Eight Lectures on Yoga

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