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
Salutation to the Sons of the
Morning!
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the
Law.
1. I should like to begin this evening by recapitulating
very briefly what has been said in the previous three lectures,
and this would be easier if I had not completely forgotten
everything I said. But there is a sort of faint glimmering
to the effect that the general subject of the series was
the mental exercises of the Yogi; and the really remarkable
feature was that I found it impossible to discuss them at
all thoroughly without touching upon, first of all, ontology;
secondly, ordinary science; and thirdly, the high Magick
of the true initiates of the light.
2. We found that both Ontology and Science, approaching
the question of reality from entirely different standpoints,
and pursuing their researches by entirely different methods,
had yet arrived at an identical 'impasse.' And the general
conclusion was that there could be no reality in any intellectual
concept of any kind, that the only reality must lie in direct
experience of such a kind that it is beyond the scope of
the critical apparatus of our minds. It cannot be subject
to the laws of Reason; it cannot be found in the fetters
of elementary mathematics; only transfinite and irrational
conceptions in that subject can possibly shadow forth the
truth in some such paradox as the identity of contradictories.
We found further that those states of mind which result from
the practice of Yoga are properly called trances, because
they actually transcend the conditions of normal thought.
3. At this point we begin to see an almost insensible drawing
together of the path of Yoga which is straight (and in a
sense arid) with that of Magick, which may be compared with
the Bacchic dance or the orgies of Pan. It suggests that
Yoga is ultimately a sublimation of philosophy, even as Magick
is a sublimation of science. The way is open for a reconciliation
between these lower elements of thought by virtue of their
tendency to flower into these higher states beyond thought,
in which the two have become one. And that, of course, is
Magick; and that, of course, is Yoga.
4. We may now consider whether, in view of the final identification
of these two elements in their highest, there may not be
something more practical than sympathy in their lower elements-I
mean mutual assistance.
I am glad to think that the Path of the Wise has become
much smoother and shorter than it was when I first trod it;
for this very reason that the old antinomies of Magick and
Yoga have been completely resolved.
You all know what Yoga is. Yoga means union. And you all
know how to do it by shutting off the din of the intellectual
boiler factory, and allowing the silence of starlight to
reach the ear. It is the emancipation of the exalted from
the thrall of the commonplace expression of Nature.
5. Now what is Magick? Magick is the science and art of
causing change to occur in conformity with the Will. How
do we achieve this? By exalting the will to the point where
it is master of circumstance. And how do we do this? By so
ordering every thought, word and act, in such a way that
the attention is constantly recalled to the chosen object.
6. Suppose I want to evoke the 'Intelligence' of Jupiter.
I base my work upon the correspondences of Jupiter. I base
my mathematics on the number 4 and its subservient numbers
16, 34, 136. I employ the square or rhombus. For my sacred
animal I choose the eagle, or some other sacred to Jupiter.
For my perfume, saffron - for my libation some preparation
of opium or a generous yet sweet and powerful wine such as
port. For my magical weapon I take the sceptre; in fact,
I continue choosing instruments for every act in such a way
that I am constantly reminded of my will to evoke Jupiter.
I even constrain every object. I extract the Jupiterian
elements from all the complex phenomena which surround me.
If I look at my carpet, the blues and purples are the colours
which stand out as Light against an obsolescent and indeterminate
background. And thus I carry on my daily life, using every
moment of time in constant self-admonition to attend to Jupiter.
The mind quickly responds to this training; it very soon
automatically rejects as unreal anything which is not Jupiter.
Everything else escapes notice. And when the time comes for
the ceremony of invocation which I have been consistently
preparing with all devotion and assiduity, I am quickly inflamed.
I am attuned to Jupiter, I am pervaded by Jupiter, I am absorbed
by Jupiter, I am caught up into the heaven of Jupiter and
wield his thunderbolts. Hebe and Ganymedes bring me wine;
the Queen of the Gods is throned at my side, and for my playmates
are the fairest maidens of the earth.
7. Now what is all this but to do in a partial (and if I
may say so, romantic) way what the Yogi does in his more
scientifically complete yet more austerely difficult methods?
And here the advantage of Magick is that the process of initiation
is spontaneous and, so to speak, automatic. You may begin
in the most modest way with the evocation of some simple
elemental spirit; but in the course of the operation you
are compelled, in order to attain success, to deal with higher
entities. Your ambition grows, like every other organism,
by what it feeds on. You are very soon led to the Great Work
itself; you are led to aspire to the Knowledge and Conversation
of the Holy Guardian Angel, and this ambition in turn arouses
automatically further difficulties the conquest of which
confers new powers. In the Book of the Thirty Aethyrs, commonly
called 'The Vision and the Voice', it becomes progressively
difficult to penetrate each Aethyr. In fact, the penetration
was only attained by the initiations which were conferred
by the Angel of each Aethyr in its turn. There was this further
identification with Yoga practices recorded in this book.
At times the concentration necessary to dwell in the Aethyr
became so intense that definitely Samadhic results were obtained.
We see then that the exaltation of the mind by means of magical
practices leads (as one may say, in spite of itself) to the
same results as occur in straightforward Yoga.
I think I ought to tell you a little more about these visions.
The method of obtaining them was to take a large topaz beautifully
engraved with the Rose and Cross of forty-nine petals, and
this topaz was set in a wooden cross of oak painted red.
I called this the shew-stone in memory of Dr. Dee's famous
shew-stone. I took this in my hand and proceeded to recite
in the Enochian or Angelic language the Call of the Thirty
Aethyrs, using in each case the special name appropriate
to the Aethyr. Now all this went very well until about the
17th, I think it was, and then the Angel, foreseeing difficulty
in the higher or remoter Aethyrs, gave me this instruction.
I was to recite a chapter from the Q'uran: what the Mohammedans
call the 'Chapter of the Unity.' 'Qol: Hua Allahu achad;
Allahu assamad: lam yalid walam yulad; walam yakun lahu kufwan
achad.' I was to say this, bowing myself to the earth after
each chapter, a thousand and one times a day, as I walked
behind my camel in the Great Eastern Erg of the Sahara. I
do not think that anyone will dispute that this was pretty
good exercise; but my point is that it was certainly very
good Yoga.
From what I have said in previous lectures you will all
recognise that this practice fulfils all the conditions of
the earlier stages of Yoga, and it is therefore not surprising
that it put my mind in such a state that I was able to use
the Call of the Thirty Aethyrs with much greater efficacy
than before.
8. Am I then supposed to be saying that Yoga is merely the
hand-maiden of Magick, or that Magick has no higher function
than to supplement Yoga? By no means. it is the co-operation
of lovers; which is here a symbol of the fact. The practices
of Yoga are almost essential to success in Magick-at least
I may say from my own experience that it made all the difference
in the world to my magical success, when I had been thoroughly
grounded in the hard drill of Yoga. But I feel absolutely
certain that I should never have obtained success in Yoga
in so short a time as I did had I not spent the previous
three years in the daily practice of magical methods.
9. I may go so far as to say that just before I began Yoga
seriously, I had almost invented a Yogic method of practising
Magick in the stress of circumstances. I had been accustomed
to work with full magical apparatus in an admirably devised
temple of my own. Now I found myself on shipboard, or in
some obscure bedroom of Mexico City, or camped beside my
horse among the sugar canes in lonely tropical valleys, or
couched with my rucksack for all pillow on bare volcanic
heights. I had to replace my magical apparatus. I would take
the table by my bed, or stones roughly piled, for my altar.
My candle or my Alpine Lantern was my light. My ice-axe for
the wand, my drinking flask for the chalice, my machete for
the sword, and a chapati or a sachet of salt for the pantacle
of art! Habit soon familiarised these rough and ready succedanea.
But I suspect that it may have been the isolation and the
physical hardship itself that helped, that more and more
my magical operation became implicit in my own body and mind,
when a few months later I found myself performing in
full operations involving the Formula of the Neophyte
(for which see my treatise 'Magick') without any external
apparatus at all. 10. A pox on all these formalistic Aryan
sages! Unless one wants to be very pedantic, it is rather
absurd to contend that this form of ritual forced upon me,
first by external and next by internal circumstances, was
anything else but a new form of Asana, Pranayama, Mantra-Yoga,
and Pratyahara in something very near perfection; and it
is therefore not surprising that the Magical exaltation resulting
from such ceremonies was in all essential respects the equivalent
of Samyama.
On the other hand, the Yoga training was an admirable aid
to that final concentration of the Will which operates the
magical ecstasy.
11. This then is reality: direct experience. How does it
differ from the commonplace every-day experience of sensory
impressions which are so readily shaken by the first breath
of the wind of intellectual analysis?
Well, to answer first of all in a common-sense way, the
difference is simply that the impression is deeper, is less
to be shaken. Men of sense and education are always ready
to admit that they may have been mistaken in the quality
of their observation of any phenomenon, and men a little
more advanced are almost certain to attain to a placid kind
of speculation as to whether the objects of sense are not
mere shadows on a screen.
I take off my glasses. Now I cannot read my manuscript.
I had two sets of lenses, one natural, one artificial. If
I had been looking through a telescope of the old pattern
I should have had three sets of lenses, two artificial. If
I go and put on somebody else's glasses I shall get another
kind of blur. As the lenses of my eyes change in the course
of my life, what my sight tells me is different. The point
is that we are quite unable to judge what is the truth of
the vision. Why then do I put on my glasses to read? Only
because the particular type of illusion produced by wearing
them is one which enables me to interpret a prearranged system
of hieroglyphics in a particular sense which I happen to
imagine I want. It tells me nothing whatever about the object
of my vision-what I call the paper and the ink. Which is
the dream? The clear legible type or the indecipherable blur?
12. But in any case any man who is sane at all does make
a distinction between the experience of daily life and the
experience of dream. It is true that sometimes dreams are
so vivid, and their character so persistently uniform that
men are actully deceived into believing that places they
have seen in dreams repeatedly are places that they have
known in a waking life. But they are quite capable of criticising
this illusion by memory, and they admit the deception. Well,
in the same way the phenomena of high Magick and Samadhi
have an authenticity, and confer an interior certainty, which
is to the experience of waking life as that is to a dream.
But, apart from all this, experience is experience; and
the real guarantee that we have of the attainment of reality
is its rank in the hierarchy of the mind.
13. Let us ask ourselves for a moment what is the characteristic
of dream impressions as judged by the waking mind. Some dreams
are so powerful that they convince us, even when awake, of
their reality. Why then do we criticise and dismiss them?
Because their contents are incoherent, because the order
of nature to which they belong does not properly conform
with the kind of experience which does hang together-after
a fashion. Why do we criticise the reality of waking experience?
On precisely similar grounds. Because in certain respects
it fails to conform with our deep instinctive consciousness
of the structure of the mind. Tendency! We happen to
be that kind of animal.
14. The result is that we accept waking experience for what
it is within certain limits. At least we do so to this extent,
that we base our action upon the belief that, even if it
is not philosophically real, it is real enough to base a
course of action upon it.
What is the ultimate practical test of conviction? Just
this, that it is our standard of conduct. I put on these
glasses in order to read. I am quite certain that the blurred
surface will become clear when I do so. Of course, I may
be wrong. I may have picked up some other body's glasses
by mistake. I might go blind before I could get them into
position. Even such confidence has limits; but it is a real
confidence, and this is the explanation of why we go ahead
with the business of life. When we think it over, we know
that there are all sorts of snags, that it is impossible
to formulate any proposition which is philosophically unassailable,
or even one which is so from a practical standpoint. We admit
to ourselves that there are all sorts of snags; but we take
our chance of that, and go ahead in the general principles
inculcated by our experience of nature. It is, of course,
quite easy to prove that experience is impossible. To begin
with, our consciousness of any phenomenon is never the thing
itself, but only a hieroglyphic symbol of it.
Our position is rather that of a man with a temperamental
motor-car; he has a vague theory that it ought to go, on
general principles; but he is not quite sure how it will
perform in any given circumstances. Now the experience of
Magick and Yoga is quite above all this. The possibility
of criticising the other types of experience is based upon
the possibility of expressing our impressions in adequate
terms; and this is not at all the case with the results of
Magick and Yoga. As we have already seen, every attempt at
expression in ordinary language is futile. Where the hero
of the adventure is tied up with a religious theory, we get
the vapid and unctuous bilgewater of people like St. John
of the Cross. All Christian Mystics are tarred with the same
brush. Their abominable religion compels them to every kind
of sentimentality; and the theory of original sin vitiates
their whole position, because instead of the noble and inspiring
Trance of Sorrow they have nothing but the miserable, cowardly,
and selfish sense of guilt to urge them to undertake the
Work.
15. I think we may dismiss altogether from our minds every
claim to experience made by any Christian of whatever breed
of spiritual virus as a mere morbid reflection, the apish
imitation of the true ecstasies and trances. All expressions
of the real thing must partake of the character of that thing,
and therefore only that language is permissible which is
itself released from the canon of ordinary speech, exactly
as the trance is unfettered by the laws of ordinary consciousness.
In other words, the only proper translation is in poetry,
art and music.
16. If you examine the highest poetry in the light of common
sense, you can only say that it is rubbish; and in actual
fact you cannot so examine it at all, because there is something
in poetry which is not in the words themselves, which is
not in the images suggested by the words 'O windy star blown
sideways up the sky!' True poetry is itself a magic spell
which is a key to the ineffable.
With music this thesis is so obvious as hardly to need stating.
Music has no expressed intellectual content whatever, and
the sole test of music is its power to exalt the soul. It
is then evident that the composer is himself attempting to
express in sensible form some such sublimities as are attained
by those who practise Magick and Yoga as they should.
17. The same is true of plastic art, but evidently in much
less degree; and all those who really know and love art are
well aware that classical painting and sculpture are rarely
capable of producing these transcendent orgasms of ecstasy,
as in the case of the higher arts. One is bound to the impressions
of the eye; one is drawn back to the contemplation of a static
object. And this fact has been so well understood in modern
times by painters that they have endeavoured to create an
art within an art; and this is the true explanation of such
movements as 'surrealisme.' I want to impress upon you that
the artist is in truth a very much superior being to the
Yogi or the Magician. He can reply as St. Paul replied to
the centurion who boasted of his Roman citizenship 'With
a great sum obtained I this freedom'; and Paul, fingering
the Old School Tie, sneered: 'But I was free born.'
18. It is not for us here to enquire as to how it should
happen that certain human beings possess from birth this
right of intimacy with the highest reality, but Blavatsky
was of this same opinion that the natural gift marks the
acquisition of the rank in the spiritual hierarchy to which
the student of Magick and Yoga aspires. He is, so to speak,
an artist in the making; and it is perhaps not likely that
his gifts will have become sufficiently automatic in his
present incarntion to produce the fruits of his attainment.
Yet, undoubtedly, there have been such cases, and that within
my own experience.
19. I could quote you the case of a man-a very inferior
and wishy-washy poet-who undertook for a time very strenuously
the prescribed magical practices. He was very fortunate,
and attained admirable results. No sooner had he done so
that his poetry itself became flooded with supernal light
and energy. He produced masterpieces. And then he gave up
his Magick because the task of further progress appalled
him. The result was that his poetry fell completely away
to the standard of wet blotting paper.
20. Let me tell you also of one man almost illiterate, a
Lancashire man who had worked in a mill from the age of nine
years. He had studied for years with the Toshophists with
no results. Then he corresponded with me for some time; he
had still no results. He came to stay with me in Sicily.
One day as we went down to bathe we stood for a moment on
the brink of the cliff which led down to the little rocky
cove with its beach of marvellous smooth sand.
I said something quite casually-I have never been able to
remember what it was-nor could he ever remember-but he suddenly
dashed down the steep little path like a mountain goat, threw
off his cloak and plunged into the sea. When he came back,
his very body had become luminous. I saw that he needed to
be alone for a week to complete his experience, so I fixed
him up in an Alpine tent in a quiet dell under broad-spreading
trees at the edge of a stream. From time to time he sent
me his magical record, vision after vision of amazing depth
and splendour. I was so gratified with his attainment that
I showed these records to a distinguished literary critic
who was staying with me at the time. A couple of hours later,
when I returned to the Abbey, he burst out upon me a flame
of excitement. 'Do you know what this is?' he cried. I answered
casually that it was a lot of very good visions. 'Bother
your visions,' he exclaimed, 'didn't you notice the style?
It's pure John Bunyan!' It was.
21. But all this is neither here nor there. There is only
one thing for anybody to do on a path, and that is to make
sure of the next step. And the fact which we all have to
comfort us is this: that all human beings have capacities
for attainment, each according to his or her present position.
For instance, with regard to the power of vision on the
astral plane, I have been privileged to train many hundreds
of people in the course of my life, and only about a dozen
of them were incapable of success. In one case this was because
the man had already got beyond all such preliminary exercise;
his mind immediately took on the formless condition which
transcends all images, all thought. Other failures were stupid
people who were incapable of making an experiment of any
sort. They were a mass of intellectual pride and prejudice,
and I sent them away with an injunction to go to Jane Austen.
But the ordinary man and woman get on very well, and by this
I do not mean only the educated. It is, in fact, notorious
that, among many of the primitive races of mankind, strange
powers of all kinds develop with amazing florescence.
22. The question for each one of us is then: first of all,
to acertain our present positions; secondly, to determine
our proper directions; and, thirdly, to govern ourselves
accordingly.
The question for me is also to describe a method of procedure
which will be sufficiently elastic to be useful to every
human being. I have tried to do this by combining the two
paths of Magick and Yoga. If we perform the preliminary practices,
each according to his capacity, the result will surely be
the acquisition of a certain technique. And this will become
much easier as we advance, especially if we bear it well
in mind not to attempt to discriminate between the two methods
as if they were opposing schools, but to use the one to help
out the other in an emergency.
23. Of course, nobody understands better than I do that,
although nobody can do your work for you, it is possible
to make use -- to a certain very limited extent-of other
people's experience, and the Great Order which I have the
honour to serve has appointed what I think you will agree
is a very satisfactory and practical curriculum.
24. You are expected to spend three months at least on the
study of some of the classics on the subject. The chief object
of this is not to instruct you, but to familiarise you with
the ground work, and in particular to prevent you getting
the idea that there is any right or wrong in matters of opinion.
You pass an examination intended to make sure that your mind
is well grounded in this matter, and you become a Probationer.
Your reading will have given you some indication as to the
sort of thing you are likely to be good at, and you select
such practices as seem to you to promise well. You go ahead
with these, and keep a careful record of what you do, and
what results occur. After eleven months you submit a record
to your superior; it is his duty to put you right where you
have gone wrong, and particularly to encourage you where
you think you have failed.
25. I say this because one of the most frequent troubles
is that people who are doing excellent work throw it up because
they find that Nature is not what they thought it was going
to be. But this is the best test of the reality of any experience.
All those which conform with your idea, which flatter you,
are likely to be illusions. So you become a Neophyte; and
attack the Task of a Zelator.
There are further grades in this system, but the general
principles are always the same-the principles of scientific
study and research.
26. We end where we began. 'The wheel has come full circle.'
We are to use the experience of the past to determine the
experience of the future, and as that experience increases
in quantity it also improves in quality. And the Path is
sure. And the End is sure. For the End is the Path.
Love is the law, love under will.
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