Frank Bennett Diary Entry

Wednesday, 9 November 1921

As I have not written anything in my record for some time, and I have had several experiences that have given me much light on some very dark questions that have troubled me since I came to stay in the Abbey [Abbey of Thelema].

Yesterday I was reading a book by Frank Harris, Contemporary Portraits, and he describes many people who have made a great name for themselves in writing. All his poets and writers have had some sort of sex complex, and it was this sex complex that has troubled me. During my reading I fell to thinking about this, and I went over the symptoms that had enabled them to express themselves in a first attempt that surpassed most of our best authors, and I found it was through the love of some woman, This love grew to such ecstasy that they had to express themselves in words; but it was the inner soul that spoke.

Then I asked myself how this physical love could bring about such ecstasy, and I found that physical love caused such emotions that cause the whole body to vibrate with intense passion, which caused men to dare anything, to get the recurrence of such emotions. Then I went back to my boyhood, when I must have been about 15 or 16, and the experience of my first kiss. That I shall never forget; it thrilled me in every fibre and cell of my body, so much so that I trembled with joy.

I then remembered that the joy lasted for days, so I tried in imagination to bring about that experience again, and after a time I began to tremble with the same joy. This encouraged me to go on. I still kept on until at last the trembling stopped, and I lost consciousness of the physical body and surroundings, and I was in a state of super-consciousness, in which state I began to speak in terms of love to myself. Of course this was all done in the mind, but I could go on and on in the most beautiful terms and phrases without any effort or stop; then I became conscious of my state, and tried to form some prose work. So I at once started to dictate an essay on the sex question, which I wish I had now; it was astounding. Then I tried an essay on mysticism, with the same ease, and it was a revelation to me. It is a pity that someone was not there to take it down. I am sure it was better and different to anything I have ever seen, and it is through this that I can not say with confidence that A.C. is not right; he has not got the right thing.

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