The Law is for All

Chapter II A Verses 25—28 117 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.]