There are two necessities of Nature’s workings which seem always to intervene in the greater forms of human activity, whether thsy belong to our ordinary fields of movement or seek those exceptional spheres and fulfilments which appear to us high and divine. Every such form tends towards a harmonised complexity and totality which again breaks apart  into various channels of special effort and tendency, only to unite once more in a larger and more puissant synthesis.

Secondly, development into forms is an imperative rule of effective manifestation; yet all truth and practice too strictly formulated becomes old and loses much, if not all, of its virtue; it must be constantly renovated by fresh streams of the spirit revivifying the dead or dying vehicle and changing it, if it is to acquire a new life. To be perpetually reborn is the condition of a material immortality. The world day to day presents the aspect of a huge cauldron of Medea in which all things are being cast, shredded into pices, experimented on, combined and recombined either to perish and provide the scattered material of new forms or to emerge rejuvaneted and changed for a fresh term of existence.

Indian Yoga, in its essence a special action or formulation of certain great powers of Nature, itself specialised, divided and variously formulated, is potentially one of these dynamic elements of the future life of humanity. The child of immemorial ages, preserved by its vitality and truth into our modern times, it is now emerging from the secret schools and ascetic retreats in which it had taken refuge and is seeking its place in the future sum of living human powers and utilities. But it first to rediscover itself, bring to the surface the profoundest reason of its being in that general truth and that unceasing aim of Nature which it represents, and find by virtue of this new self knowledge and self-appreciation its own recovered and larger synthesis.

In the right view both of life and of yoga all life is either consciously or subconsciounsly a Yoga. But all life, when partially expressed in man and in the Cosmos. But all life, when we look behind its appearances, is a vast Yoga of nature attempting to realise her perfection in an ever increasing expression of her potentalities and to unite herself with her own divine reality. Yoga, as Swami Vivekananda has said, may be regarded as a means of compressing one’s evolution into a single life or a few years or even a few months of bodily existence.

A given system of Yoga, then, can be no more than a selection or a compression, into narrower but more energetic forms of itensity, of the general methods which are already being used loosely, largely, in a leisurely movement, with a more complete combination by the great mother in her vast upward labour. It is this view of Yoga that can alone form the basis for a sound and rational synthesis of Yogic methods. For then Yoga ceases to appear something mystic and abnormal which has no relation to the ordinary processes of the World-Energy or the purposes she keeps in view in her two great movements of subjective and objective self-fulfilment ; it reveals itself rather as an intense and exceptional use of powers that she has already manifested or is progressively organinsing in her less exalted but more general operations.

Yogic methods have something of the same relation to the customary psychological workings of man as has the scientific handling of the natural force of electricity or of steam to the normal operations of steam and of electricity. And they, too are formed upon a knowledge developed and confirmed by regular experiment, practical analysis and constant result. All Rajayoga, for instance,  depends on this perception and experience that our inner elements, combinations, functions, forces, can be separated or dissolved, can be new-combined and set to novel and formely impossible workings or can be new-combined and set to novel and formerly impossible workings or can be transformed and resolved into a new general synthesis by fixed internal processes.

Hathayoga similarly depends om this perception and experience  that the vital forces and functions to which our life is normally subjected and whose ordinary operations seem set and indispensable, can be mastered and the operations changed or suspended with results that would be othewise be impossible and that seem miraculous to those whi have not seized the rationale of their process. And if in some other of its forms this character of Yoga is less apparent, because they are more intuitive and less mechanical, nearer, like the Yoga of knowledge, to a supernal infinity of consciousness and being, yet they too start from the use of some principal faculty in us by ways and for ends not contemplated in its everyday spontaneous workings. All methods grouped under the common name of Yoga are special psychological processes founded on a fixed truth of Nature and developing, out of normal functions, powers and results which were always latent but which her ordinary movements do not easily or do not often manifest.

But as in physical knowledge the multiplication of scientific processes has its disadvantages, as that tends, for instance, to develop a victorious artificiality which overwhelms our natural human life under a load of machinery and to purchase certain forms of freedom and mastery at the price of an increased servitude, so the preoccupation with Yogic process and their exceptional results may its disadvantages and losses.

The Yogin tends to draw away from the common existence and lose his hold upon it ; he tends to purchase wealth of spirit by an improverishment of his human activities, the inner freedom by an outer death. If he gains God, he loses life, or if he turns his efforts ourward to conquer life, he is in danger of losing God. Therefore we see in India that a sharp incompatibility has been created between life in the world and spiritual growth and perfection, and although the tradition and ideal of a victorious harmony between the inner attraction and the outer demand remains, it is little exemplified. In fact, when a man turns his vision and energy inward and enters on the path of Yoga, he is supposed to be lost inevitably to the great stream of our collective existence and the secular effort of humanity. So, strongly has the idea pervailed, so much has it been emphasized by prevalent philosophies and religions that to escape from life is now commonly considered as not only the necessary condition, but the general object of yoga. No synthesis of Yoga can be stisfying which does not, in its aim, reunite God and Nature in a liberated and perfected human life or, in its method, not only permit but favour the harmony of our inner and outer  activities and experiences in the divine consummation of both.

The truth and full object and utility of Yoga can only be accomplished when the conscious Yoga in man becomes,like the subconscious Yoga in Nature, outwardly conterminous with life itself and we can once more, looking out both on the path and the achievemnet, say in a more perfect and luminious sense : “All life is Yoga.”