One would think that one of the prime characteristics of the “New Aeon” would be that those promoting it would have a perspective on things like religion that was, in fact, new. What I have seen recently is not just old but a stupid version of old.

As I’ve stated before, I find the odds that one group of people have discovered “The Truth” incredibly slim. Thus it should be no surprise that the notion that one person did so seems categorically absurd to me. The same arguments apply: really big Universe, very narrow perspective interpreting it.

Spewing out a lot of post-Marxist Continental crap in between Crowley quotes will not impress me either. To me, Thelema is about, among other things, thinking for yourself. When someone’s word count reaches more than 2,000, and 1,500 of those are snippets from Crowley, I find it hard to believe a person is doing that.

This sort of religion, where the words of dead people count for more than personal experience, should be just as dead by now.

My last thoughts aside, I do find the drive toward a totally non-Crowley Thelema a bit odd to say the least. To begin with, we’re talking about a massive amount of material that would simply have to be ignored. Even keeping only Class A documents would be chopping out several million words from the sources one references. To me, this sounds like an utter waste.

Of this body of material, I would say roughly forty percent consists of amateur social theorizing based on long discredited Victorian pseudo-science that can be safely set aside as irrelevant simply on account of its own weakness. This is generally combined with the most ridiculous reading of Nietzsche one can imagine outside of a Marylin Manson interview. One must remember that Crowley switched majors out of philosophy before taking anything he said on the subject at face value. He was a poet and a seer not a systematic philosophical thinker.

This leaves sixty percent of Crowley’s corpus. Much of which is really good shit. Whole aspects of modern occultism derive from his practical and theoretical work.

Another point: While there may have been antecedents to Thelema, these in themselves do not constitute a system or a religious philosophy. Crowley was, in my opinion, one of the last systematizers of occult practice coming out of the nineteenth century. Before that trend, there wasn’t really much going on that could be described as a coherent “Tradition.” There was a general tendency amongst a large number of disparate practitioners, revolving around the bits of Lurianic Kabbalah that were available, and several different kinds of alchemy along with a host of different individual bits of technology such as Arts of Memory. But the “Hermetic Tradition” as such was largely a figment of the late Renaissance imagination.

What Crowley did was focus on those bits that tended toward sensuality and individual freedom, as well as incorporating “Eastern” practices. Again, not something that should be discarded, since these influences and ideas actually fill huge gaps left in Western Esotericism by the centuries of Christian dominance.

I think what I’m getting at is, while I don’t think it’s appropriate to idolize or slavishly follow the words of any individual, give the man some fucking credit would ya? Really, if one looks at the cultural atmosphere in which Crowley moved, he actually comes out looking pretty good. We just need to remember that our current society is to that of the early twentieth century what that period was to the late middle ages in terms of progress. In this sense, Crowley can be seen as a Renaissance man.

His call to change the Constitution “according to God’s standards” was frightening enough, but it turns out that “Republican” candidate Mike Huckabee is also affiliated with some of the most extreme edges of the Dominionist movement.

From Daily Kos:

As bad as that gets, though, it’s worse than I feared. It seems that Mike Huckabee is not only a good friend of neopente cult leader and “Bible-based baby beating” and Joel’s Army-with-guns advocate Bill Gothard…but he’s also a member of his Bible-based cult.

A site with more information on Huckabee’s connections to Bill Gothard.

He also promoted Gothard’s program in public schools as governor of Arkansas.

While he’s being portrayed in the media as a folksy kind of guy, Huckabee represents the worst kind of theocratic fascism alive in America today. Not just Dominionist, but paramilitary. He is, in fact, already a traitor to the Constitution, by virtue of his active disregard for the First Amendment, and thus unqualified for the office of President.

How many vague, qualitative terms can one put into a “scientific” finding? Just read and see.

Rosemary Aird of the University of Queensland has released a masterpiece of pseudo-science propaganda in order to “prove” that “non-traditional” religion, basically, makes you depressed and anxious. The news release from the University includes such statements as “This focus on self fulfilment and improvement over others’ wellbeing could undermine a person’s mental health with many people feeling more isolated, less healthy and having poorer relationsihps. “[sic]

This is such a startling example of post hoc ergo propter hoc thinking that I cannot believe a major university in any country would allow it to slip by. It is just as likely that thinking differently from the majority of a person’s social group would cause depression and anxiety before the adoption of a new religion, and perhaps even lead to such a change, as it is that someone developed depression and anxiety because of that religion.

What are we supposed to think of a study where the researcher says “There’s no way of measuring all of those different types of things.” You mean, there’s no way to actually determine if your findings actually refer to any real world phenomena?

Great. I’m sure this will be a popular study for Dominionists to cite. And it has an academic pedigree to give it that special authority.

I have adopted, and retained, at least five belief systems in the course of my life. They all contradict each other in some sense and overlap in others. Why have I engaged in what probably sounds like a frustrating project such as this?

It’s quite simple:

1. The Universe is, according to scientists, “very large.”
2. Human societies all, to a certain extent, limit what individuals can perceive and think.
3. So to me, the odds that one group of people, all more or less trained to see and think in the same fashion, and limited in one way or another by their knowledge of the Universe, at some point managed to discover the Ultimate Truth about that Universe, are minuscule at best.

It may be countered that since that which is above is as that which is below, any one of those groups of people could have received the Ultimate Truth. This leaves open the question of why a representative of culture A was so privileged, and not a representative of culture B, C and D. We could invoke the concept of “purity” and try to figure out which culture most closely approximates our construct, but this would only tell us more about our own prejudices. An interesting exercise in personal insight, but it tells us little about that elusive Ultimate Truth.

No, I think it far more likely that particular cultures, by nature of their conditions, are fitted to attune to and receive a particular slice of a much, much larger Gnosis. The ways to deal with that in terms of Truth go beyond what I want to speak about here, which is something related to the above in a somewhat lateral fashion. I hope the digression will be understood as necessary when I reach the end.

For a moment, adopt the perspective that a set of ideas can be, in a certain sense, a “God.” For esotericists this shouldn’t be much of a stretch, as we are pretty much all familiar with the concept of an “egregore.” Briefly, this would be the synergetic whole that transcends and includes all constituent parts within a particular sphere of manifestation.

Many people, I think, still follow a “Jealous God.” That is, their worldview is so fixed and rigid that they still feel the need to “convert” others and dominate the mental territory they encounter. This occurs in religion, of course, but also in politics and even arenas of less import, such as musical genres.

One cannot blame the Big Three religions exclusively for this Psychological Monotheism. The problem has its root, I think, in something called the reification fallacy. That is, the mistaking of abstractions to be concrete things. In other words… get ready for it… Confusing the Planes.

Yes, we’re back to that.

Really, next to mistaking the map for the territory (which could arguably be a specific instance of it) Confusing the Planes is probably one of the most widespread cognitive distortions in modern society. Yes, a cat is a cat, and a dog is a dog. If you hate dogs, but love cats, you will want to choose a cat as a pet. But ideas and sets of ideas do not exist as closed, concrete things in the same way that a dog or a cat does. Their openness or closedness depends only on how far the individual dealing with them is ready to push their edges.

Now, each culture, belief system, or ideology will arise from certain neurological biases in society and individuals as instances thereof. A Circuit 3 mindset is going to have great difficulty accepting a Circuit 2 ideology. As far as I’m concerned, this is the only practical limit, and can be dealt with in many ways. See almost any program of spiritual development and you will find methods to expand which range of circuits you work on.

Getting back to the original thought somewhat, it seems to me that the best way to deal with apparent contradictions is to build a larger structure into which “opposite” elements can fit, and see what kind of synergy develops between them. This will not be a discovery of the “real x” but an inclusion of “x” into a new, transcendent whole.

So, rather than worrying about conversion, I would suggest learning and evaluating, borrowing and in some cases rejection, to develop a personal system that can interact with more diverse elements. This may be more difficult than it’s worth in the end, and not everyone will want to do it. But it is one way to deal with the strange, complicated world we find ourselves in.