Confessions of Aleister Crowley

311 at last, not to be Aleister Crowley, an individual independent of the communion of cosmic consciousness, but merely one manifestation of the Universal Mind whose thought must be sterile unless sown broadcast to blossom and bear fruit in every acre of God's vineyard. {505} P A R T F O U R MAGICAL WORKINGS 58 November 18th, 1905 was my seventh birthday in the Order, I wrote: "About now I may count my Speculative Criticism of the Reason as not only proved and understood, but realized." And on the ninteenth: "The misery of this is simply sickening --- I can write no more." I must explain. All these seven years, especially when in the East, I had discussed religion and philosophy with all sorts and conditions of men. Further, I had studied the sacred books of all religions of antiquity. My experiences all tended to the uniform conclusion that one could go all round the circle in any argument. Christian philosophers have seized on this fact to urge that our only hope of arriving at truth is through faith; but it is the bankruptcy of faith that originally drove us to test it by reason. I saw that the true solution was, on the contrary, that of the mystic. In Cabbalistic and scientific language, we possess a faculty of apprehension independent of reason, which informs us directly of the truth. I wrote in my Magical Diary on November 19th, 1905: I realize in myself the perfect impossibility of reason; suffering great misery. I am as one who should have plumed himself for years upon the speed and strength of a favourite horse, only to find not only that its the speed and strength were illusory, but that it was not a real horse at all, but a clothes-horse. There being no way --- no conceivable way --- out of this awful trouble gives that hideous despair which is only tolerable because in the past it has ever been the Darkness of the Threshold. But this is far worse than ever before; I wish to go from A to B; and I am not only a cripple, but there is no such thing as space. I have to keep an appointment at midnight; and not only is my watch stopped, but there is no such thing as time ... But surely I am not a dead man at thirty! From this date till the first week in February, I was intellectually insane. The actual ordeal is described with intense simplicity and passion in "Aha!" I call it "the Order of the Veil, the Second Veil" and the "Veil of the Abyss". The complete destruction of reason left me without other means of apprehension than Neschamah. I have already explained briefly what are meant by Neschamah, Ruach and Nephesch. I must now go a little more deeply into the doctrines of the Cabbala. The human consciousness is represented as the centre of a hexagon {509} whose points are the various faculties of the mind; but the uppermost point, which should link the human consciousness with the divine, is missing. Its name is Daäth, Knowledge. The Babylonian legend of the "fall" is a parable of the shutting out of man from Paradise by the destruction of this