College of Thelema: Thelemic Education

Wow I'm amazed at the negative experiences people had.

Back when I was younger and still hopelessly clueless, me and a friend decided to stage an experiment with the Necronomicon. I had read the entire thing, and did some thinking on it, read the guide to using it practically and set off. We bought the incense, candles, set up the room. About 15 seconds into reading the text my head started ringing , and my mind became quite strange and I was able to visualize very clearly during this time. At the end of the ritual/experiment my entire body was ringing and I felt a beam of light shining out of my head. All in all it was a very positive experience, since it showed that sitting down at a table and reading a couple of paragraphs can really mess with your head (in a good way). Nothing I asked for actually happened, nothing negative in any way happened to me or my friend, but in the end it was a great experience.

To be fair, I agree with Froclown, everything he has said makes perfect sense, and does not require the bending of modern science to suit personal theories about the world. It is also a healthy position, if we were to believe others without scrutinizing and weighing evidence, and checking on methods we would easily be mislead. A god of the gaps argument, like the ones made from the complexity of quantum mechanics, and loss of body weight, are essentially saying look- here is something that we currently do not understand, therefore it proves my world view. I can only imagine how many such arguments were made for rainbows before we understood refraction.

To be more fair yet again, this skeptical position, is the perfect starting point for exploring the occult, personally once I get projection down to a controllable ability, I intend to do experiments on it, to verify one way or another where it is a construct of the brain, or something more objective than that. So I respect the opinions of many people here who may have verified from experiment such things for themselves, but your personal verifications cannot ever be proof to another person.

(Ninja edit: I love this forums stance on sexism in general and in the occult, its nice to see such a healthy stance given Crowley views)

@Tesla said

" and space, and since an expanding universe is the precondition for entropy, what if the universe is not expanding physically?"

Umm, whatever our views on the nature of the universe and its beginning, entropy has been observed. When you drop a droplet of ink into a glass of water and it colours the entire glass evenly you are observing entropy.

"what is the evidence we are only moving towards more complexity all over the physical universe? this is an assumption"

Entropy can be nicely described as chaos/disorder. When the droplet of ink expands in the glass of water, or a canister of pressurized gas is opened in a vacuum, the inevitable happens. If you believe this to be an assumption you can put entropy to the test in hundreds of ways in your own home.

"the pattern could very well be cyclic such that there are alternating highs and lows of greater and lesser complexity over different time periods"

Not really, no. Entropy can be seen as caused by statistics, well more like probability. If you accept a thought experiment of a canister of gas in a vacuum, I can show you. Take a vacuum and a coke can full of pressurized air.
Open the coke can. There is no physical law forcing the air to leave the coke can. In fact the molecules can bounce around nicely without ever leaving the opening. But it is probable that eventually a molecule will bounce into the direction of the opening and leave and begin whizzing around the vacuum. It is also probable that many more will do so. All buzzing around in relatively random directions. What we will observe in reality is the gas leaving the can really fast and not coming back in. But there is a probability that all of the molecules will spontaneously head back into the direction of the can opening and go back into the can. The provability is exceptionally tiny, so small that the event will never occur in the history of the universe. But even if it does, since it can, it will only be a small fluctuation in the ever greater rise of disorder. So what I'm trying to say is all the laws are in place and evident, and they say that the pattern is not cyclic. Do you have reason to believe the pattern is cyclic?

Looking at the more simple meaning of the phrase, Franz Bardon said something to the effect of love under will in "Initiation into the Hermetics". He said something like "love is love, but only under a strong will". It was somewhere in his chapters warning people not to fall prey to astral entities or not to start obsessing over spirits one invokes.

A dark age in science would be terrible, our entire civilization now rests on technology and science, having people chop at the branch they are sitting on seems like a bad prospect.

Dawkins though, I'm a big fan. The Selfish Gene, is one of my favourite books- it answered some of my most fundamental problems with understanding life, and shed light on the entire process. His vocal atheism is a necessary reaction , he's pushing for better science education in schools, for people to think rationally and for themselves.
He hasn't destroyed god, he just has a really good way of explaining complex things, and he used it to discredit many phony reasons for belief, if anything this will cause more people to look into themselves and think about life and their place in it.

Dark Age for religions and faith and ideologies? I hope so, rather see people thinking for themselves to some small degree, even if they arrive at an answer that I don't like, than see people look to religion jut because their parents and tradition did.

I did, and used it for a while, to be honest my imagination is so bad there was hardly any distinguishable feature between an angel and a human figure with human/jackal/hawk/monkey head. And most of what I ever got out of their element attributions is a faint colour.

It did something, not sure what that something is, but it definitely did excite my mind a bit. In the end I think the original is better, not that my opinion on it counts. It was on a blog somewhere, I think it is deleted, but google still keeps a cache of it.

"Right where we are now - it looks like we are at the foothills of a resource war. If you examine the long term political trends and ignore the bs excuses the populace has been given for recent wars (that have allowed the west to reinvest in the army - the UK forces growing by 400% (for instance) by waging war on the cheap to maintain financial dominance) - you can see a clear correlation between preperations for a world war and the time that resources become ultra scarce. You can even see political adjustments occuring as new resources are found to be exploited. What the human race desperately needs is to work together in the same way that we collaborated on the human geonome project - wasting less resources playing prisoners dilema (or whatever - it's been ages since I studied the games) and getting every university and private/public research lab in the world working on developing a source of free energy."

Completely agreed!

I think human societies living near each other = resource war. And we do need a good new source of energy. Good thing fusion is looking more likely than ever.

Having read my way through a few Thelemic books, and what people thought about them and how they are interpreted I am left really puzzled by this.

What is an Aeon? So far I read that there is a change of Aeons, going from Isis to Osiris to Horus, the effects of which can be felt through history, like going from matriarchal religions to patriarchal, and that an Aeon is different to an astrological age, but nowhere does anyone explain even in 2 sentences what an Aeon is... thelemapedia explains their effects but not what they are.

Fr. T.E.U.

" we are experiencing a very real problem in that: we cannot see any true causal chain of events because of the difference in aspects; matter and consciousness; object and subject.
"

We cannot see any true causal chain of events, I agree. So to begin with I can say that neither of us can "win" the argument, we can at best get a more clear picture of the problem

From where I am standing something being subjective does not stop it from being examined or analyzed. The best part being that an external observer (actually a few of them) all observing a "subjective" event can in a way then both perceive it an analyze it as an objective event. Like very detailed and specific shared hallucinations would mean that there was something there, as opposed to it just being the mushrooms.

Same can go for consciousness, while it being subjective fully for the person in question, we standing from the side may to an extent see it objectively, and say something is there, now what can it possibly be?

I wrote that to try to justify that we can still examine consciousness even though its not matter or objective.

** Fr. T.E.U.**

"...Yet people go on making the mistake that: if A brain is damaged, and they seem different therefore, that B consciousness must necessarily have been damaged - which is flawed causal thinking; it "bridges the abyss" without an explanation; in short: it jumps to a conclusion based on objects alone. Does that make more sense now, Andrey? "

Yes it does. You are right, that conclusion would be premature. We have another explanation, that the brain is like a jewel through which light passes. Damage in the jewel does not damage the light in any way.

We should then test both models/hypothesis as far as they can be tested, and see if one can be shown true/more likely.

For the transistor hypothesis we have brain surgery. For the jewel hypothesis we have ? what indication do we actually have of the consciousness possessing some external existance? A melody is not material, shows itself through matter, but Fur Elize wouldnt survive if I nuked the piano, the sheets of paper its written on and the people that can play it...

This got me thinking about astral travel, and how that may be able show that the consciousness can be external to the brain, which then begs the question Why hasnt anyone won the James Randi prize?

Anyways I think I learned something today, Im just not quite sure what it is

Hello everyone

To introduce myself, ill start with that I've been interested in the occult for about 3/4 years or so, slowly getting my way around the main points. Having finally accumulated enough data for now, I am trying my hand at practice, LBRP, breathing meditation as a start.

Discovered Thelema quite recently, mostly researching Hermetic Kabbala until now, but from what I have read of Thelema I identify with, it makes sense to me in some way.

At the end of they day, I still see the world from a scientific paradigm, taking the more subjective view of magic

This being the most mature/intelligent/interesting forum on the topics, I really hope I can learn from you

@ Fr. T.E.U. , about what you said in the first page regarding which atoms in your brain consciousness lies in. (I actually made an account to write this, this topic being so interesting )

Anyways, don't know where I read this metaphor, but it isn't mine.
The question where in the brain consciousness is, which neural pathway is responsible, is akin to asking which transistor in a computer is responsible for synchronising audio and video in a film that is playing. And then using that as an argument for the external existence of audio/video synchronism.

Considering how drugs, brain surgery, brain trauma and disease, affect consciousness itself, it is very difficult for me to think that anything we consider ourselves to be "I" can possibly survive death.