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Anyway, all this is a silly bit of morality. It arose from my trying to save my wife pain by concealing from her the fact that she was not, in the grand phrase of Emerson——

Bones. Washington Irving, I think——

Bowley. Some Yankee—the only oyster in the stew.

Bones. Who told you, Supreme Magus of our Ancient Order! [with profound sarcasm] to go about saving people pain?

Bowley. I give in. But really I tell you that you will never attain to the Brotherhood until you have genuinely conquered the Illusion of the Pairs of Opposites. Truthfulness and Lying are just as much opposites as white and black, good and evil——

Bones. I sometimes doubt if any of these are opposites at all. Next time you run up to Kether, look down the Tree and see what Truth looks like from there! Take the case of heat and cold, at one time the typical opposites. Nowadays we conceive of a hot body as one in violent internal motion, a cold body as in moderate motion.

Bowley. Fast and slow.

Bones. Or even (to allow the enemy every advantage, let us say) moving and reposing. But these are not opposites. Zero and unity are not opposites.

Bowley. Yet in another sense any two things are opposites.

Bones. That is in Kether again. If you wish to cancel a number, however, zero is no use to you; you need a minus quantity.

Bowley. Which (you are no doubt going to say) demands a geometrical interpretation, and a very conventional one that.

Bones. Yes; even the Ruach can in a sense get rid of the Opposites. How much more then when we observe the matter from the point of view of Samadhi!