A recent thread over on LAShTAL.com has been discussing the highly suspicious account Aleister Crowley gave about the “reception” of The Book of the Law. One part of the thread has morphed into a speculation as to the nature of “Aiwass”, prompting Ian Rons to write this:

I myself experienced something akin to this once, where I asked a question of my HGA who was in the room and my then partner answered out loud whilst asleep. I don’t feel the need to suppose that this thing I call “HGA” is anything other than a projection of my personality, and to think that it is something outside would be, in my opinion, a particularly dangerous form of obsession (besides being horribly unscientific), despite how utterly convincing a “performance” the HGA might give and how necessary that version of reality may seem to be.

Most discussions of this type tend to focus on whether the “Holy Guardian Angel” (HGA) is an “external individual” – i.e. an honest-to-goodness angel – or an “internal individual” – i.e. the kind of “projection of [the] personality” that Ian describes. It turns out to be far more interesting to look more closely at the idea that the HGA is any kind of individual at all.

The most simplistic interpretation of the concept of the “Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel” (a phrase which, let us remember, Crowley adopted from The Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage because “the theory implied in these words is so patently absurd that only simpletons would waste much time in analysing it. It would be accepted as a convention, and no one would incur the grave danger of building a philosophical system upon it.”) is that of an individual of some kind – external or internal – that one goes to for “advice”, that one asks questions of, and obtains guidance therefrom.

Crowley famously says in Magick Without Tears that:

My observation of the Universe convinces me that there are beings of intelligence and power of a far higher quality than anything we can conceive of as human; that they are not necessarily based on the cerebral and nervous structures that we know; and that the one and only chance for mankind to advance as a whole is for individuals to make contact with such Beings.

which was primarily responsible for kicking off the whole “Typhonian” Thelema-as-contacting-space-aliens tradition. Those in the “HGA as an external individual” camp tend to subscribe to the view that the HGA is just such an entity, despite that fact that this particular quote specifically talks about the chance for mankind to advance as a whole, rather than about any form of personal progress.

Let’s assume for a moment that such beings do exist, and that we have contacted one that we believe to be our “Holy Guardian Angel”, so we ask it questions in some way – whether verbalised or not – to obtain a form of guidance. If we are to accept on face value that the guidance we receive is guidance we should follow, we are making two implicit assumptions:

1. The entity knows what is “best for us”; and
2. The entity wants to communicate that to us.

These are not assumptions we should make without grave consideration. It is entirely possible that the entity in question may be mischievous, or positively malevolent. The fact that he is a “higher being” cannot be relied upon to infer his intentions. Humans, for instance, may reasonably be assumed (by other humans, at least) to be a “higher form of beings” than cows. Yet if cows ever managed to make a conscious link with humanity, just imagine the “wisdom” they’d receive: “We’re going to fatten you up, then kill you and eat your flesh. Oh, and we’re going to stick your children in little crates and do the same to you, too. Oh, and then we’re going to make really nice coats and shoes out of your skin. Have a good eternity!” It’s quite possible that if these beings are so far advanced compared to us, then we are so low compared to them that they may not even notice us, let alone give a damn about our wellbeing.

In any case, we are faced with the problem that we cannot accept the guidance from such an individual to be a priori worth following. This problem is not diminished by taking the “internal individual” approach. Let’s assume that, instead, the HGA is a “projection of the personality”, and repeat the process by going to it for guidance. It is well known that the personality contains many conflicting and self-destructive elements. If it were not so, then the part of the personality we are thinking with wouldn’t need the guidance of another part. This then raises a similar question: how do we know the part of the personality we are speaking to is worth listening to? What if we are speaking to the projection of a neurosis, or a conflict?

Under either approach, therefore, we are left with the problem of how to determine whether or not the guidance we receive is guidance we should be following, how to determine whether the “individual” – whether internal or external – is an individual worth listening to.

This leaves us in a sticky bind. There are only two possible approaches. One is to simply have faith that the messages are genuine. This, for obvious reasons, is not a sensible approach. The other is to assess the “genuineness” of the messages in some way, typically boiling down to “does the contact ‘feel right’?” “Does it ‘seem to be’ your HGA talking?” or some similar ‘test’. This leaves us in a bit of a situation; if we are independently capable of assessing the genuineness of the messages from the “angel”, then why do we need to contact the “angel” at all? If we already possess such a discriminatory faculty, why should such “knowledge and communication” be required, or even useful? If you go to your “angel” for guidance, and filter the messages through your own discriminatory faculty, then you aren’t “listening to your angel” at all, you’re picking and choosing the messages that best agree with what you already think. Not only does this make “Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel” a nonsensical concept, but it makes it a non-existent one; an individual following this approach is simply doing no such thing.

The fact is that the theory of the HGA as a “separate individual”, however you want to describe that, that one individual is able to consciously converse with, is fundamentally self-contradictory and flawed, and even when successful does not do what it says on the tin.

There is a way to make this approach work, however, if we shift perspective slightly. We can say that the HGA is an individual, in the full sense of the word, if we define the HGA as the self. This definition would require that we consider the conscious mind, the thoughts, the emotions, the self-image, everything we usually refer to as “ourselves” as not comprising a self at all. With this perspective, the HGA is not the “higher self” (an idea Crowley referred to as “a damnable heresy and a dangerous delusion”); it is the only self. “Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel” therefore consists not of one individual communicating with another individual, but of one “individual” realising that it’s not an individual at all, and throwing its own “interests” out of the window. In this case there is no need to “assess the genuineness” of the guidance from the “angel”, because there is no longer any conflicting guidance arising from the consciousness, no longer any “self-interest” that the “guidance” needs to further.

The whole HGA imagery therefore – regardless of the “external and internal” question – is nothing but a device for pandering to the arrogance of the conscious mind which believes “itself” to be a “self”. It is a mistake – as Crowley himself pointed out in plain language, on several occasions – to believe in the reality of one “individual” which provides guidance for another “individual”. The aspirant should be aware that any experience of “KCHGA” which takes the form of “receiving guidance from another individual” is not KCHGA at all, but signifies that he has taken a wrong turn, and is instead merely paying attention to the pictures in his head.

Crowley writes of Liber Samekh – “being the Ritual employed by the Beast 666 for the Attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel” – that:

the Adept will be free to concentrate his deepest self, that part of him which unconsciously orders his true Will, upon the realization of his Holy Guardian Angel. The absence of his bodily, mental and astral consciousness is indeed cardinal to success, for it is their usurpation of his attention which has made him deaf to his Soul, and his preoccupation with their affairs that has prevented him from perceiving that Soul

Further, he writes:

If the Adept is to be any wise conscious of his Angel it must be that some part of his mind is prepared to realise the rapture, and to express it to itself in one way or another. This involves the perfection of that part, its freedom from prejudice and the limitations of rationality so-called. For instance: one could not receive the illumination as to the nature of life which the doctrine of evolution should shed, if one is passionately persuaded that humanity is essentially not animal, or convinced that causality is repugnant to reason. The Adept must be ready for the utter destruction of his point of view on any subject, and even that of his innate conception of the forms and laws of thought.

This is exactly what we have described in Fundamentals of Thelemic Practice. His conscious mind must achieve “freedom from prejudice and the limitations of rationality so-called” in order that its own activities do not affect the actions of the self, in order that its own “preferences” do not pull the self in any one direction or another from whither it would naturally go. It must achieve silence in its own meanderings if it is to perceive accurately the nature of the self, and to become consciously aware of the will. It is indeed the “usurpation of his attention which has made him deaf to his Soul, and his preoccupation with their affairs that has prevented him from perceiving that Soul.”

The “external or internal individual” question therefore turns out to be a red herring; if it appears to be an individual at all, then it isn’t the HGA. For as long as he is filtering the “messages from the HGA” through his own conscious mind, for as long as he is perceiving “messages” at all, then his attention is still usurped, and what he is dealing with is not his “HGA”.