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begin by taking some very simple and regular bodily exercise, such as the movement of the body in
walking, or the movements of the lungs in breathing. You keep on noting what happens: 'I am
breathing out; I am breathing in; I am holding my breath,' as the case may be. Quite without
warning, one is appalled by the shock of the discovery that what you have been thinking is not true.
You have no right to say: 'I am breathing in.' All that you really know is that there is a breathing in.
19. You therefore change your note, and you say: 'There is a breathing in; there is a breathing out,'
and so on. And very soon, if you practise assiduously, you get another shock. You have no right to
say that there is a breathing. All you know is that there is a sensation of that kind. Again you change
your conception of your observation, and one day make the discovery that the sensation has
disappeared. All you know is that there is perception of a sensation of breathing in or breathing out.
Continue, and that is once more discovered to be an illusion. What you find is that there is a
tendency to perceive a sensation of the natural phenomena.
20. The former stages are easy to assimilate intellectually; one assents to them immediately that
one discovers them, but with regard to the 'tendency,' this is not the case, at least it was not so for
my own part. It took me a long while before I understood what was meant by 'tendency.' To help
you to realise this I should like to find a good illustration. For instance, a clock does nothing at all
but offer indications of the time. It is so constructed that this is all we can know about it. We can
argue about whether the time is correct, and that means nothing at all, unless, for example, we
know whether the clock is controlled electrically from an astronomical station where the
astronomer happens to be sane, and in what part of the world the clock is, and so on.
21. I remember once when I was in Teng-Yueh, just inside the Chinese frontier in Yunnan. The hour
of noon was always telegraphed to the Consulate from Pekin. This was a splendid idea, because
electricity is practically instantaneous. The unfortunate thing was, if it was unfortunate, which I
doubt, that the messages had to be relayed at a place called Yung Chang. The operators there had
the good sense to smoke opium most of the time, so occasionally a batch of telegrams would arrive,
a dozen or so in a bunch, stating that it was noon at Pekin on various dates! So all the gross
phenomena, all these sensations and perceptions, are illusion. All that one could really say was that
there was a tendency on the part of some lunatic in Pekin to tell the people at Teng-Yueh what
o'clock it was.
22. But even this Fourth Skandha is not final. With practice, it also appears as an illusion, and one
remains with nothing but the bare consciousness of the existence of such a tendency.
I cannot tell you very much about this, because I have not worked it out very thoroughly myself, but
I very much doubt whether 'consciousness' has any meaning at all, as a translation of the word
Vinnanam. I think that a better translation would be 'experience,' used in the sense in which we
have been using it hitherto, as the direct reality behind and beyond all remark.
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23. I hope you will appreciate how difficult it is to give a reasoned description, however tentative,
of these phenomena, still less to classify them properly. They have a curious trick of running one
into the other. This, I believe, is one of the reasons why it has been impossible to find any really
satisfactory literature about Yoga at all. The more advanced one's progress, the less one knows, and
the more one understands. The effect is simply additional evidence of what I have been saying all
this time: that it is very little use discussing things; what is needed is continuous devotion to the
practice.
Love is the law, love under will.
YOGA FOR YELLOWBELLIES
Fourth Lecture
Salutation to the Sons of the Morning!
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
1. I should like to begin this evening by recapitulating very briefly what has been said in the
previous three lectures, and this would be easier if I had not completely forgotten everything I said.
But there is a sort of faint glimmering to the effect that the general subject of the series was the
mental exercises of the Yogi; and the really remarkable feature was that I found it impossible to
discuss them at all thoroughly without touching upon, first of all, ontology; secondly, ordinary
science; and thirdly, the high Magick of the true initiates of the light.
2. We found that both Ontology and Science, approaching the question of reality from entirely
different standpoints, and pursuing their researches by entirely different methods, had yet arrived
at an identical 'impasse.' And the general conclusion was that there could be no reality in any
intellectual concept of any kind, that the only reality must lie in direct experience of such a kind
that it is beyond the scope of the critical apparatus of our minds. It cannot be subject to the laws of
Reason; it cannot be found in the fetters of elementary mathematics; only transfinite and irrational
conceptions in that subject can possibly shadow forth the truth in some such paradox as the identity
of contradictories. We found further that those states of mind which result from the practice of
Yoga are properly called trances, because they actually transcend the conditions of normal thought.
3. At this point we begin to see an almost insensible drawing together of the path of Yoga which is
straight (and in a sense arid) with that of Magick, which may be compared with the Bacchic dance
or the orgies of Pan. It suggests that Yoga is ultimately a sublimation of philosophy, even as Magick
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