"The only possible alternative is simply to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing…"
— 'What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell' by physicist Erwin Schrödinger. 

“Fictions are necessary for the people, and the Truth becomes deadly to those who are not strong enough to contemplate it in all its brilliance. In fact, what can there be in common between the vile multitude and sublime wisdom? The Truth must be kept secret, and the masses need a teaching proportioned to their imperfect reason.”

- Albert Pike: Morals and Dogma : Scottish Rite in Freemasonry

"But what is memory if not the language of feeling, a dictionary of faces and days and smells which repeat themselves like the verbs and adjectives in a speech, sneaking in behind the thing itself, into the pure present, making us sad or teaching us vicariously… "                                                                 — Julio Cortázar   

"We may idealize freedom but when it comes to our habits we are completely enslaved"  - Sogyal Rinpoche

“To train the mind to move with the maximum speed and energy, with the utmost possible accuracy in the chosen direction, and with the minimum of disturbance or friction. That is Magick. To stop the mind altogether. That is Yoga. ”

- Aleister Crowley

Myth, in its deep structure as well as in its superficial content, is about this compound relation between body/mind and word/world. It is metaphoric, not in the sense that is uses what we call ‘figures of speech’, mere rhetorical devices, but in the root sense of the word: 'carrying across’ the convenient boundaries we establish between sexes, seasons, species and stars. This metaphoric leakage is not consciously contrived, nor is it peculiar to myth; it penetrates, in the act, everything we do, all the sense we make- even in the most narrowly specialized branch of science. Our being-in-the-world is itself a continuous process of two-way criss-crossing between ourselves and the world which cannot help being metaphoric, so in Emerson’s words, 'The whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.’
                                                               
                                                                      — David Maclagan

"While dealing with this subject I may as well outline its scope completely. Human nature demands (in the case of most people) the satisfaction of the religious instinct, and, to very many, this may best be done by ceremonial means. I wished therefore to construct a ritual through which people might enter into ecstasy as they have always done under the influence of appropriate ritual. In recent years, there has been an increasing failure to attain this object, because the established cults shock their intellectual convictions and outrage their common sense. Thus their minds criticize their enthusiasm; they are unable to consummate the union of their individual souls with the universal soul as a bridegroom would be to consummate his marriage if his love were constantly reminded that its assumptions were intellectually absurd.

I resolved that my Ritual should celebrate the sublimity of the operation of universal forces without introducing disputable metaphysical theories. I would neither make nor imply any statement about nature which would not be endorsed by the most materialistic man of science. On the surface this may sound difficult; but in practice I found it perfectly simple to combine the most rigidly rational conceptions of phenomena with the most exalted and enthusiastic celebration of their sublimity."

— From Confessions, Aleister Crowley; On the significance of the Gnostic Mass

What is alchemy? The question still exists, despite all the resources and interpretations that have emerged in the modern period. We can easily find images of alchemists working with furnaces, herbs, chemical, and metals. But what is the goal? Is alchemy aimed at the creation of gold? Is its aim the philosopher’s stone, or great longevity, or a panacea? For all the alchemical texts and images that became available in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and for all the practicals alchemists and schools of alchemy that appeared during the same period, as well as the scholarship in a number of European languages, the fact is that alchemy retains its enigmatic, mysterious, and multivalent qualities. At times it seems that alchemical texts and imagery are like a screen upon which various interpreters project their views. And alchemical writings and imagery are so rich that they surely can support a great number of interpretations. Here, will turn our attentions to only one theme, which is the prevalence of sexual imagery in some alchemical works.

That sexual imagery plays a major role in various series of alchemical images can hardly be doubted, as we will see when we look at a few such works and images. But is this imagery suggestive of some chemical processes, to be worked out via a chemical apparatus and a furnace? Or is it possible that, as the imagery itself would suggest, alchemical imagery and writings might be multivalent, conveying multiple levels of meanings at once? This is the line of inquiry posed by Karen-Claire Voss, who, after long study, came to interpret late medieval or early modern alchemy as reflecting a process of ‘multileveled union of the two,’ from whose union emerges ’ the Child of the Work,’ a third, which also 'signifies the second birth in a theosophical [or gnostic] sense.’ She continues: 'The nature of the conjunction seems to me to suggest that the tradition of the alchemist and the soror mystica was not simply intended as a symbol with no corresponding reality in time and space, but that it was a form of Western tantra.’

— Arthur Versluis (The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism: Sacred Practices and Spiritual Marriage)

"In gardens, beauty is a by-product. The main business is sex and death."
                                                      —  Sam Llewellyn

And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words… As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.
                                                             — Alan Watts                                                      
         

“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.“ - Rainer Maria Rilke

Yet I who through the labyrinth can find my way,
Will not by erring lights be led astray.
I hold the thread that leads me to the core;
Peacefully I watch where others uselessly make war.

On the world’s stage I play no part at all.
To the vain, therefore, do I seem insignificant and small.
And while they strive to gain some part in multiplicity,
Mine is the All—O true felicity!

—Lao-tzu

156

BABALON is too beautiful
for sight of mortal eyes
She has hidden her loveliness away
in lonely midnight skies

                                                            - Jack W. Parsons