Magick Without Tears

WOOLLY POMPOSITIES 107 acquisition of new ideas. It is the difference between a man trying to pick a smut out of his wife's eye with clumsy greasy fingers coarsened by digging drains, and an oculist furnished with a speculum and all the instruments exactly suited to the task. Yet another point. Besides getting rid of the emotions and sensations which cloud the thought, the fact that you are constantly asking yourself "Now, in which drawer of which cabinet does this thought go?" automatically induces you to regard the system as the important factor in the operation, if only because it is common to every one of them. So not only have you freed Sanna (perception) from the taint of Vedana (sensation) but raised it (or demolished it, if you prefer to look at it in that light!) to be merely a member of the Sankhara (tendency) class, thus boosting you vigorously to the fourth stage, the last before the last! of the practice of Mahasatipathana . Just one more word about the element of Vedana. The Intellect is a purely mechanical contrivance, as accurate and as careless of what it turns out as a Cash Register. It receives impressions, calculates, states the result: that is A double L, ALL! Try never to qualify a thought in any way, to see it as it is in itself in relation to those other elements which are necessary to make it what it is. Above all, do not "mix the planes." A dagger may be sharp or blunt, straight or crooked; it is not "wicked-looking," or even "trusty," except in so far as the quality of its steel makes it so. A cliff is not "frowning" or "menacing." A snow-covered glacier is not "treacherous": to say so means only that Alpine Clubmen and other persons ignorant of mountain craft are unable to detect the position of covered crevasses. All such points you must decide for yourself; the important thing is that you should challenge any such ideas. Above all, do not avoid, or slur, unwelcome trains of