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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to Mrs. Graham (Aelfrida Tillyard)
[Undated: circa June 1913]
My dear Sister,
I quite appreciate the points in your letter of June 1 and quite agree with the Vision of Dhyana and I also thoroughly understand how a vision of this sort blinds the judgment and causes inaccurate description. But that is just why I say that this is only just above the physical. I think you have told me that you had The Psychology of Hashish in No. II of the Equinox. You will see visions classified in that essay and yours come under Vedana. For it is certainly based on emotion which is lower than perception. I do not mean lower in any ultimate sense, for the perfect adept has all his sense equally developed, well balanced and completely harmonised. I should say 'earlier' rather than 'lower'. In the course of evolution emotion is developed before perception. It is because you have the emotional side so well developed that I am anxious for you to cultivate an icily critical attitude. If I were writing to a scientific man, I should probably be telling him not to neglect devotionalism. Of course it is all right so long as you distinguish the essential from the accidental. But in your case it does seem as if your mind, like the minds of master artists, took on shapes too readily.
With regard to the seal of the confessional, I have always set myself against secrecy. You should never mind anyone knowing every detail of your life. Almost the whole trouble today arises from the cause. 99 people in England out of every 100 live the lives and think the thoughts of atheists. These are the people who call me religious, and the cause of this is that they are secretly ashamed of their own thoughts, because of what they falsely suppose is public opinion, and this to such a point that 98 out of the 99 do not even know that they are atheists. It is curious that my father, Plymouth Brother, found exactly the same trouble. He was a Christian but a great stickler for the reality of things, and the great obstacle that he found was that everyone was quite ready to agree with him and yet it meant absolutely nothing.
Yours fraternally.
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