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…me's school rules of intellect. With an earnest personal appeal, therefore, to come up frankly to the mourners' bench and gibber, I will take my leave of you for this evening. Love is the law, love under will.
…re 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 tells us that a line has length but no breadth. But, as long as there are only two points, length i…
…The curvature of space-time is most prominent, therefore, around large masses, for here the gravitational effects are most marked. If we take matter as fundamental, we may say that it is the presence of matter that causes the curvature of space-time. But there is a different school of thought that regards matter as due to the curvature of space-time. That is, we assume as fundamental a space-time continuum manifest to our senses as what we call matter. Both points of view have strong arguments to recommend them. But, whether or not matter may b…
replace my magical apparatus. I would take the table by my bed, or stones roughly piled, for my altar. My candle or my Alpine Lantern was my light. My ice-axe for the wand, my drinking flask for the chalice, my machete for the sword, and a chapati or a sachet of salt for the pantacle of art! Habit soon familiarised these rough and ready succedanea. But I suspect that it may have been the isolation and the physical hardship itself that helped, that more and more my magical operation became implicit in my own body and mind, when a few months late…
…aesar the things which are Caesar's before rendering to God the things which are God's. Woe to that seven months' abortion who thinks to take advantage of the accidents of birth, and, mocking the call of duty, sneaks off to stare at a blank wall in China! Yama and Niyama are only the more critical stages of Yoga because they cannot be translated in terms of a schoolboy curriculum. Nor can schoolboy tricks adequately excuse the aspirant from the duties of manhood. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Rejoice, true men, that this is t…
… remote and elusive of all Gods to throw clear light upon the subjectthe light of common sense. (2) All phenomena of which we are aware take place in our own minds, and therefore the only thing we have to look at is the mind; which is a more constant quantity over all the species of humanity than is generally supposed. What appear to be radical differences, irreconcilable by argument, are usually found to be due to the obstinacy of habit produced by generations of systematic sectarian training. (3) We must then begin the study of Yoga by looki…
…le Name; it is alleged that when pronounced accurately its vibrations would destroy the universe; and this is indeed quite true, when we take the deeper interpretation. Tetragrammaton is so called from the four letters in the word: Yod, Hé, Vau, and Hé. This is compared with the relations of a familyYod, the Father, Hé, the Mother; Vau, the Son; and the final Hé, the Daughter. (In writing she is sometimes distinguished from her mother by inserting a small point in the letter.) This is also a reference to the elements, fire, water, air, earth. …
…w something about them, and this (on examination) always turned out not to be the case. 2. Knowledge itself is impossible, because if we take the simplest proposition of knowledge, S is P, we must attach some meaning to S and P, if our statement is to be intelligible. (I say nothing as to whether it is true!) And this involves definition. Now the original proposition of identity, A = A, tells us nothing at all, unless the second A gives us further information about the first A. We shall therefore say that A is BC. Instead of one unknown we have…
colour and size; moves its position; gets out of shape. And one of the essential difficulties in practice is that it takes a great deal of skill and experience to become really alert to what is happening. You can go on day-dreaming for quite long periods before realising that your thoughts have wandered at all. This is why I insist so strongly on the practices described above as producing alertness and watchfulness, and you will obviously realise that it is quite evident that one has to be in the pink of condition and in the most favourable men…
…mpletely 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 windowpane it will continue beating against the window to the point of exhaustion and death, instead of escaping through the tube. We must not confuse the necessary automatic functioning of any of our elements with the true Will which is the proper orbit of any star. A human being only acts as a unit at all because of countless generations of tra…
…ousness becomes concentrated in that small part. I used to practise this a good deal in my retirement by Lake Pasquaney. I would usually take a finger or a toe, and identify my whole consciousness with the small movements which I allowed it to make. It would be futile to go into much detail about this experience. I can only say that until you acquire the power you have no idea of the sheer wonder and delight of that endlessly quivering orgasm.
…ustomary 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 not quite the same thing, but near it. 25. Men of science are terribly handicapped in every investigation by having been trained to ignore the immeasurable. All phenomena have subtle qualities which are at present insusceptible to any properly scientific methods of investigation. We can imitate the processes of nature in the laboratory, bu…
…berof them.) If, for example, we say that Nothing is a square triangle, we have had to invent a square triangle in order to say it. But take a more homely instance. We know what we mean by saying 'There are cats in the room.' We know what we mean when we say 'No cats are in the room.' But if we say 'No cats are not in the room,' we evidently mean that some cats are in the room. This remark is not intended to be a reflection upon this distinguished audience. 16. So then, if Nothing is to be really the absolute Nothing, we mean that Nothing does…
…rfume, saffronfor my libation some preparation of opium or a generous yet sweet and powerful wine such as port. For my magical weapon I take the sceptre; in fact, I continue choosing instruments for every act in such a way that I am constantly reminded of my will to evoke Jupiter. I even constrain every object. I extract the Jupiterian elements from all the complex phenomena which surround me. If I look at my carpet, the blues and purples are the colours which stand out as Light against an obsolescent and indeterminate background. And thus I c…
…science and philosophy. It has done nothing in religion; or, rather, where it has meddled with religion it has only done harm. What a mistake! And why? For the simple reason that it was in a position to take no notice of religion; all these matters were decided for it by the Pope, or by the Councils of the Church, and the Society was therefore able to free itself from the perplexities of religion, in exactly the same way as the novice obtains complete freedom from his moral responsibilities by sinking his personal phantasies in the will of the …
…s and ingenuity which helps us in our difficulties; he is the mechanical system, the symbolism which helps the human mind of the Yogi to take cognisance of what is coming. It must here be remarked that because of his complete indifference to anything whatever (and that thought iswhen you get far enoughonly a primary point of wisdom) he is entirely unreliable. 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…
…that the blurred surface will become clear when I do so. Of course, I may be wrong. I may have picked up some other body's glasses by mistake. I might go blind before I could get them into position. Even such confidence has limits; but it is a real confidence, and this is the explanation of why we go ahead with the business of life. When we think it over, we know that there are all sorts of snags, that it is impossible to formulate any proposition which is philosophically unassailable, or even one which is so from a practical standpoint. We adm…
Let us take the example of Pranayama, a subject with which I hope to deal in a subsequent lucubration. Let us suppose that you are managing your breath so that your cycle, breathing in, holding, and breathing out, lasts exactly a minute. That is pretty good work for most people, but it may be or may not be good enough to get you going. No one can tell you until you have tried long enough (and no one can tell you how long 'long enough' may be) whether that is going to ring the bell. It may be that if you increase your sixty seconds to sixty-four…
…t!' But it may give you some idea of what is, after all, not too bad, when I say that in the last months of my own work it often used to take me ten minutes (at the conclusion of the practice) to straighten my left leg. I took the ankle in both hands, and eased it out a fraction of a millimetre at a time. 20. At this point the band begins to play. Quite suddenly the pain stops. An ineffable sense of relief sweeps over the Yoginotice that I no longer call him 'student' or 'aspirant'and he becomes aware of a very strange fact. Not only was that…
…lts as occur in straightforward Yoga. I think I ought to tell you a little more about these visions. The method of obtaining them was to take a large topaz beautifully engraved with the Rose and Cross of forty-nine petals, and this topaz was set in a wooden cross of oak painted red. I called this the shew-stone in memory of Dr. Dee's famous shew-stone. I took this in my hand and proceeded to recite in the Enochian or Angelic language the Call of the Thirty Aethyrs, using in each case the special name appropriate to the Aethyr. Now all this went…