“
Any interest in Yoga, in miracles or psychic powers, not based on that humbleness of the soul which is the beginning and the end of all true spiritual light and love is at its best something of scientific interest, and at its worst it is that pride and desire for power which are the surest signs of spiritual darkness.
Let us take an interesting psychological experiment: thought-transmission or thought-reading [.......] The person in deep sleep reads accurately what is written, and when the same experiment is repeated with success several times with different words and numbers not the slightest doubt is left in the mind of the operator that thought-transmission, or thought-reading, is a fact. And when he hears long arguments to the contrary by those who of course have not practised the experiment he cannot but smile.
Well, what does the experiment prove? Only that, to quote Hamlet again,
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
But supposing that after this experiment we could attain all the psychic powers promised in Yoga, does this mean that we have advanced a single step on the spiritual path? Of course not. We have learnt something of amazing psychological interest; but we have not advanced on the path of love. We may even have gone backwards if the slightest pride or self-satisfaction has infected our mind. Those who rely on physical miracles to prove the truth of spiritual things forget the ever-present miracle of the universe and of our own lives. The lover of the physical miracle is in fact a materialist: instead of making material things spiritual, as the poet or the spiritual man does, he simply makes spiritual things material, and this is the source of all idolatry and superstition. Leaving aside the question that matter and spirit may simply be 'different modes, or degrees in perfection, of a common substractum ', as Coleridge says, and the Upanishads suggest, there is the far greater question that in everything spiritual there is an element of beauty which is truth, and which we find in faith, but which is lacking in fanaticism and superstition.
”
”