Excerpt from the Book of Pleasure (Self-Love) by Austin Osman Spare:
"What is there to believe, but in Self? And Self is the negation of completeness as reality. No man has seen self at any time. We are what we believe and what it implies by a process of time in the conception; creation is caused by this bondage to formula.
Actions are the expressions of ideas bound up in the belief; they being inherent are obscure, their operation indirect, easily they deceive introspection. Fruits of action are two-fold, Heaven or Hell, their Unity or Nothingness (Purgatory or Indifference). In Heaven there is desire for Women, Hell the desire intense. Purgatory is expectation delayed, Indifference but disappointment till recovery. Then verily they are one and the same. The wise pleasure seeker, having realised they are "different degrees of desire" and never desirable, gives up both Virtue and Vice and becomes a Kiaist. Riding the Shark of his desire he crosses the ocean of the dual principle and engages himself in self-love.
Religions are the projection of incapacity, the imaginations of fear, the veneer imbecility. As a virtue in the Idea to maximize pleasure cheaply, remit your sins and excuse them is but ceremonial, the expression of puppetry to the governing fear. Yes! What you have ordained in your religiousness, is your very rack, imagined though it be! The prospect is not pleasant; you have taught yourself! It has become inborn and your body is sensitive.
Some praise the idea of Faith. To believe that they are Gods (or anything else) would make them such-proving by all they do, to be full of its non-belief. Better is it to admit incapacity or insignificance, than reinforce it by faith; since the superficial "protects" but does not change the vital. Therefore reject the former for the latter. Their formula is deception and they are deceived, the negation of their purpose. Faith denial, or the metaphor of Idiotcy, hence it always fails. To make their bondage more secure, Governments force religion down the throats of their slaves, and it always succeeds; those who escape it are but few, therefore their honour is the greater. When faith perishes, the "Self" shall come into its own. Others less foolish, obscure the memory that God is a conception of themselves, and as much subject to law. Then, this ambition of faith, is it so very desirable? Myself, I have not yet seen a man who is not God already."
