Dialogue Between Adept and Novice DL3

Dialogue Between Adept and Novice

(Part III)

PUPIL:
You can see everything in the future, so why do you need me as a Tarot-reader?

MASTER:
I have to guard against seeing everything. I don’t need that kind of input. And
it would be a waste of your considerable talents in the matter of Tarot if they
were not utilised. A genuine psychic cannot be selective about what he
receives. If he is turned on, then he is turned on. As well as receiving what
he is looking for, he will also be receiving absolutely everything else. That
is why I spend all my time turned off, because I do not want to know. One
cannot tune it to one station.

PUPIL: I know it is dangerous to
be clairvoyant without the ability to control that power. Are there any
pitfalls in trying to see the future at all?

MASTER:
Normally you need an aid to clairvoyance and the Tarot works well for you. That
is no problem. But in everyday life you use intuition more than logic. At this
stage, you don’t know whether your subconscious is lying to you, so it makes
sense to use logic.

PUPIL: Crowley said that, as one
progressed and developed further abilities, one lost some of one’s earlier
skills. He mentioned clairvoyance and healing.

MASTER:
No, that is not true. One retains all one’s abilities. But, with advancement,
comes the knowledge when those abilities should not be used, as in the case of
healing which I referred to earlier.

PUPIL:
Is it necessary to have an acolyte or “Scarlet Woman” or is that just another
of the myths?

MASTER: If you have to have
anything, you are not an Adept. If Crowley needed an assistant or a Scarlet
Woman, he was not an Adept. The only way to be an Adept is to be all things but
to choose to be nothing.

If he was serious, assuming that
he was a responsible person, he could not visit upon anyone else the things
that he had to live with. If he needed someone, he was not secure enough to
risk becoming an Adept. One cannot share that burden. Judging by his writings,
just getting close was more than he could handle. If he wanted to explore that
pathway, he should have made more of what you don’t need. What Crowley found
out was not wrong, but he couldn’t handle it. Like the wrong way to find
electricity is to put you hand on the wire.

A new house is wired up, as we
all are, awaiting connection to the mains. There will always be people who
stumble around and stick their fingers into the socket.

No-one could do what Crowley did
without developing a willpower that was above the average. But it doesn’t alter
the fact that his willpower ran out when it came to facing a life without his
drugs.

I am not saying that you should
not use drugs. I am saying that it is not worth the risk. You cannot control
the way the drug does the job. It may get you there, but not the right way and
you cannot see what is on the route. The drug does not care how ready you are
for the various stages involved. It is like a car whose brakes have failed; the
only way to stop it is to run it into a wall.

If you use drugs you have not
mastered your subconscious.

You
will behave as the puppet you have always been. If you stop doing that, your
subconscious gets agitated, if has been used to control and it won’t give up
easily. Its manifestations vary from person to person; ideas, excuses, a double
dose of so-called rationalisation which has nothing rational about it at all.
It is totally despotic. Like so many things in the everyday physical world, it
hides behind what it is not.

PUPIL: Have you ever used drugs?

MASTER:
When I was still experimenting, I used to east unsafe pate. It is difficult to
judge how much to eat. It stops you thinking logically, you rationalise less.
Most Occultists have a lot of fun, but, at the end of the day, they stay the
same. Being an Adept is a bit like going to sea, because you are up to your
neck. You do it but you don’t want or seek to do it. People think that, when
you get to be an Adept, that’s it. It is just the start.

PUPIL: How do you know when you
have become an Adept?

MASTER:
The minute you whish you weren’t. I can understand only too well why Crowley
and many others found drugs their only escape.

PUPIL: Just one more question
about Crowley. He said that an advanced Occultist had to be bisexual.

MASTER: He may have been
misquoted. An advanced Occultist should have tried all forms of sexual
behaviour, or almost all, but he – or she – cannot force himself to be what he
is not. The important thing is to know what it is all about, so you know
exactly where you are. If people, from puberty onwards, follow one mode of
sexuality only, they cannot be in complete control of themselves because they
cannot be certain that another mode would not suit them better.

There will always be a kind of
sexual activity which will be more productive to you than any other. If your
sexuality is not between your legs, it is somewhere else for a good reason.
There is no such thing as an accident in the universe. Sex does not have to
manifest itself as fucking. If that is not enjoyable, you have got to go for
other paths. Using the same force, find out where else it will manifest itself.
It depends on the way the link-ups take place between neurones. If they link-up
in a certain way, this induces a certain mode of behaviour. It does not affect
anything else you do in your life.

And, once you have established
your ideal mode of sexuality, you should accept it, however unorthodox it may
be. No guilt, no hang-ups, no militancy. Leave the militancy to the
non-Occultists who feel the need to be accepted. A person aiming for Adepthood
is aware that he will never be accepted and he does not wish for acceptance or
understanding.

The militants are too busy
trying to convince everyone else that what they are does is right. They have
got into a battle they don’t need.

They
rode over the hill, saw the fight and joined in. The intelligent thing to do is
to ride back over the hill. It does not matter what anyone else is, as long as
it is he who has to live with it and not you.

PUPIL:
If there is nothing wrong with sex, in any form that feels right for the
individual, why have I been forced into celibacy?

MASTER:
You have not been forced into celibacy. You are an attractive woman, you
could have any man you wanted. You have chosen not to.

PUPIL: I
have considered it, of course. Then I remembered what you once said: ‘you have
to talk to them afterwards’. What possible communication could I have now with
ordinary men? And without communication, the whole thing would be a waste of
time.

MASTER:
Celibacy is one of the ways to face your subconscious and overcome it. Even the
Christians realised that, though naturally they do not now know why it is
necessary or how to deal with the results.

PUPIL: And, at the moment, I
don’t understand, either!

MASTER:
If I took you into a nuclear power station, you would not expect to understand
its working. This is a million times more complex, so why should you expect to
understand this yet? Nuclear physicists do not have the lies to contend with,
the lies which emanate from your subconscious, even though they will someday
realise that nuclear physics is a million times more complex than they at
present know.

Continuing
the analogy with nuclear physics, you could forge suitable qualifications and
be put in charge of a power station; sooner or later you would kill yourself
and a lot of other people. You have to work to gain the knowledge to do the job
completely. The way to Adepthood is hard. It has to be.

Put
questions in different ways. What you do not know is as valuable as what you do
know. How the mind should be working, based on a little or a lot or no
information at all.

There
are no examinations but there are assessments. You have made progress in
various ways, some of which you recognise and some of which you do not know
about.

Ask
yourself how much you know about me. If you are not satisfied, start from the
basis of how little you know about me. You do not have to quantify. An amount
will suffice. This underlines the advice that you should not ask questions to
which you do not need to know the answer, in the same way that there are many
decisions which never have to be made.

You
know enough about me to know there is a good reason for what I am doing. You do
not yet understand that reason but you know that it exists.

One
level of your mind is asking questions. Encourage other levels of your mind to
ask questions. No-one asks a question backwards; it does not come naturally.
This is the subconscious being lazy. Another bonus when you do this is that you
start to argue positively and negatively with equal belief and dedication. You
are getting further away from a stance.

There
is no instruction book. I can switch on a light so that you see something in a
different way.

As
soon as you discover sex, you have given a new and powerful tool to your
subconscious, a major weapon which it can use against you. You are using the
subconscious’s attack with its big guns. It has to come out into the open. The
you can question why it does it, you refuse to do what you are being urged to
do. Children have not yet triggered the big guns, whish is one of the reasons
why they are getting less hassle from their subconscious; children are natural
and adults are not.

PUPIL:
Does that mean that paedophilia is wrong?

MASTER:
If the other party’s experience is not commensurate with your own, you are doing
it to them rather than with them. Because of their own immaturity, sex is
something paedophiles prefer to do to others, therefore they have to have an
inexperienced person.

PUPIL: I
want to ask you why I gave up drinking wine. I didn’t really feel any need to
give up; I could afford it, I wasn’t drinking enough to damage my health. Yet I
suddenly lost all desire for it, it ceased to be pleasant. I have a feeling you
had something to do with that. I knew you didn’t approve, though you never
forbade me to drink.

MASTER:
Would you have stopped if I had told you to stop?

PUPIL: I
don’t know. I’m not sure if I could have done. But I didn’t even know that you
knew I was drinking. I never left any bottles lying around.

MASTER:
You were drinking enough to change your aura. Alcohol is debilitating to the
intelligence. Therefore it was better that you should cease entirely.

PUPIL:
Why did you do that? You said that no-one aspiring to Adepthood could be helped
on the climb.

MASTER:
Continuing to describe it as a climb up a mountain, no, you cannot be assisted
on the climb, but, before you set out, you can be provided with suitable
clothing and equipment. That equipment will not get you up the mountain if you
are not a skilled climber, but, without it, even the best climber would not
stand a chance. To stop drinking alcohol is part of that equipment.

PUPIL: I
still don’t understand why you gave me the easy way. Why you stopped me instead
of making me do it myself.

MASTER:
Even a moderate amount of alcohol reduces the intelligence. I did not wish to
waste my time talking to someone whose level of understanding was less than it
should be.

PUPIL:
Shouldn’t it have been a matter of personal responsibility?

MASTER:
Are you feeling annoyed about being manipulated?

PUPIL: Yes, but I suppose you
have manipulated me in a lot of other ways that I’m not even aware of. And now
I’m wondering if there are certain things which I thought were my own
achievements, which you have, in fact, done for me. Still, if I asked you is
this ability or that ability something which I have attained though my own
efforts or something which you have done for me, I don’t think you’d tell me,
and why should you? Because I would simply be asking out of curiosity. As you
said, there are questions which do not need to be answered, even if I would
like to know what you have done.

MASTER: Things that you could
have achieved yourself if there had been time. Do you understand personal
responsibility, since you used the term? It is not simply a matter of achieving
things by yourself. People were responsible before law came along to order
their lives. But, even then, people were separated into two different types.
This is nothing to do with conscience, because conscience is you being
manipulated by outside forces. Personal responsibility depends largely upon
honour. Being told to do something but there is no-one checking on whether or
not you have done it. People are good at lying to themselves. If you lie to
yourself, you will make no progress along the spiritual path. You will always
be the servant, the puppet, of your own subconscious. You should never do
something you cannot live with. Personal responsibility sorts the men from the
boys. All wars are started by politicians too old to fight in them.

Consider
a chemical tanker. It carries vast numbers of drums containing gases such as
cyanide and its derivatives. Ruptured drums can give off fumes more toxic than
those used in warfare. And the ferocious intensity with which these chemicals
can burn is almost beyond description. A fire in a chemical tanker can melt
steel bulkheads like wax – the ship just melts into gobs of metal. If a fire
starts in a chemical tanker, your chances are better in the sea. Having said
that, you get into the realms of discipline.

PUPIL:
From the way you described it, it’s obvious that it happened to you. How many
of your crew jumped into the sea?

MASTER:
None.

Pupil:
You referred to discipline, but it
seems more like personal responsibility. The sailors’ fear of the fire would
naturally be far greater than their fear of the captain. The fact that they all
stayed seems to indicate that they realised that a reduction in the number of
men to fight the fire would reduce the chances of survival for the ship and
everyone in it. What is the difference between discipline and personal
responsibility in that context?

MASTER:
There is a Japanese word “gi”. It can be approximately translated as
“obligation”. It has nothing to do with external influences. If you feel it, it
exists. What you do with it is up to you. The minimum requirements are courage
and honesty.

The
nearest Western equivalent is “noblesse oblige”. Westerners are very good at
responsibility-shifting and this is typical. In the Japanese version, there is
no-one else to blame. That is why they do not tie the word to any social
status.

In
the crew of my ship, I knew which men I could trust and which I could not.
Willingness without ability is a non-starter.

From the Dark Lily Journal No 3, Society of Dark Lily
(London 1987).