knowledge of all worlds is acquired.  Other miraculous attainments are such that they should be visible to others, but are probably explicable as subjective fancies.  Such are the powers of becoming heavy or light, infinitely large or infinitely small and of emitting flames.  This last phenomenon is perhaps akin to the luminous visions, called photisms by psychologists, which not infrequently accompany conversion and other religious experiences and take the form of flashes or rays proceeding from material objects[673].  The Yogi can even become many persons instead of one by calling into existence other bodies by an effort of his will and animating them all by his own mind[674].

Europeans are unfavourably impressed by the fact that the Yoga devotes much time to the cultivation of hypnotic states of doubtful value both for morality and sanity.  But the meditation which it teaches is also akin to aesthetic contemplation, when the mind forgets itself and is conscious only of the beauty of what is contemplated.  Schopenhauer[675] has well expressed the Indian idea in European language.  “When some sudden cause or inward disposition lifts us out of the endless stream of willing, the attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing but comprehends things free from their relation to the will and thus observes them without subjectivity purely objectively, gives itself entirely up to them so far as they are ideas, but not in so far as they are motives.  Then all at once the peace which we were always seeking, but which always fled from us on the former path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord and it is well with us.”  And though the Yoga Sutras represent superhuman faculties as depending chiefly on the hypnotic condition of samyama, they also say that they are obtainable—­at any rate such of them as consist in superhuman knowledge—­by pratibha or illumination.  By this term is meant a state of enlightenment which suddenly floods the mind prepared by the Yoga discipline.  It precedes emancipation as the morning star precedes the dawn.  When this light has once come, the Yogi possesses all knowledge without the process of samyama.  It may be compared to the Dibba-cakkhu or divine eye and the knowledge of the truths which according to the Pitakas[676] precede arhatship.  Similar instances of sudden intellectual enlightenment are recorded in the experiences of mystics in other countries.  We may compare the haplosis or ekstasis of Plotinus and the visions of St Theresa or St Ignatius in which such mysteries as the Trinity became clear, as well as the raptures in which various Christian mystics[677] experienced the feeling of levitation and thought that they were being literally carried off their feet.

The practices and theories which are systematized in the Yoga Sutras are known to the Upanishads, particularly those of the Atharva Veda.  But even the earlier Upanishads allude to the special physical and mental discipline necessary to produce concentration of mind.  The Maitrayana Upanishad says that the sixfold Yoga consists of restraint of the breath, restraint of the senses, meditation, fixed attention, investigation, absorption.  The Svetasvatara Upanishad speaks of the proper places and postures for meditation, and the Chandogya[678] of concentrating all the senses on the self, a process which is much the same as the pratyahara of the Yoga.