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Aleister Crowley Diary Entry Tuesday, 21 June 1921
12.40 A.M. Having concluded the above sprightly essay, I apply myself with a good conscience to sleeping off the effects of my little flurry of snow [Cocaine]. Good night!
5.40 P.M. Have been feeling rather rotten all day. Leah [Leah Hirsig] has fever quite sharply. The idea may be to overwork the household and so to embarrass Soror ESTAI [Jane Wolfe] (Strange, by the way, that her chosen name ESTAI should add to the same as her astrally given name Matonith. It shows she is all right) Her record for the 1st week is p[retty] b[loody] good.
5.45 P.M. I meant to read up "Time" today, and write on it. But I have not felt well enough to do more than go over Poincare's essay again very carefully. I want to show that Time is necessarily created by us in order to make room for the apparent existence of the duality which we devise for the presentation of unity.
Two things must evidently exist either in 2 places, or at 2 times or both; else they would be indistinguishable.
Two phenomena which differ in time would be considered simultaneous if separated in space so that our observation of the former were somehow intractable. I can see no a priori reason for this distinction; I think it arises from the fact that space is directly presented to our senses, while time is proper to the mental apprehension of impressions.
Our universe is (after all) in one place, so far as we are concerned, i.e., in our sensoria, so that any 2 impressions can only be registered by us as consecutive. Even when we are aware of their simultaneity, we are compelled to place them in sequence. Our sensorium makes no distinction between concrete and abstract ideas in this respect. Sensory impressions and general ideas are equally grist for the mill. But we make a distinction between our record of events whose sequence is a necessary part of our comprehension of them, and those which are independent of our history. We insist on the sequence of school and college, but our general judgements are recognized as independent of time. This is peculiarly the case with our idea of the Ego, which we instinctively regard as if it were eternal and unchanging, though in fact it grows and decays continually. Yet we think if the incidents of boyhood as having occurred to the Ego, forming part of its character.
Now since the Ego is only conscious by virtue of having formulated itself, or the Universe (as it happens to view the case), in the form of Duality, and since all the experiences of the Ego are necessary to it, as all phenomena soever are necessary, it is permissible to regard the totality of the experiences of the Ego as the presentation in duality of a single simultaneous fact. In other words, life is an attempt to realize one's own nature in one's own soul.
The man who fails to recognize it as such is hopelessly bewildered by the irrational character of the universe, which he takes to be real; and he cannot but regard it as aimless and absurd. The adventure of his body and mind, with their desires for material and moral well-being, are obviously as foredoomed to disaster as Don Quixote's. He must be a fool if he struggles on (against inexorable fate) to obtain results which he knows can only end in catastrophe, a climax the more bitter as he clings the more closely to his impossible ideals.
But once he acquiesces in the necessity of the course of events, and considers his body and mind as no more than the instruments which interpret himself to himself by means of dualistic presentation, he should soon acquire a complete indifference to the nature of the incidents which occur to him.
It is not surprising that these incidents should occur in an apparently disorderly sequence, any more than that the colours of a picture, or the words of a story, should not be distributed according to an a priori classification, as in a Lexicon or a colourman's catalogue. His task as a connoisseur is to recognize the ideas of the artist, and this he can only do by appreciation of the complete work. He must analyze the assemblage of elements, and assign the correct value to each, comprehending the intention of each relative to the finished design.
It will be said that nobody can realize himself so long as the presentation is imperfect, that is, so long as he is incarnated. This is no doubt true in all rigour; but one can obtain an approximation to the intended self-knowledge by withdrawing for a time to the monistic form of self-consciousness, which does not distinguish between the Ego and the non-Ego; in other words by attaining Samadhi. But the first experience of Samadhi will then naturally be an ecstasy devoid of name or form, and containing no elements distinguishable as such; and we know this to be the case. One has simply deprived oneself of the means of expression; and all dual consciousness disappears, together with its forms, time and space. One concludes from this that the Universe is identical with the Ego, and all things dissolve into a formless essence characterized by knowledge and bliss. But this early stage of Samadhi is an illusion, a sort of drunken dizziness. (So in sexual love, the ecstasy abolishes the Ego, apparently; it forgets that duality was its cause, and must be equally real with itself, in one sense or another). But subsequent Samadhi teaches the adept that his universal instantaneous Unity exists as "None and Two"; and he learns that his Samadhi is peculiar to himself as well as common to all.
He becomes able to experience the truth of the statements in the Book of the Law, the nature of Nuith and Hadith, and of himself as a Star, unique, individual, and eternal, but yet a part of the Body of Nuith, and therefore identical with all other stars in that respect.
He realizes himself as the "bed in working" of Nuith and Hadit, as a particular form assumed by the latter for the sake of variety in his "play" with the former; and he partakes in this play by his self-realization, which he synthesizes from the "events of his life".
He understands that these events are the resultant of the Universe as applied to him, so that his experience is equally unique and universal, each star being the centre of the Cosmos, and the Cosmos applicable as a whole to each star.
The experiences of each angle of a triangle are common to all, for one can express any relation as a function of any angle, at will. Each may be taken as the starting-point of the study of the properties of the triangle. But each angle is necessary to the triangle, and each is equally important to its existence. Each is bound to the others, and moreover each is in a sense illusory in respect of the triangle, which is an idea, simple and ideal, whose unity is compelled to express itself and manifest its properties by extension as a plane figure. For no triangle can express the idea of a triangle. Any triangle must be either equilateral, isosceles or scalene, either acute, right-angled, or obtuse; and no one triangle can be all these at once; while the idea of a triangle includes all these, and infinite other, possibilities.
In a similar way, Nuith and Hadit include all possible forms of existence; they can only realize Themselves by creating an infinite variety of forms of Themselves, each one real as it is Their image, illusory as it is a partial and divided aspect of Them.
Each such Star is intelligible to Them, as a poem is to its author, as a part of his soul mirrored by his mind. But it is not intelligible to itself, because it has no relation with any other ideas; it only knows itself as the babe of its mother Nuith, to whom it yearns, being stirred by its father Hadit to express that instinctive attachment by inarticulate cries.
To know itself, each such Star, or Soul, must eat of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, by accepting labour and pain as its portion, and death as its doom. That is, it must reveal its nature to itself by formulating that nature as duality. It must express itself by a series of symbolic gestures ostensibly external to it, just as a painter reveals one facet of his Delight-Diamond by covering a canvas with colours in such a way that the picture seems at first sight to represent something outside himself. It must, in fact, repeat for itself the original Magick of Nuith and Hadit which created it.
As They made Themselves visible piecemeal by fashioning particular Souls, expressing the Impersonal and Absolute Homogeneity by means of Personal Relative Heterogeneity, so, not forgetting their true nature as forms of the Infinite, whereby they are one with all, must the Stars devise methods of studying themselves.
They must make images of themselves, apparently external, and they must represent their highly complex qualities in a duality involving space and time. For each Star is of necessity related to every other Star, so that no influence is alien to its individuality; it must therefore observe its reaction to every other star.
Just so are most chemical elements possessed of but few qualities directly appreciable by our senses; we must learn their natures by putting them into relation with the other Elements in turn. (Note well that this knowledge were impossible unless there were a variety of elements; so also the fact of our self-consciousness proves the existence of individual souls; all related, all parts of the One Soul, in one sense, but none the less independent in themselves, eternal entities expressing particular elements of existence).
Each star is in itself immune and innocent; its proper consciousness is monastic; it must therefore employ a body and mind as its instruments for interpreting its relations with other souls, and comparing its nature with theirs. For the mind perceives the contrast of the Self and the Not-Self, and presents its experiences, classified and judged, to the soul as documents for the dossier; and the body reports to the mind the impressions received from its contact with alien forms as the senses receive them.
It must naturally require many incarnations for the soul to begin to know itself with any degree of perfection; and one may recognize advanced souls by their minds, which understand the nature of their work, are indifferent to the body's preference for any special forms of experience, and seek eagerly after novel adventures (like a philatelist after rare stamps) to complete the collection. They are also as a rule both very careful and very careless about their bodily welfare, taking pains to preserve their powers for the purpose of gaining new experiences, but utterly indifferent to them as valuable in themselves. They rule them with a rod of iron, and train them like pugilists; but they risk them recklessly whenever the Work demands it.
[The following lines are scrawled through with a pen.]
I am myself a physical coward, but I have exposed myself to every form of disease, accident, and violence; I am dainty and delicate, but I have driven myself to delight in dirty and disgusting debauches, and to devour human excrements and human flesh. I am at this moment defying the power of drugs to disturb my destiny and divert my body from its duty.
I am also a mental and moral weakling, whose boyhood training was so horrible that its result was that my will wholly summed up in hatred of al restraint, whose early manhood, untrained left my mind and animal soul like an elephant in rut broken out of the stockade. Yet I have mastered every mode of my mind, and made myself a morality more severe than any other in the world if only by virtue of its absolute freedom from any code of conduct.
I am absorbed all day and all night in metaphysical essays, at a time when I have not one friend to rely on, and have hardly the money for the next meal, and little hope of any arriving, though my career must be wrecked yet again if my experiment of founding an Abbey of Thelema should fail, as my poetry failed, as my marriage failed, as my prose failed, the Equinox failed, as the Rites of Eleusis failed, as my voyage to America failed, as my painting will probably fail! But I gladly accept all these things; they have shown me who and what manner of man I am. I am The Beast 666, a Magus of A∴A∴ and my work is to live out my Law by doing my Will, and to work without lust of result, writing or limning myself in music and colour and form as my genius moves me, without caring whether any one reads what I write or sees what I fashion.
For I have had more Light than any other of the sons of men now living; I have had more life than most men ever live; I have had more Love than almost all; and I have had more Liberty than all; having allowed no bond soever to bind me. And all these things I have won for myself by mine own fire and force for I was born in the black murk of the lowest cells of Christianity, organically unsound, too shy and shamed to woo, and loaded with the chains of caste and creed.
This has indeed been a digression from my original design to dissect the body of Time, and describe the nature of the animal; but my excuse must be that Time has proved to be bodiless. The sound of one's voice and the manouevers of one's hands have no possible claims to convey the thought of the speaker or writer to the hearer or reader, for they are not of the nature of thought. They only achieve this task by virtue of a series of conventions which have required ages to develop, which differ entirely in different countries and periods, and even so perform their work so crudely and uncertainly that no man can be sure of being understood by his brother. When 2 mathematicians have spent their whole lives in reading the same books and discussing the same problems and using the same highly specialized set of symbols to ensure precision of meaning, we find that one writes to the other to say that he doubts whether he has rightly interpreted his colleague's thought written in a simple sentence on a subject they have studied together for the better part of their lives.
All precise thinkers adopt a technical language invented for the purpose; and only too often it fails them, so that friends fall out over matters about which they actually agree if they could only agree to use the same language.
The history of Law, Theology, Philosophy is little more than a record of failures to find clearly defined expressions for thoughts which were for the most part common to all parties concerned.
Exactly in the same way, Time has no relation to Being, but is merely one of the accepted conventions by means whereof two Beings may be able to apprehend each other's Nature; for they cannot do so directly, any more than the thought of a stranger can be read till he tells it. The differences of the 2 natures being many, they must be marked in the mind in sequence. But Time itself is no more than this form of thought, just as the rules of a game are only the factitious limits which we devise to permit the comparison of mind with mind.
We have no means of measuring our subjective notion of Time, "psychological Time" as it is called, even within ourselves. But we know that certain mental states alter our estimate of Time, and of its value, to an amazing extent, and that others actually abolish it; we know that certain drugs distend or destroy this sense in ourselves, and also that other animals perceive the lapse of Time within a totally different gamut of rates to our own. (Thus a fly thinks an object moving one yard a minute to be still, and can distinguish the vanes of an electric fan which appear to us a blurred flicker).
We are happier when we seek to measure "objective" Time. All systems are necessarily based upon improved and improvable postulates. We cannot even find a real meaning for the ideas of simultaneity, priority, and equality of duration. We make cause determine antecedence, and antecedence determine cause, as Poincaré points out in his essay; he concludes by this climax of sceptical and even cynical candour, that we have no means of measuring or even defining Time, that all our laws are conventions, and that these must be chosen without reference to their Truth, which is undiscoverable, but only for their practical convenience. One dare not say, he exclaims, that one clock keeps good time, and another bad; but only that it is more convenient to consult the one than the other.
He shows further how 2 separate incidents of time may be proved to be simultaneous, even in so simple a system as to involve no more than 3 foci of action.
We observe, further, especially in abnormal mental states, that when our attention is withdrawn from the actual material phenomena about us, our sense of time is disturbed. Concentrated thought, even though we use our senses to read or write, play chess or make love, "makes time fly", as we say. More deeply is our motion affected when thought is fixated wholly on matters whose interest is independent of event; most of all in deep meditation and the trances thereby induced, when Time ceases to concern us at all. The degree of disturbance varies with that of the disappearance of our consciousness of duality, as we should expect from the explanation given above. When duality vanishes, how can time exist? A single state of mind cannot be aware of a previous state, or conceive even itself as in sequence to itself. We are not unaware that though a man may "live through many lives" in a few minutes, let us say if he has taken hashish, on his return to normality he accepts the evidence of the clock. But this, considered closely, is in fact one more witness to the true character of Time, as a form chosen for the convenience of his bodily instrument. One can attend to one's breathing or one's pulse, and one knows that all life long they have maintained a more or less even measure as judged by "terrestrial time". But his mind has long since taken them for granted, unless their irregularity warns him that his instrument is out of order, and does not record in his memory their doings, though his life depends on them.
In youth the body is as it were a new toy, and we play with it, and probably damage it, as we get to know it, we get tired of it. First its physical functions cease to amuse us; we no longer gambol as we did in childhood. Only the development of a new function revives our interest for a time. We soon neglect animal pleasure for passion; and as we mature perception gives us more pleasure than emotion. Later still, we coordinate our perceptions, and analyse them into the tendencies which go to form what we call character; and last of all, if we pursue the proper path, we pass behind our consciousness of our character into a state of indifferent contemplation of that character as being but a defective because partial instrument for the examination of the Universe and of ourselves. This is the natural course, and it coincides with the Buddhist psychology. As we grow, we should strip successively name and form from things, then sensation, then perception, and finally tendency, the sequence of veils which adorn the dancers in the ballet of Destiny.
The majority of people who seek Truth are so distressed and bedevilled by their perception of the apparent imbecility of the Universe that they scream for its destruction. They clutch at the straw that is "only illusion", loathing and fearing the fact of what they call Evil, and hysterically angry when reminded that the existence of this Evil Illusion is inexplicable, unless equally part of the Nature of the Good Reality which is "without quantity or quality" and absolute, and Parabrahman, and Nibbana and so on. A nightmare argues indigestion. A Delerium Tremens demon is real to the drunkard. How came the Absolute to derogate? Either Evil exists of itself, or it is an essential part of Good. The world has worn itself out in the fumbling at the veil of the inscrutable Image of Isis.
Men remind me of the strayed reveller who felt his way round and round the iron fence that protected a young tree in the Green Park, and appealed to a passing constable to let him out. The argument revolves eternally; Evil is Satan, or Maya, or Ahriman. or Mara, according to taste; but it is always unmasked in the end, and it is always the enemy of God and Truth, or their shadow; one theory blasphemes their authority, and the other their character.
We must not fall into this trap. We must accept "Illusion" as equally real with "Truth", and necessary to the self-realization of Truth. We must not even regard the 2 phases of existence with partial eyes. or flee frantically to one as the refugee from the other. It is necessary to the Absolute to interpret itself by means of the Relative, and all parts of the process are equally proper. It is even necessary to experience pain and ignorance if the totality of possibilities is to be expressed. My only object in writing this essay is to express one function of my particular Star, that of helping other Stars to realize their own natures, and to interpret the meaning of their lives to themselves. It is obvious that it is entirely without importance to me—or to the Universe whether or no my work produces any results, in the ordinary sense of the word. And I do not deny the right of any other Star who may oppose my work. I express myself also by fighting him; all that exists is sacramental and hieroglyphic.
It is part of the Nature of my Star to realize itself as an Elemental Form of the Absolute; and success in this work has revealed to me yet more of my secret nature, that I am the master of myself, joyful and confident in my comprehension of the cosmic consciousness, and the cause of its appearance in finite form.
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