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Yoga
Is a Science
Excerpt From E-Book: "An Introduction to
Yoga" - By Annie Wood
Besant
Yoga is a science. That is the second thing
to
grasp. Yoga is a science, and not a vague, dreamy drifting or
imagining. It is
an applied science, a systematized collection of laws applied to bring
about a
definite end. It takes up the laws of psychology, applicable to the
unfolding
of the whole consciousness of man on every plane, in every world, and
applies those
rationally in a particular case. This rational application of the laws
of
unfolding consciousness acts exactly on the same principles that you
see
applied around you every day in other departments of science.
You know, by looking at the world around
you,
how enormously the intelligence of man, co-operating with nature, may
quicken "natural"
processes, and the working of intelligence is as "natural" as
anything else. We make this distinction, and practically it is a real
one,
between "rational" and "natural" growth, because human
intelligence can guide the working of natural laws; and when we come to
deal
with Yoga, we are in the same department of applied science as, let us
say, is
the scientific farmer or gardener, when he applies the natural laws of
selection to breeding. The farmer or gardener cannot transcend the laws
of
nature, nor can he work against them. He has no other laws of nature to
work
with save universal laws by which nature is evolving forms around us,
and yet
he does in a few years what nature takes, perhaps, hundreds of
thousands of
years to do. And how? By applying human intelligence to choose the laws
that
serve him and to neutralize the laws that hinder. He brings the divine
intelligence
in man to utilise the divine powers in nature that are working for
general
rather than for particular ends.
Take the
breeder of pigeons. Out of the blue rock pigeon he develops the pouter
or the
fan-tail; he chooses out, generation after generation, the forms that
show most
strongly the peculiarity that he wishes to develop. He mates such birds
together,
takes every favouring circumstance into consideration and selects again
and
again, and so on and on, till the peculiarity that he wants to
establish has
become a well-marked feature. Remove his controlling intelligence,
leave the
birds to themselves, and they revert to the ancestral type.
Or take the
case of the gardener. Out of the wild rose of the hedge has been
evolved every
rose of the garden. Many-petalled roses are but the result of the
scientific
culture of the five-petalled rose of the hedgerow, the wild product of
nature.
A gardener who chooses the pollen from one plant and places it on the
carpers
of another is simply doing deliberately what is done every day by the
bee and
the fly. But he chooses his plants, and he chooses those that have the
qualities he wants intensified, and from those again he chooses those
that show
the desired qualities still more clearly, until he has produced a
flower so different
from the original stock that only by tracing it back can you tell the
stock
whence it sprang.
So is it in the application of the laws of
psychology that we call Yoga. Systematized knowledge of the unfolding
of consciousness
applied to the individualized Self, that is Yoga. As I have just said,
it is by
the world that consciousness has been unfolded, and the world is
admirably
planned by the LOGOS for this unfolding of consciousness; hence the
would-be
yogi, choosing out his objects and applying his laws, finds in the
world
exactly the things he wants to make his practice of Yoga real, a vital
thing, a
quickening process for the knowledge of the Self. There are many laws.
You can
choose those which you require, you can evade those you do
not require, you can utilize those you need, and thus you can bring
about the
result that nature, without that application of human intelligence,
cannot so swiftly
effect.
Take it,
then, that Yoga is within your reach, with your powers, and that even
some of
the lower practices of Yoga, some of the simpler applications of the
laws of
the unfolding of consciousness to yourself, will benefit you in this
world as
well as in all others. For you are really merely quickening your
growth, your
unfolding, taking advantage of the powers nature puts within your
hands, and
deliberately eliminating the conditions which would not help you in
your work,
but rather hinder your march forward. If you see it in that light, it
seems to
me that Yoga will be to you a far more real, practical thing, than it
is when
you merely read some fragments about it taken from Sanskrit books, and
often
mistranslated into English, and you will begin to feel that to be a
yogi is not
necessarily a thing for a life far off, an incarnation far removed from
the present
one.
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