About a million years ago I was young and studying Zen as an unsui with Jiyu Kennett, living in her monastery which was then located in Oakland, California. This was long before her notorious visions. The community would eventually acquire property in Mt Shasta, in far northern California, but this was well before that time, as well…
The roshi had fallen in with Alan Watts who would eventually help her get her first book published. Watts had been given a copy of Aleister Crowley’s autobiography, the Confessions, and he passed it on to her. (My memory was that this was from Watts’ publisher at the time, Pantheon. But a brief bibliographic search suggests this does not seem to be so…)
Kennett read it and very much enjoyed it. As a child Crowley was used as the bogey man, and she would be told if she weren’t a good girl, Aleister Crowley would come and take her away. And, I guess, eat her. That part wasn’t particularly clear, although in the day Crowley liked to package himself as the “wickedest man in the world.”
Anyway, she decided to use the text for a master class with her senior students. She said it was a map of anti-enlightenment, and we went through it page by page. Although frankly today mainly I recall it as a salacious read for young monks…
Years later when I was accumulating various translations of the Tao Te Ching I stumbled upon a version done by Crowley. I think it tells the whole story…
But first here’s the version by Stephen Mitchell.
The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.
The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin of all particular things.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.
Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.
Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.
Personally, I find this one of the great spiritual passages of all time.
And now here’s Crowley’s text:
The Tao-Path is not the All-Tao. The Name is not the Thing named.((Tao parallels Pleroma, Shiva, Jod, etc. Teh parallels Logos, Sakti, He, etc. But the conception of Laotze unites all these at their highest. The best parallel is given in Liber CCXX, Caps. I. and II., where Hadit is Tao and Nuit, Teh — (Yet these are in certain aspects interchanged!) The point of this paragraph is to make discrimination or definition, not to assert the superiority of either conception. The illusion of any such preference would depend on the Grade of Initiation of a Student. A Magus 9 Degree = 2 Square of A.’. A.’. would doubtless esteem the Path of ‘Becoming’ as his Absolute, for the law of his Grade is Change (see Liber I. vel Magi.) But — who knows? — an ipsissimus 10 Degree = 1 Square might find a conception to transcend even this. For instance, one might interpret this first paragraph as saying that Becoming is not Tao, but that Tao is a Being whose nature is Becoming. Matter and Motion cannot exist separately. The reader should regard every verse of this Book as a text worth of the most intense and prolonged meditation. He will not understand the Book thoroughly until he has wrought his mind into its proper shape in the great Forge of Samadhi.))
The text continues, but I think it’s enough. I’ll let you as the reader decide whether Mr Crowley caught the essence or not.
But here’s the lesson for this little post composed at the dawn of a new year.
The matter of life and death is of supreme importance.
We are faced with two options, to fritter our lives away or to deal with it, face it, and engage it with everything we’ve got.
The ways we can fritter our lives away are many. In my opinion Crowley gave himself over to ego and appetite. His Tao Te Ching is a rats nest of opinions. And, I believe, a waste of a good mind.
Of course the list of ways to waste our lives is long…
But the way to engage is simple.
Sit down.
Shut up.
Pay attention.
And one more thing.
Then get up and do something…
How’s that for a New Year’s resolution?
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