College of Thelema: Thelemic Education

Thank you for your kind reception. All four books have free samples with over 100 pages of text, so you can get an idea of what they’re like without committing your money. If you go to lulu.com and click "Bookstore" at the top center, then searching for "D. B. Stone" will bring up all my books. They won't appear at first--you have to select "Show explicit content" on the lower left-hand side of the page showing the book listings after your search returns some books. Once the books show up, sorting by "Newest" at the top right-hand part of the page should bring up the free samples on top. I'd welcome your feedback, even if it's negative. Thank you! Best, D. B. Stone

In a previous forum post, I mentioned Alfred Korzybski and Semantic Reactions. Expanding on my earlier post seems to be the most fitting response to this chapter on my part. Alfred Korzybski founded the field of General Semantics. He is notable for a book, Science and Sanity published in 1933. Korzybski sought to expand our understanding of semantics beyond our internal mechanisms of meaning making and interpretation. He focused primarily on how we react to language and symbol in our environment, including our moment-to-moment interactions with other humans in conversation. One of Korzybski's key concepts was Semantic Reaction. Semantic Reactions are whole-organism responses to a symbol. Rather than the denotative definition, this is the feeling one develops in response to a symbol. Whereas connotative meanings tend to be cultural and sociological, Semantic Reactions are the individual's physiological responses to a symbol based on the individual's psychology. A great example of this is the word, "Socialism." Oxford Languages defines Socialism as, "a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole." That definition sounds pretty cool (assuming we're living in an ideal society), right? As many already know, when you use the word, "Socialism," around different people, there is a wide diversity of responses. Some people may say that Socialism is positive and that they aspire to live in a society where Socialism makes up the structure of that civilization. Others may say that Socialism is a dirty word and react as if they smelled something foul. A third group may not have any internal experience of the word, finding it to be nothing more than a string of letters. The range of feelings associated with the word are Semantic Reactions. Korzybski believed this occurs because information processing is not a neutral mechanism. Instead, our nervous system responds to symbols based on prior conditioning, memory, fear, desire, prejudice, anxieties, etc. This may not seem like a new idea now but considering how many people ignore the importance of word choice in our daily lives, it's not hard to believe how revolutionary this idea seemed in 1933. Korzybski argued that Semantic Reactions form when we confuse the symbol for the reality it is describing. In fact, Korzybski is the one who coined the phrase, "The map is not the territory," which RAW uses as a primary thesis of Quantum Psychology. When we use language, we create an abstraction out of some "referent," the actual object we are trying to refer to. Sometimes, people speak as if the reality of the referent is smaller than the abstraction or word used to refer to the referent. To go back to my earlier example, when some people use the word, "Socialism," they do not seem to be responding to the definition of the word. Instead, they respond to what they've been told about the word. Most people in the United States have not experienced a socialist government. Yet, those who respond to the word with disgust tend to be certain that Socialism is a bad word not even worthy of contemplation (much less education on its meaning), and those who respond with pleasure tend to be certain about that a socialist government's merits and values overshadow the fact that we do not live in an ideal society where people are 100% good. I would argue that the term, "Buzzword," refers to this idea of Semantic Reactions when the reactions are positive, pleasurable, and/or addictive. People use Buzzwords, or specialized terms, to assert authority and/or impress those around them. These words often become trendy and experience an increase in usage not because of what they mean, but rather because of the Semantic Reactions they elicit in others. People mimic others, spreading Buzzwords like Social Contagion, until their nervous system is attenuated to that Semantic Reaction. When attenuation occurs, the Semantic Reaction loses its novelty or thrill, much the same way a drug addict develops a tolerance. Then the Buzzword fades away as people no longer use that term. Semantic Reactions can be even more subtle. For example, when I catch someone in a "lie," my natural reaction is to label that person a liar. Liar is a negative category in my mind, and makes me feel very distrustful, sometimes even angry at the person labelled "liar." But suppose this person spoke in Good Faith, unaware that I labelled them a liar? Perhaps their information is simply skewed or ill-informed and they are unaware. Depending on how they presented their information to me, I might be in the wrong for projecting the label, "liar," onto them. The person may have spoken in a way that made me feel as if they were a liar. Since "Liar" is a bad word, my anger and distrust are a reaction to the meaning I've projected onto the word "Liar." If this is the case, then my reaction is maladaptive and unfounded. Being able to perform maintenance on our Semantic Reactions was one of Korzybski's calls to action. In future chapters of Quantum Psychology, RAW presents a formulation of the English language that, when internalized, provides a means of recognizing our Semantic Reactions. However, certain Buddhist exercises also seek to accomplish this as well. When one becomes aware of Semantic Reactions, communication becomes more miraculous. At a certain stage of my own path, I became acutely aware that people were not actually listening to the words I was saying. Instead, people were listening to the Semantic Reactions they formed from their own associations with words. I discovered that often, others and I were not actually communicating with each other. Instead, we were essentially responding to whatever words we liked and didn't like completely independent of the actual messages we were trying to communicate. This led me down a rabbit hole that made me wonder how much of my speech and others was truly understood, and how much of it was simply forced into the conditioned responses to the words myself and others were using. This will, of course, drive someone insane because we can never know the depth of such a phenomenon. I suspect that people with more knowledge and care about their words are perhaps more likely to understand me than those who believe words are unimportant. Considering there are people in positions of power that are unaware of these ideas, it's a bit of miracle that communication and social cohesion exist at the scale that they do. In response to the specific chapter we read, RAW seems to be emphasizing institutions like the FCC are policing what is considered acceptable language by forcing other people to agree with their Semantic Reactions. Given the nature of American culture, it is likely that these Semantic Reactions are particularly puritanical. The 7 Forbidden Words are a particularly useful example in showing how groups can enforce Semantic Reactions. With a large group to enforce Semantic Reactions, it is not hard to see why RAW believes many in our modern society operate and cogitate similarly to those from Medieval England. Semantic Reactions are perhaps one of the best explanations for what the occultist can mean when referring to “spirits,” as they are one of many unseen forces that affect individuals as well as groups.

@Hannah Fascinating! I had not heard of that term before. In response to your last question, there are languages that are built without Aristotelian logic. Without giving away too many spoilers, RAW presents a form of the English language that prevents Aristotelian logic in future chapters of the book. However, I am currently also listening to a seminar on Non Violent Communication where Marshall Rosenberg (the creator of the Non Violent Communication modality) mentions encountering a tribal people who do not use language to classify people, instead focusing on needs. He says that rather than calling people selfish, their custom would be to ask what needs aren't being met that are causing this person to act in a way we call selfish. This is similar to Non Aristotelian thinking in that it doesn't identify people as static categories. More abstractly, I think the Qabalah is a language that doesn't rely on Aristotelian thinking. People who try to make it rely on Aristotelian thinking (those folks who say each symbol only has one correct meaning at the expense of everything else that symbol means) don't seem to be 'doing' Qabalah correctly. For example, the Hebrew letters and words have multiple meanings and cannot be classified in a binary. In my opinion, at its essence, Non-Aristotelian thinking is a Non Rational process that seeks to perceive the gradation between opposites. This inherently requires one to unify a few opposites before they can see what is meant (i.e. that A and B also have C in between the two terms, etc.) and this means being allowed to sit with Uncertainty until the Cognitive Dissonance collapses and reveals their connection. However, once one grasps the process of unifying opposites, I would hope that it would get easier and easier to sit with the opposites. The ideas RAW presents in this book are not necessarily original. RAW has stated that he got most of the ideas from Alfred Korzybski, a linguist that eventually was deemed a pseudo-scientist. Korzybski believed that most people, when they believe they are communicating with each other, are actually reacting to Semantic Reactions. I don't intend to be crass, but you know how certain people get really, really upset when you use the word socialism or talk about social welfare? Well, the knee jerk response to the word, "Socialism," is precisely what Korzybski was referring to. The people who react that way are not actually offended by the word, "Socialism," and don't actually seem to know what that word really means. Instead, they are reacting to a meaning that has been associated with that word, triggering a maladaptive response. Korzybski said that the best thing we can do to overcome this is to only speak, "facts," which he has a technical definition for. The way we do that is very similar to what RAW presents in future chapters. RAW is the most accessible manual of Korzybski's linguistics that I have found. So I hope this gets you excited for the chapter of the book when we learn about "E-Prime"!

Welcome, Chris!

Easy. “Wrathful Yidam”

@zeph Hahaha I was hoping to dodge that question. I have been trying to type out specifically what I mean all morning and have been unable to adequately communicate it. I don't know that this is an entirely new idea, but I like the way this chapter combats some of the blockages in understanding the True Will. If the True Will is a distant object that we are aspiring to align with and grow closer to, Aristotelian, or binary logic appears as one of the earliest obstacles obscuring the nature of the True Will. I notice, between myself and others I have spoken to online or in person, the discussion of the True Will can easily become a question of individual certainty. The True Will inherently contains a large amount of uncertainty at the outset of the path, and the emphasis placed on the True Will (as well as the projected advantages of operating from True Will) might inspire an individual to make discovery a high stakes event. It is natural for an individual to want answers. Many, myself included, have attributed messianic and apocalyptic proportion to the discovery of the True Will. The perfectly innocent question, "What is my True Will?" suddenly becomes a demon of uncertainty that must be killed so that one can magically right their life and escape suffering forever in a lightning flash. However, this demon of uncertainty (and egoic grasping towards the True Will) is predicated upon this yes/no logic. In my own experience, every possible answer I came up with to answer that question, "What is my True Will?" has not been good enough. There has always been some shred of uncertainty preventing my ego from attaining that 100% certain answer to whatever my mind posits to be my specific True Will. My ego gets very displeased with uncertainty and would rather not take action if it doesn't have everything already worked out. Rather than discover True Will in the things I already do, my ego mistakenly believes that I must be doing something else, something outside of me, otherwise I wouldn't be experiencing this uncertainty or the discomfort that comes with it. Nonetheless, I have been told, and I have experienced that my True Will keeps on regardless of my awareness of it. But if only I could say, "Yes, this IS my True Will!" then my ego could rest and my life would just magically work itself out, right? My ego would love to believe that it is that simple, a change from one state of not knowing into the state of knowing like the flip of a switch. It foolishly believes that if I just flip that switch, I will never have to suffer again. Never mind that this is a subtle tactic the ego uses to give away autonomy. I know I am not the first or the last to experience this fantasy. Any time spent on the path should demonstrate that this fantasy doesn't hold up against reality. The True Will, in my experience, appears non-local. It expresses itself in infinitely varied circumstances. Sometimes these circumstances appear completely out of left field and do not initially align with what my ego believes to be "me." Of course, the demon of uncertainty feeds on those expressions of True Will because they fly in the face of what my ego considers orderly, predictable, and easily simplified into binaries. So how does one integrate all of that without going insane? Well, if we dispense with the idea that we can be 100% certain about our True Will in any given moment (since there is always a factor we cannot account for), we must also get rid of the idea that we are entirely 0% certain of our True Will at any given moment. Already, this rearrangement of our limitations has major implications. One can easily fall into the nihilism that RAW describes if we fixate on the loss of certainty. However, if someone decides to go in the opposite direction, then there is always some level of certainty we have in every situation. Since our goal is to act with more certainty (assuming that everyone else's ego also likes certainty), we might have a lot more data to work with in any given situation than what might be apparent. If it is our responsibility to act with certainty, then we have the opportunity to be responsible in every circumstance in our lives. What does this imply further about the True Will? If the True Will "is" not the thing we do with utmost certainty, we cannot use certainty as a marker of True Will. Instead, since the True Will expresses itself in varying circumstances and varying degrees of awareness, the True Will must also follow probabilistic logic. The True Will, then, becomes a specific set of probabilities (limited by our biological vehicle and material reality) that are likely to occur based on the expression of the Life Force in any given moment. Regardless of the situation I find myself in, every set of choices I come up with can be measured as more or less likely in alignment with True Will. Rather than place high stakes on one specific choice that is 100% certainly my True Will, I now have a range of motion I can choose from with relative confidence that it will align. This blows the lid off the initial yes/no logic analysis I proposed at the beginning of this post. Suddenly, "What is my True Will?" no longer holds weight because the True Will no longer appears as an object that falls in the "True" or "Certain" category. True Will becomes infinitely more adaptable, fluid, attainable yet illusive, and even more non-rational. It is no longer one simple title, or action, or thought, etc., but rather a set of optimized potentials with varying degrees of likelihood to manifest LVX. The specific identity of the True Will no longer matters because it's infinite potential inspires more freedom. True Will holds a space between yes or no, and every situation an individual finds themselves in becomes a series of probabilities, "How likely is this choice I've settled on in alignment with my True Will?" It also dispenses of the messianic urge and apocalyptic stakes that come with the fear of acting outside of 100% alignment with the True Will. What I believe this chapter of Quantum Psychology to imply about the individual "is" that awareness progresses from binary logic (I am doing my True Will, or I'm not doing my True Will) into probabilistic logic (I am making choices that are likely in alignment with my True Will). Furthermore, some of the highest levels of probability appear to function as if I acted with 100% certainty, showing themselves to be just as effective as 100% certainty (though less destabilizing when it turns out to inaccurate). This in turn lowers the stakes and dispels superstitious thinking. Viewing the True Will as a force of potentials that are not real until brought into Assiah implies a Bell Curve of choices in every situation increasing potential freedom of movement and action not present in a "This IS True Will" dichotomy. When we dispel the need for 100% certainty, True Will no longer needs to be a specific form, and instead becomes a game of increasing confidence levels in choices to strengthen likelihoods and other probabilities. Someone can identify a different level or register of cohesion in their actions, a non-rational cohesion, that doesn't easily fit into a box. Disparate occurrences become chains of events that appear unified to the individual acting from True Will and largely chaotic to the other who has no knowledge of that individual's path. In my opinion, once a certain amount of knowledge accumulates, probabilistic logic seems to be the only practical way of navigating an otherwise overwhelming existence. If we remain in binary logic, we risk insanity as we get lost in the infinite nuance that complicates our existence. The better we can assess those probabilities, the better we can make choices that align with our overall goal and path through the world.

@zeph Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Sorry, English isn’t my native language. Maybe the translation caused some distortion, and came across as impolite in the post. When I was browsing Liber 33, I was shocked: does it really claim that someone knows all the truth about nature?! That would mean that for any question—whether scientific, spiritual, or mathematical—there is already a set answer. Humanity wouldn’t need to explore anything, and there would be no room for development (since the Secret Chiefs already know everything)… This seems to conflict with the “scientific illuminism” advocated by the A∴A∴. I just wonder if this makes the Thelemic system too closed? After all, that’s a huge claim! What exactly does “truth” include? The truth value of every mathematical proposition? Tomorrow’s lottery numbers? Love is law, love under will.

This is one of my favorite chapters of the book. There is a lot to unpack here. RAW illustrates how linguistic features (especially limitations) determine not only how we describe Reality, but also how we experience Reality. Even more convoluted, we often make statements about Reality that cannot be tested against reality. He describes how so much of Philosophy has evolved as a process of weeding out these statements and axioms that cannot be tested, discovering that many of them do not survive reality testing. As @hannah pointed out, this is most easily analogized with AI. AI has never actually experienced the physical world, yet it will spit out volumes about manifestation. Does this mean AI is intelligent, or does it mean that it can fabricate the illusion of intelligence? If you answer that AI is intelligent because it can spit out volumes about a topic, what if those volumes are filled with useless information? Does that still qualify as intelligence? Humanity, quite often, displays this same uncertainty. In college, I met many who claimed to know exactly what was being described in the Psychology textbooks yet were perfectly unable to identify those same concepts in their own psyche and day to day life. Worse were people who claimed that their projection of those concepts was the entirety of those concepts, ignoring further nuances. In my daily life, there are people who claim to know everything there is to know about plumbing because they can describe a generic plumbing system. They have never actually performed any plumbing work, but still assert to my coworkers that they somehow know more than the plumber that they hired. It seems to be confusion of the map with the territory. In many day-to-day interactions, I encounter people who claim that because their "map" is not as detailed as mine, mine must simply be wrong. What this is really pointing to is simply a disparity in the awareness of myself and the other (rather than any type of moralistic or egotistical reason that the Nephesh likes to mythologize and project). In my experience, this is typically because someone has decided within themselves that things "should be" a particular way. When their map of how things "should be" fails reality testing, people often resort to "Bad Faith". This is because it is easier to say that the world must be imperfect than it is for the Nephesh to admit that it could be wrong and course correct. As an individual's Bad Faith increases, their senses seem to dull, and they neglect the observation of their external environment. I suspect that this is because the Nephesh retreats further behind Bad Faith until the Bad Faith turns into Saturnian Lead. Ultimately, it means that an individual has decided to neglect the calibration of their instrument/map (their nervous system in this case) to justify their Bad Faith and protect their Ego. Even in the case where I am comparing my map to someone else's of equal quality and similar terrain, differences in vocabulary further obfuscate that our maps describe the same thing and function the same. I cannot tell you how many arguments I've gotten into with friends only to realize that we were saying the same thing and had not properly understood each other’s definitions of terms. In cases like these, I have caught myself doing exactly what RAW describes in this chapter, asserting that my map and my variables must be correct and that the other's map must be flawed, otherwise they'd see what I saw. When I come to an agreement with the other, both of our maps are validated, and we now develop a wider vocabulary of terms to describe the terrain our maps illustrate. In other words, when more of our maps withstand reality testing and align with each other, they create a richer picture. This is precisely why shared maps, such as those of the Tree of Life, can be so powerful and so dangerous. If understood properly and defined adequately, it provides a shared language and units of measurement that allow conversation to flow. If misunderstood, it is no different from the example I gave in a previous paragraph of someone whose map that does not survive reality testing. In those latter cases, these people appear solipsistic and delusional. "Every religion, for instance, seems to other religions (and nonbelievers) the result of logical deductions from axioms that just don't fit this universe." (pg. 61). Crowley, in Porta Lucis, is abundantly clear that a proper Thelemite respects the maps of other religions, even if that Thelemite does not agree with the map. I suspect that this is partly explained by the reasons described in this chapter of Quantum Psychology. A map (religious, political, or otherwise) is ultimately human-made and therefore is bound by the same limitations that any other instrument is. It is a system of units that serve as convenience to talk about reality, but do not replace the ineffable reality. This is no different than me saying that "Nothing is real until it manifests in Assiah," not unlike what Jim says in Chapter 16 of 776 1/2. So one of the safeguards Crowley builds into his system is this acknowledgement that (no matter how much richer of a map it is) a map is just a map. This implies that even the Qabalah or Thelema is subject to the same problems that any other map is subject to. Qabalah is a system that, relative to itself, is coherent and well developed but holds no inherent reality in the face of "Things as They Really Are". There is no "figuring everything out," there are only closer approximations (like Pi or the Golden Mean) to the truth. This was a difficult pill for me to swallow at first given how much Qabalah is written about being oh-so Holy and Divinely created. Instead, it means that things such as the Hebrew alphabet, the Tree of Life, and any other glyph included in the Qabalah is not any more special than the glyphs the comprise a math textbook, or a tool used for measuring electricity. In fact, I know many people who harness the same or even more intellectual rigor than me to study Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Those same people find me to be strange for wasting my intellectual abilities on Qabalistic nonsense. The advantage that Qabalah does have over mathematical symbols or Lord of the Rings, however, is that we have centuries of data collected from the users of Qabalah that provide a much clearer map than a map made of mathematical symbols. This is the basic idea behind “Tradition." There is nothing inherently special about one tradition over another outside of "Success is thy proof." Qabalah has survived centuries of reality testing (to greater and lesser degrees depending on the operator) and puts the objects that obscure reality from the operator front and center. Given that the Qabalah is such a transparent map, it succeeds in showing the operator what they must get over if they wish to ever perceive things as they are. But this also means that we are not inherently exceptional or special for practicing Qabalah. In fact, to assert exceptionalism over non-initiates for being unaware of Qabalah is precisely the same thing RAW describes in the quote above. It basically is saying, "I must be better than you because I have better variables and I can judge you for things that you've never told me to hold you accountable for!" Not far off from a Christian telling me that I will go to Hell unless I abide by their Law

@jjones for real! There is a difference between "sex" and "gender" but these can overlap. Sex is the biological difference between what we have named "male" and "female" which reduces plainly down to who has the smaller sex cell vs. the larger sex cell. There is a lot of variation between these two classifications, though, when considering physical sex organs, hormones, genes, and so on. "Gender" is the cultural interpretation of sex which is more malleable and dependent on , well, culture. Those who are perceived culturally "male" might actually have some physical characteristics of females such as a higher production of estrogen or even ovaries. Our culture puts a lot of emphasis on the outward expressions of sex (penis vs. vagina) but these are only outward, there are other internal markers that are harder to detect.

@Hannah Well put! "29. For I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union. 30. This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all."

Great to meet you, Will! 93s!

@Hannah hahaha I got a little excited! I've been known to send walls of text towards people

Magick, done intentionally and slowly, will unearth the root causes of mental health challenges, train the nervous system to be a mechanism of expression, and reveal purpose. That being said, those ordeals are not easy and should not be minimized. Daily practice, personal accountability, and consistency build resilience over time. I also recommend a good trans-personal psychologist.

That is great. Will you be announcing it's availability on your Facebook page when they are available (which I follow) That way I will purchase it right away.

@zeph I love how deeply you're pondering this chapter. I'd like to provide my own interpretation of what RAW was saying about the linguistic attributes of describing an experience scientifically/objectively, how often it relies on Aristotelian logic, and the hang ups you mentioned in your response. I do not think that your ideas were in conflict with RAW at all, and instead illustrate that you have done precisely the work he is describing. To give you context, I read this chapter and took away three things from it. First, that language is abused when people try to make statements about how things are for everyone when we can only know how things are for ourselves. Second, that any measurement of reality only seems to be true relative to the instrument measuring reality (including all of the strengths and weaknesses of the instrument and the units it measures in). Third, most of the statements we make about something using the verb "to be" (most commonly seen in the form of "is"), inherently imply a true/false dichotomy and fails to acknowledge that there are further states of indeterminism. I found it interesting that you brought up feeling as if this meant RAW doesn't want us to ask questions we can't adequately use language to describe. I had not thought that far past what he was saying, and instead believed that he was emphasizing the idea of relativism. Naturally, to an initiate of Thelema, relativism might seem like a given, but to someone who has not initiated, this might seem novel. RAW's background, as you may already know, was in Catholicism. In other books, he describes Catholicism as the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas relied heavily on Aristotle to justify and fill out Christian doctrine. Aristotle, and by extension Aristotelian logic, relies heavily on "True/False" dichotomies. It does not even consider the idea of a third, or synthesis of the two terms, much less a fourth, indeterminate/unknown term. Jung has also written about how Christian doctrine largely encourages this kind of thinking, hence his emphasis on the "Union of Opposites." Of course, to someone who is initiated, this third, synthetic term is not entirely new. Needless to say, in my own experiences in life, most of my encounters are with people who largely have not pondered the idea of a third term, the opposites seemingly impossible to reconcile in their minds. I imagine that those are the people that RAW is largely trying to address, which leads me to my next point. RAW is emphasizing that language cannot describe a "deep reality" in the Old Aeon sense that what I see and am describing is objectively and ontologically correct for absolutely everyone. I am sure you have heard the old joke, If you want to kill an idea, send it to a committee? Whatever I say about reality is ultimately just describing my own experience about reality. I would be abusing language to assert to you that I somehow know better than you about what your reality is supposedly structured as, no? This flies in the face of Thelemic teaching. He also describes two forms of unknown variables in addition to true and false: Indeterminate (Not Yet Testable), and Meaningless (Untestable). I bring this up to mean that if Indeterminate means Not Yet Testable, then this provides ample reason to use language to describe things we cannot adequately symbolize in language yet. We simply have not yet developed the symbols necessary to test such a thing. This brings up a further point, how do we differentiate between Not Yet Testable and Untestable given that we cannot test either one yet? It seems like RAW is highlighting another issue within linguistics and the philosophy of language. Your statement, "All is One," is fascinating in relation to this chapter. I agree that by his definition of "noise" (noise being that which is untestable by scientific standards), it certainly can be interpreted as noise. I don't think RAW would disagree with the semantic meaning of your statement, especially given that it is not hard to conceive of creating a single symbol that collapses all of creation down into it (in this case, the word, "One"). However, I am led to believe that you are using the verb "to be" in this statement to assert that you've collected enough evidence to confirm that for yourself. I also know from your response that you recognize it is just a symbol trying to describe something but it is not the thing in and of itself. I think RAW would've been just fine with your formulation, given that you are a skillful perceiver who has been collecting data over a period of time and have found a consistent pattern. "All is One," also, is not the statement he specifically calls into question. Instead, it's, "My boss is a male chauvinist drunk, and this is making me sick." He seems to be illustrating that a statement like, "My boss is a male chauvinist drunk, and this is making me sick," does not seem to be formulated properly because it doesn't acknowledge relativism. If this statement is true, then maybe this person's boss did act this way. But we can only know that this person's boss acted that way based on this person's measurements. I have not met this boss. Depending on how well I trust the person making this statement, I might decide that this statement "is not" true. Even when I make this statement that it "is not" true, I am only making this statement for myself, based on my own information and data I've collected from my experience of this situation. Therefore, both the "is true" and "is not true" statements exist, neither fully describe the reality of the situation, and yet both appear true to each individual? This highlights a significant term he has coined, but I realize was not heavily emphasized in this chapter. We can only perceive what is within our own "Reality Tunnel." In other words, I can only perceive what I am capable of perceiving. The bandwidth of my perception is my reality tunnel, and it describes my view of the All that is One. Like I said above, I cannot tell you your True Will because I do not occupy your reality tunnel, just the same as you mine, and therefore we cannot adequately make statements about a "deep reality" that I can somehow make my reality tunnel see everyone else's and then make ontologically correct statements about the All for everyone. If I did that, it would just seem like I have a really big ego. Ultimately, he is trying to describe how the ego protects itself by creating these ontological statements through the verb "to be" while embracing irrelevant measurements. He implies to me that we often phrases things in this way to give up responsibility, instead giving in to, "This is just how things are!" Rarely do people say that when things are going well! Specifically, he is trying to illustrate how much our minds create how we perceive reality. Not, create our own reality, as that implies that one could effectively remove that unknown element out of their lives. Rather, we can craft the model we use to perceive the Universe. I think that if we take this to the logical extreme, he would completely agree with your statement that a human who has been trained to be a skillful perceiver can make much more accurate ontological statements than someone who has not. In fact, I'd venture to guess that part of what makes that person a skillful perceiver is that they have become aware of the ways in which the instrument that is our body misfires and gives us faulty or irrelevant information. All of this is to say that I do not think RAW would've disagreed with your perspective, instead, I think he would've pointed out that you have done a lot of the work he is pointing to. Nonetheless, I am biased towards RAW, so my own perceptions are equally faulty!

I don't know if I can add anything that hasn't already been said about the parable other than that I find the parable to be funny. The most obvious meaning that one can derive is if you look for externalized authority, it will never come (like those who wait for the Second Coming). You'll be stuck outside the temple walls banging on the door to be let in from the conditions outside only to die alone. The door in the story was made specifically for the individual concerned in the story, so that person must be entitled to use that door, right? If its purpose is such that this person is supposed to be the one to go through it, doesn't that mean that the door has not served its purpose until it has let this person in (not unlike Crowley's metaphor that a nail has not served its purpose until hammered into wood)? The person standing in front of the door who keeps asking the guard to let them in is told to wait and that maybe one day they'll be let in. But why would someone choose to waste their time waiting to see what's on the other side of this door, made specifically for them, even though the outcome might not even occur? What could be so great that one would throw one’s life away to wait for something that might not happen? Clearly, the individual has given a sense of Authority to the guard for the individual to let the guard determine whether the individual is able to use such a door. And for why has this individual given the guard Authority anyway. Because the guard’s armor is a powerful costume associated with “Authority” symbolism that the Nephesh finds fearsome on an animal level? What exactly is the guard even guarding? Does the guard even know what’s on the other side of the door or who the door was made for? This individual in the parable also does not choose to investigate the door. The individual does not test if the door is unlocked, if the guard will prevent the individual from passing through on the individual’s own authority (“This door was made for ME!”),or find out if there are other means of getting to the other side of this wall (assuming that moving from one side of this wall to the other is in fact what this individual wants). Is the shape of that door not an invitation (in the same way that King Arthur pulls the Sword from the Stone)? Furthermore, given that RAW was interested in Thelema, it is hard not to read the "door of the Law" as anything but the Law of the Aeon. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Is it not the Will of the individual to go through that door? Is it not the Will of that Door to allow only that Individual through? The individual wants admission to the door of the Law, but the individual is not "doing" the Law. Can the guard "make" the individual "do" the Law? Who is the guard to have the authority to determine that the individual is not allowed to "do" the Law given that the door that has been uniquely fitted to this individual and clearly won't serve its purpose until it has allowed this individual in and no one else? Can the guard even adequately perceive the door and the individual clearly enough to discover that they are in the same shape? Is this individual not righteous enough to say, "Success be thy proof!"? I am reminded of how the ego likes to demand certainty before taking an action. The ego loves to search for confirmation that an individual is uniquely chosen to take this one risk that only this unique individual can responsibly handle or accurately perceive. Often, the ego finds that these types of conditions hardly ever exist. In fact, the individual in this story has more certainty than most human beings have about the thresholds they cross, because this individual might be able to perceive that they are the only one capable of crossing through that threshold indicated by the shape of the door. We will never know what is on the other side of this door for this individual because they spend their whole life waiting to be let in. Clearly, they wanted it badly enough to wait. Whether the other side of the door was disappointing or awe inspiring, or even just plain neutral, this individual only seems increasingly foolish for sitting around and waiting for external confirmation and authority, rather than using resourcefulness to discover an analogous outcome (again, was this the only door into the Law? Maybe the individual could’ve fooled the guard by walking through the door with intention and purpose, seemingly as if they were meant to go through the door that was made for the individual?). As far as the Zen student experiences a similar circumstance, did that student at least have the benefit of knowing what was on the other side of that door? The student knew that it was the meditation hall, had probably been to the hall numerous times, and only now were they locked out. Most people, when locked out of somewhere (even somewhere familiar), react with panic, fear, and the need to get inside. Did this student only fall deeper into fear of this "Dark Parable" once this happened even though they were perfectly aware of what's on the other side of that door? This student seems to have the benefit of having a theoretical knowledge and experience of the Law (hopefully even more so than the individual in the parable since the student studies Zen). Although we do not know how this student reacts to the door, one would hope that their Zen studies would’ve given the student enough of a map of experience so that the student can adequately navigate this situation (and discover the ideal course of action). If, instead, the student forgot all the training the student has been undergoing in their Zen education, then the student has clearly not internalized the Law enough to apply it.

I can't speak directly to the position of HOGD, but I have heard that Paul Foster Case (trained by A∴O∴, successor of HOGD) felt that advancement beyond 5=6 was a matter between the initiate and their angel. The supernal sephiroth were not thought to be beyond the reach of living humans, but the training for it was beyond the reach of B.O.T.A.