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Page 1 of 31939 · PDF PAGE 45
…the main line of attainment in Yoga. This is not so, because it enables one to deal with the new conditions which are established in the mind by realisation of Dhyana and Samadhi. I can now describe the elementary practices. You should begin with very short periods; it is most important not to overstrain the apparatus which you are using; the mind must be trained very slowly. In my early days I was often satisfied with a minute or two at a time; three or four such periods twice or three times a day. In the earliest stages of all it is not neces…
1939 · PDF PAGE 16
…der 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, which means the calm of the mind, and the Hindu mind is so constituted that if you offer a man the most trifling object, the incident is a landmark in his life. It upsets him completely for years. In the East, an absolutely automatic and thoughtless act of kindness to a native is liable to attach him to you, body and soul, for the rest of his life. In other words, it is going t…
1939 · PDF PAGE 18
…t 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 be…
1939 · PDF PAGE 46
…tion: their activity becomes tremendous. Only by this practice does one understand how much is really observed by the senses without the mind becoming conscious of it. Thirdly, there is a class of break partaking of the nature of reverie or 'day-dreaming.' These are very insidiousone may go on for a long time without realising that one has wandered at all. Fourthly, we get a very high class 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 w…
1939 · PDF PAGE 40
…recious little to him!) The Yod and the He combine, the Father and Mother unite, to produce a son, Vau. This son is the exalted state of mind produced by the union of the subject and the object. This state of mind is called Samadhi in the Hindu terminology. It has many varieties, of constantly increasing sublimity; but it is the generic term which implies this union which is the subject of Yoga. At this point we ought to remember poor little Hé final, who represents the ecstasyshall I say the orgasm?and the absorption thereof: the compensatio…
1939 · PDF PAGE 47
leads to a contradiction in terms. There are dozens of ways of showing that if you begin 'A is A,' you end 'A is not A.' The mind reacts against this conclusion; it anaesthetises itself against the selfinflicted wound, and it regulates philosophy to the category of paradoxial tricks. But that is a cowardly and disgraceful attitude. The Yogi has got to face the fact that we are all raving lunatics; that sanity existsif it exists at allin a mental state free from dame's school rules of intellect. With an earnest personal appeal, therefore, to …
1939 · PDF PAGE 25
… He is the adroitness and ingenuity which helps us in our difficulties; he is the mechanical system, the symbolism which helps the human mind of the Yogi to take cognisance of what is coming. It must here be remarked that because of his complete indifference to anything whatever (and that thought iswhen you get far enoughonly a primary point of wisdom) he is entirely unreliable. One of the most unfathomably dreadful dangers of the Path is that you must trust Mercury, and yet that if you trust him you are certain to be deceived. I can only exp…
1939 · PDF PAGE 68
…all this, experience is experience; and the real guarantee that we have of the attainment of reality is its rank in the hierarchy of the mind. 13. Let us ask ourselves for a moment what is the characteristic of dream impressions as judged by the waking mind. Some dreams are so powerful that they convince us, even when awake, of their reality. Why then do we criticise and dismiss them? Because their contents are incoherent, because the order of nature to which they belong does not properly conform with the kind of experience which does hang toge…
1939 · PDF PAGE 21
…ucing the effect of transcendental sublimity. I find that I cannot even begin to think of a proper definition, although I know in my own mind perfectly well what the Hindus mean; if one soaks oneself in Oriental thought for a sufficient number of years, one gets a spiritual apprehension which it is quite impossible to express in terms applicable to the objects of intellectual apprehension; it is therefore much better to content ourselves with the words as they stand, and get down to brass tacks about the practical steps to be taken to master th…
1939 · PDF PAGE 48
…n the desert of delusion; I left you wandering in the jungle of delusion, a prey to all the monsters which are thoughts. It came into my mind that it was up to me to do something about it. We have constantly been discussing mysterious entities as if we knew something about them, and this (on examination) always turned out not to be the case. 2. Knowledge itself is impossible, because if we take the simplest proposition of knowledge, S is P, we must attach some meaning to S and P, if our statement is to be intelligible. (I say nothing as to whet…
1939 · PDF PAGE 58
…with these conditions: the direct experience of spiritual truth. Here, and here only, do we find a position in which the great religious minds of all times and all climes coincide. It is necessarily above dogma, because dogma consists of a collection of intellectual statements, each of which, and also its contradictory, can easily be disputed and overthrown. 3. You are probably aware that in the Society of Jesus the postulants are trained to debate on all these highly controversial subjects. They put up a young man to prove any startling blasph…
1939 · PDF PAGE 9
…imilar results are to be found in every country. The details vary, but the general structure is the same. Because all bodies, and so all minds, have identical Forms. (6) Yoga means Union. In the mind of a pious person, the inferiority complex which accounts for his piety compels him to interpret this emancipation as union with the gaseous vertebrate whom he has invented and called God. On the cloudy vapour of his fears his imagination has thrown a vast distorted shadow of himself, and he is duly terrified; and the more he cringes before it, the…
1939 · PDF PAGE 56
…ibility of devils entering into swine, we have met the dragon science and conquered. We have seen that, however we attack the problem of mind, whether from the customary spiritual standpoint, or from the opposite corner of materialism, the result is just the same. One last quotation from Mr. Sullivan. 'The universe may ultimately prove to be irrational. The scientific adventure may have to be given up.' But that is all he knows about science, bless his little heart! We do not give up. 'You lied, d'Ormea, I do not repent!' The results of experim…
1939 · PDF PAGE 19
…uld 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 bothered about it. The Old School Tie wins through. They never suspect the meaning of the pattern on the tie: the Broad Arrow. You remember Dr. Alexandre Manette in A Tale of Two Cities. He had been imprisoned for many years in the Bastille, and to save himself from going mad had obtained permission to make shoes. Whe…
1939 · PDF PAGE 57
… of the First Volume of The Equinox, an idea is only true in so far as it contains its contradictory in itself. 33. It is such states of mind as this which constitute the really important results of Samyama, and these results are not to be destroyed by philosophical speculation, because they are not susceptible of analysis, because they have no component parts, because they exist by virtue of their very Unreason"certum est quia ineptum!" They cannot be expressed, for they are above knowledge. To some extent we can convey our experience to othe…
1939 · PDF PAGE 71
… will surely be the acquisition of a certain technique. And this will become much easier as we advance, especially if we bear it well in mind not to attempt to discriminate between the two methods as if they were opposing schools, but to use the one to help out the other in an emergency. 23. Of course, nobody understands better than I do that, although nobody can do your work for you, it is possible to make useto a certain very limited extentof other people's experience, and the Great Order which I have the honour to serve has appointed what …
1939 · PDF PAGE 30
…ave checked the body. 3. Let me digress for a moment, and brush away one misunderstanding which is certain to occur to every Anglo-Saxon mind. About the worst inheritance of the emasculate school of mystics is the abominable confusion of thought which arises from the idea that 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 rel…
1939 · PDF PAGE 12
…h 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 nature of the obstacles to un…
1939 · PDF PAGE 61
…thing occurs with adequate concentration on any object. It is connected, curiously enough, with the phenomena of invisibility. When your mind has gone so deeply into itself that it is unconscious of itself and its surroundings, one of the most ordinary results is that the body becomes invisible to other people. I do not think that it would make any difference for a photograph, though I have no evidence for saying this; but it has happened to me on innumerable occasions. It was an almost daily occurrence when I was in Sicily. 13. A party of us u…
1939 · PDF PAGE 36
…t least we are deluding ourselves into thinking that we are doing it, and the point is that, according to tradition, if you can hold the mind still for as much as twelve seconds you will get one of the highest results of Yoga. It is certainly a fact that when you are doing a cycle of 20 seconds out, 10 in, and 30 holding, there is quite a long period during the holding period when the mind does tend to stop its malignant operations. By the time this cycle has become customary, you are able to recognise instinctively the arrival of the moment wh…