I first got into meditation years ago after taking a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course. After that I found Daniel Ingram’s book, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, the Buddhist Geeks podcast, and the pragmatic dharma community.
The pragmatic dharma community is a diverse group of practitioners, many (maybe the majority) of whom believe enlightenment is real and achievable. We just had to dispense with our superstitions regarding what enlightenment is, not the least of which is that it is the province of a few holy men living in caves in India and that it requires perfect moral conduct.
MBSR is completely unconcerned with enlightenment, but what it has in common with pragmatic dharma is that both are deracinated approaches to Buddhism. They are concerned with the power of meditation itself to transform a person, abstracted from its religious context.
One encounters an analogous attitude sometimes among Thelemites who are only interested in doing magick inspired by Aleister Crowley, or who think Thelema is ultimately about achieving an altered state of consciousness like samādhi, or who want to reduce all of Thelema to following do what thou wilt.
At the risk of stating the obvious, human beings, the world they occupy, and the interactions between a person and their environment are complex. All our perennial spiritual problems—our complex patterns of self-deception and self-destruction, our failure to understand our nature, our tendency toward analysis-paralysis, absurdity, anxiety, alienation, and existential entrapment in all its forms—arise from cognitive powers that are adaptive.
For example, our ability to reflect upon ourselves makes it possible to update our beliefs about the world, to dispel illusion, and to track real patterns in our environments. And yet self-reflection can also paralyze us and prevent us from doing what we know we ought to do. This is the reflectiveness gap or the “Hamlet problem”.
The mind has the power not only to know this or that fact about something but also to create a worldview in which those facts acquire intelligibility. Many of our utterances only make sense in the context of our way of life. And yet it’s possible to become trapped in a particular way of thinking about the world. Think of conspiracy theories such as antisemitism or that the world is created by a Demiurge to imprison our souls.
Our cognitive powers are adaptive and organized into systems. This is what makes it so difficult to dispel illusions, leave cults, beat addictions, or transform our lives in a profound sense once we’ve reached adulthood. Bad decisions or delusional thoughts build upon themselves, leading to further bad decisions and further delusional thoughts. There’s a self-perpetuating, self-organizing dimension to our cognitive capacities which resists change. But this implies that simplistic interventions into the human condition cannot work. What is required instead is an approach to the human being that is able to meet the complexity of is cognitive capabilities.
Consider the Noble Eightfold Path (NEP). The NEP does not consist of just one intervention, e.g., “just meditate”. It consists of eight interventions which are organized into three practices of wisdom, morality, and meditation. Wisdom addresses worldview, and morality addresses actions that are consistent with that worldview. Together these prepare a person to meditate and also serve as a means of interpreting the results of meditation. The results of meditation also reinforce one’s commitments to the worldview and to moral action. The NEP is a self-organizing, self-reinforcing system that mirrors the self-organizing, self-reinforcing character of human living.
Solving perennial spiritual problems does not just require a set of relaxation techniques, esoteric spiritual practices, or theories. You need an entire system of interdependent, interconnected parts that reinforce one another. Transformation occurs only once a person has surrendered to the entire system and put the entire system into practice. This is what allows their entire way of looking at the world and themselves to change, and with it their way of being in the world.
One of the things that makes my approach to Thelema different from others is that I approach it through the perspective of solving our perennial spiritual problems. This is the reason why I am not satisfied with simplistic, reductionistic framings of Thelema to the effect that “it’s just about do what thou wilt” or having cool experiences with magick.
It’s not as though I haven’t tried the simpler remedies. I threw myself at “Buddhist” meditation for several years. I experienced jhāna and fruition and had these experiences confirmed by teachers and others with more experience than me. I even underwent a profound mystical experience that changed how I understood reality. And yet none of these exalted experiences even touched my baseline of life-satisfaction in the long-run.
Some of my fellow practitioners insisted I was chasing a myth. Enlightenment has nothing to do with any of this, they said. Enlightenment is about changing your perspective on suffering, not eliminating it. Those who claimed in the past to have done otherwise were either lying or never really existed.
In retrospect I can see what the actual problem was. I was relying upon meditation and mystical experiences to bear a load they were never meant to carry alone.
All of which raises another interesting question: is Thelema supposed to solve perennial spiritual problems? One response I’ve heard to this question is that, since existence is pure joy, there is no suffering problem to solve. As one idiot told me, “I am on Earth to play, not suffer.” This is just toxic positivity passed off as Thelema.
Crowley himself did believe Thelema was an answer to perennial spiritual problems, that it was in the same league as Buddhism, Stoicism, Christianity, and the like. And yes, he did think that solution was focused on the will. But it is not possible to understand what the will is or how it is meant to address these complex problems without also bringing in the Thelemic worldview, the Thelemic conception of the human being, Thelemic ethics, and Thelemic esoteric spiritual practices.
As long as Thelema is treated as a meta-religion that empowers people to pick and choose what they want from the buffet of new age and the occult, it will never have the power to address any significant spiritual problems. On the contrary, it could push people further into delusional and even self-destructive behaviors. I receive messages literally every week from individuals reminding me of the dangers of diving deep into magick without the support of a coherent worldview and ethics and a supportive community. Thankfully most Thelemites seem to believe in magick the way Christians believe in Jesus (on Sundays). These people carry the gun of esoteric spiritual practice, but it is loaded with blanks.
If Thelema is going to be more than a hobby—if it’s going to have the power to address perennial spiritual issues and to address them safely—then it has to be developed as a system with interconnecting, interdependent parts that are capable of addressing a whole human life. And it has to be applied in the context of a community that is able to support practitioners with its accumulated wisdom.