In One Star in Sight, Crowley writes of the grade of Magister Templi:

The essential Attainment is the perfect annihilation of that personality which limits and oppresses his true self.

This entry will deal with the question of that “annihiliation.”

In The Khabs is in the Khu, we presented a model of the self – the Khabs – surrounded by a “vehicle,” or “garment” – the Khu – which the self requires in order to manifest. The essential purpose of the Khu is to engender a sense of separation from the universe, so that it may be perceived from a particular point of view, enabling the generation of experience. In the same work we described how this results in suffering; the self does not perceive itself to be separate from the universe, and hence cannot suffer, but the Khu does, and can. The task of the aspirant is to identify his being with the Khabs, rather than with the Khu as is usual, to relocate his seat of awareness from his personality to his self, the identification with the personality being that “which limits and oppresses his true self.” Success in this task constitutes the attainment to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.

The attainment of the grade of Magister Templi, on the other hand, and the ordeal of the Abyss, is not to merely relocate the seat of awareness, but to “annihilate” the personality altogether. This is a concept that, not surprisingly, many people have enormous difficulties coming to terms with. “How can a Master of the Temple manifest in this world without a personality?” is the obvious question, perhaps leading one to conclude that there aren’t any Masters of the Temple at all.

“Annihilate” means, etymologically, “to reduce to nothing,” the identity of the Latin root “nihil” with “nothing” being visible in words such as “nihilism” and “nil.” This immediately raises an interesting observation. If, being rudely wakened by our alarm clock, we take a hammer to it and smash it into pieces, we really have not “annihilated” anything; all we have done is to divide the object into a number of smaller parts. We have not “reduced the clock to nothing”; on the contrary, in fact, what was previously only one thing is now a much larger number of things, so we have moved in the complete opposite direction.

What has been “annihilated” is the identity of the object as a clock. However we choose to define “clock,” it must be in terms of something which is at least potentially capable of keeping time. An electronic alarm clock does not cease to be a clock simply as a result of unplugging it, and neither does a broken clock cease to be a clock, otherwise it couldn’t be sensibly described as broken. However, a completely smashed “clock” is no longer a clock, since it is beyond repair. A completely smashed “clock” is no more an actual clock than is a collection of cogs, hands and springs in a clockmaker’s drawer.

In a similar way, we can examine exactly what constitutes the “personality.” The most relevant dictionary definition for our purpose arises from a psychological perspective, and is “the sum total of the physical, mental, emotional, and social characteristics of an individual.” Note that the personality itself is neither the physical characteristics, nor the mental characteristics, nor the emotional characteristics, nor the social characteristics; it is the “sum total” of them, that unifying quality which binds these things together and essentially “creates” the person.

When we talk about “annihilating the personality,” or “annihilating the ego,” it is this unifying quality, this “bonding agent,” which is annihilated, and not the constituent characteristics. Without this unifying quality, the existing constituent characteristics are still there, but they simply cease to constitute the personality, which has gone. It is a common complaint from those who know nothing at all of the subject that the exhibition of certain characteristics is incompatible with the grade of Magister Templi, but we can see now the absence of logic behind this view. It is often blindly supposed by such people that a Master of the Temple would exhibit certain characteristics such as humility and non-judgment, but a cursory glance will reveal the utter confusion from which this view arises. If “the essential Attainment [of the Master of the Temple] is the perfect annihilation of [the] personality” then only a simpleton could assume that a Master of the Temple could be reliably identified with respect to specified personality characteristics. The idea that one must possess a certain type of personality if one’s personality has been annihilated is self-evidently absurd. The fact is that any characteristics could be compatible with the attainment to the grade, since it is the personality itself which is annihilated and not the characteristics which may previously have constituted it.

Accordingly, another commonly held misconception that one must “annihilate” particular personality characteristics in order to attain the the grade is similarly misguided. Returning to One Star in Sight, Crowley writes that the first of the two tasks the Exempt Adept must perform in order to advance is “the emancipation from thought by putting each idea against its opposite, and refusing to prefer either.” It follows that no idea need be “annihilated,” or “resolved”; one must merely (!) abandon preferences in thought. This being the case, there is no reason for the Master of the Temple to prefer, for instance, humility over non-humility, rendering even more ridiculous the idea that the 8=3 must exhibit certain qualities in preference for others.

It is, in fact, this indifference which constitutes success in that task. The “unifying quality” of the personality functions by essentially saying that “this characteristic, and not that one, comprises ‘I.'” By refusing to prefer one thought over another, this unifying quality is lost, there no longer exists any rationale for identifying “I” with any particular set of qualities, and the personality is destroyed. The characteristics which previously constituted the personality are thereafter free to go their merry ways, functioning according to their nature, without troubling the Master of the Temple in the slightest by their presence or their absence, in exactly the same way that he is not troubled by the absence of wings or the presence of a navel. There is simply no truck to be held with the idea that “a Master of the Temple should exhibit this type of personality” when, as far as the Master himself is concerned, he doesn’t even have a personality, and only uses the pronoun “I” as a convenience at the best of times.
What, then, is the essential difference between this attainment and the attainment to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel? We have already said that in the latter attainment the personality is still present, but the 5=6 does not identify with it, whereas in the former attainment the personality is gone, but what does this actually mean?

Attainment to 5=6, to KCHGA, requires the individual to be able to “see through” the veils of his Khu and identify with that which underlies it, but identify he does. The individual in KCHGA still has preferences, even though they are the preferences of his true self and not of his conscious mind. The individual in KCHGA “prefers,” at a fundamental level, life over death for instance. In a previous post we saw how for a particular individual’s nature to be frustrated even though “everything that happens, happens naturally,” and it is perfectly possible for the nature of a 5=6 to be frustrated, no matter how he tries to avoid it. Although the individual in KCHGA is free from “false” preferences, he is not free from all preferences, because although he identifies himself with his true self, the thing that does the identification cannot be equated with the true self; he still believes himself to be separate from the universe, because he still “lives within” his Khu, just within a Khu that accurately reflects the true self, that accurately reflects the Khabs.

The 8=3, on the other hand, does not identify himself with the Khabs; he does not identify with anything, the unifying quality of the personality having been annihilated. The Master of the Temple is therefore not subject to either the false preferences of his mind or the “true” preferences of his true self, because he does not identify with any partial subset of existence. He does not even identify with nothing; that identity is simply absent.

It must be stressed again that the annihilation of the personality is not the same thing as the annihilation of its constituents. It does not logically follow that if the 8=3 does not identify with any partial subset of existence then he will not experience pain if, for instance, his arm is torn off in a freak accident involving farm equipment. Neither does it follow that he will not feel sadness at the death of a loved one, for instance. What does follow is that even if the 8=3 does experience such things, his awareness is not “contaminated” by those experiences because his awareness does not arise from a point upon which those experiences constitute a centre. The Master of the Temple may perceive a feeling of sadness but he will not “be sad himself.” The depressive colours his entire perception of the universe with his sorrow; he subsumes himself within it. The 8=3 may perceive a feeling of sorrow, but he understands that sorrow – like any other emotion – is something that happens to a personality, to an ego, and he is fully aware on a moment-by-moment basis that there is no personality. Although he may perceive a feeling of sorrow, he perceives it as an illusion, instead of falling prey to that illusion. Perceiving such feelings as mere illusion, he no longer has any reason to prefer one illusion over another.

Does it therefore follow that a Master of the Temple will therefore be equally as likely to walk off a cliff as to avoid walking off one? It does not. The Master of the Temple, having no preferences, has no will, “will” being merely the expression of the sum total of an individual object’s preferences. This being the case, there is no reason for him whatsoever to interfere with the will of his true self, and that self does have preferences, usually including a preference for self-preservation. The 8=3 will therefore not interfere with the attempts of the self to preserve its being, but he is equally untroubled by the knowledge that, at some point or another, that self will inevitably die.

The Master of the Temple perceives from the perspective of the universal, and understands that the sum total of the universe remains at zero, that although there may be fluctuations into the positive and the negative that nothing can ultimately be created or destroyed, and that the universe itself is something wholly apart from that which is perceived by individual selves. He perceives this continually on a day-to-day level because, having annihilated the personality and the individual point-of-view, there is simply no other way to perceive things. That the 8=3 has no conscious preference with regards to the fate of his own self should be no more troubling or strange than the fact that an given individual equally has no conscious preference with regards to the individual fates of the overwhelmingly vast majority of the other 6 billion or so selves on the planet. Such indifference is a natural and inevitable outcome of success in the process of “putting each idea against its opposite, and refusing to prefer either.” One can observe the suffering of another and nevertheless understand that there is nothing “bad” about it; it is not such a big step to push this observation further and apply it to one’s own self, and it is no contradiction to remark that in both cases the suffering itself does not actually disappear as a result of that observation.

As The Book of the Law says, “Bind nothing! Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & any other thing; for thereby there cometh hurt. But whoso availeth in this, let him be the chief of all!” (AL I, 22-23) The Master of the Temple is the “chief of all,” having freed himself from not only the false preferences of his mind, but from the true preferences of his self, and he is able to perceive free from all of these influences.