The movement of nature is twofold: divine and undivine. The distinction is only for practical purposes since there is nothing that is not divine. The undivine nature, that which we are and must remain so long as the faith in us is not changed, acts through limitation and ignorance and culminates in the life of the ego; but the divine nature acts by unification and knowledge, and culminates in life divine.

The passage from the lower to the higher may effect itself by the transformation of the lower and its elevation to the higher nature. It is this that must be the aim of an integral yoga. It is always through something in the lower that we must rise into the higher existence, and each school of yoga selects its own point of departure.

They choose certain aspects of the lower prakriti and turn them towards the divine. But nature's normal action is an integral movement which is affected by and affects all our environments. The whole of life is the yoga of nature.

The whole difference between the yogin and the natural man is that the yogin seeks to substitute the lower nature by the higher nature. If our aim is only an escape from the world to god, synthesis is a waste of time; for then our sole aim must be to find the shortest path to god. But if our aim be a transformation of our integral being into the terms of god-existence, then synthesis becomes necessary.

The method we have to pursue, then, is to put our whole conscious being into contact with the divine and to call him in to transform our entire being into his, so that in a sense god himself, the real person in us, becomes the sadhaka of the sadhana as well as the master of the yoga by whom the lower personality is used.

In psychological fact this method translates itself into the progressive surrender of the ego to the beyond ego with its vast and inevitable workings. It requires a colossal faith and unflinching patience. For it implies three stages of which only the last can be wholly blissful or rapid-the attempt of the ego to contact the divine.

In fact, the divine strength, often unobserved and behind the veil, substitutes itself for our weakness and supports us through all our failings of faith, courage and patience. It 'makes the blind to see and the lame to stride over the hills'. Therefore this path is at once the most difficult imaginable and yet, in comparison with the magnitude of its effort and object, the easiest.

There are three outstanding features of this action of the higher when it works integrally on the lower nature. In the first place, it does not act according to a fixed system as in the specialized methods of yoga, but with a sort of free, yet gradually intensive and purposeful working determined by the temperament of the individual in whom it operates.

In a sense, therefore, each man has his own method of yoga. Secondly, the process, being integral, accepts our complete nature and compels all to undergo a divine change. In that ever progressive experience, we begin to perceive how this lower manifestation is constituted and that everything in it, however seemingly deformed or petty or vile, is the imperfect figure of some element in the divine nature. Thirdly, the divine Power in us uses all life as a means of this integral yoga.

Every contact with our world-environment, however trifling, is used for the work, and every inner experience, even the most repellent suffering, becomes a step on the path to perfection. And we recognize in ourselves the method of god in the world, his purpose of light in the obscure.

We see the divine method to be the same in the lower and in the higher working; only in the one it is pursued tardily and obscurely through the subconscious in nature, in the other it becomes swift and self-conscious and the instrument confesses the hand of the master.

All life is a yoga of nature seeking to manifest god within itself. Yoga marks the stage at which this effort becomes capable of self-awareness and therefore of right completion in the individual. It is a gathering up and concentration of the movements dispersed and loosely combined in the lower evolution.

Excerpted from The Synthesis of Yoga