The Knowledge of Reality by Henry T. Laurency
7. YOGA IN THE LIGHT OF ESOTERICS
7. YOGA IN THE LIGHT OF ESOTERICS
1The West is becoming better and better informed as to the political and social movements of India. But there is a lamentable ignorance as to the "spiritual" life of the Indians. It is only recently that yoga propaganda in the U.S.A. has influenced certain American psychologists to begin to wonder if they ought not to investigate whether the Indians really have an "enlightened spiritual life" that it could be worth studying.
2Most of what most people know about India is probably what they were taught at Sunday school, where children learn what Christian missionaries think about these heathens with their ignorance of life. It is obvious that they confuse yogis with fakirs, not suspecting the immense distance there is between these in respect of development.
3The so-called fakirs (actually an Arabic term for ascetic), who are all at or near the stage of barbarism, can be divided into two kinds, which could be termed illusionists and quietists respectively. The illusionists show their highly specialized psychological tricks (the cherished "rope trick", for instance), which are as a rule handed down within he family. The quietists are partly those who torture their organisms, partly those who try to "murder their souls" by killing all sense perceptions, feelings, and thoughts. They think that in this way they can attain nirvana, or extinction, by not producing any new karma, not desiring anything of life that could compel them to be reborn.
4The missionaries accuse the poor heathen of worshipping horrible idols in their temples, but forget that certain Christians worship the Virgin Mary and innumerable images of saints as well as ikons in their temples. They do not suspect that the Indian statues are highly "magnetized", as a result of which the emotional worshippers devoutly contemplating the symbols of various cosmic energies receive a longed-for physical etheric and emotional stimulation.
5In the West there is a very exclusive circle of scholars, "orientalists" and sanskritists who, like Max Muller, occupy themselves with translations and interpretations of Sanskrit literature. They are ignorant of the fact that this ancient literature is thoroughly symbolic and that this symbolism cannot be correctly interpreted even by the most learned Brahmins or yogis.
6What to the normal individual (most people) is the unknowable has nowhere more than in India been the object of such unending speculation. Nowhere more than there have thoughtful people been prepared to orient themselves in reality and seek solutions of the problems of the nature of existence and the meaning of life.
7India presents a spectrum of all existing religious and philosophic views. The majority are Brahmanists who, beside innumerable lesser deities, have the as yet unelucidated, totally misinterpreted symbols of the three aspects of existence: matter (Brahma), consciousness (Vishnu), and motion (Shiva).
8The dread of the Hindus is the "metempsychosis" of popular superstition, which millennia have engraved into them. Becoming now a cooli, now a cow, now a crocodile, now dwelling in a nut, as is believed, cannot have many attractions, especially not for a Brahmin. In all who have fallen victim to that fiction the desire of avoiding such a destiny at any cost will dominate in the end. And since destiny (karma) is the result of the individual's consciousness expressions, liberation from metempsychosis and extinction in nirvana can only be achieved by killing all kinds of consciousness expressions, especially through freeing oneself from all kinds of desire for anything in life.
9There are endless variations of this basic idea, from the most primitive conceptions of the lowest caste to the most elaborate and complicated logical speculative systems of the Brahmins. A view widely held is that anyone who has succeeded in being "born twice" into the Brahmin caste, has nirvana within reach.
10The inexhaustible, restless Indian speculation (principally in the Brahmin caste) that constantly has to elaborate comprehensive logical systems out of every vagary and constantly has to have new fictions to work on, is never content with a system that has been elucidated once and for all, but goes on weaving its fabric of the airiest abstractions. A Western logician would be amazed at the acuity of these conclusions. Which confirms that logic does not solve any problems of knowledge.
11A proof of Hermann Keyserling's understanding of Indian mentality is his correct observation that the ground of the failure of Buddhism in India was and will be the fact that it hinders, not to say, precludes, a continuing mania of speculation.
1The following is a comparison of the esoteric (hylozoic) conception of reality and that of the yoga philosophy. Such a comparison has proved increasingly necessary. The yogis who have tried to present yoga to the West, have lacked the knowledge of esoterics. And the Westerners who have treated of yoga have lacked the prerequisites of elucidating the pertaining problems.
2Two in particular of India's many philosophic systems have furnished the basis for the yogis to start from. One is the system of thought used by Patanjali when he wrote his Sutras, that is to say: sankhya. The other is that form of vedanta which was given its character by Shankara.
3Sankhya is a dualist system, as was vedanta before Shankara rehashed it.
4Sankhya starts from matter (prakriti) and consciousness (purusha), vedanta from matter (akasha) and energy (prana). Energy is absent in sankhya, consciousness in vedanta; these aspects are instead attributed to the individual, qualities being the closest correspondences.
5The three qualities (gunas) attributed to prakriti (sattva, rajas, tamas) are, according to esoterics, material energies of the three atomic kinds 45, 47, 49.
6Neither in the East nor in the West have the philosophers managed to solve the fundamental problem of existence: trinity, the three aspects of existence.
7The yoga philosophers who have studied European philosophy have stopped at Schopenhauer as the one most in agreement with their philosophy. And Schopenhauer himself started from the Upanishads. They quote his "space, time, and causality", but forget to mention his two fundamental "will and idea" (consciousness). Subjectivists that they all are, they have omitted the matter aspect.
8The form given to vedanta by Shankara after his treatment of it is called "advaita", though just as often the term vedanta is used incorrectly.
9Shankara discarded the matter aspect from vedanta, absolute subjectivism being the result. Advaita denies the existence of matter, denies that there is any reality outside us, that there is anything but the self, atman, nirvana. Everything else is just "name and form", the deception of the senses, delusive reality, illusion, maya. The individuals have no existence of their own, are deceptive emanations from, or reflections of, the cosmic self.
10One of the grounds of the yogis' misconception of reality is their ignorance of the three aspects of existence. Each material world is unlike all others because of differences in density of primordial atoms. The apprehension of reality thus must be different in the different worlds.
11In the main there are three totally different kinds of so-called theory of knowledge; that of Western ignorance of life, Indian illusionist philosophy (advaita), and hylozoics, respectively.
12The Western theory is either the usual agnostic or skeptical physicalism, which denies the existence of anything that cannot be ascertained by everybody, and regards consciousness as a quality of organic matter; or philosophic subjectivism, which attributes man's different kinds of consciousness to a fictitious "immaterial" or "spiritual" world of consciousness.
13The advaita philosophy makes the cardinal mistake of judging reality in one world from the apprehension of reality in another world, and therefore arrives at nothing but absurdities. The apprehension of reality in world 45, for example, is logically impossible to both 47- selves and 43-selves. The philosophers must learn to let "this be this" in every world.
14The illusionist philosophy can be explained psychologically thus: when matter disintegrates, the atoms involved into lower atomic kinds turn into the next higher kind. When the 45-atom is "split" it disintegrates into 44-atoms.
15Hylozoics maintains that every world is its own inevitable reality, just as real as is the reality of all other worlds to those who are in it. The three aspects of reality not only seem different, but are different, in the different worlds.
16Vedanta was intended as a reaction against physicalism and involved emphasizing the consciousness aspect, but therefore in its original form did not discard the matter aspect. This was the mistake (with advaita) that was made by the Shankara who lived in the 9th century A.D. The first Shankara appeared shortly after Buddha.
17Consciousness cannot exist without a material basis. The importance of the consciousness aspect increases with each higher material world and the importance of the matter aspect decreases. But it is a mistake to deny the absolute existence of the matter aspect and an even greater one to disregard its significance in the worlds of man. The illusionist philosophy of Shankara is a mental fiction in the world of emotional illusions.
18Esoterics explains how Shankara could arrive at his idea, baroque at it seems.
19There is only one consciousness: the cosmic total consciousness in which every primordial atom has an unlosable share, and all consciousness is both collective and individual. If the matter and motion aspects of existence are disregarded, the consciousness aspect will have a totally dominating importance. Then one only needs to think out the consequences of the following facts. The physical atom (49:1) contains 48 ever higher kinds of atoms and billions of primordial atoms. The physical atom belonging to involutionary matter already possesses actualized, passive consciousness and thus has as many points of consciousness as it has primordial atoms. The whole cosmos is one consciousness, to a large extent active, in any case activated.
20The speculation of advaita shows the omnipotence of imagination when it has succeeded in getting beyond the reach of logical control and avoided the fate of Ikaros of being exposed to all too palpable a contact with reality.
21It is characteristic of the Indian mentality that both sankhya and advaita seem to be able to thrive under the same roof. After using sankhya (the matter aspect) to explain the realities of existence, there is no obstacle to crowning the work by passing to the illusionist philosophy of advaita and losing oneself in the airiest abstractions. Should one for any reason be compelled to give a rational explanation of the annoying material realities, then one turns a somersault down into dualism again, obviously being able to repeat such acrobatic feats as often as one likes.
22It is this mental versatility and the vagueness of the fluid definitions that facilitate personal and subjective formulations of new systems of thought. There is no one established view, but every yoga saint has his own formulation of the common basic dogmas. This is why, as Vivekananda said, new sects are formed in India every year. For an outsider to criticize thus is a delicate matter, because whatever one says, it is always possible for the yoga philosophers to invoke some other authority.
23The sankhya philosophy is used by the yogi until he has "achieved self-realization" and in this become "one with god", become god. After that only advaita will do, it being regarded as omniscience's view on existence. It is a strange sort of omniscience that is ignorant of the existence of:
- 49 cosmic atomic worlds
- 42 molecular solar systemic worlds
- 6 ever higher natural kingdoms in the solar system (in worlds 43-49
- 6 ever higher divine kingdoms (in worlds 1-42)
- the solar systemic government
- the planetary government
- the planetary hierarchy
and which moreover is ignorant of:
- the three aspects of existence
- primordial matter
- involutionary matter
- evolutionary matter
- the human monad in the causal envelope
- reincarnation as distinct from metempsychosis, to mention only a few facts.
24The fundamental divergence of Pythagoras' hylozoics and Shankara's pantheism is that advaita assumes that consciousness can exist without a material basis, while according to hylozoics consciousness cannot have a separate existence independent of matter, but is always and necessarily bound up with matter.
25According to pantheism, life must be without a rational purpose. The universal soul separates from itself the individual soul, which after meaningless wandering about (metempsychosis) through the four natural kingdoms, finally succeeds in attaining nirvana, and is annihilated by being reabsorbed into an eternally immutable universal soul that works blindly and automatically without a purpose. It is understandable that self-consciousness as having no firm point for its own existence, must be assumed to merge with the primordial soul once it is freed from matter.
26According to hylozoics, the cosmos is composed of primordial atoms (monads) having potential consciousness, which are awakened to life in the process of manifestation and then, from the mineral kingdom through ever higher natural kingdoms in ever higher material worlds, acquire an increasingly greater share in the cosmic total consciousness, which is made up of the collective consciousness of all monads. The individual is thus eternally immortal, and the meaning of life is the development and expansion of individual consciousness into cosmic omniscience and omnipotence. Reversion from a higher to a lower natural kingdom is, of course, precluded.
27Every solar system, planet, world in a planet, makes up a consciousness collective in which every monad (primordial atom) has an unlosable share. The more the monad's conscious share in this increases, the greater its responsibility. The destiny of the solar system is the result of the activity of all monads. All affect all. Mankind, too, makes up a collectivity in the collective.
28From what has been said it should be clear that yoga is exoterics and not esoterics.
1The "rishis", the teachers of the temple schools of Atlantis, instructed the intellectual elite in the knowledge of reality.
2Those who derived real benefit from this instruction (causal beings considerably older than the rest of mankind) have long since passed the fifth natural kingdom.
3Of the rest, those who had understanding enough not to abuse the knowledge, have been given the opportunity to remember it anew in esoteric knowledge orders.
4Those who belonged to, or followed, the black priesthood, managed so to destroy the "mental principle" (the sense of reality of the organ of mental apprehension) that some fifty thousand years of incarnations have been required to "repair" it. Apparently, nor even that has been enough for many people. They go on idiotizing their reason.
5The fact that of all nations the Indians became the foremost preservers of the knowledge was due to the "manu" allowing the oldest Aryan race to form a caste of its own (the Brahmins) and the "bodhisattva" giving this caste enough knowledge to guard, observing all kinds of precautionary measures, so that it could occupy an especial position in "spiritual" respect.
6Spiritual centres with monasteries were founded all over India. The precautionary measures taken finally led to the situation that only the hierophants were able to interpret the "sacred writings" correctly, and they would die out before worthy successors could be found.
7What now remains of the original knowledge is by and large irremediable misrepresentation. But in spite of this, the esoterician has no difficulty in recognizing the lost knowledge in the fictions prevailing today. How ingrained and still ineradicably rooted in popular mentality these fictions are can be seen from the unsuccessful attempt of the bodhisattva (later buddha) to inculcate the priority and sovereignty of common sense. It is typical that the Brahmins still jealously guard what they believe to be the original doctrine.
8The yoga philosophy is the sum of Indian philosophy of life. In this respect it is incomparably superior to what other nations have achieved, also from the psychological point of view. You could call it the science of emotionality. It can be seen, however, that human reason, as Buddha demonstrated long ago, cannot solve the problems of existence, that man thrown upon his own resources cannot, at mankind's present stage of development, even raise the veil of Isis. No one can who has not acquired self-consciousness in his causal envelope, entered into the world of Platonic ideas.
9The Sanskrit terms that have been handed down from the time when the rishis taught in Atlantis, are still misunderstood. They cannot be interpreted correctly without esoteric knowledge. The yogis' explanations of manas, buddhi, nirvana, atma, are incorrect. They have not even been able to grasp correctly the import of reincarnation and karma.
10The writings of the rishis were originally written in Senzar and were later translated into Sanskrit. At all events, what remains of these often corrupt texts (Upanishads and Vedas) cannot possibly be understood by anybody but esotericians. The fact that the Sanskrit terms are misunderstood is evident even from the different meaning attributed to them in different yoga schools.
11The yogis call "manas" now the faculty of thought, now the power of the soul, now a function of antahkarana.
12They call "buddhi" now reason, now intuition, now ahamkara, now antahkarana.
13They call "atma" now the self, now the soul, now Brahman, now the absolute.
14One authority on yoga calls antahkarana "that inner instrument through which the subject recognizes the object by identification". "Antahkarana" stands between the self and the object".
15According to esoterics, antahkarana is the connecting link between the different envelopes and their different kinds of consciousness.
16Some further yoga quotations should be of interest in this connection:
17"The Soul, or antahkarana, has its power through uniting with the Self, or Atma, which is the same as Brahman, or the Absolute."
18"The Atma of the Hindus is the immutable Reality, the Great Witness, Consciousness itself."
19"Buddhi is that resolute state which decides that this is a tree and not a man."
20Some facts will now be given about the general conceptions: the worlds of the yogis, intuition, will, rebirth, karma, and the three most characteristic of Indian outlook: dharma, selfrealization, and samadhi.
1According to esoterics, those individuals who have attained the fifth natural kingdom and joined the planetary hierarchy, have at their disposal the four planetary atomic worlds, 46-49. Individuals of the fourth natural kingdom live in three atomic worlds (47-49) divided into five molecular worlds.
2Certain yoga schools speak of five cosmic worlds. Others are content with three worlds in the universe.
3Those who believe that there are five worlds in the cosmos also grant the self five envelopes or at least four, in case the fifth and highest be the all-embracing universal soul, Brahman. Some think that three are enough, and their definitions in their vagueness remind one of the body, soul, and spirit of the theologians.
4Certain authors on yoga refer to Patanjali and speak of the individual as having five different kinds of consciousness. But it is seen that the two highest kinds belong to the individuals of the fifth natural kingdom, for they correspond to the 46- and 45-self-consciousnesses.
5Such theoretical speculation is of no significance. What matters, however, is which worlds they can speak of from experience of their own. The yogis are able by their methods to acquire physical etheric and emotional sense (clairvoyance, or objective consciousness of material realities in these worlds). What goes beyond this belongs to the domains of guess-work. They have no possibility of acquiring objective consciousness in the mental and higher worlds.
6At best, the world that they call nirvana (in which they lose their consciousness), the common final goal for Brahmanists and Buddhists, corresponds approximately to what the esotericians call the causal world, or the world of Platonic ideas. But of this they are still ignorant.
1Intuition affords knowledge by demonstrating grounds and causes.
2Since intuition and will are powers that lie beyond the reach of human experience, it is obvious that without esoteric knowledge yogis can only have hazy notions as to what these terms mean, which is also evident from the vagueness of their definitions.
3Originally, by intuition was meant the deity's immediate and allround apprehension of reality and events. Plotinos, for instance, used that word to term the deity's absolute knowledge. With the yogis intuition as a rule is the result of quick perception of emotional vibrations, which always contain some kind of mental vibrations. Psychologists speak of instant survey, rapid synthetic function in a developed intellect. Often it is a matter of immediate understanding based on remembrance anew and recognition by the subconsciousness. Some mean the acquisition of ideas from some one of man's emotional or mental superconsciousnesses. Also impulses, inspiration, and revelation have been suggested. These, however, amount to conscious or unconscious influences from another individual. In ordinary usage the term intuition has been degraded through misuse to mean freak, vagary, all sorts of fancy.
4As for higher kinds of matter and worlds with their kinds of consciousness and energy, there are no terms covering these in everyday speech. Being unable to find new terms for new things, authors on esoterics have used words already existing in language which have been hopelessly idiotized by the "uninitiated". Even the Sanskrit terms used by Vyasa and Patanjali have proved unsuitable, especially because they have been misinterpreted by authorities on yoga and learned Brahmins. In order to remedy the prevalent confusion of ideas one ought to turn to the use of mathematical notation.
5This helplessness, however, has led to esoteric authors making intuition denote two quite different kinds of consciousness: causal consciousness (47:1-3) and essential consciousness (46:1-7).
6Mental consciousness was termed esoterically the "sixth sense" and intuition the "seventh sense".
7Mental consciousness has three main functions during incarnation. It enables the self to ascertain physical facts by using the so-called five senses of the organism. It works these facts up in the brain into comprehensible systems. It acts as an intermediary for the sub-and superconsciousness.
1Man has no knowledge of the will, its essence and the laws governing its management. But ignorance, of course, knows everything about this matter, and so that term has come to be used for anything that has to do with wish, intention, striving, ability of acting, etc.
2Originally, the will was the symbolic term of the motion aspect (the will aspect).
3Dynamis acts in two ways: indirectly in the matter aspect as the initial impulse for material energy, and directly through active consciousness.
4Will meant the ability of consciousness to let dynamis act through it. The higher the kind of consciousness, the greater the potential of dynamis. The highest consciousness is also the highest "power".
5In their apparently hopeless lack of terms esoteric authors have used "will" for the highest kind of consciousness in both the fifth and sixth natural kingdoms, thus for both 45- and 43- consciousness. This has not helped to increase clarity, nor to reduce the confusion of ideas.
6Physically, man's "will" is vitality and ability of activity; emotionally, attraction and repulsion; mentally, motive (usually motive for action) adhered to.
7That theological seed of dissension, man's "free" will, was due to ignorance of the fact that the "will" is "determined" by motives and that the strongest motive will win.
8Other problems concern the inability to put knowledge or intention into action before the necessary ability of action has been acquired, also the struggle between opposite kinds of wishes. Coue's saying that when "will" and imagination conflict, imagination will always win, was due to his failure to see that actually it is a question of different wishes, he calling the most suggestive one imagination.
1The most unhappy proof of the yogis' ignorance of reality is their belief in metempsychosis. They do not even know that reversion from a higher to a lower natural kingdom is precluded, that man cannot be reborn as an animal.
2The mightiest authority of the Ramakrishna yogis, next to the school founder himself, is Vivekananda. He maintained in all seriousness that his dog was an incarnation of a dead friend of his.
3It is high time that they abandoned this exceedingly compromising error and explained to their followers the fundamental difference between belief in metempsychosis, belonging to popular superstition, and the esoteric knowledge of reincarnation.
4This ignorance is the best proof that the yogis cannot study their previous incarnations and that none of them has been able to become a causal self. If anyone has succeeded in this, he has ceased to be a yogi. When the individual has acquired objective self-consciousness in his causal envelope, the envelope that is needed in order to pass from the animal to the human kingdom, he can study all the incarnations which this permanent envelope has lived through. The causal envelope cannot incarnate in an animal body.
5When passing from the human kingdom to the fifth natural kingdom, the monad in the causal envelope acquires a new envelope in this higher world (46) and thereby becomes an essential self, a 46-self.
6Because of the many misconceptions prevalent, one cannot state too explicitly that the causal envelope in the causal world is that envelope which makes the individual (monad, self) a man, that the causal envelope is man's "soul" in the same way as the submanifestal envelope in world 44 once will be the individual's "spirit". The phenomenon known as "obsession" is the result of someone else's emotional envelope trying to push out the emotional envelope of the rightful owner. It has nothing to do with reincarnation.
7The theosophists' exceedingly unhappy term "immortality" is to be explained in this connection. Those were called "immortal" who can never more lose their continuity of consciousness, neither when they incarnate nor when the solar system dissolves.
1The doctrine of karma (the law of sowing and reaping, the law of cause and effect) is, just as the doctrine of metempsychosis, common to most Indians. It was inevitable that both doctrines (originally esoteric) were distorted by ignorance, since man seems to have an incurable tendency to replace missing facts with speculation and to believe blindly, with seemingly incorrigible conceitedness, that his vagaries ignorant of life accord with reality.
2According to esoterics, the cosmos is a whole governed by law. The process of cosmic manifestation goes on in accordance with inflexible laws of matter and energy (laws of nature). The laws of life applying to the consciousness aspect also remain inflexibly valid. To speak of "suspending laws" is evidence of ignorance. You can free yourself from the effect of a lower kind of energy by a higher kind of energy, but you cannot suspend laws, which are expressive of powers that act unchangingly.
3Nobody can suspend the laws of life applying to consciousness development. But within his own little sphere of power every being possesses, according to law of freedom, a certain measure of freedom that can be abused.
4If man lives in accordance with the laws of life, his development will progress as rapidly as possible, without friction, harmoniously, with the highest possible degree of happiness. But every mistake as to the laws of life (known or unknown ones) entails consequences calculated eventually (the number of incarnations is up to him) to teach the individual to discover the laws and apply them rightly. If he has caused suffering to other beings, he must himself experience the same measure of suffering. This is the law of uncompromising justice, which no arbitrary grace can free him from.
5It is part of man's dharma that he must do all he can to reduce the suffering in the world, for all beings and in all circumstances. Those who refuse to help when they can, are guilty of an omission that has consequences and by no means the least ones.
6The Brahmins' conception of karma as being inevitable destiny, that you "stand in the way of karma" by trying to relieve suffering and distress, is evidence of a fatal ignorance of life. Nobody can "stand in the way" of a law. If anyone is to suffer, then no power in the world can prevent that. The suffering we have caused to others can be made good through voluntary "sacrifice" in future lives.
7The planetary hierarchy has expressly stated that no man can rightly understand the law of karma. But that does not mean that you should not try to understand it.
8The problems of life that the individual has to solve by himself in order to develop recur in life after life until they have been solved rightly. The law of self-realization is an inflexible law, which says that the individual must in all kingdoms, whether planetary or cosmic ones, acquire by himself all the qualities and abilities necessary to continue his development in the next higher kingdom.
1The rishis taught the purposefulness of existence, taught that the purpose of life is the evolution of everything and that the goal of life is cosmic perfection. Of what they taught, dharma is perhaps what has best preserved its original rational content or reality content.
2Although the law of destiny and dharma are not quite synonymous terms, it is easier to understand the matter if you regard karma as the law of reaping and dharma as the law of destiny. It is wrong to consider both as the same law, especially also in the fatalistic sense.
3Dharma is the inmost nature of every individual, that which constitutes his true being. Dharma is what is given in the interdependent arrangements of things. It is the dharma of fire to burn. It is the dharma of the tree to take root, to grow, to put out leaves, flowers, and fruit. It is the dharma of animals to live in accordance with their individual characters and their inherent instinct's striving to fulfil their mission. Dharma is the meaning of life for every individual.
4Man's dharma is different at different stages of development, in different circumstances of life. Everybody has his special dharma, his problems of life to solve, his duties to perform. Man lives in a state of insecurity and uncertainty when he is not acting at the best of his ability, in accordance with his dharma. The dharma of mankind is humanity.
5We are partly free, partly not free. We become free to the extent that we have acquired knowledge of the Law and the ability to apply that knowledge. The lower down the scale of development we are, the less free we are. We become free from the lower by being absorbed in the higher. We shall only become entirely free when we have attained the highest divinity. And this we shall do by discovering and applying the Law, more and more in ever higher worlds.
6We think we are free when we are acting in accordance with our individual characters. But as long as we lack a knowledge of the Law and the ability to apply it correctly, we shall make nothing but mistakes, which will lead us into the bondage of compulsion and obsession until we have seen our mistakes through experiencing them. We are unfree when we rebel against our destiny, our dharma, the meaning or our incarnation, when we act against unity, when we are ruled by the fictions and illusions of our ignorance of life and the pertaining conceptions of right and wrong, as long as our individual character has not absorbed in itself that Law which we have come to know, and is automatically and instinctively applying it.
7We do not achieve freedom through quietism, through omitting to act. No development will be brought about through inactivity, idleness, through begging the deity to do what it is our dharma to do. We free ourselves by acting, by taking a positive attitude to everything we meet with, by letting the divine powers act in us and through us, which they unfailingly will do as soon as we remove the obstacles to their reception.
8Life puts everyone if us in the place that is best for us, which by no means always is the one we think best. If we do not understand this, but regard self-assumed duties, or those that life lays on us, as a burden which we assume reluctantly and with a feeling of constraint, then we do not understand life and we lack the right positive attitude. If we have difficulty in accepting that we are overqualified for the work that life has allotted to us, that our capacity is not duly appreciated, that we are to go through life as seemingly insignificant nonentities, this only shows that we need to be freed from many qualities which, although perhaps desirable on lower levels, are most unsuitable on higher ones. Many necessary qualities we acquire in subordinate, insignificant positions and under trying conditions. We shall make an entirely different, a more useful contribution, if we have learned to allow the competence we have acquired to be a willing tool where destiny has placed us, if we have learned to accept being seeming nonentities, just tools. Honour and distinctions, like power and wealth, have unexpected possibilities of affecting the vibrations in our lower emotional molecular kinds, the regions of illusions and false values. By being willing tools of higher powers we acquire the prerequisites of becoming tools of still higher ones.
9We do not see our real constraint. The one we do see we can also free ourselves from. An important condition of becoming free is that we live in the feeling of being free and happy, and this depends on our attitude to life. The whole of life changes for anyone who makes it clear to himself that the ordinary, the negative, attitude in perverse, that the meaning of life is happiness, that everything is intended for everybody's best, that a positive view of life is what most quickly will take us forward and upward. Everything that is negative, all constraint, has an inhibitory, debilitating effect, makes work arduous and unpleasant. Duty's slaves fail because of their constraint, their virtues, and the moral tyranny of responsibility. The yogi lets the divine powers act through him and thereby becomes free from responsibility for the outcome.
1The yogic fiction of "self-realization" is a typical example how the esoteric concepts have gradually lost their meaning. The corresponding in general usage is seen when the uneducated use a word they have heard and imagine they understand. After a generation or so it is often only the philologists who know what the word really means.
2In Western books on yoga one can read that the yogi's aim is to "achieve self-realization". If an explanation of this expression is given, it is as vague as it is misleading. Sometimes one will hear Westerners explain that to the yogis self-realization means that they have acquired selfconfidence, freedom from fear and anxiety, noble indifference to whatever may happen (the opposite of the "it doesn't matter" of life ignorance), independence of their own desires. In thinking this these authors have evidently confused means and ends.
3The yogis consider that they have "achieved self-realization" when they have realized the Self, by which they mean that they are absorbed into the cosmic Self, the universal Soul, Brahman, the Absolute. They believe that this becomes possible when they have become "pure spirit" through liberating themselves from everything material.
4"Atman is identical with Brahman, is in man the individualized Brahman, which through the delusion of the senses has lost the contact with its origin. Through yoga, God (Brahman), lost in individuation and incarnated, finds the way back to itself."
5"Yoga tries methodically to unite man (atman) with his true being (brahman)."
6Common to all Indian superphysical speculation is the belief that development has reached its final goal with man, that man is the final product of "creative evolution", that man's supreme task is to attain the stage of divinity.
7The yogis believe that man can become god and that all their great spiritual leaders have done so. Their religious history is the story of all the men who have become gods. Their mythology, as well, is teeming with them.
8Of course, those who believe that the gods have independent existence and are not absorbed into the universal soul hold different views about the ranking of the different gods, and about which spheres constitute their dwellings.
1According to authorities on yoga, the term samadhi can most simply be translated as the individual's superconsciousness. According to them, samadhi is a state of trance in which the individual becomes pure spirit, god, Brahman, or the Absolute.
2There are different kinds of samadhi differently defined by the different yoga schools.
3Patanjali's different kinds of samadhi have been divided into two main kinds: conscious and unconscious samadhi. In the conscious states one distinguishes different kinds of study objects for meditation. In the unconscious state the individual is supposed to lose himself in the superconscious and become "pure spirit".
4Others consider that in unconscious samadhi the individual loses his continuity of consciousness and when he awakes again remembers nothing of what has happened, but usually experiences a feeling of ineffable bliss.
5Of course, what goes on under the cover of the unconscious and thus the unknowable has been made the object of much speculation. The view generally held seems to be that in this state the "soul" is active while the "body" rests.
6Some maintain that the state of trance called samadhi by the yogis is produced when the man absorbed in the most profound contemplation succeeds in concentrating his consciousness on one single point, so that his waking consciousness vanishes. Then, as the problem that was the object of meditational analysis is gradually freed of all unessentials and thus is isolated as an idea, its up to then symbolic significance is revealed. And this is supposed to depend on the self's contact with the idea in the world of ideas. The strain is supposedly so great that the self loses contact with the brain, trance being the result.
7States of trance, which physiologically are more akin to "magnetic sleep", have also been found, a cataleptic state in which the activity of motor, sensory, and vegetative organs, as well as respiration and pulse are reduced to a minimum. In this state the individual does not remember what happened after he lost waking consciousness.
8Like so much else in Patanjali, several of the kinds of samadhi at which he hinted are still esoteric and have been helplessly misinterpreted by the yogis. Some of them do not even apply to man but to individuals of the fifth natural kingdom. As an example of misinterpretation it may suffice to point out that the state mentioned in Book 1, Sutra 16 can be attained by the self in the three highest systemic worlds (43-45) only.
9The superconscious state in samadhi is not one single state or one the same for everyone. There is a long series of superconsciousnesses that have to be mastered progressively throughout all the continued evolution, namely the different kinds of passive consciousness in the molecular kinds and atomic kinds not yet activated by the self.
10Therefore, samadhi is the common term for many different kinds of states of consciousness. Its original meaning has been lost, even to the most advanced yoga philosophers, and cannot be defined except by causal selves and still higher selves.
11True samadhi requires in the first place the ability to centre the monad—the self in the inmost crown chakra. In genuine samadhi the organism is fully active, directed by the lowest triad, while the monad, centred in one of the three units of the second triad, is active elsewhere, possibly in one of the three worlds of this triad.
12Ordinary sleep is obtained when the emotional envelope, together with higher envelopes, leaves the organism and its etheric envelope. Technically, samadhi is the method of being able to do this at any time whatever.
1The three oldest yoga methods are hatha, bhakti, and raja yoga. Hatha yoga is some fifteen million years old, bhakti yoga some four million years, and raja yoga some fifty thousand years old.
2Hatha yoga was the method of the Lemurians, bhakti that of the Atlanteans, and raja that of the Aryans. Hatha was intended to perfect the organism, bhakti to develop emotional consciousness, and raja mental consciousness. The planetary hierarchy has elaborated a new method, agni yoga, which is still esoteric but is intended to be permitted to become exoteric when conditions permit (assuredly not for another hundred years). This yoga is intended to develop causal consciousness. The agni yoga of the Russian woman Roerich is not the real one.
3The Indians are, as we know, uninterested in chronology. The dates that they have lately begun to use have largely been taken over from Western historiography and archaeology with their entirely faulty dating, obviously of old influenced by the Jewish chronology, according to which the world was created in the year 4004 B.C.
4The originator of the raja yoga philosophy is said to have been Patanjali. A modern authority on yoga considers that he lived about 150 B.C. That would be long after Buddha, who was born in 643 B.C. In actual fact, Patanjali lived some nine thousand years before our era, the starting point of which is what is thought to be the year of Jeshu's birth.
5In a booklet containing 192 aphorisms in four sections, Patanjali records what until then had been imparted orally to initiates of the esoteric knowledge order instituted by Vyasa some 35,000 years earlier. The presentation was based on the exoteric sankhya philosophy, which the planetary hierarchy had elaborated long before for the then elite of the temple schools of Atlantis.
6There is much in Patanjali that is still misunderstood by the yoga philosophers. Esoteric knowledge susceptible of abuse has to be reserved for those who have renounced the desire of anything for themselves for all incarnations to come and consecrated their lives to the service of evolution. The motive for their own development is to be able to become more and more competent for this service of life. That esoteric knowledge, which since 1875 to an ever greater extent has been given to the eternal seekers, is so arranged that abuse has been forestalled as far as possible. It provides a general knowledge of existence, reality, and life, intended to free people from prevalent emotional illusoriness and mental fictitiousness.
7The best known yoga methods, to be discussed later, are far from being the only ones. More and more yogas are subdivided into special branches, and there is no discernible limit for further subdivision. Many are not known at all in the West, or known only fragmentarily, for example, mantra, laya, shakti, yantra, dhyana, and kundalini yoga. It calls for a special familiarity with the Indian mentality to be able to understand the import of these methods.
8Mantra yoga was originally based on the esoteric knowledge of the effect of sound. Most mantras (combinations of words) have become worthless now that the knowledge of correct intonation has been lost, fortunately for mankind. According to esoterics, sound and energy are synonymous concepts in higher worlds. This is why the supreme power was called the Logos (the word) and the courses of power of the planets and the sun were called the "harmony of the spheres". Nowadays the mantra yogis are occupied mostly with ritual, temple dance, and art.
9Of the other yogas enumerated, laya yoga is concerned with the vitalization of the chakras of the physical etheric envelope, and kundalini yoga with experiments in awakening the energy of the basal centre. Many authorities on yoga confuse this energy with that originating from the sacral chakra. The pertaining methods have claimed countless victims ("fools rush in where angels fear to tread") despite energetic warnings against "playing with fire".
1The popular name of "yogi" given to all Indians who study Sanskrit and Indian philosophy is misleading.
2The yogis can be divided on many different grounds. The usual division is: hatha, raja, gnana, bhakti, and karma yogis. But this is misleading because many practise one system after another until they have gone through them all. Others specialize in one system.
3They can be divided according to their chief motive, the purpose of their exercises or meditations. Some seek to attain that they call the divine stage. Others strive after power over nature, seeking to become magicians.
4As a rule, the hatha yogis are considered to belong to those who wish to become magicians. The raja yogis regard neither them nor those who teach hatha and raja as real yogis.
5One ought to be clear about the fact that also the yogis are at different stages of development and that, especially where the raja yogis are concerned, there are many developmental levels within each stage.
6A certain class of raja yogis those are who belong to the so-called Ramakrishna Mission, those best known in the West and particularly in the U.S.A. More about this in the next chapter.
7In addition to the known yogis there are also those who are unknown even to the Indians; who teach their systems to a select few under the strictest vow of secrecy. There is no prospect of anyone, least of all Western "barbarians", of making contact with these.
8Besides, yoga is not for Westerners. They run the risk of being caricatures.
1Ramakrishna (who died in 1886) has come to occupy such a position of authority as an exponent of Indian yoga, thanks to his disciples' missionary work in the West, that his conception of life deserves to be treated in a separate chapter.
2Ramakrishna imparted to his many disciples his own personal life view, his own interpretation of the "sacred writings", his own experiences of the different yoga methods. He did away with the prevailing secrecy and encouraged his disciples to spread his teachings to all nations.
3In his disciples' eyes Ramakrishna was an incarnation of the supreme being. They even accorded to him the honorary title of Bhagavan (=The Lord of the World). That title has not been granted even to Buddha or to Maitreya.
4Subjectively (from the consciousness aspect), he was in many respects further advanced than most Christian mystics have been. Many raja yogis are distinguished by the fact that their mental consciousness has acquired the ability to employ mental energies of which the Westerners know nothing and which the yogi's disciples believe to be part of cosmic omniscience and omnipotence.
5Objectively (from the matter aspect), Ramakrishna was entirely uninterested in such phenomena. He considered that the magic powers of the hatha yogis detain the individual in the physical and become obstacles to his consciousness development. He believed that the quickest way for man to reach the stage of divinity is to concentrate wholly and solely on consciousness. He started from the assumption that it is by mastering his "soul force" that man can "realize his divinity". The physical etheric and emotional objective consciousness (clairvoyance) that he acquired came quite automatically.
6Ramakrishna attained the highest emotional attractional stage and made contact with the essential world. (46). But he never became a causal self. To be able to enter into and apprehend the essential world presupposes the highest causal objective consciousness. Nobody can "skip" any world in his development. Each world is intended to make it possible to acquire abilities that are necessary to further evolution. "Nature never makes a leap". Seemingly rapid development is in fact reacquisition of a level of development previously attained, and in such cases it is not the superconscious but the subconscious that is the correct explanatory ground.
7The yogi belief that the individual enters samadhi a fool and comes out a wise man, enters a man and comes out a god, is thus incorrect.
8That state of Ramakrishna, which his disciples called samadhi, was his ability, acquired through practice, of leaving his organism with its etheric envelope at will and moving freely in the many different regions of the emotional world. It even went so far that often he had difficulty in staying in his organism. His emotional envelope would spontaneously slip out in sheer distraction.
9As has already been pointed out, there is no possibility for the individual at that stage of development to judge correctly what he sees in the emotional world. It is an esoteric axiom that "no self-tutored seer ever saw correctly". And Ramakrishna was self-tutored. He thought that he was able to explore and judge everything himself. He also rejected an offer from a 45-self to be permitted to study the esoteric knowledge.
10In the highest regions of the emotional world man leads an imaginative life of tremendous intensity, thus it is understandable that the individual can think that he is omniscient and omnipotent, that "his soul has completely identified itself with Brahman". The yogi who has reached the highest stage of samadhi in the emotional world will then say of himself in good faith: "I am Brahman".
11What imagination will take for reality in this state liberated from all criteria of reality, is to be witnessed from the following account by Ramakrishna.
12"One day I felt that my spirit fled to the heights of samadhi on a path of radiant light. It soon left the world of the stars behind it and reached the subtler regions of ideas. When I ascended even higher, I saw on both sides of the path the shapes of the gods and goddesses. My spirit reached the uttermost bounds of this clime, the radiant barrier that separated the sphere of relative existence from the sphere of the absolute. It surmounted this barrier and entered the transcendental realm where no corporeal being was visible. Not even the gods dared to cast a glance in there, but were content to dwell far below. But a moment later I found there seven venerable sages who sat absorbed in samadhi ... "All of it a picture from the highest spheres of the emotional world!
13Ramakrishna's emotional excursion reminds one of the "revelations from the spiritual world" of both Swedenborg and Steiner. They all were sensible, highly intellectual, broadly oriented, acute minds. They, and innumerable other emotional clairvoyants, are confirmations of the esoteric axiom saying that without causal objective consciousness there is no possibility of correctly judging the phenomena of the emotional world. All must inevitably fall victims to the emotional illusions and fictions of this world.
14After the example given of Ramakrishna's "omniscience", another can be given of his "omnipotence". He suffered from cancer of the throat. A "great yogi" who came to see him asked why he did not cure himself as other raja yogis did. Ramakrishna replied: "That is a power I have never asked my divine mother (Kali) for".
15There is no question that Ramakrishna's message is superior to anything the West has produced in religious psychology. One can call it a summing-up of several thousand years of Indian wisdom of life. But it is not esoterics. The yogis are mistaken when believing that they can interpret what in the Upanishads is esoteric. What is esoteric does not cease to be esoteric because it has been published. The symbolic language of the rishis is still undeciphered.
1The Westerners explore the matter aspect of existence in the physical world. The yogis have explored the consciousness aspect in the physical and emotional worlds and that is what gives them their enormous superiority in "psychological" respect.
2Yoga can be most simply defined as the striving to activate physical, emotional, and mental consciousness. The existing methods of activation are the results of thousands of years of experimentation by devoted explorers of the consciousness aspect as far as it can be ascertained in the human consciousness. The following presentation of the different yoga methods is mainly based on the accounts of yogis themselves and is in accordance with prevalent views. It should be obvious that these methods are not immediately suitable for Westerners. But Western psychological research has a lot to learn from them and has a long way to go before it will be able to assimilate the essentials of these methods of activating consciousness. Also the mystics have a lot to learn, because no Western mysticism has provided such material for meditation for those who believe that they have found in devotion the way to merge with the unity of life.
3At mankind's present stage of development, man has no possibility of acquiring knowledge of any reality but the physical. Proofs of this are even the most advanced yoga philosophers. But with their objective experience of the etheric and emotional worlds and especially their subjective understanding of the consciousness aspect in the human worlds, they have an incomparably more correct conception of these realities than have Western theology, philosophy, and psychology.
4India's "spiritual" superiority hitherto will have come to an end within a hundred years or so, and it will be the turn of the so-called Westerners to teach the "Easterners" about the consciousness aspect also. "Ex oriente lux" (the light comes from the East) will always be valid, because to the people of the East the West will be East.
5When Western philosophers and psychologists at last will have acquired the "wisdom of the East", the scientific methods they have elaborated will prove their greater reality value (importance for the conception of reality). We are approaching an age when so many Westerners will acquire causal consciousness that our part of the world will be freed from most of the old emotional illusions and mental fictions. Then they will also see the untenability of the yoga fictions. As for India, progress will be slow, because it will prove considerably more difficult to discard inherited mental attitudes and the adherence to traditional, in many respect common, dogmas. Hitherto the West has had no world view or life view to stick to, as the Indians have had for thousands of years. Thus the West is more open to the message of the planetary hierarchy.
6Esoterics will discard the prevailing views in religion, philosophy, and science, in legal and financial systems. No "super-state" will be needed when all nations accept the Law as their guiding principle. The reappearance of Christos in physical shape will signify that the planetary hierarchy is resuming the spiritual leadership from which it was expelled in Atlantis. Sufficiently many people will by then have acquired common sense and realized the untenability of the prevailing idiologies.
7By their methods of activation the yogis succeed in mastering both emotional and mental waking consciousness. It is this power of mastering that they call "will", which is thus the ability of consciousness partly of activity in general, partly of affecting matter in its envelopes. Those who master their mental consciousness have acquired "mental will", in which the motive is the element of will in mental activity. The higher the molecular kind, the higher the kind of consciousness, the stronger the effect of dynamis, and the stronger the "will".
8What is called "cultivation of the will" implies partly acquiring self-confidence and selfdetermination, based on an elaborated and integrated life view and world view, partly conscious control of emotional and mental consciousness.
9The yogis wish to achieve "liberation". This expression can term a diversity of things: liberation from fear, anxiety, and uncertainty, from rebirth and, where the highest kind of yogis are concerned, liberation from the self's dependence on its envelopes of incarnation with their illusions and fictions. The self's good resolutions arouse only decided opposition in the self's envelopes with their rooted habits and tendencies inherited from many incarnations, amplified by the vibrations of public opinion flowing through the envelopes en masse. Liberation begins when the self realizes that its envelopes are not it, that the envelopes by their habits organized into "nature" counteract the self's insights newly gained. (The new emotional and mental envelopes are not altogether new. Constant vibrations — "habits, tendencies" — in the envelopes retain atoms — "skandhas" — around the first triad that accompany it in a new incarnation.)
10Esoterically, the self's evolution is a continuous process of identification and liberation. The child grows out of its toys as soon as it gets other interests. By having experiences and working these up in life after life, man learns to explore and master one domain of reality after the other in physical, emotional, and mental respect. When he has developed as far as to begin to care for the meaning and goal of life and so acquires knowledge of this, his life eventually takes on another direction, a conscious striving after development in respect of consciousness. In India then one will be a yogi.
11Yoga is typical of the one-pointed determination of those who have set about working on self-realization. By their methods they hasten their personal development to a considerable degree. Of course it depends on the level of development attained how soon the individual will reach higher stages. Nobody can omit any stage of development, since each stage is necessary to acquire the qualities requisite to attain the next higher stage and the pertaining understanding of life.
12There are risks involved in popularization of domains of knowledge methodically and systematically explored. When ordinary injudiciousness is given a superficial orientation and thus a vague notion of what the matter is about, it at once thinks itself able to comprehend, understand, and judge. This has of course been true of Indian yoga and everything esoteric. It has also been seen in the writers who have dealt with these matters without having the requisite insight. By their popularization they have managed to idiotize the whole thing into an irremediable misconception that is spreading in ever wider circles. The difficulty lies in finding a middle way between unduly superficial and unduly expert approaches, so that people will have an idea of the subject, yet see that they know too little to be able to judge or to express an opinion.
13The yoga methods can be divided into physical, emotional, and mental ones.
14In the following, the oldest and best known methods of activation will be discussed: hatha and raja yoga, gnana, bhakti, and karma yoga.
15Hatha yoga is the pronouncedly physical method, bhakti the emotional, and raja and gnana yoga the mental methods. Karma yoga (the yoga of action), once it becomes rightly understood in India, will make the individual forget his comical insignificance, his own "development", etc., and live exclusively to serve evolution. In so doing, all the requisite qualities and abilities are developed automatically and in the most rapid way. To live for one's development strengthens illusoriness.
1The most characteristic of hatha yoga is that it aims more at the matter aspect than at the consciousness aspect of existence and that it is interested in the physical only. Consciousness is regarded as a means of mastering the organism with its etheric energies.
2Many yogis practise hatha beside raja in order to give their organisms the greatest possible vigour and thus practise raja yoga more effectively. These, however, are not counted among the hatha yogis proper, whose aim is the control of physical matter (magic).
3Here it may be pointed out that the yogis' expression "suspend the laws of nature" is misleading. No law of nature (expressive of energies that act immutably and constantly) can ever be "suspended". The stronger propulsive force of the aeroplane temporarily suspends the effect of the earth's attraction but not the very law of gravity.
4The hatha yoga method includes breathing exercises to acquire control of the functions of the sympathetic nervous system (which subsequently require constant supervision) as well as of the muscles and organs of the organism. This kind of yoga has proved catastrophic to Westerners with their quite different physiological and psychological conditions.
5The raja yogis are entirely correct in pointing out that the hatha yogis not only neglect their emotional and mental development, but also end up in into a cul-de-sac, more and more being the victims of their emotional illusion that the physical is something worth striving for in itself. Man's goal is to acquire consciousness in his causal envelope. With that also comes mastery of the matter in man's worlds.
6The hatha yogi affects consciousness indirectly through his organism. The raja yogi starts directly from consciousness.
7The hatha yogi achieves mastery of consciousness by learning to control the vibrations in his physical body. Methodically, step by step, he grasps control of one after the other of the different body functions. Of course, he looks after his body rationally in all respects, adhering to a strict vegetarian diet, being careful about cleanliness and sleep. Much water is used both inside and out.
8First the body is trained so that the yogi can dominate all the muscles of the body, influence the circulation of the blood, reduce the perception of the body, etc. This is done partly by assuming a number of different sitting-postures, partly by forcing the body, even the eyes, to be absolutely still; in which not even involuntary movements, such as a wink of the eye, are allowed. Restlessness of the eye is considered to be quite enough to cause restlessness of the mind. Even the most ordinary fakir will have trained himself so as to be entirely insensitive to physical pain and unmoved by emotional suffering.
9Every movement, every expression of consciousness, uses up power. We are practically never still, neither physically nor emotionally nor mentally. By preventing this immense waste of energy the yogi accumulates stores of energy that he can use in manifold ways, not least of which is to arouse latent germs of abilities and to develop powers unknown to the normal individual.
10Egyptian statues show the sitting-posture that is best for Westerners wishing to profit by what to them is valuable in yoga: back free and straight, chest elevated, palms of the hands placed on the knees, elbows drawn back, heels together, toes turned outward. A healthful preparatory exercise is to assume as comfortable a sitting-posture as possible and remain thus for, say, half an hour every day. Attention is employed to check that everything remains motionless. You can think the word "calm" slowly until you feel calm spreading through your body and feels yourself unaffected by all impressions.
11In vibrational respect, everything consists of vibrations. The whole of life is built up of different kinds of rhythm. Everything in nature has its own rate of vibration. The yogi applies this insight to the organs and functions of his body, to his thoughts, feelings, and other manifestations of life. The yogi learns to control things by discovering their rhythms. In this he sets out from breathing, which has been made a science in its own right. By breathing exercises the yogi brings the sympathetic nervous system under the control of attention, gradually extending his control to the processes in other organs and nerves, including those functioning automatically. Their functioning will subsequently depend on attention, it being impossible to revert to automatic activity. He describes this, according to his particular view, that through the prana that is in the breath one can learn to control prana generally (the universal energy of everything) and thereby control akasha ("primordial matter") and all other matter.
12The following remarks on breathing should interest Westerners. Scarcely one per cent breathe completely naturally. The rhythm has been lost.
13The muscle at the base of the lungs (the diaphragm) ought to be drawn upward in inhaling, yet with most people this muscle is inactive. Many people press it down, thereby further compressing organs that are already too squeezed. In right inhalation the whole chest is raised and with it all the internal organs, in which the digestive organs are also exercised, which is badly needed.
14Normally we take 16-18 breaths per minute, the pulse beats being four times as many. At ten breaths per minute, the brain is clear and brain work becomes easier. At three breaths, all the vibrations of the body are harmonized. The yogi reduces his respiration to one breath per minute, which makes intense concentration possible.
15It is easy to ascertain the effect of breathing in various respects. Martial music, the colour red, etc., quicken breathing. After a spell of quick breathing (about 26 breaths per minute) the feeling of pain is reduced. When breathing slowly (10 breaths per minute) one cannot become agitated, irritated, or nervous.
16Nobody ought to embark on any kind of breathing exercises except under the guidance of a really competent teacher. The least mistake in an extremely complicated technique can be fatal, to which fact countless victims in India and elsewhere bear witness. It is, besides, true of all yoga training that no one who is not perfectly healthy in all respects should set about it. The strain is enormous (a play with unknown forces) and those with a poor physique or weak nerves will soon be unfit for life.
1Raja yoga is concerned with the consciousness aspect of existence, in its esoteric part extending far beyond consciousness in the human worlds. There would be a certain justification for calling it the "science of attention".
2As is the case with everything concerning consciousness and its development, it is up to the individual to find his own method. He can study the methods of others in order to orient himself, but he must work out his own method according to his individual character, his abilities previously acquired on his level of development. The need for this seldom arises before the individual is rapidly approaching the stage of culture.
3Raja yoga involves an activation of consciousness systematically practised in a continuing process of thought. The results normally obtained are: control of consciousness, selfdetermination, acquisition of a personality, ennoblement of emotionality up to the stage of the saint.
4The mental process itself has been divided into four stages: concentration, meditation, contemplation, and illumination. The fourth stage can be said to border on the esoteric methods, but there is a risk that the achievement of illumination will not mean increased knowledge of reality, only the finding of a misinterpreted symbol.
5Control of consciousness is acquired through the attentive supervision of the content of consciousness.
6Ordinary untrained man lives in a consciousness chaos of sense impressions, feelings, thoughts, desires, wishes, moods, expressions of the will. Most of the content of this chaos flows from the store of memory, which has acquired all the illusions and fictions that the individual has been fed with. This chaos of uncontrolled consciousness implies an enormous waste of physical, emotional, and mental energy.
7The yogi has reached that stage of development where he sees how senseless, irrational such "inner life" is. He has been able to ascertain that the bulk of human suffering is due to the uncontrolled feeling and thinking of imagination. The need for control of consciousness is aroused in him and also the wish to decide himself what is to be in his consciousness, what molecular kinds and vibrations are to be in his envelopes.
8Control of consciousness begins with paying attention to the content of consciousness. Attention follows the whole play of associations, relaxedly and impersonally, until one day this supervision becomes automatic and the wandering of consciousness has ceased. He can keep his attention on whatever he wishes for as long as he himself decides and finally will be able to decide what he will perceive, see, hear, feel, think. Like the Spartan he becomes insensitive to physical pain, like the stoic he is unmoved by any matter for grief in life, by any attack from hatred and moralism. Using analysis he eliminates all complexes useless in life that lie in his subconsciousness, and form those that promote life, that make possible automatic reactions of the kinds he will decide himself. He transforms himself into the ideal he has set up for himself.
9Concentration is the keeping of attention on a certain thing. Meditation implies a concentrated analysis of all relations pertaining to this subject-matter. Contemplation entails the isolation of the problem until one begins to see the idea and can concentrate attention on that single point. If thereby activity ceases, there is a risk of falling asleep or into ordinary trance. If activity can be kept up long enough, illumination comes and the individual will find what he has been seeking.
10Meditation is necessary to transform the subconsciousness and integrate the envelopes; contemplation, to activate passive consciousness in superconscious molecular kinds and for selfconsciousness to incorporate these into the consciousness capacity.
11By the raja yoga method the vibrational capacity of the different molecular kinds ? conscious or superconscious ? of the different envelopes is increased, and higher emotional and mental abilities are acquired.
12The activation of consciousness in the higher emotional molecular kinds is brought about in the most natural and least dangerous way through meditating on all noble qualities by being affected in his turn by the vibrations of the higher emotional molecular kinds. When selfconsciousness can sustain itself in these consciousnesses, it automatically acquires the ability of the attractive urge and discards all kinds of manifestations of hatred of the repulsive urge which hitherto have dominated emotional life. When the self can maintain itself in the highest emotional consciousness (48:2), the individual is what Christian mysticism calls a saint.
1Gnana yoga aims at activating mental consciousness. One could call the gnana yogi an Indian psychologist and philosopher in one man. Being a yogi, however, does not mean that the method has produced the result desired or that one has solved the pertaining problems. For any real success it is, at all events, necessary that the yogi previously has attained the higher emotional stage (48:2) through raja yoga, whereby he will automatically have passed to the higher mental stage (47:5).
2At this stage the individual is approaching the end of his sojourn in the human kingdom. In lives past he has seen through mankind's emotional illusions and been able to see how its mental fictions have been discarded as on a conveyor belt. The hypotheses which, esoteric facts lacking, he still has to be content with, are the crutches on which he drags himself forward. He is clearly awake to mankind's enormous ignorance as to life. His innate subconscious "instinct" has helped him discard most of what people believe they know.
3But without esoteric facts not even the yogi can rid himself of the fictions that have become "axioms" in Indian thought. These "axioms" include metempsychosis, a faulty conception of karma, man as being the final product of evolution, and man being able to become god.
4His ability of perspective consciousness allows him to incorporate into his mental system the other speculative systems in a higher synthesis, but that is not enough for him to attain the system thinking obtained in concretizing the causal ideas.
5The gnana yogi often begins by learning to distinguish between "self and not-self". German philosopher Fichte used that expression to subjectivize the contrariety of consciousness and the external world. The construction of the yogi refers to the contrariety of the self and its envelopes, properly of the self and sense perceptions, feelings, thoughts. He will emphasize that his sense perceptions are not his self, that his feelings are not his true being, that his thoughts, though being his highest kind of consciousness, are not his self, but that the self is that which can observe and make use of these consciousnesses.
6Since the yogi's goal is always the "Absolute", he uses every possible way of attaining this. He can let his feeling of self gradually embrace more and more: family, relatives, caste, nation, mankind, all the cosmos. Thereby he reaches a state where he thinks he is identical with Brahman. The bhakti yogi also uses a similar method. But whereas the bhakta follows the path of ecstasy, the gnana yogi often makes use of a fictional system.
7Typical of the Indian is his instinctive trust in life. As with the mystic, truth is a state in which he is convinced that he knows without being able to explain how or why he knows. To the gnani knowing becomes the same as being. But symbolic terms like these become comprehensible only at the stage of the 45-self.
8The gnani orients himself to the "Absolute", which he thinks he will attain by freeing himself from all attributes of the matter aspect (form, time, space, causality, etc.) through supreme contemplation. If he succeeds in this, he ends in a state in which his "emancipated" imagination is omnipotence and makes him pure spirit, Brahman, the Absolute, whatever he wishes.
9In all the 49 atomic worlds of the cosmos there are space, time, matter, energy, consciousness, conformity to law. But these are totally different in the different worlds, so that the newcomer into a higher world thinks that they are absent until he has learned to comprehend the entirely new ways in which they exist and act. The esoterician has to learn not to use the views he brings with him, not to envisage things in beforehand, since this makes it impossible to acquire the correct perception.
10The accounts of yogis show that they have not been in contact with reality, but have lived entirely in their subjective consciousness.
11As a conclusion the yogis themselves are to speak and put their view forward. Theirs is a language that the mystic will also understand.
12It is unity that is reality, that is power, harmony, concerted activity. Outside unity power is split and counteracts itself through self-deception and self-assertion in all its innumerable forms of self. When the self ceases to be a part of unity, it comes into opposition to unity and asserts itself at the expense of unity, and ruins itself.
13The union of individual consciousness with the consciousness of unity goes on gradually through the expansion of the self to embrace more and more. The yogi witnesses a process in which the individual assimilates the universal into himself. Separateness ceases for anyone who enters into unity, and all opposition between me and you, the self and the not-self, the self and that, ceases. The gnani abandons all wishes for himself, all thoughts that would lead to separateness, and forgets himself as an individual. He frees himself from dogmas and traditional views. He remains untouched by joy and pain, happiness and suffering, good and evil, life and death. All personal conditions that have any element of self-centredness or ownership are annihilated.
14Before this, he will have acquired the qualities that he has considered desirable, by taking them one by one, viewing all aspects of them in every conceivable connection, in imagination continually experiencing their perfection, until they have taken shape in his consciousness, become expressive of his nature, decisive factors in subconscious complexes, quite simply are there and spontaneously make themselves felt as dominant factors in his active life without his further attention to them.
15You cannot become what you are not. For the yogi, self-realization is a methodical striving to make his divine possibilities realities. But he does this as a sacrifice to the deity, as an expression of the divine wisdom, as a sign that the divine will has been made to act in him. There are no limits to the possibilities of the individual. Life corresponds to our trust in it, because it can never deceive. Seek to become perfect and you will do so.
16The knowledge that the yogi instinctively strives after is a consciousness identification, so that he becomes reality in the same way as he is his own consciousness. Like is only known by like. man is in essence divine. To get to know oneself is to become more and more conscious of one's divine possibilities. Just as life is eternal and only changes form, so the individual, too, is imperishable. The greatest mistake we can make is to call ourselves sinners and irremediably evil. We are imperfect, since we are still on the way towards perfection, the goal that all will eventually reach. Man limits himself by asserting that he understands nothing, can do nothing. By this he himself severs his connection with the divine.
17The gnana yogi learns to discover the higher in the lower, the divine in the human, learns to spiritualize the trivial. The true nature of existence is revealed to anyone who seeks to discover unity in all things. It is revealed in our consciousness if only we use its powers in the right way. The visible has its higher counterpart. The perishable is a symbol, a parable, the transient a likeness of the eternal. By following this universal analogy (as below, so above) step by step, the individual learns to see through appearance, to draw aside veil after veil from the archetype that is hidden behind.
1Bhakti yoga is one of the methods of activating the higher emotional consciousness. It is the method best suited to those who belong to the sixth department and the one that corresponds most closely to the life view of Western mystics. The bhakta attains the highest emotional stage and thus that of the saint.
2The life view of this yoga can hardly be better expressed than by the typical Indian views that have also become dear to many Western mystics.
3Bhakti yoga is the path of devotion. All forms of life, living or seemingly dead, are revelations of the divine. By learning to love them all and worship them, the yogi seeks to merge with unity and the deity.
4We find what we seek. We see in the world that by which our minds are filled. Those without love see in the world only evil and that men are evil. Those who hate discover hatred everywhere and are continually finding new motives for hating. They fear everything, are angered by, disdain, everything. They discover only faults and failings in everything and everyone. They cannot see good.
5Like is known by like. According to the bhakta, the good man cannot discover anything evil, all evil disappears and the world is as though transmuted. He is elevated into spheres where he will only see the best in man, will be out of reach of their negative vibrations. Such a man knows that everything is good.
6Human love is always marred by some kind of egoism, by the wish to possess. The "love divine" is the experience of all life's inseparable unity that can never be lost. Anyone who has perceived unity has experienced a kind of happiness different to the human kind: to be able to give and only to give and to forget oneself in giving and serving. After that he cannot do anything else. He wants to, has to love. He lives to love.
7Love knows no limitation. He needs no motive for loving. It finds love revealed everywhere. The power of inexhaustible love fills the mind that is willing to let itself be filled. Love needs no proof of god's existence, for it sees the godhead of love in everything. How could god be anything but love? Anything that were not love would be incompatible with his nature.
8Love knows no bargaining. It does not desire, does not envy, is not angered, does not seek its own ends. It is not repelled by anything. It is attracted to everything and itself attracts everything. Love never ceases.
9Anyone who has experienced this love, does not love for his own or someone else's sake, but because everything is included in unity, everything is unity. In everything that arouses our yearning and in which we delight, unity is revealed. In everything that we feel drawn to ? whether things, animals, or men ? it is unity that was the real cause of the attraction, acting in us and in everything, so that we become able to love and be loved.
10The way to unity is through the attraction of feeling, through sympathy, affection, yearning, devotion, worship. Anyone who carefully and tenderly cherishes these slowly sprouting feelings will find to his joy how they will give him ever greater understanding, incitement to action along with the ability to help in the right way. By learning to see and admire what is great in man, not only discovering but also bringing forth the good in men, directing their attention to what is best in themselves, the devotee comes into contact with those powers of unity which draw him to unity and arouse the divine within him to adore the divine without him, because the nature of the deity is adoration. He no longer needs to search for objects of his love in the things that surround him and happen to him. He experiences unity directly and spontaneously.
11The bhakti yogi is positive to everything. To him all things are divine things. He has no need to speculate on the nature of the divine when everything manifests the divine and he himself experiences it, cannot house anything but the deity, cannot be anything but the deity.
12The yogi teaches that one can reach the deity by worshipping it both in personal form and without name and form, but that most people find it more difficult to grasp the impersonal.
13If the yogi imagines the qualities of the divine as a personality, he endows the deity with the highest qualities that he can invent, everything to admire, to adore, to worship. He experiences this deity in imagination, visualizes it, until he sees it in living shape in an attack of spontaneous emotional clairvoyance. As a rule, the images of the gods in the temples are highly magnetized. The vibrations of ardent prayer, devout meditation, ecstatic yearning, impregnate the images with both etheric and emotional matter. Crowds of daily worshippers vitalize more and more strongly this powerful elemental on the verge of visibility. Intense desire to be made to "see god" is enough to see the elemental. The god or goddess smiles benignly upon the worshipper. The "feeling of god's presence" with the mystics is caused by this very reciprocal action of a selfformed intensely live emotional elemental and the mystic himself. The elemental becomes an inseparable companion. This is, of course, only an advantage to those who need this feeling. It raises the emotional vibrations to the sphere of attractive vibrations.
14Anyone who has "entered into unity" and been filled with the divine eventually loses the need of limitation that lies in confining these divine qualities to a person only, however powerful this person may be. The form that he has worshipped is broken up, or he transfers his worship to more and more forms, until all reveal the same qualities and emotion no longer depends on form. By then also the personal-egoistic element in the worshipper will have disappeared.
15Often the yogi retains form in order to have so many more opportunities of worship also externally, and of experiencing the deity in every conceivable relationship in life. He imagines god as father and mother, brother and sister, son and daughter, etc. He enters into all these relationships of love in order to allow himself more love of more. Unity manifests itself also in friendship. The sympathy, security, trust, that he feels in a friend give new opportunities of comparison, new possibilities of emotional associations and experiences. In the subordinate's respect and deference for his superior, in the latter's consideration and responsibility for his subordinate, are found further possibilities of discovering unity. Every kind of love, desire, yearning, is to the yogi a manifestation of the individual's divine attraction to unity. This state can sometimes be described as divine madness, boundless devotion to and worship of the divine in everything. Thus Ramakrishna would fall on his knees before a prostitute in the street, adoring her like a goddess. The divine is revealed also in misfortunes, losses, and suffering, and the afflicted regards all these things as welcome opportunities of making the offering of adoration.
16To the devotee, every new form is a new possibility of discovering and adoring the deity, which is in everything and without which nothing would exist.
1Karma yoga can best be described as "the yoga of action"; knowledge, understanding, and insight put into a life of service. What of old has been called karma yoga ought properly to be called dharma yoga, the way of the fulfilment of duty. It ought to be made known that to serve self-forgetfully is the way to acquire all necessary knowledge.
2Some authorities consider that karma yoga used to include hatha yoga and laya yoga (the science of the chakras). Divergent views as usual.
3According to the planetary hierarchy, the serving attitude to life is the easiest, safest, quickest path to the fifth natural kingdom. All kingdoms capable of it have as their foremost task of life serving those at lower stages of development, so that they will be able to reach higher ones. Without such help there would be no evolution, or evolution would take tremendously longer time. "He who gives shall receive." Those who serve mankind unselfishly are given more and more opportunities of doing so. Service itself develops all requisite qualities and abilities, liberates from emotional illusions and mental fictions.
4The karma yogi does not amass money, as the greedy do, just in order to will it away to more or less "charitable causes" when he can no longer enjoy his fortune. But he does not despise wealth and power, however. On the contrary, he recognizes their importance as long as mankind is ruled by such illusions. He will use those power factors in order to serve evolution in the most efficient way.
5Karma yoga is probably the yoga that has the least appeal to Indians, who largely have a passive attitude to life, but the one best suited to Westerners.
6Karma yoga, then, is the yoga of action, action as expression of the will. Action includes everything that the individual sets about, every visible expression of thought and feeling. Thought and feeling that are not put into action become obstacles on the path. The example is the most powerful teaching.
7To the gnana yogi, knowledge is good and ignorance evil. To the bhakti yogi, love is good and hatred evil. To the karma yogi, the problem of good and evil coincides with that of freedom and bondage. To the deity everything is good. Before that stage, such absolutifying all too easily entails a confusion of concepts resulting in a chaos of right and wrong, and would be used by ignorance as a defence for its own imperfection. Evil is what is inferior and it entails suffering. Good is what is superior to us, what we unconsciously grope towards and what we become aware of only when we try to realize it, more or less unwittingly. Then we recognize it immediately in that it fills us with happiness. Man is continually discovering anew that what he has now seen to be evil was then a means for him of finding good, that the experience of evil explained to him what was good. Finally he sees that everything that he desired for himself separated him from unity. Ignorant people see evil in matter and think that man has fallen into sin, become evil and incapable of doing good through having been born into this world. To the yogi this is almost blasphemy, the perversity of hatred of life. To him the whole of existence, visible and invisible, is a revelation of the divine with innumerable opportunities of carrying out the will of the deity in acts of service.
8Everything makes up a unity. The seemingly isolated parts are all manifestations of the one, indivisible unity. Those who live in appearance see only the parts and think that they are independent selves, while those who live in reality know that they are parts of unity, are one with everything. The yogi strives after unity and thereby raises himself above good and evil and life's perpetual changes.
9The power that we all take to be our will manifests itself to the yogi so strongly in the whole of his nature, when he follows the Law as far as he can see, that he understands that this is not his own power but something that has been put as his disposal and which will become his property when he enters into unity. Thereby he becomes a tool for the deity and his will coincides with the will of destiny. Anyone who sees the divine in everything must recognize, love, and worship the presence of this divine will in himself and, in so doing, give up all his own motives in favour of the will of unity in himself.
10This means that the yogi offers himself up as a sacrifice to the deity. In so doing, he does away with all thoughts of reward, all fear or apprehensions as to the results of action as well as every egoistic interest, even the satisfaction of having acted disinterestedly. He also refrains from every attempt at valuing his action, whether it was good or evil. Everything is sacrificed, yet the sacrifice is no self-effacement, not negative, but positive. It has nothing in common with the fatalist's resignation, which easily will degenerate into quietism, not acting at all. The sacrifice embraces everything, every action, nay, every breath; everything becomes an offering to unity divine. He acts to make an outlet for the powers of the deity that flow through him. The result itself is an offering which is made perfect in the work being perfectly done. The proof that the yogi has sacrificed everything is his indifference ("divine indifference") to whatever happens to him. He never asks what the result will be, whether happiness or misfortune, honour or disgrace, life or death.
11In the Bhagavad-Gita, which can be called the gospel of karma yoga, the necessity of action is given the strongest possible symbolic expression in the description of inner life as a struggle between two armies drawn up and prepared for battle. The poem was a reaction against the tendency to slackness, idleness, quietism, a protest against indolence and passivity. This apathy has also been fostered by the superstition that one can "go in the way of karma" (rather like going in the way of the law of gravity).
12The yoga of action has always been regarded by the planetary hierarchy as the essential one, because insight that is not put into action becomes an obstacle in the future, according to the law of karma. Therefore, one can say that karma yoga is as old as hatha. It is only that it presupposes the insight of the necessity of action. As self-initiated and purposeful activity, it will perhaps become general only when mankind has reached the stage of culture. At lower stages, the incitements of compulsion are sometimes needed, for example in emergencies or, in the case of apathetic nations, now and then a so-called dictatorship.
1If anyone in India could perhaps understand Buddha, it is not the yogis, since they are ignorant of esoterics. That he is still be misunderstood, is of course inevitable at mankind's present stage of development. Buddha made it clear to those who could comprehend and understand that man is unable to solve the problems of existence, that the solution cannot be read from the "sacred writings" of any nation.
2This is not skepticism a la Protagoras, Hume, or Bertrand Russell. Nor is it agnosticism a la Kant or Herbert Spencer. It was a particularly well-founded explanation of knowledge by the then head of the educational department of the planetary hierarchy. If this had been understood, we should have been spared more than 2500 years of imaginative speculation on reality. An indication as to the discrimination of the Christian historians of religion is that they have dared to call Buddha an attest.
3Yoga makes man a sterling personality and a saint. And that is a great thing at mankind's present stage of development. Anyone who has got as far is able to attain the stage of ideality with the acquisition of causal consciousness within a few incarnations, when otherwise perhaps thousands would be needed. But yoga will not furnish any tenable world view. It is not suited as a working hypothesis for those who have a scientific education. On the other hand, it can be suited to those emotionalists who follow the path of the mystic (through departments 6,4,2), who are not interested in the nature of existence (departments 7,5,3,1).
4When the rishis who taught in Atlantis (and still belong to the planetary hierarchy) wrote the Upanishads, etc., they had already seen the necessity of making the knowledge inaccessible to the unworthy. They used the symbolism that since immemorial times is the symbolic language of all hierarchies, but they also elaborated new ingenious symbols. The key to these has never been released.
5During the years 1875-1950, esoteric facts were gradually permitted to be published through the agency of messengers from the planetary hierarchy. These have been rejected without examination by all the yoga schools.
6The Catholic Church wisely forbade laymen to read the Bible. The existence of hundreds of different Protestant sects is proof that this was wise. They have all misunderstood the Bible. So, of course, has the Catholic Church.
7In the old days, reading of India's "sacred writings" was restricted to the learned of the Brahmin caste. They at least kept their misinterpretations secret.
8It says in the Upanishads that man can become god, get to know the Self, and acquire knowledge of the whole universe. It is true that man can become god, but not as a man. Every stone, plant, animal, will become god, too. But this will be when in the course of evolution the monads have attained the divine kingdom.
9They read about the Self and believe that they understand what it is, being ignorant of the fact that no man without esoteric knowledge can interpret that symbol correctly.
10The individual monad (primordial atom, ultimate self) can perhaps be called the Self, or Brahman, or the Absolute, when in the seventh divine kingdom it has itself acquired the cosmic total consciousness and with it cosmic omniscience and omnipotence, finally experienced itself as the ultimate self it always was.
11They believe that the self, when it has emancipated itself from its known envelopes, becomes "pure spirit", is absorbed into the universal soul and thereby becomes god. But the monad continues its development in higher worlds through acquiring envelopes in these. Without an envelope the monad would lose the possibility of activity in order to continue its evolution.
12It is true that man, like all other beings, has a share in the cosmic total consciousness, since there is only one consciousness, and all consciousness is both individual and collective. But the yogi's fundamental mistake consists in the fiction that man can identify himself with the cosmic total consciousness. Man's share in this, even in the best case, is restricted to just a few per cent (as a causal self some six per cent).
13Many of the qualities and abilities of which Patanjali wrote can be acquired only in the fifth and sixth natural kingdoms. When reading these sutras, the yogis think that we was referring to the possibilities of the individual in the fourth natural kingdom. Higher consciousness faculties always have their counterparts in lower kingdoms. They believe that he was speaking of the lower counterparts they find in themselves. They have not even understood Patanjali's method of acquiring consciousness in the higher mental (47:4,5) and causal (47:1-3) kinds of matter.
14It is a mistake to think that the philosophy of the yogis is based on facts that they can ascertain for themselves. The yoga world view is as much speculation as the Western, but there is a considerable difference. For the yogis can ascertain facts in the physical etheric world and in the emotional world, and that gives them a tremendous advantage. It is, assuredly, true that these kinds of sense cannot explore the still higher worlds. And it is also true that the yogis cannot judge correctly the reality content of what they can ascertain. That was the reason why Swedenborg and Steiner were mistaken in all essentials. But the yogis know that there are superphysical worlds.
15No psychology can arrive at a clear conception of human consciousness, unless it has knowledge of man's different envelopes, the different kinds of consciousness of these envelopes, their nature, their interdependence, and the different kinds of energies in the different envelopes' different molecular kinds.
16A raja yogi who has achieved the result he has consciously pursued in many respects resembles those who have attained the stage of humanity and acquired perspective consciousness. But he lacks knowledge of the facts (for him still esoteric) that belong to this stage of development and is also unable to free himself from the fundamental yoga fictions, which bar the way to a clear insight into the nature of existence.
17At the stage of humanity, the mental envelope frees itself from the coalescence with the emotional envelope and is attracted to the causal envelope. When the mental envelope and the causal envelope have coalesced, the man is a causal self and will never more become the victim of illusions and fictions.
18The yogis by their methods achieve control of the vibrations of physical, emotional, and mental consciousness, and also physical etheric (49:3,4) and emotional (48:3, in very rare cases 48:2) objective consciousness. But by their methods they achieve neither mental nor causal objective consciousness. They are unable to decide whether their ideas agree with reality or not.
19The yogi achieves integration envelopes of incarnation, so that his mental consciousness controls his emotionality and his emotional consciousness his physical. This done, the man has become what the planetary hierarchy calls a personality, a very vague term otherwise. It is not sufficient to be a saint in order to be a "personality", as only esotericians will understand.
1Esotericians perhaps those can be called who have mastered the Pythagorean hylozoic mental system and seen that it agrees with reality. But in that case one has to invent another designation to term those who in addition possess knowledge which has not yet been permitted to become exoteric, for they will always exist until the whole of mankind has reached the stage of ideality.
2Yoga is proof that many of the possible methods of activation have been permitted to become publicly known. Even the technical procedure of the correct esoteric methods of activation can nowadays be communicated. But the very "key" remains esoteric. The ignorant are warned against every attempt at tampering with the matter on their own. Unfortunately, warnings are not enough, for "fools rush in where angels fear to tread". Attempts at vitalizing and meditating on chakras inevitably result in catastrophe (as a rule tumours appear in the organism) without there being any prospect for these undaunted ones of achieve their aim. "The angel with the flaming sword guards the entrance to Paradise."
3Unlike the yogis' methods of activation, the esoteric one is a methodic and systematic activation of passive consciousness in one after the other of up to then superconscious molecular kinds. This is done by vitalizing the different chakras of the different envelopes. Consciousness in each molecular kind is bound up with its particular chakra. When a chakra is vitalized, subjective consciousness in that molecular kind ensues. Objective consciousness is obtained by the subjective consciousness in the chakra activating that molecular kind in the envelope. As has already been pointed out, only the causal self can rightly use emotional and mental objective consciousness. Until then, the individual will be the victim of his own ignorance and will retard his higher development.
4All the aggregate envelopes, with the exception of the causal, form themselves from the organism, and the corresponding chakras of the different envelopes are connected with one another. Because of this, chakras have positions that can be given in reference to the organism.
5The seven most important chakras in the etheric, emotional, and mental envelopes, receiving their energies from the seven departments, are:
chakra number of petals department above the diaphragm: crown 960 1st eyebrow 96 4th throat 16 3rd heart 12 2nd below the diaphragm: solar plexus (navel) 10 6th sacral 6 5th basal 4 7th
6In the raja yogis, for instance, the eyebrow chakra belongs to the 5th, the sacral to the 7th, the basal to the 4th department.
7The chakras below the diaphragm were already developed in the Lemurians and now fulfil all their requisite functions automatically as organs of apprehension and activity. In contrast, the chakras above the diaphragm are but little developed at mankind's present stage of development and mostly only slightly active.
8Of the chakras in the causal envelope of the "normal individual", which form a lotus-like organ, only those three are slightly developed which during incarnations are connected with the heart and crown chakras of the etheric, emotional, and mental envelopes.
9Normally, the throat chakra is developed at the stage of civilization, the heart chakra at the stage of culture, the eyebrow chakra at the stage of humanity, and the crown chakra at the stage of ideality. But full functional capacity is achieved only when the causal self succeeds in becoming an essential self. Until then only few petals are active.
10In each new incarnation the individual in his new envelopes has to repeat the whole process of activation. If the individual has once received the knowledge and has not abused it, he will be given occasions to remember his old knowledge anew in new lives.
11The individual who has attained full causal consciousness retains this through all his incarnations. But this does not mean that he in his new brain knows anything about it. As soon as he leaves his organism when asleep, he lives in his causal envelope, but it takes at least fifteen years before he is able to apprehend in his brain his causal consciousness. Even at 35 he may still be unaware of his status, unless he has come into contact with esoterics.
12If the individual does not want to do anything for his development, he will, like the rest of mankind, automatically and in the course of millions of years acquire subjective and objective consciousness in the different molecular kinds of all his envelopes. But if he does not wish to remain longer in the fourth natural kingdom than is necessary, he must methodically activate the passive superconsciousness in his envelopes. At mankind's present stage of development, however, not even the raja yogi can solve all the problems arising in this connection. In order to attain the fifth natural kingdom in just a few incarnations, the aspirant must strive after discipleship under the planetary hierarchy. Only those who have acquired the physical, emotional, and mental prerequisites can be accepted as disciples. Physically and dietetically, the athlete training for the Olympic Games may serve as an example. Emotionally, they must discard all manifestations of repulsion (hatred) and acquire the qualities of attraction. Mentally, they must acquire perspective consciousness and a well-developed ability to meditate in the right way. All qualities and abilities have to be put solely at the service of evolution, since their egoistic use counteracts evolution.
1Man has all the qualities and abilities which he has acquired throughout all his incarnations. But these remain latent (buried) in the subconsciousness, until actualized and activated again in a new incarnation. Ever since the stage of barbarism, man has been acquiring all mankind's good and bad qualities, all to some percentage. The qualities of the lower levels are called bad, those of the higher, good. Their percentages determine their effectiveness. Opportunities of actualization and activation in a new incarnation bring the qualities to life. Often remembrance anew will suffice. Herein lies the responsibility of all educators and apostles of culture. (Responsibility can mean that in a future life one will not have an opportunity to develop, or will be hampered in one's development, or even idiotized.)
2By meditating daily on desirable qualities man can acquire these in any percentage whatever. He will free himself of undesirable qualities by not attending to them and by meditating on their opposites. He will attain higher levels by meditating on the qualities of these higher levels. Without meditation, development is so slow that even after a hundred incarnations there is scarcely any noticeable progress.
3No stage in consciousness development can be omitted, because all the qualities of each level are needed for continued development. In tens of thousands of lives every individual is to run through his scale of development from the bottom up, until he has acquired all the necessary qualities and abilities one hundred per cent. The higher include in them the lower, and all are comprised in the twelve essential qualities, which make continued existence in the fifth natural kingdom possible. Which twelve these are the individual must find out for himself once he has acquired causal consciousness. Before then there is no understanding of them, nor are there any words in human language by which to name them. We can rest assured that the noblest emotional qualities (so-called character!) enter into them: admiration, affection, sympathy, understanding, spontaneity, tolerance, kindness, gratitude, trust in life, courage, fixity of purpose, decision, perseverance, invulnerability, lawfulness, justice, uprightness, reliability, magnanimity, loyalty, honesty, etc. Everybody can add to the list for himself. The most necessary mental abilities include common sense, insight, and discrimination. Common sense will not accept arbitrarinesses or absurdities, will distinguish between the real and the unreal, will see man's immense limitations in all respects (true humility).
4The stage of culture is the emotional attractional stage (48:4-2). The individual acquires active consciousness in the highest emotional molecular kinds. In order to attain the highest emotional kind (48:2), he must have reached the highest mentality of the stage of civilization (47:6), for a human saint can never be a mentally insignificant person.
5The stage of humanity (47:5) is not reached until the stage of the saint has been gone through. The humanists use their spare time to activate perspective (47:5) and synthesis (47:4) consciousness. If they do not have an opportunity to activate their latent saintly qualities, they may not appear to be very saintly, a fact which moralists can never understand. The humanist regards the cult of appearances as hostile to life, yet takes part in social life in order to study mankind's different levels of development and to have some occasions to say something sensible.
6The different world views are different hypotheses, attempts to explain reality and life. Everybody accepts the view that corresponds best to his level of knowledge.
7Mankind constitutes a natural kingdom, which, like all other natural kingdoms, presents a number of levels of development. Those on the higher levels have as their task to help those on the lower levels to feel more nobly and to think more rationally, to help them develop their emotional and mental consciousness.
8In order to attain the next higher kingdom, that kingdom of unity (love and wisdom) to which both Christos and Buddha testified, we must have acquired the highest kind of emotional and mental consciousness and must show our willingness to serve evolution.
9What mankind can do it also must do, according to the Law. The only guarantee that anyone who in some incarnation has reached the acme of human insight and ability will have an opportunity of acquiring them again in a new life, is that all mankind is offered the same favourable possibility. Anyone who has not done everything to combat untruth and hatred has no right to special possibilities. Nor should he pity himself in the future.
TThe above text constitutes the essay Yoga in the Light of Esoterics by Henry T. Laurency. The essay is part of the book The Knowledge of Reality by Henry T. Laurency. Copyright © 1979 by the Henry T. Laurency Publishing Foundation.