|
Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Sunday, 13 June 1920
Another very long dream but not so coherent as before. I was at St. Moritz, a sort of holiday from Sicily. Desda Smart, my mother, and several other old ladies were there.
7.45 p.m. Another perfect day, even to knowing my tobacco actually in Cefalu! I have been reading The Vicomte de Bragelonne.
It still annoys me—chiefly because Aramis makes such a supreme ass of himself, at the great
moment: it's out of character, altogether. Evident, too,
that Dumas meant to make Raoul the quintessence of the Big
Four and, having got his 'perfect man', couldn't make him
interesting or sympathetic or even heroic. What a comment on
all objections to the existence of Evil! He strains
constantly; yet he can't even bring him into the story once
in ten chapters. Obviously! How can a 'perfect man' be aught
but a phantom idea in this universe? Malory found the same
with Galahad, who pertains to the Graal, and isn't of men,
but moves among them like a Dream-person. So in religion the
piety which seeks to make its deity 100% in all examinations
merely destroys his reality. Why? Because the world is
always None or Two and never One. Of the Four, Aramis is the only one with any ulterior purpose in his life, any conception of judging things by eternal truth; accordingly, he appears as the traitor. True, he has personal ambitions which mar his character, and (I think) lead him to failure. I'm glad that (if I must boast for once) when a member of the British Government asked me what reward it could confer on me for my services—such as they were—in America, I reflected long, then shook my head. I wanted nothing. I really do want nothing. I go upon my Way; I am assured that I go upon my Way Eternally; and I know that all Ways are closed curves, that each must ultimately comprehend all. 'There is not a grain of dust that shall not attain to Buddhahood'; 'tis I that say it !—and there is no Buddha that shall not be blown upon the winds as dust. Nor is it worth while to weigh antitheses; the Juggler tosses feather and cannonball in his right hand and his left hand is empty, because it has crushed an universe.
What is weight? The (arbitrary) measure of attraction of two bodies. It is a variable symptom of mass. It is a secondary way of indicating the rate of motion with which two bodies would approach each other if free to do so. Why such motion? Gravitation is a form of 'love', a single sphere offering (mathematically) the theoretical minimum of stress in the aether, as V[ery] H[onoured] Frater Ieh Aour [Allan Bennett] shewed me long ago. When two things become one, the stress (distress!) between them is achieved. (Note how free liquids take the globular form, how their drops coalesce and make a single sphere until the surface tension is overcome by other forces.) The two things must therefore be considered as one thing under stress. The universe can never resolve itself into a single sphere, because any release of stress must be compensated elsewhere, on some plane or other. Ieh Aour used to talk of the heat of reactions as dissipated in Space. But there is no such thing as 'heat-in-itself'; 'tis but our sense-name for one symptom of the motion of matter.
Relative motion can be transfigured; it can appear under a thousand veils of force, sensible or insensible to us; but it cannot be annulled.
Then cannot M going East meet M going West, and make Rest? Motion destroyed? Matter destroyed with it, of course? Cannot there be, however rare the event, at least the theoretical possibility of annihilation of some two atoms?
Well, first, this idea involves time and space, which are mere modes of speech, imaginary rails on which thought runs. Secondly, the vacuum created would give rise to an impulse in all other bodies; as one would not make an arch 'restful' by withdrawing the keystone. Thirdly, the occurrence would be a 'fact', which is a positive thing, though on another plane. These objections do not apply to the annihilation of the whole, simultaneously. It is inconceivably unlikely that this should happen, and impossible in an infinite universe. Yet if any part can meet its exact complement, the universe is annihilated for it. Only such result is not valid, as shown above, for its disappearance creates 'Karma'; the act affects the rest of the universe, and makes history. The near-vacuum in a barometer is far from being 'nothing', philosophically. It alters stress on the glass, and it helps the work of human intelligence. The equation o ≡ 2n is therefore always true, both sides at once; for the total value of the universe is always 0°, while its expression is always 2n. Qabalistically, Ain is Truth, and Otz Chiim is Maya, and these two are one. (It's wrong to call Ain negative, obviously; negative postulates positive.) But cannot 'expression' cease? Must Tao contain the Teh-nature? It could be unexpressed if it were unconscious? (Berkeley even would say so. Matter must have consciousness—or spirit as O.E. [Oscar Eckenstein] my Holy Guru once said-as well as Matter in order to exist. The Soldier and the Hunchback!? proved the same thesis.)
Note how I have to think most of the time in terms of time and space. This writing is of reason; although it be illuminated reason. How can a thing cease if there be no time? Or exist in extension, if there be no space? It is then of the nature of the Eternal Nothing to imagine the Categories, and that Nature cannot be changed, because there's no external force to act on it, nor can be. But it can imagine all sorts of unreal things, the categories, matter, time and so on. It can even imagine absurd and impossible things, such as that force external to itself, for example; for it can imagine a part of itself as 'thinking', and thinking wrong. It can think of insane thinkers, who find ease in explaining an uncreated universe by an uncreated 'God' so denying equilibrium and postulating One who can play systems at roulette, and 'prove' that Bacon was the son of Queen Elizabeth and wrote Shakespeare to dispel any doubt on the subject, that he was a Rosicrucian, and still lives in a castle in Hungary, having written Dryden, Walt Whitman, and (why not? I offer my own contribution to Science) Doss Chiderdoss, Marie Corelli, the whole to conclude with Chaucer the Father, Keats the son, and Crowley the Holy Ghost of English poetry. Yes, ignorance, fatuity, idiocy, et omnis cohors, are as much expressions of the All, and as truly so, as all the virtues and sublimities. To discriminate, to make difference between any one and any other, is to blaspheme the Nothing-aspect of the Universe.
But then how can I be a meliorist? Thus: I see in my sphere of consciousness certain things which are, or rather seem, in excess of their opposites, and so prevent my sphere from being an exact model of being the Big Sphere. Either I expel the surplus, trading it for what seems deficient, by traffic with other spheres, or I enlarge my sphere in certain directions, or I use my surplus to feed my; deficit, thus transmuting its combinations into other more agreeable. E.g. I have an excess of 'Ignorance of Italian'. I swap this for another man's ignorance of English by 'exchanging conversations', or I go to Italy, and read Italian; or I use the ignorance itself as a sort of protection, against cash-demanding Italian officials, for instance.
I note that stopping a thing is more action than letting it go—Newton's First Law of Motion. The heart beats; pure will won't stop it, barring abnormal cases, like Colonel Townshend. It pumps blood to the brain, which is thereby forced to bid its man get food, or suffer; and so the heart procures its energy, and goes on. The brain must think too; and so the whole apparatus forms a vicious circle. But it is only when pain of some sort becomes unendurably acute or continuous that the brain resolves on an act which stops the machine. The way of the Tao in this case is then to minimize friction; to live temperately, without agitation or ambition, neither spendthrift nor miser of one's forces and resources. But suppose that the Will—0the Resultant of the summed forces of Life—has for its Word' Ambition'. Then should not one intrigue like Aramis, endure all toil and hardship, take all risk, violate all code, to satisfy that ambition? Yes: the nearest that one can come to non-Action is to act on 'Do what thou wilt'.
But is not this an ignoratio elenchi? Do not the sages mean that the machine itself is bad, that its Will is a mistake, that it ought to be stopped outright? No doubt: but they are asking an impossibility. A cubic millimetre of air in the blood produces much more result, a deeper-plunging and further-reacting series of changes, than a thousand cubic metres in the lungs. The Buddha 'passed away by that kind of passing away which leaves nothing whatever behind'. What bosh! He left the Dhamma and the Sangha; and his Karma goes marching on, much more than John Brown's soul! Two and a half chiliads, and he's obsessing Schopenhauer and creating a new era in Western philosophy. Did Alexander do so much and found so much, with all his victories? Who, even fresh from school, can give the date or outline the career of Alexander? He has left an epithet, 'the two-horned'; a phrase to echo his satiate sigh; and a jest at his own expense and profit of Diogenes. That, and a certain popularity of his name among fond fathers, nine-tenths of whom never heard of him. But Buddha, the non-Action expert; the Cook that fried his Seeds; the man who saw Everything without exception as Sorrow caused by Desire and so destroyed Desire; the Strikeleader against Existence, the saboteur that threw the monkey-wrench into the Wheel of Samsara; the sole founder and proprietor of Nibbana Exploration Company; the Patentee of the Process of Passing-Away Painlessly without By-Products in all countries of the world, including Sweden and Norway; the perpetrator of the pun 'I'd rather be Ceaser than Caesar'; what of him? He has a third of mankind for nominal followers, and they still quarrel as to what he said, and what he meant. He has pagodas, dagobas, trees, piles of stones, beyond estimation; he has more images in every conceivable material than there are people alive on the globe; he has literature so vast that no man has read a tithe of it, and so abstruse that no man has understood a thousandth part of it; he has had kings to build him monuments greater than those of all the dynasties of those of the Pharaohs, missionaries to convert Asia, and, overflowing into Europe, to plant his lotus even in the bloody mire of Christianity, poets to praise him in lyric or epic, sculptures interminable to degrade him to a doll, priests to make him their milch-cow, fanatics to perish or lose reason for his sake, monks to refuse life at mere memory of his bidding, women to make him their excuse for vanity, idleness, and default of duty-were these things not considered, Gautama, when you drew the schedule of the Chain of causes?
Say you that those who followed you diminished action, beggared Sorrow? That you are not to blame for the evil done in your name? For that last, no matter, though you were the exciting cause. But for the first, is not all change child of Desire? Is not the creation of new things, which are Sorrow, by your account? Is not this diminution of action, whereof you boast, more violent cause, more bitter effect, in a word, more derangement of Nature, than simply letting things alone? Ah (say you?) Nature's ill; derange her, that's the Noble Path; how else make stoppage of her mischief?
'Tis sound logic, maybe, though a suicide's, a melancholic madman's; if so, all I can answer is that I dispute your premises. Nature's not ill. Sorrow and Joy are relative terms; they balance; they disappear on examination. Then, 'tis not possible to stop her; witness-star-witness your own work.
Then what use in stopping her? Mere pain's surcease! That's your Oedipus-Complex, you who squat upon your mother-lotus, paunchy, inactive, ruminant! There's other types in the world!
As for your Means of stopping her? What fear you so that you refuse things pleasant-not less pleasant even if illusory-in the present? Why not face fate, take all things as they come with a stout heart and an indifferent or contemptuous smile? Is your sorrow so heavy that you cannot bear it, on philosophic archetype of Raoul de Bragelonne? Our mental tortures come, you say it truly, from Desire, Attachment, Tanha. But, if we slay Desire, cannot we canter through life, through countless lives, contented?
'Ah had you slain Desire, how could you claim a new life?' I shouldn't; but my Life's work would build it: actions the most careless often bear heaviest fruit. Your 'earnestness' is an all too legitimate child of Tennyson and Teutonism. More, what you ask is impossible not only in ontology, but in dynamic. Newton's First Law holds everywhere. If my Will, Vector of all that's I, demand some change, it is not in me to deflect or hinder it. All that's in me is used already to compose that Will. You assume that the true will of all men is to attain Nibbana. Suppose it were so? Still I pursue my path, steady and careless. Suppose Will's my Way; and it will take me there. Why all this hurry? Time's an illusion; my own personality is an illusion; you said it; then, most assuredly, to aspire to Nibbana by your Noble Path, surest and shortest, nay, perhaps only way, is to affirm again this time, this personality, which meditation with such pains threw into the dust-heap. Indeed, you robe yourself in clouts plucked from charred corpses! Who is it that is so anxious to unbind the 'bundle of sticks' as you call man? Is it his own sorrow that he shirks? How should his disappearance soothe the general sorrow? You own it cannot, deplore the Way of the Pratyek-Buddha, confess your own success has left even the poor old planet feeling poorly—while you talked of Cosmic Woe, and fathered infinite sewers of bad verse and trashy sermons, and maudlin essays, by the word. Oh! Silence had served better.
Clear thinker as you were in many ways, well as your vast and detailed system hangs together! I see the blood-clot that deranged your whole brain-structure. You did not see the universe as it is but as your 'unconscious' saw it. To you, expression meant fear, toil, sorrow; introversion offered safety, ease, rest. You felt yourself inferior to, incapable of mastering your environment. You tried to deny it reality. You wanted to take refuge from it. You craved the mother's womb of Nibbana, protection, unconsciousness, assurance against re-entry into a hostile Objectivity. Your fear sharpened your wits; you expanded the universe to infinity by observation and by imagination. It was not enough to die; there might be survival, even worse, some intensification of your helplessness and misery. You could not trust yourself: how could you trust the Universe? So you fled down ageless avenues of metaphysics seeking a refuge-and found it only in an impossibility.
Thus your Oedipus-Complex made a Bogey-Universe, exorcisable only by saying your prayers backwards with averted face. 'Sour grapes"! You cried 'Stinking fish! The fashion is for foxes to go brushless!' And your Work's aim? Since Bogey is all-bad, all-good can only be No-Bogey! Now, I'm a coward. Sorrow hurts me. I fear pain. But, like Leah, the dear fine girl, in her sufferings: 'I want to be good!' But she couldn't help screaming; nor can I sometimes. However, my will to be a man worth calling one helps me:
(1) to admit the reality of the Universe, and face it.
(2) to recognize its equilibrium of opposites, sorrow and joy, etc., in just balance.
(3) to master it by mastering myself.
(4) to acquiesce in it, in its infinite and eternal interplay of Spirit, Matter, and Motion, in myself as inherent part of it.
(5) to perceive that my true Will is the resultant of the totality of its forces, expressed through me, that my Will is moreover the final necessary component of that equilibrium without which it could not be the universe.
(6) to understand therefore, the perfection of that Word of Aiwaz in The Book of the Law; 'Thou hast no right but to do thy will.'
Observe that this general theory of mine as developed in various parts of this diary is the only one yet promulgated which:
(1) Accepts as proof of the Reality of Things the evidence of the senses, and even when it is rejected by the mind's judgement. For me a dream-mountain is as real as Chogo-Ri, though its reality differs both in degree and in kind.
(2) Explains the origin of 'evil'.
(3) Reconciles all antinomies—Being and Becoming and not Being—None, One, Many—Action and non-Action-Freewill and Destiny—and so on.
(4) Makes every individual—whether atomic or head of a hierarchy—supreme, independent, unique, eternal, necessary, and just, as each man who goes deep enough knows himself to be.
(5) Disposes of the difficulties about a 'beginning' by analysis of the nature of Zero.
(6) Identifies Reason with Law, making it necessary and absolute, yet abolishes the barriers of reason by disproving the Laws of Identity and Excluded Middle, by destroying the Square of Contradictories, and by exhibiting the Dualism (Antinomy) which concludes all metaphysical investigations. This is not only necessary to the equilibrium of things, but to the nature of any expression of Nothing, and moreover recognizable as a single category whose two contradictory terms can be apprehended as identical.
(7) Declares Necessity, chance and Will co-creative of phenomena, thus including all types of observed fact.
(8) Reconciles the Subjective and Objective Universe by recognizing both as real, the Universe which I know being no match of that known by another, any similarity of reports by two astronomers (let us say) merely proving the likeness of their senses, instruments and brains; while the Universe of smell, e.g. known by a dog and not by me, is equally real. (Note that I see only a small part even of the surface of my lamp; the rest of it exists for me by virtue of a series of mental assumptions, some based on memory of experience, some guesswork; while much of the structure is actually unknown to me in any way, e.g. what metal is it? How is it put together? A familiar, yet truly mysterious object!)
(9) Opens the way for the recognition of so-called occult forces, by allowing reality, and therefore potential power, to all things, sentient or no, imaginary or no, conscious or no. It conceives of anything as capable of conveying any force, save where the contrary is proven, as india rubber and electricity, and of nature as capable of concealing an infinite variety of modes of motion imperceptible to us. It conceives of modes of sense, of perception, and even of consciousness beyond our scope. It denies neither animism, nor pantheism. It knows no reason why every separate drop of water should not have a conscious soul, or why at the same time the sea should not have a soul, incorporate of all those souls, yet with something more original in its totality, just as a man is made of cells which live their own lives, yet is more than the sum of each.
(10) It rests its affirmation that the Universe may be partly defined in the words once written of God 'whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere'. Equally upon mathematical necessity and direct observation as recorded in the vision of the 'StarSponge'.
(11) It justifies, as firmly as it accepts, all phenomena soever, since they result from the action of a will or wills conditioned by necessity, and operating to the greater advantage of the predominant force. (Thus, the San Francisco earthquake eased the Earth's crust. The Earth, conscious or no, has the same 'right' to do this as we have to stretch our legs.) It declares each will to be of necessity free and eternal, independent of time, and bound by destiny only in so far as its impulse is its destiny. (Thus if my will is to go from Sicily to Africa, my destiny compels me to cross the Mediterranean, 'as I did foreknow, and foreknowing did predestinate'. This will is always 'right', because it exists, the complement of the Resultant of all other wills, and necessarily opposed to it.
(12) In fine, as Mr. Waite [Arthur Edward Waite] would say, it is a complete solution of all theoretical and practical difficulties in Life and Thought.
I end this at 3 a.m. of Monday.
|