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It is only right to say that; for if any special science needs particular capacities in order to attain eminence therein, the science of sciences certainly cannot fall behind the ordinary sciences in the demands that it makes on its students. For rapid progress you must have special capacities, as for anything else. If your will is weak, you must strengthen it. Try to understand; that is what the Theosophist should do; and when you understand, you will not fall into the blunders nor suffer the bewilderment many do, when you expect laws belonging to one region of the universe to bring about results in another. That is all we try to do. But suppose you know by past experience that in the long run it does not make you happier, but brings you sorrow, trouble, distress. Often the man, in whom will is predominant, does not know how he gains the object he is aiming at; it comes to his hands, but the "how" is obscure to him; he willed to have it, and nature gives it to him.

Take it, then, that Yoga is within your reach, with your powers, and that even some of the lower practices of Yoga, some of the simpler applications of the laws of the unfolding of consciousness to yourself, will benefit you in this world as well as in all others. Systematized knowledge of the unfolding of consciousness applied to the individualized Self, that is Yoga. With regard to what I have just called the two great methods in Yoga, we find that by one of these a man treads the path of knowledge by Buddhi-the pure reason; and the other the same path by Manas-the concrete mind. The confused idea makes people think that in Yoga they ought to find necessarily what are called precepts of morality, ethic. He knows that a discovery in chemistry does not depend upon his morality, and he would not think of doing an act of charity with a view to finding out a new element. It is a moral thing to abstain from meat, because thereby you are lessening the infliction of suffering; it is not a moral act to abstain from meat from the yogic standpoint, but only a means to an end.

Look into your own mind, and you will find that memory and imagination are the two things that evoke desire most strongly. Think about the results of Yoga and what it means for the world when you have become a yogi, and you will find your desire becoming stronger and stronger. Then think of Yoga as desirable, if you want to desire Yoga. Moksha Yoga: Then how does one liberate himself? Karma yoga: This is a path of service that aims to create a future free from negativity and selfishness. With the consciousness so far unfolded, does it seem impossible that it should unfold in the future into the Divine? We have found it necessary to first explain to you in the terms of Western physiology the various functions of the body, and then to indicate Nature's plans and methods, which one should adhere to as far as possible. If you see it in that light, it seems to me that Yoga will be to you a far more real, practical thing, than it is when you merely read some fragments about it taken from Sanskrit books, and often mistranslated into English, and you will begin to feel that to be a yogi is not necessarily a thing for a life far off, an incarnation far removed from the present one.

Hope to see you in the yoga room soon! The next point that I would pause upon, and ask you to realise, is the fact that Yoga is a science of psychology. Ethic is a science of life, and not an investigation into the nature of mind and the methods by which the powers of the mind may be developed and evolved. He has no other laws of nature to work with save universal laws by which nature is evolving forms around us, and yet he does in a few years what nature takes, perhaps, what is yoga hundreds of thousands of years to do. The farmer or gardener cannot transcend the laws of nature, nor can he work against them. 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. You can choose those which you require, you can evade those you do not require, you can utilize those you need, and thus you can bring about the result that nature, without that application of human intelligence, cannot so swiftly effect. For it is only by thought that you can manage desire.