Refund and Reparation

 I was sitting there tonight trying to pretend that this had been a very brave voyage of adventure because it had been so dangerous and there’s so many men fall on their faces doing this. As a matter of fact it has not been a very dangerous voyage. But uh… the point is that an awful lot of men have fallen on their faces in the last century trying to hit this track. Uh… amongst them were Nietzsche, and with him the German nation. Amongst them were Schopenhauer; uh… amongst them were Aleister Crowley. They were all trying to hit this track and they were overshooting, undershooting, round and round; because they were looking at it as ‘It’ and trying to analyse ‘It’ as itself. And trying to apply to ‘It’ its own peculiarities of logic and formulation. And it had no such evaluation. Needs a dichotomy to work something out. Two things must come together to work something out. So there was that big body of data and all of a sudden we ran into it with electronic material and Western logic, plus the Western belief that it could be done and it wasn’t complicated.

I ran in ahead of the data this business that all things are basically simple, and had this background of other material. And then I completely neglected that other background of material except where it would cross accidentally once in a while.

And I knew these two fields I… I don’t know anybody else in this century or the end of the last one who had these two backgrounds; background in mysticism and uh… occultism – metaphysics, theology, hokus-pokus, voodoo, mumbo-jumbo, magic, spiritualism uh…and so on, who took a rigorous course of Western orientation. You study civil engineering and it is about the roughest discipline there is, clinically because it says it’s there and it’s there and that you will only solve it if you recognize that it’s there and so on. And that put one on the track of agreement and a lot of other things.

So these two things crossed: This tremendous body of information in the Eastern oriental sphere and this tremendous body of collected information in the occidental, the Western world. And those two bodies of information had never been studied one to the other. I don’t know why nobody from that area about which I have any knowledge whatsoever, in India or the studies thereof, ever thought it worth his while to step out of that field and try to study something else. And I don’t know anybody in engineering who would do anything but get down and swear and spit and get very thoroughly upset at the slightest mention of the word ‘mysticism’.