Raja-Yoga

YOGA APHORISMS. 1
53
of the eggs, they flew to water, and the mother thought
they would be drowned. If experience be the only
source of knowledge, where did these chickens learn
to pick up food, or the ducklings that the water was
their natural element? If you say it is instinct, it
means nothing
it is
simply giving a word, but is no
explanation. What is this instinct? We have many
instincts in ourselves. For instance, most of you
ladies play the piano, and remember, when you
first
learned, how carefully you had to put your fingers on
the black and the white keys, one after the other, but
now, after long years of practice, you can talk with
your friends, and your hand goes on just the same.
It has become instinct. So with every work we do;
it becomes auto
by practice it becomes instinct,
matic, but so far as we know, all the cases which
we now regard as automatic, are degenerated rea
son. In the language of the Yogi,
instinct is involved
reason. Discrimination becomes involved, and gets
to be automatic Samskdras. Therefore it is perfectly
logical to think that all we call instinct in this
world is simply involved reason. As reason cannot
come without experience, all instinct is, therefore, the
result of past experience. Chickens fear the hawk,
and ducklings love the water, and these are both the
result of past experience. Then the question
is
whether that experience belongs to a particular soul,
or to the body simply, whether this experience which
comes to the duck is the duck s forefather s experience,
or the duck s own experience.
Modern scientific men