In our last entry, Sun enters Ascendant of Aries, we discussed Aleister Crowley’s definition of “magick”:

the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will

and commented on how the principle question relates not to the “causing Change” part as many suspect, but to the “conformity with Will” part. In other words, the principle purpose of magick is not in learning how to cause change, but learning which changes to make, which changes are “in conformity with Will”. In this entry, we will expand upon that idea.

“Will” is a concept which, although apparently simple, is not so easy to understand. True Will is an exploration of the fundamentals of the idea, describing how the will reflects the preferences of the “true” self, as opposed to the “imagined” self. It is a common misconception within the Thelemic community that Thelema essentially equates to “choose your own path”. As we have shown previously, nothing could be further from the truth; True Will demonstrates that, whatever will is, it is not something that can be chosen.

On a practical level, the essential task of Thelema is to distinguish between what one actually is, and what one imagines oneself to be; between what one actually prefers, and what one imagines oneself to prefer; and, from a “magick” perspective, between the external environment one actually prefers, and the external environment one imagines oneself to prefer.

As we stated in the previous entry in this series, Crowley considered the attainment to the “Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel” as:

the essential work of every man; none other ranks with it either for personal progress or for power to help one’s fellows. This unachieved, man is no more than the unhappiest and blindest of animals. He is conscious of his own incomprehensible calamity, and clumsily incapable of repairing it. Achieved, he is no less than the co-heir of gods, a Lord of Light. He is conscious of his own consecrated course, and confidently ready to run it.

The use of the phrase “unachieved, man is no more than the unhappiest and blindest of animals” is important. The distinction between what one is and what one imagines oneself to be appears to many people to be a relatively minor distinction, that if they sit down by themselves at night and think really hard, deep down they can tell easily what they really are; that although they can act tough in various situations, deep down they know that they are as frightened as everyone else. But Crowley’s use of these words arises from his understanding that this is not the case, and that imagination the average man has of himself and his environment diverges so enormously from the actual truth of the matter that he really has no hope at all of ever “following his will” unless he takes some relatively drastic steps to remedy the situation. The average man – including the average “student of the occult”, the delusionary practices of this field of study arguably serving to leave such “students” in the “less insightful than most” category – really does have no idea at all what the nature of his “true self” actually is, and as such really cannot hope at all to ever achieve success in “causing Change to occur in conformity with Will” whilst this situation continues.

This really cannot be stressed enough. Partly as a result of the commonly held misconception that Thelema involves “choosing one’s own path”, and partly as a result of the unverifiability of success in spiritual pursuits and the corresponding natural tendency to assume its presence, the average student of the occult leads himself to believe very early on that he does know his will, that he does know his “true self.” He reads a few books, learns something of the nature of the kinds of tricks his mind can play on him, and makes a fantastic leap of faith to the conclusion that since he is armed with that knowledge, he obviously isn’t being fooled anymore. As a result, he stops looking for his will and instead craves for “more advanced practices” so that he can learn to increase his “magical power”. Instead of spending 95% of his study time looking for his will, and 5% doing it, he reverses the proportions, and really never even begins to explore the subject he mistakenly considers himself to be “adept” in. It is a sorry state of affairs, caused not least by the proliferation of books and “teachers” who don’t understand the subject themselves, resulting in the blind leading the blind off the edge of a cliff.

The primary cause of this state of affairs is simply this, that nobody tells the average student what he is looking for, and nobody tells the average student what kind of result will be an indicator of some level of success. There is a marked reluctance within the “Thelemic community” to discuss questions such as “what is the will?” either because the will is presumed to be “too personal to discuss”, or because one person has “no right” to even talk about the will of another, or, worst of all, because the will is “too mysterious to understand.” But this is Thelema; if we cannot understand such a fundamental question as “what is the will?” then we are left with nothing, because will is all there is to Thelema. Lacking this kind of knowledge, the student is free to – and actually positively encourages to – believe all kinds of silly nonsense, and to justify it on the grounds that it “works for him”, the criteria against which “working” can be measured being similarly left to the student’s own judgment to carefully avoid the possibility of him ever having to figure out whether or not it actually does “work for him.”

No mistake should be made; any student who avoids asking – and answering – these questions, and any “teacher” who similarly avoids doing so, is not involved in a study of Thelema, and is not engaged in a process of either discovering or fulfilling their wills.

It does not need to be this way. The truth is that there is plenty of useful guidance that can be given to aspirants, and we can make a start right here.

Firstly we must address the question of “what is the will?” and we can do this relatively simply. The will is, as we have described, the sum total of the preferences of the “true self”. To understand this, we must then address the question of “what causes ignorance of the will?” This latter question can be answered, albeit somewhat simplistically, like so: “ignorance of the will is caused by believing the mind.”

Whatever the will is, any actions that can be said to be in accordance with it must arise from it; in other words, they cannot arise from anything else. This leads us to a very obvious conclusion: any actions undertaken for any reason other than the fact that they arise from the will are not in accordance with will, or at least, are only in accordance with it by chance if they are.

AL II, 28-33, states the following:

28. Now a curse upon Because and his kin!

29. May Because be accursèd for ever!

30. If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because, then Will stops & does nought.

31. If Power asks why, then is Power weakness.

32. Also reason is a lie; for there is a factor infinite & unknown; & all their words are skew-wise.

33. Enough of Because! Be he damned for a dog!

These verses rank amongst the most misunderstood in the whole of The Book of the Law. They are often taken to be an admonition against the use of reason, but nothing could be further from the truth; they form, in part, a direct exhortation to use it.

What these verses warn against is acting “because” one thinks one should act in a particular way. If one acts on the basis of what one thinks one should do, then by definition one’s actions are not arising from the will, but from one’s sense of morality, “morality” here being defined in terms of any tendencies to base action on what should be done, regardless of whether or not those tendencies manifest in terms of the types of actions one would normally describe as “moral” or “immoral”. For instance, under this usage, “one should use one’s talents to the maximum” would be classed as a moral statement.

A note of caution is necessary here. This injunction should not be considered to be a warning against reasoning such as “one should avoid putting one’s hand in the fire because one’s hand will get burned.” The motivating factor in this case is not the sense of “should”, but the desire to avoid burning one’s hands. The idea that “one should not burn one’s hands” would be a moral statement, and admonishing against basing actions of moral statements would not be problematic in this example, since we may reasonably assume that most people would not want to burn their hands regardless of whether or not they think they “shouldn’t”. For those who do want to burn their hands, they’re perfectly welcome to thrust their hands into the nearest fire.

Since morality causes, by definition, actions to diverge from the will, it should be clear that anybody who is seriously about discovering their’s needs to thoroughly root out any such notions, and when we say “any” such notions, we mean any. The aspirant should thoroughly extinguish any tendency to interpret events in moral terms, no matter how distasteful he may personally find them. Indeed, those concepts that present the most difficulty to him are an obvious target, and should form his starting point. He must, for instance, remove any ideas that he has that human or animal suffering, deliberate or accidental, whether through hunger, oppression, violence, abuse or neglect, is somehow “wrong”, or “unfair”, even, for instance, when it involves puppies, kittens and children. He must extinguish all ideas that any form of crime, or deception, or dishonesty is “bad”. On the other hand, he must erase any notions that charity, or honesty, or helpfulness, is “good”, or “meritous”. He must avoid thinking that he has any kind of “duty” to act in a particular way, or to refrain from acting in a particular way. He must, in short, get rid of any and all notions which lead him to think that he either “should” or “should not” act in a particular way, or that anybody else “should” or “should not” act in that way.

Any reader who feels revulsion at this idea should take that as a conclusive demonstration of the correctness of this idea. It is quite simply impossible to attain the clarity needed to perceive the will if one’s perception is skewed by moral considerations, if one rejects certain impressions in favour of others. The Method of Love explains the importance of accepting all impressions, without prejudice, and this simply cannot be done whilst one maintains a belief in morality. Discovering the will requires an exceptionally deep, open and brutally honest investigation of the self, and a complete acceptance of what one finds; this acceptance can never be complete if one judges what one finds against some arbitrary moral standards. If one dislikes what one finds, one will either reject it or try to change it, and both of these responses will prevent knowledge of the will. Even if one accepts what one finds, but still morally judges it, even if the will is known it can never be done if the individual allows only those willed actions which he considered to be “morally acceptable”, since that moral standard cannot and does not arise from his own being.

It should not be, but unfortunately is, necessary to deal with a common objection to this idea. If one does reject morality, if one does reject the idea that, for instance, “torturing babies is wrong”, it does not follow that one will suddenly start going out and torturing babies. This is a thoroughly Christian view, one that holds that the nature of man is essentially “wicked”, and that he will immediately go out and start perpetrating all manner of “‘orrible deeds” the moment he is no longer held back by a moral compass. It is a deeply internally dissonant view to claim that one is a “moral individual” who cannot accept that torturing babies can be anything other than completely evil, and then to suggest that one would start going out and doing just that if one dared to think otherwise for a moment. It may be one’s “true will” to torture babies, and if one does reject all notions of morality and discover that this actually is one’s will, then one is going to have to decide whether or not to fulfill that will. However, in most cases we can safely assume that this is unlikely to be the case.

This idea is incredibly difficult for most people to come to terms with, but it is absolutely inevitable for the serious aspiring Thelemite. The idea of a universe where morality – either “absolute” or “relative” – is a pure product of the imagination is difficult to accept, but that is the universe in which we live. If one is serious about “acting in accordance with will”, then one must ruthlessly remove all tendencies to act in accordance with anything else, including any and all standards of morality. Even if one argues that a form of morality is hardcoded into human genes, it still remains the case that an external moral standard is at best completely superfluous. Of course, if one is not serious about “acting in accordance with will”, then one is free to ignore this conclusion, to retain one’s arbitrary moral compass and to remain in the darkness.

Does this rejection of a belief in “should” statements contradict our earlier statement that AL I, 28-33 exhorted the application of reason? Isn’t “I should avoid speeding because speeding is against the law and breaking the law is wrong” a rational statement in itself? It certainly is, but so is the statement “moral standards restrict the will and should be discarded if one wants to follow the will.” It is only through the application of reason that one can detect oneself following these artificial standards; it is only through the application of reason that one can perceive the rational motivations for one’s actions, and without this perception they will remain concealed, and nothing can be done about them. We said earlier that the principle barrier to the will is “believing the mind”; the mind is a (largely) rational construction, and it is only through the application of reason – through the turning of the mind’s own weapon against itself – that it’s phantasms can be perceived and pierced. To reject reason is to render oneself prey to it, since it is only with the sword of reason that one can detect and abate its influence. The primary role of reason, in this context, is not to arrive at the “truth”, but to destroy those false notions that pretend to be the truth. Reason, as we have previously said, is its own guard dog, but only if one embraces it fully, and applies it correctly. One must be expert in the application of reason if one ever hopes to be free from its bonds.

The bedfellow of morality is belief. Indeed, the two are inseparable. One cannot “know” that “torturing babies is wrong”; one can only believe it, and mistakenly label that belief as “knowledge”. Hume demonstrated several hundred years ago that “ought” statements cannot be derived from “is” statements, rendering “moral knowledge” a contradiction in terms. A belief is a statement that one accepts without evidence, and a natural implication of that is that a belief cannot be overturned by evidence. Once more, if the aspirant’s investigation into his own nature is to be successful, he must be prepared to accept everything he finds, and he cannot do this if he has already constructed a set of rigid axioms that he is not prepared to budge on, regardless of what he finds.

Both knowledge and belief are properties of the mind, and if the aspirant is to have any hope of seeing through the tricks of his mind, he must be prepared to abandon his faith in both of these things. Knowledge should be considered only as convenient assumption, arising from observed consistency. He is justified, for instance, in accepting the assumption that changing the position of a light switch will – presuming no malfunctions in the lighting or electrical systems – cause his lights to turn either or or off depending on their current state, since he has objectively observed this consistently occurring thousands of times. Even this must be considered to be mere assumption, however, and at least potentially open to modification, but this potential decreases with the degree of consistency observed.

He is not, however, justified in assuming that the act of changing the position of his light switch causes the state of the lights to change because it somehow sends a message to a great “light god”, who magically changes the substance of the universe in order that light be created, because this conclusion cannot sensibly be inferred from his observation. This is the real distinction between knowledge and belief. “Knowledge”, strictly so-called, is an observed pattern of consistency in phenomena. “Belief”, on the other hand, adds an imaginary layer on top of that observed pattern, and this layer is pure fantasy.

Here is another critical example of why the correct application of reason is so important. The person unschooled in reason may observe a raindance, for instance, and then observe a rain shower, and conclude that the dance caused rain. He may, if he is a particularly uninsightful person, extrapolate from that and say “your reason is fundamentally unreliable; I know that raindances cause rain, and I know they do because I have seen it; I have experienced it.” One more, his rejection of reason has caused him to fall prey to its illusions.

The person well schooled in the application of reason, on the other hand, will not be fooled, because he will be well aware of precisely which conclusions a particular set of observations can sensibly yield. He will avoid mislabeling “belief” as “experiential knowledge” or valid “evidential conclusions”, because he will be sufficiently aware of the reasoning process to detect when it is in danger of going astray.

The person who seeks self-knowledge and a knowledge of the will, therefore, must not only reject any tendency to interpret phenomena in terms of a moral standard, but he must also reject any tendency to form conclusions which cannot be justified by the observations, and to do so is to reject belief in all its forms.

These two methods form the core of the path to the discovery of the will. Firstly, the individual must rid himself of all tendencies to “colour” his thought in terms of morality, of all tendencies to accept some impressions, but to reject others. He must be prepared to accept things as they are, instead of how he would like them to be. Secondly, having rid himself of this tendency and developed an ability to perceive clearly, he must be able to draw appropriate conclusions from his clear observations, and able to avoid drawing inappropriate ones. “Discovering the will” is essentially a question of observing clearly the interactions between the self and its environment, but the patterns in such interactions which constitute the will can only be determined if he is able determine which patterns and relationships he can reasonably infer from those observations, and which patterns and relationships he cannot.

Both these major components which veil the will are attributable to the mind; on the one hand, the mind encourages one to colour observations in accordance with the mind’s own preferences, obscuring their true nature to the observer, and on the other hand the mind encourages the observer to draw conclusions which he is not justified in drawing. The colouring of observations, and the drawing of inappropriate conclusions on the basis of observations which were not even objective to begin with, are by far the most significant contributors to the thick and labyrinthine web of veils which lie between the individual and his will, and it is these tendencies which he must reverse if he is to have any reasonable hope of discovering it.

It should be readily apparent that this is, ultimately, a rational approach, one that cannot ever be accomplished by, for instance, persistent application to yogic meditation. The “just do the work” approach, the idea that simple persistent application of specified practices is what is important, is a cowardly evasion, and a distraction. Anybody (well, almost anybody) can sit still for a period of time; not everybody can rigorously investigate their own natures in the required way. Of course, this is not to say that practice is useless; on the contrary, it is very important. Practice in the “sitting still and being quiet” method of meditation, for instance, will enable the individual to develop a familiarity with a state where his mind is not interfering, which will be invaluable in his attempts to detect its influence in “normal life”. But it is undeniable that these practices are an aid to the actual task, rather than the task itself, and to suggest otherwise is to do the student a grave disservice.

This, then, is the opening to the practice of Thelema, and it is these tasks which the aspiring Thelemite has to face if he is even halfway serious about discovering and fulfilling his will. It is not the case that each person gets to “decide what Thelema is for themselves”, and it is not the case that the Thelemite can simply “choose his own path” and call it his “will”; if they are not undertaking the above tasks, then they are merely playing at it, merely wallowing in the fantasies of children. This will be a hard message for many to accept, and most will not accept it. So be it. “There is great danger in me; for who doth not understand these runes shall make a great miss.”

Those who have ears, will listen, and those who have eyes, will see.