FOLLOW A WORD THROUGH THE COLLECTION
Search the corpus.
Phrase search ignores case and repeated whitespace. All-words search finds whole words anywhere on the same page. OCR errors can affect results.
21 matching pages
Page 1 of 21939 · PDF PAGE 68
…nd they admit the deception. Well, in the same way the phenomena of high Magick and Samadhi have an authenticity, and confer an interior certainty, which is to the experience of waking life as that is to a dream. But, apart from all this, experience is experience; and the real guarantee that we have of the attainment of reality is its rank in the hierarchy of the mind. 13. Let us ask ourselves for a moment what is the characteristic of dream impressions as judged by the waking mind. Some dreams are so powerful that they convince us, even when a…
1939 · PDF PAGE 71
22. The question for each one of us is then: first of all, to ascertain our present positions; secondly, to determine our proper directions; and, thirdly, to govern ourselves accordingly. The question for me is also to describe a method of procedure which will be sufficiently elastic to be useful to every human being. I have tried to do this by combining the two paths of Magick and Yoga. If we perform the preliminary practices, each according to his capacity, the result will surely be the acquisition of a certain technique. And this will become…
1939 · PDF PAGE 30
… from the former. It is at least evident that many mental processes arise from physical processes; and so we shall at least be getting a certain distance along the road if we have checked the body. 3. Let me digress for a moment, and brush away one misunderstanding which is certain to occur to every Anglo-Saxon mind. About the worst inheritance of the emasculate school of mystics is the abominable confusion of thought which arises from the idea that bodily functions and appetites have some moral implications. This is a confusion of the planes. …
1939 · PDF PAGE 37
…tal loss of weight. This, by the way, may sound a little alarming to the instructed alienist. There is a similar feeling which occurs in certain types of insanity. 27. The fourth state is Levitation. The Hindus claim that 'jumping about like a frog' implies a genuine loss of weight, and that the jumping is mainly lateral because you have not perfected the process. If you were absolutely balanced, they claim that you would rise quietly into the air. I do not know about this at all. I never saw it happen. On the other hand, I have often felt as i…
1939 · PDF PAGE 44
…ecause by introspection we mean the exploration of the sub-strata of the consciousness which are only revealed when we have progressed a certain distance, and become aware of conditions which are utterly foreign to normal intellectual conception. The first law of normal thought is A is A: the law of identity, it is called. So we can divide the universe into A and not-A; there is no third thing possible. Now, quite early in the meditation practices, the Yogi is likely to get as a direct experience the consciousness that these laws are not true i…
1939 · PDF PAGE 31
… the question of Asana. It might be thought that nothing would be more soothing than swinging or gentle massage. In a sense, and up to a certain point, this is so. But the activity cannot be continued because fatigue supervenes, and sooner or later the body protests by going to sleep. We must, therefore, make up our minds from the start to reduce bodily rhythm to its minimum. 7. I am not quite sure whether it is philosophically defensible, whether it is logically justifiable, to assert the principles of Asana as they occur in our practice. We m…
1939 · PDF PAGE 39
…y go further, and say that all possible existing things are to be classed as related to one or more of these elements for convenience in certain operations. But these four letters, though in one sense they represent the eternal framework, are not, so to speak, original. For instance, when we place Tetragrammaton on the Tree of Life, the Ten Sephiroth or numbers, we do not include the first Sephira. Yod is referred to the second, He to the third, Vau to the group from 4 to 9, and Hé final to the tenth. No. 1 is said to be symbolised by the top p…
1939 · PDF PAGE 56
… of the theory are defined in terms of one another. In the course of this exercise we derive the laws of Nature studied in physics. At a certain point in the chain of deductions, at matter, for example, we judge that we are talking about something which is an objective concrete embodiment of our abstractions. But matter, as it occurs in physics, is no more than a particular set of abstractions, and our subsequent reasoning is concerned only with these abstractions. Such other characteristics as the objective reality may possess never enter our …
1939 · PDF PAGE 42
…stroke, as each one to some extent explains the one following. Pratyahara may be roughly described as introspection, but it also means a certain type of psychological experience. For instance, you may suddenly acquire a conviction, as did Sir Humphry Davy, that the universe is composed exclusively of ideas; or you may have the direct experience that you do not possess a nose, as may happen to the best of us, if we concentrate upon the tip of it.
1939 · PDF PAGE 54
…tinuum. And it can be shown to be impossible to relate them to anything in Riemann's Geometry. Gravitation can be shown to correspond to certain geometrical peculiarities of a Riemannian space-time. But the electro-magnetic forces lie completely outside this scheme.' 27. Here is the great quag into which mathematical physics has led its addicts. Here we have two classes of phenomena, all part of a unity of physics. Yet the equations which describe and explain the one class are incompatible with those of the other class! This is not a question o…
1939 · PDF PAGE 41
…ve failed in this original strategical disposition, you are simply not going to carry through the campaign. Unforeseen contingencies are certain to arise, and therefore one of our precautions is to have some sort of reserve of resource to fling against unexpected attacks.
1939 · PDF PAGE 52
…efer the critic to Bertrand Russell's Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, where the above position is thoroughly justified, as also certain positions which follow. I want you to note in particular the astonishing final identification of this cosmic experience with the nervous system as described by the anatomist. 21. At this point we may well be led to consider once more what we call the objective universe, and what we call our subjective experience. What is Nature? Immanuel Kant, who founded an epoch-making system of subjective idealism, …
1939 · PDF PAGE 26
…e the case. I refer to the planet Herschel, or Uranus, and Neptune. Whatever may have been the knowledge of the ancients, it is at least certain that they left gaps in their system which were exactly filled by these two planets, and the newly discovered Pluto. They fill these gaps just as the newly discovered chemical elements discovered in the last fifty years fill the gaps in Mendelejeff's table of the Periodic Law. 17. Herschel represents the highest form of the True Will, and it seems natural and right that this should not rank with the sev…
1939 · PDF PAGE 36
…ording to tradition, if you can hold the mind still for as much as twelve seconds you will get one of the highest results of Yoga. It is certainly a fact that when you are doing a cycle of 20 seconds out, 10 in, and 30 holding, there is quite a long period during the holding period when the mind does tend to stop its malignant operations. By the time this cycle has become customary, you are able to recognise instinctively the arrival of the moment when you can throw yourself suddenly into the mental act of concentration. In other words, by Asan…
1939 · PDF PAGE 67
… admit that they may have been mistaken in the quality of their observation of any phenomenon, and men a little more advanced are almost certain to attain to a placid kind of speculation as to whether the objects of sense are not mere shadows on a screen. I take off my glasses. Now I cannot read my manuscript. I had two sets of lenses, one natural, one artificial. If I had been looking through a telescope of the old pattern I should have had three sets of lenses, two artificial. If I go and put on somebody else's glasses I shall get another kin…
1939 · PDF PAGE 10
…to make him think about the nature of the world as he supposes that he knows it. Let us consider a piece of cheese. We say that this has certain qualities, shape, structure, colour, solidity, weight, taste, smell, consistency and the rest; but investigation has shown that this is all illusory. Where are these qualities? Not in the cheese, for different observers give quite different accounts of it. Not in ourselves, for we do not perceive them in the absence of the cheese. All 'material things,' all impressions, are phantoms. In reality the che…
1939 · PDF PAGE 69
…Paul, fingering the Old School Tie, sneered: 'But I was free born.' 18. It is not for us here to enquire as to how it should happen that certain human beings possess from birth this right of intimacy with the highest reality, but Blavatsky was of this same opinion that the natural gift marks the acquisition of the rank in the spiritual hierarchy to which the student of Magick and Yoga aspires. He is, so to speak, an artist in the making; and it is perhaps not likely that his gifts will have become sufficiently automatic in his present incarnati…
1939 · PDF PAGE 25
…eliable. One of the most unfathomably dreadful dangers of the Path is that you must trust Mercury, and yet that if you trust him you are certain to be deceived. I can only explain this, if at all, by pointing out that, since all truth is relative, all truth is falsehood. In one sense Mercury is the great enemy; Mercury is mind, and it is the mind that we have set out to conquer. 14. The last of the seven sacred planets is the Moon. The Moon represents the totality of the female part of us, the passive principle which is yet very different to th…
1939 · PDF PAGE 66
…Great Eastern Erg of the Sahara. I do not think that anyone will dispute that this was pretty good exercise; but my point is that it was certainly very good Yoga. From what I have said in previous lectures you will all recognise that this practice fulfils all the conditions of the earlier stages of Yoga, and it is therefore not surprising that it put my mind in such a state that I was able to use the Call of the Thirty Aethyrs with much greater efficacy than before. 8. Am I then supposed to be saying that Yoga is merely the hand- maiden of Magi…
1939 · PDF PAGE 53
…ultimate truth turns out to be meaningless. It is like the well known circular definition of an obscene book, which is: one that arouses certain ideas in the mind of the kind of person in whom such ideas are excited by that kind of book. 23. I notice that my excellent chairman is endeavouring to stifle a yawn and to convert it into a smile, and he will forgive me for saying that I find the effect somewhat sinister. But he has every right to be supercilious about it. These are indeed 'old, fond paradoxes to amuse wives in ale-houses.' Since phil…