On a more personal note, I would like the reader to notice very carefully Regardie's words directly above. Those who have studied or read Laura's work, and any of the works that she has drawn from, will realize that Regardie is here presenting a framework that very much resembles real esoteric work. I personally was very familiar with this framework when I encountered the Cassiopaea material and Laura's work, so one could well imagine that I would think there was, indeed, something to this Casssiopaean business. In my mind, this new material only complemented what I already knew and thought. Of course, eventually I encountered the warnings and statements against ritual and magick and a burning desire to figure out what was going on was kindled in myself.
Several possibilites seemed evident. My first thought was that Laura and the Quantum Future School had just not had much exposure to the philosophies of magick, "how could they have exposure to magick and not see how complementary the two materials were?" I reasoned. After reading more material, I quickly threw out that reasoning and was faced with another prospect. One was wrong and one was right. Though the philosophies agreed on many major points, there was still some rather important disagreements, especially concerning ritual. Thus the two main possibilities presented themselves in sharp contrast to each other, either Laura and company were wrong, or magick was wrong. Of course, I had my biases, but I also had to know the truth and I knew I didn't have enough information to determine that.
Thus I threw myself whole-heartedly into Laura's work. I first read the last seven articles from the Adventure series because of advice given in one of the smaller articles that I initially encountered. From this, I realized a much more in depth investigation into Laura's work needed to be conducted for myself, and I decided that in order to give the material a fair shake, I needed to get to know the woman who brought this material to light. Thus I began with the Amazing Grace series. I drove myself night and day through this series and then the Wave series and the rest of the Adventures series. At the end, I still did not have my answers, they were not handed to me wholesale in any one part of the voluminous information that I had read. It was then that I learned my first real lesson about true esoteric work.
The only way I was able to find the answers was through my own efforts. This required gaining an understanding of both magick and the Cassiopaean material. I had already spent many years on magickal theory, so I knew I had to buckle down and try to understand and assimilate Laura's work. Only after I gained some understanding of her work did the answers become availabe to me, but even then I've had to search long and hard for them. I will say that the hardest part was overcoming the subjective biases toward magick that I had built up over the years. My mind kept wanting to interpret the Cassiopaean material in terms of magick. And here I learned my second real lesson about true esoteric work, one has to first divest one's self of all attachments that are not objective truth before one can truly embark on a true esoteric path. This is the moral bankruptcy that Mouravieff and Gurdjieff mention. I did not truly understand that concept until after I had begun my search for answers in earnest and ran up against the obstacles of my own attachment to magick. And I should also say that it was only my sincerity and yearning for truth that allowed me to finally see and overcome those obstacles.
