COMMUNICATION

Be aware of what makes the writer, artist or composer do what he does. He has the need to express himself. What he is expressing is one small part of his whole personality relevant to the moment when the inspiration for the work comes to him. When the individual sees the canvas or hears the music or reads the book, what he is getting is a chance to look at something through someone else’s eyes. Creating is an art in itself; appreciating what is created is also an art. You can get the most out of it by being aware that, when you are looking at the painting or reading the book, you are momentarily seeing what may be an ordinary everyday object through someone else’s eyes. If a member of the public stood next to an artist as he was painting the picture, the item being painted would not appear the same to both people, even if it was a very mundane object. You can watch the painter’s brush-strokes but you cannot do what he does. Because he is an artist, he can paint. From a mixture of chemicals and vegetable matter, he creates something that you recognise, but, if he gave you his palette and brushes and the same object, you would not create the same thing. Although you know what he does, you cannot reproduce it. If you can be particularly “moved”, if your emotions can be prodded by what is on the canvas or what you hear or read, then the artist or composer or writer has managed to transmit to you the feeling, though you may not write or pain in the way that he does. That is the whole object of the exercise.

One of the abilities of an Adept is to pick the thing that moves whatever individual or group is relevant at the moment, and manipulate that thing. The Adept is aware of what moves the individual and, without painting pictures or writing music, he manipulates that thing. The way he does it is by words, words used as statement, questions, whatever. One’s mind rationalises; if a remark is heard, that remark is subconsciously compared with something else.

Using the example of the picture, and the artist’s inspiration which impelled him to create that picture, let us represent that inspiration as a red spot. Discounting the purchase of pictures for financial reasons, the emotion which makes someone wish to acquire that picture can be quantified as another red spot. The red spot is identical between the artist and the buyer, though they are two separate individuals who may have lived in different centuries. They are both seeing the same thing. Seeing that red spot with another person’s red spot is what the Adept is about. Identifying it in the individual or group and manipulating it is what gets the Adept his own way. To have any effect on a person, I have to meet him, to be in his company for about forty-five minutes, less if I have to. In that time, I see what is inside him, what makes him respond in a certain way to certain stimuli. I recognise what moves him, then I paint the canvas accordingly, knowing that he will react in a certain way. I know his mind from the inside. To get him to do what I want, I do the brushstrokes, the colours, according to the view that he responds to. Like the artists painting for the public, painting pictures which he knows will sell.

You can find out by listening to someone – not talking to them – what kind of things they respond to. To obtain a certain effect at a certain time, you say and do certain things.

I make a joke of it when I say, in business, never ask a question unless you know the answer, but it is true. Unless you know the answer, you have no way of knowing whether or not you are told the truth. When you ask a question to which you already know the answer, the answer which you are given and the way in which it is given tell you a great deal more. Ninety-nine per cent of the population normally operate in straightforward lines. They will assume that you do not know the answer, that is why you are asking the question. So they think that you will believe what they tell you. That is not so. If there is a mystery, it is a basic law of physics that there can only be a certain number of components. If you deliberately pull them about, put them in a different order, then you are going to arrive at the answer you want. You will always know the answer, even if you don’t recognise it. The next problem is facing an answer that may be unpleasant, you opt for something more acceptable, that is conning yourself. But if you are an Adept, you do not live in that world anyway, you have no need to con yourself, you know all there is to know about height and depth and the thing in the middle called mediocrity. The word “Adept” is just a word that is a suitable and generally-understood description. If you are going to stick with using it, you must bear in mind that every religion has Adepts. A Zen Master is an Adept. One presumes the Pope is an Adept, though I have doubts on this point. All religions have their Adepts, under different names. They all have one thing in common, no matter what language they speak, what colour their skin is. There is a reason that makes the Adept so valuable when it comes to teaching. Passing on knowledge is only secondary; the real purpose of an Adept is to be a conscience to his pupils, because, after the first couple of lessons, the pupil is going to realise that it may not be to his “advantage” to give the answer that he would give to anyone else when asked a question, because he never knows why it is being asked. Then he is faced with the choice of giving an honest answer, the answer that he thinks is politic, or an answer that is entirely expedient at the time. The pupil never really knows how much knowledge the Master has. If the pupil is a crafty individual who think he knows all the angles, the Master is left with one device. One day, he is going to ask a seemingly simple question. On receiving an answer, he will make no comment, but things will then so arrange themselves that, a week, a month, a year or five years later, the individual is going to be proving or disproving the truth of his answer by his actions or words, and it will usually concern something which is totally unrelated to the original question.

If the answer to a question could be “yes”, “no” or “maybe”, there are ways of asking the question which make nine answers possible; very few pupils are aware of this when they open their mouths. Very few people use their minds the way they were meant to be used, and there are many examples of that. All the examples are re-polarisation. An Adept never starts anything without knowing the outcome; he knows what the result is going to be. Not knowing the outcome would be like getting into a car and starting to drive without knowing where you intended to go. Start at your destination and work back to the outset of the journey.

In any situation, I know when someone is lying.

From the Dark Lily Journal No 1, Society of Dark Lily (London 1987).