While i can not boast of having entirely read or understood Crowley's
"An Essay In Ontology" i append his opening and closing remarks as an
example of it. Complete text to be found here:
http://lilytears.com/spirituality/thelema/qabalah/berashith.htm
--
JL

In presenting this theory of the Universe to the world, I have but one
hope of making any profound impression, viz.--that my theory has the
merit of explaining the divergences between three great forms of
religion now existing in the world--Buddhism, Hinduism, and
Christianity, and of adapting them to ontological science by conclusions
not mystical but mathematical. Of Mohammedanism I shall not now treat,
as, in whatever light we may decide to regard it (and its esoteric
schools are often orthodox), in any case it must fall under one of the
three heads of Nihilism, Advaitism, and Dvaitism.
Taking the ordinary hypothesis of the universe, that of its
infinity, or at any rate that of the infinity of God, or of the infinity
of some substance or idea actually existing, we first come to the
question of the possibility of the co-existence of God and man.
The Christians, in the category of the existent, enumerate among
other things, whose consideration we may discard for the purposes of
this argument, God, an infinite being; man; Satan and his angels; man
certainly, Satan presumably, finite beings. These are not aspects of
one being, but separate and even antagonistic existences. All are
equally real: we cannot accept mystics of the type of Caird as being
orthodox exponents of the religion of Christ.

[note: Edward Caird? http://www.iep.utm.edu/c/caird.htm "In general,
Caird's views on religion were importantly related to his understanding
of ethics, and Caird borrows from Hegel (and Goethe) the ethical idea of
self sacrifice, or 'dying to live,' which was to have an important role
in the work of Bosanquet. Caird consistently emphasized the importance
of religion, and that a genuine metaphysics must be able to provide an
account of it." J.L.]

The Hindus enumerate Brahm, infinite in all dimensions and
directions--indistinguishable from the Pleroma of the Gnostics--and
Maya, illusion. This is in a sense the antethesis of noumenon and
phenomenon, noumenon being negated of all predicates until it becomes
almost extinguished in the Nichts under the title of the Alles. (Cf.
Max Müller on the metaphysical Nirvana, in his Dhammapada, Introductory
Essay.) The Buddhists express no opinion.

[serious, massive snippage]

Nobody any longer supposes that any means but that of meditation is of
avail to grasp the immediate causes of our being; if some person retort
that he prefers to rely on a Glorified Redeemer, I simply answer that he
is the very nobody to whom I now refer.
Meditation is then the means; but only the supreme means.
Meditation is not within the reach of every one; not all possess
the ability; very few indeed (in the West at least) have the opportunity.
In any case what the Easterns call "one-pointedness" is an
essential preliminary to even early stages of true meditation. And iron
will-power is a still earlier qualification.
By meditation I do not mean merely "thinking about" anything,
however profoundly, but the absolute restraint of the mind to the
contemplation of a single object, whether gross, fine, or altogether
spiritual.
Now true magical ceremonial is entirely directed to attain this
end, and forms a magnificent gymnasium for those who are not already
finished mental athletes. By act, word, and thought, both in quantity
and quality, the one object of the ceremony is being constantly
indicated. Every fumigation, purification, banishing, invocation,
evocation, is chiefly a reminder of the single purpose, until the
supreme moment arrives, and every fibre of the body, every force-channel
of the mind, is strained out in one overwhelming rush of the Will in the
direction desired. Such is the real purport of all the apparently
fantastic directions of Solomon, Abramelin, and other sages of repute.
When a man has evoked and mastered such forces as Taphtatharath, Belial,
Amaimon, and the great powers of the elements, then he may safely be
permitted to begin to try to stop thinking. For, needless to say, the
universe, including the thinker, exists only by virtue of the thinker's
thought. [See Berkeley and his expounders, for the Western shape of
this Eastern commonplace. Huxley, however curiously enough, states the
fact almost in these words. --A.C.]
In yet one other way is magic a capital training ground for the
Arahat. True symbols do really awake those macrocosmic forces of which
they are the eidola, and it is possible in this manner very largely to
increase the magical "potential," to borrow a term from electrical science.
Of course, there are bad and invalid processes, which tend rather
to disperse or to excite the mind-stuff than to control it; these we
must discard. But there is a true magical ceremonial, the central
Arcanum alike of Eastern and Western practical transcendentalism.
Needless to observe, if I knew it, I should not disclose it.
I therefore definitely affirm the validity of the Qabalistic
tradition in its practical part as well as in those exalted regions of
thought through which we have so recently, and so hardly, travelled.
Eight are the limbs of Yoga: morality and virtue, control of
body, thought, and force, leading to concentration, meditation, and rapture.
Only when the last of these has been attained, and itself refined
upon by removing the gross and even the fine objects of its sphere, can
the causes, subtle and coarse, the unborn causes whose seed is hardly
sown, of continued existence be grasped and annihilated, so that the
Arahat is sure of being abolished in the utter extinction of Nirvana,
while even in this world of pain, where he must remain until the ancient
causes, those which have already germinated, are utterly worked out (for
even the Buddha himself could not swing back the Wheel of the Law), his
certain anticipation of the approach of Nirvana is so intense as to
bathe him constantly in the unfathomable ocean of the apprehension of
immediate bliss.

Aum mani padme houm.

A possible mystic transfiguration of the Vedanta system has been
suggested to me on the lines of the Syllogism--

God = Being (Patanjali).
Being = Nothing (Hegel).
God = Nothing (Buddhism).

Or, in the language of religion:
Every one may admit that monotheism, exalted by the introduction
of the oo symbol, is equivalent to pantheism. Pantheism and atheism are
really identical, as the opponents of both are the first to admit.
If this be really taught, I must tender my apologies, for the
reconcilement is of course complete.