The Way of Power, L. Adams Beck [beach books txt] 📗
- Author: L. Adams Beck
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The third Yoga is known as Bhakti Yoga, and this way is open to all who possess passionate love and devotion to the occult, the Hidden Treasure. There is no Yoga that is not based on renunciation, for the reason that the individual self must be forgotten or it obscures all the rest of the universe. But this third Yoga dreams on self-renunciation, adores it, is absorbed in it. It sends rays of love to all that lives and moves and has its being, and in a sense this is the easiest Yoga of all because no renunciation is difficult where there is love. If a man loves the marvelous animal life which lives beside us and which, as Cardinal Newman said, man as a whole understands less than he does the archangels, is it difficult to him to refrain from killing, wounding, maltreating those whom science knows to be our brothers, or slaying them for food? No, indeed. And it may be added that their lover secures for himself joys wholesome, clean, uplifting to the true Yoga and understanding, which the man with a gun or knife can never know. If the heart is given to another all service for him is pure and exquisite joy, and so, in reading the lives of the saints, Eastern or Western, one sees that actual pain became pleasure when the call of the Divine was heard. The martyrs swept the flames about them like water, the tortures of the dungeons were assuaged with secret passionate incomprehensible joys. And, as the Swami Vivekananda has said, the path of love is the easiest advance to the higher consciousness because the lover does not lament the loss of what he has left behind. I myself should add that nothing is ever left behind,—all is included and carried on. (I condense.)
“A man loves his own city, then his country, and the intense love for his little city subsides smoothly, naturally. He learns to love the whole world and his fanatical patriotism for his own country drops off without pain. An uncultured man loves the pleasures of the senses, then, as he becomes cultured, he begins to love intellectual pleasures, and sense-enjoyments mean less and less to him. So, when he gets into a plane higher than the intellect or that of inspiration he finds a state of bliss in which all pleasures of the senses and even the intellect become as nothing. When the moon shines the stars dim.
“And when this love and adoration reach supreme devotion the man is free. He resembles the ship in the fable which coming near the magnetic rock lost all its iron bars and bolts, and his fetters drop. The adorer, the lover of the highest, need not suppress his emotions [as in the other Yogas] but needs only to intensify and direct them to the highest.”
When this point is attained the yogin sits smiling, enthroned above pain or change. I suppose in our own Scriptures that St. John may be taken as the type of the Bhakti-yogin, the man who has attained through utter love and devotion; and it is very clear that he was regarded by the early Christians as a mighty master of the powers, as much as, if not more than, St. Paul, who may rather be regarded as a yogin of pure intellect. This is not to say that the yogin of intellect does not love and that the yogin of love is incapable of reason, but each has trodden a different road to the occult. Both have lost the impeding ego, though by different inspirations.
I might give many illustrations of the three great paths of Yoga which have been trodden in the West, though perhaps with a less definite consciousness of the goal ahead than in the East, but I have said enough to indicate their significance and to urge some readers to study these ways in a deeper degree for themselves. It cannot be denied that in these three there is a way for every one to the occult and the powers, from the simplest to the greatest and most highly developed soul.
In the following chapters I treat of a Yoga far less known and practiced in the West than in the East, though in many a lonely monastery and cloister in Europe the road was unconsciously and therefore ignorantly followed which guides the eagle flight of the psyche to union and the powers. Yet let it not be thought that Raja Yoga—the royal Yoga—is greater in any way than the other three. It may perhaps in some respects be a straighter if a harder road, though even that is open to question. What may be said to anyone whom the irresistible music of the unseen draws is this: Take the road in which you can move most simply, steadfastly and easily to attainment. Each has his own Yoga.
I now pass on to the strange and ancient system of training and discipline by which India taught the science of concentration which she considered the key to reunion with the forces of the universe and therefore control of the powers which in India are called the Siddhis and in the West are (so far as they have been heard of) connected with the occult and the miraculous.
I need scarcely say how profoundly I was interested on finding that in India has been built up for ages a perfect and coherent system of self-education, the gymnastic of the “Occult” powers which rightly used lead to the highest attainment but in any case to the Key of the Land behind the Looking Glass where all the good things wait to be chosen. I have dwelt on the adventures which await the entrant there in a novel I have just finished, and they are all true to this teaching. Attainment, far other than is possible in this thwarted world we have created out of our physical sense-perception, is not only possible but certain there, for those who think the effort worth long pains and trouble along the lines indicated in this book.
This subject is such an enormous one, ramifying into every department of life, that I feel I can give only the silken thread with which the beetle climbed painfully upward to the prisoner in the tower. But at least the thread is silken, and the coiled rope lies below it.
And I hope that this very truncated statement may not be quite useless in aiding realization of the truth (that what desires and hopes are in a man he has the power to supply, not derived from any supernatural being but from his own relation to the forces of the universe: He who has the entry to the Land behind the Looking Glass may do what he will. And as I learned from personal experience it ceased to be astonishing that in Indian teaching the utmost stress was laid upon the comradeship of the body in the adventure. They said:
“The body is the boat which will carry us to the other shore of the Ocean of Life. So it must be taken care of and kept free from all disease. Never was there a wise man who had not to reject pleasures and enjoyments of the senses to acquire his wisdom.”
No doubt the first wish is to develop the body’s powers for the body’s own sake. That wish is soon forgotten when it is realized as an instrument of the psychic. I read with complete understanding in the ancient books of India that a human being is a channel for the flow of that ocean of power which vibrates and billows through the universe, that if the channel is kept clear the flow will be eternal, that if it is choked the flow will be delayed to the man’s great detriment and loss until slowly and painfully he reaches higher stages of development. How he uses this force when he achieves it is his own responsibility. The world has had examples of many sorts of choice and their results. India has always taught in parables the doctrine of evolution of the body and soul. That of the body is taught perhaps most clearly in the wonderful birth-stories of the Buddha, where he is represented as evolving slowly upward from the lower planes of life, gathering and developing the experiences of each as he climbs along the chain of evolution. The doctrine of psychic evolution is of course taught almost throughout Asia in the parable of reincarnation, which conveys an idea, impossible to be stated definitely in human terms, of the soul’s return to the schoolroom of life-experience until it is fully developed and capable of reunion with the Source.
It will be interesting to give a list of some of the powers which the highest authority of ancient India declares are attainable by a man who follows the bodily and spiritual discipline laid down for the purpose of psychic attainment. And if it be objected that these are miracles and that there are no such things as miracles India fully endorses the latter statement:
“There are no such things as miracles. There is nothing superhuman, but humanity is in itself a part of all the power of the universe and recognizing this and living by the law that guides it can develop ability to use the same force as that which drives the tides, the winds, and more. There have been men who knowing this have used and use these powers in higher and lower degrees, and the day will surely come when this force will be more generally studied and understood in its full normality and transcendent power.
“The man disciplined and obedient to the law can know all that is in another man’s mind by using the proper means. A man disciplined may apparently vanish. He does not really vanish but none will see him. This can be done only by one who has gained by concentration the power in which the form and the things formed can be separated. Such a man can enter a dead body and make it arise and move even while he himself is inhabiting his own. Or he can enter a living body and direct that man’s mind and organs and for the time being act through the body of that man. For each individual mind is but a part of the universal mind though from ignorance it believes itself separate and can therefore only work through the nerve currents of its own body. Therefore when a man has freed himself from the nerve currents of his own body he can work through other bodies also. Such a man does not sink in water. He can walk on thorns. He can die at will. When he wills, light can flash from his body. His body can acquire the lightness of air and he can pass from point to point.”
When a man is born with these powers it is because he has reached that stage of evolution. There are other powers, but I mention these for they will recall the misnamed “miracles” of the Christian religion (now so discredited) and of the other great faiths. What if these people were right? What if they were true manifestations of a law forgotten and discredited now in the West and perhaps slipping slowly into oblivion in the Orient?
What if the Indian thinkers were right who said, “The soul is the only reality and we have forgotten it. The body is a dream and the average man thinks he is all body”?
It would follow from that fact that the dimly perceived powers which we call Occult are the natural right and heritage of every man, and the achievement of those who care to develop the seeds latent within them into growth, blossom, and fruit.
It should be
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