The Equinox (Volume I, Number III)

THE EQUINOX coming straight from the Sham Bazaar, retail their wretched bak bak to their sheep-headed followers as the eternal word of Brahman—“ The shower from the Highest!” And, not in- frequently, end in silent meditation within the illusive walls of Wormwood Scrubbs. The East, like the West, has for long lain under the spell of that potent but Middle-class Magician—St. Shame- faced sex; and the whole of its literature swings between the two extremes of Paederasty and Brahmacharya. Even the great science of Yoga has not remained unpolluted by his breath, so that in many cases to avoid shipwreck upon Scylla the Yogi has lost his life in the eddying whirlpools of Charybdis. The Yogis claim that the energies of the human body are stored up in the brain, and the highest of these energies they call “Ojas.” They also claim that that part of the human energy which is expressed in sexual passion, when checked, easily becomes changed into Ojas; and so it is that they in- variably insist in their disciples gathering up the sexual energy and converting it into Ojas. Thus we read: It is only the chaste man and woman who can make the Ojas rise and become stored in the brain, and this is why chastity has always been considered the highest virtue. . . . That is why in all the religious orders in the world that have produced spiritual giants, you will always find this intense chastity insisted upon... .* If people practise Raja-Yoga and at the same time lead an impure life, how can they expect to become Yogis? t * Certainly not in the case of the Mahometan Religion and its Sufi Adepts, who drank the vintage of Bacchus as well as the wine of Iacchus. The question of Chastity is again one of those which rest on temperament and not on dogma. It is curious that the astute Vivekananda should have fallen into this man-trap. +t Swami Vivekananda, “ Raja Yoga,” p. 45. 80