Eight
Lectures On Yoga - Index
Eight
Lectures On Yoga Pt 1
Eight
Lectures On Yoga Pt 2
Eight
Lectures On Yoga Pt 3
Eight
Lectures On Yoga Pt 4
Eight
Lectures On Yoga Pt 5
Eight
Lectures On Yoga Pt 6
Eight
Lectures On Yoga Pt 7
Eight
Lectures On Yoga Pt 8
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 the noblest attempts to translate
these wretched 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 sufficient number of years, one
gets a spiritual apprehension which it is quite impossible
to express in terms applicable to the objects of intellectual
apprehension; it is therefore much better to content ourselves
with the words as they stand, and get down to brass tacks
about the practical steps to be taken to master 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 premise 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 practices. 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 business 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 darkness, 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 theoretically
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 understanding 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 connection 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 skeleton:
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 pressure. And so in Niyama we find that we need the qualities
of absolute 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 rigidity 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
one 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, energises 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 preoccupation 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
difference made among you between any one thing and any other
thing, for thereby there cometh hurt.'
Venus represents the ecstatic acceptance of all possible
experience, 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 indifferent 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 technique
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 indifference
to anything whatever (and that thought is-when you get far
enough-only a primary point of wisdom) he is entirely unreliable.
One of the most unfathomably dreadful dangers of the Path
is that you must trust Mercury, and yet that if you trust
him you are certain to be deceived. I can only explain this,
if at all, by pointing out that, since all truth is relative,
all truth is falsehood. 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 principle 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 particular lesson: as
the Yogi advances, magic powers (Siddhi the teachers 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 aspiration 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 discovered 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
strategical 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 supernormal 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 extremely important, above
all things important, unless one is an exceedingly rich man,
to find a country where the inhabitants understand 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 underrated, 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 not 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 unguessed phenomena whose impact will prepare
his mind for that terrific shock of its own complete overthrow
which marks the first critical result of the practices of
Yoga.
Love is the law, love under will.
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