CHAPTER I - GREAT WORK
GREAT WORK is
defined by author and occultist Aleister Crowley as those spiritual practices
leading to the mystical union of the Self and the All. This presumes that the
owner of the ‘Self’ has acquired some knowledge of the ‘Self” as well as that
of the ‘All’. The owner has deduced that a mystical union of the two is
desirable. He then proceeds to device spiritual practices towards that end.
To achieve that result without the benefit of any spiritual education (which some might call brain-washing), one has to resort to the Perennial Philosophy as enunciated by Aldous Huxley. At the core of this philosophy there are four fundamental doctrines.
First: the phenomenal world of matter and individualized consciousness – the world of things and animals and men and even gods – is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their being, and apart from which they would be nonexistent.
Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.
Third; man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.
Fourth: man’s life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground.
Let us then take a journey through the history of civilization from the beginning to our own day to test these doctrines. There is no better way to do this than to pick out pearls from historian Will Durant’s Story of Civilization.
Discussing certain inconsistencies in the character of Botticelli in The Renaissance, he writes: "Doubtless like all of us he was many men, turned on one or another of his selves as occasion required, and kept his real self a frightened secret from the world."
Rather than keep one’s real self secret, the mission of each individual ought to be to identify it with the eternal Self.
CHAPTER II
EARLY CIVILIZATION
THE WORLD as we find it today was quite different at the dawn of civilization in terms of human customs. Yet the world has always remained constant in terms of its physical laws and the fact of human birth and death. However preposterous human actions may be from time to time, the divine ground remains the same and has been so from the beginning of the civilization – within it all partial realities reside.
Primitive man seems to have recognized no distinction in morals between eating men and eating other animals. “When I have slain an enemy,” explained a Brazilian philosopher, “it is surely better to eat him than to let him waste ... The worst is not to be eaten, bur to die; if I am killed it is all the same whether my tribal enemy eats me or not. But I cold not think of any game that would taste better than he would.... You whites are really too dainty.” The custom anticipated Dean Swift’s plan for the utilization of superfluous children. To Montague it appeared more barbarous to torture a man to death than to roast and eat him after he was dead. We must pause and think who is under delusion.
WILLAM SUMMER, American socialist
held that violent subjection was usually of a settled agricultural group by a
tribe of hunters and herders. For agriculture teaches men pacific ways inures
them to a prosaic routine, and exhausts them with the long day’s toil; such men
accumulate wealth, but they forget the arts and sentiments of war. The hunter
and the herder, accustomed to danger and skilled in killing, look upon war as
another form of the chase, and hardly more perilous; they look upon the ripe
fields of the village with envy, they invent some plausible reason for attack,
they invade, conquer, enslave and rule.
AS PUBLISHER PIERRE BEAUMARCHAIS put it, man differs from the animal in eating without being hungry, drinking without being thirsty and making love at all seasons.
AN EGYPTIAN LEGEND relates that when the god Thoth revealed his discovery of the art of writing to King Thamos, the good King denounced it as an enemy of civilization. “Children and young people, protested the monarch, who had been hitherto forced to apply themselves diligently to learn and retain whatever was taught them, would cease to apply themselves, and would neglect to exercise their memories.”
WHAT IS BEAUTY? An Indian chief, being asked which of his wives was loveliest, apologized for never having thought of the matter. “Their faces,” he said, “might be more or less handsome, but in other respects women are all the same.” Where a sense of beauty is present in primitive man it sometimes eludes us by being so different from our own.. Throughout Africa it is the fat woman who is accounted loveliest.
THE MOST STRIKING FEATURE OF BABYLONIAN
life, to an alien observer, was the custom known to us chiefly from a famous
page in Herodotus:
Every native woman is obliged, once in
her life, to sit in the temple
of Venus, and have
intercourse with some stranger. And many disdaining to mix with the rest, being
proud on account of their wealth, come in covered carriages, and take up their
station at the temple with a numerous train of servants attending them. But the
far greater part do thus: many sit down in the temple of Venus, wearing a crown
of cord round their heads; some are continually coming in, and others are going
out. Passages marked out in a straight line lead in every direction through the
women, along which stranger must pass and make their choice. When a woman has
once seated herself she must not return home till some stranger has thrown a
piece of silver in her lap, and lain with her outside the temple. He who throws
the silver must say thus: “I beseech the goddess Mylitta to favour thee”, for
the Assyrians call Venus Mylitta. The silver may be ever so small, for she will
not reject it, inasmuch as it is not lawful for her to do so, for such silver
is accounted sacred. The woman follows the first man that throws, and refuses
no one. But when she has had intercourse and has absolved herself from her
obligation to the goddess, she returns home; and after that time, however a
great sum you may give her you will not gain possession of her. Those that are
endowed with beauty and symmetry of shape are soon set free; but the deformed
are detained for a long time, from inability to satisfy the law, for some wait
for a space of three or four years.
INDIA was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of Europe's languages: she was the mother of our philosophy; mother, through the Arabs, of much of our mathematics; mother, through the Buddha, of the ideals embodied in Christianity; mother, through the village community, of self-government and democracy. Mother India is in many ways the mother of us all.
It is true that even across the Himalayan barrier India has sent to the west, such gifts as grammar and logic, philosophy and fables, hypnotism and chess, and above all numerals and the decimal system.
India will teach us the tolerance and gentleness of mature mind, understanding spirit and a unifying, pacifying love for all human beings.
Greatest of late Confucians in Japan was Ogyu
Sorai. Said he: ‘Man is a natural villain, and grasps whatever he can reach;
only artificial morals and laws, and merciless education, turn him into a
tolerable citizen.”
As soon as men are born, desires spring up. When we can not realize our desires, which are unlimited, struggle arises; when struggle arises, confusion follows. As the ancient kings hated confusion, they founded propriety and righteousness, and with these governed the desires of the people. . . . Morality is nothing but the necessary means for controlling the subjects of the Empire. It did not originate with the nature, or with the impulses of man’s heart, but it was devised by the superior intelligence of certain sages, and authority was given to it by the state.
ELEMENTS OF CIVILIZATION as derived from the Orient are:
First is labour – tillage, industry, transport and trade.
The second element is government – the organization and protection of life and society through the clan and the family, law and the state.
The third element is morality – customs and manners, conscience and charity; a law built into the spirit, and generating at last that sense of right and wrong, that order and discipline of desire, without which a society disintegrates into individuals, and falls forfeit to some coherent state.
The fourth element is religion – the use of man’s supernatural beliefs for the consolation of suffering, the elevation of character, and the strengthening of social instincts and order.
The fifth element is science – clear seeing, exact recording, impartial testing, and the slow accumulation of knowledge, objective enough to generate prediction and control.
The sixth element is philosophy – the attempt of man to capture something of that total perspective which in his modest intervals he knows that only Infinity can possess; the brave and hopeless inquiry into the first causes of things, and their final significance; the consideration of truth and beauty, of virtue and justice, of ideal man and states.
The seventh element of civilization is letters – the transmission of language, the education of youth, the development of writing, the creation of poetry and drama, the stimulus of romance, and the written remembrance of things past.
The eighth element of civilization is art – the embellishment of life with pleasing colour, rhythm and form.
The nature of the one Reality must be known by one’s own clear perception . . . But the desire for personal separateness is deep-rooted and powerful, for it exists from beginningless time. It creates the notion, “I am the actor, I am he who experiences.” This notion is the cause of bondage to conditional existence, birth and death. It can be removed only by the earnest effort to live constantly in union with Brahman. By the sages, the eradication of this notion and the craving for personal separateness is called Liberation.
CHAPTER III
THE LIFE OF GREECE
NOTHING IN THIS WORLD has come as close, as the life in Greece from its earliest times, to show it was the manifestation of Divine Ground within which all other partial realities had their being.
ACCORDING TO HERODOTUS, LYCURGUS (800 BC?–730 BC?), uncle and
guardian of the Spartan King Charilaus, received from the oracle of Apollo at
Delphi certain edicts which were described by some as the laws of Lycurgus
themselves, or by others as a divine sanction for the laws that he proposed.
Apparently the legislators felt that to alter certain customs, or to establish
new ones, the safest procedure would be to present their proposals as commands
of the god; it is not for the first time – nor the last – that a state had laid
its foundations in the sky.
THE POWER AND PRIDE OF SPARTA was
above all in its army. “Return with your shield or on it,” was the Spartan
mother’s farewell to her soldier son. Flight with the heavy shield was
impossible.
In the Spartan code husbands were encouraged to lend their wives to exceptional men, so that fine children might be multiplied; husbands disabled by age or illness were expected to invite young men to help them breed a vigorous family. Lycurgus, says Plutarch, ridiculed jealousy and sexual monopoly, and called it “absurd that people should be so solicitous for their dogs and horses as to exert interest and pay money to procure fine breeding, and yet keep their wives shut up, to be made use only by themselves, who might be foolish, infirm or diseased.”
While recognizing that virtue is important, Solon does not link it with recognizable distinctions: “Wisdom is an invisible property, the measure of which is not easily known. And yet only by it can all other things be given a standard.”
In 572 BC, at the age of sixty-six, and after serving as archon for twenty-two years, Solon retired from office into private life: and having bound Athens through the oath of its officials, to obey his laws unchanged for ten years, he set out to observe the civilizations of Egypt and the East. It was now that he made his famous remark – “I grow old while always learning.”
South from the Piraeus, there is a little isle of Ceos, where on the authority of Plutarch, “there was once a law that appears to have commanded those were sixty years of age to drink hemlock, in order that the food might be sufficient for the rest,” and there was no memory of a case of adultery or seduction over a period of seven hundred years.” Simonides, a philosopher as well as a poet, was born in this isle.He said of life: Few and
evil are the days of our lives, but everlasting will be our sleep beneath the
earth. . . . Small is the strength of the man, and invincible are his errors; grief
treads upon the heels of grief through his short life; and death, whom no man
escapes, hangs over him at last; to this come good and bad alike. . . . Nothing
human is everlasting. Well said the bard of the Chios that life of man is even
as that of a green leaf; yet few who hear this bear it in mind, for hope is
strong in the breast of the young. When youth is in flower, and the heart of
man is light, he nurses idle thought, hoping he will never grow old or die; nor
does he think of sickness in good health. Fools are they who dream thus, not
know how short are the days of our youth and our life.
He compares women now to foxes, asses, pigs, and the changeful sea, and
swears that no husband has ever passed through a day without some word of
censure from his wife.
Thales (624 BC – 546 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus, and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition. According to Bertrand Russell, "Western philosophy begins with Thales.
How was the power to move other things without the movers changing to be explained? Thales saw a commonality with the powers of living things to act. The lodestone and the amber must be alive, and if that were so, there could be no difference between the living and the dead. When asked why he didn’t die if there was no difference, he replied “because there is no difference.”
Aristotle defined the soul as the principle of life, that which imbues the matter and makes it live, giving it the animation, or power to act. The idea did not originate with him, as the Greeks in general believed in the distinction between mind and matter, which was ultimately to lead to a distinction not only between body and soul but also between matter and energy.
Asked what was very difficult, he answered, in a famous apophthegm, “To know thyself.” Asked what was very easy, he answered, “to give advice.” To the question, what is God? He replied, “That which has neither beginning nor end.” Asked how men might live most virtuously and justly, he answered, “If we never do ourselves what we blame in others.”
Iona’s most famous city – Ephesus – produced a great and ugly poet, Hipponax, who produced the coarse saying: Woman brings two days of happiness to a man – “one when he marries her, the other when he buries her,” But the most illustrious son of Ephesus was Heracleitus to whom are attributed the sayings: you cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters are ever flowing on to you; we are and we are not; the one is the Many; in the very heart of Fire flickers restless change. Death is a beginning as well as ending; birth is an ending as well as a beginning. Our words, our thoughts, even our morals, are prejudices, and represent as parts or groups; philosophy must see things in the light of the whole. “To God all things are beautiful and good and right; men deem some things wrong and some right.” The mutual necessity of contraries makes intelligible and therefore forgivable the strife and suffering of life. “For men to get all they wish is not the better thing; it is disease that makes health pleasant; evil, good; hunger, surfeit; toil, rest.”
PYTHAGORAS OF SAMOS (c. 570-c. 495 BC) was an Ionian Greek philosopher and founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism. Pythagoras’ religious and scientific views were, in his opinion, inseparably interconnected. Religiously, Pythagoras was a believer of metempsychosis. He believed in transmigration, or the reincarnation of the soul again and again into the bodies of humans, animals, or vegetables until it became moral. His ideas of reincarnation were influenced by ancient Greek religion. He himself claimed to have lived four lives that he could remember in detail, and heard the cry of his dead friend in the bark of a dog. The beliefs that Pythagoras held were:-
(1) that at its deepest level, reality is
mathematical in nature,
(2) that philosophy can be used for spiritual purification,
(3) that the soul can rise to union
with the divine,
(4) that certain symbols have a mystical significance, and
(5) that all brothers of the order should observe strict loyalty and
secrecy.
IT WAS A BOON to have many deities, many fascinating legends, sacred shrines, and solemn or joyous festivals. Polytheism is as natural as polygamy, and survives as long, suiting well all the contradictory currents of the world. Even today, in the Mediterranean Christianity, it is not God who is worshipped, so much as the saints; it is polytheism that sheds over the simple life the inspiring poetry of consolatory myth, and gives to the humble soul the aid and comfort that it would not venture to expect from a Supreme Being unapproachably awful and remote.
“THE PERIOD WHICH INTERVENED BETWEEN THE BIRTH OF PERICLES AND THE DEATH OF ARISTOTLE,” wrote Shelley, “is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself or with reference to the effect which it has produced upon the subsequent destinies of civilized man, the most memorable in the history of the world.”
It was Themistocles who set the course
of Greek history by persuading Athens
that the road to supremacy lay not on land but on the sea, and not by war so
much as by trade.
The most famous woman of
Ancient Athens was Aspasia, the companion of Pericles. Because she was a
courtesan, Pericles was not permitted to marry her, but in every way she was
his partner and an important Athenian in her own right. He lived with her as
her husband and treated her as an equal. This was unseemly for a respectable
man, and for a man of Pericles' standing, unheard of. He was often criticized
for his relationship with Aspasia, and for his obvious reliance on her help and
judgment. The gossip in Athens
was always vicious, and Pericles and Aspasia were popular topics. They and
their illegitimate son were ridiculed. She was called, among other things, a
"dog-eyed whore." The busy tongues of Athens also called her a "Socratic."
This was not a complement. The Athenians did not like the funny looking little
man who is often called the father of ethical philosophy. Socrates and Aspasia
conversed often and probably influenced each other.
This aristocratic democracy was no mere watchman of property and order; it financed the Greek drama, and built the Parthenon; it made itself responsible for the welfare and development of its people, and opened up to them the opportunity “not only to live, but to live well.” History can afford to forgive it all its sins.
THE GREEK MIGHT ADMIT THAT HONESTY is the best policy, but he tries everything else first. Athens officially recognizes prostitution, and levies a tax upon its practitioners. “We have courtesans for the sake of pleasure,” says Demosthenes, “concubines for the daily health of our bodies, and wives to bear us lawful offspring and be the faithful guardians of our homes”. Through it all the real influence of woman over man continues, making her subjection largely unreal. “Sir,” says Samuel Johnson, “nature has given woman such power that the law cannot afford to give her more.”
Lais of Corinth says Atheneaus,
“appears to have been superior in beauty to any woman that had ever been seen.”
The great sculptor Myron, in his old age, persuades her; when she disrobes he
forgets his white hair and beard, and offers her all his possessions for one
night; whereupon she leaves him statueless. But she does not refuse herself to
poor but comely lovers; she restores the ugly Demosthenes to virtue by asking
ten thousand drachmas for an evening,” but to the penniless Diogenes she gives
herself for a pittance, being pleased to have philosophers at her feet.
THE PURSUIT OF WEALTH, beauty and knowledge so absorbed the Athenians that they had no time for goodness. “I swear by all the gods,” says one of Xenophan’s banqueters, “that I would not choose the power of the Persian king in preference to beauty.”
The finest work of Pericles’ builders was reserved for the Acropolis, the ancient seat of the city’s government and faith.
PHILIP CAME TO THE THRONE OF MACEDONIA in
359 BC. He liked boys but women better and married as many of them as he could.
In the end his fate was determined not by his
victories in the field but by his failure with his wife, Olympias who informed
him that he was not the real father of Alexander; it was the great god
Zeus-Ammon who had begotten the dashing prince. One of Philip’s generals,
Attalus, made matters worse by proposing a toast to Philip’s expected child by
a second wife, as promising a “legitimate” heir to the throne. Alexander flung
a goblet at his head, crying. “Am I. then, a
bastard?” Philip drew his sword against his son, but was so drunk that he could
not stand. Alexander laughed at him: “Here,” he said, “is a man preparing to
cross from Europe into Asia, who cannot step surely
from one couch to another.” A few months later one of his own officers,
Pausanias, assassinated the King.
WHEN PLATO DIED ARISTOTLE BUILT an altar to him almost divine honours; for he had loved Plato even if he could not like him. With frank simplicity, Aristotle proclaimed that the happy life is a good life. He proposed not (like Plato) how to make men good, but how to make them happy. Certain things are necessary to lasting happiness: good birth, good health, good looks, good luck, good reputation, good friends, good money, and goodness. “No man can be happy who is absolutely ugly.” Aristotle quotes, with a candour rare in philosophers, the answer of Simonides to Hieron’s wife, who had asked whether it was better to be wise or to be rich: “Rich, for we see the wise spending their time at the doors of the rich.” Thought is the mark of man, and “the proper work of a man is working of the soul in accordance with reason”, he continued:
The most fortunate of men is he who combines a measure of prosperity with scholarship, research, or contemplation; such a man comes closest to the life of the gods. Those who wish for an independent pleasure should seek it in philosophy, for all other pleasures need the assistance of men.
THE VATICAN STATUE of the great
orator, Demosthenes, is one of the masterpieces of Hellenistic realism. Sometimes,
says Plutarch, he prepared pleas for both the opposed parties to a dispute. He
worked hard and, and his only distractions were courtesans and boys. “What can
one do with Demosthenes?” his secretary complained. “Everything he has thought
of for a whole year is thrown into confusion by one woman in one night.”
The failure of the city-state accelerated the decay of the orthodox religion. Athens in the third century was so disturbed by exotic faiths, nearly all of them promising heaven and threatening hell, that Epicurus felt called upon to denounce religion as hostile to peace of mind and joy of life. Education spread, but spread thin; as in all intellectual ages it stressed knowledge more than character and produced masses of half-educated people who, uprooted from labour and the land, moved about in unplaced discontent liked loosened cargo in the ship of state.
