There are two standard answers and they have been arguing for centuries. Discipline yourself, master the appetite, hold the line. Or express it, let it out, do not bottle things up. Everybody has picked one without much examining it.
Both are offered as the mature position, and both have obvious failures — the first produces people who explode, and the second produces people who explode at somebody else. What follows takes a third route, and it turns on the physical properties of an explosive. So the question is worth asking as it is usually put. Is it better to fight the worst in you or to let it out?
The doctrine underneath everything here concerns matter and spirit, and it was taught by demonstration rather than by argument. William Gray insisted there was no difference between the two, beyond physical existence being materialised spirit and the spiritual dimension being subtle matter. One should look at the whole.1
The student objected in the ordinary way, remarking how vastly different material existence must be from the seventh heaven one hears of in Kabbalah. A frown formed. Gray paused, got up quietly, picked up an ordinary ruler, placed it on a little coffee table, and asked very politely: now Jacobus, would you kindly raise the one end of the ruler without moving the other?1
The answer was that it was impossible. Exactly, he responded, and went on to use the two ends of the ruler as matter and spirit — the two ends of existence, each intrinsically connected to the other.1
Which is why a section about inner junk keeps talking about the bowels. If the two ends move together, then what you do at one end is happening at the other. There is no separate spiritual technique for a spiritual problem.
The first half of the answer is a flat prohibition. It is no good to suppress the worst in oneself with a ruthless imposition of will.2
Note what is being ruled out. Not discipline in general, and not restraint. Ruthless imposition of will is the specific move a serious person makes when they decide to have done with a fault.
Which is also the move the whole tradition might be expected to recommend, given that the previous section was entirely about building a Magical Will. The faculty has just been trained. Here it is being told what not to be used on.
The reason is put as a piece of practical strategy. A secret and hidden enemy is much worse than an open and honest one, the latter being far easier to deal with.2
Which is true of adversaries generally and is being applied inward. A fault you have suppressed has not gone anywhere. It has gone out of sight, and you have traded a problem you could see for one you cannot.
Then the alternative, stated in one sentence. The nature of that inner enemy needs to be transformed and changed, rather than repressed and confined.2
Two verbs against two verbs. Transformed and changed are things you do to something you are still in contact with. Repressed and confined are things you do to keep something away from you, and the difference is whether you are still touching it.
Then the image that makes the whole thing concrete, and it is a real fact about explosives. In the repressed case the inner enemy becomes like an explosive, and lethal.2
But the same substance need not behave that way. Dynamite can be burned as fuel. Put a light to it and it just burns.2 That happens to be true of nitroglycerin-based explosives, which do not detonate from flame alone.
And then the condition that changes it. Compress and hit it, and it explodes.2 One substance, two behaviours, and the difference is the casing.
So the substance is not the problem. Confinement is the problem, and a bomb is dynamite plus a container. The danger in a suppressed fault is therefore not a fact about the fault at all. It is a fact about what you have built around it.
The survey that follows makes the case that expulsion has always been the practical alternative, in wildly different clothes. Religion, sex, pain and violence often go hand in hand — as in the ancient rites of Cybele, during which the priests castrated themselves in a state of religious trance.3
The reading offered is unexpected and generous. A lot of those old practices, which Christians later found so obscene and disgusting, were in fact just sheer catharsis. Letting go, so as to release all the strains of life and frustration.3
And the modern equivalent is named without condescension. A rave or a disco session, where youngsters just scream, howl, contort and fling themselves around. And the revivalist religions do very much the same thing, though along different lines.3
Then the clinical version. Primal Therapy, where the idea is to push people past an ultimate in emotional stress until they flatten out on the other side, and supposedly come up in perfect peace. The instrument is the Primal Scream, uttered until there is literally nothing left inside.3 The verdict on it is dry: at least that is the theory.
And the plain description of the whole family: giving someone a sufficiently hard kick in the guts to clear the psychic excrement out of them. That is called an abreaction, and Israel Regardie — the occultist and Reichian therapist — is reported as fond of it, getting his patients to vomit into buckets until they were exhausted.3
The whole approach is then summarised and then doubted in the same breath. The general idea is to drive patients to the utter edge of endurance, until they scream, vomit, defecate or do something drastic physically in the way of expulsion. That is supposed to take the psychic cause of their troubles with it, and in the past all of these effects were noted by exorcists as signs of demons exiting a victim.4
The summary is one sentence. Get it out of you, and do not keep it all bottled up.4 Nothing in the whole survey adds to that.
And then the reservation. These very severe ideas of clearing ourselves of psychological rubbish are often inadequate.4 Screaming until nothing is left is not transformation, and the distinction between the two has been the point since the dynamite.
What replaces it is a relocation. We have created these battlefields inside ourselves, where we think we can combat everything spoiling our lives, and it is exactly there where we will have to fight it out.4 In older language, the Dweller on the Threshold has been evoked, and the necessary combat to control the beast is under way.
Then the line that closes the section, and it is a kindness. Every human person has a peculiar life-problem which he or she has to deal or live with. And on the hypothetical person without hang-ups of any kind, the verdict is brisk. Too dull to bother with.4
You have something in you that you have been trying to get rid of by force. The instruction is to stop pressing on it.
Start by checking which of the two verbs you have been using. Transformed and changed requires staying in contact with the thing. Repressed and confined requires keeping it away from you. If what you have been doing is the second, the dynamite says you are building the container rather than removing the charge.
Then let it burn instead of compressing it. Put a light to dynamite and it just burns, which in practice means letting the thing operate somewhere it can be spent rather than sealing it. The energy is not the problem. The pressure is.
Then use the open-enemy test on yourself. A secret enemy is much worse than an open one, so anything about yourself that nobody knows, including you, falls by that standard into the worse category. Naming it out loud moves it from one column to the other before any work is done on it.
And keep the last line where you can find it. Every person has a peculiar life-problem to deal or live with, and the alternative to having one is being too dull to bother with. That is not consolation. The problem is standard equipment, and the work happens with it rather than after it.
The dynamite claim is factually correct, which is more than most such images manage. Nitroglycerin-based explosives really do burn without detonating in the open, and really do explode under confinement and shock — so the analogy carries a genuine mechanism rather than a resemblance.
The survey of cathartic practices is offered as observation rather than history, and reads as such. Cybele, the rave, revivalism, Primal Therapy and Regardie's buckets are grouped by function, and no claim is made about any of them beyond the grouping.
Tension left open. Transformed and changed rather than repressed and confined is the stated aim, and no technique for transformation appears anywhere on this page. What follows in the tradition is the toilet formula, which is expulsion — and expulsion has just been described as often inadequate.
🚩 PRACTITIONER SOURCE. 🚩 The Cybele reading — that the rites were sheer catharsis — is an interpretation offered with no source. 🚩 Regardie's practice is reported at second hand. 🚩 Often inadequate is the whole of the critique of cathartic methods, with no account of when they are adequate.
Two positions on catharsis sit in the same passage and are not reconciled. The survey treats it sympathetically. The rites of Cybele were sheer catharsis, the rave does the same job, and the whole family boils down to getting it out of you and not keeping it bottled up.
Then it is undercut. Those very severe ideas of clearing ourselves are often inadequate, and what is needed is transformation rather than expulsion.
The distinction that would resolve it is available and never drawn. Expulsion removes a charge. Transformation changes what the charge is. A person who screams until nothing is left has an empty tank and the same tank. A person whose inner enemy has been transformed has something else in there. The dynamite image supports exactly that reading, since burning is not disposal but using the material as fuel, and the section stops one step short of saying so.
Institutional Conditioning and the Suppression of Authentic Feeling — creative-practice.
The creative-practice reading traces where the habit of suppression is learned, and the route is entirely ordinary. Every time you opened your mouth in school you learned to check first. Does this match the textbook, does this agree with whoever is holding the red pen. Get it wrong a few times, feel the sting, and you adjust. Not your knowledge. Your instinct to speak at all.
Then college does it again, one register more polished, and then a job, until the checking becomes a reflex sentence said before you have decided whether you agree. By the time somebody is an adult with something real to say, the voice that comes out often does not feel like theirs. It is the voice that survived twenty years of being told which parts of itself were not allowed out.
Which supplies the piece this page is missing. It is no good to suppress the worst in oneself with a ruthless imposition of will treats suppression as a choice somebody is making now, and something they could stop. The conditioning reading says the imposition was installed by other people over twenty years, and that it runs without any decision at all.
That changes what the instruction has to be. You cannot simply stop doing a thing you are not aware of doing — and it explains why this tradition's practices are so physical. Toning the body, the spontaneous song, the croaking, the swaying, the crying let alone without interference. Every one of those bypasses the checking rather than arguing with it, which is the only route available if the check is older than the will that would have to override it.
Sharpest implication. A bomb is dynamite plus a container, and the container is the part you built. Which locates the danger of any suppressed fault entirely in the suppression — the same material, left uncompressed, would have burned off doing something useful.
Generative questions.