Aristocrates – I felt very privileged to receive your words. I feel I ought to share something of my beginnings with you and others. So here are words from my Journal.
December 24th 1966 - I have hesitated for some days to start this book. I have looked along other streets, but could see nothing at the end of them, or even nearby, to attract my footsteps. Despite the hesitation however, the urge to start has been with me all through the last few weeks. Now I can find no more contradictions in myself, or in circumstances.
Thinking back, there has been a long “in between” since I last wrote anything serious to myself, or for my own notice. The last thing was undoubtedly Apologia Rosae Crucis. This, being such statements as Psychic Development, Light of the Mind, History of the Soul, Cosmic Majesty of Sex, Alchemy of Self, and The Silent Watcher, was surely the emptying that led me to leave the Rosicrucian Order. The time, then, must be all of two years.
Two years - but they are only two that link with another two, or another four. I am on the brink of my 30s, and must look back. It was in my 21st year that I married, and tentatively began The Arcane Library, first as a group, then as a book business. This began proper on October 19th 1960, and ended around October 1964. Four years of possession by an ideal. Four years of non-ceasing toil. Toward the end came a breaking up period. I had written and printed my statements, had discovered the idea of doing nothing, and had met Sonia. (A beautiful woman I fell in love with but never acted upon – causing me a torment for years).
All the passions I had previously held back now spilled out and tormented me. My statements had loosened my attitudes, my Godalmightyness. I conceived at last, the idea of letting God act through me as an unfixed concept, of not making my own God. The wilderness swallowed me up, and fantasies and torment were everywhere; in my own body, on the faces of others, screaming from my mind and emotions.
At the end of the two years, I find myself torn from certainties I knew. Without the surety of God or myself, having lost what I had with nothing as positive, or as dynamic in its impress, taking its place. Gone are my recitations of definite truths, definite goals, and definite gods. Gone the energy that drove me for every day of four years.
See my hand is opened.
Look at what it held,
Some night dreams and some daydreams,
That for a while impelled.
Despite my opened hand, and uncertainties, I am more at peace now than ever before. It is not even a certain peace, but even that has to be accepted. So here we are (the scattered parts suddenly), at the eve of another year, seeking to restate what has been my experience, and what have been my realisations therefrom.
January 2nd 1967.
I can’t say I was a romantic or precocious child, or even a child of God. The first memories that come to mind are my childhood fears. These are common to all children - the dark - losing one’s mother - fear of not belonging and of not being accepted. I had no dreams about what I wanted to be. For instance, I can never remember ever wishing to be an engine driver. Soldiers passing with their rifles marching to D-Day let into me a desire to handle guns, but it was not excessive. Nothing stands out as a golden thread through my early childhood. It consisted merely of separate events that are mostly forgotten. Added later (That is, except for one memory deeply etched. I must have been about four, pedalling my child’s car up the walk my family had a shop in. I got to the top of the walk and saw a man cleaning the drain. In those days he had a metal ladle and a prodding rod. I felt an enormous feeling of wonder at what he might find there, money, fountain pens – anything. I knew then that was what I wanted to work at when I was older. Later I realised that it was what led me to work at cleaning the blocked drains inside of people – I was fascinated by seeing and learning what came out of them. It was what led up to writing so much about the process.)
Looking at my parents, there is much of them in me. My mother is an emotionally positive person. What she feels is right. She has no doubts about the likeness of what she feels. Thus she is able to display a social temper, angering shopkeepers etc., (who she feels, or thinks), have done her wrong. I would say that she has virtually no insight into her own feelings, and I have never heard her delve analytically into herself. This adds to her conscious certainty, although I must say I find it hard to understand what her inner life is like. I can only write about what appears objectivity. For example, whenever my mother mentions God, it is in a manner of positive belief, and yet such statements always seem surface statements, and I can never ascertain whether such belief comes from real inner conviction. It would seem more likely that they are second-hand - that they have been inherited from her mother unquestioned by either her emotions or her intellect.
But there are forces lurking beneath the certainty, her fear or loathing of sex, and anything to do with it. She will laugh at a joke with the best of them, but there is a terrible bitterness attached to her remarks about loose women, men’s dirty underwear, sex in general. She also talks with pride about the infrequency of her sexual relations.
She is given to enormous exaggeration, tremendous certainty, in the face of logical argument, and intense feeling.
Despite all this if I am to get through to the soul in her, I must say that these things are but shadows cast over her spirit, which still shines through. The soul is a proud, forceful one, strong in its love, determination and faithfulness.
January 3rd 1967 - My father is an entirely different proposition. At times, he displays the depths and subtleties of human nature. I mean by this that his conscious mind dips into his psychic/emotional experiences of life, and he lives them again in speech. In this manner he can talk of his family and youthful experiences. But this psychic life seems to be only alive up to the time of his marriage, and retarded afterwards. Thus he seems to be far less conscious of his psychic reactions to present-day life than to his past experience. Therefore, his present life lacks the depths of relationship of which he is capable. He no longer reaches, or even admits (except rarely) the depths of his present experience – not to me anyway.
This possibly stems from several factors - an almost extreme inability to express love and affection. Yet he is not incapable of feeling these things - a fixed mental or intellectual philosophy, of quite a materialistic nature. His soul, I would say, is far more realised than my mother’s, but it has become anchored, unmoving.
He is a restless man, physically and emotionally. His environment is never satisfying. He does not wish to move from it, only to keep improving it. The only failing in this is that he does so without an ideal in mind. His almost continuous efforts at decorating and modifying his house, therefore achieve very little apparent results. I mean this in the sense that compared with his efforts and money spent, his house should leave on one a far more impressive imprint.
Another of his difficulties, I should imagine, is anxiety about initiating changes. Therefore, even with sufficient capital, he has never attempted his own business.
Briefly, that is the emotional, mental and spiritual soil from which I spring. Physically, both of my parents are hardy and well built. However, they are both of a somewhat nervous disposition in various ways, as suggested above. My mother holds firm to her own mother, resisting change. Emotional situations arise when circumstances conflict with her firmly held values. This conflict between the events and her own attitudes, manifest as exhausting illness and emotional disturbance.
For my father, his apprehensions are more in regard to fear of heights, insufficient money, being made to look a fool, illness, hospitals, etc. This suggests fear of personal safety, or fear of death.
To say that these dispositions have blended evenly in myself is to speak without due thought. It is more difficult to assess my own position from an objective viewpoint, but underlying most of my activities are a need to be loved, a need to know, and a need to succeed.
My search for love is sometimes a desperate and anguished one, made difficult by my inability to ignore the various points of view, and signs of truth. My attempts at knowing are equally as desperate. Having developed, or realised, in recent years, a caustic cynicism, that cuts achievements and experience to the bone, my search for knowledge has been a frustrating one. This would not be so hard to bear, if another part of my nature were not so much given to dreams and hopes, often of an impossibly romantic nature. My hopes spur me on to activity, efforts to achieve some impractical dream, while my cynicism is actively showing me just how little of that hope I manage to realise.
Tony