I want to offer a new framing on something that I’ve mentioned many times before at this point, and which I even talked about in my recent video on structure, meaning and Thelema, and that’s the question of Thelema’s highest good.
The highest value in Thelema—the greatest good or summum bonum—is to love Nuit. (AL I.61) To love Nuit is the sacred as such in Thelema. Each star may have its own orbit, but the love of Nuit is normative for all. That’s just what it means to be “better than all things” without qualification.
In the video, I began to contextualize that claim by invoking our embodiment. I want to go a few steps further now and contextualize this a little bit more.
The highest value is not Nuit. She doesn’t say, “I am better than all things.” Rather, the highest value is to love Nuit.
Love is relational. Especially in Crowley’s usage, it is neither purely subjective nor purely objective. Rather, it expresses a relationship between parts. In this case it is a relationship between Hadit on the one hand (say, the “I” or the subject of experience) and Nuit on the other.
As Crowley says, we are to be Hadit and to love Nuit. (See New Comment to AL II.8 and this.)
Good. Let’s go deeper.
Nuit is not a thing. (AL I.27) She is no-thing. Does that mean she is not real? No, she is external nature, the “matter” of experience, and the infinite space experience occurs in.
But don’t we have experience of external nature? And when we experience nature, aren’t we experiencing things? If we experience things, and Nuit is just the set of all things we could experience, doesn’t that also make Nuit a thing?
Here’s one way of approaching this.
When we experience nature, we don’t just have a raw experience of everything around us. The mind is constantly applying filters and frames. It’s ignoring vast amounts of information. If it didn’t the amount of information would be overwhelming, and we wouldn’t be able to cope with the world. So we’re constantly drastically reducing the problem space by reducing the amount of information we’re conscious of at any moment.
And that’s how the thingness of things arises for us. By the time we see a thing—anything—a lot of filtering and narrowing down has taken place because of all these unconscious biases that we have.
Of course we can reflect upon our frames. We can reflect upon our biases. We can change the way we look at the world so as to take in information we were previously ignoring and ignore information we previously thought was salient. This is an ongoing, unending process. It’s not one we ever get to the bottom of. There is never going to be a once-and-for-all frame to capture everything relevant in. Any knowledge we can ever have of external nature always, by necessity, must have some ignorance built in to it.
If we could experience nature without a frame, though, that would be Nuit. Nuit is that sense of excess that we’re always dimly aware of. It is that which is constantly exceeding our frames, that which constantly resists and exceeds objectification while also being the condition of possibility of any objectification.
So She is real, but she is not-a-thing or no-thing.
On the other hand, we have Hadit who is also not-a-thing. He is pure going, pure motion, the primordial activity of framing which itself can never be adequately framed. (AL II.8) Every attempt to turn back on itself, to catch itself, to grasp itself, merely grasps some aspect of Nuit.
Also, He is impersonal (New Comments on AL II.6 and AL III.62). Hadit is not the personality. He does not have content of His own. His content all comes from Nuit, or more specifically, through some enframing interaction with Nuit that makes salient some aspect of her for his adoration.
So He is also real and also not-a-thing or no-thing.
There is a deep, participatory identity or resonance between these two nothings: the nothingness of external nature and the nothingness of subjectivity. They’re never found independently of one another. Nuit is never encountered on her own but rather through some aspect which is brought out by means of the activity of Hadit. Hadit’s own pure activity as such cannot be encountered directly but rather only contextually, in terms of some kind of embodied and embedded activity (see what I said in the video about the body), i.e., only indirectly through other revealed aspects of Nuit. (Man-being veiled in woman-form as the Anthem says.)
The relationship is always reciprocal and self-moving, in much the same way that an organism is always interacting with and responding to its environment. There’s a kind of “fittedness” between Nuit and Hadit which is analogous to evolution.
Just as both Nuit and Hadit are no-things, so too is the relationship between them. The relationship is real, but it is indifferent to the parts. There is no essence to the relationship between Nuit and Hadit, since literally any experience whatsoever is the conjunction of Nuit and Hadit.
Nevertheless, this relationship is self-moving, self-renewing, inexhaustible, and is not directed to any particular end.
It is a relationship of fascination with things in which mind is in participation with its object. It is characterized by flow. Being self-organizing and self-moving, it is also self-interested. When it takes interest in itself, its own processes, that is when we have the sense that we are entering into flow, self-transcendence, exceeding our frames, exceeding ourselves, moving outward, upward, onward, in love with existence, caught up in it, having an intrinsically meaningful experience, etc.
What I want to claim is that this reciprocal, self-organizing, self-moving, self-renewing, inexhaustible interest and constantly changing fittedness between self and world is the relationship Crowley calls love.
That’s the highest value, according to Thelema.
That is what is worthy of our deepest respect and reverence, above and beyond all things, precisely because (a) we are absolutely dependent upon it and (b) it is the source of meaning in life.