Animal Sacrifice.
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@Froclown said
"I see no reason why anything about Thelema should require any Gods or any other non-sense about the divine and supernatiural forces or events. That is all Crowley's waxing poetic, but what he really means, behind all the silly poetic metaphor is pure materialistic, physical science, nothing to do with actual Gods or other mystical hocus pocus. other than as literary devices and ae stand in explanations, when his ere did not yet offer science to his satisfaction."
I tend to see it the physical sciences as being an attempt to rationalize the .00000001% of the universe which can be perceived. Where mysticism is concerned with the other 99.99999999%.
Thelema? Well, that encompases 666% of the universe
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@Froclown said
"Then of course the work of 8=3 that of preparing a temple in hopes that the secret chiefs would find it worthy it dwell within"
FWIW that's a 7=4 level task.
"I see no reason why anything about Thelema should require any Gods or any other non-sense about the divine and supernatiural forces or events."
I see no reason that necessarily the word "gods" be used, or that things be labeled with the names of particular (old or new) gods. And I certainly see no reason for perpetuating the dependent pattern of, "Oh Great Mom or Dad, I am so helpless without you, so please bail me out."
But something I regard as essential (to correct ego proportion if nothing else) is the recognition - and, eventually, the direct experience - of something conscious, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent that is so vastly (infinitely!) past any concept of a concept of a concept of anything at all - and that there is no human authentic way to relate this in any sense to anything you likely think of as "myself."
The only word the English language has for this is "god." If you want to make up a new word for it, and define that word in essentially the same way that the rest of the world defines "god," then go for it.
One needs a healthy love for the unknown and rationally unknowable to get anywhere near the Abyss. One needs a keen, authentic awareness of something vastly beyond oneself to grow past Malkuth.
"but what [Crowley] really means, behind all the silly poetic metaphor is pure materialistic, physical science"
I don't think you could be further from the truth. That statement shows so little comprehension of Crowley, his life, his thinking, and his work as to suggest that you don't really know anything about him.
Now, to my thinking it's virtually a certainty that science sometime over the next few centuries will gradually absorb more and more of this "unknown" into its canon. That is, " think it's ultimately all some aspect of what we'd like to call "science." But (to run with the idea Uni_Verse just posted), it doesn't have much of anything to do with science as it exists today and is certainly not "pure materialistic" and "physical."
"Materialism," as you probably know, refers to a particular deterministic philosophy that nothing at all exists but matter - in the narrow, conventional sense that most people under stand "matter" - and that there is nothing higher or deeper than the [conventional idea of matter] existing. That's simply not true. (If you were physically blind, I bet you'd walk around telling sighted people that color is a fiction, that there is no such thing as color.)
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yes, I have a better word than God.
Several infact.
Universe, world, nature, the natural world, all space-time, The continuous all, the most general category, the null set, the Ground of Being, the perceptive medium, Nuit, or Kant's noumenon, the thing in itself, which is to say the macrocosm etc.
What it boils down to is the Pure physical reality striped of all human projections.
Then the world of Malkuth, the world of seeming, the world according to one particular Hadit, the classified and categorized world, the world of projected human values, the phenomenal, the microcosm.
Apply a little Discordian phycho-metaphyics. and we see than their are as many little t truths and microcosms as their are individual Hadits, and each human has many different perspectives on which in create many different self contained microcosms, ie different ways to look at the macrocosm and create organized little worlds.
Take this notion and add to it Douglas Adams notion of the "whole general sort of Mish-Mash" which is basically the macro-cosm and then each "parrallel" universe or is a creation of perspective orientation within the Whole mish-mash "which does not itself exist, but is merely the sum of all possible ways to look at it if it did".
Here we have Nuit is merely the sun of all possible Hadits, and Hadit is merely one possible perspective orientation within Nuit.
The first line from chapters I and II of Liber L, and no need to postulate anything supernatural, no cosmic intelligences, no God's anthropic deities waiting at the bounds of infinity to interfere in human affairs.Ever single aspect of occultism and ritual magick has a natural physical cause, effect and explination. The poetry and the imagining of Gods and spirits, connects with us, it activates archetypes, and thus in rituals we call upon Gods, we unite in our minds the image of the sun and the phallus, etc.
However, when we step out of the circle and wish to understand what really we did, we need to put away the poetry and deal with the facts.
If you are in a play, yes, Romeo and Juliette are lovers who meet on the balcony of a mansion and poison, very tragic. But after the play, you know well it was juice not poison, the actor and actress hate each other, and Juliette's balcony is really an old latter.
The events were not real, but the emotions invoked were real.
Likewise the events in ritual are symbols, poetry, play. But the feelings, the mental states, (including audio and visual hallucination) are subjective but real.It is a mistake it attribute literal objective validity to anything so see, feel, or hear in a ritual. The value comes in study of your own mind and the psychological reasons behind why you would have experienced the things as you did.
In psychotherapy the therapist may analyze your dreams, but he does not state the events in your dreams really happened and exist on a dream world plane, where the bogey man in your dream might do harm to other people in the waking world. Rather he looks to see what it is in your own mind that would cause this sort of dream, and what sort of lifestyle change or confrontation with a phobia might alter the dream, or even if using the dream imagery one can conquer a real life phobia by imagining a conflict with the dream monsters. Which is in effect Evokation with no reason to assume spirits or demons exist outside subjective imagination.
I can go on this way and provide naturalistic explanations for all such phenomena. Thus making them useful tools of science and not mystical abstractions that only fill us with spacey awe and wonderment. Very often it seems to me, occultisms do not want to know and to use what they learn in a practical way. They just want to be spaced out junkies addicted to the feeling of amazement at the vast.
"Wow like I am in touch with like these vast powers man, you should fear me and be my friend." Classic sign no inferiority complex expressed as a desire to appear superior in something vague than can't be proven wrong.
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@Froclown said
"yes, I have a better word than God.
Several infact.
Universe, world, nature, the natural world, all space-time, The continuous all, the most general category, the null set, the Ground of Being, the perceptive medium, Nuit, or Kant's noumenon, the thing in itself, which is to say the macrocosm etc."
Wait a minute, you want to do away with reference to any sort of god and yet give "Nuit" as one of your substitute words? Hysterical! (HINT to the joke: Nuit is one of those "gods" you don't want anything to do with.)
Yeah, "universe" works for me. (Of course, this doesn't have to work for me.) You'll encounter many people who use the two words interchangeably. But pretty much everything else you mentioned is way to small, parochial, etc. to meet the definition I gave in the last post.
"What it boils down to is the Pure physical reality striped of all human projections."
As much as I like, say, "universe" as a working synonym, it's no more immune to human projections than "god" (or, for that matter, "Britney"). And changing the labels doesn't solve the projection problem - instead, you have to solve the projection problem.
"Ever single aspect of occultism and ritual magick has a natural physical cause, effect and explination."
Only if it doesn't work. If it works, then by definition of working, it connects with something metaphysical.
"I can go on this way and provide naturalistic explanations for all such phenomena. Thus making them useful tools of science and not mystical abstractions that only fill us with spacey awe and wonderment."
In other words, that's all it does for you. It's not all that it does for some other people.
"Very often it seems to me, occultisms do not want to know and to use what they learn in a practical way. They just want to be spaced out junkies addicted to the feeling of amazement at the vast."
I don't have a lot of use for that crowd either. But it would be a mistake to lump serious mystics in with the unicorn and rainbow set.
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@Jim Eshelman said
""Materialism," as you probably know, refers to a particular deterministic philosophy that nothing at all exists as matter - in the narrow, conventional sense that most people under stand "matter""
Jim - surely you mean "nothing at all exists except as matter"?
I have to agree with Froclown in that I believe physics (which includes quantum physics) to be the fundamental basis of Crowley's understanding. I have been tracing why Crowley repeatedly refers to Einstein throughout his writings. In the same way Liber Legis shattered the closed monotheistic system that characterized the Old Aeon into a sidereal/cosmic-oriented multiplicity in 1904, Einstein's discovery of relativity in 1905 shattered the mechanistic, cause/effect Newtonian worldview that had dominated science for approximately 350 years, and Crowley seemed to be profoundly aware of Einstein's significance. The mechanistic Newtonian worldview is below the Abyss whereas the light of the New Aeon emanates from the Supernals. This aeonic shift is reflected in the relationship between the circle and square, the Cross and Rose, the microcosm and macrocosm. Sunlight has penetrated the closed and limited square.
Crowley on Atu XVII The Star:
*It will be seen that every form of energy in this picture is spiral. Zoroaster says, "God is he, having the head of a hawk; having a spiral force." It is interesting to notice that this oracle appears to anticipate the present Aeon, that of the hawk-headed Lord, and also of the mathematical conception of the shape of the Universe as calculated by Einstein and his school. It is only in the lower cup [read: below the Abyss] that the forms of energy issuing forth show rectilinear characteristics. In this may be discovered the doctrine which asserts that the blindness of humanity to all the beauty and wonder of the Universe is due to the illusion of straightness. It is significant that Riemann, Bolyai and Lobatchewsky seem to have been the mathematical prophets of the New Revelation. For the Euclidean geometry depends upon the conception of straight lines, and it is only because the Parallel Postulate was found to be incapable of proof that mathematicians began to conceive that the straight line had no true correspondence with reality. *
His footnote to the above:
The straight line is no more than the limit of any curve. For instance, it is an ellipse whose foci are an "infinite" distance apart. In fact, such use of the Calculus is the one certain way of ensuring "straightness".(BOT, p. 110)
So when you say Crowley's work is non-materialistic I presume this refers to the fact the perception of matter from below the Abyss changes to one from above the Abyss, when the Daughter Malkuth ascends to the throne of the Mother Binah. But wouldn't the perspective of 8=3 be quite similar to the understanding of quantum physics?
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@he atlas itch said
"Jim - surely you mean "nothing at all exists except as matter"?"
You're right! Sorry. Off to correct the typo.
"So when you say Crowley's work is non-materialistic I presume this refers to the fact the perception of matter from below the Abyss changes to one from above the Abyss, when the Daughter Malkuth ascends to the throne of the Mother Binah. But wouldn't the perspective of 8=3 be quite similar to the understanding of quantum physics?"
I pointedly referred to the conventional understanding of matter. "Materialism" has a specific meaning - it's a distinctly defined world view. And that definition includes the conventional, commonplace, ordinary day-to-day view of the word "matter." - If you change that understanding and allow a transcendant (or simply different) understanding of "matter" then you, too, are denying materialism.
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OK.
Can you explain why this different understanding of matter seems to unleash vast power?
Would meditation be the best tool for learning how to focus and align it with True Will?
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@he atlas itch said
"Can you explain why this different understanding of matter seems to unleash vast power? "
Yes. It starts with the fact that one gets outside of the framework of matter (as usually understood) altogether. There's a lot of energy wrapped up in constraining oneself to that narrowness.
EDIT: There's also the matter of uncovering power that was always there - veiled by one's previous rigidities and blindness.
"Would meditation be the best tool for learning how to focus and align it with True Will?"
Meditation won't hurt, but it probably isn't that simple.
First, of course, you have to discover your True Will. After that, reconciling it with other elements becomes fairly automatic and intuitive.
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What little I understand about my True Will is based on going back over all memories in my life during my 30s, noting seemingly random events that have stuck in my mind, looking for signs based around my date of birth, the day I was born on, noting physical marks on my body, and hearing a distinct voice in my head early one morning after having a kundalini awakening in my mid-20s. All of the above have shown me the orientation of my True Will and the planet I am attracted toward, whose characteristics I physically resemble, to realize this orientation. Curiously, the orientation of my True Will and the planet are opposed in nature, a fact that is reflected in my astrological chart.
Oddly, when I now think about it, it was this different understanding of matter and the catastrophic upheaval it brought to my life, that finally united and aligned me with the orientation of my True Will.
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Why should we assume their is anything "metaphysical" to connect with.
We have the models we make in our minds (subjective/microcosm) and the actual reality which is both the substance or hardware of that our brain is made out of and the substance of which our brain makes software models..
We ARE the hardware, but conscious awareness is software.
Our brain has software that represents the real substance (Matter) but we never directly perceive matter, we only experience the inter-relations between matter, the matter of the brain and the matter of the world. The hammer and the Anvil are unknown to us, but the sparks given off when they collide are our awareness.
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93, Jim, I just want to thank you for your beautifully written explanation of the metaphysical, or spiritual experience. Its hard to describe and your words really resonate. In fact I am sending it to some of my like-minded friends who are not on this board. 93 93/93 Persephone
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Im sorry but I fail to see the point in animal sacrifice. Maybe someone could explain it to me? If its for added energy in a ritual then breadth training and chi gong would increase that much more. You certainly arent going to elevate your soul doing it. If you need more luck or a new job there are plenty of effective types of magick that dont involve killing an animal. No amount of animal sacrifice will ever make up for a lack of discipline, which is the only thing that pushes anyone forward in any endeavour.
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@darrene2002 said
"Im sorry but I fail to see the point in animal sacrifice. Maybe someone could explain it to me? If its for added energy in a ritual then breadth training and chi gong would increase that much more. You certainly arent going to elevate your soul doing it. If you need more luck or a new job there are plenty of effective types of magick that dont involve killing an animal. No amount of animal sacrifice will ever make up for a lack of discipline, which is the only thing that pushes anyone forward in any endeavour."
you re right the best sacrifice is that of a male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence
if you know what I mean. -
ROFL
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@Iugum said
"What's so comical about that?"
uhmm, because hes talking about tallywhack tickling...
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Well someone here apparently has no sense of humour. Why dont you try and contribute something to the post then.
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â.
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Well I honestly dont think you unconciously killed your cat on purpose. If you have that much of a disparency going on between your actions and your unconcious drives you might need to get professional help from a therapist. Everything that is born eventually dies, or changes. I have had pets since I was little, one time a whole litter of cats died on us because of luekemia. Just appreciate what you have while its there and be grateful, part of initiation is being able to see more of the whole instead of a limited perspective.
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I had some trouble a few years back, where I was messing around and as best as I can figure unintentionally caused a problem with the equilibrium. I think the universe may take a sacrifice whether you offer it or not, if such is required to restore equilibrium. All 3 of my cats got deathly sick, each with some different ailment, at the same time. They had never been sick before. One didn't make it, the other had to be hospitalized, and fortunately the 2 recovered. I also detected the presence of winged serpents in the astral before and during that. I was not aware of the changes I made 'upstream' and paid the price. Sort of like the legal system, ignorance is not an excuse...the universe is going to do what it needs to restore itself regardless of my understanding...which is a bit better nowadays
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Do what thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Only a Member of the Supernal Triad may decide if any one act is well or ill, for having crossed the abyss and faced himself, the Temple Master, Master and Ipsissimus have become Wise, knowing good and evil, therefore ritual animal sacrifice is a "burden" set upon these from the duties of rank. Remember that before crossing the abyss any action which doth not lead to knowledge and conversation of the Holy Gaurdian Angel is a rite of Black Magick, and I see that the very nature of the discussion on this topic reveals that there is a thread of moral restriction implied in the actions, since the ethics of it are debated. I would suggest do what thou wilt, but beware, and ask one of greater attainment before engaging in such actions. Now I myself having also committed such adultery Am shameless to say that the creature which I sacrificed was avenged sevenfold, and I was struck by a Voodoo death curse in retaliation. However, the fact that I still live implies there was a meaningful exercise of justice and initiation involved. Taking the life of a creature requireth the Judgment of the Creator, and at the time I was a Temple Master. My actions were not to beget a rush of Sethian power, but as an offering unto He Who sent Me. Now the action taken was of pure Will unassuaged of purpose and free from the lust of result. In the end it was not an animal I was sacrificing, it was myself.
Love is the Law, Love under Will
