Eight Lectures on Yoga

YOGA FOR YELLOWBELLIES. SECOND LECTURE. Mr. Chairman, Your Royal Highness, Your Grace, my lords, ladies and gentlemen. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. In my last lecture I led you into the quag of delusion; I smothered you in the mire of delusion; I brought you to thirst in the desert of delusion; I left you wandering in the jungle of delusion, a prey to all the monsters which are thoughts. It came into my mind that it was up to me to do something about it. We have constantly been discussing mysterious entities as if we knew something about them, and this (on examination) always turned out not to be the case. 2. Knowledge itself is impossible, because if we take the simplest proposition of knowledge, S is P, we must attach some meaning to S and P, if our statement is to be intelligible. (I say nothing as to whether it is true!) And this involves definition. Now the original proposition of identity, A = A, tells us nothing at all, unless the second A gives us further information about the first A. We shall therefore say that A is BC. Instead of one unknown we have two unknowns; we have to define B as DE, C as FG. Now we have four unknowns, and very soon we have used up the alphabet. When we come to define Z, we have to go back and use one of the other letters, so that all our arguments are arguments in a circle. 3. Any statement which we make is demonstrably meaningless. And yet we do mean something when we say that a cat has four legs. And we all know what we mean when we say so. We give our assent to, or withhold it from, the proposition on the grounds of our experience. But that experience is not intellectual, as above demonstrated. It is a matter of immediate intuition. We cannot have any warrant for that intuition, but at the same time any intellectual argument which upsets it does not in the faintest degree shake our conviction. 4. The conclusion to be drawn from this is that the instrument of mind is not intellectual, not rational. Logic is merely destructive, a self- destructive toy. The toy, however, is in some ways also instructive, even though the results of its use will not bear examination. So we make a by- law that the particular sorites which annihilate logic are out of bounds, and we go on reasoning within arbitrarily appointed limits. It is subject to these conditions that we may proceed to examine the nature of our fundamental ideas; and this is necessary, because since we began to