Eight Lectures on Yoga

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