transcend

Self-Transcendence

by Uncategorized
stars zipping by

As mentioned previously, Crowley’s philosophy can be understood as a form of derivation monism: the requirement that the a priori conditions of experience must be somehow derived from a single, absolute first principle. For Crowley, the a priori conditions of experience are the subjective point of view (which he calls Hadit) and the intersubjectively accessible spatiotemporal universe (which he calls Nuit). The single, absolute first principle grounding these conditions he calls Qabalistic Zero or nothingness extended in no categories.

Additionally, Crowley can also be understood as being committed to a modified version of derivation monism called holistic monism. Holistic monism may be divided into two requirements. The holistic requirement is that empirical items must be such that all their properties are determinable only within the context of a totality composed of other items and their properties. As Crowley says, all of our empirical knowledge is “relative” or conditioned—or as Crowley sometimes puts it, “illusory”.

The monistic requirement is that the absolute first principle must be immanent within the aforementioned totality as its principle of unity. Crowley expresses this a number of ways. All manifestation (or what Crowley calls duality) “cancels out” or “balances”. The universe is apparently in ceaseless motion, and yet this motion adds to 0 or stillness. Hence, manifestions is identical with nullity, or 0 = 2.

Holistic monism can be viewed as a response to a problem originating in Platonic metaphysics, namely, how the first principle relates to or “participates in” the items it grounds. In order for the first principle to serve as ground, it must be divided up somehow into the things that it grounds. But then it loses its unity. But in order for it to maintain its unity, it has to transcend reality, and hence not have contact with it.

The holistic monist response to this problem is to maintain that the sum total of reality is one and is identical with the absolute first principle, but this does not mean that the first principle loses its transcendence, because reality itself is self-transcending. In other words, reality is constantly canceling or negating itself.

To put it another way, what the Neoplatonists said of the One—that it is self-transcending—holistic monists say of the sum total of reality itself. Reality must not be understood as an inert, static, unmoved substance but rather something more like a living being that is constantly producing itself through self-cancellation.

To model one’s individual life on the basis of nature, therefore, means to be in a state of continually overcoming one’s own sense of self, or more exactly, the sense that one has of being a separate, static substance standing apart from the rest of reality. This isn’t done through the denial of self, as in ascetic spiritual practice, but rather through the expansion of one’s sense of self through the affirmation and acceptance of more and more of the universe.

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. They have made him what he is. They correspond exactly to his own faculties. They are all – ultimately – of equal importance. The fact that he is what he is proves that each item is equilibrated. The impact of each new impression affects the entire system in due measure. He must therefore realize that every event is subject to him. It occurs because he had need of it. Iron rusts because the molecules demand oxygen for the satisfaction of their tendencies. They do not crave hydrogen; therefore combination with that gas is an event which does not happen. 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. And whenever we strive to evade an experience, whatever it may be, we thereby do wrong to ourselves. We thwart our own tendencies. To live is to change; and to oppose change is to revolt against the law which we have enacted to govern our lives. To resent destiny is thus to abdicate our sovereignty, and to invoke death. Indeed, we have decreed the doom of death for every breach of the law of Life. And every failure to incorporate any impression starves that particular faculty which stood in need of it.

Liber Samekh

From a macrocosmic point of view, the universe is “nothing” through and through. What we call “reality” is purely relative and illusory, and anything we say of it is, at best, only provisionally true. This reality does have an ultimate cause or first principle, but that principle is also nothing (the Qabalistic Zero). Both the self as experiencer and the object as experienced are particularizations or self-limitations of nothingness. The metaphysics is nihilistic through and through.

However, the self is a negative actuality expressed against the negativity of (apparent) reality. It expresses its negativity through the destruction of difference between itself and those things around it. Hadit unites continually and endlessly with Nuit. He is never substantial or separate—never a being possessed of a will but rather willing itself—always only ever overcoming the difference between himself and Nuit. This continual annulment of distinction Crowley calls love. It is a destruction, cancellation, negation, or overcoming which is productive of union.

The main mode of operation of the will is negative. It annuls distinction. But to annul distinction is to produce or to create something new, i.e., every “fresh new experience”. The nihilism or nothingness of reality is the condition of operation of the will. It allows the will to be unrestricted by any external being, and it sets the stage for the cancellation of nothingness, a negation of negation which produces a positive, affirmative reality.

Therefore the nihilistic metaphysics of the world can be viewed as the negative image from which an affirmative, positive view of reality can be constructed, i.e., willed. At the center of this positive, inverted image of the macrocosm is the magician who creates by destroying distinction between his or herself and the universe. The main method by which distinction is destroyed is through the unconditional, absolute acceptance of what is, as it is, or what I have elsewhere referred to as erotic destruction or erotic liberation.

Nihilism and spirituality

by Uncategorized

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.

image of stars in the universe with a dark unicursal hexagram superimposed over them

Between Rationalism and Fanaticism

by Uncategorized
image of stars in the universe with a dark unicursal hexagram superimposed over them

In my opinion what makes Thelema distinctive is not the occultism, not the ontology, not the ethics, not the individualism. It’s that he took the western occult tradition with its God as a creative artist and inflected it through a Nietzschean understanding of life.

Renaissance occultism is based upon a view of the cosmos where everything is ordered into spheres or levels with Earth as the focus. Natural magic is about drawing power or spiritus down from higher spheres into lower ones. “Cabalistic” magic is about ascending to superluminary spheres and mastering the angelic forces there—which tips over very easily into mysticism, as it does in Thelema. In short it’s based on a hierarchical, anthropocentric view of the universe as a kind of container focused on human affairs, and the container is overall not that large.

Robert Fludd's hierarchical view of the cosmos. Concentric spheres with planets, angels, and hebrew letters.
Angelic Hierarchies, Spheres, and the Hebrew Alphabet. From Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, maioris scilicet et minoris, metaphysica, physica atque technica historia.

This view was largely replaced by the natural philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries. According to this new view, the universe does not behave according to purposes but rather mechanisms. There are no “pulls” in the universe, only “pushes”. And the universe in which these abstract mathematical laws operate is vast enough to overwhelm the imagination and the human perspective all together. The picture of the universe generated by this natural philosophy ultimately left up in the air the place of humans in it. And with this disenchanted view of nature came a challenge to both religion and magic.

Rather than recoiling from this picture of nature into a kind of reenchanted fantasy about life, Crowley instead embraces it. The sheer enormity of the cosmos is one of the premises of Crowley’s view of reality, embodied in the goddess Nuit. The pure mathematical view of reality is not rejected either but embraced. Mathematics was part of occultism going back at least to Pico, but Crowley really makes it one of the main themes of his spirituality. So in other words rather than trying to hide from the implications of modernism, Crowley leans into them.

And he understands the fundamental spiritual problem in a very modernist way. The problem we face is not suffering, and it’s not ethics. These are pre-modern or early modern ways of looking at the problem. No, the main problem is meaning. It’s the senselessness of the world. Crowley was motivated by this experience of senselessness at least since he was a student at Cambridge, and he writes about it at least as late as Little Essays Toward Truth.

What then determines Tiphareth, the Human Will, to aspire to comprehend Neschamah, to submit itself to the divine Will of Chiah?

Nothing but the realisation, born sooner or later of agonising experience, that its whole relation through Ruach and Nephesch with Matter, i.e., with the Universe, is, and must be, only painful. The senselessness of the whole procedure sickens it. It begins to seek for some menstruum in which the Universe may become intelligible, useful and enjoyable. In Qabalistic language, it aspires to Neschamah.

Aleister Crowley, Little Essays toward Truth, “Man”

The way he understands a possible solution to senselessness is very modernist as well. The solution cannot be sought in reason. Reason operates according to the principle of sufficient reason, i.e., for any proposition F, there must be a ground G for it, or for any event B, there must be a sufficient explanation A. Putting the principle of sufficient reason at the center of human relating to the world is what generated the picture of a senseless, purely mechanical world in the first place. Therefore, reason—specifically the application of the principle of sufficient reason—must be limited, but to limit reason it must be transcended.

But—the transcendence of reason cannot interfere with the legitimate operation of reason within its own domain. Crowley is not looking to reenchant nature in some naive way. He accepts the findings of the scientific view of reality and even holds them to be axiomatic for his spirituality. Nor can the transcendence of reason be a mere animalistic “overcoming” of reason. One cannot simply will oneself to be irrational, for instance. Both of these avenues would represent a kind of fanaticism.

So Crowley has to manuever somehow between the Scylla of rationalism on the one hand and the Charybdis of dogmatism or fanaticism on the other.

This is a very modernist—specifically German Idealist—way of looking at things. When a person with a background in the philosophy of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Nietzsche hears Crowley talking about transcending “because,” they’re hearing a tune they could hum in their sleep.

And Crowley’s proposed solution to this problem is will. Will transcends reason. You cannot ask “why” of will. In and of itself it prevents the questioning but instead gives orders. It’s authoritative. This is how he avoids rationalism.

But will also represents the “true” self of the individual. It is not a mere replacement for Jehovah. It is not a projection of the law of the father. Nor is it exactly bodily or animal instinct. This is how Crowley avoids fanaticism.

Thelema and Postmodernism

by Uncategorized

Good grief. Somehow I made it all the way through the latest in Thelemic Union, a refutation of a prior article attacking “postmodern” or completely relativistic interpretations of Thelema.

When I’ve attempted in the past to orient Thelema in, well, any direction, I’ve been accused of having an “Old Aeon” perspective on Thelema, which is really just code for “I don’t like your opinion but am too weak to refute it,” so I am in some respects sympathetic toward the complaints made by Brother Sol-Om-On in the original piece being refuted here.

That being said, the points the author, James Gordon, makes at the beginning of the article are good ones and should be well-taken by anyone who wishes to bring philosophy to bear on Thelema.

Crowley was deeply influenced by Nietzsche. In fact I would say more than any other philosopher, it is Nietzsche who looms over Thelema.

But among other things, Nietzsche is the grandfather of postmodernism. (Martin Heidegger is arguably its father.) It’s difficult taking Nietzsche seriously—and Crowley did—without simultaneously adopting some of the perspectives which would later fall under the label of “postmodernism”.

In fact if I were going to level a criticism at “contemporary Thelema,” I would say that many Thelemites do not take Nietzsche or postmodernism seriously enough. They tend to view Crowley from an overly and overtly modernist perspective.

For example they take the notion of the subject—specifically the autonomous subject—too seriously. They construct a religious perspective—what in postmodern parlance would be called a “metaphysics of presence”—around MY preferences, MY choices, MY sexuality, MY responsibility, etc. This relies on a notion of subjectivity that both Nietzsche and Crowley challenged.

Take for instance the concept of Will, arguably the most important concept in Thelema. Will is not identical with your power of choice. In fact Crowley seemed pretty clearly to have been a determinist, i.e., someone who does not believe in freedom of choice. (Yes, I am aware he uses the term “free will” sometimes. Don’t @ me.) Nietzsche held to a similar point of view, regarding freedom of choice to be a fiction invented by the mind to make it appear as though the end result of the battle of many “wills to power” in a person is somehow “mine” in a final, metaphysically-grounded sense.

The desire for “freedom of will” in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui, and, with more than Munchausen daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Crowley differs from Nietzsche insofar as he thinks that whatever unfolds within the sphere of the individual is the predestined result of a course chosen outside of time by one’s Holy Guardian Angel or True Self. His perspective here seems to be closer to the monism of Leibniz than Nietzsche’s.

This is the evident and final Solvent of the Knot Philosophical concerning Fate and Freewill, that it is thine own Self, omniscient and omnipotent, sublime in Eternity, that first didst order the Course of thine own Orbit, so that that which befalleth thee by Fate is indeed the necessary Effect of thine own Will. These two, then, that like Gladiators have made War in Philosophy through these many Centuries, art made One by the Love under Will which is the Law of Thelema.

Liber Aleph, “De harmonia voluntatis cum destinia,” as quoted in NC on AL I.57

This is not just a passing opinion or remark on Crowley’s part but has importance for the pinnacle and ultimate goal of his spiritual system, which is something like amor fati or love of fate. So the result is similar to Nietzsche’s, although the philosophical contrivances used to get there are somewhat different.

Be that as it may, the problem with a lot of interpretations of Thelema is not that they are overly “subjective” or “postmodern”. I think from Crowley’s perspective they would not go far enough in that direction. Until the ground under your feet has completely vanished, you’re not really in a position to transcend. Transcendence requires a certain motivation, a kind of urgency or emergency brought about by a deconstruction which the (over-)reliance on “I-me-mine” is in place to prevent.

Nothing but the realisation, born sooner or later of agonising experience, that its whole relation through Ruach and Nephesch with Matter, i.e., with the Universe, is, and must be, only painful. The senselessness of the whole procedure sickens it. It begins to seek for some menstruum in which the Universe may become intelligible, useful and enjoyable. In Qabalistic language, it aspires to Neschamah.

This is what we mean in saying that the Trance of Sorrow is the motive of the Great Work.

Little Essays Toward Truth, “Man”

This gets confusing because Crowley says “magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.” But listen to the talk I gave on this a couple years back. I step through this really carefully. This is not about the primacy or supremacy of willing in the sense of bringing about a state of affairs that you want. It’s about the destruction of that very perspective.

The method of Magick: Love the mode in which Will operates. The method of Magick in this—and in all—Work is: “love under will.” 

Djeridensis Comment on AL I.55-56

Magick is ultimately the art of illusion or of what is illusory. Philosophically and spiritually it is concerned with destruction or the destructive quality of speech.

It’s worth keeping in mind that the mystical “center” or “source” of Thelema is not a presence at all but an absence. It is indicated by Harpocrates/Hoor-paar-kraat.

The Author [of The Book of the Law] called himself Aiwass, and claimed to be “the minister of Hoor-Paar-Kraat”; that is, a messenger from the forces ruling this earth at present, as will be explained later on.

“Introduction” to Liber AL vel Legis

At the center and source of Thelema is something of a performative paradox. The Book of the Law, the foundation of all our work, is the speech of the god of silence. Speech or logos is presence par excellance. Yet Harpocrates, conspicuously, can never be made present.

Who worshipped Heru-pa-kraath have worshipped me; ill, for I am the worshipper.

AL II.8

In the Gnostic Mass, a similar idea is expressed in the line, “O secret of secrets that art hidden in the being of all that lives, not Thee do we adore, for that which adoreth is also Thou.”

Keep in mind that Harpocrates is the Silent or True Self. What these passages seem to indicate is that selfhood is not to be understood in terms of presence. You are not there as an object to yourself. (If you were, you would no longer be subject but object.) The presence of oneself is always deferred.

Another way of saying the same thing is that the characteristic mode of being of this True Self is not properly understood as “a being” or a mode of presence but rather as a kind of going or motion. But it is all-too-easy to conceptualize this going as just another form of being present. This leaves out an important facet of motion, which is that it is a form of change or of destruction. Harpocrates is closely aligned with Aleph and the A or Apophis moment of the IAO triad.

…therefore is the knowledge of me the knowledge of death.

AL II.6

Now think of this in the context of Crowley’s numerous pseudonyms, magical and otherwise: Perdurabo, Chioa Khan, TO MEGA THERION, Oliver Haddo, OU ME, etc. Even when he signs his name “Aleister Crowley,” that’s not his legal name. His legal name was always “Edward Alexander Crowley”. Crowley’s literary presence is a play of absence and representation. He’s presenting himself in such a way as to say, “You think you’ve got me, but you don’t.”

And this gets to the second point which comes out in these passages, which is that self-possession—hence true self-governance and autonomy—is impossible, eternally deferred. No sooner have we turned toward the “True Self” than it recedes, vanishes, reveals itself as an absence of speech, by silence. This flies directly in the face of the notion that we can somehow possess or express an “authentic” self through things like preferences or even responsibilities.

As I said in my recent talk on nihilism, Will in Thelema is best understood as a solution to the problem of nihilism. But in order for the will to serve this function, it cannot be a pure, animalistic overcoming of circumstance that simply runs counter to reason. That kind of brutishness is what Nietzsche would have identified as part of the symptomology of nihilism, not its overcoming.

Even if the loss of ground is not known directly and specifically, it’s still felt, and so people look for something to plug the gap. Investing a dictator or a cult leader with divine authority (“metaphysical presence”) is a reactive attempt to do this. But I would argue that the reliance on MY WILL or MY TRUE SELF is a similar manuever.

This is why every time you post something online—whether it’s an article, in a community, or even on your own Facebook wall—suggesting that there’s some reality of Thelema apart from what “what I will it to be,” people start kicking, biting, and scratching. Yet articles like this that present the typical hippy/boomer narrative of Thelema both get hundreds of likes/hearts and are declared to be subversive. How can something receive near-universal adulation but also somehow subvert conformity?

Some person with a Hindu handle (they always have Hindu handles for some reason despite being Caucasian) took issue with one of my previous articles because I presented evidence in support of an interpretation of the Mass against another. I was told that it’s unthelemic to say someone else’s argument is wrong, even if you present evidence in favor of that conclusion.

How precious.

As Ra-Hoor-Khuit said, ” I am Ra-Hoor-Khuit; and I am powerful to protect my servant. Except when someone expresses an opinion too strongly. Then I melt like a snowflake under a hairdryer. Success is thy proof: argue not; convert not; talk not overmuch! Otherwise someone’s feelings might get hurt, and why would you want to do something like that to somebody? That’s really sad. They don’t want to hurt you.”

Obviously the supremacy of the subjective viewpoint is an issue people feel deeply insecure about. Why else would they be so reactive about it?

I didn’t find anything in the latter half of the article that was of interest.

But yes, I would definitely take care when using the word “postmodern” to denigrate some interpretation of Thelema. In my opinion a lot of Thelema is stuck in delusions that I would consider to be quite “modern” in orientation. But as usual, these terms are really blunt and have to be defined precisely to be useful.