Magick Without Tears

112 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS Unless your Universe is perfect-and perfection includes the idea of balance-how can you come even to Atmadarshana? Hindus may maintain that Atmadarshana, or at any rate Shivadarshana, is the equivalent of crossing the Abyss. Beware of any such conclusions! The Trances are simply isolated experiences, sharply cut off from normal thought-life. To cross the Abyss is a permanent and fundamental revolution in the whole of one's being. Much more, upon the brink of the Abyss. If there be missing or redundant even one atom, the entire monstrous, the portentous mass must tend to move with irresistible impact, in such direction as to restore the equilibrium. To deflect it-well, think of a gyroscope! How then can you destroy it in one sole stupendous gesture? Ah! Listen to The Vision and the Voice. Perhaps the best and simplest plan is for me to pick out the most important of the relevant passages and put them together as an appendix to this letter. Also, by contrast, those allusions to the "Black Brothers" and the "Left-hand Path." This ought to give you a clear idea of what each is, and does, of what distinguishes their respective methods in some ways so confusingly alike. I hope indeed most sincerely that you will whet your Magical Dagger on the Stone of the Wise, and wield most deftly and determinedly both the White-handled and the Black-handled Burin. In trying to express these opinions, I am constantly haunted by the dread that I may be missing some crucial point, or even allowing a mere quibble to pass for argument. It makes it only all the worse when one has become so habituated by Neschamic ideas, to knowing, even before one says it, that what one is going to say is of necessity untrue , as untrue as it is contradictory. So what can it possibly matter what one says? Such doubts are dampers! "Enough of Because! be he damned for a dog!" Here follow the quotations from The Vision and the Voice.