We have touched on the much-abused “a curse upon Because” and “reason is a lie” phrases from the second chapter of The Book of the Law in a number of places, including The fallacy of “experiential knowledge” and Sun enters Cadent of Aquarius, but we’ve never given them a thorough treatment in one place, so this entry will serve that purpose.

AL II, 27-33, reads:

27. There is great danger in me; for who doth not understand these runes shall make a great miss. He shall fall down into the pit called Because, and there he shall perish with the dogs of Reason.

28. Now a curse upon Because and his kin!

29. May Because be accursèd for ever!

30. If Will stops and cries Why, invoking Because, then Will stops & does nought.

31. If Power asks why, then is Power weakness.

32. Also reason is a lie; for there is a factor infinite & unknown; & all their words are skew-wise.

33. Enough of Because! Be he damned for a dog!

Crowley’s commentaries on these verses are quite extensive, and we’ll begin with a critical examination of those.

He begins his new comment to AL II, 27 with:

Humanity errs terribly when it gets “education”, in the sense of ability to read newspapers. Reason is rubbish; race-instinct is the true guide. Experience is the great Teacher; and each one of us possesses millions of years of experience, the very quintessence of it, stored automatically in our subconscious minds. The Intellectuals are worse than the bourgeoisie themselves; a la lanterne! Give us Men!

Here, right at the beginning, we see a statement whose sentiment will be echoed throughout these commentaries. “Race-instinct” here has no Nazi connotations, but merely refers to the fact that the physical constitution of human beings already contain within them much instinctual information which can be relied upon as a guide to action. We don’t have to think “I am hungry” in order to motivate ourselves to get up and find food to survive; our bodies tell us this naturally. Our minds, we now know, are not the “tabula rasa” of Locke fame, but are hard-wired to tend us towards certain types of interpretation, the natural ability to perceive faces within disconnected stimuli being an obvious example. Living creatures other than humans of all kinds manage to survive and thrive perfectly well without any form of reasoning ability (so far as we can tell) and they do so because evolution has, in a sense, provided them with survival vehicles which come pre-loaded with a vast amount of information (incidentally, Crowley locates this information in the “subconscious mind”, since the existence of genes was not known in his time, and this is the same sense in which Carl Jung used the term “collective unconscious”, as opposed to the ridiculous idea some occultists seem to have of some vast telepathic collective subconscious mind dynamically shared by all humans). In the cases of the so-called “higher animals” this “information” is usually not a long list of explicit stimulus-response pairs, since in order to cope with the vast amount of different circumstances in the real world such a list would be impossibly long. Rather, such animals have developed a dynamic decision-making capability which partially relies on instinct, but which largely relies on the ability to perceive and make decisions based on interpretation and what we might call “rules of thumb”. A small number of such rules of thumb can be used to cope with a far greater variety of circumstances, and so although the creature still makes decisions predominantly based in the information contained in its genes, that information is brought down to a manageable level because it is possessed of a dynamic decision-making capability which can respond based on its application of those rules of thumb, as opposed responding purely automatically and mechanically. “Race instinct” refers to the fact that such rules of thumb will be largely common within a species (since the genetic commonalities which define such rules of thumb also serve to define “species”) but, in some cases, largely different between species (or “races”). Thus, a lion’s rule of thumb will tell it to run towards the antelope, but the antelope’s rule of thumb will tell it to run away from the lion.

The capacity for rational thought, on the other hand, provides human beings with a second avenue for making such adaptive decisions. Through the process of reasoning we can develop new rules of thumb all by ourselves, and base actions on those. There quite obviously can be no genetic rule of thumb which tells us to refrain from, say, engaging in insider securities trading, but experience shows we are quite capable of developing such a rule of thumb ourselves through the reasoning process.

The core of Crowley’s criticism in the extract above hinges on the extent to which priority is given to the reason or to the “race-instinct”. Crowley comes down quite clearly on the side of the “race-instinct”, although importantly he limits his comparison of “reason”, or “education”, in this context to “in the sense of ability to read newspapers”. It is certainly easy to see how reason could lead one astray if prioritized over the “race-instinct”; if the body cries out that it is hungry, but the reason drowns it out with cries of “no, we’re not!”, then the reaper will not be long in calling, and the same goes for many other physical needs or cautions. In other words, the implication is that reason should be employed as an aid to achieving the goals which the “race-instinct” seeks, and not as a replacement for them. Since the reason evolved – presumably – as an advantageous feature in a species which was already surviving on the basis of its “race-instinct”, this should not be surprising.

Thus, when saying that “Reason is rubbish; race-instinct is the true guide”, he is really saying that the objectives developed within the reason should not replace the objectives inherent in the “race-instinct”, since the tool of reason exists only to facilitate the accomplishment of the objectives of the latter. Hence we can see Crowley’s meaning of “in the sense of ability to read newspapers”, as readers will be well familiar with the concept of modern newspapers continually trying to tell their readership what to think, what to believe, what to value, and the rest (it is beneficial to remember the regular lambasting Crowley received from the newspapers in his time). When talking of his Abbey of Thelema, Crowley wrote in his Confessions (emphasis added):

We thus got rid of that senseless envy which embitters life by filling the mind with perverse cravings for things neither good nor bad in themselves, things fruitful of pleasure and profit to the people to whom they properly belong, but a source of misery to oneself, yet desired and hugged by the foolish who have not sense enough to see that what the mass of men imagine they want on the evidence of newspapers and salesmen may bring to them selves nothing but disappointment.

The upshot is clearly that it is not reason per se which is the objection in Crowley’s paragraph, but reason’s usurpation of the “race-instinct” in the development of objectives, or “wants”. To put it more simply, “what is wanted” arises from the self, and not from the mind, and the role of reason is merely to facilitate the accomplishment of those wants, rather than to place imaginary wants in their stead. The regular reader will recognise that this precisely describes the relationship between the “True Will” and its restrictions that we have described so often here.

We can thus return to AL II, 27 itself, and echo what we wrote in The fallacy of “experiential knowledge”:

the five preceding verses [i.e. AL II, 27-31] which also deal with reason and the “pit of Because” are simply not talking about knowledge at all, but about action. The “curse upon Because and his kin” has nothing to do with statements such as “I know with a level of confidence not equal to, but very close to, certainty that the Sun will rise tomorrow morning because it has risen every morning with great regularity each and every day that I can remember being alive on this planet” but with statements such as “I should give money to the poor because it’s the right thing to do”, or “I should sit in my asana for five hours each day because performing such work is meritous”. The only “justification” required for any act under Thelema is that it be in accordance with will, so the word “because” in the latter two statements is simply out of place.

The “great miss” in question is therefore to replace the “race-instinct”, the “subconscious”, the “self”, or the “true will”, whichever term you prefer, with an arbitrary rational standard as a guide to action. In Sin and salvation we saw that:

This is really what the doctrine of “original sin” is all about. Rather than some hideous tale of an entire species being gratuitously punished for the misdemeanours of the first man and woman, it is simply a statement that this “sinful nature” exists within man as part of his very being, that man is simply constructed in a way that prevents the mind – which wants to follow the “law of God” – from getting its way. This being the case, that “original sin” is passed on from generation to generation, since that which makes a human a human is passed down through the DNA. The fable of the “fall of man” is, of course, purported to describe how and why the nature of man was constructed in this way in the first place, but it is a mistake to allow preoccupations with spurious creation myths to obscure the essentials of the philosophy being presented. The fact – according to this doctrine – is that this is simply how man is constructed, and it is how each new generation of man is going to be constructed also.

which reveals the stark difference between Thelema and Christianity. From the same essay:

Protestant doctrine holds that the carnal self frustrates the mind, whereas Thelemic doctrine holds almost the total opposite, that more usually it is the mind frustrating the carnal self, and that is where the suffering arises. AL II, 22 states that “It is a lie, this folly against self,” with AL I, 61 commanding “Ye shall gather goods and store of women and spices; ye shall wear rich jewels; ye shall exceed the nations of the earth in splendour & pride; but always in the love of me, and so shall ye come to my joy.” Thelema would hold that the Protestant denial of the “carnal self” is at the root of almost all suffering, and that a preoccupation with an imaginary “law of God” at the expense of following the will of the self is only going to lead to pain.

Thelemic doctrine thus states that it is the “race-instinct” or the “carnal self” that should guide action, whereas Christian doctrine posits some rational idea of “virtue” as a worthier goal, and the whole concept of “original sin” arises from the very fact that this “virtue” is opposed to what the self actually wants. In the words of AL II, 27, Christianity has made a “great miss” by doing this in attempting to thwart the natural inclinations of the self by trying to take a different course because it is more “virtuous” to do so. Crowley echoes this idea in his comment to AL II, 27, immediately after the paragraph we have already quoted:

Understanding is the attribute of the Master of the Temple, who has crossed the Abyss (or “Pit”) that divides the true Self from its conscious instrument.

He Crowley links the concept of the “Abyss” with the “pit called Because”, and explicitly describes it as that [which] divides the true Self from its conscious instrument. When the self and its instrument are no longer “divided”, then the instrument (i.e. the “mind”, or “reasoning faculty”) works for the self, instead of against it. This is the polar opposite of a more Christianised version of “attainment” which instead posits that the self should be “purified” or “perfected” so that it falls into line with the so-called “higher” flights of fancy of the mind, suggesting the reverse situation where it is really the self that is the “instrument” of the mind.

The regular reader will be familiar with our frequent exhortations against morality, and it is in this context that the purpose behind that can be most clearly seen. Morality, at its most fundamental, consists of a codification of rational rules which are intended to guide action. By acting in accordance with such rational rules instead of acting in accordance with his nature, the individual “divides [his] true Self from its conscious instrument” and makes the “great miss” of AL II, 27. This does not, of course, necessarily mean that the Thelemite should act in a manner which would usually be described as immoral, because as we saw in A question of ethics:

people simply are not motivated to act “morally” as a result of a moral code. If the Christian position is to be taken seriously, we have to accept that all human beings are only a hair’s breadth away from becoming horrible murderers, rapists, and child abusers at any moment, and it’s only some kind of mantra along the lines of :Don’t kill! It’s bad to kill! Don’t do it! Really, don’t kill anyone, and don’t rape anyone, either. Just think before you kill or rape anyone, and remember it’s bad to do it. Seriously now, I know you’re thinking about it, but just don’t!” that is preventing them from doing so on a moment-by-moment basis. A moment’s examination of one’s own daily life will clearly reveal that one does not refrain from constant murder and rape because one continually tells oneself that it’s bad, but because one simply has no desire to do it. That is, people are not kept in check by a moral code, but by a simple lack of inclination to act “immorally”.

Giving it some more thought, this must almost inevitably be true. If we discard the obviously absurd idea that a moral code was handed to us by a supernatural being, then that moral code had to come from somewhere. From whence, then, did it come? Both common sense and evolutionary ethics would suggest that we don’t act morally because we are subject to a moral code, but that a moral code developed because we act morally. In other words, a moral code is a codification of existing attitudes to behaviour, and not an artificial standard designed to create common modes of behaviour. Under this idea, people do not refrain from murder because they consider it “morally wrong”; rather, they consider it “morally wrong” because they refrain from doing it, because it is already “unacceptable behaviour” to them.

In other words, any “moral standards” which actually are beneficial to human beings will – at least in their fundamental essence – already be hard-coded into the “rules of thumb” that we discussed earlier, and will therefore be followed naturally anyway if people would only listen to their actual selves. It may at times be useful to form a rational representation of those standards, but the “great miss” comes when people begin to worship that representation itself, when they become cut off from the actual evolved behaviour patterns that underlie them. When people begin to worship the representation of morality itself, not only do they forget about the underlying evolved behaviour patterns that actually do make sense, but they go further and begin to work against those patterns by substituting arbitrary, meaningless and often downright harmful behaviour patterns because they have reasoned that they are “moral”.

Crowley’s commentary to AL II, 27 continues into an epistemological discussion of the nature of “truth”, most of which is not particularly germane to this discussion, but may be summed up when he says:

Nevertheless, with whatever we try to identify this Absolute, we cannot escape from the fact that it is in reality merely the formula of our own Reason. The idea of Space arises from reflection upon the relations of our bodily gestures with the various objects of our senses. (Poincare – I note after reading him, months later, as I revise this note – explains this fully). So that a “yard” is not a thing in itself, but a term in the equations which express the Laws according to which we move our muscles. My knowledge consists exclusively of the mechanics of my own mind. All that I know is the nature of its norm. The judgments of the Reason are arbitrary, and can never be verified. Truth and Reality are simply the Substance of the Reason itself. My demonstration that “None-Two is the formula of the Universe” should then preferably be re-stated thus: “The mind of the Beast 666 is so constituted that it is compelled to conceive of an Universe whose formula is None-Two.”

In other words, what we call “truth” is itself a rational phenomenon arising from whether or not our rational faculty decides a particular candidate for truth is in accordance with its own rational rules. It is not possible, in a sense, to evaluate the “truth-detecting” ability of reason by comparing it to some kind of “absolute truth”, because the “truth” we begin with it itself a rational phenomenon, and cannot be evaluated outside of that context. Fortunately for us, this is empty philosophical speculation, because not only does this notion of comparison to “absolute truth” make no practical difference to anyone or anything, but the whole concept of “absolute truth” (i.e. “absolute” meaning outside of the human reason) becomes completely meaningless when we remember that “truth” is a rational concept in the first place. You might as well attempt to argue that smelling is philosophically untenable if you are unable to detect “absolute smells” outside of any individual’s sensory apparatus. “Truth” is a standard created by and contained within the reason; it makes no sense at all to try to look for it somewhere else in the universe, and the inability to do so should therefore be no source of concern whatsoever. The religious-occult tendency to believe “truth” to be some actual thing out there in the universe to which “rational truth” should be approximated should be resisted, because there is no such thing. “Truth” is merely a rational measure of how well our mental approximations appear to match up with what is perceived by our senses, and the religious fantasy that there is some kind of “absolute truth” existing out there somewhere should be discarded.

Indeed, Crowley goes on to say in that same comment:

there is nothing incompatible with the terms of this verse. The idea of “Because” makes everything dependent on everything else, contrary to the conception of the Universe which this Book has formulated. It is true that the concatenation exists; but the chain does not fetter our limbs. The actions and reactions of illusion are only appearances; we are not affected. No series of images matters to the mirror. What then is the danger of making “a great miss?” We are immune – that is the very essence of the doctrine. But error exists in this sense, that we may imagine it; and when a lunatic believes that Mankind is conspiring to poison him, it is no consolation that others know his delusion for what it is. Thus, we must “understand these runes”; we must become aware of our True Selves; if we abdicate our authority as absolute individuals, we are liable to submit to Law, to feel ourselves the puppets of Determinism, and to suffer the agonies of impotence which have afflicted the thinker, from Gautama to James Thomson.

Here, once again, Crowley links the “great miss” of AL II, 27 to a failure to “become aware of our True Selves”, to exorcise the “delusion[s]” that we may believe about our selves and our environment. The “error” in the “great miss” is that “we may imagine it”, that we may construct false stories in our minds and talk ourselves into believing that they are true. To “understand these runes” is to clear through those delusional fantasies and instead to perceive what actually is, clear of the colouring and interpretations through which our over-active imaginations might otherwise filter it.

Onwards! Of AL II, 28, Crowley says the familiar:

There are no “standards of Right.” Ethics is balderdash. Each Star must go on its orbit. To hell with “moral Principle”; there is no such thing; that is a herd-delusion, and makes men cattle. Do not listen to the rational explanation of How Right It All Is, in the newspapers.

When commenting on the “curse of Because”, here again Crowley criticises a belief in morality as we have already discussed at length, and again clarifies the sense of “reason” which is being admonished, namely “the rational explanation of How Right It All Is, in the newspapers” as opposed to actual scientific rational investigation into how the world actually works, something anybody familiar with Crowley would realise he avidly supported. As he says in that same comment:

Shallow indeed is the obvious objection to this passage that the Book of the Law itself is full of phrases which imply causality. Nobody denies that causality is a category of the mind, a form of condition of thought which, if not quite a theoretical necessity, is yet inevitable in practice…We must not suppose for an instant that the Book of the Law is opposed to reason. On the contrary, its own claim to authority rests upon reason, and nothing else.

Contrary to what many modern day new-age occultists would like to believe, Crowley then says something which is worth highlighting (emphasis added):

It [i.e. The Book of the Law] makes reason the autocrat of the mind.

Crowley clearly had no truck at all with this fashionable modern idea that, when deciding how the universe works, reason should be supplemented with “intuition”, or some vague form of “gnosis”, or “belief”. No, reason should be the autocrat of the mind. An autocrat is “an absolute ruler…a person invested with or claiming to exercise absolute authority”, and this is the role Crowley gives to reason as far as the mind is concerned.

What he does do, however, is to put limits not on the exercise of reason, but on the exercise of the mind itself:

But that very fact emphasizes that the mind should attend to its own business. It should not transgress its limits. It should be a perfect machine, an apparatus for representing the universe accurately and impartially to its master. The Self, its Will, and its Apprehension, should be utterly beyond it. Its individual peculiarities are its imperfections. If we identify ourselves with our thoughts or our bodily instincts, we are evidently pledged to partake of their partiality. We make ourselves items of the interaction of our own illusions.

Crowley says that the mind “should be a perfect machine, an apparatus for representing the universe accurately and impartially”. Explicitly, by his immediately preceding comment, he makes reason the “autocrat” of this process. What Crowley says is that reason, reason, and nothing other than reason should be involved in “representing the universe”, in drawing factual conclusions about what the universe is and what it does. Crowley, to repeat, had absolutely no truck whatsoever with giving “belief” or “intuition” any role in this process at all.

He does, of course, emphasise that “The Self, its Will” should be the “master” of the mind. In other words, exactly as we have already described, the mind should serve the self, not the other way round. The accurate and impartial representation of the universe should be used to help the “Self” achieve its objectives, to enable the self to fulfill “its Will”, by presenting an accurate and impartial picture of how the environment in which the self is located works, and constructing that picture solely through the use of reason. If, instead, one takes the thoughts and uses them as a guide to action (as in the case of morality) then the mind has “transgress[ed] its limits” and is usurping the proper place of the self.

It is critical to understand that by saying the self is the “master” of the mind, it does not mean that the representation within the mind should be infected by any notion of “experiential gnosis” or “intuition” somehow passed down to it from that self. Crowley clearly states that reason should be the autocrat of the mind, and that The Book of the Law “disdains the arts of the orator”. All he is saying is that the mind should stick to its own business, which is accurately representing the universe and the self so that a practically optimal way of fulfilling the will may be found, and not making the mistake of thinking it has the right to set policy, something that the will has not delegated to it. For too long have new-age religious believers spread the nonsense that Crowley was somehow advocating a wishy-washy belief-based or intuition-based approach to understanding reality, or that the skepticism he continually emphasised was somehow “only for beginners”. Confronted with the plain and straightforward words of the man himself, at the least their intentions will be exposed for what they are if they continue to spout such nonsense.

From here on, our examinations can become shorter (mercifully, some may say), since the ideas developed previously form the basis upon which the remaining verses can be understood. Crowley sums up the now obvious meaning behind AL II, 30 in his commentary:

The mind must inform the Understanding, which then presents a simple idea to the Will. This issues its orders accordingly for unquestioning execution. If the Will should appeal to the mind, it must confuse itself with incomplete and uncoordinated ideas. The clamour of these cries crowns Anarchy, and action becomes impossible.

Again we see the confirmation of the idea that the mind must exist to serve the will, rather than the will appealing to the mind to figure out what it wants to do. The Djeridensis Comment adds:

[Reason’s] proper function is to express the Will in terms of conscious thought, the will being the need of the inmost self to express itself by causing some Event. This will (as such) is not conscious. We can only become aware of it…When reason usurps the higher functions of the mind, when it presumes to dictate to the Will what its desires ought to be, it wrecks the entire structure of the star. The Self should set the Will in motion, that is, the Will should only take its orders from within and above. It should not be conscious at all. But even worse may come to it. Once it is conscious, it becomes able to doubt; and, having no means of getting rid of this by appeal to the Self, it seeks a reason for its action. The reason, knowing nothing of the matter, promptly replies, basing its judgement, not on the needs of the self, but on facts outside and alien to the star.

This is why all attempts to consciously formulate the will must remain tentative; formulating the concept that “it is my will to do X” is not problematic for as long as one remembers that it is merely a convenient and temporary representation of the reflection of the will the mind has received. The danger arises from the fact that the will is dynamic, and varies between circumstances as well as over time. If the individual begins to pay more attention to his representation than to the will itself, then he runs the significant risk of believing that it is will to do X long after it has ceased to be true. Of course, the danger of making incorrect representations of the will and missing the boat altogether is so obvious that it barely needs pointing out. In either case, the important point is that your actual will, and your conscious representation of your will, are not the same thing, and the possibility of them diverging, perhaps significantly, is ever present. For this reason the mind must be constantly informed by paying attention to the self, and not letting its own creations usurp the place of the will.

For AL II, 31, Crowley comments:

It is ridiculous to ask a dog why it barks. One must fulfil one’s true Nature, one must do one’s Will…the nature of the action depends on the information received by the Will; but once the decision is taken, reflection is out of place.

The justification for performing the will arises solely from the fact that it is the will; no other justification is required, or, to state it more correctly, no justification at all is required. To “justify” an action requires some artificial standard against which it may be assessed, and as we have already seen when considering morality no such valid standard exists. “Justification” is merely the mind second-guessing the will, which is to “transgress its limits”.

Of course, this should not be seen as suggesting that proposed actions should not be evaluated at all; accounting for consequences is obviously regularly required. It is not “justification” to reason that one would be better served by walking a few hundred yards to a bridge than by confidently striding out into the thin air above the ravine. The mechanics of accomplishing a given action are within the “limits” of the mind to consider; it is only evaluating the “rightness” of the ultimate action in and of itself that it outside of the remit of the reason, since a line of “why should I do this?” questions will inevitably terminate with “just because!” Seeking for “justification” from the mind in this way is not just foolish, therefore, but actually nonsensical and impossible.

With regards to AL II, 32, where we finally come to “reason is a lie”, Crowley’s “old comment” states:

This passage only allies to “rational” criticism of the Things Beyond.

whatever the “Things Beyond” might be, but again we can see that there is no intention to use anything other than reason in figuring out what’s actually going on in the world, and no intention to give things like “intuition” or “belief” any role in that process. In the “new comment”, Crowley identifies the “factor infinite and unknown” with the “subconscious Will”, and continues to make his objection to “reason” clear by attributing the “their words” which are “skew-wise” to “the plausible humbug of the newspapers and the churches. Forget it!”

Continuing to investigate the “factor infinite and unknown”, Crowley identifies what he thinks is a problem with reason:

Reason is no more than a set or rules developed by the race; it takes no account of anything beyond sensory impressions and their reactions to various parts of our being. There is no possible escape from the vicious circle that we can register only the behaviour of our own instrument. We conclude from the fact that it behaves at all, that there must be “a factor infinite and unknown” at work upon it. This being the case, we may be sure that our apparatus is inherently incapable of discovering the truth about anything, even in part.

As we have already seen, the very idea of “discovering the truth about anything” outside of the realms of reason is utterly meaningless, since truth is a product of reason, so this is not a “problem” at all. Crowley’s confusion here appears to stem from the typical religious conviction that there must be some “ultimate truth” to which reason is attempting to approximate, but this is nothing but an attempt to impose the structure of the mind onto the universe and to insist that if “truth” exists in the mind then it must exist “out there” too.

However, one always has to remember the context of the times in which Crowley was writing, where the scientific community was just emerging from what he described as “the very-young-man cocksureness of the 19th century”. He continues in that comment:

It is now admitted that axioms themselves depend on definitions, and that Intuitive Certainty is simply one trait of “homo sapiens”, like the ears of the ass or the slime of the slug…Our senses declare some things at rest and others in motion; our reason corrects the error, firstly by denying that anything can exist unless it is in motion, secondly by denying that absolute motion possesses any meaning at all.

the last sentence referring to the theory of relativity. It is not the role of reason in determining “truth” which Crowley criticises, but an unjustified confidence in the extent to which it is capable of doing so, and the limits of this is extent are now seen to be things to which the reason it itself capable of speaking to. In any case, the idea that there is something else other than reason which is capable of “filling in the gaps” appears nowhere in these commentaries; indeed, once again, we are at pains to point out that Crowley described The Book of the Law as exhorting one to make reason the “autocrat” of the mind.

Crowley’s comment on AL II, 33, the final verse in the series, can be summed up with his final sentence:

Thus coordination of our impressions should help us to control them; but to allow reason to rule us is as abject as to expect the exactitude of our ledgers to enable us to dispense with initiative on the one hand and actual transactions on the other.

With this final sentence in the series, Crowley confirms what he said in the very first paragraph in the series; the fundamental message of this series of verses is against reason being allowed to rule what we do, and has nothing to do with allowing reason to understand we what do and the world in which we do it. His accounting analogy makes it clear; just as the exact accounting for business transactions do not remove the need to undertake those transactions in the first place, so an exactly precise representation of the world (if such a thing were possible) would not remove the need of the will to inform the mind in the first place, since the will comes from the self and not the mind.

To conclude, as should be abundantly clear by now from an in-depth analysis of The Book of the Law and Crowley’s commentaries on the subject, the “curse upon Because” in AL II, 28 and the suggestion that “reason is a lie” in AL II, 32 have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with a criticism of reason as a tool for understanding the universe, but with a criticism of reason – and the mind in general – as a substitute for will in the guiding of action. This should not be at all surprising, since it is entirely consistent with core Thelemic doctrine; the fact that “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” and “Do what thou thinkest that thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” are not the same thing should be obvious. Further, we have demonstrated that questions of this nature can usually be easily solved by a reference to Crowley’s works. Much as some might like to think that exhortation in the Comment for people to decide the meaning of the Book “each for himself” gives them infinite flexibility in interpretation, what we actually see is that the important qualifier “only by appeal to my writings” actually takes that flexibility away, leaving what they’re actually talking about something wholly unrelated to Thelema.