Magick Without Tears

386 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS mind. To me it seems a kind of non-awareness which is somehow different from mere ignorance. Rather like one's feeling about the automatic functions of physiology, perhaps: an acceptance so complete that, although the mind contains the idea, it is not stirred thereby into consciousness. These speculations are, perhaps, idle, amI so distracting, for you in your present path. Was it worth while to make this analogy? I think so, vague and unscientific as it must have seemed to you, as reminding you of the way in which unlike ideas acquire close kinship as one advanced on the path . Let us get on to your white rages! Well I do know them though I call them black-no, I shall not quarrel about the colour. To me they come almost every day. When I see the maid dust my mantelpiece-which I pay her to do-I want not merely to slay her in the extremity of torment; I want to abolish her, to annihilate her-and the mantelpiece too and everything on it! I can hardly keep from roaring at her to get out and never darken my door again. This is not because she is doing it badly; doing it at all is a token of the unspeakable horror of existence. The actual feeling is that she is somewhat disturbing my aura, which I had got so nice and clean and quiet after the nuisance of "getting up." I feel as if I were being pushed about in a crowd of swarming insect-citizens. Then there is quite another kind, which is quite clearly penny-plain frustration. Something one wants to do, perhaps a trifle, and one can't. Then one looks for the obstacle, and then the enemy behind that again; maybe one gets into one of those "ladder-meditations" (as described in Liber Aleph, quoted in The Book of Thoth, when discussing "the Fool" and Hashish, only the wrong way up!) which end by the conception of the Universe itself as the very climax, asymptote, quintessence of frustration-the perfect symbol of all uselessness. This is, or course, the absolute contradictory of Thelema; but it is the sorites on which both Hindu and Buddhist conclusions are based. This kind of rage is, accordingly, most noxious; it is direct