Aum418: I think that there is a lot of ‘arguing’ on the subject of the HGA. A lot of over-thinking, over-analyzing, over-intellectualization. The best way would be to see for yourself.

This all sounds good and virtuous, but the problem with it is that if you send a man to go see Mount Rushmore when he doesn’t know what it looks like, he may well end up at Mount Rainier and think he’s there, and spend the rest of his life sitting around thinking what a great navigator he is. Similarly, a man doesn’t learn to build a suspension bridge by going to see one for himself. Why, then, when we talk about “spiritual” matters, does it all suddenly become so different?

The whole point of having the occult/spirituality/religion/whatever as a field of study is so people don’t have to find out by trial and error what it’s all about every time. Why else would the market for occult books be so healthy?

The important thing to remember is that the HGA is not real — it is a term representing something else which is real. It is this “something else”, this real thing, which people need to focus on if they are interested in pursuing this subject. And this highlights the need for analysis in this area — there is a lot of flowery gobbledigook spoken about the “HGA”, but there is little indication that more than a tiny minority have any clear idea about what it actually is, and this is exactly what needs to be communicated. All this talk about KCHGA being too “personal” to discuss in this manner is just that, talk. It’s just a convenient excuse for folks who don’t know much about the subject to blather on about it and pretend that they do. It’s a symptom of intellectual laziness, and it’s a symptom of fear, a fear of moving out of a soothing, witchypoo comfort zone and actually getting into the reality of the matter, actually facing up to the task itself. People may comfort themselves that they do four hours of asana or multiple repetitions of the LBRP every day, but if they are not facing up to the reality of what their task actually is then all that work is just an energetic running away from the issue for the sake of maintaining a form of glamour, in exactly the same way that merely talking about it is. This is exactly the kind of misinterpretation that KCHGA resolves, so any amount of work done with this attitude will serve only to perpetuate the illusion, and a significant number of “occultists” are always quite happy to indulge in that. People need to decide what side of that divide they want to be on if they are to have any hope of real success.

Nobody can learn to fly from reading a book, but they can learn what they need to go out and do, they can learn what they need to be working at, and they can learn to recognise signs of success as well as signs of failure. Similarly, nobody achieves KCHGA by discussing it, but as in any other field of study the process of communicating pertinent facts about it can, for instance, turn a 1,000 year task into a 5 year one. People have been there and done it, in the same real world that everyone else lives in. The clarity of the map such people have laid down may be a long way from perfect, but to discard it in favour of maintaining a comforting illusion and avoiding facing up to the reality of task is certainly an attractive option, but it is not the path of wisdom in the “occult” arena any more than it is in any other.