YOGA FOR YAHOOS 
  
FOURTH LECTURE.     ASANA AND PRANAYAMA. 
  
The Technical Practices of Yoga. 
  
  
     Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. 
     1. Last week we were able to go away feeling that the back of the job 
had been broken. We had got rid of bad ways, bad wives, and bad 
weather. We are comfortably installed in the sunshine, with no one to 
bother us. We have nothing to do but our work. 
     Such being our fortunate state, we may usefully put in an hour 
considering our next step. Let us recall, in the first place, what we 
decided to be the quintessence of our task. It was to annihilate 
dividuality. 'Make room for me,' cries the Persian poet whose name I have 
forgotten, the fellow Fitzgerald translated, not Omar Khayyam, 'Make 
room for me on that divan which has no room for twain'—a remarkable 
prophetic anticipation of the luxury flatlet. 
     We are to unite the subject and object of consciousness in the ecstasy 
which soon turns, as we shall find later on, into the more sublime state of 
indifference, and then annihilate both the party of the first part aforesaid 
and the party of the second part aforesaid. This evidently results in 
further parties—one might almost say cocktail parties—constantly 
increasing until we reach infinity, and annihilate that, thereby recovering 
our original Nothing. Yet is that identical with the original Nothing? Yes—
and No! No! No! A thousand times no! For, having fulfilled all the 
possibilities of that original Nothing to manifest in positive terms, we have 
thereby killed for ever all its possibilities of mischief. 
     Our task being thus perfectly simple, we shall not require the 
assistance of a lot of lousy rishis and sanyasis. We shall not apply to a 
crowd of moth-eaten Arahats, of betel-chewing Bodhisattvas, for 
instruction. As we said in the first volume of ", in the first number: 
  
                    "We place no reliance 
                    On Virgin or Pigeon; 
                    Our method is science, 
                    Our aim is religion." 
  
     Our common sense, guided by experience based on observation, will 
be sufficient. 
     2. We have seen that the Yogic process is implicit in every 
phenomenon of existence. All that we have to do is to extend it