Occultists On Experience

This page contains a selection of quotes from Western Esotericism about the role and nature of spiritual, psychic, or magical experience in the Western Mystery Tradition.

Walter Ernest Butler

'...without direct experience the old Nature-worship degenerates into orgiastic rites; the church becomes impotent and unable to obey her Lord's command as she should, and rational philosophy and science become sterile and unable to to minister to the deeper needs of the soul of man.'

Walter Ernest Butler, Apprenticed To Magic & Magic & The Qabalah, Aquarian Press, (1978) 1990, P146.

Margaret Anderson

'I didn’t want my life to go the way of all life – to be born only to wander through experiences, to wonder at the sameness of those experiences, to want other experiences, to tire of wandering and wondering and wanting, to live at the end in remembrance of experiences, and to die – without wonder, memory, or experience.'

Margaret Anderson. The Unknowable Gurdjieff, Arkana, Lonond/New York (1962) 1991, P108.

Rudolf Steiner

‘Inner experience is the only key to the beauties of the outer world. It depends upon the inner lives we have developed whether, when we travel across the ocean, only a few inner experiences pass through our souls, or we sense the eternal language of the world spirit and understand the mysterious riddles of creation. To develop a meaningful relationship to the outer world we must learn to work with our own feelings and ideas. The world around us is filled everywhere with the glory of God, but we have to experience the divine in our own souls before we can find it in our surroundings.’

Rudolf Steiner. How To Know Higher Worlds, Anthroposophic Press, 1994. pp22-23.

Israel Regardie

'As we know, the experience of the rising of the Light in both vision and waking state is common to mystics of every age and of every people. It must be an experience of the greatest significance in the treading of the Path because its appearance seems always and everywhere an unconditional thing. It is an experience which defies definition, as well in its elementary flashes as in its most advanced transports. No code of thought, philosophy or religion, no logical process can bind it or limit it or express it. But always it represents, spiritually, a marked attainment, a liberation from the turmoil of life and from psychic complications and, as Dr. C.G. Jung has expressed the matter, it "thereby frees the inner personality from emotional and imaginary entanglements, creating thus a unity of being which is universally felt as a release." It is the attainment of spiritual puberty, marking a significant stage in growth.'

Israel Regardie. The Golden Dawn, Llewellyn, St. Paul, (1971) 2000, P24.

A.R. Orage

'There is little difference in the experiences of different people - the difference consists in what they do with them. The importance of our first food is not so much in the quantity and quality as in the digesting of it. Experiences are another form of food; from this point of view it does not matter much what happens as how we take experiences.'

A.R. Orage. On Love & Psychological Exercises, Weiser, York Beach, (1930) 1998, P61.

Helena Blavatsky

‘…most people who become really earnest students of Theosophy, and active workers in our Society, wish to do more than study theoretically the truths we teach. They wish to know the truth by their own direct personal experience, and to study Occultism, with the object of acquiring the wisdom and power which they feel that they need in order to help others effectually and judiciously, instead of blindly and at haphazard.’

Helena Blavatsky. The Key To Theosophy, Theosophical Publishing House, London, (1889) P259.

Tabitha & Chic Cicero

'What we are talking about here is controlled astral visions - meaningful and intense experiences that are completely understandable. In these visions the skryer maintains complete control and all of his or her powers of choice, willpower, and judgement. Through these experiences, the magician is able to reach the deepest levels of what Carl Jung called the collective unconscious, or what Hermetic philosophers called Anima Mundi - the soul of the world.'

Chic & Tabitha Cicero. The Essential Golden Dawn: An Introduction to High Magic, Llewellyn, St. Paul, 2003, P211.

G.I. Gurdjieff

'Understanding is the essence obtained from information intentionally learned and from all kinds of experiences personally experienced.'

G.I. Gurdjieff. Meetings With Remarkable Men: All & Everything Second Series, Penguin, London/New York, (1960) 1985, P240.

Alice Bailey

'It is said that one's deepest and most intimate spiritual experiences should never be discussed or related. This is fundamentally true and no true "experiencer" is the least interested in such discussions. The deeper and more vital the experience, the less temptation is there to tell it. Only beginners with a theoretical, imaginative events in their consciousness claim such experiences.'

Alice Bailey. The Unfinished Autobiography, Lucis Press, London, 1951, pp40-41.

P.D. Ouspensky

'The higher thinking centrer, working with hydrogen 6, is still further removed from us, still less accessible. Connection with it is possible only through the higher emotional center. It is only from descriptions of mystical experiences, ecstatic states, and so on, that we know cases of such connections. These states can occur on the basis of religious emotions, or, for short moments, through particular narcotics; or in certain pathological states such as epileptic fits or accidental traumatic injuries to the brain; in which cases it is difficult to say which is the cause and which is the effect, that is, whether the pathological state results from this connection or is its cause.'

P.D. Ouspensky. In Search Of The Miraculous, Harcourt, New York/London, (1949) 2001, P195.

Michel Conge

'All those moments spent next to Gurdjieff enabled me to understand that life is given us as an "experience", an "exercise". When I let myself become immersed in the sort of shipwreck that our lives are, if I experience it consciously, I come out enriched. What people call their experience is almost laughable. For instance when someone getting on in years says, "Young man, believe me, I have experience," he is talking nonsense and yet has almost said something true. For if he were conscious of everything that has happened to him - misfortune, luck, incidents of all kinds - he would truly be a man of experience.'

Michel Conge. Facing Mr. Gurdjieff in Gurdjieff: Essays and Reflections on the Man and His Teaching (ed. Needleman & Baker), Continuum, (1992) 2000, New York, pp361-362.