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cut down a
certain ritual of initiation to what I thought were the very
barest bones,
chiefly to make it easy to commit to memory. Then came a
candidate who
was deaf --- not merely "a little hard of hearing;" his
tympana were rup-
tured --- and the question was How?
All right for most of it; one could show him the words typed
on slips.
But during part of the ceremony he was hoodwinked; one was
reduced to
the deaf-and-dumb alphabet devised for such occasions. I am
as clumsy
and stupid at that as I am at most things, and lazy,
infernally lazy, on
top of that. Well, when it came to the point, the
communication of the
words became abominably, intolerably tedious. And then!
Then I found
that about two-thirds of my "absolutely essential" ritual
was not neces-
asary at all!
That larned 'im.
Love is the law, love under will.
Fraternally,
666
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MAGIC WITHOUT TEARS
187
CHAPTER XXVII
37
STRUCTURE OF MIND BASED ON THAT OF BODY (HAECKEL AND
BERTRAND
RUSSELL)
Cara Soror,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Was the sudden cloudburst at the end of my last letter
somewhat of a
surprise, and more that somewhat of a shock? Cheer up! The
worst is
yet to come.
This is where clean thinking --- a subject whose fringes I
seem to remember
having touched --- wins the Gold Medal of the Royal Humane
Society.
It is surely the wise course to accept the plain facts; to
try to
explain them away, or to excuse them, is certain to involve
one in a
maelstrom of sophistry; and when, despite these laudable
efforts, the
facts jump up and land a short jab to the point, one is even
worse off
than before.
This has to be said, because Sammasati is assuredly one of
the most
useful, as well as one of the most trustworthy and most
manageable,
weapons in the armoury of the Aspirant.
You stop me, obviously with a demand for a personal
explanation. "How
is it," you write, "that you reject with such immitigable
scorn the
very foundation-stones of Buddhism, and yet refer disciples
enthusiasti-
cally to the technique of some of its subtlest super-
structures?"
I laff.
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MAGIC WITHOUT TEARS
188
It is the old, old story. When the Buddha was making
experiments and
recording the results, he was on safe ground: when he
started to
theorize, committing (incidentally) innumerable logical
crimes in the
process, he is no better a guesser than the Arahat next
door, or for
the matter of that, the Arahat's Lady Char.
So, if you don't mind, we will look a little into this
matter of Samma-
sati: what is it when it's at home?
It may be no more than a personal fancy, but I think Allan
Bennett's
translation of the term, "Recollection," is as near as one
can get in
English. One can strain the meaning slightly to include Re-
collection,
to imply the ranging of one's facts, and the fitting of them
into an
organized structure. The term "sati" suggests an
identification of
Being with Knowledge --- see The Soldier and the Hunchback !
-- ! and ?
(Equinox I, 1). So far as it applies to the Magical Memory,
it lays stress
on some such expedient, very much as is explained in Liber
Thisarb
(Magick, pp. 415 - 422).
But is it not a little strange that "The Abomination of
Desolation
should be set up in the Holy Place," as it were? Why should
the whole-
bearted search for Truth and Beauty disclose such hateful
and such
hideous elements as necessary components of the Absolute
Perfection?
Never mind the why, for a moment; first let us be sure that
it is so.
38
Have we any grounds for expecting this to be the case?
We certainly have.
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MAGIC WITHOUT TEARS
189
This is a case where "clean thinking" is most absolutely
helpful. The
truth is of exquisite texture; it blazons the escutcheon of
the Unity
of Nature in such delicate yet forceful colours that the
Postulant may
well come thereby to the Opening of the Trance of Wonder;
yet religious
theories and personal pernicketiness have erected against
its impact the
very stoutest of their hedgehogs of prejudice.
Who shall help us here? Not the sonorous Vedas, not the
Upanishads,
Not Apollonius, Plotinus, Ruysbroeck, Molinos; not any
gleaner in the
field of & priori; no, a mere devotee of natural history and
biology:
Ernst Haeckel.
Enormous, elephantine, his work's bulk is almost incredible;
for us
his one revolutionary discovery is pertinent to this matter
of Samma-
sati and the revelations of one's inmost subtle structure.
He discovered, and he demonstrated, that the history of any
animal
throughout the course of its evolution is repeated in the
stages of
the individual. To put it crudely, the growth of a child
from the
fertilized ovum to the adult repeats the adventures of its
species.
This doctrine is tremendously important, and I feel that I
do not know
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