Magick Without Tears

IMPROVISING A TEMPLE 173 That, in short, is a picture of you! You have mistaken the flurry of passing over some actual snag for a snag in itself! You put the blame on to your own quite rational attempts to overcome difficulties. The secret of the trick of getting past the rocks is elasticity; yet it is that very quality with which you reproach yourself! We even, at the worst, reach the state for which Buddhism, in the East presents most ably the case: as in the West, does James Thomson (B. V.) in "The City of Dreadful Night"; we come to wish for-or, more truly to think that we wish for "blest Nirvana's sinless, stainless Peace" (or some such twaddle-thank God I can't recall Arnold's mawkish and unmanly phrase!) and B.V.'s "Dateless oblivion and divine repose." I insist on the "think that you wish," because, if the real You did really wish the real That, you could never have come to exist at all! ("But I don't exist."-"I know-let's get on!") Note, please, how sophistically unconvincing are the Buddhist theories of how we ever got into this mess. First cause: Ignorance. Way out, then, knowledge. O.K., that implies a knower, a thing known-and so on and so forth, through all the Three Waste Paper Baskets of the Law; analysed, it turns out to be nonsense all dolled up to look like thinking. And there is no genuine explanation of the origin of the Will to be. How different, how simple, how self-evident, is the doctrine of The Book of the Law! There are any number of passages dealing with this matter in my writings: let's forget them, and keep to the Text! Cap. I, v. 26: . .. my ecstasy, the consciousness of the continuity of existence, the omnipresence of my body. V.30: This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all. (There is a Qabalistic inner meaning in this text; "the