The Equinox (Volume I, Number I)

THE EQUINOX Methods of obtaining these states are to be found in any book on Bhakta Yoga—Swami Vivekananda’s is the best I know of—and in Loyola’s “ Exercitios Espirituales,’ whose discipline and method is, in my opinion, unsurpassed. These phenomena are nearly always tainted with sexuality, and are excessively dangerous from this cause. “Dirt is matter in the wrong place,” and to mix, consciously or unconsciously, either morality or immorality with religion is dirty; and dirt makes disease. The victim becomes a fanatic at the best, at the worst and most frequent a driveller. Of a lower type are the loves of Magi and invoked elementals. As Levi says, “the love of the Magus for such beings is insensate, and may destroy him.” It surely will, if he beware not in time. Higher again because more purely formless and for this reason truer to the Vedana type are the ecstasies of joy and agony experienced by such men as Luther, Fox, Molinos, and others. Professor William James treats most adequately of this matter in his ‘“ Varieties of Religious Experience.” The limitations of this stage are first, its absorption in self ; secondly, its almost always insuperable tendency to self- limitation and narrowness. Two mystics, the one wallowing in Jesus and the other in Vishnu, will describe their experiences in almost identical language, yet denounce each other as “heathen ” and “Mlechha” respectively. Among hashish phenomena the correspondences are those of the intense emotions experienced (well described 70