Magick Without Tears

WHAT IS CERTAINTY? 213 notes; that of the Party of the Second Part, hereinafter referred to as-not a Heretic, an Atheist, a Bolshie, a Die-hard, a Schismatic, an Anarchist, a Black Magician, a Friend of Aleister Crowley, or whatever may be the current term of abuse-Mr. A, Lord B, the Duke of C, Mrs. X, or whatever he or she may chance to be called-into five. The Structure called of-alI-Truth in neither of us is affected in the least, any more than in the reading of a Thermometer with Fahrenheit on one side and Centigrade on the other. You naturally object that this answer is little better than an evasion, that it automatically pushes the Gamut question outside the Charmed of-alI-Truth Circle. No, it doesn't really; for if you were able to put up a Projection of those two minds, there would be, firstly, some sort of compensation elsewhere than in the musical section; and secondly, some Truth of a yet higher order which is common to both. Not una ware am I that these conceptions are at first exceedingly difficult to formulate clearly. I wouldn't go so far as to say that one would have to be a Master of the Temple to understand them; but it is really very necessary to have grasped firmly the doctrine that "a thing is only true insofar as it contains its contradiction in itself." (A good way to realize this is by keeping up a merry dance of paradoxes, such as infest Logic and Mathematics. The repeated butting of the head against a brick wall is bound in the long run to shake up the little grey cells [as Poirot might say] , teach you to distrust any train of argument , however apparently impeccable the syllogisms, and to seek ever more eagerly the dawn of that Neschamic consciousness where all these things are clearly understood, although impossible to express in rational language.) The prime function of intellect is differentiation; it deals with marks, with limits, with the relations of what is not identical ; in Neschamah all this work has been carried out so perfectly that the "rough working" has passed clean out of mind; just so, you say "I" as if it were an indivisible Unity,