A Series of Lessons in Raja YogaAtkinson, William Walker
Religion
A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga
Atkinson, William Walker
Yoga; Yoga, Raja
We know that our students will appreciate the above testimony of Dr.
Schofield, for it is directly in the line of our teachings in the Yogi
Philosophy regarding the Planes of the Mind (see "Fourteen Lessons").
We feel justified in quoting further from Dr. Schofield, for he voices in
the strongest manner that which the Yogi Philosophy teaches as
fundamental truths regarding the mind. Dr. Schofield is an English
writer on Psychology, and so far as we know has no tendency toward
occultism, his views having been arrived at by careful scientific study
and investigation along the lines of Western psychology, which renders
his testimony all the more valuable, showing as it does, how the human
mind will instinctively find its way to the Truth, even if it has to
blaze a new trail through the woods, departing from the beaten tracks
of other minds around it, which lack the courage or enterprise to strike
out for themselves.
Dr. Schofield writes: "The mind, indeed, reaches all the way, and while
on the one hand it is inspired by the Almighty, on the other it energizes
the body, all whose purposive life it originates. We may call the
supra-conscious mind the sphere of the spirit life, the sub-conscious the
sphere of the body life, and the conscious mind the middle region where
both meet."
Continuing, Dr. Schofield says: "The Spirit of God is said to
dwell in believers, and yet, as we have seen, His presence is not the
subject of direct consciousness. We would include, therefore, in the
supra-conscious, all such spiritual ideas, together with conscience--the
voice of God, as Max Muller calls it--which is surely a half-conscious
faculty. Moreover, the supra-conscious, like the sub-conscious, is, as we
have said, best apprehended when the conscious mind is not active.
Visions, meditations, prayers, and even dreams have been undoubtedly
occasions of spiritual revelations, and many instances may be adduced as
illustrations of the workings of the Spirit apart from the action of
reason or mind. The truth apparently is that the mind as a whole is an
unconscious state, by that its middle registers, excluding the highest
spiritual and lowest physical manifestations, are fitfully illuminated
in varying degree by consciousness; and that it is to this illuminated
part of the dial that the word "mind," which rightly appertains to the
whole, has been limited."
Oliver Wendell Holmes has said: "The automatic flow of thought is often
singularly favored by the fact of listening to a weak continuous
discourse, with just enough ideas in it to keep the (conscious) mind
busy. The induced current of thought is often rapid and brilliant in
inverse ratio to the force of the inducing current."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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