Raja Yoga (the Yoga Sūtras with commentary) — trans. Swami Vivekananda (1896)

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 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 — dn-ect experience. The teachers all saw God ; they all saw their own souls, they saw their eternity, they saw their future, and what they saw 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 we 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 milHons of times before, and will be repeated eternally. Uniformity is the rigorous law of nature ; what once happened can happen always.

^ RAJA YOGA.

The teachers of the science of Yoga, therefore, declare that rehpion is not only based upon the experience of ancient times, hut that no man can be religious until he has the same perceptions himself. Yoga is the science which teaches us how to get these perceptions. It is useless to talk about religion until one has felt it. Why is there so much disturbance, so Tinich fighting and quarrelling in the name of God ? There has been more bloodshed in the name of God than for any other cause, and the reason is that people never went to the fountain head ; they were content only to give a mental assent to the customs of their forefathers, and wanted others to do the same. What right has a man to say he has a soul if he does not feel it, or that there is a God if he does not see Him ? If there is a God we must see Him, if there is a soul we must perceive it ; otherwise it is better not to believe. It is better to be an outspoken atheist than a hypocrite. The modern idea, on the one hand, with the " learned," is that religion and metaphysics, and all search after a Supreme Being, is futile ; on the other hand, with the semi-educated, the idea seems to be that these things really have no basis, that their only value consists in the fact that they are strong motive p>owers for doing good to the world. If men believe in a God, they may become good, and moral, and so make good citizens. We cannot blame them for holding such ideas, seeing that all the teaching these men get is simply to believe in an eternal rigmarole of words, without any substance behind them. They arc