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Correspondence from Aleister Crowley to John Jameson
5 Jan 39
Fili Mi.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
I have been having a ghastly three days with a liver chill. I did something stupid about the weather, and paid for it; it is much better when you pay cash for your stupidity, instead of letting it accumulate over a series of incarnations.
I hope you have been doing a little hard thinking this last week with a view to stopping that process. I cannot altogether understand the way you have been running around since you came back from America. I remember that you told me you were liable to fits of dissipation. It is a very curious thing that I used to be exactly the same, except that in my case, my slacking off was always the result of some rather profound spiritual upset; I got disgusted now and again with the futility of the whole business; that is to say, at the conclusion of a period of work, you suddenly come to the realisation that it has all been no good. In the moment of immediate reaction you fail to understand that this is part of the process of getting on; but there is also this difference in outlook and background, that my dissipations were always extremely instructive; I was learning to look at the world from new angles all the time. Of course, I cannot tell what is going on in your mind until you condescend to let me have a little information on the point, but on the surface, it does certainly appear that you are doing almost the only thing that anyone can do to crab the entire deal of life.
The herd, in the Nietschian sense, does not mean the mass of mankind; it means your own special species. You could learn a great deal by taking a job selling vacuum cleaners. You cannot learn anything from Hunt Balls because you have them in your blood. You have to be astonishingly clever and independent if you are to learn anything from your own set, whatever that set may be; you simply repeat yourself; you sink lower and lower into routine; life becomes more and more boring; you go to more and more bottle parties, and presently, there is nothing left for you.
Another point that you may or may not have missed, is that social pressure is extraordinarily strong and subtle. People are always extremely jealous of anyone in their set who starts anything on his own; people are always frightened of superiority. This is why research demands such tremendous moral courage; in fact, in my experience, it demands more courage than most men possess, unless they are really ill-tempered. You can afford to live with your set if you hate them with sufficient intensity; but even if you do that, it involves your remaining very narrow-minded and very ignorant of the world, and you are always being crushed by boredom.
You would have had a much better time in Switzerland if you had gone to live with peasants in a chalet. You would have done better to go to Sweden to ski through long days and lonely forests by yourself, taking your luck as to where you were going to sleep every night. I cannot see any sense in going to Switzerland if you carry with you your cosmopolitan hotels and clubs. Habit is the most deadly thing in the Great Work; you cannot both stand still and move ahead, and you must remember that initiation implies the discovery of new worlds within yourself, worlds of which, at first, you cannot understand any single detail. For this reason, every new experience is a preparation, and no new experience can be too strange or unpleasant unless it does some actual damage to your apparatus. For instance, I do not recommend anyone putting his eyes out in order to know what it is like to be blind. At the same time, I did learn quite a lot from my famous Guy Fawkes day, when the bandages were on my eyes for 40 days. It might not be such bad exercise to put on bandages for a week; you would certainly learn from it; it would be a help to your imagination; it would give you some idea of the helplessness that one finds in certain spiritual circumstances. But repetition of pleasant and familiar experiences teaches you nothing. You soon acquire reluctance to make any form of effort, and this is the most fatal bar to progress on the Path. It does not matter which practice we may consider; there is one rule in all of them—that each step to progress is won by a desperate effort. You may take all the training in the world, keep on improving your technique, until you are surprised at your own advance, but that does not bring the success in itself; that only comes by spasm. The agony of getting yourself to this stage is so severe that it becomes almost impossible to resist the impulse to do something else just for an hour; you have to keep on quite a long distance before you find out how fierce the anguish becomes, and it is just at this moment that the supreme effort, which you think, and rather hope, is going to kill you, turns the trick.
Good habits, though harder to acquire than bad habits, are just as powerful and compelling when they are established. So you may as well start to acquire them.
I was going to write a good deal more, chiefly on the subject of concentration, which, on the evidence of some of your acquaintances, you lack. But I don not think it is much good talking about concentration until you have first constructed yourself a set of rules for the conduct of the experiment.
Love is the law, love under will.
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