”A curious idea is being sedulously disseminated, and appears to be gaining ground, that mysticism is the “safe” path to the highest, and magic the dangerous path to the lowest.”
”One may doubt whether anything worth doing at all is free from danger, and one may wonder what danger can threaten the man whose object is his own utter ruin.”
More than a hundred years has passed since this text was written, but strangely it seems relevant. The idea that the Mystic is safe, and the Magician is dangerous – or in danger – is still around today. It might be because the Mystic is passive, while the Magician is active. The Mystic avoids. The Magician confronts. The Mystic ponders. The Magician acts. From the perspective of the bystander a mysterious uttering is not nearly as dangerous as a magical act. From the perspective of the doer there seems to be more danger in acting than in pondering. Regardless of perspective, it’s only true if we think of the world as static. Once we realize that the world itself is in motion, we must also realize that we are safer on our feet – moving with it – than we are sitting down – resisting movement. In fact stillness brings us into confrontation, (with what is moving), while skillful movement might let us escape just that.
For example, hunger can be prevented with consistent meal times. Fatigue can be prevented with exercise. Exhaustion is preventable with sleep. But to achieve equilibrium, (or homeostasis, in this case), you must cook, run, and go to bed at the right moments. Life is always working, and magic is nothing else than another level of work. Stillness, regular motion, and speed exist on a spectrum. We are always colliding with reality, but hopefully at a sustainable and comfortable speed.
“…and magic, the dangerous path to the lowest” is a path some of us choose freely. There can be many reasons. Life brings you down in some way, or another, and you learn that as a matter of fact you must put effort into living, or you will die. If you are unlucky, and you hit rock bottom, sometimes you must learn to eat, exercise, and sleep – again – as if learning a new language. Life is hard – but it is interesting – and even wonderful. Once I saw what mere breathing could do for me, if I did it right, I was hooked on exploring “…the lowest” and it wasn’t (extra) dangerous. To the contrary, not exploring it seemed to be more of a risk. Like driving without driving lessons.
“…utter ruin” may seem like a strange objective. Crowley himself does seem to have been in a hurry to find his own grave, but I’m not. I take “…utter ruin” to mean I’m not going to Heaven. I’m going to turn to space dust when I die. Meanwhile, many things feel threatening to me. I worry a lot. I guess I’m not as macho as Aleister Crowley was. But in spite of my worries, I wouldn’t prefer a “…safe path to the highest” because I don’t think it exists. I think it’s like vacation resorts. For a limited time you feel like paradise is real, but then you have to go home, because it isn’t.
Even if the Mystic would manage to avoid normal problems for a whole lifetime, what would become of it? That’s exactly Crowley’s next question.
”Hundreds of mystics shut themselves up completely and forever. Not only is their wealth-producing capacity lost to society, but so is their love and good-will, and worst of all, so is their example and precept.”
”Beware of all those who shirk the lower difficulties: it’s a good bet that they shirk the higher difficulties too.”
”…although an ounce of true humility is worth an ounce of honest pride; the man who works has no time to bother with either.”
Work is undoubtedly the best path to forgetting yourself for a minute. For a minute you’re free of the burden of being a person. You’re busy doing things. Something is done, and you have your exercise. You might even have met the needs of others in the same moment you met your own. But work must not be confused with just regular labor. There are all kinds of work in life. We are always working. There is delicate work to be done too. There are thoughts working through our brains, and sensations. We dream, and dreams are efforts. We laugh, we cry – and our muscles ache.
The sum of Aleister Crowley’s hopes in the year of 1911 was as follows:
“…but I would ask even the strongest to apply these correctives: first, the skeptical or scientific attitude, both in outlook and method; second, a healthy life, meaning by that what the athlete and the explorer mean; third, hearty human companionship, and devotion to life, work, and duty.”
We know he failed on all accords, but we know he tried for something. His hope was the hope of someone with some experience, someone who had threaded “…the dangerous path to the lowest.” And not the hopes of someone with high, or safety oriented, ideals.
My final comment on this reading will be that the text contains the word
”kindheartedness.”
Another deal Aleister Crowley broke for himself all the time. But the deal was there to be broken. And who wouldn’t want to be a skeptical athlete explorer with lots of warm relationships, and a combined zest for life, and devotion to work and duty? Kindhearted too? Too good to be true? Absolutely. I’m done reading. I’m in.
There is no way out of being a person, so it matters what we think a person is, and what we think a person can, or should be.
According to contemporary science we have little choice in who we are, and even little choice in what we are becoming. A large chunk of our personality is natural. Another large chunk depends on chance. Not much depends on upbringing, or schooling. To be treated well as a child is important for a positive development. Mistreatment scars us. Therapy might help to some extent, but for adults, as well as for children, loving relationships, and having our needs met, while also meeting the needs of others, is what ultimately heals us. Stress is detrimental. Belonging and safety is crucial.
Another crossroads to understanding who we are is what we think about the mind-body-problem. I personally go against the tides of Christian thought in my own culture, which deem the body impure, bad, and corrupting. I imagine myself whole, and in my mind my body is my soul. My mental process goes on in the flesh. My emotions are real. My mind is like a jellyfish in shape, its tentacles reach every part of me in the shapes of nerves and substances. Beyond that, my body is embedded in the environment. I eat. I breathe. I move. There is no sharp line between my mind and my body, and there is no sharp line between my body and my habitat. I inhabit all of it, and I am my own habits. They result in my actions, and reactions. At the end of the day I am what I did. Deeds echo beyond myself and beyond my lifetime. That, and the substance of the Earth, the inheritance of living and belonging – relationships stretching out in all directions – is to me my immortal soul, my eternity. Needs, wants, feelings, thoughts, sensations mingle and are quite impossible to pinpoint since they exist in flux. What is consistent in all this inconsistency is what some may call character. I call it True Will. It is the part of me my friends recognize, and are often able to predict. The part of me I trust. The part of me that is also incredibly unique. Not like anyone, or anything, but typical. The star. The stone. The signature reaction. It is beyond human, and therefore soulful. I wouldn’t confuse my cat with cats in general. I wouldn’t confuse myself either. It’s worth wondering if I would still be me if I turned into a cat, and I think so. But I can’t prove it, since it can’t happen.
Since anxiety and stress are detrimental if they are allowed to dwell longer than what is useful as a signal, which is not long at all, my practice – my magic – is a practice of acceptance. It includes honoring my body, and listening. Listening to and through it. Following the weather, the needs in my relationships, the seasons, real and metaphorical. It includes meditation and forgiveness. It includes curiosity and an effort to care for life, and for living conditions. I call it witchcraft because with all it entails it might as well be.
What part of this being that is meant to die when the ”ego death” occurs is obviously hard to tell. I hope my practice slays illusions, false concepts, unhealthy expectations – but most of all bad habits. The bad habits I have not been able to quit I try to understand and forgive. Nobody’s perfect, and no one should have to be either. Far from being divine – or being divine all the time – I know what I am is a natural occurrence. I happen to exist. I am part of life. A bug, a leaf, a person.
Death will come, but what was me will go on beyond that person.
There is something called “oceanic feeling” which might more accurately describe what some refer to as “ego death” these days. Oceanic feelings are sensations of belonging so deeply to the world that one feels at one with eternity. A sense of oceanic oneness can engulf us at any moment, and without warning, or preparation. It might happen to us without effort. It might last for a period. It might last for just a moment. It might come and go. It might turn into a habit. It might happen only once. It might frighten us, or inspire us. It might make us happy, or sad. Often it comes with a sense of awe. How small we are, and still a part of something so large. We feel it. There is nothing wrong with feeling it. Oceanic feelings are completely normal.
But they are not ego deaths.
One might also question why the ego must die – if it actually does die, or if we are just making things up – and what the ego is, if it is anything, in the first place. Does it really exist, and how real is it?
Definitions of the word “ego” vary. It is a word used by Sigmund Freud, but also by Carl Jung. It is a word used to describe concepts in diffrent strands of Eastern religion and philosophy when translated to the West. In everyday language it is used simply to mean a sense of self – healthy, or unhealthy – depending on the psychological state of the individual. It is even used to mean simply “self”; a thinking being. It is also used to mean self-esteem, and things similar to pride. Including the negative use of the word as a selfish drive, often in contrast to a better, or truer self. An ego is something that can be too big. A big ego means a selfish person, but a big person is unselfish, and generous. My point is that the word “ego” does not mean just one thing. It is as if the word “green” could also mean orange, and purple. What Sigmund Freud meant is not the same as what is meant in Zen meditation practice. What Freud means is something vital to mental health. What Zen means is something that stands in the way of the task. Something that causes suffering. The word becomes almost useless, or at least vague.
It is not very difficult to make it seem like the striking experience of oneness in the oceanic feeling somehow means that the elusive ego has died, which somehow means that one’s selfishness has died, and in the extreme cases, that one has achieved some level of enlightenment. In some cases of New Age thinking, this sense of oceanic oneness – which is something most people can experience – is taken as a sign of union with the divine, and at the very far end of extreme thinking, a sign of becoming the divine itself.
All because of a fleeting sensation.
“Ego death” was introduced to New Age culture in part by way of Timothy Leary, and his experiments with drugs. He held the belief that the right use of drugs could lead to enlightenment, as he understood the concept. Many would argue that drug use is not the way to go, and that he didn’t understand the concept at all. Perhaps he was just trying to comprehend the awe felt in drug induced oceanic feelings? For a long time New Age culture stood close to currents of magic that romanticized, and experimented with drug use. There are traces of it left today, some of them profound. In science the healing arts still experiment with mental health, and medicine based in psychedelic experience. And even today people put a lot of effort into thinking about, and trying to achieve “ego death” using all sorts of various methods. Many would even say “ego death” is the purpose of all spiritual practice. The concept has slipped into Western yoga, meditation, astrology, and tarot. But it is a nebulous concept.
The confusion is complete.
We don’t know what the word “ego” really means, so we have no way of knowing what “ego death” really means either.
Words are just words. They aren’t the experience itself. But on the other hand, words dictate future experiences, and how we come to interpret them.
Certainly if the word “ego” means a sense of self, the death of it is catastrophic, both for the individual, and for the community it lives in. But if the word “ego” simply means selfishness, perhaps a bit of death is good for you.
Whatever it means, it seems to be important, and I have tried to make sense of it. Two things can be gleaned from this initial reflection.
Some experiences – particularly those that are spontaneous and fleeting – might be better described as “oceanic feeling”.
Death is a certainty in life. All spirituality relates to death, and must relate to it. It is not strange that New Age culture tries to find new ways to relate to death. Neither is it strange to try to relate to the ego, if nothing else for practical reasons. For a self of some kind is as inevitable as death is.
“Ego death” is therefore not an irrational, or surprising concept, but it is – as it stands – nebulous, and vague.
Occasionally people have asked me if I think it’s possible to know our own True Will. I don’t know if it is. I have only ever found one answer. It’s what we already did. Because it must be.
It’s a terrible answer, but bear with me.
Most of us prefer to move on from whatever it is that we have been through. At times we need forgiveness, but forgiveness too is aimed towards the future. We do it to liberate one another from past mistakes, hurts, and wrongdoings. Forgiveness is hard, but once it’s done we are free to forget. And eventually we do forget, and begin to move forward again.
In the formula for Thelema a particularly important word is hidden, but in plain sight. The formula is written in the form of a command:
“Do what thou wilt.”
This could be compared to another well known formula, and command:
“Man, know thyself.”
But Thelema is not a matter of knowing, it’s a matter of doing. Knowing is necessarily oriented towards the past, because we cannot know the future. Doing, on the other hand, is necessarily oriented towards the future, because we cannot do anything about the past.
It is what it is. We are what we did.
First of all – and most of all – Thelema, as a philosophy, asserts the existence of the individual. It does so by suggesting that Willis the guiding principle by which we can understand reality, our relationship to one another, and even to the rest of the universe. The word Thelema means Will, and where there is a Will, there is an individual. Moreover, there is a sign of life.
Individualism is not the same as Thelema. Thelema is not bound to be only an individualist philosophy. Thelema is adaptable to transcendentalist and essentialist ideas, at least as much as it is to existentialist ideas. Meanwhile individualism, as we are used to it today, is usually more existentialist.
The reason for this difference is that Thelema is not only busy with the individual – or unit – whose importance it asserts. Thelema is also busy with its own wild claim. That there is something more than an ordinary Will at work within us, in between us, and deep within nature itself. Thelema claims True Will, and that is something altogether different than the Will that we are used to thinking about. It is different too from the Will of the existentialist thinker, who might be busy thinking about the Free Will of each individual, and therefore each human being’s right to freedom, and individualism with it.
Besides the unit of the individual, Thelema asserts that the unit is in unity with the universe. Naturally this is true – more or less a fact – from a scientific viewpoint. But how to come to terms with this fact, is the business of Thelema. That is what it tries to do, (at least sometimes), and the ambition is not unique. Thelema is not the only philosophy that admits to the truth of the existence, and reality, of individual life forms. Every modern philosophy has to take these natural facts into account, since they are actual facts. This is often in opposition to religion, since religion creates its own account of reality, apart from science. A religious person may deny a scientific fact, and go on to form her own philosophy based solely on religion. An honest philosopher may not. A Thelemite just can’t.
Thelema thrives on the friction formed in the cracks between what is a private experience, and what is an observable fact. What is religion, and what is science? What is superstition, and what is reality? Thelema deals with magic, as well as with reason. It speaks about the imagination, and it speaks about the skeptical mind.
The original founder of Thelema, Aleister Crowley, was perhaps most of all a poet. There aren’t a lot of nice things to say about him. In fact all of it is awful. If we are compelled to listen to him not-so-nice-poetry is what we will get. But we are compelled to listen to him, evidently. Perhaps because something utterly human has always compelled us to listen to drunkards and poets. Personally I believe that I’m drawn to Aleister Crowley’s ideas because there is an essence in them that I cannot resist. That I do not wish to resist. And that is what distinguishes my analysis from an existentialist viewpoint. As an existentialist I might have said that Crowley was a human being, and he had every right to have his own opinion, and every right to make his own meaning out of life. Then I would be done with it, since I would be busy making my own meaning, and asserting my own rights to do so in the process. Busy enough, so to speak, if I was only an individualist. But I’m not, I’m a Thelemite, which means I have made my own meaning out of Thelema. In part it means that I believe each life is born to an essential meaning. I believe this essential meaning emerges from living life. I believe the life of other living beings can and will inform me on the truth of life. I believe this truth, or True Will, is shared by all living beings, past, present, and future. I even believe it exists in fruit flies, which I will come to in a minute.
To an outsider, at first it may seem like Thelema is a lot of hot air, lingo, and secret hand shakes. I guess that must be because at first it is. Art. Mystery. Fantasy. All of the things we love about children when we watch them play, or better yet, play along with them, are the same things, but distorted, that disturb us when we want to get to the truth of a matter, in an adult conversation, but can’t. It seems perpetually hard to discuss the central topics of Thelema, without falling into some, or all, of its traps of dizzy pagan poetry. Even just reading Aleister Crowley sometimes gets you into trouble. He often starts out by telling you what his essay is going to be about, and then slowly but surely changes the subject to cheese, makes you laugh, and ends it on a completely different topic. Let’s not do that. Let’s talk about fruit flies instead.
The fruit fly is enough to be a unit of life. Even a fruit fly must to some extent realize its own self, and it must to some extent realize its own conditions. It must learn about itself, and it must learn about the world. This, in order to achieve its own survival. In depth studies of the behavior of fruit flies* have shown that fruit flies have a natural ”rudimentary” tendency for what philosophers might call Free Will. Scientists describe this trait as a “non-random – yet still unpredictable – decision-making capacity”. Fruit flies have that, which means that in this sense, they have a Will of their own. As a unit of life we are not so different from fruit flies, or from other living beings. Living is not so much an intellectual pursuit, and Will is dependent on intuition, and experience – maybe even more than it is on intellect.** This is an important clue to understanding Thelema. We are left here with the books, but the books were written from experience, and intuition.
This does not mean that Thelema has no intellectual pursuit. Saying that you can’t learn Thelema from books, and you have to go out and have your own experience from “magick”, or from “gnosis” easily becomes just another way to opt out of explaining the basic elements of Thelema as a philosophy. Let’s not do that. Let’s talk about the unit and the universe instead. Where there’s a Will there’s a way.
The lingo of Thelema tells us that there are two major tasks in life. One is the Knowledge and Conversation with the Holy Guardian Angel. The other is the Crossing of the Abyss. In essence this can be translated into two moods – we must realize our own self, and we must realize our own conditions. We must learn about ourselves, and we must learn about the world. But this is not unique for Thelema. This is unique for life. What is unique for Thelema is that it tells us that there is a True Will, rather than a Free Will, underpinning this mission.
So, is there?
Applied to our new friend, the fruit fly, a True Will seems both naturally obvious, and hopelessly elusive. As little as I’m sure of any scientific, or philosophical, proof of Free Will, as little am I sure of any proof of True Will. Yet, a True Will sometimes seems closer at hand, since it requires less choices, but still asserts the importance of the individual, and its capacity to choose. After all there is no choice to be, or not to be, a fruit fly. Or, is there?
Furthermore, the lingo tells us that there is Nuit, and there is Hadit. If we observe our own natural conditions, we might not have to look to the supernatural to find phenomena that these concepts can be applied to. If we translate the expressions of Nuit and Hadit into universe and unit, we are able to observe the expressions of these deities in two important fields of observation – nature, and language. There they are running across the hot summer meadow, humming like bees, swaying like flowers. And there they are, on a dark day indoors, chasing each other through the lines and letters of an old book, half read, half forgotten. There they are, wherever you look for them, the lovers of this world. The lovers hidden inside this world, and not like some other deities, hidden in the next one. Here again, is something to distinguish Thelema from other philosophies, or other religions. Even from other magical practices. The deities, the divine, is in this world. The divine is alive, and we are part of it, participating in it. Whether we realize it, or not, magic is always present. There’s no pie in the sky. There’s only pie right now.
(But maybe, in some way, the pie is eternal.)
Or, at least, that’s how I see it.
Thelema thrives on the friction of these kinds of questions, and observations. What is science, and what is religion? What must I take on faith in order to go on living? What can I observe as a matter of fact, when I look at the lives of other living beings all around me? Am I alive to the fact that every single individual unit of life is unique? And that this uniqueness may be taken as a metaphor for a Holy Guardian Angel, or vice versa? Am I alive to myself? And to how this selfhood may be taken as only a temporary assembly of various materials tossed around in space? But is it just an assembly? Is it really just being tossed around? Am I the work of pure chance? Or is there some deeper truth hidden within my own nature? Who am I? A ray of light floating over this huge dust bin, the Abyss of Everything. What about the rest of me? What is left in me that cannot be substituted, or confused, even when everything has been substituted, and confused, by living? The thing that seems to go on assembling, and go on living, what is that thing? My self? My being? And doesn’t it seem to be very true? True, rather than free?
Very confusing stuff, the unit and the universe. But no matter how confusing it is, I have found it to be a good model for understanding the mission in life that Thelema proposes to its practitioners. The Great Work. The long and arduous journey of making life worth living.
Nuit and Hadit are of course more than just universe and unit. Because they are symbols, and deities, they represent a depth that more average concepts inevitably lack. There is a reason for the mystic to be a mystic. Life is mysterious. What we know is that we don’t know. But there is no reason to mystify. Things are mysterious enough as they are. There are lots of questions. More questions than answers. So much mystery, so much poetry, and so many secret hand shakes later – at the end of the day a few things remain the same for me when it comes to Thelema as a philosophy for living. To be true. To do better than yesterday; that is, to strive. And last, but not least, to always be in love.
I’m not sure if it really is possible to know our own True Will, but I know from experience that looking back can at times be both painful and embarrassing. I try to live in such a way that I can bear to look back at life. But sometimes I can’t bear it.
I’m not sure if we are actually making proper choices in life, or if we are just living, but I assume my living is not completely random. I think it’s guided by something.