Magick Without Tears

504 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS the excessive simplication given in Eight Lectures on Yoga is a practical advantage . Any given type of Yoga is the work of a lifetime and for that reason alone it is desirable to confine oneself from the beginning to an absolutely simple programme. What then is the difference between Yoga and Magick? Magick is extraversion, the discovery of and subsequently the classification of and finally the control of new worlds on new planes. So far as it concerns the development of the mind its object and method are perfectly simple. What is wanted is exaltation. The aim is to identify oneself with the highest essence of whatever world is under consideration. With Yoga you might easily slip into saying that it was identical, with the exception that the new worlds are from the start recognised as already existing within the human cosmos, but nobody is asked to extend these worlds in any way; on the contrary the object is to analyse ever more minutely, and the control to which one approaches is not external but internal. At all times one is concentrated on the idea of simplication. The recognition of any new idea or form of ideas, is invariably the signal for its rejection: "not that, not that." One might simplify this explanation by constructing some sort of apophthegm; Magic is the journey from 0 to 2, Yoga from 2 to o. It is a very good rule for the Yogi to keep his mind constantly fixed on the fact that any idea soever is false. There is actually a Hindu proverb "That which can be thought is not true." Consequently the existence of any idea in the mind is an immediate refutation of it, but equally the contraries as well as contradictory of that idea are false, and the result of this is to knock the second law of formal logic to pieces. One puts up a sort of sorites-a is b, therefore a is not b; therefore not a is not b; and all these contrary statements are equally false, but in order to realise this fact they must themselves be announced by the mind as ecstatic discoveries of truth. The result of all this naturally is that the mind very rapidly