I’ve added A Thelemic Primer to the writings section of the site. This primer explains briefly, and in simple language, the fundamental concepts of Thelema as described on this site.

Taurus is an earth sign, and the element of earth is concerned with, amongst other things, the material world, wealth and physical power.

In The Small Cards of the Tarot, we analysed the cards relating to the three decans of the sign of Capricorn – the cardinal sign of earth – as follows:

• Two of Disks – change – physical change itself;
• Three of Disks – works – the coordination of physical change; and
• Four of Disks – power – the application of such coordination to specified ends.

The term power base is illustrative, here. Mechanical work is the amount of energy transferred by a force, and physical power is the rate at which work is performed. For instance, we may consider a car engine to perform work by transferring chemical energy in the fuel out to the car itself, increasing the car’s kinetic energy. The greater the amount of this transfer that can be achieved in a given second, the faster the car can accelerate and the more powerful the engine is.

Power is therefore a measure of the rate, rather than the amount of work performed. We may cut down a large tree by scraping at it with a small file, but it will take an awful lot of time. We can perform the same task, and the amount of work, much faster by using a chainsaw which is far more powerful.

To generate power, a stable base is required. We could attempt to increase the power output of a car engine, by increasing the compression ratio in the cylinders, but doing so increases both the stress exerted on the cylinders and pistons themselves, and increases the risk of the fuel detonating under the increase temperatures. To deal with this problem, we would need to either strengthen the cylinders themselves, or to use a higher quality of fuel which detonates at a higher temperature. Thus, to contain and direct an increased amount of energy, we need a stronger and more resistant mechanism. Read the rest of this post »

In a recent post, What’s the point of it all? we made the statement “When you’re dead, you’re dead, and nothing of the individual survives. Individuality is a temporal and temporary phenomenon”, which provoked the following comment:

you are not able to prove it either

This comment deserves a post of its own for a full rebuttal.

It is a constant source of disappointment (figuratively speaking) to us that in 2008 people who claim to be “students of the occult”, people who claim to be sincere seekers into a “deeper reality” and into what is “hidden”, can be so completely ignorant of the basics of the investigative process. However, as disappointing as it is, it is not at all surprising. Modern occultism is, as we have often said, a concealing rather than a revealing practice. Occultists do, on the whole, tend to be rather credulous people who hold sweeping and unwarranted beliefs on all kinds of points upon which they cannot hope to have any kind of real knowledge. Then, on top of that, they are often given to repeating, like mantras, a series of trite philosophical platitudes such as “it’s impossible to prove anything”, “reality is subjective”, and “nothing is true; everything is permitted” by the “teachers” who spoonfeed them their ridiculous beliefs. These platitudes are conceptually no different from the old “god works in mysterious ways” type apologies for the blatent absurdity of Christian belief.

It is, therefore, without too much hope that we offer this explanation of the error in this way of thinking. Those who are invested in maintaining their pet beliefs are unlikely to be reached with reason, and those who are likely to be reached with reason are unlikely to require this explanation. Nevertheless, since the subject is an interesting one, we will proceed. Read the rest of this post »

Recently, a private correspondent asked me the following question:

You’ve taken a lot of time explaining Thelema. However, there is something that’s been gnawing at me for some time now, and is possibly the most fundamental of all for this subject… “What’s the point of it all?”

There’s a part of me that is wondering why I should struggle to practice, to be aware of anything beyond my normal consciousness, particularly if all this work doesn’t survive my death in some way; or does it? Is there such a thing as “reincarnation?” If so, what survives? If not, then do I and all my efforts in Thelema cease to exist at death? It would all be better experienced by me if I knew that somehow all the work isn’t limited to a small span of time.

As the correspondent rightly points out, this is indeed a fundamental question, and one worth looking at closely. Inseparable from this question is the idea that impermanence is a demotivating factor: “why should I struggle to practice… if all this work doesn’t survive my death in some way?” Therefore we need to begin by looking at the question of death.

Firstly, the easy answer. “Is there such a thing as ‘reincarnation’?” No, there isn’t. When you’re dead, you’re dead, and nothing of the individual survives. Individuality is a temporal and temporary phenomenon. Naturally, there are some who would object to such a strident statement – “how can you know?” – to whom I would reply, “show me the evidence.” Even those who do believe – and “believe” is the appropriate word, here – in reincarnation never seem to speak of a continuity of individuality. They may claim to have memories of “past lives”, and they may claim to have discovered events in “past lives” which can shed some light on things they experience in this life, but nobody makes the suggestion that the consciousness of individuality simply continues from one life to the next, that a new-born baby suddenly wakes up with fifty years of intact memories, wondering how he suddenly disappeared from the scene of the car accident and woke up between some strange woman’s legs. Even if there were some “connection” between lives, therefore, the theory of reincarnation does not get one past the question of individual impermanence. We can argue that our current work may “help out” one of our reincarnations down the line, but since people today are still learning from the works of Homer, for instance, we can argue the “future life benefit” point perfectly well without having to resort to reincarnation in order to do it. Read the rest of this post »

To improve the quality of discussion, going forward, blog comments submitted for moderation will not be approved if they do not directly relate to the subject of the entry, or if they are of a frivolous nature. Such discussion belongs in the forums which have been provided to allow for less structured, although still on-topic, interaction. Frivolous or irrelevant remarks in an otherwise relevant comment will be edited out. Notice will not be given of rejection or modification under any circumstances.

A recent discussion over on heruraha.net about reincarnation saw Jim Eshelman make the following statement in response to the statement that “There are innumerable arguments against reincarnation”:

Which I’m not going to rehash or enter into. My experience confirms to me, with certainty matching or exceeding that of any other certainty in the whole range of my experience, that reincarnation is a simple fact. Take it or leave it, I’m not going to get dragged into that discussion.

We’ve often, on this blog, discussed the idea that bare experience has no explanatory power, and this comment is a good example of how people can mistake belief for knowledge when they fail to comprehend this.

We can make a statement such as “my experience confirms to me … that the Sun goes around the earth.” In fact, of course, my experience tells me nothing of the sort. All my experience does is provide me with observations of the Sun at different stations of the sky. It is my reason, my rational faculty, that ties those observations together and infers not only a circular path in the sky, but a correspondingly circular path “under” the earth. In this particular case, of course, my own reason tells me that the earth actually goes around the Sun, which nicely demonstrates the fallibility of experience even if it were true that it could provide any kind of explanation, which it can’t.

Either way, it should be clear that any statement along the lines of “my experience confirms this as fact” is quite simply untrue. A fact is something known to be true, and knowledge is a rational phenomenon. To be able to sensibly say “my experience confirms reincarnation to be a fact” it would have to be followed up by statements along the lines of “because I have observed this or that.” Right there we see that it is a rational and not an experiential conclusion; this or that is observed, therefore reincarnation is a fact. This is a rational process of deduction. Read the rest of this post »

In The HGA as an individual, we touched on the difficulties involved in assessing communications from the “Holy Guardian Angel”, however one defines that. In this entry, we will look more closely at the idea of the “external praeternatural being” theory.

In his Confessions, Aleister Crowley writes the following:

To return the the general question of religion. The fundamental problem has never been explicitly stated. We know that all religions, without exception, have broken down at the first test. The claim of religion is to complete, and (incidentally) to reverse, the conclusions of reason by means of a direct communication from some intelligence superior in kind to that of any incarnate human being.

The theory as to the “truth value” of any religion is simple; human reason is imperfect, and cannot currently – and maybe never can – answer the kinds of fundamental questions we put to it. Therefore the solution is to receive a communication from a kind of being who can answer such questions, or who can at least provide us with some guidance based on such answers, even if we cannot directly comprehend the answers themselves. This is a similar line of reasoning that he employed when making the following statement in Magick Without Tears that we also quoted in The HGA as an individual:

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.

Once more we see the implicit idea that such “Beings” possess knowledge that we either do not or cannot, that we “need” such knowledge, and that the only way – at least currently – to obtain that knowledge is to receive it from such “Beings”. Read the rest of this post »

In the entries relating to the previous two decans in this sign, we looked at magick as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will”, focusing first on the misunderstanding of “conformity with Will”, and second on the method of resolving that misunderstanding. As we enter the final decan of Aries, we will consider the “causing Change” part.

The will is, as we have often discussed, nothing other than the preferences of the true self, the “dynamic aspect of the self” as Crowley wrote in Liber II, and “the true Motion of thine inmost Being” as he wrote in Liber Aleph. This being the case, it is evident that the nature of the will cannot be to rest, but to move, to change. Strictly, it cannot be the will to achieve some end, and then to stop; it can only be the will to work towards some end at any given moment or, more accurately, to work in a particular direction, regardless of the “end”. We may, for the sake of convenience, say that it is the will of a river to flow downwards to the sea, but once it reaches its goal the water does not suddenly cease to be, it does not suddenly stop moving. Rather, we can see that the condition of flowing through a land-channel that gave rise to such a description of its will was a temporary condition, and when that condition passes, that description of the will ceases to apply.

The “will” of the water – like the will of anything else – is a product of the interaction between the object of its environment. It the depths of outer space, water would not obviously tend to flow in any one direction, but would be subject to the forces imposed upon it. On the surface of the earth, however, it is compelled by the force of gravity to seek a downwards path, and in fact to seek the shortest downwards path it can given the nature of the obstacles in its way. Thus, a river may “choose” a meandering path to the ocean along a valley, rather than cutting a direct path down a mountain by eroding a path through the hard rock, simply because the former path requires less effort than the latter. Or, put in another way, the former path offers the least resistance to the water, so that is the path it follows. Read the rest of this post »

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. Read the rest of this post »

I’ve uploaded a new essay entitled “Fundamentals of Thelemic Practice”. It is available in HTML format and in PDF format. HTML format will be available presently. It’s also available from lulu.com in printed form or as a free PDF download.