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Page 1 of 101929 · PDF PAGE 142
… resting on his head and right shoulder, exactly like an image overturned. I set him right way up and he came out of this trance. He was quite unconscious that anything unusual had happened. But he had evidently been thrown there by the mysterious forces generated by Pranayama. There is no doubt whatever about this phenomenon; it is quite common. But the yogis claim that the lateral motion is due to lack of balance and that if one were in perfect equilibrium one would rise directly in the air. I have never seen any case of levitation and hesita…
1929 · PDF PAGE 233
…entific curiosities, but some are genuine Magick; that is, the scientific explanation is not generally known. More of this later.) I was quite fixed in scepticism, as I have always been, but also in so-called rationalism, and I prosecuted these studies in a strictly scholarly spirit. I worked very hard at them and made great progress accordingly; but my true life was still the honeymoon, slightly diluted by the ordinary pleasures of sport and society. I relapsed into golf after some fourteen years' total abstinence; took a few lessons from the …
1929 · PDF PAGE 416
…y. The circumstances, therefore, of his life are uniformly adapted to his work. To take another analogy. The world appears to the lawyer quite otherwise than it does to the carpenter, and the same event occurring to the two men will suggest two quite different trains of thought and lead to two quite different results. My own errors of judgment, due to the annihilation of my ego and the consequent lack of leadership felt by my body and mind, produced their own immediate effect. I did not yet understand the extent of my fault, or even its real ca…
1929 · PDF PAGE 132
…t there was something wrong, and might have said something tactless if he had not volunteered an account of his literary career and been quite unaware of the existence of the Mayor of Casterbridge. He was the "great" Thomas Hardy, the only and original bird, the chaplain to the forces at Hong Kong and author of How to be happy though married. I don't know how I kept my face straight. As a matter of fact, he was perfectly human and even contributed a quite valuable item of information as to the psychology of publishers. He had aproached one of t…
1929 · PDF PAGE 378
…xample, in the USA a periodical is not subject to sales tax, has a different postal rate and has provisions of constitutional protection quite different from those of a book. Very likely this became a question of what laws to follow, not one of social confusion but rather conflicting statute. {606} the landing with a candle, in hysterics, leaning over the balustrade and calling to know who was there. I said, "It is only some beastly burglar," took the candle and went down. No one in the hall. In the dining-room, in pitch darkness, Gnaggs was st…
1929 · PDF PAGE 555
…am always stupid, but the Magus who uses me knows his job. {875} One afternoon we went off bathing with the Ape. I prattled as we walked quite pointlessly and just as we reached the edge of the cliff above the bay I made some casual remark which proved a winning shot. He stopped short and gasped; his eyes starting from his head. I am so stupid, let me report, that I failed to notice anything special. I was mildly surprised to see him dash down the path like a young goat, tear off his clothes, and sprint into the sea like an alarmed seal. He nev…
1929 · PDF PAGE 415
…his initiators will not murder him, and any ordeal proposed by them obviously appears a pure formality. In Freemasons' Hall he can swear quite cheerfully to keep silence under the penalty of having his throat cut across, his tongue torn out, and all the rest of it; the oath becomes a farce. In the A.'. A.'., which is a genuinely Magical Order, there are no extravagant oaths. The candidate is pledged quite simply to himself only, and his obligation binds him merely "to obtain the scientific knowledge of the nature and powers of my own being". Th…
1929 · PDF PAGE 323
… more really arrogant than assuming that one has been singled out for "strong delusion"? I had received some very remarkable evidence in quite unexpected quarters that I was singled out to accomplish the Great Work of emancipating mankind. One of these is so intensely interesting on its own accord that I must not omit it, quite apart from its bearing on the question of my destiny. One morning I had sat down to rest and smoke a pipe on the top of a little pass in warm misty weather. Salama came and sat down by my side. I looked at him in amazeme…
1929 · PDF PAGE 82
…he stars, I can recognize few constellations except the Great Bear and Orion. Besides my sense of direction on the large scale, I have a quite uncanny faculty for picking out a complicated route through rocks and ice falls. This is not simply a question of good judgment; for in any given route, seen from a distance, there may always be a passage, perhaps not twenty feet in height, which would render the whole plan abortive. This is especially the case with ice falls, where much of the route is necessarily hidden from view. Obviously, one cannot…
1929 · PDF PAGE 259
…tepping into fairyland. There are certain places --- Sonamarg in Kashmir is one of them --- which possess the quality of soft brilliance quite unearthly. There is really nothing to distinguish them from a hundred other spots in the neightbourhood, yet they stand out; as a genius does from a hundred other men in evening dress. I find these phenomena quite as real as any others and I feel impelled to seek an explanation. Assuming the existence of inhabitants imperceptible by our grosser senses, the problem presents no difficulty. One of a row of …
1929 · PDF PAGE 128
… train was late; I was tired and dirty. I postponed my call till the following day. To my surprise, my host and hostess did not greet me quite as I expected. In the course of our talk they made allusions which were quite unintelligible. At last we became aware that we were talking at crosspurposes. The crash came when Soror Vestigia insisted, "But you said so yourself at tea!" I couldn't remember that I had ever been there to tea. On my one previous visit I had lunched one day and dined the next, but no more. "At tea!" I echoed, bewildered. "Ye…
1929 · PDF PAGE 48
…, and of waking at dawn because it is dawn, raises one's animal life ipso facto to the level of poetry. There have always been in me two quite incompatible personalities with regard to my judgment of men and in practical matters. One of them possesses great instinctive shrewdness partaking of cynicism; the other an innocence amounting almost to imbecility. Der reine Thor! In certain respects, this later quality is calculated. Thus, I have always refused to believe that I am being cheated, even when I know the facts perfectly well. I have delibe…
1929 · PDF PAGE 192
192 sun; but for the most part we had clouds and rain. I should remark (by the way) that people who live in cities have quite different standards of bad weather from open-air folk. When one is living in a tent, on discovers that it is very rare indeed to experience twenty hours of continuous bad weather. There is nearly always a period of the day when one can get at least an hour or two which is fairly decent. The townsman's observations are confined to a small section of the day. The weather on the Baltoro glacier may therefore be judged as qu…
1929 · PDF PAGE 276
…his tum-tum, I said, "I cannot formulate a plan of action of any kind because there is no true continuity in phenomena." He turned on my quite simply, and said, "Quite so, but there is equally no continuity in yourself." That, of course, was no news to me. It was Hume's answer to Berkeley, for one thing. It was the essence ofSakkaya-Ditthi, for another. The ground was cut away from under my feet. At the moment, my consciousness failed to pick up the full purport of this proposition, for I found myself suddenly forced into action by a set of cir…
1929 · PDF PAGE 455
…c faith. (This is absolutely new to me, this conception {720} of Christ as Mercury.) Some difficulty about the ... (This sentence is now quite unintelligible.) To continue the identification, compare Christ's descent into hell with the function of Hermes as guide of the dead. Also Hermes leading up Eurydice, and Christ raising up Jairus' daughter. Christ is said to have risen on the third day, because it takes three days for the planet Mercury to become visible after separating from the orb of the sun. (It may be noted here that Mercury and Ven…
1929 · PDF PAGE 278
… a fish story. But as a matter of fact people who lived with me for the last three years or so have noticed that I make myself invisible quite frequently, and that (apparently) when I am not aware that I am doing so. There is a peculiar type of self-absorption which makes it impossible for people to be aware of one. In these recent cases, the observer who could see me quite plainly because in sympathy with me, could also see that the other people in the street --- or wherever it was --- could not see me at all. My theory is that the mental stat…
1929 · PDF PAGE 523
… a semi-private or amateur kind. This period was inexpressibly distressing; apart from other unpleasantnesses, my health broke down in a quite inexplicable way. There was no satisfactory diagnosis; the symptoms were confined to a spiritual and physical malaise which deprived me alike of ambition and energy. (I have good reason to suspect that this was partly due to the reaction from my experiment in reviving youth.) And there were other trials. At one time I {825} was so poor that I had to lie on the sofa of a friend in the garret which he call…
1929 · PDF PAGE 228
…I looked up. I could not see any bat. But there was Rose, stark naked, hanging to the frame with arms and legs, insanely yawling. It was quite a job to pull her down. She clung to the frame desperately, still squealing. She refused utterly to respond to the accents of the human voice. When I got her down at last, she clawed and scratched and bit and spat and squealed, exactly as the dying bat had done to her. It was quite a long time before I got her back to her human consciousness. It was the finest case of obsession that I had ever had the go…
1929 · PDF PAGE 184
184 soon as they got to the eastern foot of Chogo Ri. They knew quite well that I only said it to lure them on; they knew that I meant to make them cross to Yarkand; they knew that they {312} would die to a man; but they didn't mind, it was Kismet, and they wanted me to know that they would gladly die because I had been so nice to them. When I sent them home from Camp 10 they could hardly believe their ears, and their delight at being reprieved was pathetically charming. Modern writers have made a great deal of fun of the golden age; they have …
1929 · PDF PAGE 190
…ance to show me in practice what he had always claimed in theory; how easily a man could be pulled out, using only one hand. The man was quite calm; but had given up hope and was committing his soul to Allah. I expect he was mostly worried about the direction of Mecca. We had no need of the coiled rope; the doctor had untied himself from his own rope and left it lying on the snow! The cowardice, incompetence and imbecility of his proceedings remain today as incomprehensible as they were then. (I accuse myself of having minimized these things. I…