A Series of Lessons in Raja YogaAtkinson, William Walker
Religion
A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga
Atkinson, William Walker
Yoga; Yoga, Raja
And man has this plane of mind within him, below consciousness. In fact
the lower forms of human life manifest but little Intellect, and live
almost altogether according to their Instinctive impulses and desires.
Every man has this Instinctive mental region within him and from it are
constantly arising impulses and desires to perplex and annoy him, as well
as to serve him occasionally. The whole secret consists in whether the
man has Mastery of his lower self or not.
From this plane of the mind arise the hereditary impulses coming down
from generations of ancestors, reaching back to the cavemen, and still
further back into the animal kingdom. A queer storehouse is this.
Animal instincts--passions, appetites, desires, feelings, sensations,
emotions, etc., are there. Hate, envy, jealousy, revenge, the lust of the
animal seeking the gratification of his sexual impulses, etc., etc., are
there, and are constantly intruding upon our attention until we have
asserted our mastery. And often the failure to assert this mastery comes
from an ignorance of the nature of the desire, etc. We have been taught
that these thoughts were "bad" without being told _why_, and we have
feared them and thought them the promptings of an impure nature, or a
depraved mind, etc. This is all wrong. These things are not "bad" of
themselves--they came to us honestly--they are our heritage from the
past. They belong to the animal part of our nature, and were necessary to
the animal in his stage of development. We have the whole menagerie
within us, but that does not mean that we should turn the beasts loose
upon ourselves or others. It was necessary for the animal to be fierce,
full of fight, passionate, regardless of the rights of others, etc., but
we have outgrown that stage of development, and it is ignoble for us to
return to it, or to allow it to master us.
This lesson is not intended as a discourse upon Ethics or morals. We do
not intend going into a discussion of the details of "Right and Wrong,"
for we have touched upon that phase of the subject in other works. But we
feel justified in calling your attention to the fact that the human mind
intuitively recognizes the "Rightness" of the living up to that which
comes to us from the highest parts of the mind--the highest product of
our unfoldment. And it likewise intuitively recognizes the "Wrongness" of
the falling back into that which belongs to the lower stages of our
mentality--to the animal part of us, that is our heritage from the past
and that which has gone before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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