THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Spanish soil: the fanaticism which had once produced the hallucinating and murderous sect of the Assassins was deployed against the different infidels, against the
Giaours of Protestantism. The result of such training, of one which was often almost mechanically rationalized, was that human beings appeared as machines of the will,
with no will of their own, but charged with the energy of a mission and goal they believed in. The attitude that if you are not for us you are against us became totally one
of content, as an attitude to the kingdom of Christ on the one hand, to the kingdom of the Devil on the other, and the decision became fanatical through both. But all this
is still Europe, of course, and hence — compared with the far older, far more radical technology of the will in Asia — still almost dilettantism. At least if the inner force
which is practised by the trainers there can be compared with the European will, and above all if even just a couple of words are true in the reports which have been
circulating for ages about inconceivable intensification of inner force in India, which has so little energy. Even in India only the former yogis come into question, not the
charlatans and fakirs of nowadays, who are partly raw epigones, partly tourist industry; there is no way of checking past effects, of course. The purely ideological role
of the yogi is clear: as his first duty he had to set an example of repose; he had to make ‘higher knowledge’ equally uncontrollably exclusive. But apart from this a
subjectively genuine trance of the most disciplined kind exists here, in a form which is still inaccessible to Europeans despite the Jesuit spiritual exercises (cf. Ruben,
Geschichte der indischen Philosophie, 1954, p. 210). The intention and the methodical seriousness of the former yogis are certainly true, however unverifiable and
undiscussible for the enlightened European the traditional hair­raising effects may be. After all, the technique of yoga fashions a belief in willpower which thinks it can
move real mountains, not just mountains of difficulties; thus for ages it has formed the centre of utopian idée­force. And the intention here becomes totally
monomaniacal, it is obsessed with the most extreme utopia of the will: that of material intervention through pure resolve. Control of breathing became the main path of
these spiritual exercises: for in man as in nature, prana, breath, is regarded as the prime mover or divine wind of life. Control of breathing in the body is now to cancel
the external rhythm of time, dependence on the course of the stars; the yogi feels that he has become the breath of the world itself in the small world of his body.
Abstraction from the body is aided by disciplined muscular contractions, the ‘styles’ or figures of posture; there are ten of them. The ‘Light of Hatha­Yoga’ teaches that
they increasingly