that great Upanishad of yoga, the Bhagavad-Gita.  He spoke it out on a battle-field, and not on a mountain peak.  He spoke it to a Kshattriya ready to fight, and not to a Brahmana quietly retired from the world.  The Kurukshetra of the world is the field of Yoga.  They who cannot face the world have not the strength to face the difficulties of Yoga practice.  If the outer world out-wearies your powers, how do you expect to conquer the difficulties of the inner life?  If you cannot climb over the little troubles of the world, how can you hope to climb over the difficulties that a yogi has to scale?  Those men blunder, who think that running away from the world is the road to victory, and that peace can be found only in certain localities.

As a matter of fact, you have practised Yoga unconsciously in the past, even before your self- consciousness had separated itself, was aware of itself.  Sand knew itself to be different, in temporary matter at least, from all the others that surround it.  And that is the first idea that you should take up and hold firmly:  Yoga is only a quickened process of the ordinary unfolding of consciousness.

Yoga may then be defined as the “rational application of the laws of the unfolding of consciousness in an individual case”.  That is what is meant by the methods of Yoga.  You study the laws’ of the unfolding of consciousness in the universe, you then apply them to a special caseÄand that case is your own.  You cannot apply them to another.  They must be self-applied.  That is the definite principle to grasp.  So we must add one more word to our definition:  “Yoga is the rational application of the laws of the unfolding of consciousness, self-applied in an individual case.”

Yoga Is a Science

Next, Yoga is a science.  That is the second thing to grasp.  Yoga is a science, and not a vague, dreamy drifting or imagining.  It is an applied science, a systematized collection of laws applied to bring about a definite end.  It takes up the laws of psychology, applicable to the unfolding of the whole consciousness of man on every plane, in every world, and applies those rationally in a particular case.  This rational application of the laws of unfolding consciousness acts exactly on the same principles that you see applied around you every day in other departments of science.

You know, by looking at the world around you, how enormously the intelligence 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, and practically it is a real one, between “rational” and “natural” growth, because human intelligence can guide the working of natural laws; and when we come to deal with Yoga, 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