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Page 1 of 21939 · PDF PAGE 49
…oint, and we are told that a point has neither parts nor magnitude, but only position. But, as long as there is only one point, position means nothing. No possibility has yet been created of any positive statement. We will therefore take two points, and from these we get the idea of a line. Our Euclid tells us that a line has length but no breadth. But, as long as there are only two points, length itself means nothing; or, at the most, it means separateness. All we can say about two points is that there are two of them. 9. Now we take a third p…
1939 · PDF PAGE 9
(5) Yoga means Union. What are the elements which are united or to be united when this word is used in its common sense of a practice widely spread in Hindustan whose object is the emancipation of the individual who studies and practises it from the less pleasing features of his life on this planet? I say Hindustan, but I really mean anywhere on the earth; for research has shown that similar methods producing similar results are to be found in every country. The details vary, but the general structure is the same. Because all bodies, and so all…
1939 · PDF PAGE 8
…uced by generations of systematic sectarian training. (3) We must then begin the study of Yoga by looking at the meaning of the word. It means Union, from the same Sanskrit root as the Greek word Zeugma, the Latin word Jugum, and the English word yoke. (Yeug to join.) When a dancing girl is dedicated to the service of a temple there is a Yoga of her relations to celebrate. Yoga, in short, may be translated 'tea fight,' which doubtless accounts for the fact that all the students of Yoga in England do nothing but gossip over endless libations of…
1939 · PDF PAGE 43
…in Sanskrit which developed into the prefix 'syn' in Greek without changing the meaning'syn' in 'synopsis,' 'synthesis,' 'syndrome.' It means 'together with.' 'Adhi' has also come down through many centuries and many tongues. It is one of the oldest words in human language; it dates from the time when each sound had a definite meaning proper to it, a meaning suggested by the muscular movement made in producing the sound. Thus, the letter D originally means 'father'; so the original father, dead and made into a 'God,' was called Ad. This name c…
1939 · PDF PAGE 16
…d Jehannum. Just so, under the grouping of Yama we learn that the aspiring Yogi must become 'fixed in the non-receiving of gifts,' which means that if anyone offers you a cigarette or a drink of water, you must reject his insidious advances in the most Victorian manner. It is such nonsense as this which brings the science of Yoga into contempt. But it isn't nonsense if you consider the class of people for whom the injunction was promulgated; for, as we will be shown later, preliminary to the concentration of the mind is the control of the mind,…
1939 · PDF PAGE 30
…e occurring. All change is conditioned by time and space and other categories; any existing object must be susceptible of description by means of a system of coordinate axes. On the terrasse of the Cafe des Deux Magots it was once necessary to proclaim the entire doctrine of Yoga in the fewest possible words 'with a shout, and with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God.' St. Paul's First Epistle to the Thessalonians, the Fourth Chapter and the Sixteenth Verse. I did so. "Sit still. Stop thinking. Shut up. Get out!" The first two…
1939 · PDF PAGE 35
… 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 propose to deal with the bulk of them. There are only two which have much practical importance in life. One of these is not to be communicated to the public in a rotten country like this; the other is the well-know…
1939 · PDF PAGE 44
…of meditation proper is summed up in the word Samyama; you can translate it quite well for yourselves, since you already know that 'sam' means 'together,' and that 'Yama' means 'control.' It represents the merging of minor individual acts of control into a single gesture, very much as all the separate cells, bones, veins, arteries, nerves, muscles and so forth, of the arm combine in unconscious unanimity to make a single stroke. 16. Now the practice of Pratyahara, properly speaking, is introspection, and the practice of Dharana, properly speaki…
1939 · PDF PAGE 25
…ighest; he is the direct medium of connection between opposites; he is electricity, the very link of life, the Yogic process itself, its means, its end. Yet he is in himself indifferent to all things, as the electric current is indifferent to the meaning of the messages which may be transmitted by its means. The Niyama corresponding to Mercury in its highest forms may readily be divined from what I have already said, but in the technique of Yoga he represents the fineness of the method which is infinitely adaptable to all problems, and only so …
1939 · PDF PAGE 66
… to dwell in the Aethyr became so intense that definitely Samadhic results were obtained. We see then that the exaltation of the mind by means of magical practices leads (as one may say, in spite of itself) to the same results as occur in straightforward Yoga. I think I ought to tell you a little more about these visions. The method of obtaining them was to take a large topaz beautifully engraved with the Rose and Cross of forty-nine petals, and this topaz was set in a wooden cross of oak painted red. I called this the shew-stone in memory of D…
1939 · PDF PAGE 21
…it words is now about to be delightfully demonstrated. The nearest I can get to the meaning of Niyama is 'virtue'! God help us all! This means virtue in the original etymological sense of the wordthe quality of manhood; that is, to all intents and purposes, the quality of godhead. But since we are translating Yama 'control,' we find that our two words have not at all the same relationship to each other that the words have in the original Sanskrit; for the prefix 'ni' in Sanskrit gives the meaning of turning everything upside down and backwards…
1939 · PDF PAGE 58
…neptum!" How right the Church has been to deny the authority of Reason! 2. We are almost tempted to enquire for a moment what the Church means by 'faith.' St. Paul tells us that faith is 'the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things unseen.' I do not think, then, that we are to imagine this word faith to mean what that lecherous gross-bellied boor, Martin Luther, maintained. The faith of which he speaks is anything but a substance, and as for evidence, it is nothing but the power, as the schoolboy said, of believing that which we k…
1939 · PDF PAGE 19
…e fretful porpentine; they scream like an uprooted mandrake, and flee in terror from the accursed spot. Because: the exercise of liberty means that you have to think for yourself, and the natural inertia of mankind wants religion and ethics ready-made. However ridiculous or shameful a theory or practice is, they would rather comply than examine it. Sometimes it is hook-swinging or Sati; sometimes consubstantiation or supra-lapsarianism; they do not mind what they are brought up in, as long as they are well brought up. They do not want to be bot…
1939 · PDF PAGE 63
…ations 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 clock is, and so on. 21. I remember once when I was in Teng-Yueh, just inside the Chinese frontier in Yunnan. The hour of noon was always telegraphed to the Consulate from Pekin. This was a splendid idea, because …
1939 · PDF PAGE 42
… single stroke, as each one to some extent explains the one following. Pratyahara may be roughly described as introspection, but it also means a certain type of psychological experience. For instance, you may suddenly acquire a conviction, as did Sir Humphry Davy, that the universe is composed exclusively of ideas; or you may have the direct experience that you do not possess a nose, as may happen to the best of us, if we concentrate upon the tip of it.
1939 · PDF PAGE 23
…nsibility; we need endurance; we need patience. It is simply impossible for anyone who has not practised Yoga to understand what boredom means. I have known Yogis, men even holier than I, (no! no!) who, to escape from the intolerable tedium, would fly for refuge to a bottle party! It is a physiological tedium which becomes the acutest agony. The tension becomes cramp; nothing else matters but to escape from the self- imposed constraint. But every evil brings its own remedy. Another quality of Saturn is melancholy; Saturn represents the sorrow o…
1939 · PDF PAGE 12
… strain. 'Schizophrenia,' which is a lovely word, and may or may not be found in your dictionary, is an exceedingly common complaint. It means the splitting up of the mind. In extreme cases we get the phenomena of multiple personality, Jekyll and Hyde, only more so. At the best, when a man says 'I' he refers only to a transitory phenomenon. His 'I' changes as he utters the word. Butphilosophy apartit is rarer and rarer to find a man with a mind of his own and a will of his own, even in this modified sense. (18) I want you therefore to see the…
1939 · PDF PAGE 50
…ith three ideas which Hindu philosophers call Sat, Chit and Ananda, which are usually translated Being, Knowledge and Bliss. This really means: Sat, the tendency to conceive of an object as real; Chit, the tendency to pretend that it is an object of knowledge; and Ananda, the tendency to imagine that we are affected by it. 13. It is only after we have endowed the object with these dozen imaginary properties, each of which, besides being a complete illusion, is an absurd, irrational, and self-contradictory notion, that we arrive at even the simp…
1939 · PDF PAGE 65
that the old antinomies of Magick and Yoga have been completely resolved. You all know what Yoga is. Yoga means union. And you all know how to do it by shutting off the din of the intellectual boiler factory, and allowing the silence of starlight to reach the ear. It is the emancipation of the exalted from the thrall of the commonplace expression of Nature. 5. Now what is Magick? Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with the Will. How do we achieve this? By exalting the will to the point where it is master of c…
1939 · PDF PAGE 34
… be a sort of symptom that one is near the critical point when the anguish becomes intolerable. You will probably ask what 'intolerable' means. I rudely answer: 'Find out!' But it may give you some idea of what is, after all, not too bad, when I say that in the last months of my own work it often used to take me ten minutes (at the conclusion of the practice) to straighten my left leg. I took the ankle in both hands, and eased it out a fraction of a millimetre at a time. 20. At this point the band begins to play. Quite suddenly the pain stops. …