Magick Without Tears

22 MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS At least, I feel fairly satisfied that meditation of them severally and jointly may help you to an answer to your first question. 2. Most people in my experience either cook up a hell-broth of self-induced obstacles to success in Astral travelling, or else shoot forth on the wings of romantic imagination and fool themselves for the rest of their lives in the manner of the Village Idiot. Yours, luckily, is the former trouble. But-is it plain obstinacy?-you do not exercise the sublime Art of Guru-bullying. You should have made one frenzied leap to my dying bed, thrust aside the cohorts of Mourning Archimandrites, and wrung my nose until I made you do it. And you repeatedly insist that it is difficult. It isn't. Is there, however, some deep-seated inhibition-a (Freudian) fear of success? Is there some connection with that sense of guilt which is born in all but the very few? But you don't give it a fair chance. There is, I admit, some trick, or knack, about getting properly across; a faculty which one acquires (as a rule) quite suddenly and unexpectedly. Rather like mastering some shots at billiards. Practice has taught me how to communicate this to students; only in rare cases does one fail. (It's incredible: one man simply could not be persuaded that intense physical exertion was the wrong way to do it. There he sat, with the veins on his forehead almost on the point of bursting, and the arms of my favourite chair visibly trembling beneath his powerful grip!) In your case, I notice that you have got this practice mixed up with Dharana: you write of "emptying my mind of everything except the one idea, etc." Then you go on: "The invoking of a supersensible Being is impossible to me as yet." The impudence! The arrogance! How do you know, pray madam? (Dial numbers at random: the results are often surprisingly delightful!) Besides, I didn't ask you to invoke a supersensible (what a word!! Meaning?) Being right away, or