I’m an Aleister Crowley fan. Eight Lectures On Yoga is freely available at the link.
When I first undertook the investigation of Yoga, I was fortunately equipped with a very sound training in the fundamental principles of modern science. I saw immediately that if we were to put any common sense into the business (science is nothing but instructed common sense), the first thing to do was to make a comparative study of the different systems of mysticism. It was immediately apparent that the results all over the world were identical. They were masked by sectarian theories. The methods all over the world were identical; this was masked by religious prejudice and local custom. But in their quiddity — identical! This simple principle proved quite sufficient to disentangle the subject from the extraordinary complexities which have confused its expression.
I also liked this bit:
I do not think that anything will save the country: unless through war and revolution, when those who wish to survive will have to think and act for themselves according to their desperate needs, and not by some rotten yardstick of convention.
We surely have some hard times ahead until reality intrudes more forcefully and clears bad thinking. Change or die.
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One response to “Eight Lectures On Yoga”
This makes sense to me. As a child and later on as a young adult and adult, I had emotional experiences during church services that I was certain was the action of the Holy Spirit. I also had them away from church while contemplating things of a religious nature. To the believer, and I was one at the time, these types of emotional experiences are evidence that God is real and that many of the claims in the Bible (extraordinary and otherwise) are therefore true as well.
But due to a variety of things and events, I’ve re-examined my religious beliefs and the final result is I’m now an atheist. During this re-examination period of the last ten years or so, I reconsidered the validity of my religious experiences and came to the conclusion that there was nothing supernatural about them. I concluded that while the emotions were real, they came from me and not from an outside spirit. I concluded that the reason why I thought these emotions were from an outside spirit is because that is what believers are conditioned to believe about these emotions in this setting. I had these emotions because I believed the Biblical stories and theology to be true. And given the nature of the stories and claims about the nature of our existence, one can’t help but have emotional reactions to them when you believe them to be true events and are relating a true but unseen meta-physical reality.
The realization that my religious “spiritual” experiences were really from me and not from an outside source is just one many reasons why I am now an atheist. Now that I reject the extraordinary claims of the Bible and the notion of a deity existing, I no longer have the same emotional reactions to those claims and stories like I once had as a believer. Now I feel regret and embarrassment for having wasted time and effort in the service of something that was founded on the fears, ignorance, and superstitions of ancient humans.