Eight Lectures on Yoga

European mind. If someone gives me £200,000 pounds I automatically fail to notice it. It is a normal circumstance of life. Test me! 9. There are a great many other injunctions, all of which have to be examined independently in order to find whether they apply to Yoga in general, and to the particular advantage of any given student. We are to exclude especially all those considerations based on fantastic theories of the universe, or on the accidents of race or climate. For instance, in the time of the late Maharajah of Kashmir, mahsir fishing was forbidden throughout his territory; because, when a child, he had been leaning over the parapet of a bridge over the Jhilam at Srinagar, and inadvertently opened his mouth, so that a mahsir was able to swallow his soul. It would never have done for a Sahiba Mlecha!—to catch that mahsir. This story is really typical of 90% of the precepts usually enumerated under the heading Yama. The rest are for the most part based on local and climatic conditions, and they may or may not be applicable to your own case. And, on the other hand, there are all sorts of good rules which have never occurred to a teacher of Yoga; because those teachers never conceived the condition in which many people live today. It never occurred to the Buddha or Patanjali or Mansur el-Hallaj to advise his pupils not to practise in a flat with a wireless set next door. The result of all this is that all of you who are worth your salt will be absolutely delighted when I tell you to scrap all the rules and discover your own. Sir Richard Burton said: 'He noblest lives and noblest dies, who makes and keeps his self-made laws.' 10. This is, of course, what every man of science has to do in every experiment. This is what constitutes an experiment. The other kind of man has only bad habits. When you explore a new country, you don't know what the conditions are going to be; and you have to master those conditions by the method of trial and error. We start to penetrate the stratosphere; and we have to modify our machines in all sorts of ways which were not altogether foreseen. I wish to thunder forth once more that no questions of right or wrong enter into our problems. But in the stratosphere it is 'right' for a man to be shut up in a pressure-resisting suit electrically heated, with an oxygen supply, whereas it would be 'wrong' for him to wear it if he were running the three miles in the summer sports in the Tanezrouft. This is the pit into which all the great religious teachers have hitherto fallen, and I am sure you are all looking hungrily at me in the hope of seeing me do likewise. But no! There is one principle which carries us through all conflicts concerning conduct, because it is perfectly rigid and perfectly elastic:—'Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.' So: it is not the least use to come and pester me about it. Perfect mastery of the violin in six easy lessons by correspondence! Should I have the heart to deny you? But Yama is different. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. That is Yama. Your object is to perform Yoga. Your True Will is to attain the consummation of marriage with the universe, and your ethical code must