Some people always hated this idea. It reeked of blaming the sufferer for his or her suffering, and it also meant that the bulk of our choices were being made on a level wholly beyond conscious access. We could learn to see others’ choices, but rarely could we grasp more than the outlines of the grand mental architecture that produced them.
Hearing someone read Logic One: Responsibility is Choice, the formal presentation of this teaching, was a turning point for many people, myself included. Its counter-intuitive exposition, combined with its assertion that a wholly unknown side of myself was leading me to make decisions and to experience life in ways that, superficially, I abhorred, simply fascinated me. Perhaps it wasn’t really counter-intuitive at all – it was counter-rational, or counter-consensus, for my intuition was stirred by it.
Back then, I took it too far and learned to condemn myself for every small setback or humiliation. But I also came to recognise over time that, when I felt detached enough to view my life through this lens of Responsibility, I was not riding myself down, but holding myself up. In the decades since I resumed a private life, that alternating pair of attitudes has continued to haunt me. I have revised my interpretation of it, and I don’t hold every little incident to be a chosen infliction or reward, but the basic principle remains. I am the product of myself, and as a general principle, I accept this idea the way a believing Catholic accepts the miracle of the Mass.
Not long ago, I spent some days in the company of a friend to whom life has been very unkind. This individual is plagued by debilitated health, and lives with unsympathetic family members. Yet as I listened to what was happening, the anger being expressed came to seem, not the result of the indignities as was claimed, but also the root cause of it. To be angry is to visualise constantly a world of badness, and to view even emotionally neutral events as hostile or entrapping. Life becomes shaped according to the view we hold of it, and to feel intensely that others do not take us seriously, do not respect us, do not care about us and will not really help us, is to create a private Guantanamo Bay out of our darker imaginings.
For a considerable time, I have mused similarly on my own view of the world, which is optimistic over the long haul, but leads me to construct a very unsatisfying present. I do not feel I can do what I would like to because of a private well of darkness that colours crucial aspects and interactions in my life. This is not the same as clinical depression, though it can be depressing; rather, it is something I absorbed as a child, or maybe brought with me into the world. Precisely which, I can’t say. I have given it various names over the years, none of which defines it very well, because it is such a general and generalised force. It cannot be exorcised nor objectivised, not has it yielded to mystical disciplines, though it has become clearer and been modified as a result of practising them.
The composer Gustav Holst spoke privately of the image of a sad procession, like a funeral, that he saw often with his inner eye. The slow march in Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age in his The Planets is a musical depiction of it, and it recurs in such works as Hammersmith, especially in the opening and closing passages, and in his brooding tone-poem Egdon Heath. There are, I’m convinced, many other people who have similar haunting presences. Some succumb to them as permanent No-Entry signs in life, or, like Holst, make memorable art out of them. But I doubt that actual elimination of such brooding spirits happens very often.
And, I suspect, it should not. Having found sufficient depth in the mystical and magical writings of Aleister Crowley to make a years-long study of them, I have begun to see my own inner darkness as my own Saturn: an aspect, albeit an immense one, of the totality that is known, very clumsily, as the Holy Guardian Angel. To deny or hide from it is to miss that overarching spiritual whole. I only glimpse in the vaguest, often fleeting way what that HGA is about, but I grow more convinced that the concept is a real one with every passing year.
This is not, for me, some guarantee of personal immortality, because I doubt anything very personal survives physical death. But the notion makes me believe something beyond the personal continues. To try and say exactly what is to violate the borders that language cannot cross.
In the meantime, understanding what this Dark Angel prompts me to do is a life-task I sometimes embrace and sometimes shirk. But seeing, with some objectivity, what my friend’s anger does to one human life, I was shocked anew into recognising how my own darkness guides so many poor or unsatisfactory or superficially disappointing choices.
Had I made different moves at any of a number of junctures in life, I would perhaps now be wealthier or more fulfilled. I have not, and I continue addressing this darkness relatively late in my life. It is linked, I have learned, to the notion of True Will, the essential ‘dharma’ of a life, a cousin of the process of attaining to knowledge and conversation of the HGA. Those things I have enacted or not enacted in life, those choices the darker side has led me to make, are part of the totality that underlies any human life. They are not “wrong” except in a narrow, mundane sense, for they are the True Will’s expressions, though manifest in a one-sided fashion.
If I ever do resolve this dilemma, it will not be despite the best efforts of my Dark Angel and its promptings through my subconscious mind. Rather, it will be because they have revealed one side of an immensity that my conscious self has never yet learned to embrace except in brief, wild moments. And because I have, finally, reached the detachment about my choosings that Logic One spoke of to me, nigh on four decades ago.