This is part of a series of posts on moving beyond the Consensus Thelema paradigm.
A lot of the Consensus Thelema memes are driven by the desire to reject external authority in favor of self-authorization.
For example, Crowley does not have the authority to tell us X, where X could be how we should view the cosmos, how we should evaluate spiritual attainment, whether we should be compassionate—take your pick.
The same idea applied to spiritual experience or praxis would say that it doesn’t matter whether or not spirits or God exist in some kind of mind-independent sense. What matters is whether the belief in such things is useful to me. I’m the final authority on such questions, even whether I acknowledge the existence of an Other.
And one of my claims has been that this isn’t particular to Thelema. This is just the trend of secularism generally for the last few centuries. External authority has been reduced or eliminated in favor of self-authorization. Secularization has a lot of faces, but this is how it turns up in the religious field in particular.
Self-authorization is based upon the idea that the ground of who I am is immanent to me. I can know or freely produce my own ground, my own self, thereby becoming a self-enclosing whole. It is based upon a metaphysics of self-authoring, where who and what I am can be determined by me.
Crowley’s own view seems to have been more nuanced. On the one hand, he was critical of the idea of the self-enclosure of the “I”. He saw Amfortas, wounded by his own spear, as an object lesson in the price to be paid for overweening self-mastery. It’s spiritual masturbation. And of course the culmination of self-authorization is the Black Brother, the closest Crowley ever came to providing a stark contrast with his own spiritual ideal.
And as I’ve argued previously, his idea of will straddles the line between transcendence and immanence. It’s transcendent in the sense that it transcends reason and the ego. That gives it an element of otherness. And as it transcends reason and the capacity to question it, it speaks to us with unimpeachable authority. On the other hand, it is not alien to us, because it is in fact our true self.
Whether or not you think that makes sense or is just contradictory, that does seem to be what he was attempting with that idea. He did not view individuals as fully self-authorizing. He believed we answered to a higher power, even if that higher power was not the God of Exodus.
This shows up in various places. For example, in the Gnostic Mass, the Ceremony of the Introit represents everything we are able to do for ourselves under our own power in the religious life. We can make ourselves pure, fervent, and chaste toward the Holy Guardian Angel. But once that link is established, all else is accomplished through the intervention of a higher power—a power received through the lifted lance—which we must be passive toward and allow work through us. “I am but an hollow tube to bring down fire from heaven.”
Of course Crowley continued to view that higher power as “the higher part of the magician which seeks to unite the lower with itself.” We discipline our lower parts to make room for alterity—but that other is just ourselves at a much more profound level.
The question then becomes: When is the higher in us so much higher as to become other? At what point does the experience explode the category of self and self-authorization?
On the one hand, you have religious experience. On the other, you have a metaphysical or theological framing of experience. My guess is that most Thelemites—even those of the Consensus variety—would privilege the experience over the conceptual framing. The problem is that the memes constituting Consensus Thelema derive from the philosophy, not from the experience. The jargon of authenticity has overwhelmed the rest of Thelema—and really the rest of the religious life.
So then that raises the question: Could we have avoided the excesses of Consensus Thelema if Crowley had not framed the religious experience in terms of Self? Yes, there is a balance that needs to be struck. We want language that does justice to alterity while not rendering the experience alien. But since the categories of self and self-authorization have taken over so thoroughly in the overculture, is there better language to use for the non-alienating dimension than the framework of Self?