Wilhelm Reich (anti-mytsic)
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have been studying works of Wilhelm Reich (anti-mystic). He saw the impulse towards mysticism as a symptom of "dammed energy" i.e. "neuroses". The irony is he riles against the average man who he claims "fears height and depth" which sounds awfully mystical. Clearly Reich saw modern man or civilised man in general as having lost touch with his poetic depths i.e. religious experience but i am wondering if Reich would've frowned upon some Thelemic preoccupations as "mystical".
the irony is that Reich's "orgone" in it's description is of course identical to chi/baraka/prana and is similarly "centred" in teh 7 body zones correlating to the glands/chakras so i think Reich was more of a mystic than he realised. What do you think?
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@gerry456 said
"have been studying works of Wilhelm Reich (anti-mystic). He saw the impulse towards mysticism as a symptom of "dammed energy" i.e. "neuroses". The irony is he riles against the average man who he claims "fears height and depth" which sounds awfully mystical. Clearly Reich saw modern man or civilised man in general as having lost touch with his poetic depths i.e. religious experience but i am wondering if Reich would've frowned upon some Thelemic preoccupations as "mystical".
the irony is that Reich's "orgone" in it's description is of course identical to chi/baraka/prana and is similarly "centred" in teh 7 body zones correlating to the glands/chakras so i think Reich was more of a mystic than he realised. What do you think?"
93 gerry456,
Mysticism was seen stereotypically as shutting oneself up in a cave or hermitage for long periods - Nietzsche also talks about how this is a formula for weakness in many... but he also talksa bout how asceticism is a sublimated will-to-power in one of the highest forms (along with artists & philosophers, of course!)
The difference with Thelema is that our hermits arent away, retreating from the world in some desert, cave, mountain, or hermitage... "...there are also of my friends who be hermits. Now think not to find them in the forest or on the mountain; but in beds of purple, caressed by magnificent beasts of women with large limbs, and fire and light in their eyes, and masses of flaming hair about them; there shall ye find them. Ye shall see them at rule, at victorious armies, at all the joy; and there shall be in them a joy a million times greater than this. " -Liber AL II:24
65 & 210,
IAO131 -
93,
Don't forget that Israel Regardie used Reichian ideas in his psychoanalytic practice. From what I've read, he was more influenced by Reich than by either Freud or Jung.
Reich probably encountered the sort of theosophists Crowley disparaged, with vague and speculative ideas that bore little relationship to the lives they were actually leading.
93 93/93,
EM