An Introduction to Yoga | Page 7

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.

Man a Duality

Some of the terms used in Yoga are necessarily to be known. For Yoga
takes man for a special purpose and studies him for a special end and,
therefore, only troubles itself about two great facts regarding man,
mind and body. First, he is a unit, a unit of consciousness. That is a
point to be definitely grasped. There is only one of him in each set of
envelopes, and sometimes the Theosophist has to revise his ideas about
man when he begins this practical line. Theosophy quite usefully and
rightly, for the understanding of