John St. John

JOHN ST. JOHN 12.45. one’s body. So, too, I think, for the highest spiritual work ; for that Work extends from Malkuth to Kether. Here is the great value of the rationalistic Eastern systems. [P.S. Of course scientifically worked with pencil, note-book, and stop-watch. The Yogi is usually in practice just as vague a dreamer as the mystic] They keep one always balanced by common sense. One might go off on lines of pleasing illusion for years, until one was lost on the ”Astral Plane.” All this, observe, is very meaningless, very vague at the best. What is the Astral Plane? Is there such a thing? How do its phantoms differ from those of absinthe, reverie, and love, and so on? We may admit their unsubstantiality without denying their power; the phantoms of absinthe and love are potent enough to drive a man to death or marriage; while reverie may end in anti-vivisectionism or nut— food-madness. On the whole, I prefer to explain the many terrible catastrophes I have seen caused by magic misunder— stood by supposing that in magic one is working with some very subtle and essential function of the brain, whose disease may mean for one man paralysis, for another mania, for a third melancholia, for a fourth death. It is not äþriarz' absurd to suggest that there may be some one particular thought that would cause death. In the man with heart disease, forinstance, the thought "I will run quickly upstairs ” might cause death quite as directly as “ I will shoot myself.” Yet of 61