Aye! feast! rejoice! there is no dread hereafter. There is the dissolution, and eternal ecstasy in the kisses of Nu.
I say, “Cultivate the divine gift within you.”
A gift implies an external relationship. I cannot give a gift to myself, at least not without implying opposition within myself. It therefore implies that the thing given is not me or is not of me. It originally came from someplace else. It is of another place and another time.
That the gift is divine implies that this gift does not come from another place and from another time. Instead, it comes from beyond space and beyond time. It is transcendent. It comes from the divine realm, which is said to be both on the top of a very tall mountain but also deep under the Earth.
But the divine is also that without which life has no meaning. The divine is neither the summit of a mountain nor the depths of the Earth; rather, it is the ground itself, the ground of being.
So the gift is not just within me or entrusted to me. Rather, before it, there is no me. Wherever I am, wherever I find myself, wherever and whenever I have found myself, there, always already, was the gift.
So it is a gift which could never have been given.
To cultivate implies that the gift can grow: by seed and by root and by stem and by bud and by leaf and by flower and by fruit.
Cultivation is not the same thing as building. As Aristotle pointed out long ago, things that grow have their principle of motion within themselves, whereas things we make have their principle of motion outside of themselves. When we cultivate something, we support its principle of growth by supplying it with food, air, water, and sunlight, but the principle of growth itself lies within the thing itself, not within us.
So the gift is not within us in the sense of being within our grasp or within our power. It is within us the way a seed is within the Earth. And for us to cultivate the seed really means we are to feed ourselves to it as it grows.
Living things don’t just grow into nothing, though. They grow into a particular being, a particular image, a particular end. This end is unified. It is itself and not another thing. The trajectory of growth is defined by what the growth is growing into. All doing, all movement, all growing is for the sake of this end or telos. In other words, rather than just showing up at the end, the end defines the whole process. The end is the beginning.
To “cultivate the divine gift within you” means “feed yourself to the god from beyond space and time which is implanted in you, so that you may be metabolized forth into the unified appearance.”
And how does one go about “cultivating” or “feeding” this god? Is there some special set of techniques? Some divine names in another language that have to be uttered? Some arcane symbols to blow thine load upon?
No. All you have to do is surrender your attention to it. The miracle that is Mother Nature will accomplish the rest.
I often encounter this meme that “you need to get your Malkuth in order” before pursuing magick. Here’s a recent example I heard of it:
In order to work on more subtle planes than Malkuth, you really need to have your Malkuth together. You need to be able to manifest yourself well and appropriately in Malkuth. If you’re having problems, if you’re struggling with your physical fitness or illness, emotional disregulation, anxiety, any of this, that needs to be reigned in and addressed, because it’s going to hamstring your ability to do anything more subtle than here on Malkuth.
This meme has a kernel of truth to it. If your life is in utter chaos, it’s going to be difficult having a spiritual practice of any kind. You don’t want to be a “magus” living in your mom’s garage.
But the problem is that it can be taken to imply a kind of perfectionism, where if I don’t have stability in my external environment, I don’t have a chance of doing anything meaningful with spirituality. Consider the following counterexamples:
(1) Aleister Crowley achieved Knowledge and Conversation by practicing the Bornless Ritual every day, in his astral temple, while traveling on horse through SE Asia, with his wive and infant daughter in tow, while sick with malaria.
(2) Karl Germer achieved Knowledge and Conversation by reciting the Holy Books from memory every day while in a Nazi concentration camp.
(3) Damien Echols achieved Knowledge and Conversation while on death row and getting his ass kicked by prison guards.
These were situations where individuals had either little or no control over their external environments, and yet they were not only able to do serious spiritual work, but the spiritual work probably helped them endure their material circumstances with more dignity and hope than they would have had otherwise.
My own experience tells me you can accomplish quite a bit with one hour of intense spiritual practice a day. More is better, but one hour will do. You need enough organization in your life that you can set aside that hour, and you need your emotional state stable enough that you can use that hour productively (i.e., achieve “good enough” concentration in it).
It’s relative to the individual. Crowley knew this. It’s why he rejected traditional yama and niyama or Buddhist sila.
Another angle to consider is that having a goal—really any goal, it doesn’t have to be spiritual—tends to “pull” the rest of your life into order. Wanting to climb a tall mountain is a stronger incentive to get into shape than doing it just because your doctor told you to.
Spirituality isn’t very different in kind. It’s why I rarely tell beginners to do the LBRP or Resh every day.
First of all, there are 20 books that already say that; no one needs me to repeat it. Secondly, I tell people set a high goal, like Knowledge and Conversation, and then figure out all the things you have to do to get there.
The best motivator is to think about the type of person you want to become and then figure out the atomic habits—the little things you must do every day—that will get you there.
If you think of yourself as someone who needs to “get their Malkuth in order,” you’re highly unlike to do it. If you think of yourself as someone becoming an Adept, then you’ll start thinking like an Adept. You’ll start performing those actions that an Adept would carry out, and little by little, you will make your way there.
It used to be that few people bothered with the underworld. They recognized its existence, but they feared it, revered it, respectfully steered clear of it.
Nowadays it’s different. We haven’t simply neglected the existence of the underworld. We recognize it but treat it like we do any other dimension of human experience. We “make use of it.” We “make of it what we will.”
We go on little weekend or afternoon tours of the underworld. We take some drugs. We buy a book that teaches us some “techniques”. We “open doors” for ourselves. We read a little philosophy and learn to say clever things about what lies on the Earth and under the Earth.
What’s conspicuously absent from all this is a sense of reverence. Reverence is passé. Everything is ultimately subject to us. Meaning is relative to our ends. The gods are what we need them to be at any moment.
The Adept must accept every “spirit”, every “spell”, every “scourge”, as part of his environment, and make them all “subject to” himself; that is, consider them as contributory causes of himself … He must therefore realize that every event is subject to him. It occurs because he had need of it … All experiences contribute to make us complete in ourselves. We feel ourselves subject to them so long as we fail to recognise this; when we do, we perceive that they are subject to us.
Journeys to the underworld used to be rare and were undertaken for the benefit of the gods, the benefit of the cosmos, even the benefit of human generations. Now it’s all about me: getting something—knowledge, power, experience—for my own sake, “my growth,” for my own entertainment.
“It’s Friday. You guys wanna call down some spirits or maybe just hit the bar?”
To say that modern people have become materialistic is not strong enough of a criticism; nor is it entirely accurate. There are probably more people on the planet interested in “spirituality” than at any other point in human history. No, we haven’t simply denied the dimension of the spiritual, the world of shadow. That would be far less of a crime than what we’ve actually done.
Instead, we do with it what we do with everything else. We degrade it. We flatten it. We “democratize” it. We cheapen it. We disrespect it. We parade it. We use it for our entertainment.
We turn the dark into just another mode of the light. We “have preferences.” And we conveniently forget what magicians and prophets of nearly all time have tried to remind us, which is that what we call “light” is in and of itself the darkest void of all.
And then so we can sleep, so we can look at ourselves in the mirror, so we can look at anything at all without screaming in horror, we sprinkle a little rationalization on top.
“But what really is the difference between the sacred and the profane?”
“It really does depend how you look at it. “
“Yes, but…”
Meanwhile, the gods wait.
They do not wait in judgment. They do not even wait patiently. They wait as they always do.
One of the things that took me awhile to grasp is that the main object of spirituality—the base matter you’re working to transubstantiate—is your own sense of spiritual longing.
If you think about it, what was there before you encountered spiritual traditions and spiritual practices? There was the sense of something missing, something absent. There was a vague sense of dissatisfaction, not with one thing or another, but rather with conditioned existence itself. This is what drove us to seek spiritual traditions and practices. This is what made them appealing in the first place: that they seemed like solutions to this sense of disconnect from something higher.
Spiritual traditions and practices do not fulfill that desire for transcendence. For that matter, neither do peak spiritual experiences, no matter how profound, at least not for long. For every peak spiritual experience, the dryness returns like thunder following lightning. For each new spiritual plateau you hit, the sense of absence returns in a new, vaster form.
What happens for some people is that, after pursuing these spiritual experiences for a long time, they eventually turn around and bring their attention to the desire or sense of separateness itself. They manage to look at it a certain way. I don’t know exactly how to explain how to do this or even describe it. I just know it happens. And then there’s kind of a duck-rabbit flip that happens. The sense of separation itself is seen as presence.
That’s the moment of realization.
Imagine you’re aspiring fervently to union with your Holy Guardian Angel. You’ve experienced samadhi with your HGA on occasion, but there’s still something “missing”. There’s still the sense of a gulf between you and the divine. But then at some point, this “flip” occurs.
The “flip” is not suddenly thinking that your HGA is inside of you. That’s an extremely tempting interpretation, since we’re constantly told that God is inside of you. That’s not it. There’s something far more profound than that.
It’s more like the distance between you and God is God.
You realize that what you thought was God or your Angel is just a thought-form. It’s conditioned. It comes and it goes. But there’s something that doesn’t.
And then you look around the room or out your window and realize that God is everywhere and in everything. Basically wherever the sense of separateness is—me here, the object there—that’s oneness, unity, God. That’s the Vision of Pan.
But this is why if you don’t trigger a profound Dark Night of the Soul, it’s very difficult, maybe impossible, to achieve spiritual realization. Spiritual realization is the transformation of the sense of separateness—the darkness—into presence or gold.
But—and this is the part that’s difficult to grasp—it’s not overcome by replacing it with a presence. The Holy Guardian Angel isn’t going to show up and fill an HGA-shaped hole in your heart. If that happened, that would be just another experience. It would come, hang out for a bit, and then it would go. As profound as that experience might be, it would not be different in kind from eating a sandwich.
It’s more like the HGA-shaped hole in your heart will in and of itself be seen to be the presence of the divine. But that HGA-shaped hole is not special. It’s just a catalyst. Because every absence you look at after that will be seen as a type of presence.
This is another reason non-duality is a non-starter. Non-duality is the philosophical idea that separation (“duality”) is “just an illusion” and can be safely ignored.
Bullshit!
Yes, everything is an illusion. This world we think we exist in is about as thick and sturdy as a wet piece of toilet paper. You could put your little finger right through it if only your little finger weren’t also made of wet toilet paper.
And that’s the problem right there. “Non-duality” is just another thought-form. It’s just another concept. As such, it is made of the same flimsy material as everything else. The problem is that it surreptitiously sets itself up as something different, as being a concept which—unlike all those other concepts that posit dualisms—is somehow superior, somehow has a unique grasp on truth. As such, it establishes an even more insidious duality!
The proper response to the illusion of duality is not to reject the illusion of duality. It’s to respect the illusion of duality. To slowly draw close to it—closer than the overwhelming majority of human beings ever have—and to see it for what it truly is in and of itself.
The method of respecting the illusion in order to understand its true nature is magic.
The compiler of The Book of Black Magic and of Pacts [A.E. Waite] is not only the most ponderously platitudinous and priggishly prosaic of pretentiously pompous pork butchers of the language, but the most voluminously voluble. I cannot dig over the dreary deserts of his drivel in search of the passage which made me write to him. But it was an oracular obscurity which hinted that he knew of a Hidden Church withdrawn from the world in whose sanctuaries were preserved the true mysteries of initiation. This was one better than the Celtic Church; I immediately asked him for an introduction. He replied kindly and intelligibly, suggesting that I should read The Cloud upon the Sanctuary by Councillor von Eckartshausen. With this book I retired to Wastdale Head for the Easter vacation of 1898.
Aleister Crowley, Confessions, Ch 14
[During Easter 1898] I was absorbed in The Cloud upon the Sanctuary, reading it again and again without being put off by the pharisaical, priggish and pithecanthropoid notes of its translator, Madame de Steiger. I appealed with the whole force of my will to the adepts of the Hidden Church to prepare me as postulant for their august company. As will be seen later, acts of will, performed by the proper person, never fall to the ground, impossible as it is (at present) to understand by what means the energy is transmitted.Ibid, Ch 14
I caught up with him [Julian Baker] some ten miles below Zermatt. I told him of my search for the Secret Sanctuary of the Saints and convinced him of my desperate earnestness. He hinted that he knew of an Assembly which might be that for which I was looking. He spoke of a Sacrament where the elements were four instead of two. This meant nothing to me; but I felt that I was on the right track. I got him to promise to meet me in London. He added, ‘I will introduce you to a man who is much more of a Magician than I am.’
To sum the matter in brief, he kept his word. The Secret Assembly materialized as the ‘Hermetic Order of the G∴ D∴,’ and the Magician as one George Cecil Jones.
Ibid, Ch 19
This encounter with the ideas of a Hidden Church and a prisca philosophia did not only motivate Crowley in his youth. It informed his life’s work.
When Crowley sat down ten years later to write “An Account of A.·.A.·. sub figura XXXIII”—the first article in the first number of the first volume of The Equinox—he merely edited Steiger’s translation of Chapter 2 of “The Cloud Upon the Sanctuary”. Apart from redacting long passages glorifying the patriarchs and the Christian Church, the following substitutions occur from Eckhartshausen’s version to Crowley’s:
church → Order Interior Sanctuary or Church → Axle of the R.O.T.A regeneration of humanity → evolution of humanity God → L.V.X. or masters Jesus Christ → V.V.V.V.V. service → revel
A friend of mine was recently telling me that he did not think beliefs were important to his spirituality. I think he meant that he was doing his best to take his experiences on their own terms without jumping to conclusions about how the world works.
Damien Echols recently said something similar on his youtube channel: that magick isn’t about beliefs. This is a common sentiment, and I’ve said similar things along the way.
I replied that I attributed most of my “success” (if you can call it that) in spirituality to my nihilism. Then I had to spend a little time figuring out what I even meant by that.
There’s a man who lived a very long time ago—about 2,500 years ago in fact—in Italy. He was a priest of Apollo and a prophet-healer—what in Greek was called an iatromantis—and his name was Parmenides. While he was in a state of trance, he went on what we might call an “astral journey” to the underworld. There he encountered a goddess who taught him about the world. When he came back from his journey, he wrote it all down in a poem which we now have only in fragments.
One of the first things the goddess tells him is that there are only two paths you can follow in life: the path of being and the path of non-being. What she meant is that something either is, or it isn’t. This seems like the simplest thing in the world, but she points out that most people live their lives acting as though things simultaneously are and aren’t.
Take for example secular humanism.
Secular humanism embraces reason, ethics, and naturalism without belief in religious dogma, supernaturalism, and the like. Mere humans are incapable of the God’s eye view on reality, and this belief gives rise to skepticism and tolerance of differing points of view.
This is all fine and good, but there’s only one problem. And that’s that secular humanism is itself a religious, even supernatural point of view.
There was a German philosopher in the 19th century named Hegel who pointed this out. He said quite rightly that it was absurd to judge the capacity of human cognition in relation to something which you yourself say doesn’t exist—in other words a mere figment of imagination.
Peter Kingsley makes a similar point in the context of Jungian depth psychology. Jungians insist that Jung restricted himself to the perspective of a mere observer of the archetypes. In other words he insisted on his own humble humanity in relation to divinity. Jung was certainly no “prophet,” let alone a magician!
The only problem with this, Kingsley points out, is that “humanity” is itself an archetype. And it’s a rather insidious archetype, as it tends to cover its own tracks. Nothing seems more humble than to restrict oneself to the perspective of a mere human. We wouldn’t want to engage in “ego inflation”. And yet this apparent self-restriction is the greatest inflation of all, since it is turned into the first and last word on any possible experience.
In a long series of talks on what he calls the meaning crisis, cognitive scientist John Vervaeke has pointed out that most of the structures by means of which we define our humanity themselves have a religious substrate or simply are religious in nature.
Basic notions like progress require a particular relationship to time and narrative that have their origins in the Old Testament. I would add that this isn’t just progress in the collective sense of humanity. Any notion of personal self-discovery or personal growth you have—the sort of learning-story that might make for an interesting autobiography—also depend upon the same structures.
In other words, the ways in which we understand our humanity, individually and collectively, is itself religious in nature. Insofar as secular humanism leans on a set of religious substructures to define knowledge and ethics abstracted from religious substructures, it is a self-contradiction.
For that matter, consensus Thelema falls into a similar if not the same trap. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard Thelemites try to argue to me that human beings ought to treat one another according to such and such ethical principles—usually the ones enumerated in Liber Oz—because we are morally obligated to recognize one another as “stars”.
But there is no moral obligation beyond doing your will. Full stop. The imposition of any moral obligation beyond that just is religion in the Old Aeonic sense. And in fact the particular grounds on which this is justified—the obligation to recognize the divinity of another—is no different in spirit or in letter from Christian morality specifically!
That’s one helluva mistake to make!
If your interpretation of Liber Oz leads you to contradict the ethical core of Thelema—Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law—then you need to stop and figure out where your interpretation of Oz went wrong.
But again, this is just another, even more obvious example of attempting to have your cake and eat it too—or what the goddess in Parmenides’s poem refers to as the “wandering in two minds,” the behavior typical of “undiscerning crowds, in whose eyes the same thing and not the same is and is not, all things travel in opposite directions.”
But the situation is even worse than that. The goddess goes on to tell Parmenides that the choice between the path of being and the path of non-being is no choice at all, because there is only one path: the path of being.
I remember being a student and reading this and thinking, “My goodness! We have come so much further than this! Thank heavens we’ve learned to be more nuanced in our thinking since poor old Parmenides! We know now from so much more sophisticated thinkers that you can never step in the same river twice! We’ve learned from no less a genius than Aristotle to have moderation in all things! A little of this, a little of that, I say! All the world’s most sophisticated spiritual and religious teachers taught what, conveniently for me, accords with my own common sense! Something something modern studies show!”
But at some point I learned what all this really was. Not only is it delusional to think you can stake out a claim between these two opposed points of view of being and non-being.
It’s delusional to think there are opposed points of view in the first place.
This is bound to confuse and even upset people on more than one level.
To start, I did not follow a “heart-centered path” to my realization. I didn’t fall back upon my emotions or what I “intuited” that “the universe” wanted for me.
No, I simply followed logic.
My realization didn’t come while I was sitting in meditation (although I did spend a lot of time meditating up until that point). It came while I was thinking.
But I was not thinking the way people normally think. I was thinking in a completely uncompromising way. And as a result, for the first time in my life, I realized I couldn’t have it both ways. First I was forced into a choice, and then having made the choice, I realized there was never any choice in the first place.
And then the second bit that irritates people is that I did this shamelessly. I didn’t do what people normally do, which is to fuss endlessly with a teaching—making reason my master—and then pretending as though everything is a matter of “intuition” or feeling.
What I realized is that I was not going to “change my beliefs”. This was logically impossible. Beliefs aren’t changed into other beliefs, nor are they transformed into nothing. If you want to get rid of a belief, you need to drive it out with another belief.
And then it dawned on me that beliefs weren’t special. What I was realizing about beliefs applied to everything whatsoever, because change itself is an illusion.
Again, I could believe in everything, or I could believe in nothing. It didn’t matter which I chose, just that I was consistent. And then as soon as I was consistent, I realized I didn’t have a choice in the first place.
That was it. That was the moment I crossed the Abyss. I crossed from this world into the other world. I was freed from the limitations of the “merely human”. I became an immortal god.
And then I turned around to look back the way I came, and I realized the world I just crossed into was the world I had come from.
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