HIGHER REASON AND JUDGMENT: Page 114

to do. Instead of one man, thousands of the children of India are doing it. All aspirants after Occultism have to set before themselves as a first step the conquest of the physical nature. The Sanyasin is not permitted to remain under the same roof for more than a day;-at the most three days. He has given up his body. He knows it is the mortal, the grosser side of his nature. He trains it after certain methods; purifies and subdues it,-that done, he is free. He is non-attached. He is the master. He can turn the full current of his life-forces upon a single thought, and so vitalise it with the electric principle in himself that it shall have all the potency of the charged wires of a dynamo. There has gone out a foolish and unpardonable impression from some ignorant Western writers that the Yogi is an air-fed, emaciated, human wreck. Yes! You Westerns would give way under these practices. You who are such staunch believers in nourishment and nutrition could hardly believe the Swami Dharmananda Mahavarati when he says: In the beginning of the year 18. I formed the acquaintance of a Yogi who was then in his 260th year. In another year on my way from Afghanistan I was highly delighted at seeing a Join woman ('a Yogini) whose age could be ascertained from her eyelashes which grew again but had not turned grey. She was about 500 years old! Barth on yoga exercises says "I conscientiously observed they can only end in folly and idiocy." Professor Huxley calls them delusions! The face of Vivekananda is not a strange one to my American readers. Is that inspiring appearance indicative of mental aberration? Now listen to his account of himself: Many times I have been in the jaws of death, starving, footsore and weary; for days and days I had had no food! and often could walk no farther; I would sink down under a tree and life would seem ebbing away. I could not speak, I could scarcely think, but at last the mind would revert to the idea: "I have no fear of death; I never hunger nor thirst. The whole of nature cannot crush me; it is my servant. Assert thy strength, thou Lord of Lords! Regain thy lost empire! Arise and walk and stop not, and I would rise up, reinvigorated, and here am I, living today. This is our Swamin! Strong as a rock and one of India's Yogis. This man lived in mountain caves for years. He climbed over the mountains on foot to Thibet. He is by no means a solitary instance. Now reader! If you are wise, you will meditate day after day on these things. The practical lessons will follow. In the meantime fear not.