Collected Works (Vol. II)

244 myseia that he is the very nobody to whom I now refer. Meditation is then the means; but only the supreme means. The agony column of the 7zmes is the supreme means of meeting with the gentleman in the brown billycock and frock coat, wearing a green tie and chewing a straw, who was at. the soirée of the Carlton Club last Monday night; no doubt! but this means is seldom or never used in the similar contingency of a cow- elephant desiring her bull in the jungles of Ceylon. Meditation is not within the reach of every one; not all possess the ability; very few indeed (in the West at least) have the opportunity. In any case what the Easterns call ‘‘ one- pointedness ” is an essential preliminary to even early stages of true meditation. And iron will-power is a still earlier qualifica- tion. By meditation I do not mean merely. ‘‘thinking about’’ anything, however pro- foundly, but the absolute restraint of the mind to the contemplation of a single object, whether gross, fine, or altogether spiritual. Now true magical ceremonial is entirely directed to attain this end, and forms a magnificent gymnasium for those who are not already finished mental athletes. By act, word, and thought, both in quantity and quality, the one object of the ceremony is being constantly indicated. Every fumiga- tion, purification, banishing, invocation, evocation, is chiefly a reminder of the single purpose, until the supreme moment arrives, and every fibre of the body, every force- channel of the mind, is strained out in one overwhelming rush of the Will in the direc- tion desired. Such is the real purport of all the apparently fantastic directions of Solomon, Abramelin, and other sages of repute. When a man has evoked and mastered such forces as Taphtatharath, Belial, Amaimon, and the great powers of the elements, then he may safely be per- ‘mitted to begin to try to stop thinking. For, needless to say, the universe, including the thinker, exists only by virtue of the thinker’s thought.! In yet one other way is magic a capital training ground for the Arahat. True symbols do really awake those macrocosmic forces of which they are the eidola, and it is possible in this manner very largely to in- crease the magical ‘‘ potential,” to borrow a term from electrical scrence. | Of course, there are bad and invalid pro- cesses, which tend rather to disperse or to excite the mind-stuff than to control it; these we must discard. But there is a true magical ceremonial, the central Arcanum alike of Eastern and Western practical tran- scendentalism. Needless to observe, if I knew it, I should not disclose it. I therefore definitely affirm the validity of the Qabalistic tradition in its practical part as well as in those exalted regions of thought through which we have so recently, and so hardly, travelled. Eight are the limbs of Yoga: morality and virtue, control of body, thought, and force, leading to concentration, meditation, and rapture. Only when the last of these has been attained, and itself refined upon by removing the gross and even the fine objects of ‘its 1 See Berkeley and his expounders, for the Western shape of this Eastern commonplace. Huxley, however, curiously enough, states the fact almost in these words.—A. C, * A possible mystic transfiguration of the Vedanta system has been suggested to me on the lines of the Syllogism— God = Being (Patanjali). Being = Nothing (Hegel). God = Nothing (Buddhism). Or, in the language of religion : Every one may admit that monotheism, ex- alted by the introduction of the oo symbol, is equivalent to pantheism. Pantheism and atheism are really identical, as the opponents of both are the first to admit. If this be really taught, I must tender my apologies, for the reconcilement is of course complete.—A. C.