Buddha, Mohammed, Jesus and St. Paul. What did these four men have in common?
As Aleister Crowley points out, “No point of doctrine, no point of ethics, no theory of a ‘hereafter’ do they share, and yet in the history of their lives we find one identity amid many diversities.”
Buddha was an ordinary Hindu nobleman, and then he experienced a rapid brain change, after which he became a great Teacher.
Mohammed was a humble camel-driver, with no sign of exceptional intelligence or ambition, and then he experienced a rapid brain change, after which he became Teacher, Conqueror, Law-Maker and Prophet.
We hear nothing of Jesus (save a few fables) until the age of 30, when he experiences a rapid brain change, and puts forth a doctrine that is to overturn the Roman Empire and influence Western Civilization until the present.
St. Paul, who took the teaching of Jesus and turned it into a militant movement, suffered an extreme form of brain-change, of which he tells us that he was temporarily struck blind and lifted up into the heavens where he beheld things “of which it is not lawful to speak.”
On all else but the experience of Illumination they disagree… Making every possible reservation about fable and myth, we get this one coincidence: A nobody experiences rapid brain-change (consciousness dilation) and abruptly becomes very much a historical Somebody. Much of the human race is still living on the legacy of these four bio-electrical “illuminations,” for good and for ill.
8 Aug 2021