Chapter II A Verses 25—28
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Experience is the great Teacher; and each one of us possesses 
millions of years of experience, the very quintessence of it, stored 
automatically in our subconscious minds. The Intellectuals are 
worse than the bourgeoisie themselves; a la lanterned Give us 
Men!
We are so caked with dirt that the germs of disease cannot 
reach us. If we decide to wash, we must do it well; or we may 
have awakened some sleeping dogs, and set them on defenseless 
areas. Initiation stirs up the mud. It creates unstable equilibrium. 
It exposes our elements to unfamiliar conditions. The France of 
Louis XVI had to pass through the Terror before Napoleon could 
teach it to find itself. Similarly, any error in reaching the realiza­
tion of Hadit may abandon the Aspirant to the ambitions of every 
frenzied faction of his character, the masterless dogs of the 
Augean kennel of his mind.
28. Now a curse upon Because and his kin!
Commentary: This is against these Intellectuals aforesaid. 
There are no “standards of Right.” Ethics is balderdash. Each 
Star must go on its orbit. To hell with “moral principle”; there is 
no such thing; that is a herd-delusion, and makes men cattle. Do 
not listen to the rational explanation of How Right It All Is, in the 
newspapers.
We may moreover consider “Because” as involving the idea of 
causality, and therefore of duality. If cause and effect are really 
inseparable, as they must be by definition, it is mere clumsiness to 
regard them as separate; they are two aspects of one single idea, 
conceived as consecutive for the sake of (apparent) convenience, 
or for the general purpose previously indicated of understanding 
and expressing ourselves in finite terms.
Shallow indeed is the obvious objection to this passage that 
The Book of the Law itself is full of phrases which imply causal­
ity. Nobody denies that causality is a category of the mind, a form 
or condition of thought which, if not quite a theoretical necessity, 
is yet inevitable in practice. The very idea of any relation between 
any two things appears as causal. Even should we declare it to be
1 [Fr., “to the lamppost (with them),” i.e. hang them.]