until one day Fate threw a strange book in its way--Patanjali's "Yoga Aphorisms," a translation from the Sanskrit. I was about seventeen then, just home from a year and a half in the Moravian Brotherhood School in the Black Forest.
I shall never forget that golden September day when the slight volume, bound in blue, first caught my eye. It was lying beside a shiny black bag on the hall table, and the bag belonged, I knew, to a Mr. Scott, who had come to spend a week with us and to hold a series of meetings under my father's auspices in the village hall. Mr. Scott was an ardent revivalist. He was also--this I grasped even at the time--a cadaverous mass of religious affectations. He was writing a brochure, I learned later, to warn England that Satan was bringing dangerous Eastern teachings to the West, and this book was a first proof of the Fiend's diabolical purpose.
I opened it and read a few paragraphs in the hall. I did not understand them, though they somehow held my mind and produced a curious sense of familiarity, half of wonder, half of satisfaction. A deeper feeling than I had yet known woke in me. I was fascinated.... My father's voice calling me to tennis interrupted my reading, and I dropped the book, noticing that it fell behind the table. Hours later, though the bag was gone, the book lay where it had fallen. I stole it. I took it to bed with me and read it through from cover to cover. I read it twice, three times; bits of it I copied out; I did not understand a word of it, but a shutter rushed up in my mind, interest and joy were in me, a big troubling emotion, a conviction that I had found something I had been seeking hungrily for a long time, something I needed, something that, in an odd way, almost seemed familiar.
I repeat--I did not understand a word of it, while yet the meaningless phrases caught me with a revolutionary power. As I read and re-read till my candles guttered, there rose in me a dim consciousness, becoming more and more a growing certainty, that what I read was not entirely
new. So strong was this that it demanded audible
