Death and Thelema
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@Edward Mason said
"93,
Crowley explicitly repudiated the idea of identification with the Dying God in this Aeon. Yet there is still a requirement for death in one form or another throughout the system. "Die daily" says the Heart of the Master in its section on the Death card, and there is a necessary for the mundane ego to 'die' to allow the HGA in. Crossing the Abyss would be an even more profoundly death-like process.
"It is very interesting to read this post. Yesterday, there was a bug flying around my apartment. I usually catch them and throw them out by opening the window, but this one in particular was acting strangely. It was somewhat lethargic and avoiding my various attempts to put it on a piece of paper. I understood it wanted to be left alone, so I decided to stop and respect this sentient being. It was not a threat to me, so I forgot about it for a while. I sensed something was going on.
When I came back that afternoon, it was dead on the same place I left it, with rigor-mortis and everything.
I can say that this bug taught me a lesson. It accepted its death. It waited for it to happen... quietly and completely alone with only some sun rays coming from the window lying on my apartment floor, right where I do my LBRPs. I understood how Death is like True Love. You just have to surrender to it, and how this Love is intimate, all consuming, absolutely personal and at the same time, universal. -
Death, Fear for many, why?
The first revelation I had was of the cycle and web of life and death.
All that lives so shall die, yet from death does new life rise.
As upon the forest floor, the forest rises from the decay of itself. Just as the Earth feeds upon itself to birth anew.
Then of course is the corn god traditions, such as Osiris which continue this pristine wisdom.
Ouroboros.
Each night we sleep, and in sleep we touch upon the lands of death, for it is that subconscious realm, abode of Somnus, twin of Death - which is why so often people see spirits and such in dreams, the subconscious is the crossroads.
To fear death, is to fear life itself, so love and yearn for death so ye may truly live.
In Love and Night
Rev.D
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But what of that which neither lives nor dies.
If you fear death, it is because you identify with a transient form, it is because you do not understand the nature of life.
Just as in your body trillions of cells are born and die all the time, and yet the body take no heed of this. So likewise do trillions of being live and die but the cosmos takes no note of it.
A living being is just one sort of structure, it's a complex structure but only a structure. And just as there is nothing "special" about two stones that happen to rest touching compared to two stones that rest far apart, there is likewise nothing special about lifeforms.
From clay we can make statues, pots, plates, any number of forms, yet no matter what form we shape it, the clay is still clay, life is the same way.
To fear death is no different than to fear that a clay pot might break. However, no matter how rough you treat the pot, the clay remains at it ever was.
Thus, in a sense, the clay was never a pot and thus it never stopped being a pot, it is, was and shall be clay.
Well, a human being is nothing but atoms, a swirl of cosmic dust, thus, we are never born and we never die, all that happen is the cosmic dust swirls into a pattern and then that pattern runs it's course and new patterns form.
Does this mean that "I" will be reborn as a new person or a new body, IT does not. It means that "I" do not exist, never did and never WILL, but that which makes me up, the cosmic dust that constitutes my temporary swirl of life, is, was and shall always be forever.
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It sounds like this is an athiestic view, is it not? It sounds that you believe humans are nothing more than the physical matter that makes them and we will just return to cosmic dust? Is this correct? All religions and mystery schools (to my knowledge) require a believe in "God" and that the soul lives on past the body. The body is a vehicle for the immortal soul. We can disagree on what God is and where or how the soul exists afterward, but without these beliefs, it makes one an athiest, no? Please correct me if I am misunderstanding.
I can see relating the human body to the clay pot, but not the soul.
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@DavidH said
"All religions and mystery schools (to my knowledge) require a believe in "God" ..."
That would be 'No', at least as far as the "Mystery Schools" aspect of it.
Dan
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Why can it not be that the material universe is GOD.
We all arise from and return to the material universe, it is the limits of the material universe that represent the "order of the cosmos", which includes that the material constitution of each individual thing is unique and yet each thing is in relation to all things as a whole, (TRUE WILL).
Also, it is an illusion that one's is a discrete and separate entity from all other things, because there is no definite line between oneself and one's surroundings. We take in food, water and air that becomes out body and we excrete matter as parts of our body die off.
Thus, mystical union, or enlightenment is a result of transcending ego, which is to say to realize the higher lever of order in which one's mind and body are casually interwoven with the fabric of all space-time events.
And with the discoveries of quantum mechanics, physicalism (materialism) can not be discarded on grounds that it is too mechanical or denies agents any degree of free action.
I would say on a deeper level of awareness, certainly above the abyss, where there is no concern that this particular being came to be or ceased to be.
If you think of yourself as a wave in the ocean. The water than makes up a wave is not the same form moment to moment, yet the wave goes on. However the depth of the ocean, from which all the water than makes up the waves originates, is unaffected and unconcerned with waves on the surface. no matter how turbulent the sea gets, the water remains water and in it's depth is unmoved.
Thus is all reality (beings) are nothing but ripples in the surface of Kether. And that part of yourself which is Kether is unaffected by life and death. however you as a particular wave run a course and that is the end of you, but Kether is still there and still ripples, and the way it ripples is effected by your wake. (karma).
Thus, your Karma is re-incarnated in that the effects of your actions effect things in the future forever, in a sense a there is a little bit of you in everything to come.
If you relocate your center bellow the waves, then you escape karma. What happens to the body is dissociated from what happens to YOU, who are all things, and thus unaffected by particular events.
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@ar said
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@DavidH said
"All religions and mystery schools (to my knowledge) require a believe in "God" ..."That would be 'No', at least as far as the "Mystery Schools" aspect of it.
Dan"
93 Dan,
I'm sure you must be correct, but I can't think of an example. Can you supply one?
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I'm curious about this, also. I can't think of an exception off hand.
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@Froclown said
"Why can it not be that the material universe is GOD.
"
93!
Good comments and lots to think about. However, if you read any of the primary sources of Western Mystery Schools, including the Kabbalah, you will see the material world is just ONE aspect and there are much higher aspects. On the tree of life only the final Sephiroth in the 4th world is the "material world." It is the lowest and actually in small proportion to the rest of the tree. It is the one we are in at this moment but it is not the only world, and thus itself can't be GOD. It may be contained in God, and God can dwell there, but ithe material is just one small part and thus can't be the WHOLE (God) as you are saying. However, your writing brings up many interesting points and observations. I am no means an expert, so I am open to correction if I'm in error.
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yes, but western occultism originated in the 1500 and we have refined our understanding of more or less everything since then.
malkuth is not so much a representative of the material universe as such, but of direct sensory perception. It is sensation without cognition of what is sensed. Yesod is the bank of what plato would have called forms, it is ideas and concepts, which sensory perceptions invoke into awareness.
Tiphereth is the awareness itself, the conscious mind, and Kether is the unconscious mind, it is more than this it is the source of all things that we may potentially be aware of. beyond Kether in the ayn soph is the actual material universe all things that are, that which we can be aware and that which we are incapable of being aware.
Thus Malkuth is immediate sensation (those aspects of the material universe that happen to be bumping up against us) and Kether is all possible phenomena, that which may bump up against us.
Tiphereth is the mind, awareness itself. not that of which one is aware but the knower inside the shell of the known.
Anyway all we are aware of is our inner world, which includes the whole tree of life, but the material universe it bigger than us, it contains out entire universe of awareness, it is Nuit.
Out of Nuit precipitates Kether which is the sum of one's entire subjective universe reduced to a single point (hadit).
Thus Hadit is the microcosm and Nuit is the macrocosm.
Or in Kantian language Nuit is nuemena and Hadit is phenomena
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@Froclown said
"yes, but western occultism originated in the 1500 and we have refined our understanding of more or less everything since then.
malkuth is not so much a representative of the material universe as such, but of direct sensory perception. It is sensation without cognition of what is sensed. Yesod is the bank of what plato would have called forms, it is ideas and concepts, which sensory perceptions invoke into awareness."
There is a very common Qabalistic interpretation that Assiah doesn't exist as such - that the field of physical sensation is only a registration of impressions, and the apparency of the element Earth is a consequence of the interaction of the other three Elements.
I'm saying this is the only p.o.v., only that this is one of the two equally common interprtations of the same observations.
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well certain schools of materialism, marxism, for example would say that it is spirit which is an illusion and all elements are actually made up of earth.
But this is nothing new, the oldest philosophers each in his turn tried to show that his favorite element was the one true element. Thales with is water, Anaxamander with fire, Anaxamendes with air, etc. The Hereclitis who had was back to fire against but a new conception of fire.
In any effect. My point is that all of these are just interchangeable symbols in our minds, that our minds are nothing more than the information contained in our brains and thus reduce to the same substance as our brains.
Which is to say that substance(s) of which our brains is formed is the source of all perception and thus of all we know to exist.
That everything we see is a symbolic representation at best of some true substance which we can not have un-mediated awareness.
Thus, materialism is the appropriate stance to take, since by definition what is in the mind is ideal and what the mind is made out of is material. Thus, since ideas are made up of material, rather than material being a result of ideas, it is only logical that we assume that material is the source of all impressions.
If we take idealism, then we assume that the software creates the computer itself, which is clearly not the case. Thoughts do not produce my brains, by brains produces thought. Since all I see and hear is also a thought produced by my brain in some respect. It must be that my brains is a material entity in a world of other material entities, and thoughts are incidental to the sort of material entity that is my brain.
And thus this material world of which all my thoughts originate seem to match up with what we know of "GOD", or at least of the eastern concepts of Tao and Brahma, and is clear match for what Crowley calls NUIT.
This is most clear in the comments on Liber AL, where Crowley states Nuit is matter and Hadit is Movement. Noun and Verb.
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@DavidH said
"Good comments and lots to think about. However, if you read any of the primary sources of Western Mystery Schools, including the Kabbalah, you will see the material world is just ONE aspect and there are much higher aspects. On the tree of life only the final Sephiroth in the 4th world is the "material world." It is the lowest and actually in small proportion to the rest of the tree. It is the one we are in at this moment but it is not the only world, and thus itself can't be GOD. It may be contained in God, and God can dwell there, but ithe material is just one small part and thus can't be the WHOLE (God) as you are saying. "
The Kabbalah is based on a mythos which assumes that the universe had a beginning. While there is observational evidence that the Big Bang did occur as theorized, one should keep in mind that a century ago we thought all of the stars were contained in our own galaxy. Understanding the human existence is a matter of perspective - and civilization's perspective is evolving all the time. I think that atheism/pantheism and theism just provide different perspectives (and different jargon) of the same mountain of truth. Is your God my collective unconsciousness?
On the subject of metaphorical death (which is what this thread is supposed to be about), I see it also as a transitional thing, or more precisely as a transformational thing. If you add wheels to a crate anyone seeing it from that point on sees only a wagon, not a crate. It isn't a crate anymore- its life as a crate has come to an end, despite it never being physically destroyed.
The Universe is Change: every Change is the effect of an Act of Love: all Acts of Love contain Pure Joy. Die daily! - Heart of the Master Ch II.
Love is the union of the wheels to the crate.
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@Froclown said
"yes, but western occultism originated in the 1500 and we have refined our understanding of more or less everything since then.
"
I would not say that Western Occultism orginated in the 1500's. Maybe it came more out in the open at that point because of the reformation and break of power against the Church, but the Western Mysteries are derived from many sources that existed much earlier. The Kabbalah, the Old testament, Egyptian mysteries, Gnosticism, etc.
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@jw said
"The Kabbalah is based on a mythos which assumes that the universe had a beginning. "
Yes, this is correct once you get to Kether, but not before. If the big bang (kether) was the creation of the universe then it came out of nothing (beyond the veils). Before the manifestiation of Kether, time would not exist, thus "God" always was and always will be.
The universe has to have a beginning because the only thing without a beginning is NOTHING (beyond the veils of kether into negative existence). Manifestation is the bringing into time, which implies a beginning.
Jim, am I on the right track with this Kabbalistically speaking?
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@jw said
"The Kabbalah is based on a mythos which assumes that the universe had a beginning. "
Perhaps the Kabbalah, but not the Qabalah.
That is, the rabbinical-driven Hebraic form does rest on that assumption (as does the leading edge of contemporary science).
OTOH the Hermetic strain, including Crowley's elegant 0=2 formula, doesn't necessarily presume that - it allows for either p.o.v.
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@DavidH said
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@jw said
"The Kabbalah is based on a mythos which assumes that the universe had a beginning. "
The universe has to have a beginning because the only thing without a beginning is NOTHING (beyond the veils of kether into negative existence)."Looking away from the Kabbalah for a moment, perhaps you would entertain the idea that the universe always existed and we either don't see the big picture (i.e. a part of the universe beyond quasars our telescopes have yet to detect) or our known universe is part of a recurring cycle of Big-Bang and Big-Crunch.
My point being- If God can be described as "always was and always will be" then why can't the Universe instead be described as "always was and always will be", and just leave God out of the equation? Is the Universe really not impressive enough?
I'm not disrespecting the Kabbalah or your belief in it. As a cosmological theory I find Kabbalah very interesting, but I find its principles to be much more useful as metaphors for personal development.
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93!
Well, since I don't KNOW the answer, I'd say your idea is just as good as mine. Mine just happens to serve me better at this point in time.
