9. The various postures recommended by the teachers of Yoga depend 
for the most part upon the Hindu anatomy for their value, and upon 
mystic theories concerning the therapeutic and thaumaturgic properties 
ascribed to various parts of the body. If, for instance, you can conquer 
the nerve Udana, you can walk on water. But who the devil wants to talk 
on water? Swimming is much better fun. (I bar sharks, sting-rays, cuttle-
fish, electric eels and piranhas. Also trippers, bathing belles and Mr. 
Lansbury.) Alternatively, freeze the water and dance on it! A great deal of 
Hindu endeavour seems to consist in discovering the most difficult 
possible way to attain the most undesirable end. 
     10. When you start tying yourself into a knot, you will find that some 
positions are much more difficult and inconvenient than others; but that is 
only the beginning. If you retain any posture long enough, you get cramp. 
I forget the exact statistics, but I gather that the muscular exertion made 
by a man sleeping peacefully in bed is sufficient to raise fourteen 
elephants per hour to the stratosphere. Anyway, I remember that it is 
something rather difficult to believe, if only because I did not believe it 
myself. 
     11. Why then should we bother to choose a specially sacred position? 
Firstly, we want to be steady and easy. We want, in particular, to be able 
to do Pranayama in that position, if ever we reach the stage of attempting 
that practice. We may, therefore, formulate (roughly speaking) the 
conditions to be desired in the posture as follows: 
     1. We want to be properly balanced. 
     2. We want our arms free. (They are used in some Pranayama.) 
     3. We want our breathing apparatus as unrestrained as possible. 
     Now, if you will keep these points in mind, and do not get side-tracked 
by totally irrelevant ideas, such as to imagine that you are getting holier 
by adopting some attitude traditionally appropriate to a deity or holy 
man; and if you will refrain from the Puritan abomination that anything is 
good for you if it hurts you enough, you ought to be able to find out for 
yourself, after a few experiments, some posture which meets these 
conditions. I should very much rather have you do this than come to me 
for some mumbo-jumbo kind of authority. I am no pig-sticking pukka 
sahib—not even from Poona—to put my hyphenated haw-haw humbug 
over on the B. Public.[2] I would rather you did the thing 'wrong' by 
yourselves, and learned from your errors, than get it 'right' from the 
teacher, and atrophied your initiative and your faculty of learning 
anything at all. 
     It is, however, perfectly right that you should have some idea of what 
happens when you sit down to practise. 
     12. Let me digress for a moment and refer to what I said in my text-
book on Magick with regard to the formula IAO. This formula covers all 
learning. You begin with a delightful feeling as of a child with a new toy; 
you get bored, and you attempt to smash it. But if you are a wise child, 
you have had a scientific attitude towards it, and you do not smash it. 
You pass through the stage of boredom, and arise from the inferno of