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Page 75 of 791929 · PDF PAGE 208
…r."; and I always conceive the problem of progress as depending merely on enlightenment. I do not believe in original sin except in this sense that "The word of Sin is Restriction."; and our normal conscious selves are inevitably restricted by the categories of space, time and causality, which are essential conditions of the manifestation of separate individualities. But I cannot get it into my head that any single human being can be really hostile to another. I regard all such passions as the symptoms of a definite deformity of nature produced…
1929 · PDF PAGE 153
…mounted a shrivelled body, too feeble even to support it. There indeed was a manifest symbol of the universe as conceived by the Buddha! Senseless suffering proves that nature has no purpose or pity. The existence of a single item of this kind in the inventory demonstrates the theorem. As I gazed on the child, I began to understand that all the syllogisms of optimism were enthymemes. Every telology depends on the error of generalizing from a few selected phenomena. The boy impressed me more than the pagoda. One was the freak of misfortune; the …
1929 · PDF PAGE 94
…iduals, that anything new is a monstrous menace. For the first time I observed the extraordinary fact that in such situations one's time sense runs at two very different rates. The part of one's mind that is concerned with one's actions races riotously with their rhythm. Another part stands aloof, observing, analysing, imperturbable; a train of thought which might, in normal circumstances, occupy an hour reduced to a few minutes, and seeming slow at that. The roughs were, to all intents and purposes, insane. The neither knew nor cared whether t…
1929 · PDF PAGE 130
… interesting impression was Kamakura. The Daibutsu, colossal amid his gardens of iris, with no canopy but the sky, does really produce a sense of his universality; it does remind one of the grandeur and solidity of his teaching; of the reasonableness of his methods of attainment, the impersonal peace which is their reward; and of the boundless scope of his philosophy, independent as it is of all arbitrary assumptions, parochial points of view, sordid appeals and soul-stupefying superstitions. Already there had arisen in me the aspiration to att…
1904 · PDF PAGE 104
…ine the distinction between the Hindu and Buddhist methods and aims of the Great Work. The Hindu method is really mystical in the truest sense; for, as I have shown, the Atman is not infinite and eternal: one day
1929 · PDF PAGE 197
…es a single level of sanity; that is, that is consists in the mechanical movement of its elements in repose to the varied stimuli of the senses. There is a tendency to regard even such comparatively slight variation as the reflective habit of the man of science and the philosopher as being abnormal and in a sense unhealthy. They are the subjects of vulgar ridicule. In sheer spiritual lassitude, I left Egypt homeward bound. During my absence from England I had kept up a sort of irregular correspondence with Gerald Kelly, who had by this time sta…
1929 · PDF PAGE 64
…nd a material in which to work which is immune from the forces of change." I suppose that I still accepted Christian metaphysics in some sense or another. I had been satisfied to escape from religion to the world. I now found that there was no {124} satisfaction here. I was not content to be annihilated. Spiritual facts were the only things worth while. Brain and body were valueless except as the instruments of the soul. The ordinary materialist usually fails to recognize that only spiritual affairs count for anything, even in the grossest conc…
1929 · PDF PAGE 128
… to continue the building up of my (so-called) astral body until it was sufficiently material to be perceptible to the ordinary physical sense of people whom I should visit in this shape. There will be found in my Magical Record numerous accounts af this last experiment. In the autumn of '98 my friend, J. L. Baker, whom I hastened to see in London on my return from the Alps, took me on my first astral journey. The details of the method are given in full in The Equinox, Vol. I No. II, (Liber O). I may here outline them thus: Imagine an image of …
1929 · PDF PAGE 290
…o acquire their vitality and courage. As I have already explained, I do not regard this as superstitious; I think it is practical common sense.) Forrest was at the Jesuit mission when word came from the north that the lamas were on the war path. It was decided to flee and the entire mission hurried off. Its eldest member, Father Bernard, was a man over eighty. It was decided to separate for greater safety; but Forrest found it very hard to bring himself to leave the old man, for whom he had acquired extreme respect and affection. However, it wa…
1929 · PDF PAGE 211
…11 Now, at this time, Gerald Kelly was in his Whistler-Velasquez period. Kelly's mind is in no way creative or even critical in the true sense of the word. He was a scholar. He would convince himself by elaborate argument that So-and-so was the greatest of all artists; and he would then endeavour to discover the secrets of the master in the spirit of the analytical chemist, and proceed to paint with the most pitiful perseverance in the style of his latest hero. I possess sketches by Kelly which I defy the world to distinguish from Beardsley, Ro…
1929 · PDF PAGE 474
…as. He soon ceased to gauge the temper of the community correctly, began to lay down the law instead of arguing with moderation and good sense, was hardened in arrogance by opposition, and became as violent and stupid on his side as our own chosen propagandists were on ours. My meat! But I am overrunning myself. My immediate problem was to confirm Viereck in his conviction that I was pro-German. There was a very serious snag in the English Review for November 1914. There was a poem of mine called "An Appeal to the American Republic" inviting an…
1907 · PDF PAGE 249
…pon my olive skin, i. 6 My home is set between two ivory towers, ii. 2 My little lady light o” limb, ili. 116 My soul is aching with the sense of sound, i, 113 NAKED as dawn, the purpose of the hour, 1. 157 Nathless she locked her cabin door, ii. 78 Nay, ere ye pass your people pass, ii. 35 ‘‘ Nay! that were nothing,” say you now, ill. 11 Night brings madness, i. 173 Night, like a devil, with lidless eyes, ili. 90 Night the voluptuous, night the chaste, iii. 88 Nine times I kissed my lover in her sleep, i. 183 Nine voices that raise high the et…
1929 · PDF PAGE 296
…ouldiest of mankind. The mandarin was one of the most beautiful men I have ever seen. I use the word beautiful in its strictly aesthetic sense. He was, I judge, between thirty-five and forty years old; his features were astonishingly perfect and {483} their expression full of noble intelligence and lofty benevolence, harmonized by a placidity due to a consciousness of his superiority so unbroken and unquestioned that it had been absorbed into subconsciousness. He was a miracle of art and that art perfectly concealed. His complexion had more tha…
1906 · PDF PAGE 278
…pology in the Bible, which is now to be smuggled through as a ‘‘ poem.” If I may borrow my adversary's favourite missile, a poem in this sense is ‘‘ unhistorical nonsense."’ We should, perhaps, fail to appreciate the beauty of the Tantras if the Government (on their authority) enforced the practices of hook- swinging and Sati, and the fact that the cited passages were of doubtful authority, and am- -biguous at that, would be small comfort to our grilled widows and lacerated backs. Yet this is the political condition of England Myst. And all are…
1929 · PDF PAGE 481
…ountaineering, both amateur and professional. In 1898, I was barely more than a boy, pitiably innocent and ridiculously ambitious. (In a sense, I am so still!)
1929 · PDF PAGE 203
…n Paul and Timothy, in the light of his own perverse imagination. When I say perverse, I do not mean to use the word in the psychopathic sense. Wilde's only perversity was that he was not true to himself. Without {343} knowing it, he had adopted the standards of the English middle class, and thought to become distinguished by the simple process of outraging them. As one is said to be able to invoke the devil by reciting the Lord's Prayer backwards, so Wilde thought to set up a new morality by reciting George R. Sims backwards. He naively accept…
1929 · PDF PAGE 256
…ng on his knowledge of the language and the natives, thought it best to accept him, though his character was mean and suspicious and his sense of inferiority to white men manifested itself as a mixture of servility and insolence to them and of swaggering and bullying to the natives. These traits did not seem so important in Darjeeling, but I must blame myself for not foreseeing that his pin brain would entirely give way as soon as he got out of the world of waiters. I was quite happy about the mountain. On July 9th, only twenty-six days after m…
1929 · PDF PAGE 467
…severely as Milton, Wordsworth, Byron Shelley and Swinburne. All this does not touch the point. I am English, and that in a very special sense, as being the prophet and poet appointed by the gods to serve her. We do not accuse Isaiah of being unpatriotic because he thunders against Israel. Isaiah's motive is mine. There does not exist an essence which constitutes England, uncorrupted and incorruptible by any possible phenomenal facts. I feel myself to be an integral element of this England; what I do I do for her sake. I may have to scrub her f…
1929 · PDF PAGE 200
…documents; and they had reduced him to despair. (Let me say at once that Rodin was not a man, but a god. He had no intellect in the true sense of the word; his was a virility so superabundant that it constantly overflowed into the creation of vibrating visions. Naively enough, I haunted him in order to extract first-hand information about art from the fountain head. I have never met anyone --- white, black, brown, yellow, pink or spot-blue --- who was so completely ignorant of art as Auguste Rodin! At his best he would stammer out that nature w…
1929 · PDF PAGE 514
…it were a small boy and I its nurse. This was entirely frivolous; but the thought flashed into my mind that after all the bag was in one sense a part of myself. The two ideas came together with a snap, and I understood the machinery of a man's delusion that he is a teapot. From this I came to another discovery: I perceived why platitudes were stupid. The reason was that they represented the summing up of trains of thought, each of which was superb in every detail at one time. A platitude was like a wife after a few years; she has lost none of h…