An Introduction To Yoga

This book is a collection of four lecture of Annie Besant, delivered in 37 parts, at Benaras. The topics included, cover a broad range in the realm of spiritualism. The readers of any grade or stage may find in this book, the solution to his problems. The book may serve as a hand book to the Bhakta, Jñani as well as the Yogi, all alike but to the followers of path of knowledge, it will be more useful and appealing. This book, perhaps still remains one of the best treatises on the practical understanding of Yoga. 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 laws of unfolding consciousness acts exactly on the same principles that you see applied around you every day in other departments of science. 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 your growth, your unfolding, taking advantage of the powers nature puts within your hands, and deliberately eliminating the conditions which would not help you in your work, but rather hinder your march forward. If you see it in that light, it seems that Yoga will be to you a far more real, practical thing, than it is when you merely read some fragments, 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.