College of Thelema: Thelemic Education

@anistara said

"The iffy part of the (peer reviewed) article:

""Perhaps Marx wasn't too wrong when he called religion the opium of the people: morphine comes from poppies, cannabinoids from marijuana, and LSD from mushrooms; each of these has been used in one or another religious ceremony." said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. ""

(Find the grave error)"

Actually this is correct; LSD is (or at least originally was) derived from ergot, a fungus that attacks grain.

Perhaps the word "mushroom" is not quite as accurate as the word "fungus," however.

Very evocative, I like the atmosphere you set.

Thanks for the warm welcome everyone

I've read RAW's Prometheus Rising, as well as listened to "Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything," which is another interesting exposition of his views on, well, everything, as well as the background behind them.

I've made a few posts here but haven't really introduced myself yet.

I hail from Ontario, north of Toronto. Having been raised Roman Catholic, the world occultism carried negative or evil connotations. However, eventually fundamentalism began to irritate me and so I went through periods of agnosticism and eventually atheism, until my friend, whom I consider a rather apt philosopher, got me interested in occultism. At this point, while the word still carried negative undertones, I just thought them to be the result of uninformed demonization on the part of more extremist or fundamentalist belief systems. However I still thought the whole practice in general to be silly, given that most science as we know it offers little support to occultism (Feel free to correct me here).

Then I got into Robert Anton Wilson, whose tirades against "fundamentalist materialism," as he called it, resonated with me and converted me to a worldview of skeptical empiricism - or, "agnosticism against everything."

So my curiosity has been piqued, and while I have been wandering blind for a while I've decided to start following the Thelemic tradition, one of the most sound, unified, and well-established frameworks I have found, though I still have issues with some aspects of it that are perhaps best suited to their own thread.

This seems like a very intelligent forum of discussion from which I could learn much, and I consider it an honour to be here, though I fear I will have little to contribute.

Given that the standard examination in asana is a saucer filled with water and placed upon the head, what degree of stillness is expected from the practice? I understand that obviously any movement that would spill water would constitute a fail in this form of testing; but what of other movements, such as with the hands or facial muscles, or involuntary ones, which would not spill a drop of water? For example I find sometimes that my eyelids and face are too tense and I must work to relax them, or that I must sometimes readjust my hands to maintain a mudra. Also I find it somewhat difficult to keep my eyes from moving. Are we to attain complete stillness over every single part of the body?

I don't wish to nitpick, but as I understand from Crowley's Eight Lectures, the goal is to reduce as much as possible all sensory input from the body, and so movements of this sort should also be prevented. I just wish to determine how much discipline is needed so I don't run before I can walk and move to more advanced practices without solid grounding.

Furthermore, when would it be acceptable for one to begin practice in pranayama, or for that matter dharana? Is it after a certain duration of time has been achieved in an asana?

Is this something that a complete beginner can dive into, with only a rudimentary knowledge of the Tree of Life and little to no information on anything else? I've only just begun my studies in this field and while I have been practicing the meditations in Liber Theta for about two weeks now I find that I am unable to extract very much meaning or understanding from the symbols, aside from being able to discern vaguely what they represent.