P375 Perdurabo The Magician By Richard Kaczynski

“Beast launched into a lecture, “I want to explain to you fully, and in a few words, what initiation means, what is meant when we talk of the Real Self, and what the Real Self is.” In speaking, he equated the holy guardian angel with the subconscious mind: illumination began when one let it work without interference from the conscious mind, for the conscious mind repressed impulses of the subconscious, resulting in restriction and evil.

“There is no sin but Restriction,” The Book of the Law said, and it applied here. The most ubiq- uitous urge, which was constantly repressed to the detriment to our mental and physical health and Freud concurred with this was sex. Rather than treat it as an unfortunate and shameful accident of nature, AC saw it as a basic part of himself, not only physically but as a symbol of God’s ability to create,

This was news to Bennett, who thought the holy guardian angel was super- conscious. If Crowley was right, then all he had to do was listen to his subcon- scious.

That was one meaning of “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” The revelation made his head reel. He next had a wild impulse. Rather than ignore it, he gave in. Bennett ran down the beach and jumped into the water, joined shortly thereafter by Leah and Crowley. After the swim, Bennett excitedly asked Beast, “Please tell me again what you said just now.”

“How the devil should I remember?” he asked, but with Bennett’s remind- ers, he reconstructed the discussion as best he could. Bennett smiled with satis- faction. “You have given me the key to the inmost treasury of my soul.”

Returning to the Abbey, he pondered his illumination, musing, “I wish I knew this before. It would have saved me a lot of misery.” Going to bed at eleven that night, the churning in his mind kept him awake, and his head throbbed painfully with a pressure within, threatening to split. Suffering for four hours, suffocating, he rose from his sweat-soaked bed, threw open his window, and pressed his hands to his head to ease the pain. Then, palms to temples, Bennett dashed out into the night, gasping for air like a drowning man. Finally, a voice deep within instructed, “Breathe deep.” When he did, his body relaxed. He felt the sweat coating his skin, the stones and thorns pressing into his feet. The pain dissolved, and the pressure folded upon itself. Bennett returned to the Abbey thirty minutes after leaving and quickly fell asleep. “Absolute blackness pervaded my whole being,” he recorded in his journal.

Bennett stayed in his room the next day and went to bed early. His claus- trophobia returned that evening, but one thought penetrated the chaos in his brain. Bennett grabbed a piece of paper and desperately scribbled it down.”

“What fools we men are! We make for ourselves a prison, and erect mirrors that cover all the four walls of this prison; and not being satisfied with this, we cover the ceiling with a mirror as well. And these are our five senses which reflect themselves in hundreds of forms until we are so befogged that we believe that these reflections of ourselves of man as Man and Bull- are all that is. But there are a few who have examined these mirrors and pol- ished them, and discovered that the more the mirrors are polished the less reflection they give. Then a time has come when they have found that they are not mirrors at all, but only veils, and that one can see through the veils”

Thus he understood that one could find one’s holy guardian angel. On the third night of his trance, Bennett’s mind remained placid. He felt no pain or discomfort, and he understood Thelema better. In his diary he recorded what, in his mind, was conclusive proof of the Law’s importance: “Our Father, which art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom Come, Thy WILL be done…” Frank Bennett understood.