Posts tagged: meaning

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.

I had been there the entire time.