Holy Simplicity

Where did the idea of Magic as an old-fashioned movement come from? Strangely enough, the view that there are “old” and “new” methods of development, the “Age of Aquarius” requires “new approaches,” and that reiki, energy work and extrasensory perception are “progressive” compared to Traditional Magic is not so uncommon.

Nevertheless, careful analysis shows that this is not only a matter of the megalomania of each new generation, which treats everything that preceded it as rubbish unworthy of attention and rejects millennia of spiritual development in its naive complacency.

Such a view is uninteresting in itself and contains the seeds of its own destruction.

But the “Age of Aquarius,” “new methods for new people” — that is a phenomenon of a somewhat different order. The Indigo civilization, gaining momentum in our world and erasing the last strongholds of free thought and Magic, is hostile to “traditionalism” not merely out of conceit; it is hostile to it ideologically.

Being the highest form of development of technological consciousness, this ideology is indeed founded on principles entirely different from those of Magic, relying exclusively on the principle of intelligence. It would be wrong to assert that “the world does not divide entirely into intelligence” — it certainly does — each of the principles of the Psychocosmos is perfect and capable of encompassing it entirely.

And this is not about “perfection” or “imperfection”; it is a matter of the system’s flexibility or rigidity.

Each of the principles — whether intelligence, feeling or will — when brought to its maximum gives a complete picture.

We have already said that the intelligence principle, taken to its extreme, everywhere and always demands the establishment of an iron law of order: every nuance of spiritual content must unfold in a precise, sharply defined form, and they must all be coordinated. Anything that contradicts this is deemed false or insane. That which cannot be expressed in a rigidly defined form is declared not to exist at all and incapable of existing. Such a view creates the impression that there is no, and cannot be, an absolute mystery in the world; a day will come — and all mysteries will fall beneath the overpowering light of the reigning truth. At the same time the individual is gripped by a sense of uniqueness. A passionate desire for vigorous activity, creativity, and victory arises. Obstacles seem negligible and non-existent; everything appears possible, easy to achieve. But, as we have said, this worldview quickly degenerates into an ossification of life, into the deadening of the self. All the forces generated by the Psychocosmos collapse upon the self — contempt for everything arises and an artificial pride that brings no satisfaction, and without it a bleak despair takes hold.

The apparent “simplicity” and “harmony” of such constructions, stripped of mystery, also proves to be devoid of inner life — and this is what we observe everywhere.

One-sidedness is not a perversion of the Psychocosmos principles themselves, but a reaction triggered by disharmonic tension that is in itself aimed at the good, yet which cannot be sustained. There is no perversion of the good principle and no replacement of it by an evil one, only an excessive manifestation of its power. If a being approaches any one principle in a one-sided way — destruction is inevitable. This idea remains true for each of the principles, which is reflected, in particular, in mythology — every god has both a benevolent and a destructive aspect.