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candle or my Alpine Lantern was my light. My ice-axe for the wand,
my drinking flask for the chalice, my machete for the sword, and a
chapati or a sachet of salt for the pantacle of art! Habit soon
familiarised these rough and ready succedanea. But I suspect that it
may have been the isolation and the physical hardship itself that
helped, tËhat more and more my magical operation became implicit in my
own body and mind, when a few months later I found myself performing
*in full* operations involving the Formula of the Neophyte (for which
see my treatise 'Magick') without any external apparatus at all.
10. A pox on all these formalistic Aryan sages! Unless one
wants to be very pedantic, it is rather absurd to contend that this
form of ritual forced upon me, first by external and next by internal
circumstances, was anything else but a new form of Asana, Pranayama,
Mantra-Yoga, and Pratyahara in something very near perfection; and it
is therefore not surprising that the Magical exaltation resulting
from such ceremonies was in all essential respects the equivalent of
Samyama.
On the other hand, the Yoga training was an admirable aid to
that final concentration of the Will which operates the magical
ecstasy.
11. This then is reality: direct experience. How does it
differ from the commonplace every-day experience of sensor! y impres-
sions which are so readily shaken by the first breath of the wind of
intellectual analysis?
Well, to answer first of all in a common-sense way, the differ-
ence is simply that the impression is deeper, is less to be shaken.
Men of sense and education are always ready to admit that they may
have been mistaken in the quality of their observation of any pheno-
menon, and men a little more advanced are almost certain to attain to
a placid kind of speculation as to whether the objects of sense are
not mere shadows on a screen.
I take off my glasses. Now I cannot read my manuscript. I had
two sets of lenses, one natural, one artificial. If I had been
looking through a telescope of the old pattern I should have had
three sets of lenses, two artificial. If I go and put on somebody
else's glasses I shall get another kind of blur. As the lenses of my
eyes change in the course of my life, what my sight tells me is
different. The point is that we are quite unable to judge 1what is
the truth of the vision. Why then do I put on my glasses to read?
Only because the particular type of illusion produced by wearing them
is one which enables me to interpret a pre-arranged system of hiero-
glyphics in a particular sense which I happen to imagine I want. It
tells me nothing whatever about the object of my vision -- what I
call the paper and the ink. Which is the dream? The clear legible
type or the indecipherable blur?
12. But in any case any man who is sane at all does make a
distinction between the experience of daily life and the experience
of dream. It is true that sometimes dreams are so vivid, and their
character so persistently uniform that men are actully deceived into
believing that places they have seen in dreams repeatedly are places
that they have known in a waking life. But they are quite capable of
criticising this illusion by memory, and they admit the deception.
Well, in the same way the phenomena of high Magick and Samadhi have
an authenticity, and cÆonfer an interior certainty, which is to the
experience of waking life as that is to a dream.
But, apart from all this, experience is experience; and the real
guarantee that we have of the attainment of reality is its rank in
the hierarchy of the mind.
13. Let us ask ourselves for a moment what is the characteris-
tic of dream impressions as judged by the waking mind. Some dreams
are so powerful tht they convince us, even when awake, of their
reality. Why then do we criticise and dismiss them? Because their
contents are incoherent, because the order of nature to which they
belong does not properly conform with the kind of experience which
does hang together -- after a fashion. Why do we criticise the
reality of waking experience? On precisely similar grounds. Because
in certain respects it fails to conform with our deep instinctive
consciousness of the structure of the mind. *Tendency!* We *happen*
to be that kind of animal.
14. The result is that we accept waking experience for what it
isÍ within certain limits. At least we do so to this extent, that we
base our action upon the belief that, even if it is not philoso-
phically real, it is real enough to base a course of action upon it.
What is the ultimate prctical test of conviction? Just this,
that it is our standard of conduct. I put on these glasses in order
to read. I am quite certain that the blurred surface will become
clear when I do so. Of course, I may be wrong. I may have picked up
some other body's glasses by mistake. I might go blind before I
could get them into position. Even such confidence has limits; but
it is a real confidence, and this is the explanation of why we go
ahead with the business of life. When we think it over, we know that
there are all sorts of snags, that it is impossible to formulate any
proposition which is philosophically unassailable, or even one which
is so from a practical standpoint. We admit to ourselves that there
are all sorts of snags; but we take our chance of that, anÙd go ahead
in the general principles inculcated by our experience of nature. It
is, of course, quite easy to prove that experience is impossible. To
begin with, our consciousness of any phenomenon is never the thing
itself, but only a hieroglyphic symbol of it.
Our position is rather that of a man with a temperamental motor-
car; he has a vague theory that it ought to go, on general princi-
ples; but he is not quite sure how it will perform in any given
circumstances. Now the experience of Magick and Yoga is quite above
all this. The possibility of criticising the other types of experi-
ence is based upon the possibility of expressing our impressions in
adequate terms; and this is not at all the case with the results of
Magick and Yoga. As we have already seen, every attempt at expres-
sion in ordinary language is futile. Where the hero of the adventure
is tied up with a religious theory, we get the vapid and unctuous
bilgewater of people like St. John of the Cross. All Christian
Mystics are tarrfled with the same brush. Their abominable religion
compels them to every kind of sentimentality; and the theory of
original sin vitiates their whole position, because instead of the
noble and inspiring Trance of Sorrow they have nothing but the
miserable, cowardly, and selfish sense of guilt to urge them to
undertake the Work.
15. I think we may dismiss altogether from our minds every
claim to experience made by any Christian of whatever breed of
spiritual virus as a mere morbid reflection, the apish imitation of
the true ecstasies and trances. All expressions of the real thing
must partake of the character of that thing, and therefore only that
language is permissible which is itself released from the canon of
ordinary speech, exactly as the trance is unfettered by the laws of
ordinary consciousness. In other words, the only proper translation
is in poetry, art and music.
16. If you examine the highest poetry in the light of common [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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