What do I want out of this post? Criticsim or affirmation. You choose. My bet's on getting more of the former than the latter, especially from the cookie-cutter Theravadins here (I am a Theravadin Buddhist--just not that kind). Maybe they'll surprise me, but I doubt it.
From: MAGICK WITHOUT TEARS, Chapter XXVII: Structure of Mind Based on that of Body (Haeckel and Bertrand Russell)Was the sudden cloudburst at the end of my last letter somewhat of a surprise, and more that somewhat of a shock? Cheer up! The worst is yet to come.
This is where clean thinking—a subject whose fringes I seem to remember having touched—wins the Gold Medal of the Royal Humane Society.
It is surely the wise course to accept the plain facts; to try to explain them away, or to excuse them, is certain to involve one in a maelstrom of sophistry; and when, despite these laudable efforts, the facts jump up and land a short jab to the point, one is even worse off than before.
This has to be said, because Sammasati is assuredly one of the most useful, as well as one of the most trustworthy and most manageable, weapons in the armoury of the Aspirant.
You stop me, obviously with a demand for a personal explanation. "How is it," you write, "that you reject with such immitigable scorn the very foundation-stones of Buddhism, and yet refer disciples enthusiastically to the technique of some of its subtlest super-structures?"
I laff.
It is the old, old story. When the Buddha was making experiments and recording the results, he was on safe ground: when he started to theorize, committing (incidentally) innumerable logical crimes in the process, he is no better a guesser than the Arahat next door, or for the matter of that, the Arahat's Lady Char.
So, if you don't mind, we will look a little into this matter of Sammasati: what is it when it's at home?
It may be no more than a personal fancy, but I think Allan Bennett's translation of the term, "Recollection," is as near as one can get in English. One can strain the meaning slightly to include Re-collection, to imply the ranging of one's facts, and the fitting of them into an organized structure. The term "sati" suggests an identification of Being with Knowledge—see The Soldier and the Hunchback: ! and ? (Equinox I, 1). So far as it applies to the Magical Memory, it lays stress on some such expedient, very much as is explained in Liber Thisarb (Magick, pp. 415 - 422).
But is it not a little strange that "The Abomination of Desolation should be set up in the Holy Place," as it were? Why should the whole-bearted search for Truth and Beauty disclose such hateful and such hideous elements as necessary components of the Absolute Perfection?
Never mind the why, for a moment; first let us be sure that it is so. Have we any grounds for expecting this to be the case?
We certainly have.
This is a case where "clean thinking" is most absolutely helpful. The truth is of exquisite texture; it blazons the escutcheon of the Unity of Nature in such delicate yet forceful colours that the Postulant may well come thereby to the Opening of the Trance of Wonder; yet religious theories and personal pernicketiness have erected against its impact the very stoutest of their hedgehogs of prejudice.
Who shall help us here? Not the sonorous Vedas, not the Upanishads, Not Apollonius, Plotinus, Ruysbroeck, Molinos; not any gleaner in the field of à priori; no, a mere devotee of natural history and biology: Ernst Haeckel.
Enormous, elephantine, his work's bulk is almost incredible; for us his one revolutionary discovery is pertinent to this matter of Sammasati and the revelations of one's inmost subtle structure.
He discovered, and he demonstrated, that the history of any animal throughout the course of its evolution is repeated in the stages of the individual. To put it crudely, the growth of a child from the fertilized ovum to the adult repeats the adventures of its species.
This doctrine is tremendously important, and I feel that I do not know how to emphasize it as it deserves. I want to be exceptionally accurate; yet the use of his meticulous scientific terms, with an armoury of quotations, would almost certainly result in your missing the point, "unable to see the wood for the trees."
Let me put it that the body is formed by the super-position of layers, each representing a stage in the history of the evolution of the species. The foetus displays essential characteristics of insect, reptile, mammal (or whatever they are) in the order in which these classes of animal appeared in the world's history.
Now I want to put forward a thesis—and as far as I know it is personal to myself, based on my work at Cefal—to the effect that the mind is constructed on precisely the same lines.
You will remember from my note on "Breaks" in meditation how one's gradual improvement in the practice results in the barring-out of certain classes of idea, by classes. The ready-to-hand, recent fugitive thoughts come first and first they go. Then the events of the previous day or so, and the preoccupations of the mind for that period. Next, one comes to the layer of reveries and other forms of wish-phanstasm; then cryptomnesia gets busy with incidents of childhood and the like; finally, there intrudes the class of "atmospherics," where one cannot trace the source of the interruption.
All these are matters of the conscious rational mind; and when I explored and classified these facts, in the very first months of my serious practice of Yoga, I had no suspicion that they were no more than the foam on a glass of champagne: nay, rather of
"black wine in jars of jade
Cooled all these months in hoarded snow,
Black wine with purple starlight in its bosom,
Oily and sweet as the soul of a brown maid
Brought from the forenoon's archipelago,
Her brows bound bright with many a scarlet blossom
Like the blood of the slain that flowered free
When we met the black men knee to knee."
How apt the verses are! How close are wine and snow to lust and slaughter!
I have been digressing, for all that; let us return to our goats!
The structure of the mind reveals its history as does the structure of the body.
(Capitals, please, or bang on something; that has got to sink in.)
Just as your body was at one stage the body of an ape, a fish, a frog (and all the rest of it) so did that animal at that stage possess a mind correlative.
Now then! In the course of that kind of initiation conferred by Sammasati, the layers are stripped off very much as happens in elementary meditation (Dharana) to the conscious mind.
(There is a way of acquiring a great deal of strange and unsuspected knowledge of these matters by the use of Sulphuric Ether, (C2H5)2O, according to a special technique. I wrote a paper on it once, 16 pp. 4{to}, and fearing that it might be lost had many copies made and distributed. Where is it? I must write you a letter one day.)
Accordingly, one finds oneself experiencing the thoughts, the feelings, the desires of a gorilla, a crocodile, a rat, a devil-fish, or what have you! One is no longer capable of human thoughts in the ordinary sense of the word; such would be wholly unintelligible.
I leave the rest to your imagination; doesn't it sound to you a little like some of the accounts of "The Dweller on the Threshold?"
From: Little Essays Toward TruthMEMORY.
Memory is of the very stuff of Consciousness itself. Consider that we can never know what is happening, but only what has just happened, even when most actively concentrated on what we call "the present."
Moreover, no impression short of Sammasamadhi can ever pretend to confer any coherent idea of the Self. That exists only in an order of Consciousness far deeper than direct perception, in a type of thought which is capable of combining the quintessence of countless impressions into one, as also of transforming this tabula rasa into a positive prehensile Ego. Whether this process be hallucinatory or no, it is surely memory which, more than any other function of the mind, determines its possibilities.
Now, whatever view we may take of the nature of the Self, it is clear that our limit of error will constantly diminish as the range of our observations is extended. To calculate the orbit of Neptune from a period of days when it is retrograde could lead to formidable fallacies. When memory is seriously weakened, the resulting state approximates to dementia. Memory is then, in a figure, the mortar of the architecture of the mind.
It seems impossible even to begin to discuss its nature as it is in itself; for it is not a Thing at all, but only a relation between impressions. We must be content to observe its virtues.
First of all is that already noted, its extent in time. Second is the faculty of selection.
It would be as undesirable as it is impossible for the memory to retain all impressions indiscriminately. Such memories are found only in lunatic asylums. The memory, whatever it may be, depends on cerebral metabolism; and it thrives on a proper harmony of exercise, repose, and economy just as does muscular strength.
Memory as such is practically worthless; it is like an abandoned library. Its data must be coordinated by judgment, and played upon by skill; it resembles a great Organ which requires an organist.
By classifying simple impressions, one obtains ideas of a higher order; the repetition of this process gives a structure to the mind which makes it a worthy instrument of thought. And this means enables one to retain, and to bring at will from their quiet resting-place, a thousandfold the number of facts which would overwhelm the untrained memory. One must model one's mind upon the arrangement of the ends of the nerve-fibres and the brain.
At will! Here is the great key to proper selection, that one should resolutely remember all facts that may be useful, and as resolutely forget all those impertinent, to the True Way of one's Star in Space. For so only can one economise the mnemonic faculty; and this is to say: no man can begin to train his memory duly until he is aware of his True Will.
There is then—as in all matters pertaining to the intellect—a vicious circle; for one can only become conscious of one's true Will by a judgment (of Samadhic intensity) upon all facts that it is possible to assimilate. The resolution of the antinomy is found ambulando: that is by the selective training above indicated.
A further complication of this whole question appears during the practice of Yoga, when, the sheaths being successively stripped from the mind, one begins to remember not only long-forgotten facts, but matters which do not refer to the incarnated Ego at all. The memory extends in time to infancy, to one's previous death, and so further to an unlimited series of experiences whose scope depends on the degree of one' progress. But, parallel with this intensification of the idea of the Ego, its expansion through the aeons, there arises (in consequence of the weakening of the Ahamkara, the Ego-making faculty) a tendency to remember thing which have happened not to "oneself," but to "other people" or beings.
Herein is one of the most irritating obstacles in the Path of the Wise; for the normal development of the memory in Time leads to a better understanding of the True Will of the individual (as he conceives of himself) so that he perceives an universe teleologically more rational as he progresses. To be compelled to assimilate the experiences of supposes "alien beings" is to become confused: the old hotchpot of Choronzon (Restriction be unto him in the name of BABALON!) gapes once more for the Adept, who possibly supposed himself already (in a sense) a Freeman of the City of the Pyramids.
But it is just this experience—in default of any other—which eventually insists on his undertaking to cross the Abyss: for the alternative to sheer insanity is seen to be the discovery of a General Formula comprehensive of Universal Experience without reference to the Ego (real or supposed) in any sense.
This paradox, like all others, should be a lesson of supreme value: this, that every difficulty is for our vantage, that every question is posed only in order to lead us to an answer involving a triumph infinitely more glorious than we could otherwise have conceived.
And meditation upon this whole matter may not unlikely bring us to this further vision of wonder: that the nature of things themselves is in reality but a function of Memory.