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Page 1 of 11939 · PDF PAGE 28
acquires a feelinga quite irrational feelingthat a given place or a given method is right or wrong for its purposes. The intimation is as assured as that of the swordsman when he picks up an untried weapon; either it comes up sweet to the hand, or it does not. You cannot explain it, and you cannot argue it away. 21. I have treated Yama and Niyama at great length because their importance has been greatly underrated, and their nature completely misunderstood. They are definitely magical practices, with hardly a tinge of mystical flavour. The ad…
1939 · PDF PAGE 15
…lves perfectly simple; but they have been completely overlaid by the sinister activities of priests and lawyers. There is no question of right or wrong in any abstract sense about any of these problems. It is absurd to say that it is 'right' for chlorine to
1939 · PDF PAGE 58
…y and science, in following an independent route, had brought us to the famous exclamation of Tertullian: "certum est quia ineptum!" How right the Church has been to deny the authority of Reason! 2. We are almost tempted to enquire for a moment what the Church means by 'faith.' St. Paul tells us that faith is 'the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things unseen.' I do not think, then, that we are to imagine this word faith to mean what that lecherous gross-bellied boor, Martin Luther, maintained. The faith of which he speaks is any…
1939 · PDF PAGE 71
…is not to instruct you, but to familiarise you with the ground work, and in particular to prevent you getting the idea that there is any right or wrong in matters of opinion. You pass an examination intended to make sure that your mind is well grounded in this matter, and you become a Probationer. Your reading will have given you some indication as to the sort of thing you are likely to be good at, and you select such practices as seem to you to promise well. You go ahead with these, and keep a careful record of what you do, and what results oc…
1939 · PDF PAGE 32
…-haw humbug over on the B. Public.[2] I would rather you did the thing 'wrong' by yourselves, and learned from your errors, than get it 'right' from the teacher, and atrophied your initiative and your faculty of learning anything at all. It is, however, perfectly right that you should have some idea of what happens when you sit down to practise. 12. Let me digress for a moment and refer to what I said in my text- book on Magick with regard to the formula IAO. This formula covers all learning. You begin with a delightful feeling as of a child wi…
1939 · PDF PAGE 62
16. If I remember rightly, this practice and its result were one of the principal factors which enabled me afterwards to attain what is called the Trance of Wonder, which pertains to the Grade of a Master of the Temple, and is a sort of complete understanding of the organism of the universe, and an ecstatic adoration of its marvel. This Trance is very much higher than the Beatific Vision, for always in the latter it is the heartthe Phrenwhich is involved; in the former it is the Nous, the divine intelligence of man, whereas the heart is only …
1939 · PDF PAGE 53
…ifle 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 philosophy began, it has always been a favourite game to prove your axioms absurd. You will all naturally be very annoyed with me for indulging in these fatuous pastimes, especially as I started out with a pledge that I would deal with these subjects from the hard-headed scientific point of view. Forgi…
1939 · PDF PAGE 17
…e to modify our machines in all sorts of ways which were not altogether foreseen. I wish to thunder forth once more that no questions of right or wrong enter into our problems. But in the stratosphere it is 'right' for a man to be shut up in a pressure-resisting suit electrically heated, with an oxygen supply, whereas it would be 'wrong' for him to wear it if he were running the three miles in the summer sports in the Tanezrouft. This is the pit into which all the great religious teachers have hitherto fallen, and I am sure you are all looking …
1939 · PDF PAGE 30
… You will find out only too soon what it means to do wrong; by our very thesis itself all action is wrong. Any action is only relatively right in so far as it may help us to put an end to the entire process of action. These relatively useful actions are therefore those which make for control, or 'virtue.' They have been classified, entirely regardless of trouble and expense, in enormous volume, and with the utmost complexity; to such a point, in fact, that merely to permit oneself to study the nomenclature of the various systems can have but on…
1939 · PDF PAGE 12
…Some of the more sophisticated members of my audience may possibly be thinking that there is a catch in it somewhere. They are perfectly right. (16) The snag is simply this. Every element of which we are composed is indeed constantly occupied in the satisfaction of its particular needs by its own particular Yoga; but for that very reason it is completely obsessed by its own function, which it must naturally consider as the Be-All and End-All of its existence. For instance, if you take a glass tube open at both ends and put it over a bee on the …
1939 · PDF PAGE 26
…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 seven sacred planets, because the True Will is the sphere which transcends them. 'Every man and every woman is a star.' Herschel defines the orbit of the star, your star. But Herschel is dynamic; Herschel is explosive; Herschel, astrologically speaking, does not move in an orbit; he has his own path. So the Niyama which corresponds to this planet is, first and last, the…
1939 · PDF PAGE 36
…form the practices, obtain the experience, and come to me yourself with the information. In this way you will know that you have got the right thing, whereas if I were to tell you now, you would very likely imagine it. 2. Automatic rigidity: the body becomes still, as the result of a spasm. This is perfectly normal and predictable. It is customary to do it with a dog. You stick him in a bell-jar, pump in oxygen or carbonic acid or something, and the dog goes stiff. You can take him out and wave him around by a leg as if he were frozen. This is …
1939 · PDF PAGE 50
…able parts, powers and faculties. And they are as much a nightmare as the external universe which it has created. Gad, sir, Patanjali is right! 15. Now how do we get over this difficulty of something coming from Nothing? Only by enquiring what we mean by Nothing. We shall find that this idea is totally inconceivable to the normal mind. For if Nothing is to be Nothing, it must be Nothing in every possible way. (Of course, each of these ways is itself an imaginary something, and there are AlephZero a transfinite numberof them.) If, for example…
1939 · PDF PAGE 33
…rtunately, Time, the great healer, is on the job as usual; Time takes no week-ends off; Time does not stop to admire himself; Time keeps right on.[3] Before very long, you forget all about the pleasantness of things, and it would not be at all polite to give you any idea of what you are going to think of the Teacher. 14. Perhaps the first thing you notice is that, although you have started in what is apparently the most comfortable position, there is a tendency to change that position without informing you. For example, if you are sitting in th…
1939 · PDF PAGE 69
…'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 incarnation to produce the fruits of his attainment. Y…
1939 · PDF PAGE 25
…; the Moon is the aspiration, the link of man and God; she is the supreme purity: Isis the Virgin, Isis the Virgin Mother; but she comes right down at the other end of the scale, to be a symbol of the senses themselves, the mere instrument of the registration of phenomena, incapable of discrimination, incapable of choice. The Niyama corresponding to her influence, the first of all, is that quality of aspiration, the positive purity which refuses union with anything less than the All. In Greek mythology Artemis, the Goddess of the Moon, is virgi…
1939 · PDF PAGE 24
…to ring the bell. It may be that if you increase your sixty seconds to sixty-four the phenomena would begin immediately. That sounds all right but as you have nearly burst your lungs doing the sixty, you want this added energy to make the grade. That is only one example of the difficulty which arises with every practice. Mars, moreover, is the flaming energy of passion, it is the male quality in its lowest sense; it is the courage which goes berserk, and I do not mind telling you that, in my own case at least, one of the inhibitions with which …
1939 · PDF PAGE 49
…round, the area of possibilities, a condition of quality and so of all consciousness. It is therefore in itself completely void. Is that right, sir? 8. Now suppose we want to fulfil one of these possibilities. The simplest thing we can take is a point, and we are told that a point has neither parts nor magnitude, but only position. But, as long as there is only one point, position means nothing. No possibility has yet been created of any positive statement. We will therefore take two points, and from these we get the idea of a line. Our Euclid …