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the body, takes it away. That is because exercise has its own
rhythm; and, as I said, rhythm is half-way up the ridge to SilenceÎ.
Very good, then; in the comparative stillness of the body, the
student becomes aware of minute sounds which did not disturb him in
his ordinary life. At least, not when his mind was occupied with
matters of interest. You will begin to fidget, to itch, to cough.
Possibly your breathing will begin to play tricks upon you. All
these symptoms must be repressed. The process of repressing them is
extremely difficult; and, like all other forms of repression, it
leads to a terrific exaggeration of the phenomena which it is
intended to repress.
16. There are quite a lot of little tricks familiar to most
scientific people from their student days. Some of them are very
significant in this connection of Yoga. For instance, in the matter
of endurance, such as holding out a weight at arm's length, you can
usually beat a man stronger than yourself. If you attend to your
arm, you will probably tire in a minute; if you fix your mind reso-
lutely on something else, you can go on for five minutesÛ or ten, or
even longer. It is a question of active and passive; when Asana
begins to annoy you the reply is to annoy it, to match the active
thought of controlling the minute muscular movement against the
passive thought of easing the irritation and disturbance.
17. Now I do not believe that there are any rules for doing
this that will be any use to you. There are innumerable little
tricks that you might try; only it is, as in the case of the posture
itself, rather better if you invent your own tricks. I will only
mention one: roll the tongue back towards the uvula, at the same
time let the eyes converge towards an imaginery point in the centre
of the forehead. There are all sorts of holinesses indicated in this
attitude, and innumerable precedents on the part of the most respect-
able divinities. Do, please, forget all this nonsense! The advan-
tage is simply that your attention is forced to maintain the awkward
position. You become aware sooner than you otherwise would of any
relaxatiÔon; and you thereby show the rest of the body that it is no
use trying to disturb you by its irritability.
But there are no rules. I said there weren't, and there aren't.
Only the human mind is so lazy and worthless that it is a positive
instinct to try to find some dodge to escape hard work.
These tricks may help or they may hinder; it is up to you to
find out which are good and which are bad, the why and the what and
all the other questions. It all comes to the same thing in the end.
There is only one way to still the body in the long run, and that is
to keep it still. It's dogged as does it.
18. The irritations develop into extreme agony. Any attempt to
alleviate this simply destroys the value of the practice. I must
particularly warn the aspirant against rationalising (I *have* known
people who were so hopelessly bat-witted that they rationalised).
They thought: 'Ah, well, this position is not suitable for me, as I
thought it was. I have made a mess of the Ibis position; now I'·ll
have a go at the Dragon position.' But the Ibis has kept his job,
and attained his divinity, by standing on one leg throughout the
centuries. If you go to the Dragon he will devour you.
19. It is through the perversity of human nature that the most
acute agony seems to occur when you are within a finger's breadth of
full success. Remember Gallipoli! I am inclined to think that it
may be a sort of symptom that one is near the critical point when the
anguish becomes intolerable.
You will probably ask what 'intolerable' means. I rudely
answer: 'Find out!' But it may give you some idea of what is, after
all, not *too* bad, when I say that in the last months of my own work
it often used to take me ten minutes (at the conclusion of the
practice) to straighten my left leg. I took the ankle in both hands,
and eased it out a fraction of a millimetre at a time.
20. At this point the band begins to play. Quite suddenly the
pain stops. An ineffable sense of relief sweeps overÒ the Yogi --
notice that I no longer call him 'student' or 'aspirant' -- and he
becomes aware of a very strange fact. Not only was that position
giving him pain, but all other bodily sensations that he has ever
experienced are in the nature of pain, and were only borne by him by
the expedient of constant flitting from one to another.
He is at ease; because, for the first time in his life, he has
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