Reformatted for HTML by OmuYOGA FOR YELLOWBELLIES
(Continued from
"Yoga For Yahoos")
CONTENTS
(Part 5 of 8)
YOGA
FOR YELLOWBELLIES.
FIRST
LECTURE.
Do what thou wilt shall
be the whole of the Law.
let us begin this evening
by going briefly over the ground covered by my first four
lectures. I told you that Yoga meant union, and that this
union was the cause of all phenomena. Consciousness
results from the conjunction of a mysterious stimulus
with a mysteri- ous sensorium. The kind of Yoga which is
the subject of these remarks is merely an expansion of
this, the union of self-conscious- ness with the
universe.
We spoke of the eight
limbs of Yoga, and dealt with the four which refer to
physical training and experiences.
The remaining four deal
with mental training and experiences, and these form the
subject of the ensuing remarks.
2. Before we deal with
these in detail, I think it would be helpful to consider
the formula of Yoga from what may be called the
mathematical, or magical standpoint. This formula has
been described in my text-book on Magick, Chapter III.,
the formula of Tetragramma- ton. This formula covers the
entire universe of magical operations. The word usually
pronounced Jehovah is called the Ineffable Name; it is
alleged that when pronounced accurately its vibrations
would destroy the universe; and this is indeed quite
true, when we take the deeper interpretation.
Tetragrammaton is so
called from the four letters in the word: Yod, He, Vau,
and He'. This is compared with the relations of a family
-- Yod, the Father, He, the Mother; Vau, the Son; and the
final He', the Daughter. (In writing she is sometimes
distinguished from her mother by inserting a small point
in the letter.) This is also a reference to the elements,
fire, water, air, earth. I may go further, and say that
all possible existing things are to be classed as related
to one or more of these elements for convenience in
certain operations. But these four letters, though in one
sense they represent the eternal framework, are not, so
to speak, original. For instance, when we place
Tetragrammaton on the Tree of Life, the Ten Sephiroth or
numbers, we do not include the first Sephira. Yod is
referred to the second, He to the third, Vau to the group
from 4 to 9, and He' final to the tenth. No. 1 is said to
be symbolised by the top point of the Yod.
It is only in No. 10 that
we get the manifested universe, which is thus shown as
the result of the Yoga of the other forces, the first
three letters of the name, the active elements, fire,
water and air. (These are the three 'mother letters' in
the Hebrew alphabet.) The last element, earth, is usually
considered a sort of consolida- tion of the three; but
that is rather an unsatisfactory way of regarding it,
because if we admit the reality of the universe at all we
are in philosophical chaos. However, this does not
concern us for the moment.
3. When we apply these
symbols to Yoga, we find that fire represents the Yogi,
and water the object of his meditation. ((You can, if you
like, reverse these attributions. It makes no difference
except to the metaphysician. And precious little to him!)
The Yod and the He
combine, the Father and Mother unite, to produce a son,
Vau. This son is the exalted state of mind produced by
the union of the subject and the object. This state of
mind is called Samadhi in the Hindu terminology. It has
many varieties, of constantly increasing sublimity; but
it is the generic term which implies this union which is
the subject of Yoga. At this point we ought to remember
poor little He' final, who represents the ecstasy --
shall I say the orgasm? -- and the absorption thereof:
the compensation which cancels it. I find it excessively
difficult to express myself. It is one of these ideas
which is very deeply seated in my mind as a result of
constant meditation, and I feel that I am being entirely
feeble when I say that the best translation of the letter
He' final would be 'ecstasy rising into Silence.' Moral:
meditate yourselves, and work it out! Finally, there is
no other way.
4. I think it is very
important, since we are studying Yoga from a strictly
scientific point of view, to emphasise the exactness of
the analogy that exists between the Yogic and the sexual
process. If you look at the Tree of Life, you see that
the Number One at the top divides itself into Numbers Two
and Three, the equal and opposite Father and Mother, and
their union results in the complexity of the Son, the Vau
Group, while the whole figure recovers its simplicity in
the single Sephira of He' final, of the Daughter.
It is exactly the same in
biology. The spermatozoon and the ovum are biologically
the separation of an unmanifested single cell, which is
in its function simple, though it contains in itself, in
a latent form, all the possibilitiies of the original
single cell. Their union results in the manifestatiion of
these qualities in the child. Their potentialities are
expressed and developed in terms of time and space, while
also, accompanying the act of union, is the ecstasy which
is the natural result of the consciousness of their
annihilation, the necessary condition of the production
of their offspring.
5. It would be easy to
develop this thesis by analogies drawn from ordinary
human experiences of the growth of passion, the hunger
accompanying it, the intense relief and joy afforded by
satisfaction. I like rather to think of the fact that all
true religion has been the artistic, the dramatic,
representation of the sexual process, not merely because
of the usefulness of this cult in tribal life, but as the
veil of this truer meaning which I am explaining to you
tonight. I think that every experience in life should be
regarded as a symbol of the truer experience of the
deeper life. In the Oath of a Master of the Temple occurs
the clause: 'I will interpret every phenomenon as a
particular dealing of God with my soul.'
It is not for us to
criticise the Great Order for expressing its idea in
terms readily understandable by the ordinary intelligent
person. We are to wave aside the metaphysical
implications of the phrase, and grasp its obvious
meaning. So every act should be an act of Yoga. And this
leads us directly to the question which we have postponed
until now -- Concentration.
6. Concentration! The
sexual analogy still serves us. Do you remember the Abbe
in Browning? Asked to preside at the Court of Love, he
gave the prize to the woman the object of whose passion
was utterly worthless, in this admirable judgment:
'The love which to one,
and one only, has reference
Seems terribly like what
perhaps gains God's preference.' It is a commonplace, and
in some circumstances (such as con- stantly are found
among foul-minded Anglo-Saxons) a sort of joke, that
lovers are lunatics. Everything at their command is
pressed into the service of their passion; every kind of
sacrifice, every kind of humiliation, every kind of
discomfort -- these all count for nothing. Every energy
is strained and twisted, every energy is directed to the
single object of its end. The pain of a momentary
separation seems intolerable; the joy of consummation
impossible to describe: indeed, almost impossible to
bear!
7. Now this is exactly
what the Yogi has to do. All the books -- they disagree
on every other point, but they agree on this stupid- ity
-- tell him that he has to give up this and give up that,
some- times on sensible grounds, more often on grounds of
prejudice and superstition. In the advanced stages one
has to give up the very virtues which have brought one to
that state! Every idea, considered as an idea, is lumber,
dead weight, poison; but it is all wrong to represent
these acts as acts of sacrifice. There is no question of
depriving oneself of anything one wants. The process is
rather that of learning to discard what one thought one
wanted in the darkness before the dawn of the discovery
of the real object of one's passion. Hence, note well!
concentration has reduced our moral obligations to their
simplest terms: there is a single standard to which
everything is to be referred. To hell with the Pope! If
Lobster Newburg upsets your digestion -- and good
digestion is necessary to your practice -- then you do
not eat Lobster Newburg. Unless this is clearly under-
stood, the Yogi will constantly be side-tracked by the
sophistica- tions of religious and moral fanatics. To
hell with the Archbishops!
8. You will readily
appreciate that to undertake a course of this kind
requires careful planning. You have got to map out your
life in advance for a considerable period so far as it is
humanly possible to do so. If you have failed in this
original strategical disposition, you are simply not
going to carry through the campaign. Unforeseen
contingencies are certain to arise, and therefore one of
our precautions is to have some sort of reserve of
resource to fling against unexpected attacks.
This is, of course,
merely concentration in daily life, and it is the habit
of such concentration that prepares one for the much
severer task of the deeper concentration of the Yoga
practices. For those who are undertaking a preliminary
course there is nothing better, while they are still
living more or less ordinary lives, than the practices
recommended in 'The Equinox'. There should be -- there
must be -- a definite routine of acts calculated to
remind the student of the Great Work.
9. The classic of the
subject is 'Liber Astarte vel Berylli', the Book of
Devotion to a Particular Deity. This book is admirable
beyond praise, reviewing the whole subject in every
detail with flawless brilliancy of phrase. Its practice
is enough in itself to bring the devotee to high
attainment. This is only for the few. But every student
should make a point of saluting the Sun (in the manner
recommended in Liber Resh) four times daily, and he shall
salute the Moon on her appearance with the Mantra
Gayatri. The best way is to say the Mantra instantly one
sees the Moon, to note whether the attention wavers, and
to repeat the Mantra until it does not waver at all.
He should also practise
assiduously Liber III. vel Jugorum. The essence of this
practice is that you select a familiar thought, word or
gesture, one which automatically recurs fairly often
during the day, and every time you are betrayed into
using it, cut yourself sharply upon the wrist or forearm
with a convenient instrument.
There is also a practice
which I find very useful when walking in a christian city
-- that of exorcising (with the prescribed outward and
downward sweep of the arm and the words 'Apo pantos
kakodaimonos') any person in religious garb.
All these practices
assist concentration, and also serve to keep one on the
alert. They form an invaluable preliminary training for
the colossal Work of genuine concentration when it comes
to be a question of the fine, growing constantly finer,
movements of the mind.
10. We may now turn to
the consideration of Yoga practices themselves. I assume
that in the fortnight which has elapsed since my last
lecture you have all perfected yourselves in Asana and
Pranayama; that you daily balance a saucer brimming with
sulphuric acid on your heads for twelve hours without
accident, that you all jump about busily like frogs when
not seriously levitated; and that your Mantra is as
regular as the beating of your heart.
The remaining four limbs
of Yoga are Pratyahara, Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi.
I will give you the
definition of all four at a single stroke, as each one to
some extent explains the one following. Pratyahara may be
roughly described as introspection, but it also means a
certain type of psychological experience. For instance,
you may suddenly acquire a conviction, as did Sir Humphry
Davy, that the universe is composed exclusively of ideas;
or you may have the direct experience that you do not
possess a nose, as may happen to the best of us, if we
concentrate upon the tip of it.
11. Dharana is meditation
proper, not the kind of meditation which consists of
profound consideration of the subject with the idea of
clarifying it or gaining a more comprehensive grasp of
it, but the actual restraint of the consciousness to a
single imaginery object chosen for the purpose.
These two limbs of Yoga
are therefore in a sense the two methods employed
mentally by the Yogi. For, long after success in Samadhi
has been attained, one has to conduct the most extensive
explorations into the recesses of the mind.
12. The word Dhyana is
difficult to define; it is used by many writers in quite
contrary senses. The question is discussed at some length
in Part I. of my Book IV. I will quote what I have
written about it in conclusion --
'Let us try a final
definition. Dhyana resembles Samadhi in many respects.
There is a union of the ego and the non-ego, and a loss
of the sense of time and space and causality. Duality in
any form is abolished. The idea of time involves that of
two consecutive things, that of space two non-coincident
things, that of causality two connected things.'
13. Samadhi, on the
contrary, is in a way very easy to define. Etymology,
aided by the persistence of the religious tradition,
helps us here. "Sam is a prefix in Sanskrit which
developed into the prefix 'syn' in Greek without changing
the meaning -- 'syn' in 'synopsis,' 'synthesis,'
'syndrome.' It means 'together with.'
'Adhi' has also come down
through many centuries and many tongues. It is one of the
oldest words in human language; it dates from the time
when each sound had a definite meaning proper to it, a
meaning suggested by the muscular movement made in
producing the sound. Thus, the letter D originally means
'father'; so the original father, dead and made into a
'God,' was called Ad. This name came down unchanged to
Egypt, as you see in the Book of the Law. The word 'Adhi'
in Sanskrit was usually translated 'Lord.' In the Syrian
form we get it duplicated Hadad. You remember Ben Hadad,
King of Syria. The Hebrew word for 'Lord' is Adon or
Adonai. Adonai, *my* Lord, is constantly used in the
Bible to replace the name Jehovah where that was too
sacred to be mentioned, or for other reasons improper to
write down. Adonai has also come to mean, through the
Rosicrucian tradition, the Holy Guardian Angel, and thus
the object of worship or concentration. It is the same
thing; worship is worth-ship, means worthiness; and
anything but the chosen object is necessarily an unworthy
object.
14. As Dhyana also
represents the condition of annihilation of dividuality,
it is a little difficult to distinguish between it and
Samadhi. I wrote in Part I., Book IV. --
'These Dhyanic conditions
contradict those of normal thought, but in Samadhi they
are very much more marked than in Dhyana. And while in
the latter it seems like a simple union of two things, in
the former it appears as if all things rush together and
unite. One might say this, that in Dhyana there was still
this quality latent, that the one existing was opposed to
the many non-existing; in Samadhi the many and the one
are united in a union of existence with non-existence.
This definition is not made from reflection, but from
memory.'
15. But that was written
in 1911, and since then I have had an immense harvest of
experience. I am inclined to say at this moment that
Dhyana stands to Samadhi rather as the jumping about like
a frog, described in a previous lecture, does to
Levitation. In other words, Dhyana is an unbalanced or an
impure approximation to Samadhi. Subject and object unite
and disappear with ecstasy mounting to indifference, and
so forth, but there is still a presentation of some kind
in the new genus of consciousness. In this view Dhyana
would be rather like an explosion of gunpowder carelessly
mixed; most of it goes off with a bang, but there is some
debris of the original components.
These discussions are not
of very great importance in them- selves, because the
entire series of the three states of meditation proper is
summed up in the word Samyama; you can translate it quite
well for yourselves, since you already know that 'sam'
means 'togeth- er,' and that 'Yama' means 'control.' It
represents the merging of minor individual acts of
control into a single gesture, very much as all the
separate cells, bones, veins, arteries, nerves, muscles
and so forth, of the arm combine in unconscious unanimity
to make a single stroke.
16. Now the practice of
Pratyahara, properly speaking, is introspection, and the
practice of Dharana, properly speaking, is the restraint
of the thought to a single imaginary object. The former
is a movement of the mind, the latter a cessation of all
movement. And you are not likely to get much success in
Pratyahara until you have made considerable advance in
Dhyana, because by introspection we mean the exploration
of the sub-strata of the consciousness which are only
revealed when we have progressed a certain distance, and
become aware of conditions which are utterly foreign to
normal intellectual conception. The first law of normal
thought is *A is A*: the law of identity, it is called.
So we can divide the universe into A and not-A; there is
no third thing possible.
Now, quite early in the
meditation practices, the Yogi is likely to get as a
direct experience the consciousness that these laws are
not true in any ultimate way. He has reached a world
where intel- lectual conceptions are no longer valid;
they remain true for the ordinary affairs of life, but
the normal laws of thought are seen to be no more than a
mere mechanism. A code of conventions.
The students of higher
mathematics and metaphysics have often a certain
glimmering of these facts. They are compelled to use
irra- tional conceptions for greater convenience in
conducting their rational investigations. for example,
the square root of 2, or the square root of minus 1, is
not in itself capable of comprehension as such; it
pertains to an order of thinking beyond the primitive
man's invention of counting on his fingers.
17. It will be just as
well then for the student to begin with the practices of
Dharana. If he does so he will obtain as a by- product
some of the results of Pratyahara, and he will also
acquire considerable insight into the methods of
practising Pratyahara. It sounds perhaps, at first, as if
Pratyahara were off the main line of attainment in Yoga.
This is not so, because it enables one to deal with the
new conditions which are established in the mind by
realisa- tion of Dhyana and Samadhi.
I can now describe the
elementary practices.
You should begin with
very short periods; it is most important not to
overstrain the apparatus which you are using; the mind
must be trained very slowly. In my early days I was often
satisfied with a minute or two at a time; three or four
such periods twice or three times a day. In the earliest
stages of all it is not necessary to have got very far
with Asana, because all you can get out of the early
practices is really a foreshadowing of the difficulties
of doing it.
18. I began by taking a
simple geometrical object in one colour, such as a yellow
square. I will quote the official instruc- tions in 'The
Equinox'.
'Dharana -- Control of thought.'
'1. Constrain the mind to
concentrate itself upon a single simple object imagined.
The five tatwas are useful for this purpose; they are: a
black oval; a blue disk; a silver crescent; a yellow
square; a red triangle.
'2. Proceed to
combinations of single objects; e.g., a black oval within
a yellow square, and so on.
'3. Proceed to simple
moving objects, such as a pendulum swing- ing; a wheel
revolving, etc. Avoid living objects.
'4. Proceed to
combinations of moving objects, e.g., a piston rising and
falling while a pendulum is swinging. The relation
between the two movements should be varied in different
experiements.
'(Or even a system of flywheels, eccentrics and
governor.)
'5. During these
practices the mind must be absolutely confined to the
object determined on; no other thought must be allowed to
intrude upon the consciousness. The moving systems must
be regular and harmonious.
'6. Note carefully the
duration of the experiment, the number and nature of the
intruding thoughts; the tendency of the object itself to
depart from the course laid out for it, and any other
phenomena which may present themselves. Avoid overstrain;
this is very important.
'7. Proceed to imagine
living objects; as a man, preferably some man known to,
and respected by, you.
'8. In the intervals of
these experiments you might try to imagine the objects of
the other senses, and to concentrate upon them. For
example, try to imagine the taste of chocolate, the smell
or roses, the feeling of velvet, the sound of a
waterfall, or the ticking of a watch.
'9. Endeavour finally to
shut out all objects of any of the senses, and prevent
all thoughts arising in your mind. When you feel you have
attained some success in these practices, apply for
examina- tion, and should you pass, more complex and
difficult practices will be prescribed for you.'
19. Now one of the most
interesting and irritating features of your early
experiments is: interfering thoughts. There is, first of
all, the misbehaviour of the object which you are
contemplating; it changes its colour and size; moves its
position; gets out of shape. And one of the essential
difficulties in practice is that it takes a great deal of
skill and experience to become really alert to what is
happening. You can go on day-dreaming for quite long
periods before realising that your thoughts have wandered
at all. This is why I insist so strongly on the practices
described above as producing alertness and watchfulness,
and you will obviously realise that it is quite evident
that one has to be in the pink of condition and in the
most favourable mental state in order to make any headway
at all. But when you have had a little practice in
detecting and counting the breaks in your concentration,
you will find that they themselves are useful, because
their character is symptomatic of your state of progress.
20. Breaks are classed as
follows: -- Firstly, physical sensations; these should
have been overcome by Asana.
Secondly, breaks that
seem to be indicated by events immediately preceding the
meditation: their activity becomes tremendous. Only by
this practice does one understand how much is really
observed by the senses without the mind becoming
conscious of it.
Thirdly, there is a class
of break partaking of the nature of reverie or
'day-dreaming.' These are very insidious -- one may go on
for a long time without realising that one has wandered
at all.
Fourthly, we get a very
high class of break, which is a sort of abberation of the
control itself. You think, 'How well I am doing it!' or
perhaps that it would be rather a good idea if you were
on a desert island, or if you were in a sound-proof
house, or if you were sitting by a waterfall. But these
are only trifling variations from the vigilance itself.
A fifth class of break
seems to have no discoverable source in the mind. such
might even take the form of actual hallucination, usually
auditory. Of course, such hallucinations are infrequent,
and are recognised for what they are. Otherwise the
student had better see a doctor. The usual kind consists
of odd sentences, or fragments of sentences, which are
quite distinctly heard in a recognisable human voice, not
the student's own voice, or that of anyone he knows. A
similar phenomenon is observed by wireless operators, who
call such messages 'atmospherics.'
*There is a further kind
of break, which is the desired result itself.*
21. I have already
indicated how tedious these practices become; how great
the bewilderment; how constant the disappointment. Long
before the occurrence of Dhyana, there are quite a number
of minor results which indicate the breaking up of
intellectual limita- tion. You must not be disturbed if
these results make you feel that the very foundations of
your mind are being knocked from under you. The real
lesson is that, just as you learn in Asana, the normal
body is in itself nothing but a vehicle of pain, so is
the normal itself insane; by its own standards it *is*
insane. You have only got to read a quite simple and
elementary work like Professor Joad's 'Guide to
Philosophy' to find that any argument carried far enough
leads to a contradiction in terms. There are dozens of
ways of showing that if you begin 'A is A,' you end 'A is
not A.' The mind reacts against this conclusion; it
anaesthetises itself against the self-inflicted wound,
and it regulates philosophy to the category of paradoxial
tricks. But that is a cowardly and disgraceful attitude.
The Yogi has got to face the fact that we are all raving
lunatics; that sanity exists -- if it exists at all -- in
a mental state free from dame's school rules of
intellect.
With an earnest personal
appeal, therefore, to come up frankly to the mourners'
bench and gibber, I will take my leave of you for this
evening.
Love is the law, love
under will.
(Part 6 of 8)
YOGA
FOR YELLOWBELLIES.
SECOND
LECTURE.
Mr. Chairman, Your Royal
Highness, Your Grace, my lords, ladies and gentlemen.
Do what thou wilt shall
be the whole of the Law.
In my last lecture I led
you into the quag of delusion; I smothered you in the
mire of delusion; I brought you to thirst in the desert
of delusion; I left you wandering in the jungle of
delusion, a prey to all the monsters which are thoughts.
It came into my mind that it was up to me to do something
about it.
We have constantly been
discussing mysterious entities as if we knew something
about them, and this (on examination) always turned out
not to be the case.
2. Knowledge itself is
impossible, because if we take the simplest proposition
of knowledge, S is P, we must attach some meaning to S
and P, if our statement is to be intelligible. (I say
nothing as to whether it is true!) And this involves
definition. Now the original proposition of identity, A =
A, tells us nothing at all, unless the second A gives us
further information about the first A. We shall therefore
say that A is BC. Instead of one unknown we have two
unknowns; we have to define B as DE, C as FG. Now we have
four unknowns, and very soon we have used up the
alphabet. When we come to define Z, we have to go back
and use one of the other let- ters, so that all our
arguments are arguments in a circle.
3. Any statement which we
make is demonstrably meaningless. And yet we do mean
something when we say that a cat has four legs. And we
all know what we mean when we say so. We give our assent
to, or withhold it from, the proposition on the grounds
of our experi- ence. But that experience is not
intellectual, as above demonstra- ted. It is a matter of
immediate intuition. We cannot have any warrant for that
intuition, but at the same time any intellectual argument
which upsets it does not in the faintest degree shake our
conviction.
4. The conclusion to be
drawn from this is that the instrument of mind is not
intellectual, not rational. Logic is merely destruc-
tive, a self-destructive toy. The toy, however, is in
some ways also instructive, even though the results of
its use will not bear exami- nation. So we make a by-law
that the particular sorites which annihilate logic are
out of bounds, and we go on reasoning within arbitrarily
appointed limits. It is subject to these conditions that
we may proceed to examine the nature of our fundamental
ideas; and this is necessary, because since we began to
consider the nature of the results of meditation, our
conceptions of the backgrounds of thought are decided in
quite a different manner; not by intellectual analysis,
which, as we have seen, carries no conviction, but by
illumination, which does carry conviction. Let us,
therefore, proceed to examine the elements of our normal
thinking.
5. I need hardly
recapitulate the mathematical theorem which you all
doubtless laid to heart when you were criticising
Einstein's theory of relatively. I only want to recall to
your minds the simplest element of that theorem; the fact
that in order to describe anything at all, you must have
four measurements. It must be so far east or west, so far
north or south, so far up or down, from a standard point,
and it must be after or before a standard moment. There
are three dimensions of space and one of time.
6. Now what do we mean by
space? Henri Poincare, one of the greatest mathematicians
of the last generation, thought that the idea of space
was invented by a lunatic, in a fantastic (and evidently
senseless and aimless) endeavour to explain to himself
his experience of his muscular movements. Long before
that, Kant had told us that space was subjective, a
necessary condition of thinking; and while every one must
agree with this, it is obvious that it does not tell us
much about it.
7. Now let us look into
our minds and see what idea, if any, we can form about
space. Space is evidently a continuum. There cannot be
any difference between any parts of it because it is
wholly *where*. It is pure background, the area of
possibilities, a condi- tion of quality and so of all
consciousness. It is therefore in itself completely void.
Is that right, sir?
8. Now suppose we want to
fulfil one of these possibilities. The simplest thing we
can take is a point, and we are told that a point has
neither parts nor magnitude, but only position. But, as
long as there is only one point, position means nothing.
No possi- bility has yet been created of any positive
statement. We will therefore take two points, and from
these we get the idea of a line. Our Euclid tells us that
a line has length but no breadth. But, as long as there
are only two points, length itself means nothing; or, at
the most, it means separateness. All we can say about two
points is that there are two of them.
9. Now we take a third
point, and at last we come to a more positive idea. In
the first place, we have a plane surface, though that in
itself still means nothing, in the same way as length
means nothing when there are only two points there. But
the introduction of the third point has given a meaning
to our idea of length. We can say that the line AB is
longer than the line BC, and we can also introduce the
idea of an angle.
10. A fourth point,
provided that it is not in the original plane, gives us
the idea of a solid body. But, as before, it tells us
nothing about the solid body as such, because there is no
other solid body with which to compare it. We find also
that it is not really a solid body at all as it stands,
because it is merely an instantaneous kind of illusion.
We cannot observe, or even imagine, anything, unless we
have time for the purpose.
11. What, then is time?
It is a phantasm, exactly as tenuous as space, but the
possibilities of differentiation between one thing and
another can only occur in one way instead of in three
different ways. We compare two phenomena in time by the
idea of sequence.
12. Now it will be
perfectly clear to all of you that this is all nonsense.
In order to conceive the simplest possible object, we
have to keep on inventing ideas, which even in the proud
moment of invention are seen to be unreal. How are we to
get away from the world of phantasmagoria to the common
universe of sense? We shall require quite a lot more acts
of imagination. We have got to endow our mathematical
conceptions with three ideas which Hindu philoso- phers
call Sat, Chit and Ananda, which are usually translated
Being, Knowledge and Bliss. This really means: Sat, the
tendency to conceive of an object as real; Chit, the
tendency to pretend that it is an object of knowledge;
and Ananda, the tendency to imagine that we are affected
by it.
13. It is only after we
have endowed the object with these dozen imaginary
properties, each of which, besides being a complete
illusion, is an absurd, irrational, and
self-contradictory notion, that we arrive at even the
simplest object of experience. And this object must, of
course, be constantly multiplied. Otherwise our
experience would be confined to a single object incapable
of description.
14. We have also got to
attribute to ourselves a sort of divine power over our
nightmare creation, so that we can compare the differ-
ent objects of our experience in all sorts of different
manners. Incidentally, this last operation of multiplying
the objects stands evidently invalid, because (after all)
what we began with was absol- utely Nothingness. Out of
this we have somehow managed to obtain, not merely one,
but many; but, for all that, our process has followed the
necessary operation of our intellectual machine. Since
that machine is the only machine that we possess, our
arguments must be valid in some sense or other
conformable with the nature of this machine. What
machine? That is a perfectly real object. It con- tains
innumerable parts, powers and faculties. And they are as
much a nightmare as the external universe which it has
created. Gad, sir, Patanjali is right!
15. Now how do we get
over this difficulty of something coming from Nothing?
Only by enquiring what we mean by Nothing. We shall find
that this idea is totally inconceivable to the normal
mind. For if Nothing is to be Nothing, it must be Nothing
in every possible way. (Of course, each of these ways is
itself an imaginary some- thing, and there are Aleph-Zero
-- a transfinite number -- of them.) If, for example, we
say that Nothing is a square triangle, we have had to
invent a square triangle in order to say it. But take a
more homely instance. We know what we mean by saying
'There are cats in the room.' We know what we mean when
we say 'No cats are in the room.' But if we say '*No*
cats are *not* in the room,' we evidently mean that
*some* cats *are* in the room. This remark is not
intended to be a reflection upon this distinguished
audience.
16. So then, if Nothing
is to be really the absolute Nothing, we mean that
Nothing does not enter into the category of existence. To
say that absolute Nothing exists is equivalent to saying
that everything exists which exists, and the great Hebrew
sages of old time noted this fact by giving it the title
of the supreme idea of reality (behind their tribal God,
Jehovah, who, as we have previously shown, is merely the
Yoga of the 4 Elements, even at his highest, -- the
Demiourgos) Eheieh-Asher-Eheieh, -- I am that I am.
17. If there is any sense
in any of this at all, we may expect to find an almost
identical system of thought all over the world. There is
nothing exclusively Hebrew about this theogony. We find,
for example, in the teachings of Zoroaster and the
neo-Platonists very similar ideas. We have a Pleroma, the
void, a background of all possibilities, and this is
filled by a supreme Light-God, from whom drive in turn
the seven Archons, who correspond closely to the seven
planetary deities, Aratron, Bethor, Phaleg and the rest.
These in their turn constitute a Demiurge in order to
crate matter; and this Demiurge is Jehovah. Not far
different are the ideas both of the classical Greeks and
the neo-Platonists. The differences in the terminology,
when examined, appear as not much more than the differ-
ences of local convenience in thinking. But all these go
back to the still older cosmogony of the ancient
Egyptians, where we have Nuit, Space, Hadit, the point of
view; these experience congress, and so produce
Heru-Ra-Ha, who combines the ideas of Ra-Hoor-Khuit and
Hoor- paar-Kraat. These are the same twin Vau and He'
final which we know. Here is evidently the origin of the
system of the Tree of Life.
18. We have arrived at
this system by purely intellectual examination, and it is
open to criticism; but the point I wish to bring to your
notice tonight is that it corresponds closely to one of
the great states of mind which reflect the experience of
Samadhi.
There is a vision of
peculiar character which has been of cardinal importance
in my interior life, and to which constant reference is
made in my Magical Diaries. So far as I know, there is no
extant description of this vision anywhere, and I was
surprised on looking through my records to find that I
had given no clear account of it myself. The reason
apparently is that it is so necessary a part of myself
that I unconsciously assume it to be a matter of common
knowledge, just as one assumes that everyone knows that
one possesses a pair of lungs, and therefore abstains
from mentioning the fact directly, although perhaps
alluding to the matter often enough.
It appears very essential
to describe this vision as well as possible, considering
the difficulty of langauge, and the fact that the
phenomena involved logical contradictions, the conditions
of consciousness being other than those obtaining
normally.
The vision developed
gradually. It was repeated on so many occasions that I am
unable to say at what period it may be called complete.
The beginning, however, is clear enough in my memory.
19. I was on a Great
Magical Retirement in a cottage overlook- ing Lake
Pasquaney in New Hampshire. I lost consciousness of
every- thing but an universal space in which were
innumerable bright points, and I realised that this was a
physical representation of the uni- verse, in what I may
call its essential structure. I exclaimed: 'Nothingness,
with twinkles!' I concentrated upon this vision, with the
result that the void space which had been the principal
element of it diminished in importance. Space appeared to
be ablaze, yet the radiant points were not confused, and
I thereupon completed my sentence with the exclamation:
'But *what* Twinkles!'
20. The next stage of
this vision led to an identification of the blazing
points with the stars of the firmament, with ideas,
souls, etc. I perceived also that each star was connected
by a ray of light with each other star. In the world of
ideas, each thought possessed a necessary relation with
each other thought; each such relation is of course a
thought in itself; each such ray is itself a star. It is
here that logical difficulty first presents itself. The
seer has a direct perception of infinite series.
Logically, there- fore, it would appear as if the entire
space must be filled up with a homogeneous blaze of
light. This is not, however, the case. The space is
completely full, yet the monads which fill it are
perfectly distinct. The ordinary reader might well
exclaim that such state- ments exhibit symptoms of mental
confusion. The subject demands more than cursory
examination. I can do no more than refer the critic to
Bertrand Russell's 'Introduction to Mathematical
Philosophy', where the above position is thoroughly
justified, as also certain positions which follow.
I want you to note in
particular the astonishing final identifi- cation of this
cosmic experience with the nervous system as described by
the anatomist.
21. At this point we may
well be led to consider once more what we call the
objective universe, and what we call our subjective
experience. What is Nature? Immanuel Kant, who founded an
epoch- making system of subjective idealism, is perhaps
the first philoso- pher to demonstrate clearly that
space, time, causality (in short, all conditions of
existence) are really no more than conditions of thought.
I have tried to put it more simply by defining all
possible predicates as so many dimensions. To describe an
object properly it is not sufficient to determine its
position in the space-time con- tinuum of four
dimensions, but we must enquire how it stands in all the
categories and scales, its values in all 'kinds' of
possibility. What do we know about it in respect of its
greenness, its hardness, its mobility, and so on? And
then we find out that what we imagine to be the
description of the object is in reality nothing of the
sort.
22. All that we recorded
is the behaviour of our instruments. What did our
telescopes, spectroscopes, and balances tell us? And
these again are dependent upon the behaviour of our
senses; for the reality of our instruments, of our organs
of sense, is just as much in need of description and
demonstration as are the most remote phenomena. And we
find ourselves forced to the conclusion that anything we
perceive is only perceived by us as such 'because of our
tendency so to perceive it.' And we shall find that in
the fourth stage of the great Buddhist practice,
Mahasatipatthana, we become directly and immediately
aware of this fact instead of digging it out of the holts
of these interminable sorites which badger us! Kant
himself put it, after his fashion: 'The laws of nature
are the laws of our own minds.' Why? It is not the
contents of the mind itself that we can cognise, but only
its structure. But Kant has not gone to this length. He
would have been extremely shocked if it had ever struck
him that the final term in his sorites was 'Reason itself
is the only reality.' On further examination, even this
ultimate truth turns out to be meaningless. It is like
the well known circular definition of an obscene book,
which is: one that arouses certain ideas in the mind of
the kind of person in whom such ideas are excited by that
kind of book.
23. I notice that my
excellent chairman is endeavouring to stifle a yawn and
to convert it into a smile, and he will forgive me for
saying that I find the effect somewhat sinister. But he
has every right to be supercilious about it. These are
indeed 'old, fond paradoxes to amuse wives in
ale-houses.' Since philosophy began, it has always been a
favourite game to prove your axioms absurd.
You will all naturally be
very annoyed with me for indulging in these fatuous
pastimes, especially as I started out with a pledge that
I would deal with these subjcts from the hard-headed
scientific point of view. Forgive me if I have toyed with
these shining gos- samers of the thought-web! I have only
been trying to break it to you gently. I proceed to brush
away with a sweep of my lily-white hand all this tenuous,
filmy stuff, 'such stuff as dreams are made of.' We will
get down to modern science.
24. For general reading
there is no better introduction than 'The Bases of Modern
Science', by my old and valued friend the late J. W. N.
Sullivan. I do not want to detain you too long with
quota- tions from this admirable book. I would much
rather you got it and read it yourself; you could hardly
make better use of your time. But let us spend a few
moments on his remarks about the question of geometry.
Our conceptions of space
as a subjective entity has been com- pletely upset by the
discovery that the equations of Newton based on Euclidean
Geometry are inadequate to explain the phenomena of
gravi- tation. It is instinctive to us to think of a
straight line; it is somehow axiomatic. But we learn that
this does not exist in the objective universe. We have to
use another geometry, Riemann's Geometry, which is one of
the curved geometries. (There are, of course, as many
systems of geometry as there are absurd axioms to build
them on. Three lines make one ellipse: any nonsense you
like: you can proceed to construct a geometry which is
correct so long as it is coherent. And there is nothing
right or wrong about the result: the only question is:
which is the most convenient system for the purpose of
describing phenomena? We found the idea of Gravitation
awkward: we went to Riemann.)
This means that the
phenomena are not taking place against a background of a
flat surface; the surface itself is curved. What we have
thought of as a straight line does not exist at all. And
this is almost impossible to conceive; at least it is
quite impossible for myself to visualise. The nearest one
gets to it is by trying to imagine that you are a
reflection on a polished door-knob.
25. I feel almost ashamed
of the world that I have to tell you that in the year
1900, four years before the appearance of Einstein's
world-shaking paper, I described space as 'finite yet
boundless,' which is exactly the description in general
terms that he gave in more mathematical detail.(*) You
will see at once that these three words do describe a
curved geometry; a sphere, for instance, is a finite
object, yet you can go over the surface in any direction
without ever coming to an end.
I said above that
Riemann's Geometry was not quite sufficient to explain
the phenomena of nature. We have to postulate different
kinds of curvature in different parts of the continuum.
And even then we are not happy!
26. Now for a spot of
Sullivan! 'The geometry is so general that it admits of
different degrees of curvature in different parts of
space-time. It is to this curvature that gravitational
effects are due. The curvature of space-time is most
prominent, therefore, around large masses, for here the
gravitational effects are most marked. If we take matter
as fundamental, we may say that it is the presence of
matter that causes the curvature of space-time. But there
is a different school of thought that regards matter as
due to the curvature of space-time. That is, we assume as
fundamental a space-time continuum manifest to our senses
as what we call matter. Both points of view have strong
arguments to recommend them. But, whether or not matter
may be derived from the geometrical peculiari- ties of
the space-time continuum, we may take it as an
established scientific fact that gravitation has been so
derived. This is obviously a very great achievement, but
it leaves quite untouched another great class of
phenomena, namely, electro-magnetic phenomena. In this
space-time continuum of Einstein's the electro-magnetic
forces appear as entirely alien. Gravitation has been
absorbed, as it were, into Riemannian geometry, and the
notion of force, so far as gravitational phenomena are
concerned, has been abolished. But the electro-magnetic
forces still flourish undisturbed. There is no hint that
they are manifestations of the geometrical peculiarities
of the space-time continuum. And it can be shown to be
impossible to relate them to anything in Riemann's
Geometry. Gravitation can be shown to correspond to
certain geometrical peculiarities of a Riemannian
space-time. But the electro-magnetic forces lie
completely outside this scheme.'
27. Here is the great
quag into which mathematical physics has led its addicts.
Here we have two classes of phenomena, all part of a
unity of physics. Yet the equations which describe and
explain the one class are incompatible with those of the
other class! This is not a question of philosophy at all,
but a question of fact. It does not do to consider that
the universe is composed of particles. Such a hypothesis
underlies one class of phenomena, but it is nonsense when
applied to the electro-magnetic equations, which insist
upon our abandoning the idea of particles for that of
waves.
Here is another Welsh
rabbit for supper!
'Einstein's finite
universe is such that its radius is dependent upon the
amount of matter in it. Were more matter to be created,
the volume of the universe would increase. Were matter to
be annihilat- ed, the volume of space would decrease.
Without matter, space would not exist. Thus the mere
existence of space, besides its metrical properties,
depends upon the existence of matter. With this concep-
tion it becomes possible to regard all motion, including
rotation, as purely relative.'
Where do we go from here,
boys? 28. 'The present tendency of physics is towards
describing the universe in terms of mathematical
relations between unimaginable entities.'
We have got a long way
from Lord Kelvin's too-often and too- unfairly quoted
statement that he could not imagine anything of which he
could not construct a mechanical model. The Victorians
were really a little inclined to echo Dr. Johnson's gross
imbecile stamp on the ground when the ideas of Bishop
Berkeley penetrated to the superficial strata of the
drink-sodden grey cells of that beef-witted brute.
29. Now, look you, I ask
you to reflect upon the trouble we have taken to
calculate the distance of the fixed stars, and hear
Professor G. N. Lewis, who 'suggests that two atoms
connected by a light ray may be regarded as in actual
physical contact. The *interval* between two ends of a
light-ray is, on the theory of relativity, zero, and
Professor Lewis suggests that this fact should be taken
seriously. On this theory, light is not propagated at
all. This idea is in conformity with the principle that
none but observ- able factors should be used in
constructing a scientific theory, for we can certainly
never observe the passage of light in empty space. We are
only aware of light when it encouters matter. Light which
never encounters matter is purely hypothetical. If we do
not make that hypothesis, then there is no empty space.
On Professor Lewis's theory, when we observe a distant
star, our eye as truly makes physical contact with that
star as our finger makes contact with a table when we
press it.'
30. And did not all of
you think that my arguments were argu- ments in a circle?
I certainly hope you did, for I was at the greatest pains
to tell you so. But it is not a question of argument in
Mr. Sullivan's book; it is a question of facts. He was
talking about human values. He was asking whether science
could possibly be cognizant of them. Here he comes, the
great commander! Cheer, my comrades, cheer!
'But although consistent
materialists were probably always rare, the
humanistically important fact remained that science did
not find it necessary to include values in its
description of the universe. For it appeared that
science, in spite of this omission, formed a closed
system. If values form an integral part of reality, it
seems strange that science should be able to give a
consistent description of phenomena which ignores them.
'At the present time,
this difficulty is being met in two ways. On the one
hand, it is pointed out that science remains within its
own domain by the device of cyclic definition, that is to
say, the abstractions with which it begins are all it
ever talks about. It makes no fresh contacts with
reality, and therefore never encounters any possibly
disturbing factors. This point of view is derived from
the theory of relativity, particularly from the form of
presentation adopted by Eddington. This theory forms a
closed circle. The primary terms of the theory,
*point-events*, *potentials*, *matter* (etc. -- there are
ten of them), lie at various points on the circum-
ference of the circle. We may start at any point and go
round the circle, that is, from any one of these terms we
can deduce the others. The primary entities of the theory
are defined in terms of one another. In the course of
this exercise we derive the laws of Nature studied in
physics. At a certain point in the cahin of deductions,
at *matter*, for example, we judge that we are talking
about something which is an objective concrete embodiment
of our abstractions. But matter, as it occurs in physics,
is no more than a particular set of abstractions, and our
subsequent reasoning is concerned only with these
abstractions. Such other characteristics as the objective
reality may possess never enter our scheme. But the set
of abstractions called matter in relativity theory do not
seem to be adequate to the whole of our scientific
knowledge of matter. There remain quantum phenomena.'
Ah!
'So we leave her, so we leave her,
Far from where her swarthy kindred roam -- kindred roam
In the Scarlet Fever, Scarlet Fever,
Scarlet Fever Convalescent Home.'
31. So now, no less than
that chivalrous gentleman, His Grace, the Most Reverend
the Archbishop of Canterbury, who in a recent broadcast
confounded for ever all those infidels who had presumed
to doubt the possibility of devils entering into swine,
we have met the dragon science and conquered. We have
seen that, however we attack the problem of mind, whether
from the customary spiritual standpoint, or from the
opposite corner of materialism, the result is just the
same.
One last quotation from
Mr. Sullivan. 'The universe may ulti- mately prove to be
irrational. The scientific adventure may have to be given
up.'
But that is all *he*
knows about science, bless his little heart! We do not
give up. 'You lied, d'Ormea, I do not repent!' The
results of experiment are still valid for experience, and
the fact that the universe turns out on enquiry to be
unintelligible only serves to fortify our ingrained
conviction that experience itself is reality.
32. We may then ask
ourselves whether it is not possible to obtain experience
of a higher order, to discover and develop the faculty of
mind which can transcend analysis, stable against all
thought by virtue of its own self-evident assurance. In
the language of the Great White Brotherhood (whom I am
here to represent) you cross the abyss. 'Leave the poor
old stranded wreck' -- Ruach -- 'and pull for the shore'
of Neschamah. For above the abyss, it is said, as you
will see if you study the Supplement of the fifth number
of the First Volume of 'The Equinox', an idea is only
true in so far as it contains its contradictory in
itself.
33. It is such states of
mind as this which constitute the really important
results of Samyama, and these results are not to be
destroyed by philosophical speculation, because they are
not suscep- tible of analysis, because they have no
component parts, because they exist by virtue of their
very Unreason -- 'certum est quia ineptum!' They cannot
be expressed, for they are above knowledge. To some
extent we can convey our experience to others familiar
with that experience to a less degree by the aesthetic
method. And this explains why all the good work on Yoga
-- alchemy, magick and the rest -- not doctrinal but
symbolic -- the word of God to man, is given in Poetry
and Art.
In my next lecture I
shall endeavour to go a little deeper into the technique
of obtaining these results, and also give a more detailed
account of the sort of thing that is likely to occur in
the course of the preliminary practices.
Love is the law, love
under will.
---------------
*TANNHAUSER, written in Mexico, O.F., August, 1900. See
also my BERASHITH, written in Delhi, April, 1901.
(Part 7 of
8)
YOGA
FOR YELLOWBELLIES.
THIRD
LECTURE.
Dear Children,
Do what thou wilt shall
be the whole of the Law.
1. You will remember that
last week our study of Yoga had led us to the Fathers of
the Church. We saw that their philosophy and science, in
following an independent route, had brought us to the
famous exclamation of Tertullian: 'certum est quia
ineptum!' How right the Church has been to deny the
authority of Reason!
2. We are almost tempted
to enquire for a moment what the Church means by 'faith.'
St. Paul tells us that faith is 'the substance of things
hoped for; the evidence of things unseen.' I do not
think, then, that we are to imagine this word faith to
mean what that lecherous gross-bellied boor, Martin
Luther, maintained. The faith of which he speaks is
anything but a substance, and as for evidence, it is
nothing but the power, as the schoolboy said, of
believing that which we know to be untrue. To have any
sensible meaning at all, faith must mean experience, and
that view is in exact accord with the conclusion to which
we were led in my last lecture. Nothing is any use to us
unless it be a certainty unshakeable by criticism of any
kind, and there is only one thing in the universe which
complies with these conditions: the direct experience of
spiritual truth. Here, and here only, do we find a
position in which the great religious minds of all times
and all climes coincide. It is necessarily above dogma,
because dogma consists of a collection of intellectual
statements, each of which, and also its contradictory,
can easily be disputed and overthrown.
3. You are probably aware
that in the Society of Jesus the postulants are trained
to debate on all these highly controversial subjects.
They put up a young man to prove any startling blasphemy
that happens to occur to them. And the more shocked the
young man is, the better the training for his mind, and
the better service will he give to the Society in the
end; but only if his mind has been completely disabused
of its confidence in its own rightness, or even in the
possibility of being right.
4. The rationalist, in
his shallow fashion, always contends that this training
is the abnegation of mental freedom. On the contrary, it
is the only way to obtain that freedom. In the same
Society the training in obedience is based on a similar
principle. The priest has to do what his Superior orders
him -- 'perinde ac cadaver.' Protestants always represent
that this is the most outra- geous and indefensible
tyranny. "The poor devil,' they say, 'is bludgeoned
into having no will of his own.' That is pure nonsense.
By abnegating his will through the practice of holy
obedience his will has become enormously strong, so
strong that none of his natural instincts, desires, or
habits can intrude. He has freed his will of all these
inhibitions. He is a perfect function of the machinery of
the Order. In the General of the Society is concentrated
the power of all those separate wills, just as in the
human body every cell should be completely devoted in its
particular quality to the concentrated will of the
organism.
5. In other words, the
Society of Jesus has created a perfect imitation of the
skeleton of the original creation, living man. It has
complied with the divinely instituted order of things,
and that is why we see that the body, which was never
numerically important, has yet been one of the greatest
influences in the development of Europe. It has not
always worked perfectly, but that has not been the fault
of the system; and, even as it is, its record has been
extraordinary. And one of the most remarkable things
about it is that its greatest and most important
achievements have been in the domain of science and
philosophy. It has done nothing in religion; or, rather,
where it has meddled with religion it has only done harm.
What a mistake! And why? For the simple reason that it
was in a position to take no notice of religion; all
these matters were decided for it by the Pope, or by the
Councils of the Church, and the Society was therefore
able to free itself from the perplexities of religion, in
exactly the same way as the novice obtains complete
freedom from his moral responsibilities by sinking his
personal phantasies in the will of the Superior.
6. I should like to
mention here that the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius
are in their essence really admirable Yoga practices.
They have, it is true, a tinge of magical technique, and
they have been devised to serve a dogmatic end. That was,
however, necessary, and it was good magic too, at that,
because the original will of the Founder was to produce a
war engine as a counterblast to the Reforma- tion. He was
very wise to devise a plan, irrespective of its ab-
stract merits as philosophy, which would most efficiently
serve that single purpose. The only trouble has been that
this purpose was not sufficiently cosmic in scope to
resist internal forces. Having attained the higher planes
by practice of these exercises, they found that the
original purpose of the Society was not really adequate
to their powers; they were, so to speak, over-engined.
They stupidly invaded the spiritual sphere of the other
authorities whom they were founded to support, and thus
we see them actually quarrelling with the Pope, while
failing signally to obtain possession of the Papacy.
Being thus thwarted in their endeavours, and confused in
their purpose, they redoubled the ardour of their
exercises; and it is one of the characteristics of all
spiritual exercises, if honestly and efficiently
performed, that they constantly lead you on to higher
planes, where all dogmatic considerations, all
intellectual concepts, are invalid. Hence, we found that
it is not altogether surprising that the General of the
Order and his immediate circle have been supposed to be
atheists. If that were true, it would only show that they
have been corrupted by their preoccupation with the
practical politics of the world, which it is impossible
to conduct on any but an atheistic basis; it is brainless
hypocrisy to pretend otherwise, and should be restricted
to the exclusive use of the Foreign Office.
It would, perhaps, be
more sensible to suppose that the heads of the Order have
really attained the greatest heights of spiritual
knowledge and freedom, and it is quite possible that the
best term to describe their attitude would be either
Pantheistic or Gnostic.
7. These considerations
should be of the greatest use to us now that we come to
discuss in more detail the results of the Yoga practices.
There is, it is true, a general similarity between the
ecstatic outbursts of the great mystics all over the
world. Compari- sons have often been drawn by students of
the subject. I will only detain you with one example: 'Do
what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.' What is
this injunction? It is a generalisation of St.
Augustine's 'Love, and do what thou wilt.' But in 'The
Book of the Law', lest the hearer should be deluded into
a spasm of antinomi- anism, there is a further
explanation: 'Love is the law, love under will.'
8. However, the point is
that it is no use discussing the results of Yoga, whether
that Yoga be the type recommended by Lao- Tze, or
Patanjali, or St. Ignatius Loyola, because for our first
postulate we have: that these subjects are incapable of
discussion. To argue about them only causes us to fall
into the pit of Because, and there to perish with the
dogs of Reason. The only use, there- fore, of describing
our experiences is to enable students to get some sort of
idea of the sort of thing that is going to happen to them
when they attain success in the practices of Yoga. We
have David saying in the Psalms: 'I hate thoughts, but
Thy law do I love.' We have St. Paul saying: 'The carnal
mind is enmity against God.' One might almost say that
the essence of St. Paul's Epistles is a strug- gle
against mind: 'We war not against flesh and blood' -- you
know the rest -- I can't be bothered to quote it all --
Eph. vi. 12.
9. It is St. Paul, I
think, who describes Satan, which is his name for the
enemy, owing to his ignorance of the history of the
world, as the Prince of the Power of the Air; that is, of
the Ruach, of the intellect; and we must never forget
that what operated the conversion of St. Paul was the
Vision on the road to Damascus. It is particularly
significant that he disappeared into the Desert of Arabia
for three years before coming forward as the Apostle to
the Gentiles. St. Paul was a learned Rabbi; he was the
favourite pupil of the best expositor of the Hebrew Law,
and in the single moment of his Vision all his arguments
were shattered at a single stroke!
10. We are not told that
St. Paul said anything at the time, but went quietly on
his journey. That is the great lesson: not to discuss the
results. Those of you who possess a copy of 'The Equinox
of the Gods' may have been very much surprised at the
extraordinary injunction in the Comment: the prohibition
of all discussion of the Book. I myself did not fully
understand that injunction; I do so now.
11. Let us now deal with
a few of the phenomena which occur during the practices
of Pratyahara.
Very early during my
retirement in Kandy, I had been trying to concentrate by
slanting my eyes towards the tip of my nose. This, by the
way, is not a good practice; one is liable to strain the
eyes. But what happened was that I woke up in the night;
my hand touched a nose; I immediately concluded that some
one was in the room. Not at all; I only thought so
because my nose had passed away from the region of my
observation by the practice of concentrating upon it.
12. The same sort of
thing occurs with adequate concentration on any object.
It is connected, curiously enough, with the phenomena of
invisibility. When your mind has gone so deeply into
itself that it is unconscious of itself and its
surroundings, one of the most ordinary results is that
the body becomes invisible to other people. I do not
think that it would make any difference for a photograph,
though I have no evidence for saying this; but it has
happened to me on innumerable occasions. It was an almost
daily occurrence when I was in Sicily.
13. A party of us used to
go down to a very beautiful bay of sand, whence jutted
fantastically-shaped islets of rock; it is rimmed by
cliffs encrusted with jewels of marine life. The way was
over a bare hillside; except for a few hundred yards of
vineyard there was no cover -- nay, not for a rabbit. But
it often happened that one of the party would turn to
speak to me, and fail to see me. I have often known this
to happen when I was dictating; my chair was apparently
empty.
Incidentally, this
faculty, which I think is exercised, as a rule,
unconsciously, may become an actual magical power.
14. It happened to me on
one occasion that a very large number of excited people
were looking for me with no friendly intentions; but I
had a feeling of lightness, of ghostliness, as if I were
a shadow moving soundlessly about the street; and in
actual fact none of the people who were looking for me
gave the slightest indication that they were aware of my
presence.
There is a curious
parallel to this incident in one of the Gospels where we
read that 'they picked up stones to stone him, but he,
passing through the midst of them, went his way.' 15.
There is another side to this business of Pratyahara, one
that may be described as completely contradictory against
what we have been talking about.
If you concentrate your
attention upon one portion of the body with the idea of
investigating it, that is, I suppose, allowing the mind
to move within very small limits, the whole of your
conscious- ness becomes concentrated in that small part.
I used to practise this a good deal in my retirement by
Lake Pasquaney. I would usually take a finger or a toe,
and identify my whole consciousness with the small
movements which I allowed it to make. It would be futile
to go into much detail about this experience. I can only
say that until you acquire the power you have no idea of
the sheer wonder and delight of that endlessly quivering
orgasm.
16. If I remember
rightly, this practice and its result were one of the
principal factors which enabled me afterwards to attain
what is called the Trance of Wonder, which pertains to
the Grade of a Master of the Temple, and is a sort of
complete understanding of the organism of the universe,
and an ecstatic adoration of its marvel. This Trance is
very much higher than the Beatific Vision, for always in
the latter it is the heart -- the Phren -- which is in-
volved; in the former it is the Nous, the divine
intelligence of man, whereas the heart is only the centre
of the intellectual and moral faculties.
17. But, so long as you
are occupying yourself with the physi- cal, your results
will only be on that plane; and the principal effect of
these concentrations on small parts of the body is the
understanding, or rather the appreciation, of sensuous
pleasure. This, however, is infinitely refined,
exquisitely intense. It is often possible to acquire a
technique by which the skilled artist can produce this
pleasure in another person. Map out, say, three square
inches of skin anywhere, and it is possible by extreme
gentle touches to excite in the patient all the possible
sensations of pleasure of which that person is capable. I
know that this is a very extraordi- nary claim, but it is
a very easy one to substantiate. The only thing I am
afraid of is that experts may be carried away by the
rewards, instead of getting the real value of the lesson,
which is that the gross pleasures of the senses are
absolutely worthless.
This practice, so far as
it is useful to all, should be regarded as the first step
towards emancipation from the thrall of the bodily
desires, of the sensations self-destructive, of the
thirst for pleasure.
18. I think this is a
good opportunity to make a little digres- sion in favour
of Mahasatipatthana. This practice was recommended by the
Buddha in very special terms, and it is the only one of
which he speaks so highly. He told his disciples that if
they only stuck to it, sooner or later they would reach
full attainment. The practice consists of an analysis of
the universe in terms of consciousness. You begin by
taking some very simple and regular bodily exercise, such
as the movement of the body in walking, or the movements
of the lungs in breathing. You keep on noting what
happens: 'I am breath- ing out; I am breathing in; I am
holding my breath,' as the case may be. Quite without
warning, one is appalled by the shock of the discovery
that what you have been thinking is not true. You have no
right to say: 'I am breathing in.' All that you really
know is that there is a breathing in.
19. You therefore change
your note, and you say: 'There is a breathing in; there
is a breathing out,' and so on. And very soon, if you
practise assiduously, you get another shock. You have no
right to say that there is a breathing. All you know is
that there is a sensation of that kind. Again you change
your conception of your observation, and one day make the
discovery that the sensation has disappeared. All you
know is that there is perception of a sensation of
breathing in or breathing out. Continue, and that is once
more discovered to be an illusion. What you find is that
there is a tendency to perceive a sensation of the
natural phenomena.
20. The former stages are
easy to assimilate intellectually; one assents to them
immediately that one discovers them, but with regard to
the 'tendency,' this is not the case, at least it was not
so for my own part. It took me a long while before I
understood what was meant by 'tendency.' To help you to
realise this I should like to find a good illustration.
For instance, a clock does nothing at all but offer
indications of the time. It is so constructed that this
is all we can know about it. We can argue about whether
the time is correct, and that means nothing at all,
unless, for example, we know whether the clock is
controlled electrically from an astro- nomical station
where the astronomer happens to be sane, and in what part
of the world the clock is, and so on.
21. I remember once when
I was in Teng-Yueh, just inside the Chinese frontier in
Yunnan. The hour of noon was always telegraphed to the
Consulate from Pekin. This was a splendid idea, because
electricity is practically instantaneous. The unfortunate
thing was, if it *was* unfortunate, which I doubt, that
the messages had to be relayed at a place called Yung
Chang. The operators there had the good sense to smoke
opium most of the time, so occasionally a batch of
telegrams would arrive, a dozen or so in a bunch, stating
that it was noon at Pekin on various dates! So all the
gross phenomena, all these sensations and perceptions,
are illusion. All that one could really say was that
there was a tendency on the part of some lunatic in Pekin
to tell the people at Teng-Yueh what o'clock it was.
22. But even this Fourth
Skandha is not final. With practice, it also appears as
an illusion, and one remains with nothing but the bare
consciousness of the existence of such a tendency.
I cannot tell you very
much about this, because I have not worked it out very
thoroughly myself, but I very much doubt whether
'consciousness' has any meaning at all, as a translation
of the word Vinnanam. I think that a better translation
would be 'experience,' used in the sense in which we have
been using it hitherto, as the direct reality behind and
beyond all remark.
23. I hope you will
appreciate how difficult it is to give a reasoned
description, however tentative, of these phenomena, still
less to classify them properly. They have a curious trick
of running one into the other. This, I believe, is one of
the reasons why it has been impossible to find any really
satisfactory literature about Yoga at all. The more
advanced one's progress, the less one knows, and the more
one understands. The effect is simply additional evidence
of what I have been saying all this time: that it is very
little use discussing things; what is needed is
continuous devotion to the practice.
Love is the law, love
under will.
(Part 8 of 8)
YOGA
FOR YELLOWBELLIES.
FOURTH
LECTURE.
Salutation to the Sons of
the Morning!
Do what thou wilt shall
be the whole of the Law.
1. I should like to begin
this evening by recapitulating very briefly what has been
said in the previous three lectures, and this would be
easier if I had not completely forgotten everything I
said. But there is a sort of faint glimmering to the
effect that the general subject of the series was the
mental exercises of the Yogi; and the really remarkable
feature was that I found it impossible to discuss them at
all thoroughly without touching upon, first of all,
ontology; secondly, ordinary science; and thirdly, the
high Magick of the true initiates of the light.
2. We found that both
Ontology and Science, approaching the question of reality
from entirely different standpoints, and pursuing their
researches by entirely different methods, had yet arrived
at an identical 'impasse.' And the general conclusion was
that there could be no reality in any intellectual
concept of any kind, that the only reality must lie in
direct experience of such a kind that it is beyond the
scope of the critical apparatus of our minds. It cannot
be subject to the laws of Reason; it cannot be found in
the fetters of elementary mathematics; only transfinite
and irrational concep- tions in that subject can possibly
shadow forth the truth in some such paradox as the
identity of contradictories. We found further that those
states of mind which result from the practice of Yoga are
properly called trances, because they actually transcend
the conditions of normal thought.
3. At this point we begin
to see an almost insensible drawing together of the path
of Yoga which is straight (and in a sense arid) with that
of Magick, which may be compared with the Bacchic dance
or the orgies of Pan. It suggests that Yoga is ultimately
a sublimation of philosophy, even as Magick is a
sublimation of science. The way is open for a
reconciliation between these lower elements of thought by
virtue of their tendency to flower into these higher
states beyond thought, in which the two have become one.
And that, of course, is Magick; and that, of course, is
Yoga.
4. We may now consider
whether, in view of the final identifi- cation of these
two elements in their highest, there may not be something
more practical than sympathy in their lower elements -- I
mean mutual assistance.
I am glad to think that
the Path of the Wise has become much smoother and shorter
than it was when I first trod it; for this very reason
that the old antinomies of Magick and Yoga have been
completely resolved.
You all know what Yoga
is. Yoga means union. And you all know how to do it by
shutting off the din of the intellectual boiler factory,
and allowing the silence of starlight to reach the ear.
It is the emancipation of the exalted from the thrall of
the commonplace expression of Nature.
5. Now what is Magick?
Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur
in conformity with the Will. How do we achieve this? By
exalting the will to the point where it is master of
circumstance. And how do we do this? By so ordering every
thought, word and act, in such a way that the attention
is constantly recalled to the chosen object.
6. Suppose I want to
evoke the 'Intelligence' of Jupiter. I base my work upon
the correspondences of Jupiter. I base my mathema- tics
on the number 4 and its subservient numbers 16, 34, 136.
I employ the square or rhombus. For my sacred animal I
choose the eagle, or some other sacred to Jupiter. For my
perfume, saffron -- for my libation some preparation of
opium or a generous yet sweet and powerful wine such as
port. For my magical weapon I take the scep- tre; in
fact, I continue choosing instruments for every act in
such a way that I am constantly reminded of my will to
evoke Jupiter. I even constrain *every* object. I extract
the Jupiterian elements from all the complex phenomena
which surround me. If I look at my carpet, the blues and
purples are the colours which stand out as Light against
an obsolescent and indeterminate background. And thus I
carry on my daily life, using every moment of time in
constant self-admonition to attend to Jupiter. The mind
quickly responds to this training; it very soon
automatically rejects as unreal anything which is not
Jupiter. Everything else escapes notice. And when the
time comes for the ceremony of invocation which I have
been consis- tently preparing with all devotion and
assiduity, I am quickly inflamed. I am attuned to
Jupiter, I am pervaded by Jupiter, I am absorbed by
Jupiter, I am caught up into the heaven of Jupiter and
wield his thunderbolts. Hebe and Ganymedes bring me wine;
the Queen of the Gods is throned at my side, and for my
playmates are the fairest maidens of the earth.
7. Now what is all this
but to do in a partial (and if I may say so, romantic)
way what the Yogi does in his more scientifically
complete yet more austerely difficult methods? And here
the advan- tage of Magick is that the process of
initiation is spontaneous and, so to speak, automatic.
You may begin in the most modest way with the evocation
of some simple elemental spirit; but in the course of the
operation you are compelled, in order to attain success,
to deal with higher entities. Your ambition grows, like
every other organ- ism, by what it feeds on. You are very
soon led to the Great Work itself; you are led to aspire
to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian
Angel, and this ambition in turn arouses automati- cally
further difficulties the conquest of which confers new
powers. In the Book of the Thirty Aethyrs, commonly
called 'The Vision and the Voice', it becomes
progressively difficult to penetrate each Aethyr. In
fact, the penetration was only attained by the initia-
tions which were conferred by the Angel of each Aethyr in
its turn. There was this further identification with Yoga
practices recorded in this book. At times the
concentration necessary to dwell in the Aethyr became so
intense that definitely Samadhic results were obtained.
We see then that the exaltation of the mind by means of
magical practices leads (as one may say, in spite of
itself) to the same results as occur in straightforward
Yoga.
I think I ought to tell
you a little more about these visions. The method of
obtaining them was to take a large topaz beautifully
engraved with the Rose and Cross of forty-nine petals,
and this topaz was set in a wooden cross of oak painted
red. I called this the shew-stone in memory of Dr. Dee's
famous shew-stone. I took this in my hand and proceeded
to recite in the Enochian or Angelic language the Call of
the Thirty Aethyrs, using in each case the special name
appropriate to the Aethyr. Now all this went very well
until about the 17th, I think it was, and then the Angel,
foreseeing difficulty in the higher or remoter Aethyrs,
gave me this instruction. I was to recite a chapter from
the Q'uran: what the Mohammedans call the 'Chapter of the
Unity.' 'Qol: Hua Allahu achad; Allahu assamad: lam yalid
walam yulad; walam yakun lahu kufwan achad.' I was to say
this, bowing myself to the earth after each chapter, a
thousand and one times a day, as I walked behind my camel
in the Great Eastern Erg of the Sahara. I do not think
that anyone will dispute that this was pretty good
exercise; but my point is that it was certainly very good
Yoga.
From what I have said in
previous lectures you will all recog- nise that this
practice fulfils all the conditions of the earlier stages
of Yoga, and it is therefore not surprising that it put
my mind in such a state that I was able to use the Call
of the Thirty Aethyrs with much greater efficacy than
before.
8. Am I then supposed to
be saying that Yoga is merely the hand-maiden of Magick,
or that Magick has no higher function than to supplement
Yoga? By no means. it is the co-operation of lovers;
which is here a symbol of the fact. The practices of Yoga
are almost essential to success in Magick -- at least I
may say from my own experience that it made all the
difference in the world to my magical success, when I had
been thoroughly grounded in the hard drill of Yoga. But
-- I feel absolutely certain that I should never have
obtained success in Yoga in so short a time as I did had
I not spent the previous three years in the daily
practice of magical methods.
9. I may go so far as to
say that just before I began Yoga seriously, I had almost
invented a Yogic method of practising Magick in the
stress of circumstances. I had been accustomed to work
with full magical apparatus in an admirably devised
temple of my own. Now I found myself on shipboard, or in
some obscure bedroom of Mexico City, or camped beside my
horse among the sugar canes in lonely tropical valleys,
or couched with my rucksack for all pillow on bare
volcanic heights. I had to replace my magical apparatus.
I would take the table by my bed, or stones roughly
piled, for my altar. My candle or my Alpine Lantern was
my light. My ice-axe for the wand, my drinking flask for
the chalice, my machete for the sword, and a chapati or a
sachet of salt for the pantacle of art! Habit soon
familiarised these rough and ready succedanea. But I
suspect that it may have been the isolation and the
physical hardship itself that helped, that more and more
my magical operation became implicit in my own body and
mind, when a few months later I found myself performing
*in full* operations involving the Formula of the
Neophyte (for which see my treatise 'Magick') without any
external apparatus at all.
10. A pox on all these
formalistic Aryan sages! Unless one wants to be very
pedantic, it is rather absurd to contend that this form
of ritual forced upon me, first by external and next by
internal circumstances, was anything else but a new form
of Asana, Pranayama, Mantra-Yoga, and Pratyahara in
something very near perfection; and it is therefore not
surprising that the Magical exaltation resulting from
such ceremonies was in all essential respects the
equivalent of Samyama.
On the other hand, the
Yoga training was an admirable aid to that final
concentration of the Will which operates the magical
ecstasy.
11. This then is reality:
direct experience. How does it differ from the
commonplace every-day experience of sensory impres- sions
which are so readily shaken by the first breath of the
wind of intellectual analysis?
Well, to answer first of
all in a common-sense way, the differ- ence is simply
that the impression is deeper, is less to be shaken. Men
of sense and education are always ready to admit that
they may have been mistaken in the quality of their
observation of any pheno- menon, and men a little more
advanced are almost certain to attain to a placid kind of
speculation as to whether the objects of sense are not
mere shadows on a screen.
I take off my glasses.
Now I cannot read my manuscript. I had two sets of
lenses, one natural, one artificial. If I had been
looking through a telescope of the old pattern I should
have had three sets of lenses, two artificial. If I go
and put on somebody else's glasses I shall get another
kind of blur. As the lenses of my eyes change in the
course of my life, what my sight tells me is different.
The point is that we are quite unable to judge what is
the truth of the vision. Why then do I put on my glasses
to read? Only because the particular type of illusion
produced by wearing them is one which enables me to
interpret a pre-arranged system of hiero- glyphics in a
particular sense which I happen to imagine I want. It
tells me nothing whatever about the object of my vision
-- what I call the paper and the ink. Which is the dream?
The clear legible type or the indecipherable blur?
12. But in any case any
man who is sane at all does make a distinction between
the experience of daily life and the experience of dream.
It is true that sometimes dreams are so vivid, and their
character so persistently uniform that men are actully
deceived into believing that places they have seen in
dreams repeatedly are places that they have known in a
waking life. But they are quite capable of criticising
this illusion by memory, and they admit the deception.
Well, in the same way the phenomena of high Magick and
Samadhi have an authenticity, and confer an interior
certainty, which is to the experience of waking life as
that is to a dream.
But, apart from all this,
experience is experience; and the real guarantee that we
have of the attainment of reality is its rank in the
hierarchy of the mind.
13. Let us ask ourselves
for a moment what is the characteris- tic of dream
impressions as judged by the waking mind. Some dreams are
so powerful tht they convince us, even when awake, of
their reality. Why then do we criticise and dismiss them?
Because their contents are incoherent, because the order
of nature to which they belong does not properly conform
with the kind of experience which does hang together --
after a fashion. Why do we criticise the reality of
waking experience? On precisely similar grounds. Because
in certain respects it fails to conform with our deep
instinctive consciousness of the structure of the mind.
*Tendency!* We *happen* to be that kind of animal.
14. The result is that we
accept waking experience for what it is within certain
limits. At least we do so to this extent, that we base
our action upon the belief that, even if it is not
philoso- phically real, it is real enough to base a
course of action upon it.
What is the ultimate
prctical test of conviction? Just this, that it is our
standard of conduct. I put on these glasses in order to
read. I am quite certain that the blurred surface will
become clear when I do so. Of course, I may be wrong. I
may have picked up some other body's glasses by mistake.
I might go blind before I could get them into position.
Even such confidence has limits; but it is a real
confidence, and this is the explanation of why we go
ahead with the business of life. When we think it over,
we know that there are all sorts of snags, that it is
impossible to formulate any proposition which is
philosophically unassailable, or even one which is so
from a practical standpoint. We admit to ourselves that
there are all sorts of snags; but we take our chance of
that, and go ahead in the general principles inculcated
by our experience of nature. It is, of course, quite easy
to prove that experience is impossible. To begin with,
our consciousness of any phenomenon is never the thing
itself, but only a hieroglyphic symbol of it.
Our position is rather
that of a man with a temperamental motor- car; he has a
vague theory that it ought to go, on general princi-
ples; but he is not quite sure how it will perform in any
given circumstances. Now the experience of Magick and
Yoga is quite above all this. The possibility of
criticising the other types of experi- ence is based upon
the possibility of expressing our impressions in adequate
terms; and this is not at all the case with the results
of Magick and Yoga. As we have already seen, every
attempt at expres- sion in ordinary language is futile.
Where the hero of the adventure is tied up with a
religious theory, we get the vapid and unctuous
bilgewater of people like St. John of the Cross. All
Christian Mystics are tarred with the same brush. Their
abominable religion compels them to every kind of
sentimentality; and the theory of original sin vitiates
their whole position, because instead of the noble and
inspiring Trance of Sorrow they have nothing but the
miserable, cowardly, and selfish sense of guilt to urge
them to undertake the Work.
15. I think we may
dismiss altogether from our minds every claim to
experience made by any Christian of whatever breed of
spiritual virus as a mere morbid reflection, the apish
imitation of the true ecstasies and trances. All
expressions of the real thing must partake of the
character of that thing, and therefore only that language
is permissible which is itself released from the canon of
ordinary speech, exactly as the trance is unfettered by
the laws of ordinary consciousness. In other words, the
only proper translation is in poetry, art and music.
16. If you examine the
highest poetry in the light of common sense, you can only
say that it is rubbish; and in actual fact you cannot so
examine it at all, because there is something in poetry
which is not in the words themselves, which is not in the
images suggested by the words 'O windy star blown
sideways up the sky!' True poetry is itself a magic spell
which is a key to the ineffable. With music this thesis
is so obvious as hardly to need stating. Music has no
expressed intellectual content whatever, and the sole
test of music is its power to exalt the soul. It is then
evident that the composer is himself attempting to
express in sensible form some such sublimities as are
attained by those who practise Magick and Yoga as they
should.
17. The same is true of
plastic art, but evidently in much less degree; and all
those who really know and love art are well aware that
classical painting and sculpture are rarely capable of
producing these transcendent orgasms of ecstasy, as in
the case of the higher arts. One is bound to the
impressions of the eye; one is drawn back to the
contemplation of a static object. And this fact has been
so well understood in modern times by painters that they
have endea- voured to create an art within an art; and
this is the true explana- tion of such movements as
'surrealisme.' I want to impress upon you that the artist
is in truth a very much superior being to the Yogi or the
Magician. He can reply as St. Paul replied to the
centurion who boasted of his Roman citizenship 'With a
great sum obtained I this freedom'; and Paul, fingering
the Old School Tie, sneered: "But I was free born.'
18. It is not for us here
to enquire as to how it should happen that certain human
beings possess from birth this right of intimacy with the
highest reality, but Blavatsky was of this same opinion
that the natural gift marks the acquisition of the rank
in the spiritual hierarchy to which the student of Magick
and Yoga aspires. He is, so to speak, an artist in the
making; and it is perhaps not likely that his gifts will
have become sufficiently automatic in his present
incarntion to produce the fruits of his attainment. Yet,
undoubted- ly, there have been such cases, and that
within my own experience.
19. I could quote you the
case of a man -- a very inferior and wishy-washy poet --
who undertook for a time very strenuously the prescribed
magical practices. He was very fortunate, and attained
admirable results. No sooner had he done so that his
poetry itself became flooded with supernal light and
energy. He produced master- pieces. And then he gave up
his Magick because the task of further progress appalled
him. The result was that his poetry fell completely away
to the standard of wet blotting paper.
20. Let me tell you also
of one man almost illiterate, a Lancashire man who had
worked in a mill from the age of nine years. He had
studied for years with the Toshophists with no results.
Then he corresponded with me for some time; he had still
no results. He came to stay with me in Sicily. One day as
we went down to bathe we stood for a moment on the brink
of the cliff which led down to the little rocky cove with
its beach of marvellous smooth sand.
I said something quite
casually -- I have never been able to remember what it
was -- nor could he ever remember -- but he suddenly
dashed down the steep little path like a mountain goat,
threw off his cloak and plunged into the sea. When he
came back, his very body had become luminous. I saw that
he needed to be alone for a week to complete his
experience, so I fixed him up in an Alpine tent in a
quiet dell under broad-spreading trees at the edge of a
stream. From time to time he sent me his magical record,
vision after vision of amazing depth and splendour. I was
so gratified with his attainment that I showed these
records to a distinguished literary critic who was
staying with me at the time. A couple of hours later,
when I returned to the Abbey, he burst out upon me a
flame of excitement. 'Do you know what this is?' he
cried. I answered casually that it was a lot of very good
visions. 'Bother your visions,' he exclaimed, 'didn't you
notice the style? It's pure John Bunyan!' It was. 21. But
all this is neither here nor there. There is only one
thing for anybody to do on a path, and that is to make
sure of the next step. And the fact which we all have to
comfort us is this: that all human beings have capacities
for attainment, each according to his or her present
position.
For instance, with regard
to the power of vision on the astral plane, I have been
privileged to train many hundreds of people in the course
of my life, and only about a dozen of them were incapable
of success. In one case this was because the man had
already got beyond all such preliminary exercise; his
mind immediately took on the formless condition which
transcends all images, all thought. Other failures were
stupid people who were incapable of making an experi-
ment of any sort. They were a mass of intellectual pride
and preju- dice, and I sent them away with an injunction
to go to Jane Austen. But the ordinary man and woman get
on very well, and by this I do not mean only the
educated. It is, in fact, notorious that, among many of
the primitive races of mankind, strange powers of all
kinds develop with amazing florescence.
22. The question for each
one of us is then: first of all, to acertain our present
positions; secondly, to determine our proper directions;
and, thirdly, to govern ourselves accordingly.
The question for me is
also to describe a method of procedure which will be
sufficiently elastic to be useful to every human being. I
have tried to do this by combining the two paths of
Magick and Yoga. If we perform the preliminary practices,
each according to his capacity, the result will surely be
the acquisition of a certain technique. And this will
become much easier as we advance, especial- ly if we bear
it well in mind not to attempt to discriminate between
the two methods as if they were opposing schools, but to
use the one to help out the other in an emergency.
23. Of course, nobody
understands better than I do that, although nobody can do
your work for you, it is possible to make use -- to a
certain very limited extent -- of other people's
experience, and the Great Order which I have the honour
to serve has appointed what I think you will agree is a
very satisfactory and practical curriculum.
24. You are expected to
spend three months at least on the study of some of the
classics on the subject. The chief object of this is not
to instruct you, but to familiarise you with the ground
work, and in particular to prevent you getting the idea
that there is any right or wrong in matters of opinion.
You pass an examination intended to make sure that your
mind is well grounded in this matter, and you become a
Probationer. Your reading will have given you some
indication as to the sort of thing you are likely to be
good at, and you select such practices as seem to you to
promise well. You go ahead with these, and keep a careful
record of what you do, and what results occur. After
eleven months you submit a record to your superior; it is
his duty to put you right where you have gone wrong, and
particularly to encourage you where you think you have
failed. 25. I say this because one of the most frequent
troubles is
that people who are doing
excellent work throw it up because they find that Nature
is not what they thought it was going to be. But this is
the best test of the reality of any experience. All those
which conform with your idea, which flatter you, are
likely to be illusions. So you become a Neophyte; and
attack the Task of a Zelator.
There are further grades
in this system, but the general prin- ciples are always
the same -- the principles of scientific study and
research.
26. We end where we
began. 'The wheel has come full circle.' We are to use
the experience of the past to determine the experience of
the future, and as that experience increases in quantity
it also improves in quality. And the Path is sure. And
the End is sure. For the End is the Path.
Love is the law, love
under will.
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