INTRODUCTORY.(2/10)

In the first place I will ask you to analyse all the various religions of the world. You will find that these are divided into two classes, those with a book, and those without a book.Those with a book are the strongest, and have the largest number of followers.Those without books have mostly died out, and the few new ones have very small followings.Yet, in all of them we find one consensus of opinion,that the truths they teach are the results of the experiences of particular persons.
The Christian asks you to believe in his religion,to believe in Christ, and to believe in Him as the incarnation of God, to believe in a God, in a soul, and in a better state of that soul. If I ask him for reasons he says, “No,it is my belief.”But if you go to the fountain head of Christianity you will find that it is based upon experience. Christ said He saw God; the disciples said they felt God; and so forth.Similarly, in Buddhism, it is Buddha’s experience He experienced certain truths, saw them, came in contact with them, and preached them to the world. So with the Hindus in their book the writers, who are called Rishis,or sages, declare that they have experienced certain truths, and these they preach. Thus it is clear that all the religions of the world have been built upon that one universal and adamantine foundation of all our knowledge—direct experience. The teachers all saw God; they all saw their own souls, they saw their eternity, they saw their future, and they saw what they preached.Only there is this difference, that in most of these religions, especially in modern times, a peculiar claim is put before us, and that claim is that these experiences are impossible at the present day; they were only possible with a few men, who were the first founders of the religions that subsequently bore their names.
At the present time these experiences have become obsolete,and therefore whe have now to take religion on belief.This I entirely deny.If there has been one case of experience in this world in any particular branch of knowledge it absolutely follows that this experience has been possible millions of times before, and will be repeated eternally.Uniformity is the rigorous law of nature; what once happened can happen always.
The teachers of the science of Yoga, therefore, declare that religion is not only based upon the experiences of ancient times, but that no man can be religious until he has had the same perceptions himself. Yoga is the science which teaches us to get these perceptions. It is useless to talk about religion until one has felt it.
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