What is the Will?
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@Mahanta70 said
"I've kept up my daily magick rituals, including doing the bornless rite 2xday.
It's been over a month since I've been at it. No K&C yet
"It took me 14 years, which was slightly faster than my teacher (not that we were racing). From Crowley's first initiation to his K&C was about 8 years. Be patient. There are definitely earlier goals along the way.
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I had posted this on the wrong forum then copied and pasted over here. Seems like the bottom of my original post did not make it through so he goes again, these questions were intended to be at the end of my original post starting this thread,
What is the relationship of the Will to the HGA?
What is the relationship of the Will to the Body of Light?
What is the Will?
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We can just look at a dictionary, to figure out the "will" as a noun, means a purpose, intent, or deliberate action.
It seems to me that any subset of our personality can have a "will" to enact it's own desires. For example, a subset of your personality deliberately seeks out comic book.
You might find this thread interesting, even thought it's about "True Will", not "Will" per se
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"What is the relationship of the Will to the HGA?"
From that thread:
@JAE said
"I've often distinguished the articulation of True Will from the K&C by calling it "the Voice of the HGA.""
(Side point: So, what separates True Will from Will is that it comes from the HGA; not a subset of one's personality.)
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@Mahanta70 said
"What is the relationship of the Will to the HGA?"
I've always found the best way to express this as: Our True Will is the Word, or Voice, of our HGA.
"What is the relationship of the Will to the Body of Light?"
More or less the same as the relationship of the Will to any other layer, or body, of our being (e.g., the physical body).
"What is the Will?"
I think by "the Will" you mean what is called "True Will." I would define it as: the inmost nature of a being expressed through its most fundamental course or movement through time, space, and experience: The essential vector of an infinite being.
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@Vlad said
"So where does the K&C go in the ToL? 5=6? Conflused."
Yes, it is is the distinctive characteristic of the 5=6 Grade of A.'.A.'..
"And what kind of consciousness does it entail? A kind of samadhi?"
There is room for honest disagreement here, but I'll give you my best answer. - One can certainly say it is a specie of samadhi.
I cannot distinguish the descriptions of samadhi from the characteristics of Briatic consciousness; and the opening to Briah is a preliminary to the K&C. In symbolic language, one might say that by consciousness opening to Briah, one becomes the cup or grail. (This would be the essential characteristic of what the A.'.A.'. terms 5=6 Without.) - But the K&C is more than this, for, in it, the grail finds the lance which is thrust into it so that the two are deeply and permanently united.
You would benefit from reading the Scholion to Liber Samekh, wherein the type of consciousness is analyzed more miinutely.
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@Jim Eshelman said
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@Vlad said
"So where does the K&C go in the ToL? 5=6? Conflused."Yes, it is is the distinctive characteristic of the 5=6 Grade of A.'.A.'..
"And what kind of consciousness does it entail? A kind of samadhi?"
There is room for honest disagreement here, but I'll give you my best answer. - One can certainly say it is a specie of samadhi."
Etc. And, now that I'm not rushing out the door, I wanted to add something a little more pedantic to the above.
If you were to study Crowley's important essay "One Star in Sight," you might come to a different conclusion regarding the thresholds corresponding to the grades. For reference, you can find a copy here: ordoaa.org/onestar.htm
OSIS lists the "general characteristics and attributions" of the Dominus Liminis grade as: "Is expected to show mastery of Pratyahara and Dharana." That is, it characterizes one who passes to Adeptus Minor Without as having mastered Pratyahara and Dharana.
I remain perplexed that OSIS lists such a low threshold. Certainly these are a minimum, concerning what is undertaken in the grade, and certainly they are basic methods of addressing all the other core elements of the grade; and there is no earlier grade where these specific pratices are tested directly. They are IMHO suitably tested in Dom. Lim. by the record, and by the consequences of the whole scope of practice.
One is then left to ask, "Where are Dhyana and Samadhi expected?" In OSIS there is no mention of Dhyana, and the only mention of Samadhi is under 8=3, Magister Templi, who is identified as being, "a Master of Samadhi." The wording under 8=3 and 9=2 (in OSIS) is structurally different than for the other grades. Also, Samadhi isn't a single phenomenon or result marking an "end of the road." Eastern classics identify many layers of Samadhi (many kinds of Samadhi), so that it is more the beginning than the end. Therefore, I have tended to understand the 8=3 passage in OSIS as meaning a mastery of the entire range or category of mystical attainment (in complement to the "Master of all Magick" remark for 9=2).
And, as I mentioned earlier, I'm personally unable, from either experience or theory, to distinguish Briatic consciousness from the classic descriptions of Samadhi (once the sensationalism is stripped away). They are described in nearly the same words. By the time I got to Dom. Lim., it was, from walking the road, so obvious to me that everything described and expected as a result, as a threshold to attain and surpass, was not only Dharana and Pratyahara, but Dhyana - and that Dhyana is most simply describable as the apex of the Yetziratic part of our being, all of it coming to a head with Dhyana's distinctive "shock and awe" characteristics, and the final parting of the veil between Yetzirah and Briah. The result is the stable opening of Briah.
But AC didn't mention Dhyana anyplace in OSIS, except... well, yeah, actually, he did mention it. But then he took it out. He originally listed it as characteristic of the Adeptus Minor grade. (We know this from surviving pre-publication typescripts.) But, then, he took it out before publication.
I mostly think that he took it out because he was being scrupulously careful not to overly define the K&C of the HGA. Other than his phenomenological discussion of this in the Scholion of Liber Samekh, he was generally very careful never to quite define it (although he talked about its phenomena).
I'd like to think he took it out before publication because he thought it was simply wrong. The equation of Dhyana as a basic, defining characteristic of the Adeptus Minor grade simply seems (to me) to be far too low a threshold, and only distantly relatable to the phenomena of the K&C of the HGA.
But, on the rare occasion I actively think about it, I worry that it's what he actually thought. Worse, I'm pretty sure that a significant group of his present-day students have that opinion.
Such a characterizing certainly puts the 8=3 passage in a different light. It would leave us with a system where 5=6 is marked by Dhyana, and 8=3 by Samadhi. To me, this is a serious and significant degradation of the A.'.A.'. grade system.
To put it bluntly: What Soror Meral and I characterized as my Dominus Liminis period concluded with easy, stable occurrence of Dhyana, and opened me - in a more or less ongoing way (in contrast to the points and spots of it in earlier years) - to a whole new dimension of consciousness. Months later, my formal 5=6 working culminated in a rather climactic occurence of Samadhi upon the actuality of my Holy Guardian Angel. And, I swear, there's no way I was a Master of the Temple at that point! (Or, if I was, then the title is too pathetic a thing to crow about.)
That initial result then deepened, passed through other stages and modes of training, etc. Like Samadhi, it had many deeper layers. But - giving AC, on this 63rd anniversary of his death, all credit, all respect, and all praise as the prophet whose teachings brought me into these results - it would indeed be pathetic if the samadhic result of April 18, 1993 were to be catalogued as the phenomena of an 8=3. With no disparagement to that very significant and sacred step, I also know the limits of where it took me, and, if that was 8=3 then we're going to need a lot more numbers for the stages of development beyond them.
So... the main point of all of this... Crowley may have been equating 5=6 to Dhyana and 8=3 to Samadhi in the period that "One Star in Sight" was written, but I dispute that as a meaningful (let alone accurate) labelling. It places too low a threshold on the 5=6. The threshold I believe accurately describes 5=6 would, most certainly, have been called 8=3 in the old G.D. model, but not in the results-based systems of the New Aeon.
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@Jim Eshelman said
"I'd like to think he took it out before publication because he thought it was simply wrong. The equation of Dhyana as a basic, defining characteristic of the Adeptus Minor grade simply seems (to me) to be far too low a threshold, and only distantly relatable to the phenomena of the K&C of the HGA.
But, on the rare occasion I actively think about it, I worry that it's what he actually thought. Worse, I'm pretty sure that a significant group of his present-day students have that opinion.
Such a characterizing certainly puts the 8=3 passage in a different light. It would leave us with a system where 5=6 is marked by Dhyana, and 8=3 by Samadhi. To me, this is a serious and significant degradation of the A.'.A.'. grade system."
Maybe he put it out because, from what he'd seen, the occurrence of the K&C happens either in dhyana or a low kind of Samadhi?I've read the document many times. Funny that I've had just exactly the same question in my head often. To have Samadhi only in 8=3 seems ridiculous, and, from what I can criticize myself (not well), I'd have to put myself THERE, because... it seems that I can produce a Samadhi of some kind. That in and of itself puts the thing out of the question, and I'd say that I really don't think a low kind of Samadhi is a rare phenomenon.
Maybe one attains some kind of a Samadhi at, say, 6=5, and has developed Samadhi to its fullest at 8=3? This is how I've thought of it before. I've got a memory that you've written that you've attained 8=3? Am I right? So what is your experience?
Ok. So the Magus goes on and becomes the master of Magick. Another question I've had is that doesn't Samadhi change at all at this stage?
