An Introduction to Yoga | Page 5

one Self, embodied in countless
forms, may realize their own identity, and manifest the powers of the
Self through the matter that envelops them.
There is but one Self in the lowliest dust and the loftiest deva.
"Mamamsaha"ÄMy portion,Ä" a portion of My Self," says Sri Krishna,
are all these Jivatmas, all these living spirits. For them the universe
exists; for them the sun shines, and the waves roll, and the winds blow,
and the rain falls, that the Self may know Himself as manifested in

matter, as embodied in the universe.

The Unfolding of Consciousness

One of those pregnant and significant ideas which Theosophy scatters
so lavishly around is thisÄthat the same scale is repeated over and over
again, the same succession of events in larger or smaller cycles. If you
understand one cycle, you understand the whole. The same laws by
which a solar system is builded go to the building up of the system of
man. The laws by which the Self unfolds his powers in the universe,
from the fire-mist up to the LOGOS, are the same laws of
consciousness which repeat themselves in the universe of man. If you
understand them in the one, you can equally understand them in the
other. Grasp them in the small, and the large is revealed to you. Grasp
them in the large, and the small becomes intelligible to you.
The great unfolding from the stone to the God goes on through millions
of years, through aeons of time. But the long unfolding that takes place
in the universe, takes place in a shorter time-cycle within the limit of
humanity, and this in a cycle so brief that it seems as nothing beside the
longer one. Within a still briefer cycle a similar unfolding takes place
in the individualÄ rapidly, swiftly, with all the force of its past behind
it. These forces that manifest and unveil themselves in evolution are
cumulative in their power. Embodied in the stone, in the mineral world,
they grow and put out a little more of strength, and in the mineral world
accomplish their unfolding. Then they become too strong for the
mineral, and press on into the vegetable world. There they unfold more
and more of their divinity, until they become too mighty for the
vegetable, and become animal.
Expanding within and gaining experiences from the animal, they again
overflow the limits of the animal, and appear as the human. In the
human being they still grow and accumulate with ever-increasing force,
and exert greater pressure against the barrier; and then out of the human,
they press into the super-human. This last process of evolution is called

"Yoga."
Coming to the individual, the man of our own globe has behind him his
long evolution in other chains than oursÄthis same evolution through
mineral to vegetable, through vegetable to animal, through animal to
man, and then from our last dwelling-place in the lunar orb on to this
terrene globe that we call the earth. Our evolution here has all the force
of the last evolution in it, and hence, when we come to this shortest
cycle of evolution which is called Yoga, the man has behind him the
whole of the forces accumulated in his human evolution, and it is the
accumulation of these forces which enables him to make the passage so
rapidly. We must connect our Yoga with the evolution of
consciousness everywhere, else we shall not understand it at all; for the
laws of evolution of consciousness in a universe are exactly the same as
the laws of Yoga, and the principles whereby consciousness unfolds
itself in the great evolution of humanity are the same principles that we
take in Yoga and deliberately apply to the more rapid unfolding of our
own consciousness. So that Yoga, when it is definitely begun, is not a
new thing, as some people imagine.
The whole evolution is one in its essence. The succession is the same,
the sequences identical. Whether you are thinking of the unfolding of
consciousness in the universe, or in the human race, or in the individual,
you can study the laws of the whole, and in Yoga you learn to apply
those same laws to your own consciousness rationally and definitely.
All the laws are one, however different in their stage of manifestation.
If you look at Yoga in this light, then this Yoga, which seemed so alien
and so far off, will begin to wear a familiar face, and come to you in a
garb not wholly strange. As you study the unfolding of consciousness,
and the corresponding evolution of form, it will not seem so strange
that from man you should pass on to superman, transcending the barrier
of humanity, and finding yourself in the region where divinity