Yoga Is a Science
Next, Yoga is a science. That is the second thing to
grasp. Yoga is a science, and not a vague, dreamy drifting
or imagining. It is an applied science, a systematized
collection of laws applied to bring about a definite end. It
takes up the laws of psychology, applicable to the unfolding
of the whole consciousness of man on every plane, in every
world, and applies those rationally in a particular case.
This rational application of the laws of unfolding
consciousness acts exactly on the same principles that you
see applied around you every day in other departments of
science.
You know, by looking at the world around you, how
enormously the intelligence of man, co-operating with
nature, may quicken "natural" processes, and the working of
intelligence is as "natural" as anything else. We make this
distinction, and practically it is a real one, between
"rational" and "natural" growth, because human intelligence
can guide the working of natural laws; and when we come to
deal with Yoga, we are in the same department of applied
science as, let us say, is the scientific farmer or
gardener, when he applies the natural laws of selection to
breeding. The farmer or gardener cannot transcend the laws
of nature, nor can he work against them. He has no other
laws of nature to work with save universal laws by which
nature is evolving forms around us, and yet he does in a few
years what nature takes, perhaps, hundreds of thousands of
years to do. And how? By applying human intelligence to
choose the laws that serve him and to neutralize the laws
that hinder. He brings the divine intelligence in man to
utilise the divine powers in nature that are working for
general rather than for particular ends.
Take the breeder of pigeons. Out of the blue rock pigeon
he develops the pouter or the fan-tail; he chooses out,
generation after generation, the forms that show most
strongly the peculiarity that he wishes to develop. He mates
such birds together, takes every favouring circumstance into
consideration and selects again and again, and so on and on,
till the peculiarity that he wants to establish has become a
well-marked feature. Remove his controlling intelligence,
leave the birds to themselves, and they revert to the
ancestral type.
Or take the case of the gardener. Out of the wild rose of
the hedge has been evolved every rose of the garden. Many-petalled
roses are but the result of the scientific culture of the
five-petalled rose of the hedgerow, the wild product of
nature. A gardener who chooses the pollen from one plant and
places it on the carpers of another is simply doing
deliberately what is done every day by the bee and the fly.
But he chooses his plants, and he chooses those that have
the qualities he wants intensified, and from those again he
chooses those that show the desired qualities still more
clearly, until he has produced a flower so different from
the original stock that only by tracing it back can you tell
the stock whence it sprang.
So is it in the application of the laws of psychology
that we call Yoga. Systematized knowledge of the unfolding
of consciousness applied to the individualized Self, that is
Yoga. As I have just said, it is by the world that
consciousness has been unfolded, and the world is admirably
planned by the LOGOS for this unfolding of consciousness;
hence the would-be yogi, choosing out his objects and
applying his laws, finds in the world exactly the things he
wants to make his practice of Yoga real, a vital thing, a
quickening process for the knowledge of the Self. There are
many laws. You can choose those which you require, you can
evade those you do not require, you can utilize those you
need, and thus you can bring about the result that nature,
without that application of human intelligence, cannot so
swiftly effect.
Take it, then, that Yoga is within your reach, with your
powers, and that even some of the lower practices of Yoga,
some of the simpler applications of the laws of the
unfolding of consciousness to yourself, will benefit you in
this world as well as in all others. For you are really
merely quickening your growth, your unfolding, taking
advantage of the powers nature puts within your hands, and
deliberately eliminating the conditions which would not help
you in your work, but rather hinder your march forward. If
you see it in that light, it seems to me that Yoga will be
to you a far more real, practical thing, than it is when you
merely read some fragments about it taken from Sanskrit
books, and often mistranslated into English, and you will
begin to feel that to be a yogi is not necessarily a thing
for a life far off, an incarnation far removed from the
present one. |