A repost from LAShTAL.com.

“gurugeorge” wrote:

It’s the “inner man” who is aflame with this mystical Love of All, not the body.mind, which follows the laws of physics, and does well to follow the (just) customs of its people, etc.

Agape is mystical love, higher grade love. It’s not making nicey-nice to entities that are evil, that seek the disintegration of the unique form that one represents, or that others, includinng the defenceless, represent. No, at that level, to hell with them if they can’t take a joke!!!

The body.mind is (or should be!) very well-trained to look after its own integrity and the integrity of others, and on its own plane will do whatever it does, and will divide the world into good (for) and evil (for) – from various perspectives that it takes on.

This just isn’t right at all. It is completely unhelpful to make this kind of division between “inner man” and “outer man”, and to give them different rules; it’s just an excuse to avoid dealing with the task at hand by claiming that the “outer man” should just go on doing what it’s been doing while the “inner man” can look after himself, allowing oneself to “attain” without actually doing any work. It’s a device for the “outer man” to hang on to the same old restrictions that he’s supposed to be getting rid of, and justifying it as being “the Thelemic way”. It’s either uninformed and untrue, or disingenuous and untrue. Thelema is not about just reinforcing your regular superstitions. There’s no such thing as “higher grade love”.

First of all, people need to understand that the significance of the word “Agape” is that it sums to 93. It is a mistake to take the meaning of the Greek word and then to suppose that the Thelemic concept must stem from that, because it doesn’t. If “Eros” had summed to 93, Crowley would have picked that instead without the meaning changing one tiny little bit. If we want to understand the significance of “love” to Thelema then we have to look to the Thelemic writings, not to a Greek dictionary.

To understand what Crowley meant by the term “love” (when talking about the Thelemic concept, at any rate) we need to break with convention and look at what the man actually said about it, and all will mysteriously become clear. Somebody has already quoted Reguli – without explanation – which sums it up reasonably well, but there are better places to look. Liber Aleph sheds a lot of light on the concept – as it does for many. From Cap. D we have:

The Fault, that is Fatality, in Love, as in every other Form of Will, is impurity. It is not the Spontaneity thereof which worketh Woe, but some Repression in the Environment. In the Fable of Adam and Eve is this great Lesson taught by the Masters of the Holy Qabalah. For Love were to them the eternal Eden, save for the Repression signified by the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Thus their Nature of Love was perfect; it was their Fall from that Innocence which drove them from the Garden.

So we learn from this that “love”, whatever it may be, must be “pure” – that “innocence” must be maintained. What is innocence? Ignorance of (or freedom from, if you prefer) “the Knowledge of Good and Evil”. In possession of this innocence, “Love [is] perfect.”

We get a hint of Reguli from Cap. Ph:

Therefore, must thou seek ever those Things which are to thee poisonous, and that in the highest Degree, and make them thine by Love. That which repels, that which disgusts, must thou assimilate in this Way of Wholeness.

At first glance, this would seem to contradict the previous quote – how can love be “pure” if we are to seek out “that which disgusts”? Cap. DP gives us an answer:

Turn not therefore away thine Eyes, for that they are too pure to behold Evil; but look upon Evil with Joy, comprehending it in the Fervour of this Light that I have enkindled in thy Mind. Learn also that every Thing soever is Evil, if thou consider it as apart, static and in Division.

The “Knowledge of Good and Evil” is, therefore, the tainting of impressions by the judgmental mind. The mind labels impressions “good” or “evil”, and it is this labelling that is the “impurity”, because it colours and pollutes the pure impressions themselves. So why should one “seek ever those Things which are to thee poisonous…and make them thine by Love”? Simply to practice ceasing to label impressions in this way, to experience those things which you find distasteful until you simply stop finding them distasteful. Cap. EB tells us what happens if we don’t:

But now consider him that worketh not with his will, how his mind is idle, not reaching out after reality, but debating within itself of its own affairs, like a democracy, introspective. This this mind, not reacting equally and with elasticity to the world, is lost in its own anarchy and civil war, so that although it works not, it is overcome by weakness of division, and becometh Choronzon.

The failure to stop labelling and judging impressions through some false sense of morality means one does not perceive them for what they are, and if one does not perceive them for what they are, one obviously perceives them for what they are not, and if one tries to go through life reacting to things that aren’t there then one only has oneself to blame for it. The mind “[debates] within itself of its own affairs” when it debates over things that are “good” and things that are “evil”, because these are qualities is has created itself. There is no such thing in the real world.

Crowley’s works are swimming with this idea. We see it all the way back in Book Four, Part Two, appropriately enough in the section on the cup:

And this is the danger of the Cup; it must necessarily be open to all, and yet it anything is put into it which is out of proportion, unbalanced, or impure, it takes hurt. And here again we find difficulty with our thoughts. The grossness and stupidity of ‘simple impressions’ cloud the waters; ’emotions’ trouble it; ‘perceptions’ are still far from the perfect purity of truth; they cause reflections; while the ‘tendencies’ alter the refractive index, and break up the light … Since at the best this water is but a reflection, how tremendously important it becomes that it should be still! If the cup is shaken, the light will be broken up … There is, however, a universal solvent and harmonizer, a certain dew which is so pure that a single drop of it cast into the water of the Cup will for the time being bring all to perfection. This dew is called Love … human love is an excitement, not a stilling, of the mind; and as it is bound to the individual, only leads to greater trouble in the end. This Divine Love, on the contrary, is attached to no symbol.

Again, we see the idea that all impressions must be accepted without distortion, that the water “should be still”. Labelling impressions as “good” or “bad” is not a perfect reflection; it “breaks up the light”. Only by accepting all impressions for what they are without judging them can they be accurately reflected, and this process is “Love”.

There are many other references for those who care to look, including the new comment (especially verses II, 8, II, 9 and II, 73), Magick Without Tears (especially chapters 17 and 33), The Book of Thoth (“We must understand, first of all, that the root of Moral Responsibility, on which man stupidly prides himself as distinguishing him from the other animals, is Restriction, which is Word of Sin. Indeed, there is truth in the Hebrew fable, that the knowledge of Good and Evil brings forth Death. To regain Innocence is to regain Eden. We must learn to live without the murderous consciousness that every breath we draw swells the sails which bear our frail vessels to the Port of the Grave. We must cast out Fear by Love; seeing that every Act is an Orgasm, their total issue cannot be but Birth.”), the Confessions (“I was able to observe what went on as few people can, for the average man’s sense are deceived by his emotions. He gets things out of proportion and he exaggerates them even when he is able to appreciate them at all. I made up my mind that it should be an essential part of my system of initiation to force my pupils to be familiar with just those things which excite or upset them, until they have acquired the power of perceiving them accurately without interference from the emotions … Evil can only be destroyed by ‘love under will’; and so long as it is feared and hated, so long as we insist on attributing a real and irreconcilable existence to it, so long will it remain evil for us. The same of course applies to what we call ‘good’. Good it itself evil in so far as it is separate from other ideas.”) and Eight Lectures on Yoga (“Venus represents the ecstatic acceptance of all possible experience.”) amongst many others.

And there we have it. Going back to the source clarifies the matter, as always. It should be patently clear that even if we do presume a distinction between “inner man” and “outer man”, it is the “outer man” who must undertake the process of “love under will”; the “inner man” doesn’t need it, since he doesn’t get clouded by such things. What this process of “love” works on is the tendency to colour, distort and judge perceptions, so it is a process that most definitely is intended to take place within the regular old mundane mind. To describe as something which only the “inner man” experiences is to make a complete nonsense of the whole concept. The “outer man” must strive to perfect ‘love under will’ in order to prevent his conscious mind from interfering with the expression of will by presenting false and distorted impressions to it. There’s a reason why “will” and “love” are linked; it is the process of love that allows the will to come out, because love removes the self-imposed restrictions that keep it in or send it off skew-wise.

Now it is certainly true that we get plenty of things like “For although to thee in thy True Self, absolute and without Conditions, all the Universe, which is relative and conditioned is an Illusion; yet to that Part of Thee by which thou perceivest it, the Law of its Being … is a Law of Truth. Learn then that all Relations are true upon their own Plane, and that it would be a violation of Nature to adjust them skewwise” which is probably where you are getting your “inner man” and “outer man” stuff from but this categorically does not mean that the “outer man” can ignore this stuff and “do what seems right to him”; as we’ve seen, the entire “love under will” process is directly squarely at him. The same book continues later to clarify this: “praise then or blame aught, as seemeth good unto Thee; but with this reflection, that thy judgment is relative to thine own condition, and not absolute. This also is a point of tolerance, whereby thy shalt avoid indeed those things that are hateful or noxious to thee.” Far too many people make this misunderstanding – just because one perceives clearly that, for instance, murder isn’t “evil”, this doesn’t mean that they suddenly go out and start murdering people. Similarly, just because you know on a very conscious level that drinking bleach isn’t “evil” it doesn’t mean that you will be indifferent to drinking bleach. You simply don’t have to believe or even think at a conscious level that there is anything “wrong” with drinking bleach in order to avoid doing it. The task of “love under will” is indeed for your “outer man” to become completely impartial on a very conscious level to all the impressions he receives, but to act in a way that is most appropriate to his being, without any kind of consideration from whether those acts are “right” or “wrong”. That’s what “love” entails, in a Thelemic context. It does not mean that the “outer man” should just carry on believing in the same old morality he used to believe in because love is somehow reserved for the “inner man”; this would take away the whole point of practising Thelema.

As to the original querant…”And how does the Thelemite maintain Agape in a environment/society that corrupts, perverts and seeks the abasement of Agape?” This is like somebody saying “I tried to bench press 300lbs, and it was impossible! How does anybody bench press 300lbs when it’s so heavy?!?!?” By practising, of course! The error is precisely in believing that “society … corrupts, perverts and seeks the abasement of Agape.” It is precisely through the practice of ‘love under will’ that these kinds of silly notion be destroyed. To ask in amazement how it can be possible is no different from asking “how can I become a chess grandmaster without doing any practice?!? I keep getting beaten!!” To imply that ‘love under will’ is impossible because “things are so evil” shows a complete lack of understanding for what ‘love under will’ is in the first place; as long as you think that “things are evil” you’ll never accomplish it, because it is inherent to the accomplishment that you stop thinking things like this.