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the Divine, for which there is a rational ground deprived of the
proper nourishment, is driven to feed itself voraciously on a
fictitious other-world, on the hair-raising tales of ghosts and
haunted houses, on incredible stories of hypothetical miracle-
working supermen and hierarchic Methuselahs living in inacces-
sible regions, which has done, and is doing, great harm by
diverting the attention of the true seekers from the understanding of
a mighty law of nature by which man can raise himself to a sub-
86 THE SECRET OF YOGA
lime state in a most rational way as natural and as practical as the
birth and development of a child. This unwholesome diet caused
serious harm in several directions. On the one hand, it aggravates
the mental condition and makes the appetite even more morbid
and, on the other, draws the attention from the genuine ideals and
diverts it toward persons or concepts of the occult and the Divine
that are either fictitious and have no relation to reality or are not at
all fit to form the models worthy of emulation by mankind.
Approached in a sane way the realm of the occult and
supernatural will also be found to be crowded with the fictitious
and the spurious, as in any worldly realm. Those who do so will
find that, barring the experience of those prophets, mystics and
Yoga sages, whose names are household words in the countries to
which they belong, all the rest they have heard about such as the
imaginary adepts and wonder-workers do not possess the seal of
attestation either of those who were a witness to their extraordinary
lives, or of the monuments they left behind to show that they were
men or women of flesh and blood. The utmost they will discover of
the occult, in the objective world, well attested and confirmed, will
be the erratic and unpredictable phenomena produced by sensitives,
mediums, hypnotized subjects, or some self-hypnotizing Yogis, but
beyond that, nothing. If they try to bring before their minds the
image of the most outstanding seer or Yogi they have ever heard
of, out of the known and well-attested cases, they will find that he
is something quite different from what they themselves would wish
to be. They will also find that almost all the illuminati, about whom
they have heard, had lives of suffering, of intense longing for the
Divine, sometimes almost to the point of madness, of utter
simplicity and self-denial, of detachment from the world and
renunciation of its pleasures, of selfless service, often in the face of
colossal odds and insurmountable difficulties, of complete
immersion in the love of the Deity and entire absorption in the
inner universe. They can easily gather from this that success in the
quest, if ever attained, would add
YOGA, TRUE AND FALSE 87
their names to the same category, and fill their minds with the
same fires of passion, renunciation, love of the Divine, and service
for humanity that characterized the illuminati.
It is well known that in both medieval and ancient times the men
and women, who delved into the occult in order to become
sorcerers, magicians, necromancers, wizards, or witches were
never publicly applauded. They were forced to practice in secret, to
form esoteric circles and brotherhoods, and to perform their weird
rites far from the eyes of common men, in eerie spots and in the
shades of night. Modern man, deceived by the fictitious accounts
he has read, and filled with the glamorous images of hypothetical
Master Yogis, is too often led to believe that a few years practice
with certain secret methods would raise him to the same level, able
to achieve impossible deeds with the power gained over the forces
of nature, to conquer disease, to win domination over men, to know
the deeper secrets of life, and to live in utter peace and bliss under
all circumstances. How many men succeed in achieving these
objectives can be gauged from the fact that in recent years out of
the millions, who undertook the practice of Yoga, not one has
claimed that he has gained even a fraction of the powers claimed
for it or for other forms of esoteric discipline by the over-
enthusiastic protagonists of these systems. Leaving miraculous
powers aside, how many have plainly or implicitly made the as-
sertion that they, in their person, have attained the transcendent
state of Consciousness claimed for Yoga, and backed their asser-
tions by a frank self-revelation in the same way as has been done
by several well-known Christian mystics, Sufis, and Yoga saints in
the past with a candour and sincerity that has made their works
Immortal? If there is none or only one or two, it clearly points to
the fact that the present way of approach to Yoga holds little [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]