College of Thelema: Thelemic Education

Oh for f***'s sake, has no-one actually read the history of this? Crowley was prescribed Diamorphine for the bronchitis he developed after the Kanchenchunga expedition of 1905, he did not use it for pleasure or magical purposes. He was deeply addicted early on, and was prescribed a new miracle cure for it, Cocaine, before doctors finally realised that was addictive too - Freud was a coke-head as well. His first recorded attempt to give up is in Liber Tzba, which I published in the early 1990's and which dates to 1918, years before Cefalu.
He remained addicted all his life, he was not clean in the 1930s.
And if anyone, ever again, says i can't understand Crowley or Thelema without becoming a junkie myself, I would point out that Diamorphine was first introduced to Crowley the year after the reception of Liber Al, and I do not need , in a day and age where heroin (the brand name by which Diamorphine was sold in the USA) is understood, to act like a twat to be a better magician.

@RifRaf said

"But is any of that useful for later attainments? I was doing some intense Pranayama for about 8 months, and during the last 2 weeks I started to get hallucinations from a certain way I would hold my breath, and how long I would hold it. I would contemplate something and then my mind would just open up and all these dancing and luminous colors and sounds would flood my senses. But I still have yet to find any use for it or any meaning behind it."

Valid question...

Pranayama has two primary advantages that I can see, aside from the broader category of contributing to health and giving a tool to calm and smooth the mind.

First, taken down a particular path it does break loose new channels of energy and give experience in regulating their movement through the system. (These energies, once awakened, take their own course to a certain extent.)

The other is that, in advanced magick and, especially, mysticism, one benefits from anything that enhances the ability to concentrate unwaveringly for long periods of time, and having this ability long-established is a boon.