Eight Lectures on Yoga

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