Reposted from LAShTAL.com:

Iskandar wrote:

While I very much disagree with Mika’s last sentence, I am in complete agreement with her essential thesis, that “living according to one’s Will *is* achieving one’s Will.” I would consider Crowley as responsible for some confusion regarding this issue, but mostly because he was – Prophet or not – also a cultural product of his times and a successor to a rather linear understanding of the nature of the Great Work as formulated in a bulk of the teaching of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. There is thus – in my current understanding – a continuous subtext that one may equate with ‘the lust of result’ in Crowley’s opus: you do certain things and then certain results follow.

The admonition of “lust of result” is often mistakenly read to promote a complete disinterest in results at all, but it doesn’t mean anything like this. A statement that “the end results, if any, are irrelevant” is far too strong.

To continue an earlier analogy, one cannot sensibly play a game of chess without trying to win, since it is the objective of winning which provides the context within which a “good move” can be judged. In the same way, one can’t sensibly learn to play a musical instrument without deliberately trying to get better at it. On an even more banal scale, nobody would ever drop a couple slices of bread into a toaster without having the end result of toast in mind.

The important point is that nobody makes the mistake of thinking that if they win this particular game of chess that they’re playing right now, all their problems will go away. While you are playing, you definitely want to win, but it never occurs to you to think that winning this game will have much of any significance to your life once you’ve won it. Once it’s won – or lost – it’s done, and you move on to the next thing. It should be clear to anyone that although the objective of winning is of critical importance to playing a game of chess, it is the act of playing that is ultimately of worth to one’s life – as a form of enjoyment, or intellectual stimulation, or whatever – and not the winning. You’d be suffering from “lust of result” if you started believing that there was something inherently valuable to winning games of chess in and of itself, which – naturally – very few people believe, not least because winning a game of chess is all the evidence you need to show you that there isn’t.

This is often not the case with “spiritual practice”. Certainly it is true that practice is directed towards an end. One might engage in meditation to improve concentration, or to engender a feeling of relaxation, or just to enjoy the process of meditation itself, for that matter. It is not indicative of “lust of result” to work towards an objective when you do such things. However, where people start going wrong is when they start believing that if they “practice” enough or if they “attain” to a particular level then they will become enlightened beings and all their problems will go away. They won’t. Just like when you win a game of chess, all that will happen is that you’ll be in a new place with new things to do; at that point, any “success” you had will be in your past, and it won’t matter a whole lot to what you are going to do next.

All “lust of result” illustrates is the obvious truth that static things don’t bring satisfaction or enjoyment. It doesn’t mean that the end result is unimportant to what you are doing now and should be studiously ignored; it just means that the end result is not important in and of itself. Results are only valuable insofar as they provide context for action; once they are achieved, they really won’t matter much to anyone, because you’ll be acting in a different context, but a major part of “enjoying the journey” is indeed deliberately striving towards the goal. All “conquering lust of result” entails is realising that when your brain starts telling you that everything is going to be great if only you can achieve this result or another, it’s telling you an outrageous fib. Realising this then naturally enables one to focus on the real life instead of the imaginary one, and enables one to prevent one illusory pipedream after another from continually distracting one’s attention from what actually is happening now.