VISITORS at Point Loma who learn something of the high moral tone of the Râja Yoga College here and of the way in which the young people are protected from evil influences, are much impressed with these educational conditions, as desirable as they are unique. Compared with the average youth's environment, which modern life keys to an ever-increasing pitch of excitement, self-indulgence, and artificiality, the serene, disciplined, natural life of the Point Loma young folk makes an atmosphere of quite another world. Even the keenest critics admit this.
The judgment, however, becomes so colored by the prevailing customs and ideas and the critical minds are so skeptical from previous failures in fulfilment, that even friendly visitors are prepared to find a flaw somewhere. So it is not surprising to hear them say: "Well, there is something wonderful here and it is the right way to live; but how will it be with these young people when they leave the school and go out to meet the unknown temptations of ordinary life? How will they stand the test?"
That question touches the point wherein the Râja Yoga method differs from prevailing educational systems, in training the pupil, not for examination day, but for practical life.
In analysing temptations of any kind they may be traced to a common root: the promise of giving the tempted more power—the power to feel more, to think more, to do more. This proffered power is the naturally alluring counterfeit of that conscious inner sense which longs to be more.
First take the physical appetites which so often develop a mastery of the thoughtless or deliberately indulgent. The normal sense of taste enlarges the feeling of pleasure, and agreeable food stimulates the body's latent nutritive forces to an output of strength and action. Usually the desire of the alcoholic and drug habitués is not primarily for the taste of the drink or the drug but for the coveted feeling of attainment that they (apparently) give, the temporary, apparent return of waning poise and power. Even when unable to stand steadily, the inebriate is convinced of his own strength and importance by the feeling of energy and largeness he has recklessly lashed into an outgoing, aimless tide of exhausting sensation. The maudlin type finds himself the central figure of a fictitious emotional sphere, while the ambitious but incompetent man basks in the pleasing delusion of his own wealth and dignity. The craving for stimulants and sedatives grows with the indulgence which weakens the will, shatters the nerves, dulls the mind, and debases the spirit. The wretched habitué feels a vital lack of selfhood and clutches at even a passing furlough for his mutilated and chaotic sense of identity.
The sense of smell is not only intensified by favorite odors, but these recall and vivify other scenes and sensations. A fragrant flower may suggest a realm of beauty and poetry and sweetness. Savory odors appeal to the sense of taste and the appetite becomes the means of still further arousing one through the memory and imagination. The degenerate nature enjoys even offensive odors as the means of making him more alive to the possibilities of his degenerate world. A dog's markedly developed olfactory sense is not attracted by aesthetic odors as he smells impartially at everything, and follows up—tempted, if you will—those odors that make him more aware of his canine capacity for sensation and action: that, in short, make him more of a dog.
The auditory sense is also the gateway to a larger range of feeling and power. The savage responds to his own defiant war-cry, and the small boy dilates with his noisy activities, as the refined expand under nature's finished rhythm of sound and the tones of inspiring music.
The eye also lights up old and new scenes of thought and feeling and the characteristic sensations are reflexly stimulated whether one seeks an exciting round of changing pictures or chooses more beautiful and useful things, whether the higher or the lower nature is appealed to, it is the larger sense of power to feel or to think or to know that is the attraction of vision.