Resolve, for example, saying:  “I will do such and such thing every morning,” and do it.  One thing at a time is enough for a feeble will.  Make yourself a promise to do such and such a thing at such a time, and you will soon find that you will be ashamed to break your promise.  When you have kept such a promise to yourself for a day, make it for a week, then for a fortnight.  Having succeeded, you can choose a harder thing to do, and so on.  By this forcing of action, you strengthen the will.  Day after day it grows greater in power, and you find your inner strength increases.  First have a strong desire.  Then transmute it into a strong will.

The third requisite for Yoga is a keen and broad intelligence.  You cannot control your mind, unless you have a mind to control.  Therefore you must develop your mind.  You must study.  By study, I do not mean the reading of books.  I mean thinking.  You may read a dozen books and your mind may be as feeble as in the beginning.  But if you have read one serious book properly, then, by slow reading and much thinking, your intelligence will be nurtured and your; mind grow strong.

These are the things you want—­a strong desire, an indomitable will, a keen. intelligence.  Those are the capacities that you must unfold in order that the practice of Yoga may be possible to you.  If your mind is very unsteady, if it is a butterfly mind like a child’s, you must make it steady.  That comes by close study and thinking.  You must unfold the mind by which you are to work.

Forthgoing and Returning

It will help you, in doing this and in changing your desire, if you realise that the great evolution of humanity goes on along two paths—­the Path of Forthgoing, and the Path of Return.

On the Path, or marga, of Pravritti—­forthgoing on which are the vast majority of human beings, desires are necessary and useful.  On that path, the more desire a man has, the better for his evolution.  They are the motives that prompt to activity.  Without these the stagnates, he is inert.  Why should Isvara have filled the worlds with desirable objects if He did not intend that desire should be an ingredient in evolution?  He deals with humanity as a sensible mother deals -with her child.  She does not give lectures to the child on the advantages of walking nor explain to it learnedly the mechanism of the muscles of the leg.  She holds a bright glittering toy before the child, and says:  “Come and get it.”  Desire awakens, and the child begins to crawl, and so it learns to walk.  So Isvara has put toys around us, but always just out of our reach, and He says:  “Come, children, take these.  Here are love, money, fame, social consideration; come and get them.  Walk, make efforts for them.”  And we, like children, make great efforts and struggle along to snatch these toys.  When we seize the toy, it breaks into pieces and is of no use.  People fight and struggle and