The Law is for All

112 The Law is for All truthfully from lack of imagination and analysis. Idealist painters like Bouguereau, awake to the divergence between Nature and their academic standards of Beauty, falsify the facts in order to delude themselves. The greatest, like Rembrandt, paint a gallant, a hag, and a carcass with equal passion and rapture; they love the truth as it is. They do not admit that anything can be ugly or evil; its existence justifies itself. This is because they know themselves to be part of an harmonious unity; to disdain any item of it would be to blaspheme the whole. The Thelemite is able to revel in any experience soever; in each he recognizes the tokens of ultimate Truth. It is surely obvious, even intellectually, that all phenomena are interdependent, and therefore involve each other. Suppose a + b + c = d, a = d - b - c, just as much as b = d - c - a. It is senseless to pick out one equation as “nice,” and another as “nasty.” Personal predilections are evidence of imperfect vision. But it is even worse to deny reality to such facts as refuse to humour them. In the charter of spiritual sovereignty it is written that the charcoal-burner is no less a subject than the duke. The structure of the state includes all elements; it were stupid and suicidal to aim at homogeneity, or to assert it. Spiritual experience soon enables the aspirant to assimilate these ideas, and he can enjoy life to the full, finding his True Self alike in the contemplation of every element of existence. 23. I am alone: there is no God where I am. Commentary: This refers to the spiritual experience of Iden­ tity. When one realizes one’s Truth there is no room for any other conception. It also means that the God-idea must go with other relics of the Fear born of Ignorance into the limbo of savagery. I speak of the Idea of God as generally understood, God being “some­ thing not ourselves, that makes for righteousness,” as Matthew Arnold victorianatically phrased his definition.1 The whiskered wowser! Why this ingrained conviction that self is unrighteous? 1 [Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible (1896), p. 348; emphasis Crowley’s. See also Crowley, Book 4, Part III, rev. ed., p. 141.]