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.