Yoga Is a Science

Yoga Is a Science

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.