Not sure if I ever offered an explanation of my intention in making this.
This was meant to visualize some insights I had while listening to Alan Chapman’s Magia Teachings and reading Peter Kingsley’s book on Carl Jung, Catafalque, last summer.
The outer circle represents forms of absence. The flow of time is the absence of presence or the now. The other is the absence of self or self-subsistence. Appearance is the absence of reality.
Opposed to absence is the second circle of presence. Eternity is opposed to time by standing outside of it. It is the eternal present or the eternal now. Self is opposed to other. It is that which subsists, that which possesses itself. Reality is opposed to mere appearance by being the opposite of illusion.
Philosophy and spirituality aim to overcome absence and to achieve presence. They aim at timeless truth, the One Self or One Itself, the reality that lies behind the mere flow of appearances.
But overcoming absence is merely the first stage of the process. The next level of insight requires one to find absence in presence: eternity in the here and now, self in other and other in self, reality in appearance. Once both presence and absence are found in one another, their duality is transcended.
The union of time and eternity is immortality.
The union of self and other is love.
The union of appearance and reality is incantation or magical speech.
Aleister Crowley grasps this non-duality of duality and non-duality through the idea of 0=2. But 0=2 is not the mystery itself but rather the gateway to the mystery. 0=2 is the portal through which Thelemic spirituality opens on to the subterranean current of mystery underlying human transcendence as such.
Now we encounter eternal creation as the characteristic activity of the immortal God.
We find the divine self as the the loving comportment of All with Itself.
And we find the magical universe as the self-speaking totality.
Beyond even that mystery there is the mixing bowl or kratēr in which All is manifest: the divine individual, the sōtēr or the Holy Graal.