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"right," you may
well ask by what standard you may judge events.
2. Their Work is creative; They operate on the dull mass of
unrealized
possibilities. Thus they meet, firstly, the opposition of
Inertia;
secondly, the recoil, the reaction, the rebound.
3. Things theoretically feasible are practically impossible
when (a)
desirable though their accomplishment may be, it is not the
one feat
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MAGIC WITHOUT TEARS
114
essential to the particular Work in hand and the moment; (b)
the sum
total of available energy being used up by that special
task, there is
none available for side-issues; (c) the opposition, passive
or active,
is too strong, temporarily, to overcome.
More largely, one cannot judge how a plan is progressing
when one has
no precise idea what it is. A soldier is told to "attack;"
he may be
intended to win through, to cover a general retreat, or to
gain time by
deliberate sacrifice. Only the Commander in Chief knows
what the order
means, or why he issues it; and even he does not know the
issue, or
whether it will display and justify his military skill and
judgment.
Our business is solely to obey orders: our responsibility
ends when we
have satisfied ourselves that they emanate from a source
which has the
right to command.
P.P.S. A visitor's story has just reminded me of the
possibility that
I am a Secret Chief myself without knowing it: for I have
sometimes
been recognized by other people as having acted as such,
though I was
not aware of the fact at the time.
CHAPTER X
THE SCOLEX SCHOOL
64
Cara Soror,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
You actually want to know how to distinguish gold from
copper pyrites40 ---
"fool's gold" they called it in '49 California --- no! I
wasn't there ---
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MAGIC WITHOUT TEARS
115
or "absolute" alcohol and --- Liqueur Whisky from "alki"
(commercial alcohol
---
see Jack London's The Princess, a magnificent story ---
don't miss it!)
and Wartime Scotch as sold in most British pubs in 1944, era
vulgari.
One pretty good plan is to take a masterpiece, pick out a
page at random,
translate it into French or German or whatever language you
like best,
walk around your chair three times (so as to forget the
English) and then
translate it back again.
You will gather a useful impression of the value of the
masterpiece by
noticing the kind of difficulty that arises in the work of
translation;
more, by observing the effect produced on you by reading
over the result;
and finally, by estimating the re-translation; has the
effect of the
original been enhanced by the work done on it? Has it
become more lucid?
Has it actually given you the information which it purported
to do?
(I am giving you credit for very unusual ability; this test
is not easy
to make; and, obviously, you may have spoilt the whole
composition,
especially where its value depends on its form rather than
on its sub-
stance. But we are not considering poetry, or poetic prose;
all we
want is intelligible meaning.)
It does not follow that a passage is nonsensical because you
fail to
understand it; it may simply be too hard for you. When
Bertrand Russell
writes "We say that a function R is 'ultimately Q-convergent
à' if
there is a member y of the converse domain of R and the
field of Q such
that the value of the function for the argument y and for
any argument
to which y has the relation Q is a member of à." Do we?
But you do not doubt that if you were to learn the meaning
of all these
unfamiliar terms, you would be able to follow his thought.
Now take a paragraph from an "occult teacher."
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MAGIC WITHOUT TEARS
116
What's more, I'll give you wheat, not tares; it seems
terrifyingly easy
for sound instruction to degenerate in to a "pi-jaw." Here
goes!
"To don Nirmanakaya's humble robe is to forego eternal
bliss for
self, to help on man's salvation. To reach Nirvana's
bliss but to
renounce it, is the supreme, the final step --- the
highest on Renun-
ciation's Path."
Follows a common-sense comment by Frater O.M.
"All this about Gautama Buddha having renounced Nirvana
is apparently
all a pure invention of Mme. Blavatsky, and has no
authority in the
Buddhist canon. The Buddha is referred to, again and
again, as having
'passed away by that kind of passing away which leaves
nothing what-
40^ WEH NOTE: If Homer can nod, so can Crowley. The
mineral called fool's
gold is actually iron pyrites, not copper. It has a brassy
look, and that
might account for this error.
65
ever behind.' The account of his doing this is given
in the
Mahaparinibbana Sutta; and it was the contention of the
Toshophists
that this 'great, sublime Nibbana story' was something
peculiar to
Gautama Buddha. They began to talk about Parinibbana,
super-Nibbana,
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