from the Eastern standpoint, sensation
is a mental function also, for the senses are part of the cognitive
faculty, but they are unfortunately classed with feelings in Western
psychology. Now having established that relation between yourself and
objects outside, what is the next process of the mind? Reasoning: that
is, the establishing of relations between different objects, as
perception is the establishment of your relation with a single object.
When you have perceived many objects, then you begin to reason in order
to establish relations between them. Reasoning is the establishment of
a new relation, which comes out from the comparison of the different
objects that by perception you have established in relation with
yourself, and the result is a concept. This one phrase, “establishment
of relations,” is true all round. The whole process of thinking is the
establishment of relations, and it is natural that it should be so,
because the Supreme Thinker, by establishing a relation, brought matter
into existence. Just as He, by establishing that primary relation
between Himself and the Not-Self, makes a universe possible, so do we
reflect His powers in ourselves, thinking by the same method,
establishing relations, and thus carrying out every intellectual
process.
Pleasure and PainPleasure and Pain
Let us pass again from that to another statement made by this great
teacher of Yoga: “Pentads are of two kinds, painful and non-painful.”
Why did he not say: “painful and pleasant”? Because he was an accurate
thinker, a logical thinker, and he uses the logical division that
includes the whole universe of discourse, A and Not-A, painful and
non-painful. There has been much controversy among psychologists as to
a third kind —indifferent. Some psychologists divide all feelings into
three: painful, pleasant and indifferent. Feelings cannot be divided
merely into pain and pleasure, there is a third class, called
indifference, which is neither painful nor pleasant. Other
psychologists say that indifference is merely pain or pleasure that is
not marked enough to be called the one or the other. Now this
controversy and tangle into which psychologists have fallen might be
avoided if the primary division of feelings were a logical division. A
and Not-A—that is the only true and logical division. Patanjali is
absolutely logical and right. In order to avoid the quicksand into
which the modern psychologists have fallen, he divides all vrittis,
modes of mind, into painful and nonpainful.
There is, however, a psychological reason why we should say “pleasure
and pain,” although it is not a logical division. The reason why there
should be that classification is that the word pleasure and the word
pain express two fundamental states of difference, not in the Self, but
in the vehicles in which that Self dwells. The Self, being by nature
unlimited, is ever pressing, so to say, against any boundaries which
seek to limit him. When these limitations give way a little before the
constant pressure of the Self, we feel “pleasure,” and when they resist
or contract, we feel “pain”. They are not states of the Self so much as
states of the vehicles, and states of certain changes in consciousness.
Pleasure and pain belong to the Self as a whole, and not to any aspect
of the Self separately taken. When pleasure and pain are marked off as
belonging only to the desire nature, the objection arises: “Well, but
in the exercise of the cognitive faculty there is an intense pleasure.
When you use the creative faculty of the mind you are conscious of a
profound joy in its exercise, and yet that creative faculty can by no
means be classed with desire.” The answer is: “Pleasure belongs to the
Self as a whole. Where the vehicles yield themselves to the Self, and
permit it to ‘expand’ as is its eternal nature, then what is called
pleasure is felt.” It has been rightly said: “Pleasure is a sense of
moreness.” Every time you feel pleasure, you will find the word
“moreness” covers the case. It will cover the lowest condition of
pleasure, the pleasure of eating. You are becoming more by
appropriating to yourself a part of the Not-Self, food. You will find
it true of the highest condition of bliss, union with the Supreme. You
become more by expanding yourself to His infinity. When you have a
phrase that can be applied to the lowest and highest with which you are
dealing, you may be fairly sure it is all-inclusive, and that,
therefore, “pleasure is moreness” is a true statement. Similarly, pain
is “lessness”.
If you understand these things your philosophy of life will become more
practical, and you will be able to help more effectively people who
fall into evil ways. Take drink. The real attraction of drinking lies
in the fact that, in the first stages of it, a more keen and vivid life
is felt. That stage is overstepped in the case of the man who gets
drunk, and then the attraction ceases. The attraction lies in the first
stages, and many people have experienced that, who would never dream of
becoming drunk. Watch people who are taking wine and see how much more
lively and talkative they become. There lies the attraction, the
danger.
The real attraction in most coarse forms of excess is that they give an
added sense of life, and you will never be able to redeem a man from
his excess unless you know why he does it. Understanding the
attractiveness of the first step, the increase of life, then you will
be able to put your finger on the point of temptation, and meet that in
your argument with him. So that this sort of mental analysis is not
only interesting, but practically useful to every helper of mankind.
The more you know, the greater is your power to help.
The next question that arises is: “Why does he not divide all feelings
into pleasurable and not-pleasurable, rather than into ‘painful and
not-painful’?” A Westerner will not be at a loss to answer that: “Oh,
the Hindu is naturally so very pessimistic, that he naturally ignores
pleasure and speaks of painful and not-painful. The universe is full of
pain.” But that would not be a true answer. In the first place the
Hindu is not pessimistic. He is the most optimistic of men. He has not
got one solitary school of philosophy that does not put in its
foreground that the object of all philosophy is to put an end to pain.
But he is profoundly reasonable. He knows that we need not go about
seeking happiness. It is already ours, for it is the essence of our own
nature. Do not the Upanishads say: “The Self is bliss”? Happiness
exists perennially within you. It is your normal state. You have not to
seek it. You will necessarily be happy if you get rid of the obstacles
called pain, which are in the modes of mind. Happiness is not a
secondary thing, but pain is, and these painful things are obstacles to
be got rid of. When they are stopped, you must be happy. Therefore
Patanjali says: “The vrittis are painful and non-painful.” Pain is an
excrescence. It is a transitory thing. The Self, who is bliss, being
the all-permeating life of the universe, pain has no permanent place in
it. Such is the Hindu position, the most optimistic in the world.
Let us pause for a moment to ask: “Why should there be pain at all if
the Self is bliss?” Just because the nature of the Self is bliss. It
would be impossible to make the Self turn outward, come into
manifestation, if only streams of bliss flowed in on him. He would have
remained unconscious of the streams. To the infinity of bliss nothing
could be added. If you had a stream of water flowing unimpeded in its
course, pouring more water into it would cause no ruffling, the stream
would go on heedless of the addition. But put an obstacle in the way,
so that the free flow is checked, and the stream will struggle and fume
against the obstacle, and make every endeavour to sweep it away. That
which is contrary to it, that which will check its current’s smooth
flow, that alone will cause effort. That is the first function of pain.
It is the only thing that can rouse the Self. It is the only thing that
can awaken his attention. When that peaceful, happy, dreaming, inturned
Self finds the surge of pain beating against him, he awakens: “What is
this, contrary to my nature, antagonistic and repulsive, what is this?”
It arouses him to the fact of a surrounding universe, an outer world.
Hence in psychology, in yoga, always basing itself on the ultimate
analysis of the fact of nature, pain is the thing that asserts itself
as the most important factor in Self-realisation; that which is other
than the Self will best spur the Self into activity. Therefore we find
our commentator, when dealing with pain, declares that the karmic
receptacle the causal body, that in which all the seeds of karma are
gathered Up, has for its builder all painful experiences; and along
that line of thought we come to the great generalisation: the first
function of pain in the universe is to arouse the Self to turn himself
to the outer world, to evoke his aspect of activity.
The next function of pain is the organisation of the vehicles. Pain
makes the man exert himself, and by that exertion the matter of his
vehicles gradually becomes organised. If you want to develop and
organise your muscles, you make efforts, you exercise them, and thus
more life flows into them and they become strong. Pain is necessary
that the Self may force his vehicles into making efforts which develop
and organise them. Thus pain not only awakens awareness, it also
organises the vehicles.
It has a third function also. Pain purifies. We try to get rid of that
which causes us pain. It is contrary to our nature, and we endeavour to
throw it away. All that is against the blissful nature of the Self is
shaken by pain out of the vehicles; slowly they become purified by
suffering, and in that way become ready for the handling of the Self.
It has a fourth function. Pain teaches. All the best lessons of life
come from pain rather than from joy. When one is becoming old, as I am
and I look on the long life behind me, a life of storm and stress, of
difficulties and efforts, I see something of the great lessons pain can
teach. Out of my life story could efface without regret everything that
it has had of joy and happiness, but not one pain would I let go, for
pain is the teacher of wisdom.
It has a fifth function. Pain gives power. Edward Carpenter said, in
his splendid poem of “Time and Satan,” after he had described the
wrestlings and the overthrows: “Every pain that I suffered in one body
became a power which I wielded in the next.” Power is pain transmuted.
Hence the wise man, knowing these things, does not shrink from pain; it
means purification, wisdom, power.
It is true that a man may suffer so much pain that for this incarnation
he may be numbed by it, rendered wholly or partially useless.
Especially is this the case when the pain has deluged in childhood. But
even then, he shall reap his harvest of good later. By his past, he may
have rendered present pain inevitable, but none the less can he turn it
into a golden opportunity by knowing and utilising its functions.
You may say: “What use then of pleasure, if pain is so splendid a
thing?” From pleasure comes illumination. Pleasure enables the Self to
manifest. In pleasure all the vehicles of the Self are made
harrnonious; they all vibrate together; the vibrations are rhythmical,
not jangled as they are in pain, and those rhythmical vibrations permit
that expansion of the Self of which I spoke, and thus lead up to
illumination, the knowledge of the Self. And if that be true, as it is
true, you will see that pleasure plays an immense part in nature, being
of the nature of the Self, belonging to him. When it harmonises the
vehicles of the Self from outside, it enables the Self more readily to
manifest himself through the lower selves within us. Hence happiness is
a condition of illumination. That is the explanation of the value of
the rapture of the mystic; it is an intense joy. A tremendous wave of
bliss, born of love triumphant, sweeps over the whole of his being, and
when that great wave of bliss sweeps over him, it harmonises the whole
of his vehicles, subtle and gross alike, and the glory of the Self is
made manifest and he sees the face of his God. Then comes the wonderful
illumination, which for the time makes him unconscious of all the lower
worlds. It is because for a moment the Self is realising himself as
divine, that it is possible for him to see that divinity which is
cognate to himself. So you should not fear joy any more than you fear
pain, as some unwise people do, dwarfed by a mistaken religionism. That
foolish thought which you often find in an ignorant religion, that
pleasure is rather to be dreaded, as though God grudged joy to His
children, is one of the nightmares born of ignorance and terror. The
Father of life is bliss. He who is joy cannot grudge Himself to His
children, and every reflection of joy in the world is a reflection of
the Divine Life, and a manifestation of the Self in the midst of
matter. Hence pleasure has its function as well as pain and that also
is welcome to the wise, for he understands and utilises it. You can
easily see how along this line pleasure and pain become equally
welcome. Identified with neither, the wise man takes either as it
comes, knowing its purpose. When we understand the places of joy and of
pain, then both lose their power to bind or to upset us. If pain comes,
we take it and utilise it. If joy comes, we take it and utilise it. So
we may pass through life, welcoming both pleasure and pain, content
whichever may come to us, and not wishing for that which is for the
moment absent. We use both as means to a desired end; and thus we may
rise to a higher indifference than that of the stoic, to the true
vairagya; both pleasure and pain are transcended, and the Self remains,
who is bliss.
Lecture IV YOGA AS PRACTICELecture IV
YOGA AS PRACTICE
Brothers:
Yesterday, in dealing with the third section of the subject, I drew
your attention to the states of mind, and pointed out to you that,
according to the Samskrit word vritti, those states of mind should be
regarded as ways m which the mind exists, or, to use the philosophical
phrase of the West, they are modes of mind, modes of mental existence.
These are the states which are to be inhibited, put an end to,
abolished, reduced into absolute quiescence. The reason for this
inhibition is the production of a state which allows the higher mind to
pour itself into the lower. To put it in another way: the lower mind,
unruffled, waveless, reflects the higher, as a waveless lake reflects
the stars. You will remember the phrase used in the Upanishad, which
puts it less technically and scientifically, but more beautifully, and
declares that in the quietude of the mind and the tranquility of the
senses, a man may behold the majesty of the Self. The method of
producing this quietude is what we have now to consider.
Inhibition of States of MindInhibition of States of Mind
Two ways, and two ways only, there are of inhibiting these modes, these
ways of existence, of the mind. They were given by Sri Krishna in the
Bhagavad-Gita, when Arjuna complained that the mind was impetuous,
strong, difficult to bend, hard to curb as the wind. His answer was
definite: “Without doubt, O mighty-armed, the mind is hard to curb and
restless; but it may be curbed by constant practice (abhyasa) and by
dispassion (vai-ragya).”[7]
[7] _loc. cit._, vi. 35, 35
These are the two methods, the only two methods, by which this
restless, storm-tossed mind can be reduced to peace and quietude.
Vai-ragya and abhyasa, they are the only two methods, but when steadily
practiced they inevitably bring about the result.
Let us consider what these two familiar words imply. Vai-ragya, or
dispassion, has as its main idea the clearing away of all passion for,
attraction to, the objects of the senses, the bonds which are made by
desire between man and the objects around him. Raga is “passion,
addiction,” that which binds a man to things. The prefix “vi”—changing
to “vai” by a grammatical rule —means “without,” or “in opposition to”.
Hence vai-ragya is “non-passion, absence of passion,” not bound, tied
or related to any of these outside objects. Remembering that thinking
is the establishing of relations, we see that the getting rid of
relations will impose on the mind the stillness that is Yoga. All raga
must be entirely put aside. We must separate ourselves from it. We must
acquire the opposite condition, where every passion is stilled, where
no attraction for the objects of desire remains, where all the bonds
that unite the man to surrounding objects are broken. “When the bonds
of the heart are broken, then the man becomes immortal.”
How shall this dispassion be brought about? There is only one right way
of doing it. By slowly and gradually drawing ourselves away from outer
objects through the more potent attraction of the Self. The Self is
ever attracted to the Self. That attraction alone can turn these
vehicles away from the alluring and repulsive objects that surround
them; free from all raga, no more establishing relations with objects,
the separated Self finds himself liberated and free, and union with the
one Self becomes the sole object of desire. But not instantly, by one
supreme effort, by one endeavour, can this great quality of dispassion
become the characteristic of the man bent on Yoga. He must practice
dispassion constantly and steadfastly. That is implied in the word
joined with dispassion, abhyasa or practice. The practice must be
constant, continual and unbroken. “Practice” does not mean only
meditation, though this is the sense in which the word is generally
used; it means the deliberate, unbroken carrying out of dispassion in
the very midst of the objects that attract.
In order that you may acquire dispassion, you must practice it in the
everyday things of life. I have said that many confine abhyasa to
meditation. That is why so few people attain to Yoga. Another error is
to wait for some big opportunity. People prepare themselves for some
tremendous sacrifice and forget the little things of everyday life, in
which the mind is knitted to objects by a myriad tiny threads. These
things, by their pettiness, fail to attract attention, and in waiting
for the large thing, which does not come, people lose the daily
practice of dispassion towards the little things that are around them.
By curbing desire at every moment, we become indifferent to all the
objects that surround us. Then, when the great opportunity comes, we
seize it while scarce aware that it is upon us. Every day, all day
long, practice—that is what is demanded from the aspirant to Yoga, for
only on that line can success come; and it is the wearisomeness of this
strenuous, continued endeavour that tires out the majority of
aspirants.
I must here warn you of a danger. There is a rough-and- ready way of
quickly bringing about dispassion. Some say to you: “Kill out all love
and affection; harden your hearts; become cold to all around you;
desert your wife and children, your father and mother, and fly to the
desert or the jungle; put a wall between youself and all objects of
desire; then dispassion will be yours.” It is true that it is
comparatively easy to acquire dispassion in that way. But by that you
kill more than desire. You put round the Self, who is love, a barrier
through which he is unable to pierce. You cramp yourself by encircling
yourself with a thick shell, and you cannot break through it. You
harden yourself where you ought to be softened; you isolate yourself
where you ought to be embracing others; you kill love and not only
desire, forgetting that love clings to the Self and seeks the Self,
while desire clings to the sheaths of the Self, the bodies in which the
Self is clothed. Love is the desire of the separated Self for union
with all other separated Selves. Dispassion is the non-attraction to
matter—a very different thing. You must guard love—for it is the very
Self of the Self. In your anxiety to acquire dispassion do not kill out
love. Love is the life in everyone of us, separated Selves. It draws
every separated Self to the other Self. Each one of us is a part of one
mighty whole. Efface desire as regards the vehicles that clothe the
Self, but do not efface love as regards the Self, that never-dying
force which draws Self to Self. In this great up-climbing, it is far
better to suffer from love rather than to reject it, and to harden your
hearts against all ties and claims of affection. Suffer for love, even
though the suffering be bitter. Love, even though the love be an avenue
of pain. The pain shall pass away, but the love shall continue to grow,
and in the unity of the Self you shall finally discover that love is
the great attracting force which makes all things one.
Many people, in trying to kill out love, only throw themselves back,
becoming less human, not superhuman; by their mistaken attempts. It is
by and through human ties of love and sympathy that the Self unfolds.
It is said of the Masters that They love all humanity as a mother loves
her firstborn son. Their love is not love watered down to coolness, but
love for all raised to the heat of the highest particular loves of
smaller souls. Always mistrust the teacher who tells you to kill out
love, to be indifferent to human affections. That is the way which
leads to the left-hand path.
Meditation With and Without SeedMeditation With and Without Seed
The next step is our method of meditation. What do we mean by
meditation? Meditation cannot be the same for every man. Though the
same in principle, namely, the steadying of the mind, the method must
vary with the temperament of the practitioner. Suppose that you are a
strong-minded and intelligent man, fond of reasoning. Suppose that
connected links of thought and argument have been to you the only
exorcise of the mind. Utilise that past training. Do not imagine that
you can make your mind still by a single effort. Follow a logical chain
of reasoning, step by step, link after link; do not allow the mind to
swerve a hair’s breadth from it. Do not allow the mind to go aside to
other lines of thought. Keep it rigidly along a single line, and
steadiness will gradually result. Then, when you have worked up to your
highest point of reasoning and reached the last link of your chain of
argument, and your mind will carry you no further, and beyond that you
can see nothing, then stop. At that highest point of thinking, cling
desperately to the last link of the chain, and there keep the mind
poised, in steadiness and strenuous quiet, waiting for what may come.
After a while, you will be able to maintain this attitude for a
considerable time.
For one in whom imagination is stronger than the reasoning faculty, the
method by devotion, rather than by reasoning, is the method. Let him
call imagination to his help. He should picture some scene, in which
the object of his devotion forms the central figure, building it up,
bit by bit, as a painter paints a picture, putting in it gradually all
the elements of the scene He must work at it as a painter works on his
canvas, line by line, his brush the brush of imagination. At first the
work will be very slow, but the picture soon begins to present itself
at call. Over and over he should picture the scene, dwelling less and
less on the surrounding objects and more and more on the central figure
which is the object of his heart’s devotion. The drawing of the mind to
a point, in this way, brings it under control and steadies it, and thus
gradually, by this use of the imagination. he brings the mind under
command. The object of devotion will be according to the man’s
religion. Suppose—as is the case with many of you—that his object of
devotion is Sri Krishna; picture Him in any scene of His earthly life,
as in the battle of Kurukshetra. Imagine the armies arrayed for battle
on both sides; imagine Arjuna on the floor of the chariot, despondent,
despairing; then come to Sri Krishna, the Charioteer, the Friend and
Teacher. Then, fixing your mind on the central figure, let your heart
go out to Him with onepointed devotion. Resting on Him, poise yourself
in silence and, as before, wait for what may come.
This is what is called “meditation with seed”. The central figure, or
the last link in reasoning, that is “the seed”. You have gradually made
the vagrant mind steady by this process of slow and gradual curbing,
and at last you are fixed on the central thought, or the central
figure, and there you are poised. Now let even that go. Drop the
central thought, the idea, the seed of meditation. Let everything go.
But keep the mind in the position gained, the highest point reached,
vigorous and alert. This is meditation without a seed. Remain poised,
and wait in the silence and the void. You are in the “cloud,” before
described, and pass through the condition before sketched. Suddenly
there will be a change, a change unmistakable, stupendous, incredible.
In that silence, as said, a Voice shall be heard. In that void, a Form
shall reveal itself. In that empty sky, a Sun shall rise, and in the
light of that Sun you shall realise your own identity with it, and know
that that which is empty to the eye of sense is full to the eye of
Spirit, that that which is silence to the ear of sense is full of music
to the ear of Spirit.
Along such lines you can learn to bring into control your mind, to
discipline your vagrant thought, and thus to reach illumination. One
word of warning. You cannot do this, while you are trying meditation
with a seed. until you are able to cling to your seed definitely for a
considerable time, and maintain throughout an alert attention. It is
the emptiness of alert expectation. not the emptiness of impending
sleep. If your mind be not in that condition, its mere emptiness is
dangerous. It leads to mediumship, to possession, to obsession. You can
wisely aim at emptiness, only when you have so disciplined the mind
that it can hold for a considerable time to a single point and remain
alert when that point is dropped.
The question is sometimes asked: “Suppose that I do this and succeed in
becoming unconscious of the body; suppose that I do rise into a higher
region; is it quite sure that I shall come back again to the body?
Having left the body, shall I be certain to return?” The idea of
non-return makes a man nervous. Even if he says that matter is nothing
and Spirit is everything, he yet does not like to lose touch with his
body and, losing that touch, by sheer fear, he drops back to the earth
after having taken so much trouble to leave it. You should, however,
have no such fear. That which will draw you back again is the trace of
your past, which remains under all these conditions.
The question is of the same kind as: “Why should a state of Pralaya
ever come to an end, and a new state of Manvantara begin?” And the
answer is the same from the Hindu psychological standpoint; because,
although you have dropped the very seed of thought, you cannot destroy
the traces which that thought has left, and that trace is a germ, and
it tends to draw again to itself matter, that it may express itself
once more. This trace is what is called the privation of matter—
samskara. Far as you may soar beyond the concrete mind, that trace,
left in the thinking principle, of what you have thought and have
known, that remains and will inevitably draw you back. You cannot
escape your past and, until your life-period is over, that samskara
will bring you back. It is this also which, at the close of the
heavenly life, brings a man back to rebirth. It is the expression of
the law of rhythm. In Light on the Path, that wonderful occult
treatise, this state is spoken of and the disciple is pictured as in
the silence. The writer goes on to say: “Out of the silence that is
peace a resonant voice shall arise. And this voice will say: ‘It is not
well; thou hast reaped, now thou must sow.’ And knowing this voice to
be the silence itself, thou wilt obey.”
What is the meaning of that phrase: “Thou hast reaped, now thou must
sow?” It refers to the great law of rhythm which rules even the Logoi,
the Ishvaras —the law of the Mighty Breath, the out-breathing and the
in-breathing, which compels every fragment which is separated for a
time. A Logos may leave His universe, and it may drop away when He
turns His gaze inward, for it was He who gave reality to it.
He may plunge into the infinite depths of being, but even then there is
the samskara of the past universe, the shadowy latent memory, the germ
of maya from which He cannot escape. To escape from it would be to
cease to be Ishvara, and to become Brahma Nirguna. There is no Ishvara
without maya, there is no maya without Ishvara. Even in pralaya, a time
comes when the rest is over and the inner life again demands
manifestation; then the outward turning begins and a new universe comes
forth. Such is the law of rest and activity: activity followed by rest;
rest followed again by the desire for activity; and so the ceaseless
wheel of the universe, as well as of human lives, goes on. For in the
eternal, both rest and activity are ever present, and in that which we
call Time, they follow each other, although in eternity they be
simultaneous and ever-existing.
The Use of MantrasThe Use of Mantras
Let us see how far we can help ourselves in this difficult work. I will
draw your attention to one fact which is of enormous help to the
beginner.
Your vehicles are ever restless. Every vibration in the vehicle
produces a corresponding change in consciousness. Is there any way to
check these vibrations, to steady the vehicle, so that consciousness
may be still? One method is the repeating of a mantra. A mantra is a
mechanical way of checking vibration. Instead of using the powers of
the will and of imagination, you save these for other purposes, and use
the mechanical resource of a mantra. A mantra is a definite succession
of sounds. Those sounds, repeated rhythmically over and over again in
succession, synchronise the vibrations of the vehicles into unity with
themselves. Hence a mantra cannot be translated; translation alters the
sounds. Not only in Hinduism, but in Buddhism, in Roman Catholicism, in
Islam, and among the Parsis, mantras are found, and they are never
translated, for when you have changed the succession and order of the
sounds, the mantra ceases to be a mantra. If you translate the words,
you may have a very beautiful prayer, but not a mantra. Your
translation may be beautiful inspired poetry, but it is not a living
mantra. It will no longer harmonise the vibrations of the surrounding
sheaths, and thus enable the consciousness to become still. The poetry,
the inspired prayer, these are mentally translatable. But a mantra is
unique and untranslatable. Poetry is a great thing: it is often an
inspirer of the soul, it gives gratification to the ear, and it may be
sublime and beautiful, but it is not a mantra.
AttentionAttention
Let us consider concentration. You ask a man if he can concentrate. He
at once says: “Oh! it is very difficult. I have often tried and
failed.” But put the same question in a different way, and ask him:
“Can you pay attention to a thing?” He will at once say: “Yes, I can do
that.”
Concentration is attention. The fixed attitude of attention, that is
concentration. If you pay attention to what you do, your mind will be
concentrated. Many sit down for meditation and wonder why they do not
succeed. How can you suppose that half an hour of meditation and
twenty- three and a half hours of scattering of thought throughout the
day and night, will enable you to concentrate during the half hour? You
have undone during the day and night what you did in the morning, as
Penelope unravelled the web she wove. To become a Yogi, you must be
attentive all the time. You must practice concentration every hour of
your active life. Now you scatter your thoughts for many hours, and you
wonder that you do not succeed. The wonder would be if you did. You
must pay attention every day to everything you do. That is, no doubt,
hard to do, and you may make it easier in the first stages by choosing
out of your day’s work a portion only, and doing that portion with
perfect, unflagging attention. Do not let your mind wander from the
thing before you. It does not matter what the thing is. It may be the
adding up of a column of figures, or the reading of a book. Anything
will do. It is the attitude of the mind that is important and not the
object before it. This is the only way of learning concentration. Fix
your mind rigidly on the work before you for the time being, and when
you have done with it, drop it. Practise steadily in this way for a few
months, and you will be surprised to find how easy it becomes to
concentrate the mind. Moreover, the body will soon learn to do many
things automatically. If you force it to do a thing regularly, it will
begin to do it, after a time, of its own accord, and then you find that
you can manage to do two or three things at the same time. In England,
for instance, women are very fond of knitting. When a girl first learns
to knit, she is obliged to be very intent on her fingers. Her attention
must not wander from her fingers for a moment, or she will make a
mistake. She goes on doing that day after day, and presently her
fingers have learnt to pay attention to the work without her
supervision, and they may be left to do the knitting while she employs
the conscious mind on something else. It is further possible to train
your mind as the girl has trained her fingers. The mind also, the
mental body, can be so trained as to do a thing automatically. At last,
your highest consciousness can always remain fixed on the Supreme,
while the lower consciousness in the body will do the things of the
body, and do them perfectly, because perfectly trained. These are
practical lessons of Yoga.
Practice of this sort builds up the qualities you want, and you become
stronger and better, and fit to go on to the definite study of Yoga.
Obstacles to YogaObstacles to Yoga
Before considering the capacities needed for this definite practice,
let us run over the obstacles to Yoga as laid down by Patanjali.
The obstacles to Yoga are very inclusive. First, disease: if you are
diseased you cannot practice Yoga; it demands sound health, for the
physical strain entailed by it is great. Then languor of mind: you must
be alert, energetic, in your thought. Then doubt: you must have
decision of will, must be able to make up your mind. Then carelessness:
this is one of the greatest difficulties with beginners; they read a
thing carelessly, they are inaccurate. Sloth: a lazy man cannot be a
Yogi; one who is inert, who lacks the power and the will to exert
himself; how shall he make the desperate exertions wanted along this
line? The next, worldly-mindedness, is obviously an obstacle. Mistaken
ideas is another great obstacle, thinking wrongly about things. One of
the great qualifications for Yoga is “right notion” “Right notion”
means that the thought shall correspond with the outside truth; that a
man shall he fundamentally true, so that his thought corresponds to
fact; unless there is truth in a man, Yoga is for him impossible.
Missing the point, illogical, stupid, making the important, unimportant
and vice versa. Lastly, instability: which makes Yoga impossible, and
even a small amount of which makes Yoga futile; the unstable man cannot
be a yogi.
Capacities of YogaCapacities of Yoga
Can everybody practise Yoga? No. But every well-educated person can
prepare for its future practice. For rapid progress you must have
special capacities, as for anything else. In any of the sciences a man
may study without being the possessor of very special capacity,
although he cannot attain eminence therein; and so it is with Yoga.
Anybody with a fair intelligence may learn something from Yoga which he
may advantageously practice, but he cannot hope unless he starts with
certain capacities, to be a success in Yoga in this life. It is only
right to say that; for if any special science needs particular
capacities in order to attain eminence therein, the science of sciences
certainly cannot fall behind the ordinary sciences in the demands that
it makes on its students.
Suppose I am asked: “Can I become a great mathematician?” What must be
my answer? “You must have a natural aptitude and capacity for
mathematics to be a great mathematician. If you have not that capacity,
you cannot be a great mathematician in this life.” But this does not
mean that you cannot learn any mathematics. To be a great mathematician
you must be born with a special capacity for mathematics. To be born
with such a special capacity means that you have practiced it in very
many lives and now you are born with it ready-made. It is the same with
Yoga. Every man can learn a little of it. But to be a great Yogi means
lives of practice. If these are behind you, you will have been born
with the necessary faculties in the present birth.
There are three faculties which one must have to obtain success in
Yoga. The first is a strong desire. “Desire ardently.” Such a desire is
needed to break the strong links of desire which knit you to the outer
world. Moreover, without that strong desire you will never go through
all the difficulties that bat your way. You must have the conviction
that you will ultimately succeed, and the resolution to go on until you
do succeed. It must be a desire so ardent and so firmly rooted, that
obstacles only make it more keen. To such a man an obstacle is like
fuel that you throw on a fire. It burns but the more strongly as it
catches hold of it and finds it fuel for the burning. So difficulties
and obstacles are but fuel to feed the fire of the yogi’s resolute
desire. He only becomes the more firmly fixed, because he finds the
difficulties.
If you have not this strong desire, its absence shows that you are new
to the work, but you can begin to prepare for it in this life. You can
create desire by thought; you cannot create desire by desire. Out of
the desire nature, the training of the desire nature cannot come.
What is it in us that calls out desire? Look into your own mind, and
you will find that memory and imagination are the two things that evoke
desire most strongly. Hence thought is the means whereby all the
changes in desire can be brought about. Thought, imagination, is the
only creative power in you, and by imagination your powers are to be
unfolded. The more you think of a desirable object, the stronger
becomes the desire for it. Then think of Yoga as desirable, if you want
to desire Yoga. Think about the results of Yoga and what it means for
the world when you have become a yogi, and you will find your desire
becoming stronger and stronger. For it is only by thought that you can
manage desire. You can do nothing with it by itself. You want the
thing, or you do not want it, and within the limits of the desire
nature you are helpless in its grasp. As just said, you cannot change
desire by desire. You must go into another region of your being, the
region of thought, and by thought you can make yourself desire or not
desire, exactly as you like, if only you will use the right means, and
those means, after all, are fairly simple. Why is it you desire to
possess a thing? Because you think it will make you happier. But
suppose you know by past experience that in the long run it does not
make you happier, but brings you sorrow, trouble, distress. You have at
once, ready to your hands, the way to get rid of that desire. Think of
the ultimate results. Let your mind dwell carefully on all the painful
things. Jump over the momentary pleasure, and fix your thought steadily
on the pain which follows the gratification of that desire. And when
you have done that for a month or so, the very sight of those objects
of desire will repel you. You will have associated it in your mind with
suffering, and will recoil from it instinctively. You will not want it.
You have changed the want, and have changed it by your power of
imagination. There is no more effective way of destroying a vice than
by deliberately picturing the ultimate results of its indulgence.
Persuade a young man who is inclined to be profligate to keep in his
mind the image of an old profligate; show him the profligate worn out,
desiring without the power to gratify; and if you can get him to think
in that way, unconsciously he will begin to shrink from that which
before attracted him; the very hideousness of the results frightens
away the man from clinging to the object of desire. And the would-be
yogi has to use his thought to mark out the desires he will permit, and
the desires that he is determined to slay.
The next thing after a strong desire is a strong will. Will is desire.
transmuted, its directing is changed from without to within. If your
will is weak, you must strengthen it. Deal with it as you do with other
weak things: strengthen it by practice. If a boy knows that he has weak
arms, he says: “My arms are weak, but I shall practice gymnastics, work
on the parallel bars: thus my arms. will grow strong.” It is the same
with the will. Practice will make strong the little, weak will that you
have at present.
Resolve, for example, saying: “I will do such and such thing every
morning,” and do it. One thing at a time is enough for a feeble will.
Make yourself a promise to do such and such a thing at such a time, and
you will soon find that you will be ashamed to break your promise. When
you have kept such a promise to yourself for a day, make it for a week,
then for a fortnight. Having succeeded, you can choose a harder thing
to do, and so on. By this forcing of action, you strengthen the will.
Day after day it grows greater in power, and you find your inner
strength increases. First have a strong desire. Then transmute it into
a strong will.
The third requisite for Yoga is a keen and broad intelligence. You
cannot control your mind, unless you have a mind to control. Therefore
you must develop your mind. You must study. By study, I do not mean the
reading of books. I mean thinking. You may read a dozen books and your
mind may be as feeble as in the beginning. But if you have read one
serious book properly, then, by slow reading and much thinking, your
intelligence will be nurtured and your; mind grow strong.
These are the things you want—a strong desire, an indomitable will, a
keen. intelligence. Those are the capacities that you must unfold in
order that the practice of Yoga may be possible to you. If your mind is
very unsteady, if it is a butterfly mind like a child’s, you must make
it steady. That comes by close study and thinking. You must unfold the
mind by which you are to work.
Forthgoing and ReturningForthgoing and Returning
It will help you, in doing this and in changing your desire, if you
realise that the great evolution of humanity goes on along two
paths—the Path of Forthgoing, and the Path of Return.
On the Path, or marga, of Pravritti—forthgoing on which are the vast
majority of human beings, desires are necessary and useful. On that
path, the more desire a man has, the better for his evolution. They are
the motives that prompt to activity. Without these the stagnates, he is
inert. Why should Isvara have filled the worlds with desirable objects
if He did not intend that desire should be an ingredient in evolution?
He deals with humanity as a sensible mother deals -with her child. She
does not give lectures to the child on the advantages of walking nor
explain to it learnedly the mechanism of the muscles of the leg. She
holds a bright glittering toy before the child, and says: “Come and get
it.” Desire awakens, and the child begins to crawl, and so it learns to
walk. So Isvara has put toys around us, but always just out of our
reach, and He says: “Come, children, take these. Here are love, money,
fame, social consideration; come and get them. Walk, make efforts for
them.” And we, like children, make great efforts and struggle along to
snatch these toys. When we seize the toy, it breaks into pieces and is
of no use. People fight and struggle and toil for wealth, and, when
they become multi-millionaires, they ask: “How shall we spend this
wealth?” I read of a millionaire in America, who was walking on foot
from city to city, in order to distribute the vast wealth which he
accumulated. He learned his lesson. Never in another life will that man
be induced to put forth efforts for the toy of wealth. Love of fame,
love of power, stimulate men to most strenuous effort. But when they
are grasped and held in the hand, weariness is the result. The mighty
statesman, the leader of the nation, the man idolised by
millions—follow him home, and there you will see the weariness of
power, the satiety that cloys passion. Does then God mock us with all
the objects? No. The object has been to bring out the power of the Self
to develop the capacity latent in man, and in the development of human
faculty, the result of the great lila may be seen. That is the way in
which we learn to unfold the God within us; that is the result of the
play of the divine Father with His children.
But sometimes the desire for objects is lost too early, and the lesson
is but half learned. That is one of the difficulties in the India of
today. You have a mighty spiritual philosophy, which was the natural
expression for the souls who were born centuries ago. They were ready
to throw away the fruit of action and to work for the Supreme to carry
out His Will.
But the lesson for India at the present time is to wake up the desire.
It may look like going back, but it is really a going forward. The
philosophy is true, but it belonged to those older souls who were ready
for it, and the younger souls now being born into the people are not
ready for that philosophy. They repeat it by rote, they are hypnotised
by it, and they sink down into inertia, because there is nothing they
desire enough to force them to exertion. The consequence is that the
nation as a whole is going downhill. The old lesson of putting
different objects before souls of different ages, is forgotten, and
every one is now nominally aiming at ideal perfection, which can only
be reached when the preliminary steps have been successfully mounted.
It is the same as with the “Sermon on the Mount” in Christian
countries, but there the practical common sense of the people bows to
it and—ignores it. No nation tries to live by the “Sermon on the Mount”
It is not meant for ordinary men and women, but for the saint. For all
those who are on the Path of Forthgoing, desire is necessary for
progress.
What is the Path of Nivritti? It is the Path of Return. There desire
must cease; and the Self-determined will must take its place. The last
object of desire in a person commencing the Path of Return is the
desire to work with the Will of the Supreme; he harmonises his will
with the Supreme Will, renounces all separate desires, and thus works
to turn the wheel of life as long as such turning is needed by the law
of Life. Desire on the Path of Forthgoing becomes will on the Path of
Return; the soul, in harmony with the Divine, works with the law.
Thought on the Path of Forthgoing is ever alert, flighty and changing;
it becomes reason on the Path of Return; the yoke of reason is placed
on the neck of the lower mind, and reason guides the bull. Work,
activity, on the Path of Forthgoing, is restless action by which the
ordinary man is bound; on the Path of Return work becomes sacrifice,
and thus its binding force is broken. These are, then, the
manifestations of three aspects, as shown on the Paths of Forthgoing
and Return.
Bliss manifested as desire is changed into will Wisdom manifested as
thought is changed into reason. Activity manifested as work is changed
into sacrifice.
People very often ask with regard to this: “Why is will placed in the
human being as the correspondence of bliss in the Divine?” The three
great Divine qualities are: chit or consciousness; ananda or bliss; sat
or existence. Now it is quite clear that the consciousness is reflected
in intelligence in man—the same quality, only in miniature. It is
equally clear that existence and activity belong to each other. You can
only exist as you act outwards. The very form of the word shows It
—“ex, out of”; it is manifested life. That leaves the third, bliss, to
correspond with will, and some people are rather puzzled with that, and
they ask: “What is the correspondence between bliss and will?” But if
you come down to desire, and the objects of desire, you will be able to
solve the riddle. The nature of the Self is bliss. Throw that nature
down into matter and what will be the expression of the bliss nature?
Desire for happiness, the seeking after desirable objects, which it
imagines will give it the happiness which is of its own essential
nature, and which it is continually seeking to realise amid the
obstacles of the world. Its nature being bliss, it seeks for happiness
and that desire for happiness is to be transmuted into will. All these
correspondences have a profound meaning if you will only look into
them, and that universal “will-to-live” translates itself as the
“desire for happiness” that you find in every man and woman, in every
sentient creature. Has it ever struck you how surely you are justifying
that analysis of your own nature by the way you accept happiness as
your right, and resent misery, and ask what you have done to deserve
it? You do not ask the same about happiness, which is the natural
result of your own nature. The thing that has to be explained is not
happiness but pain, the things that are against the nature of the Self
that is bliss. And so, looking into this, we see how desire and will
are both the determination to be happy. But the one is ignorant, drawn
out by outer objects; the other is self-conscious, initiated and ruled
from within. Desire is evoked and directed from outside; and when the
same aspect rules from within, it is will. There is no difference in
their nature. Hence desire on the Path of Forthgoing becomes will on
the Path of Return.
When desire, thought and work are changed into will, reason and
sacrifice, then the man is turning homewards, then he lives by
renunciation.
When a man has really renounced, a strange change takes place. On the
Path of Forthgoing, you must fight for everything you want to get; on
the Path of Return, nature pours her treasures at your feet. When a man
has ceased to desire them, then all treasures pour down upon him, for
he has become a channel through which all good gifts flow to those
around him. Seek the good, give up grasping, and then everything will
be yours. Cease to ask that your own little water tank may be filled,
and you will become a pipe, joined to the living source of all waters,
the source which never runs dry, the waters which spring up
unfailingly. Renunciation means the power of unceasing work for the
good of all, work which cannot fail, because wrought by the Supreme
Worker through His servant.
If you are engaged in any true work of charity, and your means are
limited and the wealth does not flow into your hands, what does it
mean? It means that you have not yet learnt the true renunciation. You
are clinging to the visible, to the fruit of action, and so the wealth
does not pour through your hands.
Purification of BodiesPurification of Bodies
The unfolding of powers belongs to the side of consciousness;
purification of bodies belongs to the side of matter. You must purify
each of your three working bodies—mental, astral and physical. Without
that purification you had better leave yoga alone. First of all, how
shall you purify the thought body? By right thinking. Then you must use
imagination, your great creative tool, once more. Imagine things, and,
imagining them, you will form your thought-body into the organisation
that you desire. Imagine something strongly, as the painter imagines
when he is going to paint. Visualise an object if you have the power of
visualisation at all: if you have not, try to make it. It is an
artistic faculty, of course, hut most people have it more or less. See
how far you can reproduce perfectly a face you see daily. By such
practice you will be strengthening your imagination, and by
strengthening your imagination you will be making the great tool with
which you have to practice in Yoga.
There is another use of the imagination which is very valuable. If you
will imagine in your thought-body the presence of the qualities that
you desire to have, and the absence of those which you desire not to
have, you are half-way to having and not having them. Also, many of the
troubles of your life might be weakened if you would imagine them on
right lines before you have to go through them. Why do you wait
helplessly until you meet them in the physical world. If you thought of
your coming trouble in the morning, and thought of yourself as acting
perfectly in the midst of it (you should never scruple to imagine
yourself perfect), when the thing turned up in the day, it would have
lost its power, and you would no longer feel the sting to the same
extent. Now each of you must have in your life something that troubles
you. Think of yourself as facing that trouble and not minding it, and
when it comes, you will be what you have been thinking. You might get
rid of half your troubles and your faults, if you would deal with them
through your imagination.
As the thought body, becomes purified in this way, you must turn to the
astral body. The astral body is purified by right desire. Desire nobly,
and the astral body will evolve the organs of good desires instead of
the organs of evil ones. The secret of all progress is to think and
desire the highest, never dwelling on the fault, the weakness, the
error, but always on the perfected power, and slowly in that way you
will be able to build up perfection in yourself. Think and desire,
then, in order to purify the thought body and the astral body.
And how shall you purify the physical body? You must regulate it in all
its activities—in sleep, in food, in exercise, in everything. You
cannot have a pure physical body with impure mental and astral bodies
so that the work of imagination helps also in the purification of the
physical. But you must also regulate the physical body in all its
activities. Take for instance, food. The Indian says truly that every
sort of food has a dominant quality in it, either rhythm, or activity,
or inertia, and that all foods fall under one of these heads. Now the
man who is to be a yogi must not touch any food which is on the way to
decay. Those things belong to the tamasic foods—all foods, for
instance, of the nature of game, of venison, all food which is showing
signs of decay (all alcohol is a product of decay), are to be avoided.
Flesh foods come under the quality of activity. All flesh foods are
really stimulants. All forms in the animal kingdom are built up to
express animal desires and animal activities. The yogi cannot afford to
use these in a body meant for the higher processes of thought.
Vitality, yes, they will give that; strength, which does not last, they
will give that; a sudden spurs of energy, yes, meat will give that; but
those are not the things which the yogi wants; so he puts aside all
those foods as not available for the work he desires, and chooses his
food out of the most highly vitalised products. All the foods which
tend to growth, those are the most highly vitalised, grain, out of
which the new plant will grow, is packed full of the most nutritious
substances; fruits; all those things which have growth as their next
stage in the life cycle, those are the rhythmic foods, full of life,
and building up a body sensitive and strong at the same time.
Dwellers on the ThresholdDwellers on the Threshold
Of these there are many kinds. First, elementals. They try to bar the
astral plane against man. And naturally so, because they are concerned
with the building up of the lower kingdoms, these elementals of form,
the Rupa Devas; and to them man is a really hateful creature, because
of his destructive properties. That is why they dislike him so much. He
spoils their work wherever he goes, tramples down vegetable things, and
kills animals, so that the whole of that great kingdom of nature hates
the name of man. They band themselves together to stop the one who is
just taking his first conscious steps on the astral plane, and try to
frighten him, for they fear that he is bringing destructiveness into
the new world. They cannot do anything, if you do not mind them. When
that rush of elemental force comes against the man entering on the
astral plane, he must remain quiet, indifferent, taking up the
position: “I am a higher product of evolution than you are; you can do
nothing to me. I am your friend, not your enemy, Peace!” If he be
strong enough to take up that position, the great wave of elemental
force will roll aside and let him through. The seemingly causeless
fears which some feel at night are largely due to this hostility. You
are, at night, more sensitive to the astral plane than during the day,
and the dislike of the beings on the plane for man is felt more
strongly. But when the elementals find you are not destructive, not an
embodiment of ruin, they become as friendly to you as they were before
hostile. That is the first form of the dweller on the threshold. Here
again the importance of pure and rhythmic food comes in; because if you
use meat and alcohol, you attract the lower elementals of the plane,
those that take pleasure in the scent of blood and spirits, and they
will inevitably prevent your seeing and understanding things clearly.
They will surge round you, impress their thoughts upon you, force their
impressions on your astral body, so that you may have a kind of shell
of objectionable hangers-on to your aura, who will much obstruct you in
your efforts to see and hear correctly. That is the chief reason why
every one who is teaching Yoga on the right-hand path absolutely
forbids indulgence in meat and alcohol.
The second form of the dweller on the threshold is the thought forms of
our own past. Those forms, growing out of the evil of lives that lie
behind us, thought forms of wickedness of all kinds, those face us when
we first come into touch with the astral plane, really belonging to us,
but appearing as outside forms, as objects; and they try to scare back
their creator. You can only conquer them by sternly repudiating them:
“You are no longer mine; you belong to my past, and not to my present.
I will give you none of my life.” Thus you will gradually exhaust and
finally annihilate them. This is perhaps one of the most painful
difficulties that one has to face in treading the astral plane in
consciousness for the first time. Of course, where a person has in any
way been mixed up with objectionable thought forms of the stronger
kind, such as those brought about by practicing black magic, there this
particular form of the dweller will be much stronger and more
dangerous, and often desperate is the struggle between the neophyte and
these dwellers from his past backed up by the masters of the black
side.
Now we come to one of the most terrible forms of the dwellers on the
threshold. Suppose a case in which a man during the past has steadily
identified himself with the lower part of his nature and has gone
against the higher, paralysing himself, using higher powers for lower
purposes, degrading his mind to be the mere slave of his lower desires.
A curious change takes place in him. The life which belongs to the Ego
in him is taken up by the physical body, and assimilated with the lower
lives of which the body is composed. Instead of serving the purposes of
the Spirit, it is dragged away for tile purposes of the lower, and
becomes part of the animal life belonging to the lower bodies, so that
the Ego and his higher bodies are weakened, and the animal life of the
lower is strengthened. Now under those conditions, the Ego will
sometimes become so disgusted with his vehicles that when death
relieves him of the physical body he will cast the others quite aside.
And even sometimes during physical life he will leave the desecrated
temple. Now after death, in these cases, the man generally reincarnates
very quickly; for, having torn himself away from his astral and mental
bodies, he has no bodies with which to live in the astral and mental
worlds, and he must quickly form new ones and come again to rebirth
here. Under these conditions the old astral and mental bodies are not
disintegrated when the new mental and astral bodies are formed and born
into the world, and the affinity between the old and new, both having
had the same owner, the same tenant, asserts itself, and the highly
vitalised old astral and mental bodies will attach themselves to the
new astral and mental bodies, and become the most terrible form of the
dweller on the threshold.
These are the various forms which the dweller may assume, and all are
spoken of in books dealing with these particular subjects, though I do
not know that you will find anywhere in a single book a definite
classification like the above. In addition to these there are, of
course, the direct attacks of the Dark Brothers, taking up various
forms and aspects, and the most common form they will take is the form
of some virtue which is a little bit in excess in the yogi. The yogi is
not attacked through his vices, but through his virtues; for a virtue
in excess becomes a vice. It is the extremes which are ever the vices;
the golden mean is the virtue. And thus, virtues become tempters in the
difficult regions of the astral and mental worlds, and are utilised by
the Brothers of the Shadow in order to entrap the unwary.
I am not here speaking of the four ordinary ordeals of the astral
plane: the ordeals by earth, water, fire and air. Those are mere
trifles, hardly worth considering when speaking of these more serious
difficulties. Of course, you have to learn that you are entirely master
of astral matter, that earth cannot crush you, nor water drown you,
etc. Those are, so to speak, very easy lessons. Those who belong to a
Masonic body will recognise these ordeals as parts of the language they
are familiar with in their Masonic ritual.
There is one other danger also. You may injure yourself by
repercussion. If on the astral plane you are threatened with danger
which belongs to the physical, but are unwise enough to think it can
injure you, it will injure your physical body. You may get a wound, or
a bruise, and so on, out of astral experiences. I once made a fool of
myself in this way. I was in a ship going down and, as I was busy
there, I saw that the mast of the ship was going to fall and, in a
moment’s forgetfulness, thought: “That mast will fall on me” that
momentary thought had its result, for when I came back to the body in
the morning, I had a large physical bruise where the mast fell. That is
a frequent phenomenon until you have corrected the fault of the mind,
which thinks instinctively the things which it is accustomed to think
down here.
One protection you can make for yourself as you become more sensitive.
Be rigorously truthful in thought, in word, in deed. Every thought,
every desire, takes form in the higher world. If you are careless of
truth here, you are creating a whole host of terrifying and deluding
forms. Think truth, speak truth, live truth, and then you shall be free
from the illusions of the astral world.
Preparation for YogaPreparation for Yoga
People say that I put the ideal of discipleship so very high that
nobody can hope to become a disciple. But I have not said that no one
can become a disciple who does not reproduce the description that is
given of the perfect disciple. One may. But we do it at our own peril.
A man may be thoroughly capable along one line, but have a serious
fault along another. The serious fault will not prevent him from
becoming a disciple, but he must suffer for it. The initiate pays for
his faults ten times the price he would have had to pay for them as a
man of the world. That is why I have put the ideal so high. I have
never said that a person must come utterly up to the ideal before
becoming a disciple, but I have said that the risks of becoming a
disciple without these qualifications are enormous. It is the duty of
those who have seen the results of going through the gateway with
faults in character, to point out that it is well to get rid of these
faults first. Every fault you carry through the gateway with you
becomes a dagger to stab you on the other side. Therefore it is well to
purify yourself as much as you can, before you are sufficiently evolved
on any line to have the right to say: “I will pass through that
gateway.” That is what I intended to be understood when I spoke of
qualifications for discipleship. I have followed along the ancient road
which lays down these qualifications which the disciple should bring
with him; and if he comes without them, then the word of Jesus is true,
that he will be beaten with many stripes; for a man can afford to do in
the outer world with small result what will bring terrible results upon
him when once he is treading the Path.
The End
What is to be the end of this long struggle? What is the goal of the
upward climbing, the prize of the great battle? What does the yogi
reach at last? He reaches unity. Sometimes I am not sure that large
numbers of people, if they realised what unity means, would really
desire to reach it. There are many “virtues” of your ordinary life
which will drop entirely away from you when you reach unity. Many
things you admire will be no longer helps but hindrances, when the
sense of unity begins to dawn. All those qualities so useful in
ordinary life—such as moral indignation, repulsion from evil, judgment
of others—have no room where unity is realised. When you feel repulsion
from evil, it is a sign that your Higher Self is beginning to awaken,
is seeing the dangers of evil: he drags the body forcibly away from it.
That is the beginning of the conscious moral life. Hatred of evil is
better at that stage than indifference to evil. It is a necessary
stage. But repulsion cannot be felt when a man has realised unity, when
he sees God made manifest in man. A man who knows unity cannot judge
another. “I judge no man,” said the Christ. He cannot be repelled by
anyone. The sinner is himself, and how shall he be repelled from
himself? For him there is no “I” or “Thee,” for we are one.
This is not a thing that many honestly wish for. It is not a thing that
many honestly desire. The man who has realised unity knows no
difference between himself and the vilest wretch that walks the earth.
He sees only the God that walks in the sinner, and knows that the sin
is not in the God but in the sheath. The difference is only there. He
who has realised the inner greatness of the Self never pronounces
judgment upon another, knows that other as himself, and he himself as
that other—that is unity. We talk brotherhood, but how many of us
really practice it? And even that is not the thing the yogi aims at.
Greater than brotherhood are identity and realisation of the Self as
one. The Sixth Root Race will carry brotherhood to the highest point.
The Seventh Root Race will know identity, will realise the unity of the
human race. To catch a glimpse of the beauty of that high conception,
the greatness of the unity in which “I” and “mine,” “you” and “yours”
have vanished, in which we are all one life, even to do that lifts the
whole nature towards divinity, and those who can even see that unity is
fair; they are the nearer to the realisation of the Beauty that is God.
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