(Part 3 of 8)
Yoga for Yahoos
THIRD LECTURE. NIYAMA
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
- The subject of my third lecture is Niyama.
Niyama? H'm! The inadequacy of even th noblest attempts to translate these
wretched Sanskrit words is now about to be delightfully demonstrated. The
nearest I can get to the meaning of Niyama is 'virtue'! God help us all!
This means virtue in the original etymological sense of the word -- the
quality of manhood; that is, to all intents and purposes, the quality of
godhead. But since we are translating Yama 'control,' we find that our two
words have not at all the same relationship to each other that the words
have in the original Sanskrit; for the prefix 'ni' in Sanskrit gives the
meaning of turning everything upside down and backwards forwards, -- as
*you* would say, Hysteron Proteron -- at the same time producing the effect
of transcendental sublimity. I find that I cannot even begin to think of a
proper definition, although I know in my own mind perfectly well what the
Hindus mean; if one soaks oneself in Oriental thought for a sufficient
number of years, one gets a spiritual apprehension which it is quite
impossible to express in terms applicable to the objects of intellectual
apprehension; it is therefore much better to content ourselves with the
words as they stand, and get down to brass tacks about the practical steps
to be taken to master these preliminary exercises.
- It will hardly have escaped the attentive
listener that in my previous lectures I have combined the maximum of
discourse with the minimum of information; that is all part of my training
as a Cabinet Minister. But what does emerge tentatively from my mental fog
is that Yama, taking it by long and by large, is mostly negative in its
effects. We are imposing inhibitions on the existing current of energy, just
as one compresess a waterfall in turbines in order to control and direct the
natural gravitational energy of the stream.
- It might be as well, before altogether leaving
the subject of Yama, to enumerate a few of the practical conclusions which
follow from our premiss that nothing which might weaken or destroy the
beauty and harmony of the mind must be permitted. Social existence of any
kind renders any serious Yoga absolutely out of the question; domestic life
is completely incompatible with even elementary practices. No doubt many of
you will say, 'That's all very well for him; let him speak for himself; as
for me, I manage my home and my business so that everything runs on ball
bearings.' Echo answers . . .
- Until you actually start the practice of Yoga,
you cannot possibly imagine what constitutes a disturbance. You most of you
think that you can sit perfectly still; you tell me what artists' models can
do for over thirty-five minutes. They don't. You do not hear the ticking of
the clock; perhaps you do not even know whether a typewriter is going in the
room; for all I know, you could sleep peacefully through an air-raid. That
has nothing to do with it. As soon as you start the practices you will find,
if you are doing them properly, that you are hearing sounds which you never
heard before in your life. You become hypersensitive. And as you have five
external batteries bombarding you, you get little repose. You feel the air
on your skin with about the same intensity as you would previously have felt
a fist in your face.
- To some extent, no doubt, this fact will be
familiar to all of you. Probably most of you have been out at some time or
other in what is grotesquely known as the silence of the night, and you will
have become aware of infinitesimal movements of light in the darkness, of
elusive sounds in the quiet. They will have soothed you and pleased you; it
will never have occurred to you that these changes could each one be felt as
a pang. But, even in the earliest months of Yoga, this is exactly what
happens, and therefore it is best to be prepared by arranging, before you
start at all, that your whole life will be permanently free from all the
grosser causes of trouble. The practical problem of Yama is therefore, to a
great extent, 'How shall I settle down to the work?' Then, having complied
with the theoretically best conditions, you have to tackle each fresh
problem as it arises in the best way you can.
- We are now in a better position to consider
the meaning of Niyama, or virtue. To most men the qualities which constitute
Niyama are not apprehended at all by their self-consciousness. These are
positive powers, but they are latent; their development is not merely
measurable in terms of quantity and efficiency. As we rise from the coarse
to the fine, from the gross to the subtle, we enter a new (and
what appears on first sight to be an immeasurable) region. It is quite
impossible to explain what I mean by this; if I could, you would know it
already. How can one explain to a person who has never skated the nature of
the pleasure of executing a difficult figure on the ice? He has in himself
the whole apparatus ready for use; but experience, and experience only, can
make him aware of the results of such use.
- At the same time, in a general exposition of
Yoga, it may be useful to give some idea of the functions on which those
peaks that pierce the clouds of the limitations of our intellectual
understanding are based.
I have found it very useful in all kinds of thinking to employ a sort of
Abacus. The schematic representation of the universe given by astrology and
the Tree of Life is extremely valuable, especially when reinforced and
amplified by the Holy Qabalah. This Tree of Life is susceptible to infinite
ramifications, and there is no need in this connectin to explore its
subtleties. We ought to be able to make a fairly satisfactory diagram for
elementary purposes by taking as the basis of our illustration the solar
system as conceived by the astrologers.
I do not know whether the average student is aware that in practice the
significations of the planets are based generally upon the philosophical
conceptions of the Greek and Roman gods. Let us hope for the best, and go
on!
- The planet Saturn, which represents anatomy,
is the skeleton: it is a rigid structure upon which the rest of the body is
built. To what moral qualities does this correspond? The first point of
virtue in a bone is its rigidity, its resistance to pressure. And so in
Niyama we find that we need the qualities of absolute simplicity in our
regimen; we need insensibility; we need endurance; we need patience. It is
simply impossible for anyone who has not practised Yoga to understand what
boredom means. I have known Yogis, men even holier than I, (*no! no!*) who,
to escape from the intolerable tedium, would fly for refuge to a bottle
party! It is a 'physiological' tedium which becomes the acutest agony. The
tension becomes cramp; nothing else matters but to escape from the
self-imposed constraint.
But every evil brings its own remedy. Another quality of Saturn is
melancholy; Saturn represents the sorrow of the universe; it is the Trance
of sorrow that has determined one to undertake the task of emancipation.
This is the energising force of Law; it is the rigidity of the fact that
everything is sorrow which moves one to the task, and keeps one on the Path.
- The next planet is Jupiter. This planet is in
many ways the opposite of Saturn; it represents expansion as Saturn
represents contraction; it is the universal love, the selfless love whose
object can be no less than the universe itself. This comes to reinforce the
powers of Saturn when they agonise; success is not for self but for all; one
might acquiesce in one's own failure, but one cannot be unworthy of the
universe. Jupiter, too, represents the vital, creative, genial element of
the cosmos. He has Ganymede and Hebe to his cupbearers. There is an immense
and inaccessible joy in the Great Work; and it is the attainment of the
trance, of even the intellectual foreshadowing of that trance, of joy, which
reassures the Yogi that his work is worth while. Jupiter digests
experiences; Jupiter is the Lord of the Forces of Life; Jupiter takes common
matter and transmutes it into celestial nourishment.
- The next planet is Mars. Mars represents the
muscular system; it is the lowest form of energy, and in Niyama it is to be
taken quite literally as the virtue which enables on to contend with, and to
conquer, the physical difficulties of the Work. The practical point is this:
'The little more and how much it is, the little less and what worlds away!'
No matter how long you keep water at 99 degrees Centigrade under normal
barometric pressure, it will not boil. I shall probably be accused of
advertising some kind of motor spirit in talking about the little extra
something that the others haven't got, but I assure you that I am not being
paid for it.
Let us take the example of Pranayama, a subject with which I hope to deal in
a subsequent lucubration. Let us suppose that you are managing your breath
so that your cycle, breathing in, holding, and breathing out, lasts exactly
a minute. That is pretty good work for most people, but it may be or may not
be good enough to get you going. No one can tell you until you have tried
long enough (and no one can tell you how long 'long enough' may be) whether
that is going to ring the bell. It may be that if you increase your sixty
seconds to sixty-four the phenomena would begin immediately. That sounds all
right but as you have nearly burst your lungs doing the sixty, you want this
*added* energy to make the grade. That is only one example of the difficulty
which arises with every practice.
Mars, morever, is the flaming energy of passion, it is the male quality in
its lowest sense; it is the courage which goes berserk, and I do not mind
telling you that, in my own case at least, one of the inhibitions with which
I had most frequently to contend was the fear that I was going mad. This was
especially the case when those phenomena began to occur, which, recorded in
cold blood, did seem like madness. And the Niyama of Mars is the ruthless
rage which jests at scars while dying of one's wounds.
' . . . the grim Lord of Colonsay
Hath turned him on the ground,
And laughed in death-pang that his blade
The mortal thrust so well repaid'
- The next of the heavenly bodies is the centre
of all, the Sun. The Sun is the heart of the system; he harmonises all,
energises all, orders all. His is the courage and energy which is the source
of all the other lesser forms of motion, and it is because of this that in
himself he is calm. They are planets; he is a star.
For him all planets come; around him they all move, to him they all tend. It
is this centralisation of faculties, their control, their motivation, which
is the Niyama of the Sun. He is not only the heart but the brain of the
system; but he is not the 'thinking' brain, for in him all thought has been
resolved into the beauty and harmony of ordered motion.
- The next of the planets is Venus. In her, for
the first time, we come into contact with a part of our nature which is none
the less quintessential because it has hitherto been masked by our
pre-occupation with more active qualities. Venus resembles Jupiter, but on a
lower scale, standing to him very much as Mars does to Saturn. She is close
akin in nature to the Sun, and she may be considered an externalisation of
his influence towards beauty and harmony. Venus is Isis, the Great Mother;
Venus is Nature herself; Venus is the sum of all possibilities.
The Niyama corresponding to Venus is one of the most important, and one of
the most difficult of attainment. I said the sum of all possibilities, and I
will ask you to go back in your minds to what I said before about the
definition of the Great Work itself, the aim of the Yogi to consummate the
marriage of all that he is with all that he is not, and ultimately to
realise, insofar as the marriage is consummated, that what he is and what he
is not are identical. Therefore we cannot pick and choose in our Yoga. It is
written in the 'Book of the Law', Chapter 1, verse 22, 'Let there be no
difference made among you between any one thing and any other thing, for
thereby there cometh hurt.'
Venus represents the ecstatic acceptance of all possible experience, and the
transcendental assumption of all particular experience into the one
experience.
Oh yes, by the way, don't forget this. In a lesser sense Venus represents
tact. Many of the problems that confront the Yogi are impracticable to
intellectual manipulation. They yield to graciousness.
- Our next planet is Mercury, and the Niyama
which correspond to him are as innumerable and various as his own qualities.
Mercury is the Word, the Logos in the highest; he is the direct medium of
connection between opposites; he is electricity, the very link of life, the
Yogic process itself, its means, its end. Yet he is in himself indifferent
to all things, as the electric current is indifferent to the meaning of the
messages which may be transmitted by its means. The Niyama corresponding to
Mercury in its highest forms may readily be divined from what I have already
said, but in the technique of Yoga he represents the fineness of the method
which is infinitely adaptable to all problems, and only so because he is
supremely indifferent. He is the adroitness and ingenuity which helps us in
our difficulties; he is the mechanical system, the symbolism which helps the
human mind of the Yogi to take cognisance of what is coming.
It must here be remarked that because of his complete indifference to
anything whatever (and that thought is -- when you get far enough -- only a
primary point of wisdom) he is entirely unreliable. One of the most
unfathomably dreadful dangers of the Path is that you must trust Mercury,
and yet that if you trust him you are certain to be deceived. I can only
explain this, if at all, by pointing out that, since all truth is relative,
all truth is falsehood. In one sense Mercury is the great enemy; Mercury is
mind, and it is the mind that we have set out to conquer.
- The last of the seven sacred planets is the
Moon. The Moon represents the totality of the female part of us, the passive
principle which is yet very different to that of Venus, for the Moon
corresponds to the Sun much as Venus does to Mars. She is more purely
passive than Venus, and although Venus is so universal the Moon is also
universal in another sense. The Moon is the highest and the lowest; the Moon
is the aspiration, the link of man and God; she is the supreme purity: Isis
the Virgin, Isis the Virgin Mother; but she comes right down at the other
end of the scale, to be a symbol of the senses themselves, the mere
instrument of the registration of phenomena, incapable of discrimination,
incapable of choice. The Niyama corresponding to her influence, the first of
all, is that quality of aspiration, the positive purity which refuses union
with anything less than the All. In Greek mythology Artemis, the Goddess of
the Moon, is virgin; she yielded only to Pan. Here is one particular lesson:
as the Yogi advances, magic powers (Siddhi the teachers call them) are
offered to the aspirant; if he accepts the least of these -- or the greatest
-- he is lost.
- At the other end of the scale of the Niyama of
the Moon are the fantastic developments of sensibility which harass the
Yogi. These are all help and encouragement; these are all intolerable
hindrances; these are the greatest of the obstacles which confront the human
being, trained as he is by centuries of evolution to receive his whole
consciousness through the senses alone. And they hit us hardest because they
interfere directly with the technique of our work; we are constantly gaining
new powers, despite ourselves, and every time this happens we have to invent
a new method for bringing their malice to naught. But, as before, the remedy
is of the same stuff as the disease; it is the unswerving purity of
aspiration that enables us to surmount all these difficulties. The Moon is
the sheet-anchor of our work. It is the Knowledge and Conversation of the
Holy Guardian Angel that enables us to overcome, at all times and in all
manners, as the need of the moment may be.
- There are two other planets, not counted as
among the sacred seven. I will not say that they were known to the ancients
and deliberately concealed, though much in their writing suggests that this
may be the case. I refer to the planet Herschel, or Uranus, and Neptune.
Whatever may have been the knowledge of the ancients, it is at least certain
that they left gaps in their system which were exactly filled by these two
planets, and the newly discovered Pluto. They fill these gaps just as the
newly discovered chemical elements discovered in the last fifty years fill
the gaps in Mendelejeff's table of the Periodic Law.
- Herschel represents the highest form of the
True Will, and it seems natural and right that this should not rank with the
seven sacred planets, because the True Will is the sphere which transcends
them. 'Every man and every woman is a star.' Herschel defines the orbit of
the star, your star. But Herschel is dynamic; Herschel is explosive;
Herschel, astrologically speaking, does not move in an orbit; he has his own
path. So the Niyama which corresponds to this planet is, first and last, the
discovery of the True Will. This knowledge is secret and most sacred; each
of you must incorporate for yourself the incidence and quality of Herschel.
It is the most important of the tasks of the Yogi, because, until he has
achieved it, he can have no idea who he is or where he is going.
- Still more remote and tenuous is the influence
of Neptune.
Here we have a Niyama of infinite delicacy, a spiritual intuition far, far
removed from any human quality whatever. Here all is fantasy, and in this
world are infinite pleasure, infinite perils. The True Niyama of Neptune is
the imaginative faculty, the shadowing forth of the nature of the
illimitable light.
He has another function. The Yogi who understands the influence of Neptune,
and is attuned to Neptune, will have a sense of humour, which is the
greatest safeguard for the Yogi. Neptune is, so to speak, in the front line;
he has got to adapt himself to difficulties and tribulations; and when the
recruit asks 'What made that 'ole?' he has got to say, unsmiling, 'Mice.'
Pluto is the utmost sentinel of all; of him it is not wise to speak.
. . . Having now given vent to this sybilline, obscure and sinister
utterance, it may well be asked by the greatly daring: Why is it not wise to
speak of Pluto? The answer is profound. It is because nothing at all is
known about him.
Anyhow it hardly matters; we have surely had enough of Niyama for one
evening!
- It is now proper to sum up briefly what we
have learnt about Yama and Niyama. They are in a sense the moral, logical
preliminaries of the technique of Yoga proper. They are the strategical as
opposed to the tactical dispositions which must be made by the aspirant
before he attempts anything more serious than the five finger exercises, as
we may call them -- the recruit's drill of postures, breathing exercises and
concentration which the shallow confidently suppose to constitute this great
science and art. We have seen that it is presumptuous and impractical to lay
down definite rules as to what we are to do. What does concern us is so to
arrange matters that we are free to do anything that may become necessary or
expedient, allowing for that development of super-normal powers which
enables us to carry out our plans as they form in the mutable bioscope of
events.
If anyone comes to me for a rough and ready practical plan I say: Well, if
you must stay in England, you may be able to bring it off with a bit of luck
in an isolated cottage, remote from roads, if you have the services of an
attendant already well trained to deal with the emergencies that are likely
to arise. A good disciplinarian might carry on fairly well, at a pinch, in a
suite in Claridge's.
But against this it may be urged that one has to reckon with unseen forces.
The most impossible things begin to happen when once you get going. It is
not really satisfactory to start serious Yoga unless you are in a country
where the climate is reliable, and where the air is not polluted by the
stench of civilisation. It is extremely important, above all things
important, unless one is an exceedingly rich man, to find a country where
the inhabitants understand the Yogin mode of life, where they are
sympathetic with its practices, treat the aspirant with respect, and
unobtrusively assist and protect him. In such circumstances, the exigency of
Yama and Niyama is not so serious a stress.
There is, too, something beyond all these practical details which it is hard
to emphasise without making just those mysterious assumptions which we have
from the first resolved to avoid. All I can say is that I am very sorry, but
this particular fact is going to hit you in the face before you have started
very long, and I do not see why we should bother about the mysterious
assumptions underlying the acceptance of the fact any more than in the case
of what is after all equally mysterious and unfathomable: any object of any
of the senses. The fact is this; that one acquires a feeling -- a quite
irrational feeling -- that a given place or a given method is right or wrong
for its purposes. The intimation is as assured as that of the swordsman when
he picks up an untried weapon; either it comes up sweet to the hand, or it
does not. You cannot explain it, and you cannot argue it away.
- I have treated Yama and Niyama at great length
because their importance has been greatly under-rated, and their nature
completely misunderstood. They are definitely magical practices, with hardly
a tinge of mystical flavour. The advantage to us here is that we can very
usefully exercise and develop ourselves in this way in this country where
the technique of Yoga is for all practical purposes impossible.
Incidentally, one's real country -- that is, the conditions -- in which one
happens to be born is the only one in which Yama and Niyama can be
practised. You cannot dodge your Karma. You have got to earn the right to
devote yourself to Yoga proper by arranging for that devotion to be a
necessary stage in the fulfilment of your True Will. In Hindustan one is now
allowed to become 'Sanyasi' -- a recluse -- until one has fulfilled one's
duty to one's own environment -- rendered to Caesar the things which are
Caesar's before rendering to God the things which are God's.
Woe to that seven months' abortion who thinks to take advantage of the
accidents of birth, and, mocking the call of duty, sneaks off to stare at a
blank wall in China! Yama and Niyama are only the more critical stages of
Yoga because they cannot be translated in terms of a schoolboy curriculum.
Nor can schoolboy tricks adequately excuse the aspirant from the duties of
manhood. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Rejoice, true men, that this is thus!
For this at least may be said, that there are results to be obtained in this way
which will not only fit the aspirant for the actual battle, but will introduce
him to classes of hitherto unguessed phenomena whose impact will prepare his
mind for that terific shock of its own complete overthrow which marks the first
critical result of the practices of Yoga.
Love is the law, love under will.