Question on Liber L
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@Sphynx said
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@ThatNarrowFellow said
"Why is there so much emphasis on violence and conquest in this utopian society of yours?"Why is there so much emphasis on violence and conquest in Liber AL?"
93,
I expect because it was written during the Victorian era, and during a time when Christianity and turn the other cheek were far more ubiquitous than they are today.
We should not follow the Christians' error of refusing to recognize that our holy book was written in a specific time and place. It seems like some people would like to say, "Everyone's got their own individual true Will, but it has to be violent and orgiastic." This is a mistake.
Love=Law
- C
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Hi Froclown,
You are concerned with people who don't fit in and have no place. You think a caste system will eliminate that. I get that. It is a noble reason.
But freedom means freedom to fail, Froclown.
A caste system might be OK if it was implemented without the injustice of powerful people managing to keep their power by putting others in the wrong caste. Also, powerful people keep their own families in the best possible castes.
Ideas are great. Implementing ideas sometimes results in living nightmare situations. Look at the War on Poverty creating a welfare underclass that spanned generations.
Never know how things turn out.
Glad you gave me perspective on your desire to have us all embrace a Gor life.
In L.V.X.,
chrys333 -
"Let this formula be accepted by every government. Experts will immediately be appointed to work out, when need arises, the details of the True Will of every individual, and even that of every corporate body whether social or commercial, while a judiciary will arise to determine the equity in the case of apparently conflicting claims. (Such cases will become progressively more rare as adjustment is attained.) All appeal to precedent and authority, the deadwood of the Tree of Life, will be abolished, and strictly scientific standards will be the sole measure by which the executive power shall order the people. The absolute rule of the state shall be a function of the absolute liberty of each individual will."
If this does not imply a caste system, designed by scientific method, I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.
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Froclown 93,
A caste system, whether it is the classic Hindu arrangement or a somewhat less restrictive European class system, is not based remotely on scientific principles. It is based on an extreme form of precedent and authority.
"Your father worked on a farm with his hands - thus, you are unable to appreciate the finer things of art, and life, and spirituality, which are henceforth denied you," is not a scientific statement.
Perhaps you're taking Liber L II 57-58 : "He that is righteous shall be righteous still; he that is filthy shall be filthy still.....the kings of the earth shall be Kings forever," in this passage's narrowest sense. The total passage, though, clearly implies a spiritual perception, not a program for a kind of Thelemofascism on the mundane level of social organization. To assume it requires such a soul-crunching societal structure flies in the face of the primary theme of individual evolution outlined in the Book.
93 93/93,
EM
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@Froclown said
""Let this formula be accepted by every government. Experts will immediately be appointed to work out, when need arises, the details of the True Will of every individual, and even that of every corporate body whether social or commercial, while a judiciary will arise to determine the equity in the case of apparently conflicting claims. (Such cases will become progressively more rare as adjustment is attained.) All appeal to precedent and authority, the deadwood of the Tree of Life, will be abolished, and strictly scientific standards will be the sole measure by which the executive power shall order the people. The absolute rule of the state shall be a function of the absolute liberty of each individual will."
If this does not imply a caste system, designed by scientific method, I have no idea what this is supposed to mean."
Then you have no clue what you are talking about.
IAO131
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thelema implies that we all have a unique WILL and that we can not or must not act outside of those limits that are part of our natural being.
Thus we need a social system that recognizes the limits of each individual and does not attempt to push people into roles they are not suited for.
A fish's WILL is to swim in the water this it is classified in the caste of aquatic creatures, thus we know fish swim and can not fly, so we don't pressure fish out of the water, nor attempt to throw them in the air.
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93,
Any social system that forces me to be what it presupposes I am, is about as unThelemic as it could possibly be.
93 93/93,
EM
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So what Edward said, meant what I wished to say, but didn't.
Caste system and Thelema. Doesn't seem logical to me.
chrys333 -
allow me then to quote a few lines and paragraphs from a lesser know essay written by Crowley
Groans from the Padded Cell
(The Minority Report of the Editorial Rooms).... Today all this is absolutely changed. Every important branch of work is so specialized that a man must give his whole life to his particular job for 40 years or more before he is capable of holding his own in it. Such a man must obviously be chosen from the start on the ground of inclination and capacity. He must be allowed ample leisure. He must be secured freedom from all worries and anxiety, or he will never arrive at competence. A university education is not nearly enough. It is only a general ground-work. When a man leaves a university he wants at least 10 years uninterrupted work in his particular line before he even begins to succeed in it. In other words, the complexity of civilization demands an elaborate caste system. For one thing, the habit of authority is absolutely necessary to any one who is to fill a position of responsibility. Put a man who has done mental work all his life into an important position. He inevitably becomes a "Jack in office," harsh, overbearing, and tyrannical. On the other hand, if you take a boy and give him well trained servants, he will, when he becomes a man, get things done with perfect suavity and good feeling and absence of fiction.1 This is why you can take a boy from Eton or Winchester and send him out to rule a province in India. The "Competition-wallah," the boy of no birth or breeding who obtains a position in the Indian Civil Service by intellectual merit, is a disastrous failure.
There must, however, be an end to all this talk of equality of opportunity. It will always be necessary to have a great majority of the population engaged in mechanical tasks. It is evidently quite impossible to give every man and woman even a university education. Most people have to earn their living by the time they are sixteen. Even if this experiment were possible, it would be absurd, because the university education would unfit the average individual for the necessary work of life. It is no good to teach a man political economy and Greek, and then set him to make rivets in a boiler factory for the rest of his life. ........ Now undoubtedly much mischief is wrought by having a caste which is hereditary and nothing more, because the said degenerates and imbeciles interfere with the working of the social machine. Our business is to get the right man in the right place; and the hard and fast rule of primogeniture has in many cases worked badly. One may concede that ultimately it is bound to work badly is all cases. ....
... What then is the ideal form of government? The greatest of all the political lessons of history is that society is founded on the family, and the family on the land. A strong agrarian class is the best defense against invasion, physical or moral. "A bold peasantry, its country's pride, when once destroyed, can never be supplied." There is something in the contact with earth and air and water and sun which makes men vigorous. All strong and stable states have had Cincinnatus for a unit. The power of England has always lain in the landed nobility and gentry. Each great estate has been the nucleus of a peasantry with "soul" -- with a peculiar pride in itself. The lords of the land, great or little, were also the fathers of the people. Each took a particular and individual interest in each of his tenants....
... And it is the soul which determines the action of a true man. A nation swayed wholly by economic considerations is a nation lost alike to God and to man. "Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, When wealth accumulates and men decay."
The first business of government is to guard the hardihood of the race. So we must see to it that every child is healthy and well-fed, inured to sport, to hardship within certain bounds. The spirit must be free, the passions strong and well regulated, the intellect unhampered by old wives' fables. We must assure to every one the first necessaries of life, shelter, food, warmth, and the easy exercise of the power of reproduction, without shame or sentimentality.
We must make a firm, almost a paternal bond, between the "lord" and his dependents. If an employer were soundly whipped whenever one of his men or women had a preventable sickness, it would change things considerably! The happiest, the most healthy, the most prosperous class in recent history were the slaves in the South before the Civil War, wherever the owner was a decent Southern Gentleman, and not a Yankee nigger-driver with no interest in the slaves beyond dollars. If America is to survive, nay, to become a nation, it must be by the development of an enlightened feudalism....Let me repeat that last line, it must be by the development of an enlightened
feudalism"Look up the whole essay and compare this with the Feudal system that is the basis of Gorean city structure, and you see where I am coming from.
Also contrast These very clear views, with the this modern liberal misrepresentation of Thelema. -
Froclown, 93,
I think you misunderstand what Crowley meant by an *enlightened *feudalism. Also, a 'strong agrarian class' might have prevailed in his day, but no modern society has one.
But finally, while I respect Crowley for having tried to describe a society in which we all would prosper, I have never been convinced by his sociological and political theories. I think he is often at his weakest in these areas - certainly he is much less incisive in them than he is on mystical topics.
I'll stick with my 'liberal' ideas.
Over and out on this one,
93 93/93,
EM
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@Froclown said
"...because their is no attempt whatsoever to discern in general what classes of WILL expression are common and create social roles that approximate these classes of WILL. Nor is their a panel of experts that analyze the character of each individual to aid them in the discipline and self-awareness necessary to discern where one fits in that system of orbits.
...Thus a caste system is preparing possible orbital shells, such that those with a Will to fill them will have some where to express that WILL. I see no harm in that, and much good. Better than our system that has no scientific means to plan society in harmony with the individuals that occur their.
Experts will immediately be appointed to work out, when need arises, the details of the True Will of every individual, ... strictly scientific standards will be the sole measure by which the executive power shall order the people. "
Yet, you yourself acknowledged in another thread that:
@Froclown said"Scientific illuminism teaches that the rational mind alone is not able to grasp ones TRUE WILL"
I responded by further noting that the rational mind alone is not able to grasp the true will of a particular society either. I would have thought it also goes without saying that one individual is not able to grasp ANOTHER individual's true will, whether "strictly scientific standards" are used or not. This being the case, I cannot believe any panel of experts would have any actual authority to determine where I belong based on their assessment of my true will: because such an assessment can only be made by ONE person, me.
@Froclown said
"Thus we need a social system that recognizes the limits of each individual and does not attempt to push people into roles they are not suited for. "
I have a radical proclamation: such a system is already in place! And even better, it hasn't been designed by humans. It's called existence. It is necessarily a "social system" since existence is characterized by relationships, and it completely recognizes the limits of each individual, and it never attempts to push people into roles they are not suited for. Note your fish example as a perfect illustration of this.
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@Sphynx said
"Why is there so much emphasis on violence and conquest in Liber AL?"
@ThatNarrowFellow said
"I expect because it was written during the Victorian era ..."
Oh? Check out today's news (Iraq, Afgan, Assorted African Nations, Korea, etc, etc) - Not much has changed. No agreement - human nature was and is aggressive and it turns violent whenever it thinks it can get away with it.
@ThatNarrowFellow said
"It seems like some people would like to say, "Everyone's got their own individual true Will, but it has to be violent and orgiastic." This is a mistake. "
Agreement on this. There are obviously people whose "Will" is pacific and gentle. Even if human nature (like most animals) tends to be violent, it is often best to avoid such nonsense (if possible). -
let me refine what I meant
The rational mind unaided by objective records of ones expressed behaviors and the results of those behaviors, is not sufficient to discern what its own best interest might be, let alone what actions are in it's won best interest. One does no innately know thyself, one must mavke a study of onself on scientfic means, which includes calling upon unbiased third parites to help interpret data in a bind so better a double blind assesment sf the data.
The True WILL can then realized once all of the bits of datum, are incorperated and assemelated holistically by the unconscious transrational faculty, ie a samadhi and satori upon the conscious data, which unites and infuses that unbiased information into the personal identity and personality.
To put this another way, one creates knowledge of and enters into communication with the holy gaurdian angel. That being ones most objective self that generally only reveals inself with subjective ego bias and distoritions of the conscious mind, cleared of these distortions by objective accounting of ones behavior.
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I'd like to comment briefly on something as it harkens back to something I said way earlier in this thread. Froclown wrote that a fish's true will is to swim. Now if this if his interpretation of True Will, then I can understand why he writes what he writes. But, a fish's True Will is not to swim. You have taken out that one must discover their True Will. I doubt fish can do this. Let alone have a C & K of the HGA to guide or enlighten them to their True Will. So it seems this process was taken out of Froclown's writings, as if True Will was already conscious for everyone. Froclown also leaves out people who think they know their True Will but do not. These later two actions would account for most of the decisions in Froclown's writings, and I'm sure, the world of Gor as well.
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I think I covered that.
Fish don't have a conscious rational mind that works on symbols and language, so a Fish is always in knowledge and conversation, in fact a fish does not need conversation at all its angel (in this case elemental) manifests directly in the fishes actions,
anyway, the discovery of the True WILL, is the discovery that everything you think, feel, and intuit is askew, the True Will is Pure behaviorism, the self stripped of all cognition and the notion of an active agent, It it the body voided of the conscious mind. The conscious mind does not make discisions, because really the HGA has Willed the sort of conscious thoughts, the logic it will accept and reject, and the whole general personality
A fish simply is driven by its elemental spirit
A human can how -
Also fish live in nature, we live in constructed social systems, that attempt to protect us from elements of the wilderness, but often the society can frustrate our goals and instincts in the precess.
Thus the idea is to create a society that allows the free expression of ones natural WILL, while at the same time facilitating our needs. Thus the role of the social system is to put the right man in the right place, and to assure that each man is specialized and content in the roll society has devised for him, in that way he can contribute his whole being in the field of his expertise and feel a sense of personal satisfaction following his own WILL, without having to take into account other people. Yet due to expert social planning the Brute WILLS all fit together in such a way as to produce net gain in communal well being,
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I usually side with what Crowley wrote, but to me this is such bunch of nonsense.
"It is no good to teach a man political economy and Greek, and then set him to make rivets in a boiler factory for the rest of his life. ....
"Not even Crowley can say what's good for a man that has knowledge of Greek and political economy. If he decides to go work in a factory, so be it. You don't put what is good for society before what is good for the individual. That's what is wrong with this essay. It is written with the wrong insight.
" The happiest, the most healthy, the most prosperous class in recent history were the slaves in the South before the Civil War, wherever the owner was a decent Southern Gentleman, and not a Yankee nigger-driver with no interest in the slaves beyond dollars. "
This is one example of Crowley at its lowest.
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Its only considered low by you, because your brainwashed with capitalist liberal-democracy ideals.
That sentence is not low at all, it expresses exactly how, prosperity is not a function of absolute rugged individualism shunning all social influences, the ideal human condition is not to strive for personal wealth and thus alienation of oneself to a high throne.
Rather it shows that having a role to play in a higher order, in the community, a goal beyond oneself, where ones unique WILL is fulfilled in that higher ends, that is what determines success, for most individuals.
The Slave with a master who takes an interest in how not only in pumping out product for dollars, but has in fact is concerned that he is doing a service to the world, by producing the best product he can, having a clean safe farm, and slaves that are happy and healthy, to contribute to that over all situation. The slaves taken care of by such a master are of course subject to discipline, but they would also be granted a lively hood far beyond their means, if freed and forced into share cropping. They were also protected from the unhampered racism of to day due to their status as being the property of a well known master. Same one could just go up an shoot a rogue negro in those days and never face a trial, but if you shoot a man's slave, you will have to pay property damages.
Where as the as Crowley put it Yankee-nigger driver, had no concern for the slaves themselves and basically ran industrialized farming systems, that abuse the nature of the slaves, did not care if they were happy, did not care to run beautiful respectful plantations, they run factories that chewed up slaves and spit them out. Just like the early industries did to orphans and any one else forces to work for them, under the whip of the time clock and the constant danger of being crushed or burned, for a nickle a day. These people were free, in the sense they can just not go to work and not get paid, but they are more oppressed by far than the feudal serf or the southern slave.
The point is here that we mush take into account more factors than material wealth when we discern the WILL of the individual and the corrective good of society.
And this is were Midevil feudalism is far superior to modern Capitalism and Socialism is ever worse. -
@Froclown said
"Its only considered low by you, because your brainwashed with capitalist liberal-democracy ideals. "
Anyway, you are not addressing my point. You don't need a master before or after discovering your True Will.
Having a master before you discover your True Will, would make it very difficult (almost impossible) since you live for your master. (You can't do your spiritual retreat to perform the Abramelin Operation just to give an example)
Having a master after discovering your True Will makes no sense, since you live to serve your HGA and to do YOUR True Will, not your masters will.
(Unless your master is your guru and you have discovered that you need to serve your guru as part of your True Will)The whole essay is flawed from a thelemic point of view.
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"Oh? Check out today's news (Iraq, Afgan, Assorted African Nations, Korea, etc, etc) - Not much has changed. No agreement - human nature was and is aggressive and it turns violent whenever it thinks it can get away with it. "
93 Sphynx,
I think you've misunderstood my point. I'm not saying that human nature does not include violence (although I'm not sure it does to the point you suggest); I'm saying that at the time The Book of the Law was written society was much more restrictive in regards both to the nature of sexuality and the healthy expression of aggression. The effect of writing extensively on sexual license and violence would have been sharper on the average 19th century Londoner than it is on the 21st century New Yorker. Honestly, compared to today's HBO programming TBOTL is pretty tame.
My point in bringing it up is not to argue that Thelema is some kind of pacifist, hippie philosophy, but rather to offer an objection to Froclown's model. My objection is not the caste system, per se, but the implication that everyone should be solving their differences by beating the snot out of each other. It makes no sense for us to expect Stephen Hawking to defend his position as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics every year through mortal combat.
I think Froclown has rendered my objection null by quoting that bit from Crowley in which mention is made of arbitration committees or some such.
Hope this clears up my position.
Love=Law
- C