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Page 1 of 21939 · PDF PAGE 57
…an convey our experience to others familiar with that experience to a less degree by the aesthetic method. And this explains why all the good work on Yoga- alchemy, magick and the restnot doctrinal but symbolicthe word of God to man, is given in Poetry and Art. In my next lecture I shall endeavour to go a little deeper into the technique of obtaining these results, and also give a more detailed account of the sort of thing that is likely to occur in the course of the preliminary practices. Love is the law, love under will. 4Tannhäuser, writt…
1939 · PDF PAGE 63
… own part. It took me a long while before I understood what was meant by 'tendency.' To help you to realise this I should like to find a good illustration. For instance, a clock does nothing at all but offer indications of the time. It is so constructed that this is all we can know about it. We can argue about whether the time is correct, and that means nothing at all, unless, for example, we know whether the clock is controlled electrically from an astronomical station where the astronomer happens to be sane, and in what part of the world the …
1939 · PDF PAGE 35
…akes for endurance. If you keep in constant practice, you ought to find that about ten minutes in the posture will rest you as much as a good night's sleep. So much for the obstacle of the body considered as static. Let us now turn our attention to the conquest of its dynamics. 22. It is always pleasing to turn to a subject like Pranayama. Pranayama means control of force. It is a generalised term. In the Hindu system there are quite a lot of subtle sub-strata of the various energies of the body which have all got names and properties. I do not…
1939 · PDF PAGE 61
…ring my retirement in Kandy, I had been trying to concentrate by slanting my eyes towards the tip of my nose. This, by the way, is not a good practice; one is liable to strain the eyes. But what happened was that I woke up in the night; my hand touched a nose; I immediately concluded that some one was in the room. Not at all; I only thought so because my nose had passed away from the region of my observation by the practice of concentrating upon it. 12. The same sort of thing occurs with adequate concentration on any object. It is connected, cu…
1939 · PDF PAGE 33
…you purr with self-satisfaction. How clever you have been! How nicely the posture suits all conditions! You absolutely melt with maudlin good feeling. I have known pupils who have actually been betrayed into sparing a kindly thought for the Teacher! It is quite clear that there is something wrong about this. Fortunately, Time, the great healer, is on the job as usual; Time takes no week-ends off; Time does not stop to admire himself; Time keeps right on.[3] Before very long, you forget all about the pleasantness of things, and it would not be a…
1939 · PDF PAGE 24
…e that you are managing your breath so that your cycle, breathing in, holding, and breathing out, lasts exactly a minute. That is pretty good work for most people, but it may be or may not be good enough to get you going. No one can tell you until you have tried long enough (and no one can tell you how long 'long enough' may be) whether that is going to ring the bell. It may be that if you increase your sixty seconds to sixty-four the phenomena would begin immediately. That sounds all right but as you have nearly burst your lungs doing the sixt…
1939 · PDF PAGE 66
… a day, as I walked behind my camel in the Great Eastern Erg of the Sahara. I do not think that anyone will dispute that this was pretty good exercise; but my point is that it was certainly very good Yoga. From what I have said in previous lectures you will all recognise that this practice fulfils all the conditions of the earlier stages of Yoga, and it is therefore not surprising that it put my mind in such a state that I was able to use the Call of the Thirty Aethyrs with much greater efficacy than before. 8. Am I then supposed to be saying t…
1939 · PDF PAGE 71
…this matter, and you become a Probationer. Your reading will have given you some indication as to the sort of thing you are likely to be good at, and you select such practices as seem to you to promise well. You go ahead with these, and keep a careful record of what you do, and what results occur. After eleven months you submit a record to your superior; it is his duty to put you right where you have gone wrong, and particularly to encourage you where you think you have failed. 25. I say this because one of the most frequent troubles is that pe…
1939 · PDF PAGE 30
… bodily functions and appetites have some moral implications. This is a confusion of the planes. There is no true discrimination between good and evil. The only question that arises is that of convenience in respect of any proposed operation. The whole of the moral and religious lumber of the ages must be discarded for ever before attempting Yoga. You will find out only too soon what it means to do wrong; by our very thesis itself all action is wrong. Any action is only relatively right in so far as it may help us to put an end to the entire pr…
1939 · PDF PAGE 46
…of break, which is a sort of abberation of the control itself. You think, 'How well I am doing it!' or perhaps that it would be rather a good idea if you were on a desert island, or if you were in a sound-proof house, or if you were sitting by a waterfall. But these are only trifling variations from the vigilance itself. A fifth class of break seems to have no discoverable source in the mindsuch might even take the form of actual hallucination, usually auditory. Of course, such hallucinations are infrequent, and are recognised for what they ar…
1939 · PDF PAGE 37
…nical, and to that extent it is just possible for a man of extraordinary will power, with plenty of leisure and no encumbrances, to do a good deal of the spade-work of Yoga even in England. But I should advise him to stick very strictly to the purely physical preparation, and on no account to attempt the practices of concentration proper, until he is able to acquire suitable surroundings. But do not let him imagine that in making this very exceptional indulgence I am going to advocate any slipshod ways. If he decides to do, let us say, a quarte…
1939 · PDF PAGE 41
…s: there is a single standard to which everything is to be referred. To hell with the Pope! If Lobster Newburg upsets your digestionand good digestion is necessary to your practicethen you do not eat Lobster Newburg. Unless this is clearly understood, the Yogi will constantly be sidetracked by the sophistications of religious and moral fanatics. To hell with the Archbishops! 8. You will readily appreciate that to undertake a course of this kind requires careful planning. You have got to map out your life in advance for a considerable period s…
1939 · PDF PAGE 27
…emote from roads, if you have the services of an attendant already well trained to deal with the emergencies that are likely to arise. A good disciplinarian might carry on fairly well, at a pinch, in a suite in Claridge's. But against this it may be urged that one has to reckon with unseen forces. The most impossible things begin to happen when once you get going. It is not really satisfactory to start serious Yoga unless you are in a country where the climate is reliable, and where the air is not polluted by the stench of civilisation. It is e…
1939 · PDF PAGE 11
…t we know and practice, this Yoga that produced these ecstatic results that we call phenomena, includes among its spiritual emanations a good deal of unpleasantness. The more we study this universe produced by our Yoga, the more we collect and synthesize our experience, the nearer we get to a perception of what the Buddha declared to be characteristic of all component things: Sorrow, Change, and Absence of any permanent principle. We constantly approach his enunciation of the first two 'Noble Truths,' as he called them. 'Everything is Sorrow'; …
1939 · PDF PAGE 32
…ng some attitude traditionally appropriate to a deity or holy man; and if you will refrain from the Puritan abomination that anything is good for you if it hurts you enough, you ought to be able to find out for yourself, after a few experiments, some posture which meets these conditions. I should very much rather have you do this than come to me for some mumbo-jumbo kind of authority. I am no pig-sticking pukka sahibnot even from Poonato put my hyphenated haw-haw humbug over on the B. Public.[2] I would rather you did the thing 'wrong' by you…
1939 · PDF PAGE 59
…, it is true, a tinge of magical technique, and they have been devised to serve a dogmatic end. That was, however, necessary, and it was good magic too, at that, because the original will of the Founder was to produce a war engine as a counterblast to the Reformation. He was very wise to devise a plan, irrespective of its abstract merits as philosophy, which would most efficiently serve that single purpose. The only trouble has been that this purpose was not sufficiently cosmic in scope to resist internal forces. Having attained the higher plan…
1939 · PDF PAGE 62
…mancipation from the thrall of the bodily desires, of the sensations self-destructive, of the thirst for pleasure. 18. I think this is a good opportunity to make a little digression in favour of Mahasatipatthana. This practice was recommended by the Buddha in very special terms, and it is the only one of which he speaks so highly. He told his disciples that if they only stuck to it, sooner or later they would reach full attainment. The practice consists of an analysis of the universe in terms of consciousness. You begin by taking some very simp…
1939 · PDF PAGE 70
…e 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 i…
1939 · PDF PAGE 34
… instinct to try to find some dodge to escape hard work. These tricks may help or they may hinder; it is up to you to find out which are good and which are bad, the why and the what and all the other questions. It all comes to the same thing in the end. There is only one way to still the body in the long run, and that is to keep it still. It's doggèd as does it. 18. The irritations develop into extreme agony. Any attempt to alleviate this simply destroys the value of the practice. I must particularly warn the aspirant against rationalising (I h…
1939 · PDF PAGE 17
…on local and climatic conditions, and they may or may not be applicable to your own case. And, on the other hand, there are all sorts of good rules which have never occurred to a teacher of Yoga; because those teachers never conceived the condition in which many people live today. It never occurred to the Buddha or Patanjali or Mansur el-Hallaj to advise his pupils not to practise in a flat with a wireless set next door. The result of all this is that all of you who are worth your salt will be absolutely delighted when I tell you to scrap all t…