practice of Dharana is perhaps more generally useful. As one 
prevents the more accessible thoughts from arising, we strike 
deeper strata — memories of childhood reawaken. Still deeper lies 
a class of thoughts whose origin puzzles us. Sojne of these 
apparently belong to former incarnations. By cultivating these 
departments of one’s mind we can develop them; we become 
expert ; we form an organized cohérence of these originally 
disconnected éléments ; the faculty grows with astonishing rapidity, 
once the knack of the business is mastered. 
It is much easier (for obvious reasons) to acquire the Magical 
Memory when one has been sworn for many lives to reincarnate 
immediately. The great obstacle is the phenomenon called 
Freudian forgetfulness; that is to say, that, though an unpleasant 
event may be recorded faithfully enough by the mechanism of 
the brain, we fail to recall it, or recall it wrong, because it is 
painful. “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” analyses and 
illustrâtes this phenomenon in detail. Now, the King of Terrors 
being Death, it is hard indeed to look it in the face. Mankind has 
created a host of phantastic masks; people talk of “going to 
heaven”, “passing over”, and so on; banners flaunted from paste- 
board towers of baseless théories. One instinctively flinches from 
remembering one’s last, as one does from imagining one’s next, 
death. 1 The point of view of the initiate helps one immensely. 
As soon as one has passed this Pons Asinorum, the practice 
becomes much easier. It is much less trouble to reach the life 
before the last; familiarity with death breeds contempt for it. 
It is a very great assistance to the beginner if he happens to 
hâve some intellectual grounds for identifying himself with some 
definite person in the immédiate past. A brief account of Aleister 
Crowley’s good fortune in this matter should be instructive. It 
will be seen that the points of contact vary greatly in character. 
i. The date of Eliphas Levi’s death was about six months 
previous to that of Aleister Crowley s birth. The reincarnating 
ego is supposed to take possession of the foetus at about this stage 
of development. 
i. This latter is a very valuable practice to perforai. See Liber 
HHH; also read up the Buddhist méditations on the Ten Impurities. 
— 51 —