Eight Lectures on Yoga

constantly be adapted precisely to the conditions of your experiment. Even when you have discovered what your code is, you will have to modify it as you progress; 'remould it nearer to the heart's desire'—Omar Khayyam. Just so, in a Himalayan expedition your rule of daily life in the valleys of Sikkim or the Upper Indus will have to be changed when you get to the glacier. But it is possible to indicate (in general terms expressed with the greatest caution) the 'sort' of thing that is likely to be bad for you. Anything that weakens the body, that exhausts, disturbs or inflames the mind is deprecable. You are pretty sure to find as you progress that there are some conditions that cannot be eliminated at all in your particular circumstances; and then you have to find a way of dealing with these so that they make a minimum of trouble. And you will find that you cannot conquer the obstacle of Yama, and dismiss it from your mind once and for all. Conditions favourable for the beginner may become an intolerable nuisance to the adept, while, on the other hand, things which matter very little in the beginning become most serious obstacles later on. Another point is that quite unsuspected problems arise in the course of the training. The whole question of the sub-conscious mind can be dismissed almost as a joke by the average man as he goes about his daily business; it becomes a very real trouble when you discover that the tranquillity of the mind is being disturbed by a type of thought whose existence had previously been unsuspected, and whose source is unimaginable. Then again there is no perfection of materials; there will always be errors and weaknesses, and the man who wins through is the man who manages to carry on with a defective engine. The actual strain of the work develops the defects; and it is a matter of great nicety of judgment to be able to deal with the changing conditions of life. It will be seen that the formula—'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law' has nothing to do with 'Do as you please.' It is much more difficult to comply with the Law of Thelema than to follow out slavishly a set of dead regulations. Almost the only point of emancipation, in the sense of relief from a burden, is just the difference between Life and Death. To obey a set of rules is to shift the whole responsibility of conduct on to some superannuated Bodhisattva, who would resent you bitterly if he could see you, and tick you off in no uncertain terms for being such a fool as to think you could dodge the difficulties of research by the aid of a set of conventions which have little or nothing to do with actual conditions. Formidable indeed are the obstacles we have created by the simple process of destroying our fetters. The analogy of the conquest of the air holds excellently well. The things that worry the pedestrian worry us not at all; but to control a new element your Yama must be that biological principle of adaptation to the new conditions, adjustment of the faculties to those conditions, and consequent success in those conditions, which