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Page 104 of 1121929 · PDF PAGE 138
… thought, he will seek to impose it on others, and so delude his disciples, pervert their minds and prevent their development. He can do good only in one way, that is by publishing the methods by which he attained illumination: in other words, by adding his experience to the sum of scientific knowledge. I have myself striven strenuously to do this, always endeavouring to make it clear that my results are of value only to myself, and that even my methods may need modification in every case, just as each poet, golfer and barrister must acquire a …
1904 · PDF PAGE 99
…le if he be finite, there is an end of the usual Christian reasons for worship, though I daresay I could myself discover some reasonably good ones. [I hardly expect to be asked, somehow.] The resulting equilibrium of God and man, destructive of worship, is of course absurd. We must reject it, unless we want to fall into Positivism, Materialism, or something of the sort. But if, then, we call God i nfinite, how are we to regard man, and Satan? (the latter, at the very least, surely no integral part of him). The fallacy lies not in my demonstrati…
1907 · PDF PAGE 250
…ched with vivid truth, ili. 46 So fearful is the wrath divine, li. 120 So have the leaves departed, i. 127 So here is my tribute—a jolly good strong ‘un, il. 168 So, love, not thus for you and me! iii, 13 Some lives complain of their own happiness, i. 194 Some sins assume a garb so fine and white, 1, 132 Sometimes I think my blood in waves appears, ll, 18 Some years ago I thought to try, ii. 178 So much when philosophy’s lacteal river, ii. 168 So not one word derogatory, il. 152 -So now the Earl was-well a-weary, il. 49 SACRED, between the serp…
1929 · PDF PAGE 348
…62} altogether extraordinary capacity for Magick. We soon drifted into talking about the subject and I found that he already practised a good deal of spiritualism and clairvoyance. The former was his bane. The habit of making himself spiritually passive and inviting the entire spirit world to obsess him proved finally fatal to him. Despite all we could do to protect his aura, we found it impossible to stop the leak altogether, so that at any moment he was liable to become possessed of the devil. He soon learnt how to protect himself as soon as …
1929 · PDF PAGE 168
…ed to spend much of our time on sunny days trying to dry them on convenient rocks. The general bandobast of the expedition was open to a good deal of criticism. One of Eckenstein's few failings was his faith in professorial science. Because the German soldier thrives on Erbs-suppe and the British on "Bovril bacon rations", he expected us to do the same, with the result that much of our provisions was quite uneatable. The general plan was to pack biltas with supplies for one day for twelve men. We had thirty-six of these. In other kiltas were pa…
1929 · PDF PAGE 511
…short, it was the justification of my whole life, the unique and supreme reward of my immeasurable toils. Fortified and rejoiced by this good news, I began at once to devote myself to research in the strict sense of the word. And then the fun began! I found myself unable to do anything of the sort. I am not quite sure how the circumstances responsible for this fit in with my general situation, but they are well worthy of record for their own sake. I have mentioned elsewhere that in the bosom of the Sanctuary of the Gnosis of the O.T.O. is cheri…
1907 · PDF PAGE 132
…rance of evil. But is this not because the holiness of his life and thought keeps him so close to his divine Master that he can only see good in all he gazes on? It is the eagle, ever steadfastly beholding the sun, that swoops down upon carrion, and thanks God for the meal. It is the urblind race of miserable men that turn fastidioust from wholesome and natural f . However this may be, it is undoubtedly no easy task to follow the royal bird in his dazzling flight through illimitable oathyr. Yet the attempt will avail us much; even if we can rise…
1944 · PDF PAGE 41
…tion with the superior, be‐ cause subtler, forms of Life. He could perhaps cause them to manifest themselves to him in material shape. A good deal of this rests upon the Platonic ideology, which maintained that any mate‐ rial object was an impure and imperfect copy of some ideal perfection. So men who wished to advance in spiritual science and philosophy strove always to formulate for themselves the pure idea. They tried to proceed from the Particular to the General; and this principle has been of the greatest service to ordinary science. The m…
1929 · PDF PAGE 31
…compass on a stormy sea. I cannot sink, for God will hold me up, etc. Again, I wrote a poem on the death of my Aunt Ada, which I thought good enough to include in my Songs of the Spirit, and is entirely irreproachable on the score of piety. It seems as if I possessed a theology of my own which was, to all intents and purposes, Christianity. My satanism did not interfere with it at all; I was trying to take the view that the Christianity of hypocrisy and cruelty was not true Christianity. I did not hate God or Christ, but merely the God and Chri…
1929 · PDF PAGE 243
…. George's, to make up the house party. Ivor Back is one of the most amusing companions possible, to those who can stand him. He knows a good deal about literature and had published in The Hospital magazine some of the poems in which I had celebrated various diseases. I dedicated my In Residence, a collection of my undergraduate verses, to him, and he collaborated with me to a certain extent in the composition of various masterpieces of the lighter kind. He and Gerald are also responsible for numberous improvements in the preface {405} to Alice…
1929 · PDF PAGE 282
…that a man's progress depended upon personal prowess. No doubt this is philosophically absurd, but I still maintain that it is practical good sense. The conversation, nevertheless, turned to considerations of what my Kamma had in store for me. "This might be discovered," he said, "by acquiring the Magical Memory." This is equivalent to Sammasati, Right Recollection, the seventh step on the Noble Eightfold Path. I must explain what this means. The Buddhist theory of metempsychosis does not involve, like the corresponding Hindu idea, the survival…
1944 · PDF PAGE 50
… ordinary man; therefore, his father must be a god. But as a god is a gaseous vertebrate, he must be some materialisation of a god. Very good! Let him be the god Mars under the form of a wolf, or Jupiter as a bull, or a shower of gold, or a swan; or Jehovah in the form of a dove; or some other creature of phantasy, preferably disguised in some animal form. There are innumerable forms of this tradition, but they all agree on one point: the saviour can only appear as the re‐ sult of some extra ordinary accident, quite contrary to whatever is norm…
1929 · PDF PAGE 281
… that he represents a step ahead in evolution and he is fantastically afraid of "going fanti"; so he has his knife into anyone who has a good word to say for the people. {461} Allan Bennett, by becoming a Buddhist monk, was a lining witness that some Europeans thought Burmese beliefs better than their European equivalents; and the idea --- so far as an idea may be
1929 · PDF PAGE 149
…ly published under the title The Sword of Song. One of the great sights of south India is the great temple of the Shivalingam. I spent a good deal of time in its courts meditating on the mystery of phallic worship. Apologists ordinarily base their defence on a denial that the lingam is worshipped as such. They claim correctly enough that it is merely the symbol of the supreme creative spiritual force of the Most High. It is perfectly true, none the less, that barren women circumambulate it in the hope of becoming fruitful. I accepted this subli…
1904 · PDF PAGE 112
… I am conscious of m y non-self.’ “Or again, he gets the notion, ‘This soul of mine can be perceived, it has exper ienced the r esult of good or evil actions com mitted here and there; now this soul of m ine is permanent, lasting, eternal, has the inhe rent quality of never changing, and will contiue for ever and ever!’ “This, brethren, is called the walking in de- lusion, the jungle of delusion, the wilder ness of delusion, the puppet- show of delusion, the writhing of delusion, the fetter of delusion.” There are, it may be noted, only five ( …
1929 · PDF PAGE 177
…story of the lighthouse keeper who went mad are outstanding examples of the psychological processes which are likely to occur. Perfectly good friends become ready to kill each other over a lump of sugar. I won't say that I couldn't have stood the Baltoro glacier in the absence of Milton and the rest; but it is at least the case that Pfannl went actually mad, that Wessely brooded on food to the point of stealing it, and {302} that Eckenstein and Knowles1 both lost their heads over the cholera scare! Thus the only man beside myself to retain perf…
1929 · PDF PAGE 280
…urma lay mysterious China; I conjured up a cloud of amusing phantasies. Romance and adventure. I am incurable; though I have had all the good thinks of life, nearly all my life, though I no longer value them or enjoy them for themselves, I still enjoy the idea of them. I embrace hardship and privation with ecstatic delight; I want everything that the world holds; I would go to prison or to the scaffold for the sake of the experience. I have never grown out of the infantile belief that the universe was made for me to suck. I grow delirious to co…
1929 · PDF PAGE 33
…his belongings, stole his private letters and dismissed him. But it was too late; my eyes were opened and I had become as a god, knowing good and evil. I was in a position to take the initiative. Till them, I could only aim at escaping from the hideous hell of home. Now I had an objective; now I could attack. I must explain something of the horror of life in my mother's house. To begin with, I was entirely debarred from the society of boys and girls of my own age, unless they were the children of Brethren. The sect was already moribund and in a…
1929 · PDF PAGE 532
…s can only be described vaguely by saying that I obtained a reconciliation of two contraries of which "There is a discrimination between good and evil" is one. This experience has shaken me utterly; it has been a terrible struggle to force myself to this record. The secret comes along the Path of Aleph to Chokmah. I could write it plainly in a few words of one syllable, and most people would not even notice it.1 But it has might to hurl every Master of the Temple into the Abyss, and to fling every adept of the Rose Cross down to the Qliphoth. N…
1929 · PDF PAGE 523
…actory 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 called his studio to have anywhere to sleep, and I really don't quite remember what I did about eating. I suppose I must have earned a few dollars now and again in one way or another. …