The Equinox (Volume III, Number I)

THE SEVEN PORTALS It now becomes clear that all this is meant in an elementary sense, for verse 18 is really little more than a statement that an irritable frame of mind is bad for meditation. Of course anybody who really ‘bore love,’ etc., as requested would be suffering from softening of the brain. That is, if you take all this in its obvious literal sense. There is a clean way of Love, but it is not this toshy slop treacle-goo. 19. Of teachers there are many; the MASTER-SOUL is one, Alaya, the Universal Soul. Live in that MASTER as ITS ray in thee. Live in thy fellows as they live in IT. Here the killing of the sense of separateness is further ad- vised. It is a description of the nature of Atma, and Atma is, as elsewhere stated, not a Buddhist, but a Hindu idea. The teaching is here to refer everything to Atma, to regard everything as a corruption of Atma, if you please, but a cor- ruption which is unreal, because Atma is the only real thing. There is a similar instruction in Liber Legis: “Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing and any other thing”; and you are urged not to “confound the space marks,” saying “they are one,” or “they are many.” 20. Before thou standest on the threshold of the Path; be- fore thou crossest the foremost gate, thou hast to merge the two into the One and sacrifice the personal to SELF imper- sonal and thus destroy the “path” between the two—Anta- karana. Here is again the confusion noted with regard to verse 15 —for the destruction of the lower Manas implies an attain- ment not less than that of a Master of the Temple. 93