Eight Lectures on Yoga

replace my magical apparatus. I would take the table by my bed, or stones roughly piled, for my altar. My candle or my Alpine Lantern was my light. My ice-axe for the wand, my drinking flask for the chalice, my machete for the sword, and a chapati or a sachet of salt for the pantacle of art! Habit soon familiarised these rough and ready succedanea. But I suspect that it may have been the isolation and the physical hardship itself that helped, that more and more my magical operation became implicit in my own body and mind, when a few months later I found myself performing in full operations involving the Formula of the Neophyte (for which see my treatise Magick) without any external apparatus at all. 10. A pox on all these formalistic Aryan sages! Unless one wants to be very pedantic, it is rather absurd to contend that this form of ritual forced upon me, first by external and next by internal circumstances, was anything else but a new form of Asana, Pranayama, Mantra-Yoga, and Pratyahara in something very near perfection; and it is therefore not surprising that the Magical exaltation resulting from such ceremonies was in all essential respects the equivalent of Samyama. On the other hand, the Yoga training was an admirable aid to that final concentration of the Will which operates the magical ecstasy. 11. This then is reality: direct experience. How does it differ from the commonplace every-day experience of sensory impressions which are so readily shaken by the first breath of the wind of intellectual analysis? Well, to answer first of all in a common-sense way, the difference is simply that the impression is deeper, is less to be shaken. Men of sense and education are always ready to admit that they may have been mistaken in the quality of their observation of any phenomenon, and men a little more advanced are almost certain to attain to a placid kind of speculation as to whether the objects of sense are not mere shadows on a screen. I take off my glasses. Now I cannot read my manuscript. I had two sets of lenses, one natural, one artificial. If I had been looking through a telescope of the old pattern I should have had three sets of lenses, two artificial. If I go and put on somebody else's glasses I shall get another kind of blur. As the lenses of my eyes change in the course of my life, what my sight tells me is different. The point is that we are quite unable to judge what is the truth of the vision. Why then do I put on my glasses to read? Only because the particular type of illusion produced by wearing them is one which enables me to interpret a prearranged system of hieroglyphics in a particular sense which I happen to imagine I want. It tells me nothing whatever about the object of my vision—what I call the paper and the ink. Which is the dream? The clear legible type or the indecipherable blur? 12. But in any case any man who is sane at all does make a distinction between the experience of daily life and the experience of dream. It is true that sometimes dreams are so vivid, and their character so persistently uniform that men are actually deceived into believing that