AZ 156 Charisma, mysticism, truth, pretension. Pretentiousness. Mystical authority,. Charlatanry.
Religion as charlatanry, charlatanry as magic.
Richard Rolle. Criticism of mysticism as more or less high or deep. How should we look at all this?
AS 20 Gnosticism. The Pymander. Idea that the mystical inward psychological interpretation was a later development of the original mythological. This somehow surprising. I would have imagined the mystical as there from the start.
Gnostic appeal as paralleling the Nietzschean in the modern world.
23 Belief in God as such can seem naïve. Forms of mystical awareness that do not really require it, are not so easily shattered. The religion of Wordsworth, Shelley, Coleridge even. seems more intelligent but there are forms of religious crisis that can shake even that.
See how religious doubt could still be possible by paralysing the possibility of mystical experience, like showing it rests on philosophical or grammatical confusion,.. there thus arises the problem of restoring it.. This is the essence of the problem of doubt.
It can seem a childish problem. But there is more to it than that,.. a number of intertwined questions. Religion can seem to mean different things. Scepticism may seem to bring the real freedom. Religion can come across as the real oppressor, as authority, compulsory belief.
AT 45 Thinking about what Wagner offered, this promise of ecstasy that could only be fulfilled in death. Wagner’s music as like Venice. Schopenhauerian mysticism. This aspiration to a mystical ecstasy that was never quite completed. All the yearning that is sung about in Tristan.
We now, who have LSD, who have experienced mystical enlightenment, see things differently. We have seized the mysteries.
184 Unamuno … in some ways like Kierkegaard, but a Spanish religiosity, suggesting the mystics and richly ornate Spanish churches. A mysticism one might want to call pathological, like Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann.
Again a question of how you describe the experience. Is this really life denial? Is it strictly honest?
Unamuno talks as if he is dealing with universal features of human nature. Perhaps they are not universal. Just Spanish Catholic, the product of education and an emotional need that comes from that, instead of those ideas we should have more enlightenment ideas.
His disdain for theology, the rational God of the scholastics. A sort of pride, an aristocratic pride
217 Eckhart, Plato, to get back to the presocratics, to understand the motive that underlies Plato while escaping his spell.
See how study of Eckhart might inspire Heidegger.
The mystical question, ideas under whose spell we still perhaps remain. Like enlightenment. The nature of the experience, how to analyse it. The power of creative thinking.
319 Mysticism, kabala, the extreme individuality of the vision. The individuality of judgement.. the interpretative framework for experience.
AQ 196& There is a form of mysticism aimed at the second rate mind, expressing the complacency of the second rate. For someone of a higher capacity that can never offer satisfactory food. But the fault lies not in the mystical quality but its intellectual consistency.
AU 36 Morality may usually be understood as set of prohibitions. Kant extends it to cover the whole of life. It becomes a whole life programme. And with this comes a most gratifying sense of power and superiority. There is s sort of knowledge sought that is not ordinary knowledge that is like the mystical.
121 Corbin’s book. I felt it was unnecessarily prolix, that he kept making essentially the same point over and over again. I take it there is an affinity with Guenon and Eliade.. a sort of mystical theosophical tradition that acquired a sort of respectability in France.
I do like the point Corbin makes. It is an acceptable sort of theosophy. No fallen Sophia here.
321 James Stirling on painting.
Mysticism, beauty, amazing forms. Phallic mysticism and non phallic. Hargrave Jennings and his description of the Rosicrucians. Barbarous symbolism that seems charged with meaning. Even understood meaning, though you would be hard put to say what it is.. Like innocent meaning. The mystic bug.
Look at the reality the deep inner significance of this fertility religion. Essentially the defeat of the moralistic interpretation of religion. Certainly no intention of reducing religion to sexual activity on a Swedish model.
An interesting new field opens up, of esoteric religion, which relates closely to all I have written about Nietzsche. Understands why there we have the need for all this to remain hidden. So easy for it to be profaned. And the esoteric, cryptic style of expressing it conveys very much more than otherwise might be said.
AP 217 Georges Bataille’s Eroticism. Much of it is interesting and sound enough, but is it significant? Any more so than Mme Blavatsky, for example? The attack on philosophy, on Socrates. An anti philosophical motive. Anti-philosophical means blind authority. Such a position is always possible it is never exciting, never to be thought of as a triumph or an advance.
Mysticism, transgression.. Somehow he still clings to respectability as in his rejection of De Sade. He could almost move into some form of Catholicism, certainly he does not hate it. The raptures of the mystic and their close relation to the erotic.
Yet is there not in him something suspiciously unhealthy? The mysticism he favours the tormented pathological excesses of St John of the Cross and St Theresa. Counter Reformation. Like Foucault a peculiar destructive concern. He completely lacks rigour. Certain questions, like eternal damnation not discussed. Imagine a much calmer clearer form of mysticism. Also erotic in a way but overcoming more than that. Etc etc
376 Vision and poetry. Theosophical ways of responding to mystical visions. How is it possible to assimilate them into our own outlook?
AX 64 Why I like Dionysius. His draining of definable content from the truth. Just Proclus they say, but Proclus with a new, positive twist.
178 The Dark Night of the Soul. One of the great books of world literature. The natural objection to it is that it is sick, morbid. One may prefer a simpler mysticism. But I think we might see why the simpler mysticism would not be satisfactory.
The dependence on Christian doctrines can be misleading.. will to power, creative genius.
DD 189 Inadequacy of words to express visionary experience. Words attempting to express it have either an alternative mundane interpretation which will nearly always be made, or they are liable to be mistaken for the mumbo jumbo which with paranormal experience is most frequently feigned.
BD 127 A mystical experience can induce conviction. at first that is. the more interesting questions arise when it turns bad. One experience of some sort of enlightenment is not enough to go on. Academics are not sages, they are not the best placed to judge.
QQ 4 The ecstasies of Christian mysticism do not justify Christian doctrine. Any doctrine might serve a mystic, if he could expand it enough to incorporate bizarre paradoxes. And what religion contains more bizarre paradoxes than Christianity?. Perhaps Dali is right, perhaps much of its spirit is surrealist.. but the surrealist interpretation is a vision, if you like a theme played upon all kinds of normally unacceptable material, sickening sentimentality, gross scientific ignorance etc etc. Ultraparadoxicality can make this mishmash somehow seem acceptable, just as Aldous Huxley says the world, for all its suffering, seems fundamentally good, and acceptable to the psychedelic visionary.. Too much in Huxley of a mishmash of bits of psychology, mysticism etc. His philosophy is eclectic. He treats things as revealed which are not necessarily revealed at all. The theory makes a lot of difference to the data….In dealing with material like visionary mystical or religious experience we need to have some basic structure with which to interpret it.. How could we be both scientific and creative? The path of Huxley and Leary leads from eclecticism to arbitrary dogmatism. It ends up a restrictive and oppressive.. supposed accredited scientific fact, and new consensus.
(see Zaehner, Mysticism Sacred and Profane.
BB 123 Plato’s forms. As forms of ideas they are not specific. The form of the good. What philosophy says is most good is not some particular thing but the form of goodness to which a number of particular goods might more or less approximate.
Likewise the supreme principle of Dionysius or Boehme, something above all particular characterisation. The supreme concepts with which we are presented are moist definitely not to be narrowly defined… in some measure Plato’s doctrine is the elaboration of a higher logic, defending the limits of what can be said and thought rather than a doctrine commanding what must be so.
Time and again the confines of too dogmatic a religion have been escaped by religious mystics. The ineffable indescribable incomprehensible Godhead that may yet be approached by certain mystical disciplines. Ultimate truth, it is insisted is something that cannot be put into words, that transcends all particular formulae. Silence or even nonsense, is said to be the nearest we can attain to expressing it.
OO 35 In one respect the renaissance was an advance on ancient Greece. Centuries of experience had given mystical experience a kind of mathematical orderliness. Plotinus in his day might have seemed decadent and escapist. But this other world to which he paid attention lends itself to most ingenious forms of philosophical treatment.. the mysteries of Orpheus or Demeter were crude and primitive in comparison with what the genius philosophers could later achieve,
the theosophist is one who lifts the veils.. Blavatsky book The Veil of Isis has a very good title. Thus it is open to us hippy theosophists to enjoy the churches.. for all they should about their own truth claims all that is merely necessary.
249* Mystics, The claim to spiritual and moral superiority on the basis of an experience. But a beast might do as well. Is that the best life has to offer? And if we admire an illuminatus, is that what we admire him for? That he is in heaven and can pull us there with him, with perhaps a few wrenches on the way.. No. We admire the one who engages our will, who can set us in motion. The appeal of a spiritual master is on an ordinary intellectual plane, it is not a hope, a blind faith, of heaven.
Sing the praises of drugs, even of the bad experiences they can bring.
MM 51 Mystical inspiration in Ouspensky and other such people. Usually it appeals as a desire for something as not yet experienced, i.e. it is an ideal that is sustained by desire.
KK 114 Think of the mediaeval mystics. think of what they were given, a spiky religious dogmatism pressing on the imagination. In their writings they left us their autobiographies. A modern writer like Strindberg gives us an account of his life as a struggle against the pressures of the world. A mystic is similar, engaged in a very similar business, he too describes the buffets of the world against himself and his efforts to break through, but here the external world is represented by a spiky religious dogmatism. What is the novel at its greatest but a kind of autobiography. Under the Volcano, the works of Gissing Tolstoy Dostoyevsky, plays of Strindberg. All records of spiritual tension, for which the best analogues are the writings of the mystics. Note the fact that mysticism and novel writing are among the few creative activities in which women sometimes excel.
HH 90 Nietzsche and Crowley on the psychology of the redeemer.. the pacific parts of the gospels as simply the necessary conditions of a yogi’s existence. This technique has been mistakenly exalted as the highest ideal for mankind in general. A set of injunctions having practical import for a certain type of temperament, one who wishes to see visions and obtain mystical experience, are converted into a rule for mankind as a whole, one which it is admitted is impossible.
Love thy neighbour, be non aggressive the practical conditions for those who wish to lead a meditative spiritual life. . but there is the possibility of another type of mystic, the Rasputin type. … Goodwill to all men becomes a hangup as soon as it has been converted into a moral ideal, something it was not originally meant to be.
218 There have been many mystical prophets insisting on the point that the intellect is not necessary for mystical enlightenment. Counteracting the natural inferiority complex of the ignorant. Fair enough of course, study and intellectual effort are not an essential condition of mystical enlightenment. Unfortunately the idea has got around that they are actually an impediment to it.
GG 249 The myth of Pistils Sophia is more in tune with my situation. Christian mysticism makes me uneasy, it relies on the institution of the church, and world be impossible without that point of security.
Christian mysticism I find it hard to take with equanimity, it seems to me a propagandist offensive against me. It is all very well saying kill your personality and yield to the silence witching you but institutions such as the Inquisition were designed rudely to shatter that silence and to break even the faith of martyrs.. It may be said that Christian mysticism is only against my false self, against the delusions and obstacles to which I cling.. but I think threat runs deeper than that.. beyond the destruction of these delusions and attachments it threatens the rack, the auto da fe and the dungeons of the Inquisition. It is an unhealthy mysticism, it preaches a self annihilation only within a framework that is tightly surrounded by the torments of hell. There may be reasons for wishing to preserve some of these things of self other than mere pride and vanity. the mystical path may therefore be different accordingly. The loss of ego is still necessary. But even Molinos would surely abhor the destruction of the church by the infidel. That is a care that has been turned into a ritual rule and which does not have to bother about. In protestant mysticism the virtue of non attachment could be practised without forfeiting ones one’s loyalties.
254 Mysticism. The evils of self will. Perhaps it is important to trust something absolutely as truth, and it doesn’t matter too much what it is.. Otherwise we remain in the condition of morbid uncertainties which seemed to distress dr Johnson.. the form of truth, the Platonism of Christianity, This insight itself, if it is a piece of scientific understanding, is something that must be trusted, it is itself a truth, it makes the claim for itself as a truth. It must be a certainty a foundation, not subject to constant questioning.
What do I resist when I resist the mystic insight? Surely I resist only myself.
SS 84 Celibacy has opened the door to a new kind of nature mysticism.
EE 115 Capra’s book The Tao of Physics. If illuminating on physics weak on oriental mysticism. No study of western philosophy, no mention of Kant. Mysticism has been linked up with science before and far more effectively, as by Sidney Klein in Science and the Infinite.. Looking into atomic physics for the ultimate truth of things is fatal. One is led to the motto the abyss. Everything throws itself back into the same confusion, and the word is confusion, Note Blake’s image of Newton.
126& St John of the Cross counter reformation Spanish style Christianity. The idea of him as the greatest to mystics is nonsense but it is easy to see how it arose. Admiration of the vulgar for the extremes of asceticism as in the Hindu epic. Secondly for Catholics perhaps the embodiment of the pathological condition that results for the taking counter reformation Christianity, the form of Catholicism which prevails today, seriously. It is an extreme form of unnaturalism.
RR 86 Mystical insights as confirming your beliefs (confirmed by Scholem).
103 Relations between philosophy and mysticism. The One of Plotinus as a worthy object for philosophy. The One may be characterised as the resolution of perplexity. That philosophical insight or the object of that philosophical insight that resolves philosophical perplexity concerning the nature and origin of that which is. Yet insofar as the One is postulated as existing it generates its opposite. Mysticism the idea that such doctrines are only to be understood from the vantage point of certain abnormal states of consciousness. I disagree up to a point.
The idea of the One can be grasped and conceived philosophically. The basic concepts around which mysticism works are constructed or revealed by the intellect. But the complete removal of perplexity will be an intense subjective experience.
CC 117 A great mystic like Rumi we feel to deal with sources of energy that lie deeper than simply the power bestowed by particular beliefs. Yet is there an escape from the circle of faith? Philosphy does not pretended to escape it and it would be self delusion to pretend to be able to do so, but it ought to be possible to rise to a position that transcends particular limitations.
G 116 Passmore’s book, The Perfectibility Of Man. I think some of Passmore’s criticisms of mysticism are fair enough as far as they go. He maintains that mystics are alienated from normal humanity, cold and contemptuous of normal human ideals. I look upon such coldness as perhaps the result of overspecialisation. . He has not discussed Faust, perhaps because he does not understand it as a religious poem, has nothing to say about Rosicrucians, hermeticists, magicians, alchemists, kabbalists perhaps because he does not understand their aims. Could they be confused with the kind of mystic he is attacking, even though their aims are frequently not renunciation at all in the sense in which he understands it? He objects to renunciation of such things as love and friendship. The new mysticism of Norman Brown still renounces such ‘human’ accomplishments even though it does not attempt to restrain sex.. the mysticism of Crowley did no such thing.
Is Passmore wanting to attach himself to ‘the world’. Not so much because he loves the world as because he feels envious of the mystics? Perhaps he rejects it because he does not understand it?
Passmore’s book sticks to the mainstream of religious and intellectual history. Is he putting himself on the side of whatever inhibits mystical attainment? Is it because he values it in itself or because it inhibits mystical attainment?
Imagine a group of impotent men criticising the sexually active on the grounds that the fantasies and longings that evolve from permanent frustration are what really should be valued, the lewd imaginings of schoolboys, the companionship of those who all share a certain kind of failure in common.
“Man become perfect” is just one way of looking at yourself as a final cause. Perfection as a concept is not really crucial.
F 105 We talk of a mystic uniting himself with truth. But sometimes the truth is something outside himself, sometimes it is the realisation of something within. It might be the truth that there is no truth. Truth is a word that applies to what is true, whatever it is.. but one could begin to worship truth, construct a God out of he mere idea of truth. Then one might eventually personify it to make it accessible to the common people etc
E6 Norman Brown is a protestant mystic. Perhaps that is why I find him more sympathetic than other proponents of the new consciousness. Catholicism is worse than Protestantism or rather counter reformation Catholicism is what is so bad. The middle ages was saved by its mysticism.
D 126 Criticisms of Blake. The Hindu mystics had more sense when they argued that the reason why the fully enlightened omnipotent ones should yet not control Maya is that some would will preservation while others world will destruction.
134 I think orthodox traditions of KNOWLEDGE within our society are inadequate. Mysticism for example is usually understood by those who have not advanced far on the path of mystical experience as being in essence a system of contemplation. It is not accepted that mysticism is a means of obtaining hidden knowledge and certainly not need be merely contemplative . It only exalts the contemplative life above all others if the knowledge acquired involves this. Perhaps I should not say “system of knowledge” but “”method of attainment”, using Crowley’s terms.
AA 125 Plato & Pythagoras & Orpheus. Plato’s ideas a comprehensive logical system, the possibilities allowed by it. Plato’s logic was verbal whereas Pythagoras was mathematical Advance from Russell to Wittgenstein. Pythagoras first identified philosophic understanding with attainment of the divine, the orphic idea. The divine was the principle of order in the cosmos, the only way to participate in it is to understand it. Order out of chaos. Chaos is nothing. Heraclitus disagreed, or at least presented a another aspect of existence, which had to be synthesised in Plato
174 Whoso has felt the Spirit of the Highest,
Cannot confound nor doubt Him nor deny:
Yea with one voice, O world, tho' thou deniest,
Stand thou on that side, for on this am I.
— Frederic W.H. Myers, Saint Paul
— The naïve idealism of the once fucked. Truest mystical insight is beyond words.
C 133 The mystic sees that on e one level religion is no more than big con trick, but a desirable and necessary one. He smiles patronisingly because he sees it and accepts the invitation to concur in it. All the effort and pain he puts into believing in it was based on a wrong idea, but it bore good fruits that are now being enjoyed as the fantasy faculty takes full wing. And except when the fantasy faculty takes full wing how can religion be seen in such a fully satisfying was, as riddle which has been solved? To the mystic who has received such revelations his fantasies become more important than anything else. So it becomes plain why the advanced mystic is prepared to admit all religions are one.
Mysticism came after the rise of Christianity it is seen as an understanding of its innermost essence. etc etc
B 30 The Hare Krishna people, walking along chanting. They look ridiculous, but are not all religious mystics told that they will be despised and laughed at in the eyes of the world It must take moral courage to do what they are doing. Yet who is there to admire them, to whom but the tiniest minority? Can they communicate the ecstasy they feel? In the eyes of the world they are pathetic idiots.
FF 17 Maldoror, and ultraparadoxicality, truly religious work, comparable with Ruysbrook, Eckhart, Molinos. A fanatical intensity which raises it above the frivolous.
Given a stage of religious antinomianism Maldoror cold be accepted as work of genuine religious inspiration. Hatred of God.
AF 10 Of the mystic it is said that his delights and satisfactions are sublimations of the direct satisfaction of the will.
37 Psychedelics. Mystical insight not romanticism. Wise and serene. Rejoicing this great work.
47& What is religion? Something that satisfies religious needs, offers a solution to certain perplexities and anxieties. The Judeo Christian answer to this is ‘thou shalt believe’ a body of doctrine.
Modern so called secular humanism is a direct offshoot of Christianity. With such a doctrine or creed, the anxieties and perplexities do not have to be met, or rather the doctrine is to take priority and all experience is to be made to fit.
I would say that mysticism is of the first importance. The mystical trance is the goal towards which so much human feeling would tend… but that is not quite true, it slightly misses the point. It is not a goal in the ordinary sense of the word
288 Plato's influence on the whole of western mysticism. The theory that this whole influence rests on certain logical confusions about the forms. Vlastos on this. The oddness of the view. For one inclined to feel that mysticism is just experience, that mystical writings are writings about experience, the anti-mystical point of view may appear wrong and ignorant. Idea that the form of beauty is itself beautiful. Possible logical error. Is the form of plurality itself plural? But mystical experience gives a profound feeling of penetrating to the underlying reality. But if you did not have certain ideas in your mind then you would not have that experience of that reality, and perhaps the ideas come to be implanted, insinuated through the effects of the general culture with so many people influenced by it. To see Plato as actually inventing mysticism must surely be an intellectualistic distortion. He himself claimed to respect the wisdom of the Egyptian priests. …if we explain flaws etc etc
For the corollary of that is that if we explain flaws in Plato’s basic argument then there no mysticism, mystical insights are founded on a mistake.
BC 17 How times change and a natural process that looks like degeneration may actually be a sort of healing.. these ideas of what give life its meaning.. alternative idea that it has none. Intellectual meaning sought in life,.
Mystics, Richard Rolle, Gurdjieff. Sixties culture, the affirmation of decadence. The incomprehensibility of this to an older generation. AO 325& Imitation of Christ. A terrible book. Behind all the sickly love, one imagines a willingness to burn heretics., i.e. a vicious defensive hatred it would not be too hard to provoke. Also from a modern viewpoint it just seems like massive error.
Self denial now, but only for the hope of something much better after death.
But then again one wonders how much value even the spiritual advice has in its own terms. Suppose it is irrelevant, scientifically unsound not even a sufficient remedy for producing the desired states. . suppose that there are illusions about causation. That a state of grace, or good conscience just descends or not as a result of essentially physiological factors.. that trying to affect the mind by prayer is no different from praying for rain? It is a late mediaeval book, it expresses a kind of sickly decadence. A very feminine emotionality, remote from the creative vigour of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries.
AN 110 Hobhouse on the school of Eckhart, (Tauler, Suso, Theologia Germanica) and its influence on William Law. See how deeply thrilling some of these beliefs can be.. but how can we be thrilled when we share the beliefs? See one of the things Hegel was trying to do. Regions or centres in the Godhead.
AM 234 Idea that mysticism expresses truth. Or is its apparent expression of truth nothing but an emotion it stimulates? This goes right to the heart of the claim of the will to power to express any kind of knowledge. The claim for this perception, this mood, to have any priority over other viewpoints
Knowledge’s the only possible ground for such a claim Setting limits on the urge to dominate. St Bernard attacking the Cluniacs as their churches reminded him of the “old rites of the Jews”
AL 324 William Law of whom Huxley writes in the highest terms. A saint, a genius, a master of prose one who knows what it is all about. My own reservations. Law’s life. Spiritual director to a rich woman. Does not this argue quite a pleasant life? Was a real saint someone like Simone Weil who killed herself working in factories? And what is really the virtue in all this mysticism anyway? Isn’t the promise just one of extreme delight and enjoyment, i.e. a hedonistic motive?
Adolescent attracted to religion later forsaking it for sex.
AK 168 Mysticism. The emotion felt for a supposed solution. A numerical absolute. Truth, mystical truth and enlightenment like mathematical or musical constructs for the direction of emotion.
Medical materialism. That life is assumed to be satisfactory without any thought. This is itself an obnoxious dogma.
So maybe religion did serve a valuable function. Maybe it was a protection against greater evils we can scarcely perceive. Like degenerate crappy religion, the neo-paganism of Glastonbury as people try to make sense of their acid ecstasies.. or the dogmas of a secular faith.
PP 59
Magic, mysticism esoteric wisdom. What is its benefit? Power, life death. To know, to feel quite certain in the brain. Power to compel thought’ In mysticism I am by no means adept. My message is not one of mysticism. I am not seeking nirvana or any earthly state of pacifity. But such mysticism can do for holy idiots. I seek to become a certain kind of sage, however one involved in a certain mission on this earth. This is the western mode of esoteric wisdom, one involving movement instead of stillness.
AH 226 It might be thought that Aristotle's world is much flatter than Plato's. Plato's is a world rich in mysticism, in mystery beyond what is perceived. Some want to blame Plato for mysticism, for the entire western tradition, as if he was responsible for inventing a world beyond that of which we are immediately aware. But Aristotle's work depends upon Plato's, derives from a criticism of it, almost assumes it as background. Doctrine of potentiality and actuality is impressive, and might seem to remove a lot of confusion about reality. However Aristotle seems stuck uncomfortably between Platonic ideas and a full blown nominalism. The idea of universals and natural kinds. Either it seems we remove universals from the realm of reality or we place reality in the realm of universals, i.e. in language. With Plato one thinks of the whole future development of Platonism and Neo-Platonism, of states of enlightenment, grades of consciousness. Taken on its own there seem grave difficulties in the Aristotelian account. Less an explanation than a system of classification.
UU 13& The Sufi master tries to shock people out of their conventional ways. One must outrage morality to destroy false views, notably that of the absolute necessity of some conventional set of values. Conventional taboos and shibboleths, democracy, work ethic deliberate cruelty, kindness to animals truthfulness etc etc.
But what is mysticism? Does every mystic have to have regular visions? Is mysticism simply esoteric religion? What does that mean? Am I a mystic? I have been called such.
What is a mystic? Compare mystic and philosopher.
AB 166 Mystic emotion. Something that feels itself to be not exactly emotion at all, some state of awareness above the turbulence of merely human emotions. A transcending of will and desire
a starlit of a moonlit dome disdains all the man is
all mere complexities
the fury and fire of human veins
176 When the will is directly satisfied, that is good of course.
Ugliness of the will. Nature of the mystic. The pure ones
Compromise with the will.
In future time a charm and beauty may become apparent which is that of the form of the will. But its immediate presentation is that of the pressure of the will.
The idea for you to minister to another’s sense of security and importance by sharing his own will.
The inevitable pessimism of the mystic. Mystic as kind of drop out. One is heavily cynical about people and their motives, seemingly negative. Sort of drop out.
Detachment, seeking to identify yourself with no party, no other person’s will.
196 Wordsworth’s Prelude. Platonism to prophets.
The use of reason, i.e. of right philosophy enables mystic and aesthetic experience to be enjoyed without fear, without childlike dependence.
324 Ego loss, becoming reconciled to things. No longer trying to force your own interpretation as against hostile interpretation. Simply being willing to observe reality. With the loss of your own ego it is not that you become a slave to the egos of others. Their egos dissolves as well Ego dissolves as a reality is revealed. Reality is an intensely joyful experience because it is a relief from pressure, the pressure of the will, interpretation pitted against interpretation. It is not a triumph of own will, but nor is it a defeat.
VV 34 Do not mystics often seem to be more profound than philosophers? Philosophers seem to close possibilities, whereas the irrationality of mystics (including people like Lewis Carroll and the surrealists) seems to leave room for antithesis and to be wise in a way to which no philosopher could attain
ZZ 131 Increase pleasure to a certain intensity and it would seem you would have the mystical.
Child of joy. Joy in nature etc.
136 My mysticism is not reaction, not pose or style. It is the adjunct of a completely new form of rationalism, taking its place in the context of a wide range of emotional experience, romantic post romantic pre romantic irrelevant to romantic etc,
267 So much I have written at various points about this ( naturism). There is an element of mysticism which needs to be disentangled from the more crudely priapic and put into proper relation with it.
292 Difference between St Augustine’s mysticism and other forms of it. Mystics have often been condemned as heretics. The impulse of much mysticism has been precisely to escape the oppression and constriction of an orthodoxy such as Augustine; often the starting point is a radical dissatisfaction with the scheme in which Augustine delights, the need to make acceptable and intelligible what seems so inapprehensible and repellent.
Same motive works in some is some Jewish and Islamic mysticism.
310 admiration for Eriugena. Thought like the greatest art.
Aristocratic pride, intellectual and philosophical systems as ways of producing equivalent of this.
324 Marenbon p 17-18 Pseudo Dionysius contrasted with Proclus, a mystic given to assertion not argument.
Crowley too is a mystic given to assertion not argument. This may matter very little, argument may be the business of other people. But we can see the reason for the opposition he arouses.
The mystics of Nietzscheanism.
Crowley’s mystical certainties.
334& Arthur Avalon. One could say that he writes largely in Sanskrit. One wonders what would be the virtue of mastering all the concepts, what precisely would one profit from it? Is it the case that in mysticism one cam largely make up one’s own doctrine? Hinduism. Eclectic. The wisdom of one guru will be different from that of another
AC 99 Epicureanism. One might think it a shallow philosophy, and perhaps in some of its implications it is. But pleasure itself is not shallow. Make it intense enough and it becomes mystical
210 Beauty of Kensington Gardens in October.. reflections on the nature of memory. In places like this I am a kind of mystic. Not detached observer. I merge with the lawns and the undulations.
253& Much of my inspiration of course derives from the religious experiences of my acid trips. People critics acid heads for despising consumer society while being dependent on its benefits. But why not? Why should the only revolution be an economic one?
270 Admiration for Dionysius. I admire him for being so ant- democratic, and therefore in a sense anti-Christian. The insistence upon a standard of perfect wisdom. Like all true mysticism, strangely irrelevant. Crucially important in the history of Christianity
AD 3 Mysticism. Search for an experience and a satisfaction springing from a profound discontent with ordinary life
261 Contemplation of form. Mere aestheticism, unsatisfactory and unsatisfying unless it develops into mysticism.
