It can. In fact shutting it down entirely is one of the basic training points in magick.

You misunderstand. I’m not saying it’s impossible; I’m saying that you cannot do those “activities which require the use of the mind” if you do. In other words, you cannot discover and fulfill the will by shutting down the mind entirely, regardless of whether or not you can shut down the mind entirely as an exercise in its own right.

It isn’t easy, but possible.

I disagree; I think it is easy.

Yeah, but when someting is ‘very easy’ it becomes very difficult for the mind. Hard to explain.

Yes, much of the difficulty lies in figuring out how easy things are. The ingenuity of the mind in making easy things look impossible is endless.

I have a question for you that interests me: how did your time-experience change when you’ve developed through various stages?

Many people over the years have accused me of being “too cerebral” or too “verbose”, but the fact is it doesn’t take me very long at all to rattle off a long post.

Same thing with responses like this, if I’m at my computer, an email turns up telling me I have a comment, I switch attention and rattle off a response in about a minute, then switch back to what I was doing before. It looks like you’re all over the place, but really you’re just dealing with things for a few moments as they come in then going back to what you were doing. Some people seem to need a couple of hours to compose a couple of paragraphs; I don’t.

In terms of “time experience” and development… time passes quickly when you aren’t paying attention to it. Obviously, as you get older, each amount of time forms a smaller proportion of your life. For a five year old kid, a year is 20% of his life to date, whereas for a fifty-year old, it’s only 2%, so it’s not surprising it passes quicker as you age. Add to that the fact that the older you get, the more stuff you have in your head to distract you, and before you know it, all the time has gone and you’re dead.

Time passes quickly when you consider things to be making demands on your time. If you just change the parameters, and decide that whatever is happening is what you are currently choosing to do, then all of a sudden you find yourself with all the time in the world. If what you are doing at the current moment is always what you are choosing to do, then you always have more than enough time to do the things that you choose. But if you’re doing something just to get it out of the way, then time is going to fly by, because you’re not paying attention to what’s happening, so you miss it, and it goes right over your head.

Do you consider ‘Resh’ as something not fundamental, or are the goals of ‘Resh’ adequately met with the practices you outlined here?

I think it’s the purpose of ‘Resh’ that is important, rather than the details of it, such purpose being “repeated application of … [fixing] his attention on something outside of himself which causes his awareness to lift itself out of his own petty problems and concerns and to settle on a point of relative consistency and indifference.” The practices in the current essay achieve the same end by encouraging the aspirant to see the unreality of what’s in his mind, and “lifting him out” that way.

There are many, many different types of practice that could help towards this end; “Resh” is just one of them. Different people will need to approach this issue in different ways. That’s why understanding the underlying rationale is so important, instead of blindly following random prescribed practices.

Additionally, I noticed that you are preparing another essay called ‘Principles of Thelema.’ Any idea when that will be available?

It’s a full length book rather than an essay. It was originally slated for release early this year, but due to a number of factors, it’s more likely to be the end of this year now.

I was looking forward to reading your viewpoint about the cosmology of Thelema, which was mentioned in the description.

The Khabs is in the Khu gives the fundamentals of that, in the meantime. Principles expands on this in a fair amount of detail, but does not materially alter any of the conclusions in that essay.

Erwin,
This post and your essay on True Will helped me a lot.

In fact only by reading them i can spot here and there hints of my Will more clearly.

Thank you so much.