In the previous entry – which should be read prior to this one – we saw how one of the most fundamental mistakes that the occultist makes is to believe himself to have discovered some truth, where in fact he has only discovered an amusing word game. Having dispensed with the word games, we will now turn to the second error that the original correspondent referred to in that entry made: believing in “mythtical truth” (no, it’s not a typo).

The second error is only visible indirectly in the original correspondence, and to reveal it we must repeat one of our conclusions from previous entry, that “there is one thing” is not a factual statement. This conclusion appears innocuous enough, until we reflect that it pulls the rug out from under the feet of mysticism, and denies flat out the truth of the single factual statement that anybody is even able to claim results from mystical practice: the realisation that “all is one”.

Magical practice, mysticism, and essentially all religions (in their esoteric interpretations, at least) all claim that “union with God” is the ultimate objective and the only “reality”, whether by that term or by “union with the all”, just “union”, or any one of a number of similar sounding statements. Visit just about any occult forum anywhere on the internet and you will see posts infested with this idea.

Let us be very clear exactly what is at issue, here. It should be beyond doubt that it is perfectly possible to get into “mystical states” where everything feels like “it is one”, and anybody with even the smallest amount of mystical experience will be able to attest to this. What is at issue here is the assertion that everything actually is one, that the “dualism” of conscious existence is actually an illusion, and, correspondingly, that mysticism and other occult practices are capable of bringing one to an understanding of the “real reality” of which conscious day-to-day existence is merely a poor reflection. In other words, the question at issue is whether or not there is even such a thing as “mystical truth”.

To begin with, we need to remember our discussion on word games in the previous post, and give some thought to what we actually do mean by “mystical truth”, since if its meaning is not clear, then we cannot sensibly question it. We will define “truth” in this way as being “the true or actual state of a matter; conformity with fact or reality; a verified or indisputable fact, proposition, principle, or the like”. Note very clearly that in order for something to qualify as “truth”, it must be verifiable. In the previous entry we referred to a post (looking increasingly ill-informed) by Ian Rons, in which he made a second glaring error: Read the rest of this post »

Every couple of weeks or so, I get an email from somebody claiming to have discovered some fundamental and important truth or another, particularly if it disagrees with something that I have written here. These “truths” usually fall into one of two categories. The first type comes under the heading of “gibberish”. Not just a silly idea, but actual, honest-to-goodness, incomprehensible gibberish. The second type comes in the form of some kind of simplistic philosophical platitude, which, if “Occult 101” was an actual class, would be taught in the first week, but these are stated with a revelatory air as if the correspondent is the first person in the universe to have ever had such an idea.

This week, I received on of the second type. It was in response to the Let there be no difference made entry, and I quote:

Explanation:
There is only one thing (ararita)
Every single part of this one thing is inherently the entire thing.
Done.

(Not surprisingly, the email actually began with the words “I did not read your entire story about this bit…Well, actually i only read the start”, which is never a promising explanation for someone claiming to be offering a better explanation of what was written.)

There are a couple of fundamental errors which are revealed by this “explanation” and which warrant elucidation. Each of these errors will be dealt with in a separate entry.

My initial response to the individual went along these lines: the explanation, as given is inherently contradictory. The statement “there is only one thing” cannot peacefully co-exist alongside the second statement, “every single part of this one thing”, because each of those parts is a thing in itself, and if each part were not a thing in itself, then there would be no parts. This elicited the response:

Being one thing does not at all preclude there being different parts of this one thing.

(As an aside, we can instantly notice the not-so-subtle change in argument from “there is only one thing” to “being one thing”. After all, it’s much easier to demonstrate that one can be one thing than to demonstrate that there only is one thing, so why not simply pretend that was the argument from the beginning and save some trouble?)

The error in question is an extremely common one, particularly among occultists, and I will state it here simply before examining it in more detail: all too often, people believe themselves to have discovered some kind of fundamental “truth”, whereas what they’ve actually discovered is an amusing word game. Read the rest of this post »

John Crow has just posted an interesting new entry on his blog, to which I responded with the following comment to one of his points, reproduced here for reference.

John Crow wrote:
Empiricism? As Crowley points out, our senses are very limited and in many cases, we only know of phenomenon by the results or if we create some mechanism to translate an unobservable phenomenon into an observable one, such as a Geiger counter converts unobservable radiation into an observable meter or gauge measurement. How do we know what we know, and how do we know our knowledge to be true? … We are still stuck with an epistemological difficulty. This is one of the reasons to retain magick in the modern world

In Richard Dawkins’ best-selling 374-page statement of the bleeding obvious, The God Delusion, he criticises what he calls the “worship of gaps”, here with specific reference to biological evolution:

Searching for particular examples of irreducible complexity is a fundamentally unscientific way to proceed: a special case of arguing from present ignorance… Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. What worries thoughtful theologians such as Bonhoeffer is that gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide.

I see a similar phenomenon happening with this “epistemological difficulty” that you mention in the occult community. Some occultists love the ideas that “nothing can be absolutely proven”, “all experience is ultimately subjective” and “there is no such thing as ‘truth'” because it gives them space in which their beliefs in supernatural entities and processes can be claimed to reside. Thelemites in particular seem rather prone to this because – with a generous and creative disregard for context – AL II, 27-29 can be quoted in support of such an approach.

Furthermore, just as with Dawkins’ creationists, there appears to be a common but unspoken assumption that if science is unable to address these epistemological difficulties, if it is unable to close these gaps, then there must exist an alternative approach capable of doing so, which is assumed by default to be occultism. Read the rest of this post »

So, Ian Rons has temporary moderating duties over at LAShTAL.com while the proprietor is on holiday, and true to form, within a day is back to the antics that made everyone glad to see the back of him in the first place. Now, it makes no difference to me where I get banned from, you understand, but Ian – still smarting from the last time he embarrassed himself trying to argue against me in the Go-Go-Godel thread there and unsuccessfully trying to draw me into agreeing to define my terms in the only way that would enable him to have the argument that he wanted and could win rather than the argument he was actually having and could not – likes to present his case and then immediately ban people to prevent them from cutting down his weak straw-man arguments and foolish, distractionary nonsense. On a happier note, he can’t moderate this blog, so we’ll continue the discussion here, whether he likes it or not.

The original post of mine sparking this slow-witted troll to impudence dealt with elementary arithmetic, but both Ronnie and another poster managed – in their never-ending but ultimately futile bid to get the better of me in an argument – to turn it into a discussion of “Chokmah days”. The other poster remarked as follows, with regards to the idea that 73 day periods, or “Chokmah days”, denote more-or-less significant life events:

the only way to test this would be to observe the events of your own life with reference to the suggested pattern

to which I naturally replied:

the fact that one may be able to identify significant events in one’s own life at 73 day intervals does nothing to demonstrate any actual significance in such an interval, so it’s no good pretending that observing the events of one’s own life with reference to the suggested pattern is going to “test” anything other than one’s own susceptibility to suggestion, regardless of what the “results” might be. If you really wanted to “test” such an idea, you’d have to do it with a sample significantly greater than one, and you’d have to use several other intervals as control groups.

which provoked the following hasty and ill-conceived post from Ian:

Just because you can’t think of a mechanism by which certain currents of events could have a period of 73 days, doesn’t give you the right to be so condescending in your remarks. There are plenty of other periodic events in nature, such as larval periods of some animals that happen in prime numbers of years, the yearly cyle of the four seasons, etc. But you always take this attitude whenever you disagree with someone — it’s a poor show, and more than usually narcissistic for the internet.

Just as the original poster inexplicably managed to take a post explaining how 73 * 5 was equal to 365 to be critical of the whole idea of “Chokmah days” just so he could rehash the same old nonsense about “validation through experience” that he normally comes out with, so Ian Rons – still smarting from the last time he lost to me in an argument, much to his obvious bitterness and frustration – manages to confuse a statement about testing the idea that such periods could be significant for one which asserts that they certainly do not. It’s an all too common illustration of the lengths to which petty-minded know-nothings will go to make themselves feel knowledgable. Read the rest of this post »

It is common for the unthinking occultist (and unthinking dullards in general) to champion the place of “experience” over “reason”, or “theory”, in the acquisition of knowledge. As we have said before, this is not merely mistaken; it is an outright category error.

Let us imagine that individual gets into a car accident, and by a stroke of fortune – as occasionally happens – escapes death or serious injury because he was not wearing a seat belt. This kind of experience is likely to be powerful, since it involves an encounter with mortality.

It should be clear to anyone that the individual who says “based on my experience, I know that not wearing a seat belt is safer than wearing a seat belt” is making a significant error. Here is a rough outline of the acquisition of such “knowledge”:

1. I was in a car accident.
2. I was not wearing a seat belt, and I escaped relatively unscathed.
3. According to medical reports, if I had been wearing a seat belt, I would have been killed or seriously injured.
4. Therefore, not wearing a seat belt probably saved my life.
5. Therefore, not wearing a seat belt is safer than wearing a seat belt.

As we have said before, this “knowledge” does not arise from “experience” at all, because experience has no explanatory power. The “knowledge” is acquired by the individual reasoning on the basis of his experience. All knowledge is formed in this way. There is no such thing as “experiential knowledge”, only “rational knowledge”. Note that it is no escape to argue along the lines of “I know this thing here is a cat, but I can’t tell you why I know it’s a cat; I can’t define ‘cat’ very well, for you. Therefore this must be experiential knowledge, and not rational knowledge at all.” We have simply learned, through repetition and association, to attach the label “cat” to things that look (or smell) like that. We have no “direct experiential knowledge” that has somehow informed us what a cat is; we have just mechanically learned to attach such a label to such things.

The mistake in the seat belt reasoning case, of course, is that the individual is basing his reasoning solely upon his own experience, which is singular. The individual who “accepts experiential knowledge and eschews reason” is highly prone to falling into this trap, which is precisely why the person who says “I know God exists because I have experienced his presence” is so roundly mocked by his fellows.

The correct response is to recognise that all knowledge is rational knowledge, and to acknowledge that forming rational conclusions on the basis of isolated personal experiences is foolish. Read the rest of this post »

AL I, 22 contains the following lines:

Since I am Infinite Space, and the Infinite Stars thereof, do ye also thus. Bind nothing! Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & any other thing; for thereby there cometh hurt.

“Bind nothing! Let there be no difference made” is usually interpreted as an instruction towards some form of experiential non-dualism, usually of a distinctly mystical nature, but this type of non-interpretation is unsatisfactory as it really explains nothing. The aspiring Thelemite must learn to avoid – and to be positively suspicious of – flowery mystical claptrap. As we have stated many times in the past, putting Thelema into vague mystical terms serves mainly to distract the aspiring Thelemite into non-action, by phrasing objectives in terms so vague and non-distinct that there is no way to even begin the task. Indeed, in today’s culture of egalitarianism we are not unjustified in describing this as a deliberate ploy; if the stated objectives are so ill-defined that they cannot even be started, let alone completed, then there can be no question of anybody being further ahead than anybody else, there can be no question of anybody failing (since they don’t even begin) and everybody can safely declare themselves to be masters since there is not only no reliable standard against which levels of knowledge can be measured, but in fact no level of knowledge to measure in the first place. Most modern-day “occultists” consider everybody’s opinion to be “just as valid” as anybody else’s, and this is absolutely true when the subject matter in question is reduced to literally nothing at all. Regular readers will be aware that we have no truck with such silliness here.

We can begin by examining the phrase “let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & any other thing”. This appears, at first glance, to be somewhat curious; a quick glance around one’s immediate environment will likely reveal trees, windows, dogs, tables, canker sores, hornets, bread baskets, horse blankets, microwave ovens, lead piping and all manner of other objects which seem quite self-evidently to be different from one another. Are we really to suppose that we should treat pillows and red-hot pokers as being the same?

We can shed some light on this question quite easily, because we don’t have to look too far back to come across another instance where “infinity” and “no difference” are mentioned in the same verse. AL I, 4 contains the following:

Every number is infinite; there is no difference.

A brief consideration of this will reveal that there are two distinct ways of interpreting “no difference”. The first is to assume that “no difference” means equality; we might say that there is “no difference” between 9 and 3 * 3, for instance. In this sense, the word “difference” figures prominently in elementary arithmetic where it is used to describe subtraction; The “difference” between 7 and 5, for instance, is 2.

In this sense, “difference” implies making a comparison, and when that comparison does not result in equality, then there is a difference. In order to do this, the two things being compared must be similar in some way. By remarking that “Every number is infinite”, AL I, 4 reveals the second way of interpreting “no difference”, which occurs when the two (or more) things in question are incommensurable. That is to say, they have no common basis, no common standard of measure, and no standard of comparison, so that they simply cannot be compared, and if they cannot be compared, then no distinction can be drawn and no “difference” can be calculated. Read the rest of this post »

A repost from LAShTAL.com.

“gurugeorge” wrote:

It’s the “inner man” who is aflame with this mystical Love of All, not the body.mind, which follows the laws of physics, and does well to follow the (just) customs of its people, etc.

Agape is mystical love, higher grade love. It’s not making nicey-nice to entities that are evil, that seek the disintegration of the unique form that one represents, or that others, includinng the defenceless, represent. No, at that level, to hell with them if they can’t take a joke!!!

The body.mind is (or should be!) very well-trained to look after its own integrity and the integrity of others, and on its own plane will do whatever it does, and will divide the world into good (for) and evil (for) – from various perspectives that it takes on.

This just isn’t right at all. It is completely unhelpful to make this kind of division between “inner man” and “outer man”, and to give them different rules; it’s just an excuse to avoid dealing with the task at hand by claiming that the “outer man” should just go on doing what it’s been doing while the “inner man” can look after himself, allowing oneself to “attain” without actually doing any work. It’s a device for the “outer man” to hang on to the same old restrictions that he’s supposed to be getting rid of, and justifying it as being “the Thelemic way”. It’s either uninformed and untrue, or disingenuous and untrue. Thelema is not about just reinforcing your regular superstitions. There’s no such thing as “higher grade love”.

First of all, people need to understand that the significance of the word “Agape” is that it sums to 93. It is a mistake to take the meaning of the Greek word and then to suppose that the Thelemic concept must stem from that, because it doesn’t. If “Eros” had summed to 93, Crowley would have picked that instead without the meaning changing one tiny little bit. If we want to understand the significance of “love” to Thelema then we have to look to the Thelemic writings, not to a Greek dictionary.

To understand what Crowley meant by the term “love” (when talking about the Thelemic concept, at any rate) we need to break with convention and look at what the man actually said about it, and all will mysteriously become clear. Read the rest of this post »

The current which has been sustaining the output on this blog, web site and other venues over the last sixteen months or so is exhausted, and as such a period of reduction in activity will now ensue. Updates to the blog and to the rest of this web site will likely continue, but they will be significantly less frequent for a period of time.

The last two or three years has seen something of a mini-resurgence in interest in Thelema. Amongst other manifestations, a number of books from the likes of Gerald Del Campo and Lon Milo Duquette have surfaced, blogs – particularly on LiveJournal – have sprouted up, John Crow produced his “Thelema Coast to Coast” podcast, and the centennial of the “reception” of The Book of the Law passed. A recurrent theme through almost all of this output is a woeful and apparently complete ignorance of the subject matter being discussed. The central concept of Thelema – will – has been completely ignored, presumably because the commentators have nothing to say on the matter. Instead, attention has been paid to vague ramblings about mysticism, laughable notions of “ceremonial magick”, ethical values, and the “strategic goals” of an obscure organisation grounded in Victorian freemasonry and resurrected by ineffectual hippies. Despite frequent exhortations, people have failed to take their own advice to “go back to the Crowley material” and hence have failed to realise what Thelema even is, let alone to develop an ability to say something sensible about it.

The motivation behind the output on this blog in particular was to remedy that. Through essays such as The Ethics of Thelema, The Khabs is in the Khu, True Will, Fundamentals of Thelemic Practice and A Thelemic Primer we have distilled from the writings of Aleister Crowley, and presented in plain language, the essentials of what Thelema actually is, what the “will” is and how it might be apprehended, the nature of the obstacles in its path, and the essence of attainment. Through a variety of other entries, we have illustrated these concepts from many different perspectives. Using the material available on this web site, any serious student should now be able to understand, in a relatively short amount of time, the theory and practice of Thelema and to devise a course of action to begin the task of approaching his will. We have given him the tools to finally throw off any and all of the unfortunate associations Thelema has acquired with romantic mysticism, dubious and juvenile “evocation of spirits”, religious and other supernatural beliefs, blatherings about the “transcendental”, misguided and obscurantist philosophy and occultism, leaving him free to discard all these distractions and to focus finally on the task at hand, that of apprehending and then following his will.

It is useless to continue to beat a dead horse. Therefore the time has come to allow this material to mature and disseminate – as has already begun – and to enter a period of relative silence. Silence is innocence, the absence of restriction. Effort provides the fuel for growth, but silence provides the space to grow into, exactly as a muscle must be rested in order to reap the benefits of exercise, exactly as the aspirant must open up and observe to give his newly acquired knowledge some context. People naturally reject overthrowing their sentimental pet beliefs at the behest of others, but with a little time they lead themselves to think that they are overthrowing them on their own account, once they no longer have anything to react against. The ideas have been embedded into people’s minds where they will grow regardless of the intentions of the thinker, under cover of darkness.

Normal activity will resume in the future, and the foundations presented here will be built upon further. There is no fixed timescale; it may be months or years. In the meantime, the time has come to return to the woods, the mountains, the rivers and the sky. Occasional updates will be made, but regular readers should take the opportunity to concentrate on the material presented to date, to study it, and to absorb it. The author will remain contactable via email.

Into my loneliness comes—
The sound of a flute in dim groves that haunt the uttermost hills.
Even from the brave river they reach to the edge of the wilderness.
And I behold Pan.
The snows are eternal above, above—
And their perfume smokes upward into the nostrils of the stars.
But what have I to do with these?
To me only the distant flute, the abiding vision of Pan.

In the old days, occultists with a high school education and a penchant for misunderstanding and misapplying science would wax lyrical about quantum mechanics. It offered – for those not willing or able to take the time to learn anything about it – an alluring prospect of “probability waves” which gave the occultist the delusion that by bellowing charges to Goetic demons, or concentrating hard on the end of his nose, he could somehow “nudge” those probability waves into making his own pretensions to miraculous magical power just that little bit more likely. What’s more, the Uncertainty Principle enabled the occultist to both believe that the universe possessed intelligence and volition on a sub-atomic level – because particles, on being observed, naturally “decide” to alter their velocities in an unpredictable way to vex and fox their natural enemy, the objective observer – and, conveniently, to believe in all manner of silly nonsense safe in the knowledge that “complete knowledge is impossible” and that his delusions can never be disproved.

Today’s crop of fools have a new tool with which to delude themselves – Godel’s incompleteness theorems. One occultist sorely in need of a clue recently uttered the following in a thread over at LAShTAL.com, after posting no less than eight paragraphs from the Wikipedia article on the subject:

See further on this as you will, [of course! We’d never expect you to be able to actually explain this sort of thing – EH] self-contradiction certainly seems the name of the game, but the bottom line is that Reason may always be, ultimately, governed by the law of bullshit …Reason is always, perhaps, ultimately bullshit.

Those following this blog will recognise this as part of a popular theme, here, that of the credulous occultist who desires – for reasons we will examine again later in this post – to discredit the role of reason insofar as it is applied in criticism of their delusions.

(In fairness, we should mention that the same poster wrote, shortly thereafter, “I do not mean to underestimate the value of Reason … I simply mean to caution against overestimating its value.” Somehow, I don’t think most sane and sensible people would interpret “Reason is always, perhaps, ultimately bullshit” in such a manner.)

The main objective of this post is not a large-scale examination of Godel’s theorems, but we must give them a cursory examination with which to both provide context for the discussion that will follow, and to relieve those capable of rational thought from the popular conclusion which this amateur clown mistakenly presents. Read the rest of this post »

I’ve been conducting a discussion over on another blog (which, incidentally, has predictably ended up with the other party crying foul, claiming that he is “not trying to attain a reasoning state” and “as a student of human psychology” insisting on reading sinister motives into getting comments on one entry he made to a public blog quoting me at length and criticising my position and on a second entry written in response to my comments. There’s just no pleasing some people.) which revolved, in part, around the question of “agnosticism”.

The blogger wrote the following:

[Aleister Crowley] was openly agnostic about such topics as reincarnation, the immortality of the soul or the existence of God (as understood in the Abrahamic faiths, at least), but this faction appears actively antagonistic to such notions, and sometimes antagonistic to those holding them.

We have written in a previous post about the tendency for occultists to glibly spout poorly-understood philosophical platitudes and to get themselves in all kinds of messes as a result of it, and this is a good example. It is very fashionable in these times to claim to be “agnostic” about all manner of things on the grounds that “absolute proof is impossible”. The people who make these claims turn out to be woefully mistaken.

Let’s take the position that we are “agnostic” with regards to the existence of God, for instance, as conceived by the Abrahamic religions. It is certainly true that we cannot absolutely disprove the existence of such a god. However, we are equally unable to disprove Scientology’s saga of General Xenu, and equally unable to disprove the idea that we are the subjects of invisible monkey overlords who planted evidence of evolution in order to gradually encourage acceptance of the idea that monkeys are our forefathers and natural rules. Yet who takes either of these ideas seriously? Technically, the scientific method requires us to be just as “agnostic” with regards to this type of proposition as any other. Read the rest of this post »