Israel Regardie The Philosophers Stone

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

record of one practitioner that some years ago was shown to me, eight hours a day was devoted to
pranayama before finally a minor illumination flooded the mind. Clearly such a course is impossible for
the average man of the West, no matter how great his sympathy for the Eastern ideal. He has at least
two thousand years of incessant activity, commercial bustle, and materialistic preoccupation behind
him. It would be a violation of his nature and his racial heredity to refute his ancestry and adopt the
Eastern hermit life.
Hence it is by some contended that the alchemistic and mesmeric theory is almost an ideal
adaptation principally for such an individual. It is a European version of the Eastern Yoga technique,
developed essentially for the evolving Western man. Since one phase of Yoga has as its primary object
the deliberate and willed absorption of enormous quantities of spiritual energy, the Western methods
adopt the same theory in its broad outlines. But its practice proceeds along entirely different lines.
Magnetism, or prana, is imparted from operator to subject by the usual magnetic practical methods and
then thrown back again by the subject to the former operator. In so doing it undergoes a fermentation
and acceleration. As the presence of power increases and induces power, so the continual trituration and
friction of the vital spirit causes an increase both of the energy and its potency. Its intensity is
augmented to a degree which is inconceivable. Its voltage, so to speak, is increased, the psychic state
opened thereby transcending the mere impassivity of the ordinary mesmeric trance - developing slowly
but gradually a charge or flow of libido which becomes so powerful in its intensity and quality as well
to be named the Secret Fire of the Wise.
Having thus dilated and enlarged upon the fundamental bases of the Atwood hypothesis and
compared it briefly with the Yoga practice of pranayama, it may be worth while to give Mrs. Atwood's
own theory in her own words. First of all she castigates the modern (about I850) practice of the
Mesmeric art in these terms.
If, then, we go out at once to throw our common life to common lives (that is, impart our own
unpurified and undeveloped prana to equally unpurified subjects), what wonder we have only
common results? That much depends upon the quality of the life imparted, general observation
teaches; and with what sure corresponding consequences the moral leaven is attended may be
understood, in a degree, by the recipient in the mesmeric trance. But the spontaneous fermentation
which the Vital Spirit undergoes, and the change that is thereby effected in the Passive Subject, is
not taken advantage of in modern practice or pushed to the uttermost; much less is understood that
exact art of grafting and transplanting which the ancients practised, and by means of which a
growth and sublimation of the Spirit was effected.
And again, in describing the technical method whereby the grafting of the Vital Spirit
proceeds, she declares:
As this life, being fermented by this life, its similar, leads into the common trance, or is
entranced, so that consequent life, being fermented by its similar, leads into that third life which
moves in and with the Creative Essence, so that the mind becomes in that case related to the
Universal Vitalizing Power, and so can act Its will . . . The fire of the natural life entering into and
fermenting the natural fire - the same life in another, opens the last and develops and excites and
sets free the celestial life and Light - that is one main principle . . . When one life being fermented
throws its life to another equally fermented, a greater perfection is produced in the patient than was
Page 52
Israel Regardie - The Philosophers Stone
before in the agent who imparts it. That is the law of progression of the vital force - sic itur ad
astra.
It is in this last couple of sentences where the really significant secret is contained. It is in the
transference of spiritual vitality, consciously and deliberately, from operator to subject, and back again,
and retransferring the dynamic charge to subject, continuing the process again and again, which
develops the latent fire and awakens the life of the concealed and latent spirit. There are several
methods already known to us for the fermentation or augmentation of the individual spiritual power
interiorly. Several of these I have summarized and described in my former work The Middle Pillar.
Simplest among such methods is the art of rhythmic breathing. The ordinary Yoga theory postulates that
the most familiar mechanism for dealing with and thus controlling and augmenting prana is the
machinery of the lungs. By deliberately establishing a slow, measured rhythm of exhalation and
inhalation of the breath, whilst formulating in the mind the idea of absorbing vitality from the universe
about one, the body and mind become very considerably charged with vitality. The method is
exceedingly simple, requiring only a little patience and practice to become quite adept with it, and to
benefit in no inconsiderable way by the increase of vitality and power which it imparts.
A second method, rather more complex than the above, is that known as the Middle Pillar
technique, of which a brief description appears in The Art of True Healing. Its procedure is [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Pokrewne