[From private correspondence]

The key to “integrating these two minds [i.e. the conscious and subconscious minds]” is to understand exactly what is causing them to be separate in the first place. The quote I gave which was just under the one you included in your message is actually more helpful here, so I’ll repeat it:

“The Khu is the magical garment which it weaves for itself, a ‘form’ for its being beyond form, by use of which it can experience through self-consciousness…Our minds and bodies are veils of the Light within. The uninitiate is a ‘dark star’, and the Great Work for him is to make his veils transparent by ‘purifying’ them. This ‘purification’ is really ‘simplification’; it is not that the veil is dirty, but that the complexity of its folds make it opaque. The Great Work therefore consists principally in the solution of complexes.”

I’m not overly familiar with Case’s work, so the correspondences may not be exact, but you can liken the “Khabs” from AL I, 8 to the subconscious you spoke of [Note: this identification of the Khabs with the “subconscious mind” is most unsatisfactory, but the analogy was close enough given the context of the original question – EH], and the “Khu” to the conscious. The function of the Khu is to give ‘form’ to the Khabs, essentially to give it self-awareness and a directing or decision-making faculty. In order to do this, to give that sense of self-awareness, the Khu has to “veil” the true nature of the individual from its conscious self. This is why Crowley describes it as both a “garment” and a “veil”.

This is why they are separate, and this would be fine if it wasn’t for one problem: instead of acting as a tool or a vehicle for the Khabs, the Khu starts to believe it is the individual itself, turning the separation into a chasm. When this happens, the Khu stops interpreting phenomena in terms of their relationship to the true self, but in terms of itself. Correcting this process is what we really mean by “integration”.

This is all possibly better understood through some examples. Have you ever, for instance, driven to work, and when you’ve gotten there you realise you were on “automatic pilot” for the whole time? Or eaten a meal while thinking about a problem and never really tasted it? Or gone to an area of natural beauty with something else on your mind, and not appreciated what you were seeing?

In all these examples, your mind was not perceiving what was actually out there. Neither was it perceiving your subconscious or “true” self. What was it perceiving? Itself. In all these examples your mind was focusing on the images contained within itself, not on reality.

This would be annoying, but it doesn’t stop there. The real problem is not that the mind perceives itself, per se, but that it then begins to perceive itself and mistakes that perception of itself for reality. Here is where the conflicts really begin.

Some more examples. Ever had an argument with someone and spend the next few hours (or days) fuming to yourself about it? The anger and frustration you feel at such times seems very real, but it doesn’t come from the outside, it comes from your mind. Regardless of how “justified” you might feel in being angry, your mind is creating those “negative impulses” and fooling you into thinking they are real. Or how about (especially when you were a kid) spend weeks or months wanting something really badly only to find out you didn’t want it? Again, we are not talking about something like food or sleep where there is a real connection between your being and your environment that makes you need something like that — the desire is created wholly by your mind, but it convinces you it’s real and that you’ll be so happy when you get it.

I could go on, but this is the real source of the problem. Your conscious mind, working in this way, mistakes its own images for reality. It also mistakes its own twisted images of its own nature for your real self. So, you end up with a warped perception of reality, and a warped perception of your self. When you consider that realising the true will consists of placing yourself in the right set of circumstances that suits your actual nature at any given point in time, you can see how this misperception can cause serious difficulties.

This, then, is the source of the problem we are trying to fix. The solution flows naturally from this. Rather than in some older philosophies (the Golden Dawn being a well known example) we are not trying to “transform” or “perfect” the conscious self, since all this leads to is one set of false mental images being replaced by another — we are just led to believe this new set is “better”.

The essence of integration is essentially this: you have to gradually stop paying attention to the false images in your head, and start paying attention to reality. That is, you aren’t really “integrating” the two minds at all — you are just stopping the conscious mind (the “Khu”) from preventing you from clearly perceiving the unconscious mind (the “Khabs”) [Note: see above for comment on this identification – EH]. As in the quote I gave at the beginning, its more like smoothing the veils to make them transparent, or cleaning a dirty window, than it is about “growing” or “transforming” into something new. You gradually begin paying more attention to reality until you get better at it, and as your practice continues it will become more and more natural for your mind to work this way. Success in this matter enables you to perceive both your real self and your environment clearly, which is what makes the true will clear.

The methods of doing this vary, but essentially yoga serves to quieten the mind, to stop its movement which is what really distorts, and magick (traditionally) serves to focus the mind on one thing to drown out and effectively silence the rest of the mind’s chattering. Either way, you free yourself from all this mental whirling and enable yourself to perceive free from it, for a while. It is this part that is personal to the individual, since his particular set of mental images will be his own, and he will require his own methods to rectify them. Then, discovering the true will is essentially a matter of maintaining that perception and gaining varied “life experience” to observe how the true self operates and therefore to rediscover what you are really about, now that your illusions of what you thought you were about are shattered.

That’s about as plainly and clearly as I can put it. Everything else connected with the practice ultimately comes down to this.