Therefore, unless you make yourself equal to God, you cannot understand God; for like is not intelligible save to the like. Make yourself grow to a greatness beyond measure; by a leap [of intellect], free yourself from the body; raise yourself above all time, become Eternity; then you will understand God.
Believe that nothing is impossible for you; think yourself immortal and capable of understanding all, all arts, all sciences, the nature of every living being. Mount higher than the highest height; descend lower than the lowest depth. Draw into yourself all sensations of everything created, fire and water, the dry and the moist, imagining that you are everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the sky; that you are not yet born, in the maternal womb, adolescent, old, dead, beyond death. If you embrace in your thought all things at once-all times, places, substances, qualities, quantities-you may understand God.
Quotes
Freedom is something that dies unless it’s used
Great thoughts are against all doctrines of conformity
Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult…All that was required of them was a primitive patriotism which could be appealed to whenever it was necessary to make them accept longer working hours or shorter rations. And when they become discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontentment led nowhere, because being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.
Real magick doesn’t have a safety net.
Magical intent has much in common with what we normally associate with the concept of willpower. It is, however, something much greater than the teeth-gritting power of concentration to force something to happen that was otherwise not going to happen. Magical intent is more a matter “seeing” what you truly want so dearly that your vision (indeed, your love of the vision) creates a living entity. Faced with the birth of this new cosmic citizen on the creative plane, the universe has no alternative but to rearrange conditions on the material plane to accommodate the complete manifestation of this now-inevitable object or event.
Lon Milo DuQuette
Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities
Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.
In a world in which nearly everyone is technically a felon, we rely on the good judgment of prosecutors to decide who should be targets and how hard the law should come down on them. We have thus entered a legal reality not so different from that faced by Socrates when the Thirty Tyrants ruled Athens, and it is a dangerous one. When everyone is guilty of something, those most harshly prosecuted tend to be the ones that are challenging the established order, poking fun at the authorities, speaking truth to power — in other words, the gadflies of our society.
If someone can prove me wrong and show me my mistake in any thought or action, I shall gladly change. I seek the truth, which never harmed anyone: the harm is to persist in one’s own self-deception and ignorance.
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
(via ybb55)