Free Masks of the Illuminati by Robert A. Wilson Page B

progress in the Great Work, you must become aware of the invisible truth behind the visible paraphernalia of all religions. In our Order, the Christian may remain Christian, the Jew Jew, the Moslem Moslem, as it may be, but whatever their faith, they may
not
remain narrow-minded sectarians.”
    Sir John began to understand this ambiguous ecumenicism a bit while studying a text on Buddhism. The refrain, “Everyone you meet is a Buddha,” began to drive him to despair; it was so nonsensical; it was repeated so often, in so many different ways; it was obvious that he would have to understand it before he began to comprehend what Buddhism was all about. He, therefore, at Jones’ suggestion, tried to
see
the Buddha in everyone he met—and then he understood quickly.
    The effect was the same as the deliberate mystification with the Golden Dawn about who was or wasn’t a member. Looking for the Buddha in everyone, like looking for more members of the Order, caused Sir John to pay a great deal closer attention to people than he ever had before, and to see more of their mysterious and adamantine individuality, rather than classifying them into categories of age, sex, race, caste or other superficialities. He now saw all people as mysterious, incredible beings; and he understood, suddenly, a most annoying paradox of Goethe, who had said, “What is hardest of all? That which seems most simple: to see with your eyes what is before your eyes.”
    And he understood, too, Saint Paul’s insistence that “we are all members of the Body of Christ.” Every man and woman was a single facet of the diamond-mirror, made in the image of God, which was humanity. Buddhism, as Jones had promised him, had not weakened his Christianity but had illuminated it further.
    Sir John thought this was marvelous and poured it out in manic excitement at his next meeting with Jones.
    “Very good,” Jones said condescendingly. “You have awakened, a little, from one of the dreams that keep the sleepwalkers on the street from
seeing
one another. This is a beginning, but only a beginning. Don’t be too impressed with your progress, for God’s sake, or you’ll never move another inch. Try seeing the divine Light in every beautiful object that comes your way—deep scarlet rubies, or tiger-lilies in a field, or the red markings on a crab’s back. Then ask yourself where consciousness and divinity are
not.”
    And with that crushing and yet encouraging speech, delivered with a trace of leonine fire, mild Mr. Jones seemed to Sir John definitely beyond all doubt the genuine article: a true Adept. Then, without mercy, Jones dumped ten books on Cabala upon Sir John, told him to master them thoroughly—and nearly torpedoed and sank him forever.
    Babcock, previously, had studied Cabala only as a historian, learning enough of its terminology and theories to trace its influence from the early Hermeticists like Pico della Mirándola and Giordano Bruno through Dr. Dee and Sir Francis Bacon, onward to Freemasonry and Illuminism. Now he found himself confronted with the necessity of mastering the entire Cabalistic theory of the universe, which was about a thousand times more complicated than the periodic table of chemical elements Uncle Bentley kept in his study.
    According to Cabala, the cosmos is governed by symboliccorrespondences between many planes of being, visible and invisible. That
seemed
simple enough; but the correspondences themselves had no logical connections at all—“Cabala
transcends
logic,” Jones reminded Sir John. The correspondences could only be learned by brute force and rote repetition until they finally embedded themselves in the memory. Even after being memorized, the correspondences would not be
understood
by the student, Jones cheerfully remarked; true understanding, he said, could come only through intuition or through direct experience of the invisible planes, by techniques to be taught when Sir John graduated from Probationer to