Confessions of Aleister Crowley

367 {590} they happen to be our personal property. The intuitions of the Neschamah are guaranteed by interior certainty, and then cannot be criticized for the simple reason that they have themselves completed the work of criticism of the most destructive kind before presenting themselves at all. Buddhist psychology has analysed many of these characteristics of super-consciousness and even arranged them in an order corresponding with spiritual development. I may say that I have toiled for many years to express ideas of this order in terms intelligible to the normal consciousness and susceptible of apprehension by the normal intellect. Success has scarcely been complete; only on rare occasions has the flash fixed itself on the film when the lens was in focus and the exposure correct. I am acutely aware that many of my most arduous and ardent attempts to interpret mystical experience have resulted in blurred images, sometimes perhaps grandiose and suggestive --- but that is no compensation for obscurity and vagueness. May I present one effort which I myself am able to hold more or less clearly in my ordinary consciousness? The Buddhists describe the closest approximation to true observation of anything by saying that it is seen in the four-fold formless state, which they define in the following terms: Any proposition about an object is simultaneously perceived as being both true and false, but also neither true nor false. To perceive an object in this manner implies that the observer has attained the last possible degree of spiritual development which permits any positive point of view soever. Such a man is but one step from the threshold of Arahatship. He has only to destroy this conception of things, as is done in this four-fold formless state, to attain the trance Nerodha-Sammapatti, in which all being and form is absolutely annihilated, so much so that the trance is only distinguishable from Nibbana by the fact that one comes out of it. It was on October 2nd, 1919 that I first attained to this Pisgah-sight of the promised land, Pari- Nibbana. I was spending the night in Fleischmann's Turkish Baths in New York. It was my custom in all such places to practise the tenth clause of my vow as a Master of the Temple, "To interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with my soul", by forcing advertisements and other public announcements to yield some spiritual significance. I would either apply the Cabbala to the words and manipulate the numbers so as to reach a state of mind in which some truth might suddenly spring in the silence, or I would play upon the words as if they were oracles, or else force the filthy falsehoods of fraudulent dollar-dervishes to transfigure themselves at the touch of my talisman into mysterious messages from the Masters. I had awakened at dawn and meditated a while upon this four-fold formless state. I was merely trying to make out what could possibly be meant by {591} piling contradiction on contradiction as the definition did. I did not understand it in the least, and I had not the slightest intention of trying to reach realization of it. At that time all such meditation was entirely out of my line, but accidents will happen even in the best regulated magical circles and the following extraordinary experience knocked me sideways. I quote verbatim my Magical Record: I was putting on my bath-robe after weighing, and turning a sleeve inside out, when my masseur, an holy man positively trembling on the brink of Arahatship, cried to me that both sides of it were inside, and both outside. I replied humbly that I was seeking for a side that neither inside nor outside --- and then like a flash I saw that I had it! Oh Glory Ineffable of Realization! (Oh Right Thinking!) For either side is both inside and outside because I can use it as such, and it is neither inside nor outside with regard to the discrimination which might be made by an uninitiate between any one thing an any other thing. Now this quality is not in the robe, which has two sides easily distinguishable by hemmings, machining, etc., to say nothing of orientation in space, but in me, and arises from my positive