Here follows Crowley's Commentary (section subtitled "On Changing States of Mind"), from
Commentaries on the Holy Books and Other Papers: The Equinox (Equinox, Vol 4, No 1).
Verse 37. The dolphin signifies any state of mind that is uneasy, ill-content, and unable to escape from its surroundings.
Verse 38. Cure this by reflecting that it is the material of Beauty, just as Macbeth's character, Timon's misfortunes, etc., gave Shakespeare his chance. Make your own trouble serve your sense of your own life as a sublime drama.
Verse 39. Your thought will thus become lyrical; but this will not satisfy your need. You will feel the transitory nature of such a thought.
Verse 40. Transform it by looking at it as a necessary and important fact in the framework of the Universe.
Verse 41. The lyrical exaltation will now pass into a deep realization of yourself and all that concerns you as an Inhabitant of Nature, containing in your own consciousness the elements of the Divine, and the Bestial, both equally necessary to the Wholeness of the Universe. Your original discomfort of mind will now appear as pleasant, since, lacking that experience, you would have been eternally the poorer.
Verse 42. Now interpret that experience "as a particular dealing of God with your soul." Discover an articulate explanation of it: compel it to furnish an intelligible message.
Verse 43. Follow up this train of thought until you enter into Rapture, caused by the recognition of the fact that you—and all else—are ecstatic expressions of a sublime Spiritual Spasm, elements of an omniform Eucharist. Truth, no matter how splendid, will now lose all meaning for you. It belongs to a world where discrimination between Subject and Predicate is possible, which implies imperfection; and you are risen above it. You thus become Pan, the All; no longer a part. You thrill with the joy of the lust of creation, become a virgin goddess for your sake. Also, you are insane, sanity being the state which holds things in proper proportion; while you have dissolved all in your own being, in ecstasy beyond all measure.
Verse 44. Do not attempt to cure a fit of melancholy by lofty ideas: such will seem absurd, and you will only deepen your despair.
How many of us have ever truly tried applying Crowley's step-by-step instructions on "cur[ing] a fit of melancholy" to their end, rather than solely relying on the counsel of one's peers and friends and loved ones? While I by no means believe such counsel ought to be dispensed with (a support system is obviously a personal boon), results in dealing with emotionally-critical states rely ultimately on one's own power, one's "ingenium." "Neither grace nor guilt" means one is one's sole redeemer. This is a practical differentiation between our age, the Aeon of Horus, and that of its predecessor.
The issue is complicated by the fact that, in order to effectively carry out these instructions, one must see one's own interior, subjective states as possessed of substance rather than as simply affect (because one cannot bring form to the insubstantial), which flies in the face of modern psychological interpretations of such states. First, one must arrive at the realization that one's inner states are subject to how one chooses to see them, rather than simply being at their whim; and the experience of these states as something substantial (though not the less "transitory" thereby: the water in a swift river is also possessed of a "substance" capable of sweeping one away) has historical precedents in tantric work. Julius Evola writes in
The Yoga of Power: Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way (pp 63-64):
Those who follow this path and the disciplines associated with it eventually come to realize, through a direct experience, that passions, emotions and impulses are only mitigated, variously conditioned manifestations and faint echoes of powers. [...] The "great elements" exist in and of themselves, beyond their visible manifestations. For instance, the fire of any given flame is only a particular and a contingent apparition caused by certain constant conditions that are mistaken for its cause, namely, fire itself. Thus, once concupiscence, hatred, anger, and sadness are manifested in various individuals because of different circumstances, they can all be identified with corresponding shaktis ["powers"] or beings (devatas), in other words, with metasubjective forces. Therefore, one should not say "I love," "I hate," and so forth, but rather, "A given force is now manifested in me as love, or as hate," etc. A proof of this theory relies both on the compulsiveness of passions and of emotions and on the little power that people can exercise over them, regardless of what people may think.
Or, as stated more succinctly in Liber LXV: "Behold! the Abyss of the Great Deep. Therein is a mighty dolphin, lashing his sides with the force of the waves."
Given the substantial nature of emotion, then, the operative principle is that of the tree that bends with the wind, rather than snapping due to rigidity. "Do not attempt to cure a fit of melancholy by lofty ideas" Crowley writes. One should rather identify with the melancholy—or whatever afflicts oneself—than try to stave it off, for the friction generated thereby will likely only feed the substantial source of the emotion, "and you will only deepen your despair" while wallowing in your impotence.
One always identifies, to a large extent, with what one considers beautiful, so it follows that one makes of one's emotional crisis the substance of the beautiful: "Cure this by reflecting that it is the material of Beauty, just as Macbeth's character, Timon's misfortunes, etc., gave Shakespeare his chance. Make your own trouble serve your sense of your own life as a sublime drama." The way forward through the morass is not to be conflated with simple masochism; rather it is an intuitive-aesthetic experience above the confines of simple sensual gratification, and is therefore an act of will. The danger in seeing in Crowley's instructions a prescription for a lumpen masochism is that one never rises above the conditioning of the world of the senses, which is the most immediate trough for the emotions. When, in other words, does the feeding stop?
The hellish nature of emotional crises, aside from the lack of control one feels over them, rests most often on their typical "stupidity," i.e., their stochastic nature and lack of meaning. Absent meaning, too, it's difficult to ascribe beauty to something, and Crowley recognizes that the shortest route to meaning and to beauty is through narrative; one sees one's life as a "sublime drama." One sees one's crisis as an inherent part of a larger drama, a ritual through whose consummation a redemption may be effected.
Beauty, however, is fleeting, and the beautiful is too often characterized as merely adjunct and ancillary to the necessary - because it is a "subjective" experience there must be something accidental or haphazard in its manifestation - so one is then tasked to see in one's crisis the workings of necessity itself, an "important fact in the framework of the Universe." This, of course, only increases the sum total of meaning ascribable to one's crisis, thereby decreasing the pain paid as dowry to the unknowable.
One has now come to a place where one can take comfort in the experience of feeling oneself a necessary part of manifestation, of the matter and motion of the Universe; and therefore it's at this point that one has most likely arrived at being capable of managing one's crisis; one has arrived at the trough of the wave, and one can sink no further; it wounds no more. And most people would be content with that; to suffer no more is as great a reward in life as a slave can reasonably expect. But the Thelemic path is not one of simply making do, of simple survival, for lack of suffering is not a sufficient condition for joy. After all, "Existence is pure joy," as we're told; and it is the sole prerogative of kings and gods to experience manifestation in such a way. Therefore, how does one make of one's crisis fodder for coronation and apotheosis?
“Exaltation” gives way to “deep realization”; that is, the exalting of the negative state unto an object of beauty necessarily passes beyond the need to view it as "negative," and should be replaced with the beginnings of direct gnosis of Nature itself, the Nature of that very same Universe of which one previously saw oneself as an integral part, Nature as both God and Beast conjoined in the eternal nuptial of objective, indestructible existence, “world without end”: “… containing in your own consciousness the elements of the Divine, and the Bestial, both equally necessary to the Wholeness of the Universe.” That an almost ironic species of inversion or reversal of perspective is expected, can be gleaned by the symbols and terminology employed: the “bird” becomes a “faun,” “lyrical exaltation” becomes “deep realization,” the “above” becomes the “below.” From the lofty abstracted “Universe” one descends into “Nature,” and one celebrates and affirms sensate experience once again as one’s original pain is transmuted into the preliminary joy which usually accompanies states of gnosis. The far side of the trough has begun to be ascended, the opposite crest seen dimly through the clouds.
Crowley’s commentary to the next verse (42) contains part of the formula for the achievement of the grade of Magister Templi, to interpret every experience “as a particular dealing of God with your soul.” This is the ultimate fiat for one’s experience of crisis, that it has been specifically vouchsafed unto oneself—and no other, at any other time—as a direct communication from the Absolute; but it is not in a passively receptive state that this is accomplished, because one is enjoined to “compel it to furnish an intelligible message.” One “forces the hand of chance,” as it were, and demands an accounting thereby, much like Jacob wrestling his Angel. The gift of this unique experience is answered with a stern “Who gives this, and why?”
And one persists in this until one is rewarded with “Rapture,” attendant upon recognizing the identity, in oneself, of the Virgin Daughter in Malkuth (the sphere of the elements, the disk, the “omniform Eucharist”) and the Queen in Binah (the all-embracing cup, the great sea which absorbs and neutralizes all brackish waters), the bipartite Eucharist of Bread and Wine, the Body and the Blood of God; this is the redemption of the descent into apathy, anxiety, depression, and all states constituted of exaggerated “gravitas.” The struggle of St. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra against the “spirit of gravity” reaches its culmination in oneself when the Trance of Sorrow in the Sphere of Saturn, Lord of Heaviness and Contraction, is understood for what it truly is: the Trance of Wonder in the Sphere of Saturn, King of the Golden Age, but dimmed through the lens of Limit: refracted, atomistic, sequential. St. William Blake tells us: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” And Crowley writes in his essay "
Sorrow":
Each Event is an Act of Love, and so generates Joy: all existence is composed solely of such Events. But how comes it then that there should be even an illusion of Sorrow?
Simply enough; by taking a partial and imperfect Vision. An example: in the human body each cell is perfect, and the man is in good health; but should we choose to regard almost any portion of the machine which sustains him, there will appear various decompositions and the like, which might well be taken to imply the most tragic Events. And this would inevitably be the case had we never at any time seen the man as a whole, and understood the necessity of the divers processes of nature which combine to make life.
The “various decompositions” Crowley speaks of are processes known to modern medicine as
apoptosis (from Greek: “dropping off” of petals or leaves): a type of programmed cell-death without which the body as a whole would die quickly. Menstruation, for example, is an apoptotic process. The Wikipedia entry on apoptosis states that:
… apoptosis, in general, confers advantages during an organism's life cycle. For example, the differentiation of fingers and toes in a developing human embryo occurs because cells between the fingers apoptose; the result is that the digits are separate. Between 50 billion and 70 billion cells die each day due to apoptosis in the average human adult. For an average child between the ages of 8 and 14, approximately 20 billion to 30 billion cells die a day. In a year, this amounts to the proliferation and subsequent destruction of a mass of cells equal to an individual's body weight.
Taken on their own, these billions of discrete events certainly would take on the character of the tragic; it’s only in the macrocosm that they are seen as part of the ongoing maintenance and health of the whole. The will to not merely accept and manage one’s more grave mental states and personal crisis-events, but to openly embrace and welcome them as being of essence apoptotic—both microcosmically and macrocosmically—is the other, concomitant side to the “Yes” to life Zarathustra teaches us; as another blogging friend once pointed out, it is also necessary to say “Yes” to death ("initiation = active death" - Julius Evola).
“Who gives this, and why?” Just as, in nondualist metaphysics, “the knower is one,” so, ultimately, are the giver and receiver. One not only arrives at the “why” of the crisis, but also at the “why” behind one’s incarnation, one’s very own primordial and indestructible choice to be—which is another way of saying “True Will.”
