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religions, and treating these as purely subjective phenomena,
without regard to the question of their truth we are obliged, on
account of their extraordinary influence upon action and en-
durance, to class them amongst the most important biological
functions of mankind. Their stimulant and anaesthetic effect is so
great that Professor Leuba, in a recent article, goes so far as to say
that so long as men can use their God, they care very little Who he
is, or even whether he is at all. The truth of the matter Can be put,
says Leuba, in this way: God is not known, he is not understood;
he is used sometimes as meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral
support, sometimes as friend, sometimes as an object of love. If he
proves himself useful, the religious consciousness asks for no more
than that. Does God really exist? How does he exist? What is he?
Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is,
in the last analysis, the end of religion.
*Longmans Green, New York, 1903.
150 THE SECRET OF YOGA
The love of life, at any and every level of development, is the
religious impulse. At this purely subjective rating, therefore, re-
ligion must be considered vindicated in a certain way from the
attacks of her critics. It would seem that it cannot be a mere
anachronism and survival, but must exert a permanent function,
whether it be with or without intellectual content, and whether it be
true or false.
It is not God who is used by men but, in actual fact, it is God
who is using mortals for a divine purpose which He alone knows.
Do we know why we lean so heavily on the Supreme Being who is
the cause of our existence? Do we know why we exist at all? If not,
our attitude to the still unfathomed mystery of creation should be
more reverent and more in keeping with our stature as rational
beings. It is the upward pull from Universal Consciousness, or call
it God, exerted through the psychosomatic channel of kundalini,
which is at the bottom of this attitude of reliance on God displayed
by the religious-minded of all denominations. What our minds
habitually reflect must have its source in the invisible Fount from
which all our healthy instincts originate. This is the reason for the
idea often expressed by mystics of all countries that God
reciprocates in a larger measure the love of His devotees and is
always at least as eager to receive the love-sick soul into His arms
as the soul is to reach Him. The very existence of the idea of God
and its close interconnection with the manifold hopes and fears of
the human mind provides in itself a strong testimony in support of
the stand that religion is inseparably connected with the whole
biological and mental structure of man.
The success of surgical operations and medicines in the treat-
ment of diseases depends entirely on the inherent tendency, present
in the living flesh, to fill up and heal the wounds. and to react to
the chemical agents that enter into the stomach or the bloodstream.
If this tendency did not exist it would be dangerous, even fatal, to
perform surgical operations, and medicine would prove of no avail
in the treatment of illness. The same law
THE BIOLOGICAL ASPECT OF KUNDALINI 151
must be operative with varying degrees of effectiveness at the
bottom of all religious and occult practices, which means, in other
words, that unless there exists a possibility in the body to respond
spontaneously to such efforts to create the mental and physiologi-
cal condition necessary for religious experience no amount of hard
work done to achieve success in the enterprise can ever be
actualized in the smallest degree. The body and mind are so closely
interrelated that a change in one is directly or indirectly reflected in
the other. Therefore, any exercises or practices undertaken for
causing any kind of change in the mind, as for instance inducing
samadhi or attainment of paranormal faculties, cannot but have a
corresponding effect on the body. To deny that the human body is
an indispensable factor in the development of a higher state of
consciousness or for the exhibition of supernormal faculties
amounts to a negation of the objective reality of the phenomena.
Those who believe in religion and the validity of religious
experience must also believe in the capacity of the human body to
exhibit the phenomena either as a characteristic present from birth
or as a hidden potentiality that can be developed with exercise, or
that may spontaneously declare itself at some later period in life
in all the three cases manifested in a manner for which we have no
rational explanation at present. If for the expression of normal
human consciousness a delicately adjusted intricate biological
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