Reformatted for HTML by Omu THE
EQUINOX VOLUME III, NUMBER FOUR
EIGHT LECTURES
ON YOGA
BY
MAHATMA GURU
SRI PARAMAHANSA SHIVAJI
BY ALEISTER CROWLEY
PREFACE
Aleister Crowley has achieved the
reputation of being a master of the English language.
This book which is as fresh and vibrant today as when
it was penned over thirty years ago demonstrates this
fact. It shows how impossible it is to categorize him
as a particu- lar kind of stylist. At turns he can be
satirical, poetical, sarcas- tic, rhetorical,
philosophical or mystical, gliding so easily from one
to the other that the average reader is hard put to
determine whether or not to take him at face value.
His description of mystical states
of consciousness clarifies what tomes of more erudite
writing fails to elucidate. It is in effect a
continuation of Part I of Book 4 brought to maturity.
Nearly three decades had elapsed between the writing
of these two books, in which time his own inner
development had soared ineffably. A great deal of
what he has to say may seem prosaic at first sight,
but do not be fooled by this. Other of his comments
are profound beyond belief, requiring careful and
long meditation if full value is to be derived from
them.
This is not a book to be read while
standing or running. It is a high water mark of
Crowley's literary career, incorporating all that we
should expect from one who had experimented with and
mastered most technical forms of spiritual growth.
There is humor here, a great deal of sagacity, and
much practical advice. This book cannot be dispensed
with for the student for whom Yoga is 'the way.'
Israel Regardie
March 21, 1969
Studio City, Calif.
CONTENTS
YOGA FOR
YAHOOS
(Part 1 of 8)
YOGA
FOR YAHOOS.
FIRST
LECTURE. FIRST PRINCIPLES.
Do what thou wilt shall
be the whole of the Law.
It is my will to explain
the subject of Yoga in clear language, without resort to
jargon or the enunciation of fantastic hypotheses, in
order that this great science may be thoroughly
understood as of universal importance.
For, like all great
things, it is simple; but, like all great things, it is
masked by confused thinking; and, only too often, brought
into contempt by the machinations of knavery.
(1) There is more
nonsense talked and written about Yoga than about
anything else in the world. Most of this nonsense, which
is fostered by charlatans, is based upon the idea that
there is some- thing mysterious and Oriental about it.
There isn't. Do not look to me for obelisks and
odalisques, Rahat Loucoum, bul-buls, or any other tinsel
imagery of the Yoga-mongers. I am neat but not gaudy.
There is nothing mysterious or Oriental about anything,
as everybody knows who has spent a little time
intelligently in the continents of Asia and Africa. I
propose to invoke the most remote and elusive of all Gods
to throw clear light upon the subject -- the light of
common sense.
(2) All phenomena of
which we are aware take place in our own minds, and
therefore the only thing we have to look at is the mind;
which is a more constant quantity over all the species of
humanity than is generally supposed. What appear to be
radical differences, irreconcilable by argument, are
usually found to be due to the obstinacy of habit
produced 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 Lyons' 1s. 2d.
(4) Yoga means Union.
In what sense are we to
consider this? How is the word Yoga to imply a system of
religious training or a description of religious
experience?
You may note incidentally
that the word Religion is really identifiable with Yoga.
It means a binding together.
(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
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 more the spectre seems to stoop to
crush him. People with these ideas will never get to
anywhere but Lunatic Asylums and Churches.
It is because of this
overwhelming miasma of fear that the whole subject of
Yoga has become obscure. A perfectly simple problem has
been complicated by the most abject ethical and
superstitious non- sense. Yet all the time the truth is
patent in the word itself. (7) Yoga means Union.
We may now consider what
Yoga really is. Let us go for a moment into the nature of
consciousness with the tail of an eye on such sciences as
mathematics, biology, and chemistry.
In mathematics the
expression 'a' plus 'b' plus 'c' is a trivi- ality. Write
'a' plus 'b' plus 'c' equals 0, and you obtain an
equation from which the most glorious truths may be
developed.
In biology the cell
divides endlessly, but never becomes any- thing
different; but if we unite cells of opposite qualities,
male and female, we lay the foundations of a structure
whose summit is unattainably fixed in the heavens of
imagination.
Similar facts occur in
chemistry. The atom by itself has few constant qualities,
none of them particulary significant; but as soon as an
element combines with the object of its hunger we get not
only the ecstatic production of light, heat, and so
forth, but a more complex structure having few or none of
the qualities of its ele- ments, but capable of further
combination into complexities of astonishing sublimity.
All these combinations, these unions, are Yoga.
(8) Yoga means Union.
How are we to apply this
word to the phenomena of mind? What is the first
characteristic of everything in thought? How did it come
to be a thought at all? Only by making a distinction
between it and the rest of the world.
The first proposition,
the type of all propositions, is: S is P. There must be
two things -- different things -- whose relation forms
knowledge.
Yoga is first of all the
union of the subject and the object of consciousness: of
the seer with the thing seen.
(9) Now, there is nothing
strange of wonderful about all this. The study of the
principles of Yoga is very useful to the average man, if
only to make him think about the nature of the world as
he supposes that he knows it.
Let us consider a piece
of cheese. We say that this has certain qualities, shape,
structure, colour, solidity, weight, taste, smell,
consistency and the rest; but investigation has shown
that this is all illusory. Where are these qualities? Not
in the cheese, for different observers give quite
different accounts of it. Not in ourselves, for we do not
perceive them in the absence of the cheese. All 'material
things,' all impressions, are phantoms.
In reality the cheese is
nothing but a series of electric charges. Even the most
fundamental quality of all, mass, has been found not to
exist. The same is true of the matter in our brains which
is partly responsible for these perceptions. What then
are these qualities of which we are all so sure? They
would not exist without our brains; they would not exist
without the cheese. They are the results of the union,
that is of the Yoga, of the seer and the seen, of subject
and object in consciousness as the philosophical phrase
goes. They have no material existence; they are only
names given to the ecstatic results of this particular
form of Yoga.
(10) I think that nothing
can be more helpful to the student of Yoga than to get
the above proposition firmly established in his
subconscious mind. About nine-tenths of the trouble in
understanding the subject is all this ballyhoo about Yoga
being mysterious and Oriental. The principles of Yoga,
and the spiritual results of Yoga, are demonstrated in
every conscious and unconscious happening. This is that
which is written in 'The Book of the Law' -- Love is the
law, love under will -- for Love is the instinct to
unite, and the act of uniting. But this cannot be done
indiscriminately, it must be done 'under will,' that is,
in accordance with the nature of the particu- lar units
concerned. Hydrogen has no love for Hydrogen; it is not
the nature, or the 'true Will' of Hydrogen to seek to
unite with a molecule of its own kind. Add Hydrogen to
Hydrogen: nothing happens to its quality: it is only its
quantity that changes. It rather seeks to enlarge its
experience of its possibilities by union with atoms of
opposite character, such as Oxygen; with this it combines
(with an explosion of light, heat, and sound) to form
water. The result is entirely different from either of
the component elements, and has another kind of 'true
Will,' such as to unite (with similar disengagement of
light and heat) with Potassium, while the resulting
'caustic Potash' has in its turn a totally new series of
qualities, with still another 'true Will' of its own;
that is, to unite explosively with acids. And so on.
(11) It may seem to some
of you that these explanations have rather knocked the
bottom out of Yoga; that I have reduced it to the
category of common things. That was my object. There is
no sense in being frightened of Yoga, awed by Yoga,
muddled and mystified by Yoga, or enthusiastic over Yoga.
If we are to make any progress in its study, we need
clear heads and the impersonal scientific atti- tude. It
is especially important not to bedevil ourselves with
Oriental jargon. We may have to use a few Sanskrit words;
but that is only because they have no English
equivalents; and any attempt to translate them burdens us
with the connotations of the existing English words which
we employ. However, these words are very few; and, if the
definitions which I propose to give you are carefully
studied, they should present no difficulty.
(12) Having now
understood that Yoga is the essence of all phenomena
whatsoever, we may ask what is the special meaning of the
word in respect of our proposed investigation, since the
process and the results are familiar to every one of us;
so familiar indeed that there is actually nothing else at
all of which we have any knowledge. It *is* knowledge.
What is it we are going
to study, and why should we study it? (13) The answer is
very simple.
All this Yoga that 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 constant- ly
approach his enunciation of the first two 'Noble Truths,'
as he called them. 'Everything is Sorrow'; and 'The cause
of Sorrow is Desire.' By the word 'Desire' he meant
exactly what is meant by 'Love' in 'The Book of the Law'
which I quoted a few moments ago. 'Desire' is the need of
every unit to extend its experience by combining with its
opposite.
(14) It is easy enough to
construct the whole series of argu- ments which lead up
to the first 'Noble Truth.'
Every operation of Love
is the satisfaction of a bitter hunger, but the appetite
only grows fiercer by satisfaction; so that we can say
with the Preacher: 'He that increaseth knowledge
increaseth Sorrow.' The root of all this sorrow is in the
sense of insufficien- cy; the need to unite, to lose
oneself in the beloved object, is the manifest proof of
this fact, and it is clear also that the satisfac- tion
produces only a temporary relief, because the process
expands indefinitely. The thirst increases with drinking.
The only complete satisfaction conceivable would be the
Yoga of the atom with the entire universe. This fact is
easily perceived, and has been con- stantly expressed in
the mystical philosophies of the West; the only goal is
'Union with God.' Of course, we only use the word 'God'
because we have been brought up in superstition, and the
higher philosophers both in the East and in the West have
preferred to speak of union with the All or with the
Absolute. More superstitions!
(15) Very well, then,
there is no difficulty at all; since every thought in our
being, every cell in our bodies, every electron and
proton of our atoms, is nothing but Yoga and the result
of Yoga. All we have to do to obtain emancipation,
satisfaction, everything we want is to perform this
universal and inevitable operation upon the Absolute
itself. Some of the more sophisticated members of my
audience may possibly be thinking that there is a catch
in it somewhere. They are perfectly right.
(16) The snag is simply
this. Every element of which we are composed is indeed
constantly occupied in the satisfaction of its particular
needs by its own particular Yoga; but for that very
reason it is completely obsessed by its own function,
which it must natural- ly consider as the Be-All and
End-All of its existence. For in- stance, if you take a
glass tube open at both ends and put it over a bee on the
windowpane it will continue beating against the window to
the point of exhaustion and death, instead of escaping
through the tube. We must not confuse the necessary
automatic functioning of any of our elements with the
true Will which is the proper orbit of any star. A human
being only acts as a unit at all because of countless
generations of training. Evolutionary processes have set
up a higher order of Yogic action by which we have
managed to subordinate what we consider particular
interests to what we consider the general wel- fare. We
are communities; and our well-being depends upon the
wisdom of our Councils, and the discipline with which
their decisions are enforced. The more complicated we
are, the higher we are in the scale of evolution, the
more complex and difficult is the task of legislation and
of maintaining order.
(17) In highly civilised
communities like our own (*loud laughter*), the
individual is constantly being attacked by conflict- ing
interests and necessities; his individuality is
constantly being assailed by the impact of other people;
and in a very large number of cases he is unable to stand
up to the 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. But -- philosophy apart -- it 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 union with the
Absolute. For one thing, the Yoga which we constantly
practice has not invariable results; there is a question
of atten- tion, of investigation, of reflexion. I propose
to deal in a future instruction with the modifications of
our perception thus caused, for they are of great
importance to our science of Yoga. For example, the
classical case of the two men lost in a thick wood at
night. One says to the other: 'That dog barking is not a
grasshopper; it is the creaking of a cart.' Or again, 'He
thought he saw a banker's clerk descending from a bus. He
looked again, and saw it was a hippopotamus.'
Everyone who has done any
scientific investigation knows pain- fully how every
observation must be corrected again and again. The need
of Yoga is so bitter that it blinds us. We are constantly
tempted to see and hear what we want to see and hear.
(19) It is therefore
incumbent upon us, if we wish to make the universal and
final Yoga with the Absolute, to master every element of
our being, to protect it against all civil and external
war, to intensify every faculty to the utmost, to train
outselves in know- ledge and power to the utmost; so that
at the proper moment we may be in perfect condition to
fling ourselves up into the furnace of ecstasy which
flames from the abyss of annihilation.
Love is the law, love
under will.
(Part 2 of 8)
YOGA
FOR YAHOOS.
SECOND
LECTURE. YAMA.
Do what thou wilt shall
be the whole of the Law. Stars and placental amniotes!
And ye inhabitants of the ten thousand worlds!
The conclusion of our
researches last week was that the ultimate Yoga which
gives emancipation, which destroys the sense of separate-
ness which is the root of Desire, is to be made by the
concentration of every element of one's being, and
annihilating it by intimate combustion with the universe
itself.
I might here note, in
parenthesis, that one of the difficulties of doing this
is that all the elements of the Yogi increase in every
way exactly as he progresses, and by reason of that
progress. However, it is no use crossing our bridges
until we come to them, and we shall find that by laying
down serious scientific principles based on universal
experience they will serve us faithfully through every
stage of the journey.
2. When I first undertook
the investigation of Yoga, I was fortunately equipped
with a very sound training in the fundamental principles
of modern science. I saw immediately that if we were to
put any common sense into the business (science is
nothing but instructed common sense), the first thing to
do was to make a com- parative study of the different
systems of mysticism. It was immedi- ately apparent that
the results all over the world were identical. They were
masked by sectarian theories. The methods all over the
world were identical; this was masked by religious
prejudice and local custom. But in their quiddity --
identical! This simple principle proved quite sufficient
to disentangle the subject from the extraordinary
complexities which have confused its expression.
3. When it came to the
point of preparing a simple analysis of the matter, the
question arose: what terms shall we use? The mysticisms
of Europe are hopelessly muddled; the theories have
entirely overlaid the methods. The Chinese system is
perhaps the most sublime and the most simple; but, unless
one is born a Chinese, the symbols are of really
unclimbable difficulty. The Buddhist system is in some
ways the most complete, but it is also the most
recondite. The words are excessive in length and
difficult to commit to memory; and generally speaking,
one cannot see the wood for the trees. But from the
Indian system, overloaded though it is by accretions of
every kind, it is comparatively easy to extract a method
which is free from unnecessary and undesirable
implications, and to make an interpretation of it
intelligible to, and acceptable by, European minds. It is
this system, and this interpretation of it, which I
propose to put before you.
4. The great classic of
Sanskrit literature is the Aphorisms of Patanjali. He is
at least mercifully brief, and not more than ninety or
ninety-five percent of what he writes can be dismissed as
the ravings of a disordered mind. What remains is
twenty-four carat gold. I now proceed to bestow it.
5. It is said that Yoga
has eight limbs. Why limbs I do not know. But I have
found it convenient to accept this classification, and we
can cover the ground very satisfactorily by classing our
remarks under these eight headings.
6. These headings are: --
1. Yama.
2. Niyama.
3. Asana.
4. Pranayama.
5. Pratyahara.
6. Dharana.
7. Dhyana.
8. Samadhi.
Any attempt to translate
these words will mire us in a hopeless quag of
misunderstanding. What we can do is to deal with each one
in turn, giving at the outset some sort of definition or
description which will enable us to get a fairly complete
idea of what is meant. I shall accordingly begin with an
account of Yama.
Attend! Perpend! Transcent!
7. Yama is the easiest of
the eight limbs of Yoga to define, and corresponds pretty
closely to our word 'control.' When I tell you that some
have translated it 'morality,' you will shrink appalled
and aghast at this revelation of the brainless baseness
of humanity.
The word 'control' is
here not very different from the word 'inhibition' as
used by biologists. A primary cell, such as the amoeba,
is in one sense completely free, in another completely
passive. All parts of it are alike. Any part of its
surface can ingest its food. If you cut it in half, the
only result is that you have two perfect amoebae instead
of one. How far is this condition removed in the
evolutionary scale from trunk murders!
Organisms developed by
specialising their component structures have not achieved
this so much by an acquisition of new powers, as by a
restriction of part of the general powers. Thus, a Harley
Street specialist is simply an ordinary doctor who says:
'I won't go out and attend to a sick person; I won't, I
won't, I won't.'
Now what is true of cells
is true of all already potentially specialised organs.
Muscular power is based upon the rigidity of bones, and
upon the refusal of joints to allow any movement in any
but the appointed directions. The more solid the fulcrum,
the more efficient the lever. The same remark applies to
moral issues. These issues are in themselves perfectly
simple; but they have been com- pletely overlaid by the
sinister activities of priests and lawyers.
There is no question of
right or wrong in any abstract sense about any of these
problems. It is absurd to say that it is 'right' for
chlorine to combine enthusiastically with hydrogen, and
only in a very surly way with oxygen. It is not virtuous
of a hydra to be hermaphrodite, or contumacious on the
part of an elbow not to move freely in all directions.
Anybody who knows what his job is has only one duty,
which is to get that job done. Anyone who possesses a
function has only one duty to that function, to arrange
for its free fulfilment.
Do what thou wilt shall
be the whole of the Law.
8. We shall not be
surprised therefore if we find that the perfectly simple
term Yama (or Control) has been bedevilled out of all
sense by the mistaken and malignant ingenuity of the
pious Hindu. He has interpreted the word 'control' as
meaning compliance with certain fixed proscriptions.
There are quite a lot of prohibitions grouped under the
heading of Yama, which are perhaps quite necessary for
the kind of people contemplated by the Teacher, but they
have been senselessly elevated into universal rules.
Everyone is familiar with the prohibition of pork as an
article of diet by Jews and Mohammedans. This has nothing
to do with Yama, or abstract right- eousness. It was due
to the fact that pork in eastern countries was infected
with the trichina; which killed people who ate pork
impro- perly cooked. It was no good telling the savages
that fact. Any way, they would only have broken the
hygienic command when greed overcame them. The advice had
to be made a universal rule, and supported with the
authority of a religious sanction. They had not the
brains to believe in trichinosis; but they were afraid of
Jehovah and 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, 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 to
upset him; and as a budding Yogi he has got to refuse it.
But even the refusal is going to upset him quite a lot;
and therefore he has got to become 'fixed' in refusal;
that is to say, he has got to erect by means of habitual
refusal a psychological barrier so strong that he can
really dismiss the temptation without a quiver, or a
quaver, or even a demisemiquaver of thought. I am sure
you will see that an absolute rule is necessary to obtain
this result. It is obviously impossible for him to try to
draw the line between what he may receive and what he may
not; he is merely involved in a Socratic dilemma; whereas
if he goes to the other end of the line and accepts
everything, his mind is equally upset by the burden of
the responsibility of dealing with the things he has
accepted. However, all these considerations do not apply
to the average European mind. If someone gives me 200,000
pounds sterling, I automatically fail to notice it. It is
a normal circumstance of life. Test me!
9. There are a great many
other injunctions, all of which have to be examined
independently in order to find whether they apply to Yoga
in general, and to the particular advantage of any given
stu- dent. We are to exclude especially all those
considerations based on fantastic theories of the
universe, or on the accidents of race or climate.
For instance, in the time
of the late Maharajah of Kashmir, mahsir fishing was
forbidden throughout his territory; because, when a
child, he had been leaning over the parapet of a bridge
over the Jhilam at Srinagar, and inadvertently opened his
mouth, so that a mahsir was able to swallow his soul. It
would never have done for a Sahib -- a Mlecha! -- to
catch that mahsir. This story is really typical of 90% of
the precepts usually enumerated under the heading Yama.
The rest are for the most part based 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 the
rules and discover your own. Sir Richard Burton said: 'He
noblest lives and noblest dies, who makes and keeps his
self-made laws.'
10. This is, of course,
what every man of science has to do in every experiment.
This is what constitutes an experiment. The other kind of
man has only bad habits. When you explore a new country,
you don't know what the conditions are going to be; and
you have to master those conditions by the method of
trial and error. We start to penetrate the stratosphere;
and we have to modify our machines in all sorts of ways
which were not altogether foreseen. I wish to thunder
forth once more that no questions of right or wrong enter
into our problems. But in the stratosphere it is 'right'
for a man to be shut up in a pressure-resisting suit
electrically heated, with an oxygen supply, whereas it
would be 'wrong' for him to wear it if he were running
the three miles in the summer sports in the Tanezrouft.
This is the pit into
which all the great religious teachers have hitherto
fallen, and I am sure you are all looking hungrily at me
in the hope of seeing me do likewise. But no! There is
one principle which carries us through all conflicts
concerning conduct, because it is perfectly rigid and
perfectly elastic: -- 'Do what thou wilt shall be the
whole of the law.'
So: it is not the least
use to come and pester me about it. Perfect mastery of
the violin in six easy lessons by correspondence! Should
I have the heart to deny you? But Yama is different.
Do what thou wilt shall
be the whole of the Law. *That* is Yama.
Your object is to perform
Yoga. Your True Will is to attain the consummation of
marriage with the universe, and your ethical code must
constantly be adapted precisely to the conditions of your
experiment. Even when you have discovered what your code
is, you will have to modify it as you progress; 'remould
it nearer to the heart's desire' -- Omar Khayyam. Just
so, in a Himalayan expedition your rule of daily life in
the valleys of Sikkim or the Upper Indus will have to be
changed when you get to the glacier. But it is possible
to indicate (in general terms expressed with the greatest
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
become an intolerable nuisance to the adept, while, on
the other hand, things which matter very little in the
beginning become most serious obstacles later on.
Another point is that
quite unsuspected problems arise in the course of the
training. The whole question of the sub-conscious mind
can be dismissed almost as a joke by the average man as
he goes about his daily business; it becomes a very real
trouble when you discover that the tranquillity of the
mind is being disturbed by a type of thought whose
existence had previously been unsuspected, and whose
source is unimaginable.
Then again there is no
perfection of materials; there will always be errors and
weaknesses, and the man who wins through is the man who
manages to carry on with a defective engine. The actual
strain of the work develops the defects; and it is a
matter of great nicety of judgment to be able to deal
with the changing conditions of life. It will be seen
that the formula -- 'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole
of the Law' has nothing to do with 'Do as you please.' It
is much more difficult to comply with the Law of Thelema
than to follow out slavishly a set of dead regulations.
Almost the only point of emancipation, in the sense of
relief from a burden, is just the difference between Life
and Death.
To obey a set of rules is
to shift the whole responsibility of conduct on to some
superannuated Bodhisattva, who would resent you bitterly
if he could see you, and tick you off in no uncertain
terms for being such a fool as to think you could dodge
the difficulties of research by the aid of a set of
conventions which have little or nothing to do with
actual conditions.
Formidable indeed are the
obstacles we have created by the simple process of
destroying our fetters. The analogy of the con- quest of
the air holds excellently well. The things that worry the
pedestrian worry us not at all; but to control a new
element your Yama must be that biological principle of
adaptation to the new conditions, adjustment of the
faculties to those conditions, and consequent success in
those conditions, which were enunciated in respect of
planetary evolution by Herbert Spencer and now
generalised to cover all modes of being by the Law of
Thelema.
But now let me begin to
unleash my indignation. My job -- the establishment of
the Law of Thelema -- is a most discouraging job. It is
the rarest thing to find anyone who has any ideas at all
on the subject of liberty. Because the Law of Thelema is
the law of liber- ty, everybody's particular hair stands
on end like the quills of the 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 consub- stantiation 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. When he was released, he disliked it. He had to be
approached with the utmost precaution; he fell into an
agony of fear if his door was left unlocked; he cobbled
away in a frenzy of anxiety lest the shoes should not be
finished in time -- the shoes that nobody wanted. Charles
Dickens lived at a time and in a country such that this
state of mind appeared abnormal and even deplorable, but
today it is a characteristic of 95 per cent of the people
of England. Subjects that were freely discussed under
Queen Victoria are now absolutely taboo; because everyone
knows subconsciously that to touch them, however gently,
is to risk precipitating the catastrophe of their
dry-rot.
There are not going to be
many Yogis in England, because there will not be more
than a very few indeed who will have the courage to
tackle even this first of the eight limbs of Yoga: Yama.
I do not think that
anything will save the country: unless through war and
revolution, when those who wish to survive will have to
think and act for themselves according to their desperate
needs, and not by some rotten yard-stick of convention.
Why, even the skill of the workman has almost decayed
within a generation! Forty years ago there were very few
jobs that a man could not do with a jack- knife and a
woman with a hair-pin; today you have to have a separate
gadget for every trivial task.
If you want to become
Yogis, you will have to get a move on. Lege! Judica!
Tace!
Love is the law, love
under will.
(Part 3 of 8)
YOGA
FOR YAHOOS.
THIRD
LECTURE. NIYAMA.
Do what thou wilt shall
be the whole of the Law.
1. The subject of my
third lecture is Niyama. Niyama? H'm! The inadequacy of
even th noblest attempts to translate these wretch- ed
Sanskrit 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 word -- the
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 forwards, -- as *you* would say, Hysteron
Proteron -- at the same time producing 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 suffi- cient
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 these preliminary exercises.
2. It will hardly have
escaped the attentive listener that in my previous
lectures I have combined the maximum of discourse with
the minimum of information; that is all part of my
training as a Cabinet Minister. But what does emerge
tentatively from my mental fog is that Yama, taking it by
long and by large, is mostly negative in its effects. We
are imposing inhibitions on the existing current of
energy, just as one compresess a waterfall in turbines in
order to control and direct the natural gravitational
energy of the stream.
3. It might be as well,
before altogether leaving the subject of Yama, to
enumerate a few of the practical conclusions which follow
from our premiss that nothing which might weaken or
destroy the beauty and harmony of the mind must be
permitted. Social existence of any kind renders any
serious Yoga absolutely out of the question; domestic
life is completely incompatible with even elementary
prac- tices. No doubt many of you will say, 'That's all
very well for him; let him speak for himself; as for me,
I manage my home and my busi- ness so that everything
runs on ball bearings.' Echo answers . . .
4. Until you actually
start the practice of Yoga, you cannot possibly imagine
what constitutes a disturbance. You most of you think
that you can sit perfectly still; you tell me what
artists' models can do for over thirty-five minutes. They
don't. You do not hear the ticking of the clock; perhaps
you do not even know whether a typewriter is going in the
room; for all I know, you could sleep peacefully through
an air-raid. That has nothing to do with it. As soon as
you start the practices you will find, if you are doing
them properly, that you are hearing sounds which you
never heard before in your life. You become
hypersensitive. And as you have five external batteries
bombarding you, you get little repose. You feel the air
on your skin with about the same intensity as you would
previously have felt a fist in your face.
5. To some extent, no
doubt, this fact will be familiar to all of you. Probably
most of you have been out at some time or other in what
is grotesquely known as the silence of the night, and you
will have become aware of infinitesimal movements of
light in the dark- ness, of elusive sounds in the quiet.
They will have soothed you and pleased you; it will never
have occurred to you that these changes could each one be
felt as a pang. But, even in the earliest months of Yoga,
this is exactly what happens, and therefore it is best to
be prepared by arranging, before you start at all, that
your whole life will be permanently free from all the
grosser causes of trouble. The practical problem of Yama
is therefore, to a great extent, 'How shall I settle down
to the work?' Then, having complied with the theoreti-
cally best conditions, you have to tackle each fresh
problem as it arises in the best way you can.
6. We are now in a better
position to consider the meaning of Niyama, or virtue. To
most men the qualities which constitute Niyama are not
apprehended at all by their self-consciousness. These are
positive powers, but they are latent; their development
is not merely measurable in terms of quantity and
efficiency. As we rise from the coarse to the fine, from
the gross to the subtle, we enter a new (and what appears
on first sight to be an immeasurable) region. It is quite
impossible to explain what I mean by this; if I could,
you would know it already. How can one explain to a
person who has never skated the nature of the pleasure of
executing a difficult figure on the ice? He has in
himself the whole apparatus ready for use; but
experience, and experience only, can make him aware of
the results of such use.
7. At the same time, in a
general exposition of Yoga, it may be useful to give some
idea of the functions on which those peaks that pierce
the clouds of the limitations of our intellectual
understand- ing are based.
I have found it very
useful in all kinds of thinking to employ a sort of
Abacus. The schematic representation of the universe
given by astrology and the Tree of Life is extremely
valuable, especially when reinforced and amplified by the
Holy Qabalah. This Tree of LIfe is susceptible to
infinite ramifications, and there is no need in this
connectin to explore its subtleties. We ought to be able
to make a fairly satisfactory diagram for elementary
purposes by taking as the basis of our illustration the
solar system as conceived by the astrologers.
I do not know whether the
average student is aware that in practice the
significations of the planets are based generally upon
the philosophical conceptions of the Greek and Roman
gods. Let us hope for the best, and go on!
8. The planet Saturn,
which represents anatomy, is the skele- ton: it is a
rigid structure upon which the rest of the body is built.
To what moral qualities does this correspond? The first
point of virtue in a bone is its rigidity, its resistance
to pres- sure. And so in Niyama we find that we need the
qualities of abso- lute simplicity in our regimen; we
need insensibility; 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 of the universe; it is the
Trance of sorrow that has determined one to undertake the
task of emancipation. This is the energising force of
Law; it is the rigidi- ty of the fact that everything is
sorrow which moves one to the task, and keeps one on the
Path.
9. The next planet is
Jupiter. This planet is in many ways the opposite of
Saturn; it represents expansion as Saturn represents
contraction; it is the universal love, the selfless love
whose object can be no less than the universe itself.
This comes to reinforce the powers of Saturn when they
agonise; success is not for self but for all; one might
acquiesce in one's own failure, but one cannot be
unworthy of the universe. Jupiter, too, represents the
vital, creative, genial element of the cosmos. He has
Ganymede and Hebe to his cupbearers. There is an immense
and inaccessible joy in the Great Work; and it is the
attainment of the trance, of even the intellectual
foreshadowing of that trance, of joy, which reassures the
Yogi that his work is worth while.
Jupiter digests
experiences; Jupiter is the Lord of the Forces of Life;
Jupiter takes common matter and transmutes it into
celestial nourishment.
10. The next planet is
Mars. Mars represents the muscular system; it is the
lowest form of energy, and in Niyama it is to be taken
quite literally as the virtue which enables on to contend
with, and to conquer, the physical difficulties of the
Work. The practical point is this: 'The little more and
how much it is, the little less and what worlds away!' No
matter how long you keep water at 99 degrees Centigrade
under normal barometric pressure, it will not boil. I
shall probably be accused of advertising some kind of
motor spirit in talking about the little extra something
that the others haven't got, but I assure you that I am
not being paid for it.
Let us take the example
of Pranayama, a subject with which I hope to deal in a
subsequent lucubration. Let us suppose 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 sixty, you want this *added*
energy to make the grade. That is only one example of the
difficulty which arises with every practice.
Mars, morever, is the
flaming energy of passion, it is the male quality in its
lowest sense; it is the courage which goes berserk, and I
do not mind telling you that, in my own case at least,
one of the inhibitions with which I had most frequently
to contend was the fear that I was going mad. This was
especially the case when those phenomena began to occur,
which, recorded in cold blood, did seem like madness. And
the Niyama of Mars is the ruthless rage which jests at
scars while dying of one's wounds.
' . . . the grim Lord of
Colonsay
Hath turned him on the ground,
And laughed in death-pang that his blade
The mortal thrust so well repaid'
11. The next of the
heavenly bodies is the centre of all, the Sun. The Sun is
the heart of the system; he harmonises all, ener- gises
all, orders all. His is the courage and energy which is
the source of all the other lesser forms of motion, and
it is because of this that in himself he is calm. They
are planets; he is a star. For him all planets come;
around him they all move, to him they all tend. It is
this centralisation of faculties, their control, their
motivation, which is the Niyama of the Sun. He is not
only the heart but the brain of the system; but he is not
the 'thinking' brain, for in him all thought has been
resolved into the beauty and harmony of ordered motion.
12. The next of the
planets is Venus. In her, for the first time, we come
into contact with a part of our nature which is none the
less quintessential because it has hitherto been masked
by our pre-occupation with more active qualities. Venus
resembles Jupiter, but on a lower scale, standing to him
very much as Mars does to Saturn. She is close akin in
nature to the Sun, and she may be considered an
externalisation of his influence towards beauty and
harmony. Venus is Isis, the Great Mother; Venus is Nature
herself; Venus is the sum of all possibilities.
The Niyama corresponding
to Venus is one of the most important, and one of the
most difficult of attainment. I said the sum of all
possibilities, and I will ask you to go back in your
minds to what I said before about the definition of the
Great Work itself, the aim of the Yogi to consummate the
marriage of all that he is with all that he is not, and
ultimately to realise, insofar as the marriage is
consummated, that what he is and what he is not are
identical. Therefore we cannot pick and choose in our
Yoga. It is written in the 'Book of the Law', Chapter 1,
verse 22, 'Let there be no dif- ference made among you
between any one thing and any other thing, for thereby
there cometh hurt.'
Venus represents the
ecstatic acceptance of all possible experi- ence, and the
transcendental assumption of all particular experience
into the one experience.
Oh yes, by the way, don't
forget this. In a lesser sense Venus represents tact.
Many of the problems that confront the Yogi are
impracticable to intellectual manipulation. They yield to
graciousness.
13. Our next planet is
Mercury, and the Niyama which correspond to him are as
innumerable and various as his own qualities. Mercury is
the Word, the Logos in the highest; 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
indif- ferent 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 tech- nique of Yoga
he represents the fineness of the method which is
infinitely adaptable to all problems, and only so because
he is supremely indifferent. 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 indif- ference to anything
whatever (and that thought is -- when you get far enough
-- only a primary point of wisdom) he is entirely unreli-
able. 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
explain this, if at all, by pointing out that, since all
truth is relative, all truth is false- hood. In one sense
Mercury is the great enemy; Mercury is mind, and it is
the mind that we have set out to conquer.
14. The last of the seven
sacred planets is the Moon. The Moon represents the
totality of the female part of us, the passive princi-
ple which is yet very different to that of Venus, for the
Moon corresponds to the Sun much as Venus does to Mars.
She is more purely passive than Venus, and although Venus
is so universal the Moon is also universal in another
sense. The Moon is the highest and the lowest; the Moon
is the aspiration, the link of man and God; she is the
supreme purity: Isis the Virgin, Isis the Virgin Mother;
but she comes right down at the other end of the scale,
to be a symbol of the senses themselves, the mere
instrument of the registration of phenomena, incapable of
discrimination, incapable of choice. The Niyama
corresponding to her influence, the first of all, is that
quality of aspiration, the positive purity which refuses
union with anything less than the All. In Greek mythology
Artemis, the Goddess of the Moon, is virgin; she yielded
only to Pan. Here is one parti- cular lesson: as the Yogi
advances, magic powers (Siddhi the teach- ers call them)
are offered to the aspirant; if he accepts the least of
these -- or the greatest -- he is lost.
15. At the other end of
the scale of the Niyama of the Moon are the fantastic
developments of sensibility which harass the Yogi. These
are all help and encouragement; these are all intolerable
hindrances; these are the greatest of the obstacles which
confront the human being, trained as he is by centuries
of evolution to receive his whole consciousness through
the senses alone. And they hit us hardest because they
interfere directly with the technique of our work; we are
constantly gaining new powers, despite ourselves, and
every time this happens we have to invent a new method
for bringing their malice to naught. But, as before, the
remedy is of the same stuff as the disease; it is the
unswerving purity of aspira- tion that enables us to
surmount all these difficulties. The Moon is the
sheet-anchor of our work. It is the Knowledge and
Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel that enables us
to overcome, at all times and in all manners, as the need
of the moment may be.
16. There are two other
planets, not counted as among the sacred seven. I will
not say that they were known to the ancients and
deliberately concealed, though much in their writing
suggests that this may be the case. I refer to the planet
Herschel, or Uranus, and Neptune. Whatever may have been
the knowledge of the ancients, it is at least certain
that they left gaps in their system which were exactly
filled by these two planets, and the newly dis- covered
Pluto. They fill these gaps just as the newly discovered
chemical elements discovered in the last fifty years fill
the gaps in Mendelejeff's table of the Periodic Law.
17. Herschel represents
the highest form of the True Will, and it seems natural
and right that this should not rank with the seven sacred
planets, because the True Will is the sphere which
transcends them. 'Every man and every woman is a star.'
Herschel defines the orbit of the star, your star. But
Herschel is dynamic; Herschel is explosive; Herschel,
astrologically speaking, does not move in an orbit; he
has his own path. So the Niyama which corresponds to this
planet is, first and last, the discovery of the True
Will. This knowledge is secret and most sacred; each of
you must incorporate for yourself the incidence and
quality of Herschel. It is the most important of the
tasks of the Yogi, because, until he has achieved it, he
can have no idea who he is or where he is going.
18. Still more remote and
tenuous is the influence of Neptune. Here we have a
Niyama of infinite delicacy, a spiritual intuition far,
far removed from any human quality whatever. Here all is
fantasy, and in this world are infinite pleasure,
infinite perils. The True Niyama of Neptune is the
imaginative faculty, the shadowing forth of the nature of
the illimitable light.
He has another function.
The Yogi who understands the influence of Neptune, and is
attuned to Neptune, will have a sense of humour, which is
the greatest safeguard for the Yogi. Neptune is, so to
speak, in the front line; he has got to adapt himself to
difficulties and tribulations; and when the recruit asks
'What made that 'ole?' he has got to say, unsmiling,
'Mice.'
Pluto is the utmost
sentinel of all; of him it is not wise to speak.
. . . Having now given
vent to this sybilline, obscure and sinister utterance,
it may well be asked by the greatly daring: Why is it not
wise to speak of Pluto? The answer is profound. It is
because nothing at all is known about him.
Anyhow it hardly matters;
we have surely had enough of Niyama for one evening!
19. It is now proper to
sum up briefly what we have learnt about Yama and Niyama.
They are in a sense the moral, logical preliminaries of
the technique of Yoga proper. They are the stra- tegical
as opposed to the tactical dispositions which must be
made by the aspirant before he attempts anything more
serious than the five finger exercises, as we may call
them -- the recruit's drill of postures, breathing
exercises and concentration which the shallow confidently
suppose to constitute this great science and art.
We have seen that it is
presumptuous and impractical to lay down definite rules
as to what we are to do. What does concern us is so to
arrange matters that we are free to do anything that may
become necessary or expedient, allowing for that
development of super-normal powers which enables us to
carry out our plans as they form in the mutable bioscope
of events.
If anyone comes to me for
a rough and ready practical plan I say: Well, if you must
stay in England, you may be able to bring it off with a
bit of luck in an isolated cottage, remote 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 ex- tremely important, above all
things important, unless one is an exceedingly rich man,
to find a country where the inhabitants under- stand the
Yogin mode of life, where they are sympathetic with its
practices, treat the aspirant with respect, and
unobtrusively assist and protect him. In such
circumstances, the exigency of Yama and Niyama is not so
serious a stress.
There is, too, something
beyond all these practical details which it is hard to
emphasise without making just those mysterious
assumptions which we have from the first resolved to
avoid. All I can say is that I am very sorry, but this
particular fact is going to hit you in the face before
you have started very long, and I do not see why we
should bother about the mysterious assumptions underlying
the acceptance of the fact any more than in the case of
what is after all equally mysterious and unfathomable:
any object of any of the senses. The fact is this; that
one acquires a feeling -- a quite irrational feeling --
that a given place or a given method is right or wrong
for its purposes. The intimation is as assured as that of
the swordsman when he picks up an untried weapon; either
it comes up sweet to the hand, or it does not. You cannot
explain it, and you cannot argue it away.
21. I have treated Yama
and Niyama at great length because their importance has
been greatly under-rated, and their nature completely
misunderstood. They are definitely magical practices,
with hardly a tinge of mystical flavour. The advantage to
us here is that we can very usefully exercise and develop
ourselves in this way in this country where the technique
of Yoga is for all practical purposes impossible.
Incidentally, one's real country -- that is, the
conditions -- in which one happens to be born is the only
one in which Yama and Niyama can be practised. You cannot
dodge your Karma. You have got to earn the right to
devote yourself to Yoga proper by arranging for that
devotion to be a necessary stage in the fulfilment of
your True Will. In Hindustan one is now allowed to become
'Sanyasi' -- a recluse -- until one has fulfilled one's
duty to one's own environment -- rendered to Caesar the
things which are Caesar's before rendering to God the
things which are God's.
Woe to that seven months'
abortion who thinks to take advantage of the accidents of
birth, and, mocking the call of duty, sneaks off to stare
at a blank wall in China! Yama and Niyama are only the
more critical stages of Yoga because they cannot be
translated in terms of a schoolboy curriculum. Nor can
schoolboy tricks adequately excuse the aspirant from the
duties of manhood. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole
of the Law.
Rejoice, true men, that
this is thus!
For this at least may be
said, that there are results to be obtained in this way
which will not only fit the aspirant for the actual
battle, but will introduce him to classes of hitherto un-
guessed phenomena whose impact will prepare his mind for
that terific shock of its own complete overthrow which
marks the first critical result of the practices of Yoga.
Love is the law, love
under will.
(Part 4 of 8)
YOGA
FOR YAHOOS.
FOURTH
LECTURE. ASANA AND PRANAYAMA.
The Technical Practices
of Yoga.
Do what thou wilt shall
be the whole of the Law.
1. Last week we were able
to go away feeling that the back of the job had been
broken. We had got rid of bad ways, bad wives, and bad
weather. We are comfortably installed in the sunshine,
with no one to bother us. We have nothing to do but our
work.
Such being our fortunate
state, we may usefully put in an hour considering our
next step. Let us recall, in the first place, what we
decided to be the quintessence of our task. It was to
annihilate dividuality. 'Make room for me,' cries the
Persian poet whose name I have forgotten, the fellow
Fitzgerald translated, not Omar Khayyam, 'Make room for
me on that divan which has no room for twain' -- a
remarkable prophetic anticipation of the luxury flatlet.
We are to unite the
subject and object of consciousness in the ecstasy which
soon turns, as we shall find later on, into the more
sublime state of indifference, and then annihilate both
the party of the first part aforesaid and the party of
the second part aforesaid. This evidently results in
further parties -- one might almost say cocktail parties
-- constantly increasing until we reach infinity, and
annihilate that, thereby recovering our original Nothing.
Yet is that identical with the original Nothing? Yes --
and No! No! No! A thousand times no! For, having
fulfilled all the possibilities of that original Nothing
to manifest in positive terms, we have thereby killed for
ever all its possibilities of mischief.
Our task being thus
perfectly simple, we shall not require the assistance of
a lot of lousy rishis and sanyasis. We shall not apply to
a crowd of moth-eaten Arahats, of betel-chewing
Bodhisattvas, for instruction. As we said in the first
volume of 'The Equinox', in the first number:
'We place no reliance
On Virgin or Pigeon;
Our method is science,
Our aim is religion.'
Our common sense, guided
by experience based on observation, will be sufficient.
2. We have seen that the
Yogic process is implicit in every phenomenon of
existence. All that we have to do is to extend it
consciously to the process of thought. We have seen that
thought cannot exist without continual change; all that
we have to do is to prevent change 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 co-ordinate 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
Thessa- lonians, the Fourth Chapter and the Sixteenth
Verse. I did so. 'Sit still. Stop thinking. Shut up. Get
out!'
The first two of these
instructions comprise the whole of the
technique of Yoga. The
last two are of a sublimity which it would be improper to
expound in this present elementary stage.
The injunction 'Sit
still' is intended to include the inhibition of all
bodily stimuli capable of creating movement in
consciousness. The injunction 'Stop thinking' is the
extension of this to all mental stimuli. It is
unnecessary to discuss here whether the latter can exist
apart from the former. It is at least evident that many
mental processes arise from physical processes; and so we
shall at least be getting a certain distance along the
road if we have checked the body.
3. Let me digress for a
moment, and brush away one misunder- standing 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
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
process of action.
These relatively useful
actions are therefore those which make for control, or
'virtue.' They have been classified, entirely regardless
of trouble and expense, in enormous volume, and with the
utmost complexity; to such a point, in fact, that merely
to permit oneself to study the nomenclature of the
various systems can have but one result: to fuddle your
brain for the rest of your incarnation.
4. I am going to try to
simplify. The main headings are:
(a) Asana, usually
translated 'posture,' and
(b) Pranayama, usually translated 'control of breath.'
These translations, as
usual, are perfectly wrong and inadequate. The real
object of Asana is control of the muscular system,
conscious and unconscious, so that no messages from the
body can reach the mind. Asana is concerned with the
static aspect of the body. Pranayama is really the
control of the dynamic aspect of the body.
There is something a
little paradoxical in the situation. The object of the
process of Yoga is to stop all processes, including
itself. But it is not sufficient for the Yogi to shoot
himself, because to do so would be to destroy the
control, and so to release the pain-producing energies.
We cannot enter into a metaphysical discussion as to what
it is that controls, or before we know where we are we
shall be moonstruck by hypotheses about the soul.
5. Let us forget all this
rubbish, and decide what is to be done. We have seen that
to stop existing processes by an act of violence is
merely to release the undesirable elements. If we want
peace on Dartmoor, we do not open the doors of the
prison. What we do is to establish routine. What is
routine? Routine is rhythm. If you want to go to sleep,
you get rid of irregular, unexpected noises. What is
wanted is a lullaby. You watch sheep going through a
gate, or voters at a polling station. When you have got
used to it, the regularity of the engines of a train or
steamship is soothing. What we have to do with the
existing functions of the body is to make them so
regular, with gradually increasing slowness, that we
become unconscious of their operation.
6. Let us deal first with
the question of Asana. It might be thought that nothing
would be more soothing than swinging or gentle massage.
In a sense, and up to a certain point, this is so. But
the activity cannot be continued because fatigue
supervenes, and sooner or later the body protests by
going to sleep. We must, therefore, make up our minds
from the start to reduce bodily rhythm to its minimum.
7. I am not quite sure
whether it is philosophically defensi- ble, whether it is
logically justifiable, to assert the principles of Asana
as they occur in our practice. We must break away from
our sorites, turn to the empiricism of experiment, and
trust that one day we may be able to work back from
observed fact to a coherent metaphysic.
The point is that by
sitting still, in the plain literal sense of the words,
the body does ultimately respond to the adjuration of
that great Mahatma, Harry Lauder, 'Stop your ticklin',
Jock!'
8. When we approach the
details of Asana, we are immediately confronted with the
refuse-heap of Hindu pedantry. We constantly approach the
traditional spiritual attitude of the late Queen
Victoria. The only types of Asana which offer even the
most trans- ient interest are those of which I am not
going to speak at all, because they have nothing whatever
to do with the high-minded type of Yoga which I am
presenting to this distinguished audience. I should blush
to do otherwise. Anyhow, who wants to know about these
ridicu- lous postures? If there is any fun in the subject
at all, it is the fun of finding them out. I must admit
that if you start with a problem such as that of
juxtaposing the back of your head and should- ers with
the back of the head and shoulders of the other person
concerned,(*1) the achievement does produce a certain
satisfaction. But this, I think, is mostly vanity, and it
has nothing whatever to do, as I said before, with what
we are trying to talk about.
9. The various postures
recommended by the teachers of Yoga depend for the most
part upon the Hindu anatomy for their value, and upon
mystic theories concerning the therapeutic and
thaumaturgic properties ascribed to various parts of the
body. If, for instance, you can conquer the nerve Udana,
you can wlk on water. But who the devil wants to talk on
water? Swimming is much better fun. (I bar sharks,
sting-rays, cuttle-fish, electric eels and picanhas. Also
trippers, bathing belles and Mr. Lansbury.)
Alternatively, freeze the water and dance on it! A great
deal of Hindu endeavour seems to consist in discovering
the most difficult possible way to attain the most
undesirable end.
10. When you start tying
yourself into a knot, you will find that some positions
are much more difficult and inconvenient than others; but
that is only the beginning. If you retain 'any' posture
long enough, you get cramp. I forget the exact
statistics, but I gather that the muscular exertion made
by a man sleeping peacefully in bed is sufficient to
raise fourteen elephants per hour to the stratosphere.
Anyway, I remember that it is something rather diffi-
cult to believe, if only because I did not believe it
myself.
11. Why then should we
bother to choose a specially sacred position? Firstly, we
want to be steady and easy. We want, in particular, to be
able to do Pranayama in that position, if ever we reach
the stage of attempting that practice. We may, therefore,
formulate (roughly speaking) the conditions to be desired
in the posture as follows: --
1. We want to be properly
balanced.
2. We want our arms free.
(They are used in some Pranyama.)
3. We want our breathing
apparatus as unrestrained as possible.
Now, if you will keep
these points in mind, and do not get side- tracked by
totally irrelevant ideas, such as to imagine that you are
getting holier by adopting some attitude traditionally
appropriate to a deity or holy man; and if you will
refrain from the Puritan abomi- nation 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 author- ity. I am no pig-sticking
pukka sahib -- not even from Poona -- to put my
hyphenated haw-haw humbug over on the B. Public.(*2) I
would rather you did the thing 'wrong' by yourselves, and
learned from your errors, than get it 'right' from the
teacher, and atrophied your initiative and your faculty
of learning anything at all.
It is, however, perfectly
right that you should have some idea of what happens when
you sit down to practise.
12. Let me digress for a
moment and refer to what I said in my text-book on Magick
with regard to the formula IAO. This formula covers all
learning. You begin with a delightful feeling as of a
child with a new toy; you get bored, and you attempt to
smash it. But if you are a wise child, you have had a
scientific attitude towards it, and you do *not* smash
it. You pass through the stage of boredom, and arise from
the inferno of torture towards the stage of resurrection,
when the toy has become a god, declared to you its inmost
secrets, and become a living part of your life. There are
no longer these crude, savage reactions of pleasure and
pain. The new knowledge is assimilated.
13. So it is with Asana.
The chosen posture attracts you; 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 at all polite to give you
any idea of what you are going to think of the Teacher.
14. Perhaps the first
thing you notice is that, although you have started in
what is apparently the most comfortable position, there
is a tendency to change that position without informing
you. For example, if you are sitting in the 'god'
position with your knees together, you will find in a few
minutes that they have moved gently apart, without your
noticing it. Freud would doubtless inform you that this
is due to an instinctive exacerbation of infantile sexual
theories. I hope that no one here is going to bother me
with that sort of nauseating nonsense.
15. Now it is necessary,
in order to hold a position, to pay attention to it. That
is to say: you are going to become conscious of your body
in ways of which you are not conscious if you are engaged
in some absorbing mental pursuit, or even in some purely
physical activity, such as running. It sounds paradoxical
at first sight, but violent exercise, so far from
concentrating attention on the body, takes it away. That
is because exercise has its own rhythm; and, as I said,
rhythm is half-way up the ridge to Silence.
Very good, then; in the
comparative stillness of the body, the student becomes
aware of minute sounds which did not disturb him in his
ordinary life. At least, not when his mind was occupied
with matters of interest. You will begin to fidget, to
itch, to cough. Possibly your breathing will begin to
play tricks upon you. All these symptoms must be
repressed. The process of repressing them is extremely
difficult; and, like all other forms of repression, it
leads to a terrific exaggeration of the phenomena which
it is intended to repress.
16. There are quite a lot
of little tricks familiar to most scientific people from
their student days. Some of them are very significant in
this connection of Yoga. For instance, in the matter of
endurance, such as holding out a weight at arm's length,
you can usually beat a man stronger than yourself. If you
attend to your arm, you will probably tire in a minute;
if you fix your mind reso- lutely on something else, you
can go on for five minutes or ten, or even longer. It is
a question of active and passive; when Asana begins to
annoy you the reply is to annoy it, to match the active
thought of controlling the minute muscular movement
against the passive thought of easing the irritation and
disturbance.
17. Now I do not believe
that there are any rules for doing this that will be any
use to you. There are innumerable little tricks that you
might try; only it is, as in the case of the posture
itself, rather better if you invent your own tricks. I
will only mention one: roll the tongue back towards the
uvula, at the same time let the eyes converge towards an
imaginery point in the centre of the forehead. There are
all sorts of holinesses indicated in this attitude, and
innumerable precedents on the part of the most respect-
able divinities. Do, please, forget all this nonsense!
The advan- tage is simply that your attention is forced
to maintain the awkward position. You become aware sooner
than you otherwise would of any relaxation; and you
thereby show the rest of the body that it is no use
trying to disturb you by its irritability.
But there are no rules. I
said there weren't, and there aren't. Only the human mind
is so lazy and worthless that it is a positive 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 dogged 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
*have* known people who were so hopelessly bat-witted
that they rationalised). They thought: 'Ah, well, this
position is not suitable for me, as I thought it was. I
have made a mess of the Ibis position; now I'll have a go
at the Dragon position.' But the Ibis has kept his job,
and attained his divinity, by standing on one leg
throughout the centuries. If you go to the Dragon he will
devour you.
19. It is through the
perversity of human nature that the most acute agony
seems to occur when you are within a finger's breadth of
full success. Remember Gallipoli! I am inclined to think
that it may 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. An
ineffable sense of relief sweeps over the Yogi -- notice
that I no longer call him 'student' or 'aspirant' -- and
he becomes aware of a very strange fact. Not only was
that position giving him pain, but all other bodily
sensations that he has ever experienced are in the nature
of pain, and were only borne by him by the expedient of
constant flitting from one to another.
He is at ease; because,
for the first time in his life, he has become really
unconscious of the body. Life has been one endless
suffering; and now, so far as this particular Asana is
concerned, the plague is abated.
I feel that I have failed
to convey the full meaning of this. The fact is that
words are entirely unsuitable. The complete and joyous
awakening from the lifelong and unbroken nightmare of
physical discomfort is impossible to describe.
21. The results and
mastery of Asana are of use not only in the course of
attainment of Yoga, but in the most ordinary affairs of
life. At any time when fatigued, you have only to assume
your Asana, and you are completely rested. It is as if
the attainment of the mastery has worn down all those
possibilities of physical pain which are inherent in that
particular position. The teachings of physio- logy are
not contradictory to this hypothesis.
The conquest of Asana
makes 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 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-known 'control of breath.'
This simply means that
you get a stop watch, and choose a cycle of breathing out
and breathing in. Both operations should be made as
complete as possible. The muscular system must be taxed
to its utmost to assist the expansion and contraction of
the lungs. When you have got this process slow and
regular, for instance, 30 seconds breathing out and 15
in, you may add a few seconds in which the breath is
held, either inside or outside the lungs. (It is said, by
the way, that the operation of breathing out should last
about twice as long as that of breathing in, the theory
being that breathing out quickly may bring a loss of
energy. I think there may be something in this.)
23. There are other
practices. For instance, one can make the breathing as
quick and shallow as possible. Any good practice is
likely to produce its own phenomena, but in accordance
with the general thesis of these lectures I think it will
be obvious that the proper practice will aim at holding
the breath for as long a period as possible -- because
that condition will represent as close an approximation
to complete stillness of the physiological apparatus as
may be. Of course we are not stilling it; we are doing
nothing of the sort. But at 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 when you can throw yourself
suddenly into the mental act of concentration. In other
words, by Asana and Pranayama you have worked yourself
into a position where you are free, if only for a few
seconds, to attempt actual Yoga processes, which you have
previously been prevented from attempting by the
distracting activi- ties of the respiratory and muscular
systems.
24. And so? Yes.
Pranayama may be described as nice clean fun. Before you
have been doing it very long, things are pretty certain
to begin to happen, though this, I regret to remark, is
fun to you, but death to Yoga.
The classical physical
results of Pranayama are usually divided into four
stages:
1. Perspiration. This is
not the ordinary perspiration which comes from violent
exercise; it has peculiar properties, and I am not going
to tell you what these are, because it is much better for
you to perform the practices, obtain the experience, and
come to me yourself with the information. In this way you
will know that you have got the right thing, whereas if I
were to tell you now, you would very likely imagine it.
2. Automatic rigidity:
the body becomes still, as the result of a spasm. This is
perfectly normal and predictable. It is customary to do
it with a dog. You stick him in a bell-jar, pump in
oxygen or carbonic acid or something, and the dog goes
stiff. You can take him out and wave him around by a leg
as if he were frozen. This is not quite the same thing,
but near it.
25. Men of science are
terribly handicapped in every investiga- tion by having
been trained to ignore the immeasurable. All pheno- mena
have subtle qualities which are at present insusceptible
to any properly scientific methods of investigation. We
can imitate the processes of nature in the laboratory,
but the imitation is not always exactly identical with
the original. For instance, Professor J. B. S. Haldane
attempted some of the experiments suggested in 'The
Equinox' in this matter of Pranayama, and very nearly
killed himself in the process. He did not see the
difference between the experiment with the dog and the
phenomena which supervene as the climax of a course of
gentle operation. It is the difference between the exhil-
aration produced by sipping Clos Vougeot '26 and the
madness of swilling corn whiskey. It is the same
foolishness as to think that sniffing cocaine is a more
wholesome process than chewing coca leaves. Why, they
exclaim, cocaine is chemically pure! Cocaine is the
active principle! We certainly do not want these nasty
leaves, where our sacred drug is mixed up with a lot of
vegetable stuff which rather defies analysis, and which
cannot possibly have any use for that reason! This
automatic rigidity, or Shukshma Khumbakham, is not merely
to be defined as the occurrence of physiological
rigidity. That is only the grosser symptom.
26. The third stage is
marked by Buchari-siddhi: 'the power of jumping about
like a frog' would be a rough translation of this
fascinating word. This is a very extraordinary
phenomenon. You are sitting tied up on the floor, and you
begin to be wafted here and there, much as dead leaves
are moved by a little breeze. This does happen; you are
quite normal mentally, and you can watch yourself doing
it.
The natural explanation
of this is that your muscles are making very quick short
spasmodic jerks without your being conscious of the fact.
The dog helps us again by making similar contortions. As
against this, it may be argued that your mind appears to
be perfectly normal. There is, however, one particuliar
point of consciousness, the sensation of almost total
loss of weight. This, by the way, may sound a little
alarming to the instructed alienist. There is a similar
feeling which occurs in certain types of insanity.
27. The fourth state is
Levitation. The Hindus claim that 'jumping about like a
frog' implies a genuine loss of weight, and that the
jumping is mainly lateral because you have not perfected
the process. If you were absolutely balanced, they claim
that you would rise quietly into the air.
I do not know about this
at all. I never saw it happen. On the other hand, I have
often felt as if it were happening; and on three
occasions at least comparatively reliable people have
said that they saw it happening to me. I do not think it
proves anything.
These practices, Asana
and Pranayama, are, to a certain extent, mechanical, 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 concentra- tion
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 quarter of an hour's Asana twice daily,
rising to an hour four times daily, and Pranayama in
proportion, he has got to stick to this -- no cocktail
parties, football matches, or funer- als of near
relations, must be allowed to interfere with the routine.
The drill is the thing, the acquisition of the habit of
control, much more important than any mere success in the
practices themselves. I would rather you wobbled about
for your appointed hour than sat still for fifty-nine
minutes. The reason for this will only be apparent when
we come to the consideration of advanced Yoga, a subject
which may be adequately treated in a second series of
four lectures. By special request only, and I sincerely
hope that nothing of the sort will happen.
29. Before proposing a
vote of thanks to the lecturer for his extraordinarily
brilliant exposition of these most difficult sub- jects,
I should like to add a few words on the subject of
Mantra- Yoga, because this is really a branch of
Pranayama, and one which it is possible to practise quite
thoroughly in this country. In Book IV., Part I., I have
described it, with examples, quite fully enough. I need
here only say that its constant use, day and night,
without a moment's cessation, is probably as useful a
method as one could find of preparing the current of
thought for the assumption of a rhythmi- cal form, and
rhythm is the great cure for irregularity. Once it is
established, no interference will prevent it. Its own
natural tendency is to slow down, like a pendulum, until
time stops, and the sequence of impressions which
constitutes our intellectual apprehen- sions of the
universe is replaced by that form of consciousness (or
unconsciousness, if you prefer it, not that either would
give the slightest idea of what is meant) which is
without condition of any kind, and therefore represents
in perfection the consummation of Yoga.
Love is the law, love
under will.
---------------
*1) In coitu, of course. -- ED.
*2) One Yeats-Brown. What
*are* Yeats? Brown, of course, and Kennedy.
*3) Some Great Thinker
once said: 'Time *marches* on.' What felicity of phrase!
|