Next, Yoga is a science. That is the second thing to grasp. Yoga is a
science, and not a vague, dreamy drifting or imagining. It is an
applied science, a systematized collection of laws applied to bring
about a definite end. It takes up the laws of psychology, applicable to
the unfolding of the whole consciousness of man on every plane, in
every world, and applies those rationally in a particular case. This
rational application of the laws of unfolding consciousness acts
exactly on the same principles that you see applied around you every
day in other departments of science.
You know, by looking at the world around you, how enormously the
intelligence of man, co-operating with nature, may quicken “natural”
processes, and the working of intelligence is as “natural” as anything
else. We make this distinction, and practically it is a real one,
between “rational” and “natural” growth, because human intelligence can
guide the working of natural laws; and when we come to deal with Yoga,
we are in the same department of applied science as, let us say, is the
scientific farmer or gardener, when he applies the natural laws of
selection to breeding. The farmer or gardener cannot transcend the laws
of nature, nor can he work against them. He has no other laws of nature
to work with save universal laws by which nature is evolving forms
around us, and yet he does in a few years what nature takes, perhaps,
hundreds of thousands of years to do. And how? By applying human
intelligence to choose the laws that serve him and to neutralize the
laws that hinder. He brings the divine intelligence in man to utilise
the divine powers in nature that are working for general rather than
for particular ends.
Take the breeder of pigeons. Out of the blue rock pigeon he develops
the pouter or the fan-tail; he chooses out, generation after
generation, the forms that show most strongly the peculiarity that he
wishes to develop. He mates such birds together, takes every favouring
circumstance into consideration and selects again and again, and so on
and on, till the peculiarity that he wants to establish has become a
well-marked feature. Remove his controlling intelligence, leave the
birds to themselves, and they revert to the ancestral type.
Or take the case of the gardener. Out of the wild rose of the hedge has
been evolved every rose of the garden. Many-petalled roses are but the
result of the scientific culture of the five-petalled rose of the
hedgerow, the wild product of nature. A gardener who chooses the pollen
from one plant and places it on the carpers of another is simply doing
deliberately what is done every day by the bee and the fly. But he
chooses his plants, and he chooses those that have the qualities he
wants intensified, and from those again he chooses those that show the
desired qualities still more clearly, until he has produced a flower so
different from the original stock that only by tracing it back can you
tell the stock whence it sprang.
So is it in the application of the laws of psychology that we call
Yoga. Systematized knowledge of the unfolding of consciousness applied
to the individualized Self, that is Yoga. As I have just said, it is by
the world that consciousness has been unfolded, and the world is
admirably planned by the LOGOS for this unfolding of consciousness;
hence the would-be yogi, choosing out his objects and applying his
laws, finds in the world exactly the things he wants to make his
practice of Yoga real, a vital thing, a quickening process for the
knowledge of the Self. There are many laws. You can choose those which
you require, you can evade those you do not require, you can utilize
those you need, and thus you can bring about the result that nature,
without that application of human intelligence, cannot so swiftly
effect.
Take it, then, that Yoga is within your reach, with your powers, and
that even some of the lower practices of Yoga, some of the simpler
applications of the laws of the unfolding of consciousness to yourself,
will benefit you in this world as well as in all others. For you are
really merely quickening your growth, your unfolding, taking advantage
of the powers nature puts within your hands, and deliberately
eliminating the conditions which would not help you in your work, but
rather hinder your march forward. If you see it in that light, it seems
to me that Yoga will be to you a far more real, practical thing, than
it is when you merely read some fragments about it taken from Sanskrit
books, and often mistranslated into English, and you will begin to feel
that to be a yogi is not necessarily a thing for a life far off, an
incarnation far removed from the present one.