August 11, 1943.
My dear Brother McMurtry,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
Did I write you a few days ago that I had received your two M.O:, one for $10 and the last one of Aug. 2, for $5.00? If not, please accept my thanks.
Your letter of July 20 was very interesting and I have had occasion to mention to Jack to take steps and contact you, which, probably, he has done in the meantime. Finances now being run in a different way at Agape Lodge, I would suggest to give your monthly contribution for G.H.Q. to Jack direct – provided diplomatic relations are re-established between you. It simplifies it.
The first paragraph with the description of some accidents during maneuvers may be just a poet’s expression, but, in connection with some of your poems, it seems to show a serious defect, a spot where you are ‘softy’. I wish the spirit of Chapter III of AL could be hammered into your soul. Whathehell does it matter whether anybody dies from one cause or another? “Some great general once said: “Do you want to live eternally?” to some dodging soldiers. That’s the spirit. Life and death are but two sections of one curve: both are equal in value, same as night and day. It shows a serious defect in your philosophical maturity, in your perception of truth and Nature. You are young, so there is time, and you may just be passing through a normal phase, where you do not perceive the right place for such conceptions as death, cruelty, right and wrong; of how precisely Nature’s bookeeper balances the account of long crimes or repressions committed in the course of history.
Perhaps a serious study of the Little Essays towards Truth would be of value to you. What you need is the Vision of the machinery of the Universe; and various others. You are very much in the lyric stage: don’t stay there.
Your paragraph about the Germans sound to me as though your knowledge – if understanding – of history hails from newspaper education, the worst possible. As though they had to apologise for Bach or Beethoven, Helmholtz or Luter or Goethe, or thousands of others. Study the French Revolution, Napoleon, the American Civil War, or an unbiased history of England and draw your own conclusions on flighty, superficial newspaper judgments.
I advise to be correct in your thinking, writing, etc., concise, and clear: You say you received No. 80 of “The House of God”. This is a mistake which appears symptomatic: you have not sufficient discipline, it seems, which another learns by going through business training, or military, or through the discipline needed when studying some branch of exact science. – Write me soon again.
Love is the law, love under will.
NOTE: Thank you to Frater Orpheus for providing this material.