INTRODUCTION TO YOGA.

guide the working of natural laws; and when we come to deal with Yoga Yoga is presented here not as a religion, but as a technical system used to speed up the natural growth of human consciousness., 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 the 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 neutralise the laws that hinder. He brings the divine intelligence In this context, the author suggests that the human mind is a localized expression of a higher, universal intelligence, capable of directing natural forces. 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 fantail The "pouter" and "fantail" are specific breeds of domestic pigeons characterized by their unique physical traits, created through many generations of selective breeding.; 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 favoring 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 The original, wild form of a species before human intervention or domestication changed its appearance..

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