The sixth requirement is the cultivation of a certain inner balance (equanimity). The student endeavors to retain his composure in the face of joy and sorrow, and eradicates the tendency to fluctuate between the seventh heaven of joy and the depths of despair.
Rudolf Steiner, How to Know Higher Worlds [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
The depths of human nature and self knowledge, the hidden mysteries of the soul of man are not, as real initiates well know, probed into with impunity except by the “properly prepared”. The man who does so has, as it were, a cable-tow around his neck; because when once stirred by a genuine desire for the higher knowledge that real initiation is intended to confer, he can never turn back on what he learns thereof without committing moral suicide; he can never be again the same man he was before he gained a glimpse of the hidden mysteries of life. And as the Angel stood with a flaming sword at the entrance of Eden to guard the way to the Tree of Life, so will the man whose initiation is not a conventional one find himself threatened at the door of the higher knowledge by opposing invisible forces if he rashly rushes forward in a state of moral unfitness into the deep secrets of the Centre. Better remain ignorant than embark upon this unknown sea unwisely and without being properly prepared and in possession of the proper passports.
W L Wilmshurst, The Meaning of Masonry, Chapter II Masonry as a Philosophy
He would just have to earn it honestly. Disgusting, the depths to which he had sunk.
Robert Lynn Asprin & al., Thieves’ World
LXXXIII
Droplets of water, like tinkling bells,
Fall from the cup of the Princess of Shells.
From mellifluous depths is her liquor drawn,
I raise up the cup and adore Babalon!
— In Nomine Babalon: 156 Adorations to the Scarlet Goddess
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