Yoga Is a Science

Yoga Is a Science For yoga beginner

ext, Yoga is a science. That is the second thing to grasp. Yogais a science, and not a vague, dreamy drifting or imagining. Itis an applied science, a systematized collection of laws appliedto bring about a definite end. It takes up the laws ofpsychology, applicable to the unfolding of the wholeconsciousness of man on every plane, in every world, and appliesthose rationally in a particular case.
This rational applicationof the laws of unfolding consciousness acts exactly on the sameprinciples that you see applied around you every day in otherdepartments of science.

You know, by looking at the world around you, how enormously theintelligence 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, andpractically it is a real one, between "rational" and "natural"growth, because human intelligence can guide the working ofnatural laws; and when we come to deal with Yoga, we are in thesame department of applied science as, let us say, is thescientific farmer or gardener, when he applies the natural lawsof selection to breeding.

The farmer or gardener cannot transcendthe laws of nature, nor can he work against them. He has no otherlaws of nature to work with save universal laws by which natureis evolving forms around us, and yet he does in a few years whatnature takes, perhaps, hundreds of thousands of years to do. Andhow? By applying human intelligence to choose the laws that servehim and to neutralize the laws that hinder. He brings the divineintelligence in man to utilise the divine powers in nature thatare working for general rather than for particular ends.

THE NATURE OF YOGA -

For yoga beginner

In this first discourse we shall concern ourselves with thegaining of a general idea of the subject of Yoga, seeking itsplace in nature, its own character, its object in humanevolution.