@IChTUS 93 said
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"That was early Dharana training, comparable to what a Probationer might start from Liber E. Yes, I was referring to the late 1905 period also (but I think it was Burma, not Ceylon)."
Do many Probationers attain Dhyana?"
No. And Crowley wasn't typical. - But yes, some do.
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"I'm speaking of the phase immediately before that, climaxing in the February 9, 1905 diary entry, "About this full moon consciousness began to break through Ruach into Neschamah;" and he then set out to plan his Abramelin operation for the China trip. (You know the pony story etc. - classic Dom. Lim. stuff.)"
Yes, that was when he was doing sammasati, which I always thought was mainly a 7=4 activity."
The practice in question is first assigned in 1=10 (I suspect to help with the Path of Tav). - But also, we're talking about two different things (I just realized): You're focussed on what tasks he was doing, and I'm focussed on what stage of internal development he'd reached.
"In 'Confessions' he wrote, "From this date [19th November 1905] till the first week in February, I was intellectually insane. The actual ordeal is described with intense simplicity and passion in 'Aha!' I call it 'the Ordeal of the Veil, the Second Veil' and the 'Veil of the Abyss'. The complete destruction of reason left me without other means of apprehension than Neschamah.""
As indicated previously: Yes, I'm sure this is how he saw it at the time. It fit the GD-rooted framework he was using to categorize his progress. But when you look at it, this is just the Ruach's disentanglement as Yetzirah opens to Briah, i.e., the defining characteristic of what we now know as the Dominus Liminis stage.
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"It's quite clear that AC, at that time, thought he was already a Greatly Honored Adeptus Exemptus, and was putting everything in perspective of that. (That's the basis of so much of this confusion.) But he wasn't, and he came to understand this later."
Was the diagram at the beginning of "Magick", which shows the dates of his attainments (including 9=2), not done by him? I guess he may have written the dates for the earlier Grades, and possibly added the higher ones later, without altering the dates of the earlier Grades."
For most (all?) of his life, he tended to list the attainment of GD-level grades as "when he got the grade." And why not? He was self-promoting, and it looks better to the reader who would be impressed by such things, and it's technically correct.
"That ceremony with D.D.S. was on the 27th July 1906. And whilst it was extraordinary, Crowley does not appear to have considered it as the completion of the Abramelin operation."
Of course he didn't. He had sworn to perform the operation for six months, so it wasn't finished until the six months was finished, regardless of what occurred along the way. (Similarly, during my 5=6 stage I committed to a 93-day operation and, although the desired result was clearly established in less than half that time, I continued all 93 days - which I'm glad I did, because the morning of the final day was a further result that blew away everything that came before it.)
"Then in 'Confessions' he writes in relation to the experience of Shivadarshana on 9th October 1906, "On the ninth, having prepared a full invocation and ritual, I performed it. I had no expectation, I think, of attaining any special success; but it came. I had performed the Operation of the Sacred Magick of Abra-Melin the Mage.""
Yes, I'd forgotten that. It matches my experience just mentioned above. In the last few days of the operation, I had no reason to believe there was anything more coming. Then the final day, upon doing the invocation, I got blown the fuck away.
"In 'The Temple of Solomon the King' it says, "The ostensible object of this Retirement was to discover for certain whether by the use of the plain strightforward methods accessible to the normal man he could definitely attain Samadhi within a reasonable time. In other words, whether the methods themselves were valuable.""
I'm not sure what your point was. You're basically saying what I was saying.