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YOGA.
79
undergo the unwinding' process themselves. Each one must discover and apply the ‘Key of Knowledge 'to his own heart where the serpent of darkness is supposed to be in hiding. You must remove your own doubts, one by one, for no one but your own self knows what your doubts are. This is the very first principle. It will, in due course of time, bring its reward, which is self-reliance. Its development is the first sign of success. The wonderful success of the man of science is due to his self-reliance.
The next essential is meditation, without which no knowledge is possible. One may believe the conclusions. arrived at by others to be correct, but this is merely a second-hand method. Unless you have thought over the thing yourself, you can never be certain of the result, and the germ of doubt cannot be said to have been killed. The only way of effectively destroying doubt is to revolve the thing to be meditated upon, in all its bearings, in mind, that is, to dissect it, to analyze it, to cut it to pieces, and to pry into it from all possible points of view. When an opinion is formed as the result of the foregoing processes, it will never admit of doubt. The difference between a conclusion arrived at by yourself and one heard from another is precisely that between a house founded on rock and one built on sand. Meditation is the process of classification and generalization of facts into principles, and it is obvious. that no sound grounding of knowledge can be possible without it. But meditation depends on concentration, which is the greatest secret of success.
We have already seen what is meant by concentra
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