The Small Cards of the Tarot is now available on this web site in HTML format.

I’ve today published The Small Cards of the Tarot, an extended essay analysing the small cards of the Tarot in terms of the framework presented in A Qabalistic Framework (that essay being included in the print version), and in terms of their astrological and elemental attributions.

It is available from lulu in a 116 page perfect-bound 6″ x 9″ book format for $6.85 (the cost of printing). A PDF version is available for free download from lulu, and from this website.

Dicon wrote:

OK who was/is Erwin Hessle? Please.

Chade wrote:

He’s a magician, a philosopher, an adventurer, an ale drinker, a web
master, a seducer, a secret chef, a singer of songs, a heckler of
poets, a lover of women, a bare knuckle fighter, an alt.magick reg and
a Welshman too. Although not necessarily in that order, at least not
every day.

As good a summary as any, I suppose.

Erwin wrote:

The way to discover [the “true will”], essentially, is to stop paying attention to the things that distract you from it. If you stop paying attention to those things, the will makes itself known without any effort required to dig it up.

Halla wrote:

I see what you mean.

Unfortunately one may also find efforts to ignore distractions thwarted by those around who have no interest in you finding your will but instead want to exert theirs. ;-)

One may indeed. Discovering the will is the “science” part of magick,and successfully imposing it on your environment is the “art” part. There are no guarantees that either part will be successful, although if you adopt a definition of “will” that is unaffected by external constraint then you improve your chances at succeeding in the art considerably. This may at first sound like cheating, but turns out to be no more so than restricting the will to those things that don’t require, for instance, being able to breathe unaided underwater for several hours at a time, or being able to travel to Jupiter solely by the power of your own flatulence. There are plenty of external constraints out there that can not be overcome but only adjusted to, gravity being an obvious example. There’s no a priori reason to treat the interference of other human beings as a separate category to these.

Any given individual can be considered to have a “natural” course of action in any given situation, regardless of what the details of that situation are, including situations where some possibilities are being withheld from you by other human beings. If you are in a room with only one exit, then without an ability to walk through walls you can be pretty sure that at some point in the near future your “true” will is going to be to leave that room through that single door. The walls are not “restricting” your will, in this case; they are defining it. The same can apply when people get in your way in a similar manner. We can draw an analogy with an electrical current; a resistor offers opposition to the flow of current, but if that current is not confined to a well-defined and closed circuit in the first place then there will be no flow at all, and no will. To a large extent, discovering the will can be considered to be a process of determining “defining constraints” from “restricting constraints”. If there is a “natural” course of action, then it is natural because your nature demands it, and your nature is outside of your control. You never get to choose what your “true” will is, you can only choose whether or not to conform to it.

But anyway, if this “natural” course of action is considered to be the will, then it is always available regardless of opposition, if one could only become aware of it. It’s only when you’re faced with a number of seemingly suitable and feasible options that a wider definition of will becomes useful.

Chade wrote:
I wonder how plot devices such as fate developed.

Tom wrote:
Here’s my theory: Growth and development follow very obvious patterns again and again. So it’s easy to imagine that this pattern is repeated in the events of our lives as well as in the development of our bodies. Just as the child is destined to grow to an adult in a certain way, no matter what it might wish for itself, we are each destined to grow in spirit in a certain way, no matter what we choose. That’s fate.

Here’s mine. Until the development of statistical probabilistic methods for quantifying uncertainty, the progression of future events was unintelligible. Some times things happened, and sometimes they didn’t, and there appeared to be no consistent connection between actions taken and results caused except for on a relatively trivial basis such as dropping an object and seeing it fall to the ground. This absence of consistency was, through a process of anthropomorphism, attributed to some other entity – usually the “gods” – interfering, and having their own way despite the attempts of man to influence the course of events. That’s fate.

The discovery of tools for quantifying uncertainty, which primarily began in the 17th century, enabled this observation of “sometimes things happen, and sometimes they don’t” to be properly understood as illustrative of probability. This was a consciousness-raising discovery for the human race, and enabled the future to be once and for all taken out of the hands of the gods and into the hands of men, enabling rapid advances to be made in fields as diverse as engineering, architecture and finance.

Note: refer to “Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk” by Peter L. Bernstein for more on this idea.

Original poster wrote (responding to a citation of this post):

Interesting, although I’m sort of grasping at the concept. It gives me the idea that, since the true nature is clothed in self-awareness (er,that’s how it reads to me, I’ll happily be corrected if I’ve picked itup wrong), one may be able to develop another seperate awareness for apurpose if one is aware of the seperation and interconnectedness of the two things

“the true nature is clothed in self-awareness” is a reasonable summary. If we were to impute some sort of “cosmic plan” to the universe, we might say that the way this self-awareness should function is to correctly interpret the self, to correctly interpret the environment, and to correctly determine the optimal course of the former through the latter.

The reality is that this functioning is far from perfect. Arguably this is due to a “defect” in the faculty of self-awareness, but this turns out not to be the case. The essential problem is that the mind lives in a reflection of the universe, rather than the real universe, since it is cut off from that universe and can receive only reflections of it through the senses. If this reflection were accurate, there’d be no problems, but it isn’t. The source of the problem we’re discussing is that man spends the greater part of his time paying attention to the unreality inside his head than to the reality outside of it.

This is, in fact, the way the mind is “supposed” to work. The mind cannot possibly usefully process all the sensory information at every given moment, so it has to form patterns of expectation, which helps cut down on the processing. Motor memory is an example of where this can be useful. When you start learning to drive a car, it’s very difficult, because you have to pay attention to everything, including your own movements, and it’s so much to take in that you cannot do it well. As you progress, much of this becomes internalised, and your physical movements no longer require your conscious attention.

Another good example, and one that’s been floating around the internet recently, is the idea that the brain doesn’t actually read individual letters in words; if the first and last letters of a word are in the right places, but you scramble the rest, then your brain will nine times out of ten correctly read the word. The word your brain perceives is not the one that’s written down, so the brain is perceiving something that isn’t there.

Similarly, early man was “programmed” to jump and run at the sounds of rustling in the bushes. It was not conducive to survival to work out in painful detail each time whether or not there actually was a lion hiding in there waiting to pounce; it became safer to associate that sound with danger, and to react accordingly, regardless of whether or not the danger is there.

In other words, the brain functions to a large extent by forming patterns, and reacting to those patterns instead of to the actual stimuli themselves. This is the basis of learning, and it’s how the brain naturally functions. Read the rest of this post »

Tom wrote:

I think it’s a good idea to distinguish between “awareness” and “narration”. What is often referred to as “self-awareness” is the ability to conceive of oneself as a character in a story and to narrate the events which happen to this character. Awareness, on the other hand, is our response to our environment. It is entirely composed of immediate feelings, not thoughts or even integrated perceptions. Awareness does not require narration because awareness does not insist upon explanations for what’s happening. Explanations are necessary to narration because that’s what makes the story tie together.

When I’m talking about a “higher self”, I’m talking about awareness without narration. It’s a direct apprehension (but not necessarily comprehension) of reality. I call it “higher” only by convention. In fact, its more basic and hence might be more accurately described as lower.

Achieving a state of awareness without narration reveals to us the extent to which our version of reality is infested with imaginary objects and relationships which makes it a powerfully revelatory and potentially life-changing experience. Thus it is often thought of as superior consciousness.

We do not have more than one form of awareness. We can, however, make up as many narrations of our experience as we like.

I think this explanation is good as far as it goes, but I think you’re being way too simplistic in boiling everything down to “narration”. There are elements of “coloured perception” masking the HGA which go far deeper than “narration” would suggest. I much prefer to make the distinction between awareness of what’s actually real, and awareness of what’s imaginary, and I’d replace your usage of “narration” with the latter term. Absorbed’s “facing fears” thread we had some time ago was a good illustration of the kind of thing I’m talking about.

Tom wrote:

To talk about one’s “true nature” is to narrate some place for oneself in the universe that is correct, some action that is purer or more appropriate for one than some other action. This is, I think, a mistake.

This is indeed a common way of looking at “true nature,” but it’s not the one I employ. I actually don’t like the qualifier “true” very much, and prefer to just use “nature” (with the unspoken understanding that it is one’s real nature rather than what one imagines one’s nature to be that is being referred to).

The significance of the “true” qualifier in the way I use it is to denote what’s left when all the imaginary elements of nature have been stripped away, making it pretty much an opposite usage to the one you describe above. The same goes for “true will”; “true will” is not some cosmologically laid down consecrated course that you’ve been destined to follow, but the tendency to action that you have when you are free from the imaginary phantasms that distract you down roads that are not conducive to your actual non-imaginary nature.

“True”, in this sense, doesn’t signify “special” as much as it does “free from all the false crap.” It’s something of a negative definition, and in practical terms there’s no a priori reason why any number of different acts couldn’t be in accordance with true will at any given point in time. Theoretically there is arguably only one such act at any given time, but we can safely assume the inadequacy of our measuring equipment will forever prevent us from actually discovering what that is even if it does exist, so we can happily discard the idea for all practical purposes.

I’ve made another couple of essays available on lulu.com. The following essays are now available in printed form:

• The Ethics of Thelema;
• The Khabs is in the Khu;
• The Method of Love;
• True Will;
• The Value of Divination; and
• The Qabalistic Cross.

I have added a new tool to the resources section enabling the display of some selected principal Qabalistic correspondences from Liber 777. Up to three correspondence columns can be selected for simultaneous display, allowing for quick access to the desired information and for comparison between columns which may be on different pages in the book.

Principles of Thelema is a full-length treatise developing and analysing the core principles of the philosophical and spiritual system of Thelema, according to the works of Aleister Crowley and to The Book of the Law itself.

Topics covered in Volume One include the cosmogony and ontology of Thelema, will, love, the Holy Guardian Angel, ethics and the relevance of Thelema to society.

Volume Two, to be released at a later date, will consist of a detailed commentary on The Book of the Law.

Volume One available early 2008 through major online retailers.