Hackers Underworld 2: Forbidden Knowledge/Hackers Underworld 2: Forbidden Knowledge.iso/OCCULT/YOGA7.TXT

Text File | 1989-01-27 | 19KB | 308 lines

(Part 7 of 8)

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                         YOGA FOR YELLOWBELLIES.

                             THIRD LECTURE.
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Dear Children,

     Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

     1.  You will remember that last week our study of Yoga had led
us to the Fathers of the Church.  We saw that their philosophy and
science, in following an independent route, had brought us to the
famous exclamation of Tertullian:  'certum est quia ineptum!'  How
right the Church has been to deny the authority of Reason!
     2.  We are almost tempted to enquire for a moment what the
Church means by 'faith.'  St. Paul tells us that faith is 'the
substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things unseen.'  I do
not think, then, that we are to imagine this word faith to mean what
that lecherous gross-bellied boor, Martin Luther, maintained.  The
faith of which he speaks is anything but a substance, and as for
evidence, it is nothing but the power, as the schoolboy said, of
believing that which we know to be untrue.  To have any sensible
meaning at all, faith must mean experience, and that view is in exact
accord with the conclusion to which we were led in my last lecture.
Nothing is any use to us unless it be a certainty unshakeable by
criticism of any kind, and there is only one thing in the universe
which complies 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 blasphemy
that happens to occur to them.  And the more shocked the young man
is, the better the training for his mind, and the better service will
he give to the Society in the end; but only if his mind has been
completely disabused of its confidence in its own rightness, or even
in the possibility of being right.
     4.  The rationalist, in his shallow fashion, always contends
that this training is the abnegation of mental freedom.  On the
contrary, it is the only way to obtain that freedom.  In the same
Society the training in obedience is based on a similar principle.
The priest has to do what his Superior orders him -- 'perinde ac
cadaver.'  Protestants always represent that this is the most outra-
geous and indefensible tyranny.  "The poor devil,' they say, 'is
bludgeoned into having no will of his own.'  That is pure nonsense.
By abnegating his will through the practice of holy obedience his
will has become enormously strong, so strong that none of his natural
instincts, desires, or habits can intrude.  He has freed his will of
all these inhibitions.  He is a perfect function of the machinery of
the Order.  In the General of the Society is concentrated the power
of all those separate wills, just as in the human body every cell
should be completely devoted in its particular quality to the
concentrated will of the organism.
     5.  In other words, the Society of Jesus has created a perfect
imitation of the skeleton of the original creation, living man.  It
has complied with the divinely instituted order of things, and that
is why we see that the body, which was never numerically important,
has yet been one of the greatest influences in the development of
Europe.  It has not always worked perfectly, but that has not been
the fault of the system; and, even as it is, its record has been
extraordinary.  And one of the most remarkable things about it is
that its greatest and most important achievements have been in the
domain of science and philosophy.  It has done nothing in religion;
or, rather, where it has meddled with religion it has only done harm.
What a mistake!  And why?  For the simple reason that it was in a
position to take no notice of religion; all these matters were
decided for it by the Pope, or by the Councils of the Church, and the
Society was therefore able to free itself from the perplexities of
religion, in exactly the same way as the novice obtains complete
freedom from his moral responsibilities by sinking his personal
phantasies in the will of the Superior.
     6.  I should like to mention here that the Spiritual Exercises
of St. Ignatius are in their essence really admirable Yoga practices.
They have, it is true, a tinge of magical technique, and they have
been devised to serve a dogmatic end.  That was, however, necessary,
and it was good magic too, at that, because the original will of the
Founder was to produce a war engine as a counterblast to the Reforma-
tion.  He was very wise to devise a plan, irrespective of its ab-
stract merits as philosophy, which would most efficiently serve that
single purpose.  The only trouble has been that this purpose was not
sufficiently cosmic in scope to resist internal forces.  Having
attained the higher planes by practice of these exercises, they found
that the original purpose of the Society was not really adequate to
their powers; they were, so to speak, over-engined.  They stupidly
invaded the spiritual sphere of the other authorities whom they were
founded to support, and thus we see them actually quarrelling with
the Pope, while failing signally to obtain possession of the Papacy.
Being thus thwarted in their endeavours, and confused in their
purpose, they redoubled the ardour of their exercises; and it is one
of the characteristics of all spiritual exercises, if honestly and
efficiently performed, that they constantly lead you on to higher
planes, where all dogmatic considerations, all intellectual concepts,
are invalid.  Hence, we found that it is not altogether surprising
that the General of the Order and his immediate circle have been
supposed to be atheists.  If that were true, it would only show that
they have been corrupted by their preoccupation with the practical
politics of the world, which it is impossible to conduct on any but
an atheistic basis; it is brainless hypocrisy to pretend otherwise,
and should be restricted to the exclusive use of the Foreign Office.
     It would, perhaps, be more sensible to suppose that the heads of
the Order have really attained the greatest heights of spiritual
knowledge and freedom, and it is quite possible that the best term to
describe their attitude would be either Pantheistic or Gnostic.
     7.  These considerations should be of the greatest use to us now
that we come to discuss in more detail the results of the Yoga
practices.  There is, it is true, a general similarity between the
ecstatic outbursts of the great mystics all over the world.  Compari-
sons have often been drawn by students of the subject.  I will only
detain you with one example:  'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole
of the Law.'  What is this injunction?  It is a generalisation of St.
Augustine's 'Love, and do what thou wilt.'  But in 'The Book of the
Law', lest the hearer should be deluded into a spasm of antinomi-
anism, there is a further explanation:  'Love is the law, love under
will.'
     8.  However, the point is that it is no use discussing the
results of Yoga, whether that Yoga be the type recommended by Lao-
Tze, or Patanjali, or St. Ignatius Loyola, because for our first
postulate we have:  that these subjects are incapable of discussion.
To argue about them only causes us to fall into the pit of Because,
and there to perish with the dogs of Reason.  The only use, there-
fore, of describing our experiences is to enable students to get some
sort of idea of the sort of thing that is going to happen to them
when they attain success in the practices of Yoga.  We have David
saying in the Psalms:  'I hate thoughts, but Thy law do I love.'  W