DIALOGUE BETWEEN ADEPT AND PUPIL

Part 7

PUPIL: I recently saw a ghost. It seemed quite real at the time, and I had no reason for hallucinating, but, thinking about it afterwards, I cannot rationalise what happened. Can you explain what are “ghosts”?

MASTER: What you see is the essence or energy but your subconscious fleshes it out to suit yourself – so, if you expect a ghost to be a headless horseman or a lady in grey, that is how it will appear. People will not see a headless horseman in a house, that would be incongruous.

Everything is composed of energy and this is why only a minority of hauntings occur outside. It is difficult to charge anything outside, there is too much open space.

PUPIL: Are ghosts the same as visions?

MASTER: Energy is formless, timeless, sexless. When religion comes along, people suspend all logic. They expect a totally different set of rules to obtain in that situation, and it just isn’t on. There is only one set of rules for the universe and everything in it.

A disbeliever’s subconscious will not flesh anything out, but he will also be aware of the essence. An atheist never gets possessed.

Everyone is composed of energy. A strong personality is a preliminary indication of the amount of energy in that person.

Energy can be used to charge a room. I can make a room very uncomfortable for everyone in it or very comfortable.

The secret is to be aware of that energy and observe it without your mind artificially dressing it up. If energy is there, it is there all the time, only the reception differs.

PUPIL: Is a mirage a different phenomenon?

MASTER: Whereas a “ghost” is caused by one’s reception of the energy in a particular place, a mirage in the desert is an entirely subjective occurrence. Lack of water causes an increase in other chemicals in the body; fear of dying increases adrenalin. Physically a man may be on his hands and knees in the desert, but, if he is a non-spiritual man, he has long lost control of where his mind is.

PUPIL: If we are all composed of energy, an Adept should feel like several megatons. How do you prevent this energy in you from affecting other people?

MASTER: I neither transmit nor receive. Or I do, but I shroud it. One cannot “close down” completely but one can cloak it.

PUPIL: Is this to prevent harm to other people or to protect yourself from receiving too many impressions?

MASTER: Both.

PUPIL: Are the things in the future so unpleasant that you do not wish to see them – but you must have seen them, because you have spoken about them. Like your insistence that traditions have a value, they must be maintained because their abolition would create a vacuum which would have to be filled by something.

MASTER: I know what is waiting in the wings to replace abolished tradition.

PUPIL: Why can’t you tell me?

MASTER: You will understand that when you are ready to know. I cannot describe to you things that you cannot comprehend; I know you cannot comprehend them because, if you could, you would not need me to explain them to you. To tell you what those things are would be like someone who has reached the top of a mountain describing the view to someone who is only halfway up. However detailed the description, it would be nothing like seeing it for yourself.

PUPIL: Is Adepthood perfection?

Master: If you are perfect, you are totally without balance. Without balance because it is all one thing. Eliminate perfection and imperfection. There must be some perfection and some imperfection. In the same way, a person who is 100% masculine or feminine would have no physiological balance.

PUPIL: But an Adept is so far above ordinary people, surely that must be what we call perfection?

MASTER: Qualities add to your responsibility, not to your superiority. It means that there are less excuses for you and more for everyone else who does not possess those qualities.

PUPIL: At least you have some human feelings, such as your love for your dog.

MASTER: How many other species do you know? So how can you say that love is a human emotion?

PUPIL: I thought you said you could not love.

MASTER: It is not a question of loving or not loving, it is a question of doing things in balance.

PUPIL: So we get back to this thing about balance again.

MASTER: We never left it. Without balance, nothing is achievable, there is no past, not future, no progress.

PUPIL: What is the balancing factor in your love for your dog?

MASTER: There is no balancing factor; you take a balanced view as far as love in itself is concerned. There is day but there is also night. My love for my dog is not an extreme and irrational thing, it is thought-out like everything else I do.

PUPIL: Is love balanced by the opposite emotion?

MASTER: No, it is a balanced thing in itself. It does not rely on emotion, it is not demanding.

PUPIL: Do you think I have achieved a balance in my love for you?

MASTER: Only you can answer that for yourself.

PUPIL: And I think I’m getting there. Though there are setbacks, of course. But, hastily changing the subject (and thereby showing just how much progress I haven’t made), we were talking about something much more interesting, Adepts. Are there different grades of Adept?

MASTER: Pursuit of the Occult is the pursuit of knowledge. Knowledge is knowledge. Every Adept knows the same things as any other Adept. The more you know does not make you any better, it increases your responsibilities and increases everyone else’s excuses. The minute you start feeling superior, check yourself, something is going wrong.

Equate energy with power. Power is like electricity, it is neither good nor bad. Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Power without responsibility is dangerous. An increase in power leaves less room for error on your part. Ignorance is bliss; that proves the equation a second way.

PUPIL: This seems to relate to the isolation which we discussed earlier. I no longer get annoyed by people’s bad behaviour in mundane matters – for instance, when they don’t return borrowed items or don’t say thank-you for help. I thought this was because I simply didn’t care about them.

MASTER: Nothing must have the power to affect you. One of the first things that happens as you move along the path is that you no longer belong to a particular place. If you do not belong to a place, the only thing you can belong to is a time. You are alive here and now but that does not mean that you belong to this time.

PUPIL: I have never felt that I belonged to any place, never felt any emotional attachment to any country or area. It would never matter to me where I lived, providing it was somewhere comfortable.

MASTER: You will eventually reach a stage in your development where your situation is totally unimportant.

PUPIL: All right, I know I haven’t got so far yet! But, to go on to the next thing you mentioned, time. In DL2, you referred to the different “cells” from which one’s body is composed having existed at different times. Is this what you are talking about now?

MASTER: Partly. You could have a large proportion of cells from one time. But there is one particular time that is your and you have to find that time.

PUPIL: How?

MASTER: You fit into the time, it does not fit into you. You will know the time to which you belong in the same way that you know your own coat in a dark room even if you had to pick it out from twenty identical coats.

Balance what was then against what is now. Try each time to see what fits.

PUPIL: How does one start? By reading about the different eras and seeing which ring any bells?

MASTER: You have to start by reading, or some other method of gaining knowledge about that era, but then you must think about it. Go into that era, try it on like a coat and see if it fits.

PUPIL: You said ‘or some other method of gaining knowledge about that era’. I first became aware of the time which I think may be mine when I saw a film about events that took place then.

MASTER: Films and television are very useful because they can bring us more information in a few minutes than we could gain by several hours’ reading.

Pupil: So they save time, not waste it?

MASTER: Nothing is wasted. Even fictional drama was written by human beings; you should think about what they have written and analyse it.

PUPIL: Discounting the profit motivation, they write to entertain, sometimes to put across propaganda. It used to seem strange to me that my viewpoint is so different from what appears to be “the average”, but I think I can now see where it really is me being different or merely the writer trying to convert people.

MASTER: Everything you read or see can be useful to you. Everyone’s personality is made up of different facets. Reading or seeing events of a dubious quality can trigger recognition within the reader/viewer; if it does that, it triggers identification. If it is dubious, it is hard to climb above it afterwards. There are so many books available today that it is easy to end up with the wrong role model. If your subconscious or personality has identified with something, later in life you will gravitate towards that thing. All the time it will shackle you to the earth. Most of today’s entertainment for children is symptomatic of man’s descent into crudity. The Greyfriars of previous generations is now Grange Hill. What your mind reads can surface a lot of years later in many peculiar ways. There are books which, if read by a mature mind, can be entertaining and even instructive, but, if you read them when you are too young, before you have any real experience of your own, they can have an overly large effect. At the time when you read or see things, it does not have any real effect; what matters is what you do afterwards with what you have seen or read. The lightest of books, written solely for entertainment, is still written by a human being, with a personality, featuring day-to-day events, problems, solutions, descriptive passages referring to a scene, a viewpoint. There is no point in reading anything if, afterwards, you do not analyse it. This is part of the process of learning to use everything instead of being used.

PUPIL: Like when one has an illness – instead of saying ‘now I can’t go potholing any more’, think of something that one now has time to do. Or take the view that one is no longer risking one’s neck at weekends. Though that raises another question – you said that some people need danger. How do they cure themselves – or should they try?

MASTER: Danger is like a drug, more addictive than heroin. But you are equating danger with taking silly risks, and there is no connection.

PUPIL: Oh. Yes. I see. I’ve done it again – taken a viewpoint without thinking about it. ‘Question yourself constantly’ – you’ve said that several times, and I do try, but some things slip through. Maybe I’ll catch them next time around.

MASTER: People claim that they wish to know themselves, but most, even, if they are not aware of it, would do anything to avoid finding out.

PUPIL: How does one try to find out?

MASTER: The method is for the individual to select. Do something or stop doing something. One cannot give someone a set of exercises. Your mind and body has to work in the knowledge that you yourself designed the situation. If someone has done that for you, it reduces you to the level of soldiers in battle, there because they were ordered to be there.

Create the situation, remove as many safeguards as possible and see what happens. Examples are undertaking a long journey on foot without stopping; starving oneself almost to death; engineering a situation in which one has a 50% chance of survival. You have got to make sure before you start, that you are strong enough not to judge, not to like or dislike, but just to experience and observe. Observe yourself, observe the feelings that are generated.

When you take up a serious study of the Occult, you are climbing into the ring with your subconscious, fighting for supremacy not just in this life but for all eternity. You can use the dirty tricks which the subconscious uses.

PUPIL: I know you said it was going to be hard, but it is harder than I expected.

MASTER: The Occult is the study of yourself and the universe in yourself which relates directly to the external universe. If you think this is hard, you have seen nothing yet.

Continued in DL8

From the Dark Lily Journal No 7, Society of Dark Lily (London 1988).