John St. John

1.5. 1.25. 1.45. JOHN ST. JOHN So also I go through all the Ritual, and try all the Means; at the End it may be I shall find No rituals and No means, but an act or a silence so simple that it cannot be told or understood. Lord Adonai, bring me to the End I After writing above, and adding a few touches to the Pantacle, am ready to go to lunch. Arrived at Pantheon, with mantra. Rumpsteak aux pommes soufflées, poire, £2- Evian, and the three Cs. Was meditating on asceticism. John Tweed once told me that Swami Vivekananda, towards the end of his life, wrote a most pathetic letter deploring that his sanctity forbade his “ going on the bust.” What a farce is such sanctity! How much wiser for the man to behave as a man, the God as a God ! This is my real bed-rock objection to the Eastern systems. They decry all manly virtue as dangerous , and wicked; and they look upon Nature as evil. True enough, everything is evil relatively to Adonai ; for all stain is impurity. A bee’s swarm is evil—inside one’s clothes. “Dirt is matter in the wrong place." It is dirt to connect sex with statuary, morals with art. Only Adonai, who is in a sense the True Meaning of everything, cannot defile any idea. This is a hard saying, though true, for nothing of course is dirtier than to try and use Adonai as a fig—leaf for one’s shame. To seduce women under pretence of religion is un- 127