From beyond the Abyss (lV.)

May ALL adepts attain the City of Pyramids

How to get there, one might wonder.

One way:


"The only correct and adequate mode of the Attainment of Understanding is to shut off and to inhibit the rational mind altogether, thus leaving a Tabula rasa upon which the entirely alien faculty -- de novo and sui generis -- can write its first word.

But then (it will surely be said) what is more unintelligent than this supposed Intelligence? than this formless, even delirious Ecstasy which sweeps away all shapes of thought? No sane man would deny this premiss: but the explanation is that this Ecstasy is (so to say) the throe of Birth of the new faculty. It is surely natural for an observer to be startled, for the moment, by the discovery of a new Universe. Ananda must be mastered manfully, not indulged as a vice in the manner of the Mystic! Samadhi must be clarified by Sila, by the stern virtue of constraint: and then appears the paradox that the new Law of the Mind has "come not to destroy but to fulfil" the old. 
The Understanding takes full cognizance of all that vast material which the Reason was unable to build into any coherent structure. The contradictions have disappeared by absorption; they have been accepted as essential factors in the nature of Truth, which without them were a mere congeries of Facts.

It will be clear from all these considerations that there need be no surprise at this primordial paradox: that Scepticism, absolute in every dimension, is the sole possible basis of true Attainment. All attempts to shirk the issue by appeals to "faith," by mystic transcendental sophistries, or any other spiritual varieties of the Three-Card-Trick, are devoted to the most abject destruction.

One cannot "find the Lady" by any other way than that of the Knight-Errant, of the Great Fool -- the Way of the Eagle in the Air -- whose Sacred Number is the Sacred Zero. Yea also, Naught being All, and All being Pan, the only due address to Godhead is in the dual form

[GRK WRDS (all-devourer, all-begetter)] PAMPHAGE PAGGENETOR.

For all must be destroyed that All may be begotten."

- The Little Essays, Understanding by A. Crowley