?

I got nothin', baby.

Or maybe I just got pms.

you and me both.

So it seems. Sorry baby.

Look on the bright side, I'm the only one who gets the gooey parts.

at least then i'd be able to prove it.

I believe you.

"For being furnished with every kind of armour, and armed, he is similar to the goddess." -- ZOROASTER.


My dear Professor, how can you expect me to believe this nonsense about bacteria? Come, saith he, to the microscope; and behold them!

I don't see anything.

Just shift the fine adjustment -- that screw there -- to and fro very slowly!

I can't see --

Keep the left eye open; you'll see better!

Ah! -- But how do I know? ...

Oh, there are a thousand questions to ask!

Is it fair observation to use lenses, which admittedly refract light and distort vision?

How do I know those specks are not dust?

Couldn't those things be in the air?

And so on.

The Professor can convince me, of course, and the more sceptical I am the more thoroughly I shall be convinced in the end; but not until I have learned to use a microscope. And when I have learned -- a matter of some months, maybe years --- how can I convince the next sceptic?

Only in the same way, by teaching him to use the instrument.

And suppose he retorts, "You have deliberately trained yourself to hallucination!" What answer have I? None that I know of. Save that microscopy has revolutionised surgery, &c., just as mysticism has revolutionised, again and again, the philosophies of mankind.

The analogy is a perfect one. By meditation we obtain the vision of a new world, even as the world of microorganisms was unsuspected for centuries of thinking -- thinking without method -- bricks without straw!

Just so, also, the masters of meditation have erred. They have attained the Mystic Vision, written long books about it, assumed that the conclusions drawn from their vision were true on other planes -- as if a microscopist were to stand for Parliament on the platform "Votes for Microbes" -- never noted possible sources of error, fallen foul of sense and science, dropped into oblivion and deserved contempt.

I want to combine the methods, to check the old empirical mysticism by the precision of modern science.

Hashish at least gives proof of a new order of consciousness, and (it seems to me) it is this primâ facie case that mystics have always needed to make out, and never have made out.

But to-day I claim the hashish-phenomena as mental phenomena of the first importance; and I demand investigation.

I assert -- more or less ex cathedrâ -- that meditation will revolutionise our conception of the universe, just as the microscope has done.

Then my friend the physiologist remarks:

"But if you disturb the observing faculty with drugs and a special mental training, your results will be invalid."

And I reply:

"But if you disturb the observing faculty with lenses and a special mental training, your results will be invalid."

And he smiles gently:

"Patient experiment will prove to you that the microscope is reliable."

And I smile gently:

"Patient experiment will prove to you that meditation is reliable."

So there we are.

So there we are indeed.

if you've got some time:

http://users.lycaeum.org/%7Esputnik/Ludlow/Texts/Rats/psych.html

it's well worth a read.

"But unfortunately the "common sense" of mankind retorted that after all the interior angles of every triangle "are" together equal to two right-angles; and that a mental process which deduced this so accurately from a few simple axioms and definitions must be trustworthy; adding something uncomplimentary about Germans and Metaphysics.

Both are right, and both are wrong. In the world of common sense, reason works; in the world of philosophy, it doesn't. The metaphysical deadlock is a real and not a verbal one. The inner nature of things is not rational, at least so long as we are asked to define "rational" as "rationalistic." Why should it be? Why should the rules of golf govern the mechanics of the flight of a golf-ball?"

we could pick up a crowley book anytime. the one im told to get is like fifty bucks though, so we'd have to split it.

Fair enough, I'm in.