a duck-rabbit drawing

Separation and illusion

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a duck-rabbit drawing

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.

Five concentric circles. Outer circle: absence, time, other, appearance. Second circle: presence, eternity, self, reality. Third circle: transcendence, immortality, love, incantation. Fourth circle: mystery, eternal creation, divine self, magical universe. Innermost circle: Secret of the Holy Graal.

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.

photo of a church ceiling depicting interlocking patterns

Two Essential Patterns in Crowley’s Spirituality

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photo of a church ceiling depicting interlocking patterns

Two of the most important patterns in Crowley’s spirituality are the relationship between speech and silence and the relationship between the word and life and death.

You see the speech-silence pattern crop up everywhere. The Book of the Law itself is delivered by Aiwass, who announces himself as the minister of Hoor-Paar-Kraat, the god of silence. So the Book of the Law could be understood as the speech of the god of silence.

The god of silence is absent, unmanifest. Any attempt to objectify the god of silence inevitably fails. So the issue of speech and silence is simultaneously the issue of presence versus absence. Absence can only be manifest through presence by means of various detours or blinds—basically illusions. Magic deals principally in illusions, the magician being a Master of Illusions. This is why all the powers of the magician revolve around silence.

Absence is also worked with through Crowley’s pseudonyms: Perdurabo, To Mega Therion, V.V.V.V.V., Chioa Khan, etc. (I’ve never actually seen anyone attempt this analysis for some reason…)

The speech-silence pattern shows up in the Mass. “Silence” is indicated at two crucial points in the script. Also, if you’ve read any of my stuff on the Mass, I’ve indicated how essential Hoor-paar-kraat is to that ritual. The Mass itself is a ceremony of implantation of the god of silence into the soil of the Earth.

The drama of the Mass moves from the silence of the tomb, out into manifestation, and then back into the silence of the tomb.

AUMGN—the formula most often vibrated through the Mass—is itself a formula representing the movement of the silent seed into manifest speech and back out into non-existence.

The neophyte formula of A∴A∴ encapsulates exactly the same idea in slightly different form. In Pyramidos, it is described as the path of HUA or IAΩ—in other words of the Holy Guardian Angel itself.

The Man of Earth degrees form a cycle which expresses the same idea. In the Minerval degree, the candidate manifests out of silence or nothingness, is brought into manifestation in the 1st and 2nd degrees, passes out of existence in the 3rd, and passes back into silence or nothingness as a Perfect Initiate.

If you’ve read my stuff, you know I think the MoE candidate is actually the HGA for pretty much exactly this reason. If you’ve read my stuff on the Mass, you know I think it involves the HGA in exactly this way.

“Oh so what? You think everything Crowley ever did was about the HGA, huh?”

How many times did he himself say that? He couldn’t have been kidding all those times.

And then the other pattern has to do with the word—which is the HGA in manifestation—as it relates to life and death.

So the first thing to notice is that the word uses life and death to manifest itself down the generations. It’s how it gets spoken in the first place.

So the word in the macrocosmic sense is the Sun and basically all the things the Sun represents. In the Mass, we refer to the Sun as ON, which represents the Beast 666 who is also the Logos (word) of the current Aeon. And since most magical formulae represent not only a thing but also a process of attainment, ON also represents two paths of deification of the individual, one corresponding with Ayin, the other with Nun. (I’ve written about this elsewhere.)

But the word in the microcosmic sense—where it relates directly to life and death—is the phallus. This is the word utilizing the process of life and death or incarnation or becoming or suffering or what have you in order to manifest itself. This is the 5th collect of the Mass. This is the Anthem. This is the production of the seed which goes into the soil which becomes Baphomet. It’s the whole magic of the Mass, really: manifestation of the macrocosm in the microcosm.

Now when it manifests, it also transcends those conditions or reveals itself as transcending those conditions. Hence, Baphomet “destroys the destroyer”. This is the redemptive aspect of the word. This is why you would want to hear the word. This is why you would want to know God or to experience Knowledge and Conversation. It’s because it’s that within you which is using you or using your conditioned existence in order to be. It’s that for the sake of which all this is happening. It’s the impersonal vibration left over at the end of AUMGN from which existence will once again spring forth.

You find the same issue at work in the 3rd degree of M∴M∴M∴.

You see it in the IAO formula.

You see it in the Neophyte ritual of A∴A∴.

So if you ever find yourself lost in the weeds of Crowley’s writings, these are the two patterns I would try to focus on. One pattern has to do with how speech and silence relate. This is the life-cycle of the Word, the Logos, the HGA. The other pattern has to do with the life of the Word. This is how the Word uses life-death to manifest itself and how in the process it redeems becoming.