In himself he neither wept nor laughed
Since 2003, 35 pits at the site in a valley near Truro have been excavated containing swan pelts, dead magpies, unhatched eggs, quartz pebbles, human hair, fingernails and part of an iron cauldron.
It’s interesting to see the Gnostic Mass reported on as part of a “survey of local churches” type of series. I do get the feeling that the Mass in question was “barbaric,” with the priestess remaining clothed throughout. The reporter doesn’t mention a naked priestess, and the description of the space makes it sound as if it is partially outdoors.
The suggestion that ending the Challenge after 10 years supports any statement that psi does not exist or someone would have won the challenge, is absurd on many levels.
The procedures for the Challenge included several hurdles in favor of, and multiple “outs” for Randi and the JREF that any discerning individual capable of any kind of extraordinary human performance would think twice about (and here I’m not just referring to psychics and the like).
What are these hurdles that Auerbach refers to?
Now, I do not “believe in” psychic phenomena in any uncritical sense. Some things make me wonder, though. What bothers me about this is that it’s basically rigged to fail. The Challenge effectively asks a person to produce phenomena according to what people who have a cartoonish idea of such things have constructed before the fact. So, you can’t win, either in terms of the number of tests you’d actually have to run, or beating a strawman created by someone who already thinks you’re nuts.
Hyatt was part of a very specific generation of esoteric authors. Like Robert Anton Wilson, he stressed liberation from our fixed ideas, and was fiercely anti-dogmatic. The last book of his that I read was To Lie is Human, Not Getting Caught is Divine which is basically a series of questions to ask about how much you betray yourself. It’s strange, angry, and the kind of magickal book that doesn’t center around reifying a symbol set so that you can be a pre-fab “adept.”
His voice will be missed.
We look at the world through windows on which have been drawn grids (concepts). Different philosophies use different grids.
-Principia Discordia
The song quoted above was written as a kind of protest against suburban conformity, using the artifact of the pre-fabricated tract home as a concrete metaphor. I think it expresses something a bit deeper, about how we tend to think.
We live in the most data rich environment in history. Some call it the “information” age, but the if we take the word in its technical sense, in terms of organization of data into something *new* we will see that there is very little actual information out there. Lots of bits floating around, little actual novelty.
This is because, in another sense, we have in-formed a great deal of data beforehand into discrete packages that to a large degree limit our capacity to incorporate novelty. Things which are alien to the boxes we’ve made in our brains tend to either *not* register, or register in some sub-optimal way. To make matters worse, we tend to put alien data into *other* boxes, with labels that mostly boil down to “threat to mental territory.” Since the human brain works partly by association, data bearing even a passing resemblance to anything in the “threat” boxes automatically get put there. All based not on the validity or lack thereof of an idea, but because it “sounds like” it originated in “Box X.”
We inherit nearly all of our boxes. Most of them quite early in life. They’re built up first of associations with a feeling of security, then a desire to dominate or submit. Random events cause us to associate certain perspectives with certain kinds of people. Those linked pre-consciously to those people we have good experiences with tend to be the ones we build our boxes with. By the time we hit maturity, the world rushes in with several different sorts of “package deals” to put in our ready made containers.
Politics, which is really just a form of stylized territorial conflict with the State as the mediator of some kind of violence, consists mostly of one group of people triggering in another the associations laid down in their “target audience.” No matter how much politicians make noises about their campaigns being “about ideas” or “about policy,” they’re really about making people feel threatened enough in their mental space to run to a protector. Naturally, the associations triggered don’t just deactivate after election season. They accumulate more data, more crumbs on the sticky slush of the mind. Entire chunks of language acquire special meanings, and even ones directly opposite to their obvious meaning. (For instance “neoconservative” refers, in fact, to radical right wing ideologies, not anything remotely “conservative” in the literal sense.)
Religion, of course, is the ultimate “package deal.” The Western approach tends to be “read the book, follow the instructions, don’t ask too many questions.” It’s “tradition,” inviolable even when the “tradition” has been exposed as pure invention. There is no absurdity, impossibility, atrocity, or torture that has not been defended in terms of “tradition.”
We also have, related to this, the division of the world into “sacred” things and “profane” things. How this division makes sense outside the set of boxes in someone’s head I simply don’t know. These are not categories such as “hot” and “cold” which can be measured with instruments, but a priori value judgments. (Unless someone has a “sacredometer” to measure the relative “sacredness” of every idea or phenomena.) Too many things are held sacred in one place and not in another for the distinction to be anything but prejudice.
In the occult, we see this pattern as well. The “traditional wisdom” is often considered valid even when it conflicts with known history and advances in philosophy. What’s important is to “follow the tradition” because it can teach you something about how to do it yourself. Which is all well and good, but one would think that it would do a better job if irrelevancies and nonsense were gotten rid of, rather than sanctified. Or, if it is noted that some other system fills an obvious gap or solves a problem, it makes more sense to incorporate it rather than shun it as “not part of the tradition.”
One often hears people using phrases like “think outside the box,” and some will even agree that the “map is not the territory.” Unfortunately, this rarely means anything, other than that this person has built another box which includes platitudes of this nature. It’s still identity, not relationship with the world.
To honestly “think outside the box” means breaking it. Taking out the contents and periodically reorganizing. This is very difficult, and can lead one to some very odd places. Conversations with others become steadily more surreal unless some common ground is discovered.
Still, the effort is worth it, if one can even once look at the world totally fresh, without previous filtering. That is, before the new filters get installed, and one starts again.
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:
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.
There is not only folly, but fraud in confusing the planes, and representing that which was experienced subjectively as having actually happened in the world of matter.
-Dion Fortune Ceremonial Magic Unveiled
I have resisted for some time saying anything about the intersection between magick and political ideology. Not because I am wary of controversy (people seem to place me in their camp whatever I say) but because the topic makes my brain bleed. No matter how hard I tried, I could not find an esoteric justification for one ideological position or another that wasn’t directly contradicted by some consideration that I hadn’t thought of.
This was a difficult place to be in, for someone who had matured as a very political animal. Everything seemed turned around or simply empty. Which was of course the point.
The Western Mystery Tradition gives us a framework: that of the Tree of Life. This is further divided into Four Worlds in a manner based on the Lurianic system of Qabalah. While this is a conceptual metaphor, it does refer to concrete system functions. Atziluth really is a different kind of perspective than Assiah, or the other two worlds in between. Even Yetzirah, which holds the patterns of manifestation, requires a different approach that what we experience in Malkuth. It’s more fluid, more like our dream life than that of our waking existence.
Now, what happens to a lot of people is that they start to “get off” during their magickal practices. They experience all sorts of lovely visions and synchronicities and insights into the workings of the Universe. This can lead to a tendency to confuse one mode of perception with another, or assume that the “higher” level supersedes or somehow “cancels out” the realities of the “lower.”
This is true in a sense. The more “in tune” with the more refined or abstract modalities one becomes, their relationship with the relatively concrete will see greater openness and fluidity. But (and this is a gigantic, elephantine “but”) the “lower” must be honored for what it is. Becoming in tune with, more comfortable in, more concerned with, the day to day, mundane aspects of existence is a prerequisite for any true assimilation of the more refined.
Those who neglect to do this, or to refine their awareness of the very real distinction between “map and territory” often come out of the “getting off” phase thinking they know the One True Path to a Utopia ruled by either Ascended Masters or Thelemic Suprefolk who are all free and doing their “True Will” bothering no one else other than those “out of their orbit.” It happens quite a great deal in the Thelemic community because Crowley did a lot of amateur social theorizing (sorry) and because Thelema appeals to the same kids who spent their lunch hours hiding form people in the library, reading Ayn Rand or Nietzsche.
In order to understand why this doesn’t work, we need to familiarize ourselves with one model of how the Four Worlds play out in Assiah, the Eight Circuit Model of consciousness. This, too, is a metaphor, but one which is fairly intuitive. It also has a passing resemblance to the Chakra system and their functional concerns. The important part to think about here is that the territorial circuit (2) can be said to interface with the semantic circuit (3) and create a political ideology. As in Qabalah, the “spiritual development” angle doesn’t kick in until the relative “center point” of the system has been imprinted (circuit 5 in the model, Tipharet on the Tree). Addressing political concerns to this area of the brain is what could be called an “address error.” It’s beyond all that shit throwing and monkey howling.
The “higher” circuits also build on the “lower,” so if the functions “below” are imprinted in an predatory fashion, or in a more victim oriented way, when the 5th through 8th circuits “wake up” they will tend to be hindered by bad programming “in the cellar.” Unless one has actually done the actual work of purification and consecration, that is.
So where does this leave us, politically speaking? What I think it means is that, while esoteric studies cannot tell us what ideology to adhere to, and would probably discourage us from holding to any too enthusiastically, it can teach us how to choose, and how to go about promoting that choice. We learn about balance, about mercy and severity, and about compassion. The world would be far better off if individuals approached their particular concerns in this way, rather than bemoaning the fact that not everyone agrees with them. An awareness of wholes, rather than of clashing “opposites” (mostly phantom horns on ghost dilemmas) can help us in greater measure than the constant attempt to “win” something we know to be beneath our efforts and unduly complicated when achieved. (Rule the world? Are you fucking serious??!! Do you know what a pain in the ass… never mind.)
I’ve written before about “objective interests,” particularly of Pagans. Nothing I’ve said here should be seen to contradict that. There are things which a person who practices magick will be required to concern themselves with. Likewise with Pagans in general: if you say you worship the Earth as a Goddess then that entails a basic set of political problems to address. It does not mean you are required to be a democrat. But, if Republican, I would hope you’d
work to make the environment a real concern for that Party, rather than simply towing the line.
The main point, whether for esotericists or religionists, magi or priests, is to let the light of awareness shine through whatever you do. We will not change the world with manifestos, party platforms, or revolutions. We will change it by making an effort to let just a little more mindfulness, a little more compassion, shine into the dank, dying world we have inherited.
