Eight Lectures on Yoga

19. I could quote you the case of a man—a very inferior and wishy- washy poet—who undertook for a time very strenuously the prescribed magical practices. He was very fortunate, and attained admirable results. No sooner had he done so that his poetry itself became flooded with supernal light and energy. He produced masterpieces. And then he gave up his Magick because the task of further progress appalled him. The result was that his poetry fell completely away to the standard of wet blotting paper. 20. Let me tell you also of one man almost illiterate, a Lancashire man who had worked in a mill from the age of nine years. He had studied for years with the Toshophists with no results. Then he corresponded with me for some time; he had still no results. He came to stay with me in Sicily. One day as we went down to bathe we stood for a moment on the brink of the cliff which led down to the little rocky cove with its beach of marvellous smooth sand. I said something quite casually—I have never been able to remember what it was—nor could he ever remember—but he suddenly dashed down the steep little path like a mountain goat, threw off his cloak and plunged into the sea. When he came back, his very body had become luminous. I saw that he needed to be alone for a week to complete his experience, so I fixed him up in an Alpine tent in a quiet dell under broad-spreading trees at the edge of a stream. From time to time he sent me his magical record, vision after vision of amazing depth and splendour. I was so gratified with his attainment that I showed these records to a distinguished literary critic who was staying with me at the time. A couple of hours later, when I returned to the Abbey, he burst out upon me a flame of excitement. 'Do you know what this is?' he cried. I answered casually that it was a lot of very good visions. 'Bother your visions,' he exclaimed, 'didn't you notice the style? It's pure John Bunyan!' It was. 21. But all this is neither here nor there. There is only one thing for anybody to do on a path, and that is to make sure of the next step. And the fact which we all have to comfort us is this: that all human beings have capacities for attainment, each according to his or her present position. For instance, with regard to the power of vision on the astral plane, I have been privileged to train many hundreds of people in the course of my life, and only about a dozen of them were incapable of success. In one case this was because the man had already got beyond all such preliminary exercise; his mind immediately took on the formless condition which transcends all images, all thought. Other failures were stupid people who were incapable of making an experiment of any sort. They were a mass of intellectual pride and prejudice, and I sent them away with an injunction to go to Jane Austen. But the ordinary man and woman get on very well, and by this I do not mean only the educated. It is, in fact, notorious that, among many of the primitive races of mankind, strange powers of all kinds develop with amazing florescence.