| Dr. Jai Maharaj 2006-05-10, 11:26 am |
| 5/5 'AN INTRODUCTION TO YOG' BY ANNIE BESANT
Concentration is attention. The fixed attitude of
attention, that is concentration. If you pay attention to
what you do, your mind will be concentrated. Many sit
down for meditation and wonder why they do not succeed.
How can you suppose that half an hour of meditation and
twenty- three and a half hours of scattering of thought
throughout the day and night, will enable you to
concentrate during the half hour? You have undone during
the day and night what you did in the morning, as
Penelope unravelled the web she wove. To become a Yogi,
you must be attentive all the time. You must practice
concentration every hour of your active life. Now you
scatter your thoughts for many hours, and you wonder that
you do not succeed. The wonder would be if you did. You
must pay attention every day to everything you do. That
is, no doubt, hard to do, and you may make it easier in
the first stages by choosing out of your day's work a
portion only, and doing that portion with perfect,
unflagging attention. Do not let your mind wander from
the thing before you. It does not matter what the thing
is. It may be the adding up of a column of figures, or
the reading of a book. Anything will do. It is the
attitude of the mind that is important and not the object
before it. This is the only way of learning
concentration. Fix your mind rigidly on the work before
you for the time being, and when you have done with it,
drop it. Practise steadily in this way for a few months,
and you will be surprised to find how easy it becomes to
concentrate the mind. Moreover, the body will soon learn
to do many things automatically. If you force it to do a
thing regularly, it will begin to do it, after a time, of
its own accord, and then you find that you can manage to
do two or three things at the same time. In England, for
instance, women are very fond of knitting. When a girl
first learns to knit, she is obliged to be very intent on
her fingers. Her attention must not wander from her
fingers for a moment, or she will make a mistake. She
goes on doing that day after day, and presently her
fingers have learnt to pay attention to the work without
her supervision, and they may be left to do the knitting
while she employs the conscious mind on something else.
It is further possible to train your mind as the girl has
trained her fingers. The mind also, the mental body, can
be so trained as to do a thing automatically. At last,
your highest consciousness can always remain fixed on the
Supreme, while the lower consciousness in the body will
do the things of the body, and do them perfectly, because
perfectly trained. These are practical lessons of Yog.
Practice of this sort builds up the qualities you want,
and you become stronger and better, and fit to go on to
the definite study of Yog.
Obstacles to Yog
Before considering the capacities needed for this
definite practice, let us run over the obstacles to Yog
as laid down by Patanjali.
The obstacles to Yog are very inclusive. First, disease:
if you are diseased you cannot practice Yog; it demands
sound health, for the physical strain entailed by it is
great. Then languor of mind: you must be alert,
energetic, in your thought. Then doubt: you must have
decision of will, must be able to make up your mind. Then
carelessness: this is one of the greatest difficulties
with beginners; they read a thing carelessly, they are
inaccurate. Sloth: a lazy man cannot be a Yogi; one who
is inert, who lacks the power and the will to exert
himself; how shall he make the desperate exertions wanted
along this line? The next, worldly-mindedness, is
obviously an obstacle. Mistaken ideas is another great
obstacle, thinking wrongly about things. One of the great
qualifications for Yog is "right notion" "Right notion"
means that the thought shall correspond with the outside
truth; that a man shall he fundamentally true, so that
his thought corresponds to fact; unless there is truth in
a man, Yog is for him impossible. Missing the point,
illogical, stupid, making the important, unimportant and
vice versa. Lastly, instability: which makes Yog
impossible, and even a small amount of which makes Yog
futile; the unstable man cannot be a yogi.
Capacities of Yog
Can everybody practise Yog? No. But every well-educated
person can prepare for its future practice. For rapid
progress you must have special capacities, as for
anything else. In any of the sciences a man may study
without being the possessor of very special capacity,
although he cannot attain eminence therein; and so it is
with Yog. Anybody with a fair intelligence may learn
something from Yog which he may advantageously practice,
but he cannot hope unless he starts with certain
capacities, to be a success in Yog in this life. It is
only right to say that; for if any special science needs
particular capacities in order to attain eminence
therein, the science of sciences certainly cannot fall
behind the ordinary sciences in the demands that it makes
on its students.
Suppose I am asked: "Can I become a great mathematician?"
What must be my answer? "You must have a natural aptitude
and capacity for mathematics to be a great mathematician.
If you have not that capacity, you cannot be a great
mathematician in this life." But this does not mean that
you cannot learn any mathematics. To be a great
mathematician you must be born with a special capacity
for mathematics. To be born with such a special capacity
means that you have practiced it in very many lives and
now you are born with it ready-made. It is the same with
Yog. Every man can learn a little of it. But to be a
great Yogi means lives of practice. If these are behind
you, you will have been born with the necessary faculties
in the present birth.
There are three faculties which one must have to obtain
success in Yog. The first is a strong desire. "Desire
ardently." Such a desire is needed to break the strong
links of desire which knit you to the outer world.
Moreover, without that strong desire you will never go
through all the difficulties that bat your way. You must
have the conviction that you will ultimately succeed, and
the resolution to go on until you do succeed. It must be
a desire so ardent and so firmly rooted, that obstacles
only make it more keen. To such a man an obstacle is like
fuel that you throw on a fire. It burns but the more
strongly as it catches hold of it and finds it fuel for
the burning. So difficulties and obstacles are but fuel
to feed the fire of the yogi's resolute desire. He only
becomes the more firmly fixed, because he finds the
difficulties.
If you have not this strong desire, its absence shows
that you are new to the work, but you can begin to
prepare for it in this life. You can create desire by
thought; you cannot create desire by desire. Out of the
desire nature, the training of the desire nature cannot
come.
What is it in us that calls out desire? Look into your
own mind, and you will find that memory and imagination
are the two things that evoke desire most strongly. Hence
thought is the means whereby all the changes in desire
can be brought about. Thought, imagination, is the only
creative power in you, and by imagination your powers are
to be unfolded. The more you think of a desirable object,
the stronger becomes the desire for it. Then think of Yog
as desirable, if you want to desire Yog. Think about the
results of Yog and what it means for the world when you
have become a yogi, and you will find your desire
becoming stronger and stronger. For it is only by thought
that you can manage desire. You can do nothing with it by
itself. You want the thing, or you do not want it, and
within the limits of the desire nature you are helpless
in its grasp. As just said, you cannot change desire by
desire. You must go into another region of your being,
the region of thought, and by thought you can make
yourself desire or not desire, exactly as you like, if
only you will use the right means, and those means, after
all, are fairly simple. Why is it you desire to possess a
thing? Because you think it will make you happier. But
suppose you know by past experience that in the long run
it does not make you happier, but brings you sorrow,
trouble, distress. You have at once, ready to your hands,
the way to get rid of that desire. Think of the ultimate
results. Let your mind dwell carefully on all the painful
things. Jump over the momentary pleasure, and fix your
thought steadily on the pain which follows the
gratification of that desire. And when you have done that
for a month or so, the very sight of those objects of
desire will repel you. You will have associated it in
your mind with suffering, and will recoil from it
instinctively. You will not want it. You have changed the
want, and have changed it by your power of imagination.
There is no more effective way of destroying a vice than
by deliberately picturing the ultimate results of its
indulgence. Persuade a young man who is inclined to be
profligate to keep in his mind the image of an old
profligate; show him the profligate worn out, desiring
without the power to gratify; and if you can get him to
think in that way, unconsciously he will begin to shrink
from that which before attracted him; the very
hideousness of the results frightens away the man from
clinging to the object of desire. And the would-be yogi
has to use his thought to mark out the desires he will
permit, and the desires that he is determined to slay.
The next thing after a strong desire is a strong will.
Will is desire. transmuted, its directing is changed from
without to within. If your will is weak, you must
strengthen it. Deal with it as you do with other weak
things: strengthen it by practice. If a boy knows that he
has weak arms, he says: "My arms are weak, but I shall
practice gymnastics, work on the parallel bars: thus my
arms. will grow strong." It is the same with the will.
Practice will make strong the little, weak will that you
have at present.
Resolve, for example, saying: "I will do such and such
thing every morning," and do it. One thing at a time is
enough for a feeble will. Make yourself a promise to do
such and such a thing at such a time, and you will soon
find that you will be ashamed to break your promise. When
you have kept such a promise to yourself for a day, make
it for a week, then for a fortnight. Having succeeded,
you can choose a harder thing to do, and so on. By this
forcing of action, you strengthen the will. Day after day
it grows greater in power, and you find your inner
strength increases. First have a strong desire. Then
transmute it into a strong will.
The third requisite for Yog is a keen and broad
intelligence. You cannot control your mind, unless you
have a mind to control. Therefore you must develop your
mind. You must study. By study, I do not mean the reading
of books. I mean thinking. You may read a dozen books and
your mind may be as feeble as in the beginning. But if
you have read one serious book properly, then, by slow
reading and much thinking, your intelligence will be
nurtured and your; mind grow strong.
These are the things you want -- a strong desire, an
indomitable will, a keen. intelligence. Those are the
capacities that you must unfold in order that the
practice of Yog may be possible to you. If your mind is
very unsteady, if it is a butterfly mind like a child's,
you must make it steady. That comes by close study and
thinking. You must unfold the mind by which you are to
work.
Forthgoing and Returning
It will help you, in doing this and in changing your
desire, if you realise that the great evolution of
humanity goes on along two paths -- the Path of
Forthgoing, and the Path of Return.
On the Path, or marga, of Pravritti -- forthgoing on
which are the vast majority of human beings, desires are
necessary and useful. On that path, the more desire a man
has, the better for his evolution. They are the motives
that prompt to activity. Without these the stagnates, he
is inert. Why should Isvara have filled the worlds with
desirable objects if He did not intend that desire should
be an ingredient in evolution? He deals with humanity as
a sensible mother deals -with her child. She does not
give lectures to the child on the advantages of walking
nor explain to it learnedly the mechanism of the muscles
of the leg. She holds a bright glittering toy before the
child, and says: "Come and get it." Desire awakens, and
the child begins to crawl, and so it learns to walk. So
Isvara has put toys around us, but always just out of our
reach, and He says: "Come, children, take these. Here are
love, money, fame, social consideration; come and get
them. Walk, make efforts for them." And we, like
children, make great efforts and struggle along to snatch
these toys. When we seize the toy, it breaks into pieces
and is of no use. People fight and struggle and toil for
wealth, and, when they become multi-millionaires, they
ask: "How shall we spend this wealth?" I read of a
millionaire in America, who was walking on foot from city
to city, in order to distribute the vast wealth which he
accumulated. He learned his lesson. Never in another life
will that man be induced to put forth efforts for the toy
of wealth. Love of fame, love of power, stimulate men to
most strenuous effort. But when they are grasped and held
in the hand, weariness is the result. The mighty
statesman, the leader of the nation, the man idolised by
millions -- follow him home, and there you will see the
weariness of power, the satiety that cloys passion. Does
then God mock us with all the objects? No. The object has
been to bring out the power of the Self to develop the
capacity latent in man, and in the development of human
faculty, the result of the great lila may be seen. That
is the way in which we learn to unfold the God within us;
that is the result of the play of the divine Father with
His children.
But sometimes the desire for objects is lost too early,
and the lesson is but half learned. That is one of the
difficulties in the India of today. You have a mighty
spiritual philosophy, which was the natural expression
for the souls who were born centuries ago. They were
ready to throw away the fruit of action and to work for
the Supreme to carry out His Will.
But the lesson for India at the present time is to wake
up the desire. It may look like going back, but it is
really a going forward. The philosophy is true, but it
belonged to those older souls who were ready for it, and
the younger souls now being born into the people are not
ready for that philosophy. They repeat it by rote, they
are hypnotised by it, and they sink down into inertia,
because there is nothing they desire enough to force them
to exertion. The consequence is that the nation as a
whole is going downhill. The old lesson of putting
different objects before souls of different ages, is
forgotten, and every one is now nominally aiming at ideal
perfection, which can only be reached when the
preliminary steps have been successfully mounted. It is
the same as with the "Sermon on the Mount" in Christian
countries, but there the practical common sense of the
people bows to it and -- ignores it. No nation tries to
live by the "Sermon on the Mount " It is not meant for
ordinary men and women, but for the saint. For all those
who are on the Path of Forthgoing, desire is necessary
for progress.
What is the Path of Nivritti? It is the Path of Return.
There desire must cease; and the Self-determined will
must take its place. The last object of desire in a
person commencing the Path of Return is the desire to
work with the Will of the Supreme; he harmonises his will
with the Supreme Will, renounces all separate desires,
and thus works to turn the wheel of life as long as such
turning is needed by the law of Life. Desire on the Path
of Forthgoing becomes will on the Path of Return; the
soul, in harmony with the Divine, works with the law.
Thought on the Path of Forthgoing is ever alert, flighty
and changing; it becomes reason on the Path of Return;
the yoke of reason is placed on the neck of the lower
mind, and reason guides the bull. Work, activity, on the
Path of Forthgoing, is restless action by which the
ordinary man is bound; on the Path of Return work becomes
sacrifice, and thus its binding force is broken. These
are, then, the manifestations of three aspects, as shown
on the Paths of Forthgoing and Return.
Bliss manifested as desire is changed into will Wisdom
manifested as thought is changed into reason. Activity
manifested as work is changed into sacrifice.
People very often ask with regard to this: "Why is will
placed in the human being as the correspondence of bliss
in the Divine?" The three great Divine qualities are:
chit or consciousness; ananda or bliss; sat or existence.
Now it is quite clear that the consciousness is reflected
in intelligence in man -- the same quality, only in
miniature. It is equally clear that existence and
activity belong to each other. You can only exist as you
act outwards. The very form of the word shows It -- "ex,
out of"; it is manifested life. That leaves the third,
bliss, to correspond with will, and some people are
rather puzzled with that, and they ask: "What is the
correspondence between bliss and will?" But if you come
down to desire, and the objects of desire, you will be
able to solve the riddle. The nature of the Self is
bliss. Throw that nature down into matter and what will
be the expression of the bliss nature? Desire for
happiness, the seeking after desirable objects, which it
imagines will give it the happiness which is of its own
essential nature, and which it is continually seeking to
realise amid the obstacles of the world. Its nature being
bliss, it seeks for happiness and that desire for
happiness is to be transmuted into will. All these
correspondences have a profound meaning if you will only
look into them, and that universal "will-to-live"
translates itself as the "desire for happiness" that you
find in every man and woman, in every sentient creature.
Has it ever struck you how surely you are justifying that
analysis of your own nature by the way you accept
happiness as your right, and resent misery, and ask what
you have done to deserve it? You do not ask the same
about happiness, which is the natural result of your own
nature. The thing that has to be explained is not
happiness but pain, the things that are against the
nature of the Self that is bliss. And so, looking into
this, we see how desire and will are both the
determination to be happy. But the one is ignorant, drawn
out by outer objects; the other is self-conscious,
initiated and ruled from within. Desire is evoked and
directed from outside; and when the same aspect rules
from within, it is will. There is no difference in their
nature. Hence desire on the Path of Forthgoing becomes
will on the Path of Return.
When desire, thought and work are changed into will,
reason and sacrifice, then the man is turning homewards,
then he lives by renunciation.
When a man has really renounced, a strange change takes
place. On the Path of Forthgoing, you must fight for
everything you want to get; on the Path of Return, nature
pours her treasures at your feet. When a man has ceased
to desire them, then all treasures pour down upon him,
for he has become a channel through which all good gifts
flow to those around him. Seek the good, give up
grasping, and then everything will be yours. Cease to ask
that your own little water tank may be filled, and you
will become a pipe, joined to the living source of all
waters, the source which never runs dry, the waters which
spring up unfailingly. Renunciation means the power of
unceasing work for the good of all, work which cannot
fail, because wrought by the Supreme Worker through His
servant.
If you are engaged in any true work of charity, and your
means are limited and the wealth does not flow into your
hands, what does it mean? It means that you have not yet
learnt the true renunciation. You are clinging to the
visible, to the fruit of action, and so the wealth does
not pour through your hands.
Purification of Bodies
The unfolding of powers belongs to the side of
consciousness; purification of bodies belongs to the side
of matter. You must purify each of your three working
bodies -- mental, astral and physical. Without that
purification you had better leave yog alone. First of
all, how shall you purify the thought body? By right
thinking. Then you must use imagination, your great
creative tool, once more. Imagine things, and, imagining
them, you will form your thought-body into the
organisation that you desire. Imagine something strongly,
as the painter imagines when he is going to paint.
Visualise an object if you have the power of
visualisation at all: if you have not, try to make it. It
is an artistic faculty, of course, hut most people have
it more or less. See how far you can reproduce perfectly
a face you see daily. By such practice you will be
strengthening your imagination, and by strengthening your
imagination you will be making the great tool with which
you have to practice in Yog.
There is another use of the imagination which is very
valuable. If you will imagine in your thought-body the
presence of the qualities that you desire to have, and
the absence of those which you desire not to have, you
are half-way to having and not having them. Also, many of
the troubles of your life might be weakened if you would
imagine them on right lines before you have to go through
them. Why do you wait helplessly until you meet them in
the physical world. If you thought of your coming trouble
in the morning, and thought of yourself as acting
perfectly in the midst of it (you should never scruple to
imagine yourself perfect), when the thing turned up in
the day, it would have lost its power, and you would no
longer feel the sting to the same extent. Now each of you
must have in your life something that troubles you. Think
of yourself as facing that trouble and not minding it,
and when it comes, you will be what you have been
thinking. You might get rid of half your troubles and
your faults, if you would deal with them through your
imagination.
As the thought body, becomes purified in this way, you
must turn to the astral body. The astral body is purified
by right desire. Desire nobly, and the astral body will
evolve the organs of good desires instead of the organs
of evil ones. The secret of all progress is to think and
desire the highest, never dwelling on the fault, the
weakness, the error, but always on the perfected power,
and slowly in that way you will be able to build up
perfection in yourself. Think and desire, then, in order
to purify the thought body and the astral body.
And how shall you purify the physical body? You must
regulate it in all its activities -- in sleep, in food,
in exercise, in everything. You cannot have a pure
physical body with impure mental and astral bodies so
that the work of imagination helps also in the
purification of the physical. But you must also regulate
the physical body in all its activities. Take for
instance, food. The Indian says truly that every sort of
food has a dominant quality in it, either rhythm, or
activity, or inertia, and that all foods fall under one
of these heads. Now the man who is to be a yogi must not
touch any food which is on the way to decay. Those things
belong to the tamasic foods -- all foods, for instance,
of the nature of game, of venison, all food which is
showing signs of decay (all alcohol is a product of
decay), are to be avoided. Flesh foods come under the
quality of activity. All flesh foods are really
stimulants. All forms in the animal kingdom are built up
to express animal desires and animal activities. The yogi
cannot afford to use these in a body meant for the higher
processes of thought. Vitality, yes, they will give that;
strength, which does not last, they will give that; a
sudden spurs of energy, yes, meat will give that; but
those are not the things which the yogi wants; so he puts
aside all those foods as not available for the work he
desires, and chooses his food out of the most highly
vitalised products. All the foods which tend to growth,
those are the most highly vitalised, grain, out of which
the new plant will grow, is packed full of the most
nutritious substances; fruits; all those things which
have growth as their next stage in the life cycle, those
are the rhythmic foods, full of life, and building up a
body sensitive and strong at the same time.
Dwellers on the Threshold
Of these there are many kinds. First, elementals. They
try to bar the astral plane against man. And naturally
so, because they are concerned with the building up of
the lower kingdoms, these elementals of form, the Rupa
Devas; and to them man is a really hateful creature,
because of his destructive properties. That is why they
dislike him so much. He spoils their work wherever he
goes, tramples down vegetable things, and kills animals,
so that the whole of that great kingdom of nature hates
the name of man. They band themselves together to stop
the one who is just taking his first conscious steps on
the astral plane, and try to frighten him, for they fear
that he is bringing destructiveness into the new world.
They cannot do anything, if you do not mind them. When
that rush of elemental force comes against the man
entering on the astral plane, he must remain quiet,
indifferent, taking up the position: "I am a higher
product of evolution than you are; you can do nothing to
me. I am your friend, not your enemy, Peace!" If he be
strong enough to take up that position, the great wave of
elemental force will roll aside and let him through. The
seemingly causeless fears which some feel at night are
largely due to this hostility. You are, at night, more
sensitive to the astral plane than during the day, and
the dislike of the beings on the plane for man is felt
more strongly. But when the elementals find you are not
destructive, not an embodiment of ruin, they become as
friendly to you as they were before hostile. That is the
first form of the dweller on the threshold. Here again
the importance of pure and rhythmic food comes in;
because if you use meat and alcohol, you attract the
lower elementals of the plane, those that take pleasure
in the scent of blood and spirits, and they will
inevitably prevent your seeing and understanding things
clearly. They will surge round you, impress their
thoughts upon you, force their impressions on your astral
body, so that you may have a kind of shell of
objectionable hangers-on to your aura, who will much
obstruct you in your efforts to see and hear correctly.
That is the chief reason why every one who is teaching
Yog on the right-hand path absolutely forbids indulgence
in meat and alcohol.
The second form of the dweller on the threshold is the
thought forms of our own past. Those forms, growing out
of the evil of lives that lie behind us, thought forms of
wickedness of all kinds, those face us when we first come
into touch with the astral plane, really belonging to us,
but appearing as outside forms, as objects; and they try
to scare back their creator. You can only conquer them by
sternly repudiating them: "You are no longer mine; you
belong to my past, and not to my present. I will give you
none of my life." Thus you will gradually exhaust and
finally annihilate them. This is perhaps one of the most
painful difficulties that one has to face in treading the
astral plane in consciousness for the first time. Of
course, where a person has in any way been mixed up with
objectionable thought forms of the stronger kind, such as
those brought about by practicing black magic, there this
particular form of the dweller will be much stronger and
more dangerous, and often desperate is the struggle
between the neophyte and these dwellers from his past
backed up by the masters of the black side.
Now we come to one of the most terrible forms of the
dwellers on the threshold. Suppose a case in which a man
during the past has steadily identified himself with the
lower part of his nature and has gone against the higher,
paralysing himself, using higher powers for lower
purposes, degrading his mind to be the mere slave of his
lower desires. A curious change takes place in him. The
life which belongs to the Ego in him is taken up by the
physical body, and assimilated with the lower lives of
which the body is composed. Instead of serving the
purposes of the Spirit, it is dragged away for tile
purposes of the lower, and becomes part of the animal
life belonging to the lower bodies, so that the Ego and
his higher bodies are weakened, and the animal life of
the lower is strengthened. Now under those conditions,
the Ego will sometimes become so disgusted with his
vehicles that when death relieves him of the physical
body he will cast the others quite aside. And even
sometimes during physical life he will leave the
desecrated temple. Now after death, in these cases, the
man generally reincarnates very quickly; for, having torn
himself away from his astral and mental bodies, he has no
bodies with which to live in the astral and mental
worlds, and he must quickly form new ones and come again
to rebirth here. Under these conditions the old astral
and mental bodies are not disintegrated when the new
mental and astral bodies are formed and born into the
world, and the affinity between the old and new, both
having had the same owner, the same tenant, asserts
itself, and the highly vitalised old astral and mental
bodies will attach themselves to the new astral and
mental bodies, and become the most terrible form of the
dweller on the threshold.
These are the various forms which the dweller may assume,
and all are spoken of in books dealing with these
particular subjects, though I do not know that you will
find anywhere in a single book a definite classification
like the above. In addition to these there are, of
course, the direct attacks of the Dark Brothers, taking
up various forms and aspects, and the most common form
they will take is the form of some virtue which is a
little bit in excess in the yogi. The yogi is not
attacked through his vices, but through his virtues; for
a virtue in excess becomes a vice. It is the extremes
which are ever the vices; the golden mean is the virtue.
And thus, virtues become tempters in the difficult
regions of the astral and mental worlds, and are utilised
by the Brothers of the Shadow in order to entrap the
unwary.
I am not here speaking of the four ordinary ordeals of
the astral plane: the ordeals by earth, water, fire and
air. Those are mere trifles, hardly worth considering
when speaking of these more serious difficulties. Of
course, you have to learn that you are entirely master of
astral matter, that earth cannot crush you, nor water
drown you, etc. Those are, so to speak, very easy
lessons. Those who belong to a Masonic body will
recognise these ordeals as parts of the language they are
familiar with in their Masonic ritual.
There is one other danger also. You may injure yourself
by repercussion. If on the astral plane you are
threatened with danger which belongs to the physical, but
are unwise enough to think it can injure you, it will
injure your physical body. You may get a wound, or a
bruise, and so on, out of astral experiences. I once made
a fool of myself in this way. I was in a ship going down
and, as I was busy there, I saw that the mast of the ship
was going to fall and, in a moment's forgetfulness,
thought: "That mast will fall on me" that momentary
thought had its result, for when I came back to the body
in the morning, I had a large physical bruise where the
mast fell. That is a frequent phenomenon until you have
corrected the fault of the mind, which thinks
instinctively the things which it is accustomed to think
down here.
One protection you can make for yourself as you become
more sensitive. Be rigorously truthful in thought, in
word, in deed. Every thought, every desire, takes form in
the higher world. If you are careless of truth here, you
are creating a whole host of terrifying and deluding
forms. Think truth, speak truth, live truth, and then you
shall be free from the illusions of the astral world.
Preparation for Yog
People say that I put the ideal of discipleship so very
high that nobody can hope to become a disciple. But I
have not said that no one can become a disciple who does
not reproduce the description that is given of the
perfect disciple. One may. But we do it at our own peril.
A man may be thoroughly capable along one line, but have
a serious fault along another. The serious fault will not
prevent him from becoming a disciple, but he must suffer
for it. The initiate pays for his faults ten times the
price he would have had to pay for them as a man of the
world. That is why I have put the ideal so high. I have
never said that a person must come utterly up to the
ideal before becoming a disciple, but I have said that
the risks of becoming a disciple without these
qualifications are enormous. It is the duty of those who
have seen the results of going through the gateway with
faults in character, to point out that it is well to get
rid of these faults first. Every fault you carry through
the gateway with you becomes a dagger to stab you on the
other side. Therefore it is well to purify yourself as
much as you can, before you are sufficiently evolved on
any line to have the right to say: "I will pass through
that gateway." That is what I intended to be understood
when I spoke of qualifications for discipleship. I have
followed along the ancient road which lays down these
qualifications which the disciple should bring with him;
and if he comes without them, then the word of Jesus is
true, that he will be beaten with many stripes; for a man
can afford to do in the outer world with small result
what will bring terrible results upon him when once he is
treading the Path.
The End
What is to be the end of this long struggle? What is the
goal of the upward climbing, the prize of the great
battle? What does the yogi reach at last? He reaches
unity. Sometimes I am not sure that large numbers of
people, if they realised what unity means, would really
desire to reach it. There are many "virtues" of your
ordinary life which will drop entirely away from you when
you reach unity. Many things you admire will be no longer
helps but hindrances, when the sense of unity begins to
dawn. All those qualities so useful in ordinary life --
such as moral indignation, repulsion from evil, judgment
of others -- have no room where unity is realised. When
you feel repulsion from evil, it is a sign that your
Higher Self is beginning to awaken, is seeing the dangers
of evil: he drags the body forcibly away from it. That is
the beginning of the conscious moral life. Hatred of evil
is better at that stage than indifference to evil. It is
a necessary stage. But repulsion cannot be felt when a
man has realised unity, when he sees God made manifest in
man. A man who knows unity cannot judge another. "I judge
no man," said the Christ. He cannot be repelled by
anyone. The sinner is himself, and how shall he be
repelled from himself? For him there is no "I" or "Thee,"
for we are one.
This is not a thing that many honestly wish for. It is
not a thing that many honestly desire. The man who has
realised unity knows no difference between himself and
the vilest wretch that walks the earth. He sees only the
God that walks in the sinner, and knows that the sin is
not in the God but in the sheath. The difference is only
there. He who has realised the inner greatness of the
Self never pronounces judgment upon another, knows that
other as himself, and he himself as that other -- that is
unity. We talk brotherhood, but how many of us really
practice it? And even that is not the thing the yogi aims
at. Greater than brotherhood are identity and realisation
of the Self as one. The Sixth Root Race will carry
brotherhood to the highest point. The Seventh Root Race
will know identity, will realise the unity of the human
race. To catch a glimpse of the beauty of that high
conception, the greatness of the unity in which "I" and
"mine," "you" and "yours" have vanished, in which we are
all one life, even to do that lifts the whole nature
towards divinity, and those who can even see that unity
is fair; they are the nearer to the realisation of the
Beauty that is God.
5-part series 'AN INTRODUCTION TO YOG' BY ANNIE BESANT concluded.
Jai Maharaj
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