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so widely disseminated among Western students as to need no description or
comment in this connection. It enjoys perhaps the place of foremost popularity
among all the Oriental religious dissertations. But the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali
come perhaps nearest to being a definite text-book of Theosophic devotional
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discipline. It is therefore important to look carefully at the features of the
physical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual regimen prescribed in this ancient
text for the cultivation of the highest Theosophic virtue.
It is a handbook for the practice of the Science of Yoga. Yoga, in brief, means
union,6 having specific reference to the eventual merging of the individual Soul
or Monad into the Universal or World Soul, and in a larger view the absorption
of all finite souls into the Absolute. Its rules and injunctions are the natural
outgrowth of a philosophy which holds that man is an ensemble of several
separate entities or principles, whose harmonious evolution postulates a cultus
demanding the unification under one central control of the different
individualities which, till that harmonization is effected, live together at
odds and cross purposes within the same organism. To mollify that discordance it
is requisite first of all that man should rise above the delusion that he is
essentially his body, or his feelings, or even his mind. He must first learn
through an inner realization that he, in his true Self, is none of these, but
that he, the real inner man, uses these as his servants. He must recognize
himself as the divine imperishable Ego, the Jivatma,7 and in so doing he will
cease to commit the error of identifying himself with those temporary and
transient aspects of himself which he so long mistook for his real being. This
orientation of himself from his lower manifestations into his true plane of
Selfhood will release him from all the pain and distress that attends his
illusion that he is the impermanent lower self.
This in brief is the general aim of Eastern occult practices; but its complete
rationale involves an understanding of the details of a labyrinthine science of
soul unfoldment that in its intricacy staggers the psychological neophyte in the
West. It is necessary in some degree to go into this psychological technology
for a better comprehension of the theme.
Its adept devotees in the East tell us that Yoga is no mere cult, but an exact
and complex science, with precise rules, very definite stages, and a quite
scientific methodology.
There are several types or forms of Yoga practice, which must first be
differentiated. The most definite forms are: (1), Karma Yoga; (2), Bhakti Yoga;
and (3), Raja Yoga. Karma Yoga is the path of active exertion (Karma meaning
"action"), by which the man at an early stage of evolution learns to acquire
control of his physical organism and his sense apparatus for the purposes of an
energetic bodily career in the world. It has been subdivided into two types,
called Hatha Yoga and Laya Yoga. The first, or "forceful," gives control over
the physical mechanism of the body; the second, or "inactive," governs the
emotional or etheric component of man. In this process there are gradually
brought into active operation the four force centers, wheels or chakras, which
lie below the diaphragm. Karma Yoga is supposed to have been employed by the
Lemurian or Third Race people, to enable them to perform their appropriate
functions in the line of earthly racial evolution. It is not to be practiced by
us.
Bhakti ("Love") Yoga, the second type, awakens the heart and throat centers in
the etheric body, which latter is achieved by the exercise of devotion and
affectional qualities. Love, affection, loyalty, attachment to personality, are
the powerful stimuli that rouse the centers above the diaphragm to active
functioning. It is the path of feeling and emotion, using the astral body. Its
use was credited to the Atlanteans, or Fourth Race folk, as their most
appropriate type of evolutionary expression, and is no longer our task.
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Raja ("King") Yoga, type three, is the specific discipline for our Fifth Race,
the Aryan. It is designed to awaken the centers in the head (the pineal gland
and the pituitary body) crowning the work of the two earlier Yogas in the
development of the functions of the etheric body. It is consequently the path of
mentality, which is the Fifth principle in man; and hence it becomes the
appointed task of the Fifth or Aryan Race to unfold it. As the work of Yoga is
to unify the various principles in man into harmonious accord, it will be seen
that, as Karma Yoga arouses the four lower centers, and Bhakti Yoga unites them
with the two middle centers (the heart and throat), so it is the purpose of Raja
Yoga to link the ascending forces with the centers in the head (the brain and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]