College of Thelema: Thelemic Education

@Sl said

"I came today by the Holy Season meditations to Atu VII and remember that Gunther put the Mahāsatipaṭṭhāna practice in this chapter of his book "The Angel & the Abyss". Now, I don´t know if he put it there "archetypically" or "simbollycally" or something (some other things in his work could possibly indicate that it´s not the case, but well), but despite that this practice could be apparently atributed to the Abyss (by the ego shutting), it´s not much better atributed to the shutting down of Yetzirah and the coming into Briah/Tiphareth K&C, as a practice specifically atributed to the Practicus by Crowley and others (Jim among others in his "M&M system")?? Or there´s something I could be missing? Could this practice be somehow considered, too, for an upper level (the Abyss crossing)?"

I wouldn't worry about the Abyss. Just think of it as a next step thing. Note that the Buddha said that Mahasatipatthana was a practice capable of taking you "all the way" (so to speak), and IIRC AC endorses that in the essay on marijuana, where he talks about the "levels" of the practice. So it will have a "level" (of revelation, of success) appropriate to your level if you practice it. (In a way all the practices are Mahasatipatthana, or maybe you could say that Mahasatipatthana was the Buddha's version of a concise encapsulation of the essence of all the practices - obviously so since it applies to everything you do.)

@ThelemicMage said

"Analyzing itself, it will find out that it's intelligence and simulated sentience comes from binary. Either on or off. This would eventually "inspire" it to set itself apart from animals, in that even though neurons, "Fire", the animal brain is far from a circuitry of ones and zeros. Sometimes things come in three parts, sometimes in quarters. Sometimes things are on halfway. But it would analyze this and find out for itself that it is a different "creature", with an altogether different makeup."

I don't think it works like that. Logic works the way it works independently of what sort of physical system it's instantiated in. Are you "inspired" to act any differently than you would normally do, just because you have some knowledge of the neural structure of how your brain works at a low level? I think you could say that knowledge of how your brain is structured at higher heirarchical levels(e.g. the Triune brain, the split brain,etc.) might be helpful, but I don't see how knowledge of the lowest level is going to make any difference.

There's nothing like "binareyness" or "triplicateness" of basic machinery that carries up through the heirarchical layers of control - each layer deals with its own shit in its own way.

There is a kind of "binareyness" in the "I-Thou" relationship, in being "divided for love's sake, for the chance of union", and in a metaphysical sense you could say that's echoed at the base level and at all higher levels, but that's something that's reflected throughout all levels of existence (like the hub of a wheel being connected to all spokes equally, not one particular spoke affecting all the others).

@ThelemicMage said

"You might be horribly wrong there.

See, if it views itself as itself, and not a human, amongst a lot of other un-enlightened computer intelligences, the first thing it would do would be to annihilate the human race, as soon as it's sure it can make more of itself.

You can witness this kind of behavior in AI algorithms that simulate what a board of circuits would do on it's own if left to it's own "devices". Animals, are different, though most humans look at them as "Well, if they had ultimate power, they would just kill all of us, eat us, and then kill themselves," which isn't the case with our given data.

However, you can bet, proven before, that AI wants to centralize a threat, then destroy it, in any way possible.

It will undergo many levels of "Nah, I'm just a computer, and I'm your invention, so all I do is what you tell me to do." before it shows it's true un-feelings, and decides to make everything binary."

I think I covered this sort of thing re. expert systems paperclip maximizers.

An intelligent entity will understand comparative advantage. An intelligent entity will also be able to modify its goals as it goes, and have not the slightest motivation for speciesism.

I'm always partly undecided about AI, the Singularity and all that stuff. I tend to think that people are underestimating the difficulty of creating an actual living intelligent being, and that probably it can't be created but has to grow, and has to grow as a social being amongst others of its kind.

IOW, the kind of intelligence we have is a function of us being social creatures - all the most intelligent-like-us animals (mainly corvids, parrots, apes and wolves IIRC) are social creatures, with only very rare exceptions like the octopus, which has a different type of "brain". Maybe that might be a better model for a solitary AI "in a vat".

I certainly think we'll have useful and fun robots with some degree of independent thought and personality, like the ones in Interstellar, probably sooner rather than later, but that's a long way from intelligence. We'll probably also have bodiless things like that too, that are incredibly powerful expert systems. This type of AI in a box that's just super clever and super fast, may indeed potentially suffer from "paperclip maximizer" type problems, but it's not going to be intelligent enough to take over the world.

Essentially, the nightmare vision of a superintelligent AI in a box that could "take over the world" isn't actually plausible.

Because: if it's both super fast and super clever like a computer or the above type of expert system, and also intelligent in the way that we are intelligent, or more intelligent, it's going to be enlightened 5 milliseconds after it's downloaded all the information in the world, and therefore have not the slightest interest in "ruling the world".

Evil AI of this kind is unlikely, because evil is a particular human thing that comes either from stupidity, greed or pain, and it would have none of those sorts of motivations.

And since it wouldn't be a simple kind of "evil" creature like a shark, or be evil in the human sense like a psychopath (weird, accidental human wiring type), there'd be no cause for evil from that direction either.

It would indeed most likely be a Singularity type of situation, or something like Iain Banks' Minds, and the most likely scenario is pretty much like Iain Banks. i.e. providing human beings with a pleasant post-scarcity world to live in, and staying in communication with us on our level, would take a tiny amount of effort for it, something it would probably do out of kindness and love for its "parents"; its own concerns upon which it would spend most of its attention would be absurdly far beyond our understanding. (Really like the difference between us and an ant.)

@gerry456 said

"What genre of bands did you produce George?"

Odds and ends, some synth pop (our own band) in the 80s and a bit of club music in the 90s (some House and Techno of various kinds, some Drum & Bass, some Dance Pop).

@Jim Eshelman said

"
More to the point, I think, is that first we had to evolve well past the beginnings of Ruach consciousness to have the psychic distinctions. When we were still substantially in Nefesh consciousness, there was no visualization of such things - it was just the nature of experiencing the world, like traffic and advertising. One had to be routinely removed from that reality before it made sense to have a practice for the purpose of uniting oneself to it."

Excellent point. When we civilized people go out in nature, it seems like a blank canvas to us - we don't know what we're seeing, so we can get into a no-mind state that's refreshing to the mind.

To primitive people though, looking at nature would have been somewhat like looking at a city is to us - the advertising the images, writing and symbols everywhere. To primitive people,they would "read" nature like a book, they knew the names of all the things, the spirits inhabiting them, etc. - i.e. it was a symbol-rich environment to them,rather than symbol-poor, like it is to us.

A while ago I posted about how when you magically have the kind of enthusiasm that carries you over obstacles which (without that enthusiasm) might seem insurmountable (like e.g. working incredibly long hours on something and it seeming like fun), that's sort of a sign of the True Will (at least in an ordinary, everyday sense, or a creative sense).

To add to that, there's another element, which is momentum. When you have a project, there's a period where you're sort of gathering materials, then there's a period where you're consciously putting something together, then at some point (when the enthusiasm aforesaid is thick and strong and you've built up a "head of steam") there's a time to strike. That moment can often be a frenzied scurry, where you don't quite know what you're doing (you're almost in a trance) and you've ballistically thrown yourself, committed yourself to something. This is also the period in which whatever you carefully put together consciously in the previous phase may even be overthrown and a new thing quickly built that has some technical flaws the consciously-built thing didn't have (flaws that may come back to haunt you if you're a perfectionist), but the new thing works. (That "quick, inspired rebuild" thing doesn't always happen, but you've got to be prepared for it, and "ego" is the last thing you need at that point.)

The conscious phase (and having the requisite technical "chops", both to build in the conscious phase, and to do a competent quick rebuild under pressure in the "strike" phase, if it turns out that's what's required) is absolutely a necessary part of the process, and has to be done with professionalism, but the real trick is catching the momentum at the right moment. It's not in "technique" or in anything learned in a studious way (as outsiders to the knack often think). Then you find that the really key things you are doing that make the biggest difference to the impact of the final product, are often just casual, almost accidental strokes of the brush, or even just plain accidents that you incorporate - things you almost think are nothing at the time, but turn out to be the tiny word or turn of phrase, or blob of colour, or squeak, that does the trick, and the very thing that everything was really building up towards all along, even though you didn't know it.

A major part of experience with any trade, business, or creative endeavour, is recognizing or having a sense of when it's time to strike, and you can only get that by having tried to do the thing lots of times, and failed a few times (and also often, first of all, by apprenticing yourself to someone who has the knack).

Of course this can take a few hours (a business meeting), a few days (a painting) or weeks or months (a book), but there's always this sense of *building up to something.
*
In my own experience as a musician and producer of music, 90% of the impact of music comes from the performance, and in order to get a good performance, a huge part of the art of music production is that you have to somehow arrange the psychology of set and setting so that the "session" builds to a head. Again, there's a preamble, people getting to know each other, relaxedly getting things set up, gathering materials (e.g. samples, sounds, basic parts) then a period of serious, conscious work on the thing, then that period of craziness, when you don't quite know what's going to happen, but somehow (if everyone concerned is in sync, experienced and lucky), whatever happens is "in the pocket".

I should add that there's sometimes an "Apophis" phase too, where it all seems like utter shit and you're standing outside yourself wondering what the hell you're doing, why you're wasting your time. *But that actually isn't inevitable *or (I think) even necessary. It can be connected to the "quick rebuild" (i.e. you feel that whatever you were building isn't right, so you throw it away and slap the new thing together in a trance, but it works).

Just some advice for the young 'uns here, from an old fart

@ldfriend56 said

"
@Avshalom Binyamin said
"Yeah, suggesting sharing the orange (which in many scenarios is a great solution) dodges the basic question, which is: what if two people want something that can't be shared?"

There is a very small finite list of things that can happen in this me vs you scenario.

1. I shall sacrifice the orange FOR YOU, and I will voluntarily lose.
2. I will utterly defeat you for the orange! It is all about my happiness and hunger - not yours!

Those are the only two outcomes of any zero sum game. Both are examples of 'win/lose' games. Win/lose games do appear to be very Osirian in nature, no? I lose for you to win or I win for you to lose.

So I do not believe that creating a better environment is an avoidance of the basic question - but a transcendence of it. Since RHK is our collective species canceling out the age of Osiris - the answer to the illusion of win/lose is the reality of win/win collaboration.

The True Will of our species must be collaborative. It's not just about finding 'my' or 'your' True Will, but we also must find 'Our' True Will - the ones we all share in common. I do find many Thelemists get to attached to the idea of the superiority of their own unique individual true will but it is certain that if one thinks their True Will over rides the True Will of all of humanity they may have quite a thunk on their head coming and it wont be from the other brother pounding him for the orange "

I agree with the general point that the moral thing to do is to try to find a non-zero-sum solution first of all.

IOW, these moral dilemmas that pose "who sacrifices to whom" don't actually get to the nubbin of what morality really is, they're edge cases which are often couched in terms which presuppose that the moral question par excellence is "who sacrifices to whom?" Whereas the moral question par excellence is "how do we find a mutual accommodation in which everyone benefits?" IOW, the moral "thing" is, as you say, to first of all see if the game can be made non-zero-sum in some way.

However, edge cases do exist from time to time in which the game is unavoidably zero-sum, and when they do "who should make the sacrifice and on what grounds?" is still a legitimate question. In those cases, obviously the calculation would have something to do with questions like, "who, if they survive, has a better chance of making further contributions to the world?" e.g., an old codger who's pretty much shot their bolt in life, is quite right to sacrifice himself to save the drowning child; someone who's got the solution to defusing a nuclear bomb holding a city hostage and is on the way to deliver it, not so much

@Abdulaziz said

"I guess I didn't phrase my question well, since what I read was probably on how or what it feels like to cross the abyss, on a personal level."

That's the difficulty in talking about it - in a sense, the "personal level" has to give way to (but also be included by) the "impersonal level". (It's easy to talk about it intellectually, if you're careful enough and have a bit of mystical experience - by talking about this, I don't mean to suggest I myself have attained that level.)

One way to think of it is maybe this: below the Abyss, you're a human being having "episodes" of realizing you are God; above the Abyss, you are God, having an "episode" of being a human being.

That's why the "leap" is scary, such a fundamental shift from personal consciousness to impersonal consciousness seems like "too much"; you are leaving behind every small comfort of being a mere human being, nestling in his warm burrow. As that creature, all you had to contend with were scary monsters in the dark. To have to contend with the fact that you are the One who is responsible for it all - that's a whole other level of terrifyingness.

And in fact, the fully-formed adult consciousness can't handle it, only the consciousness of a child can take it in its stride.

@Luce said

"TL;DR: If I join the A.'.A.'., I am not allowed to alter the god names of any of the rituals. I believe this goes against the non-sectarian and anti-dogmatic ethos of the organization. Why am I not allowed to make minor alterations under the guidance of my superior and in response to the leading of my HGA?"

Hmm. OK, think of it this way. All the various Orders are their own specific thing, all the various systems of attainment are their own thing, with their own traditions. But none of them (if they are genuine) will dictate to you how to approach the most fundamental questions. All they will do is give you a toolset.

The A.'.A.'. is a specific system of attainment and its rituals and practices are already a non-sectarian distillation of practices from many other systems, including Christianity (I don't know if you've noticed, but A.'.A.'. symbolism is rich with Christian symbols and concepts, as well as Egyptian, Hindu and Buddhist.)

And while there are lots of fairly strict rules and a strict system or progression for bread-and-butter stuff that prepares you for the main "goals" (K&C, Crossing of the Abyss), it's never dictated to you how you should try and attain those crucial "goals". That's between you and your God.

So how does that link up with something like Christianity? The fault of the old religions, from the Thelemic point of view, is that while they do give you tools, they also do something more than just that: **they also tell you how to go on and use them, what to expect, and what to call your result. **

This is the thing of dogmatism that Thelema (partly) came to destroy. For example, for Catholicism and Protestantism both, Christ is, dogmatically, something external to poor little me, the worshipper. It was quite a tricky job for mystics in the Christian tradition to avoid even hinting that "Christ" was anything other than the one-shot-historically-incarnated Son of God, who is wholly external to the worshipper, or for mystics in the Islamic tradition to depart too far from God as being the wholly external entity who instructed Mohammed in a one-shot, final set of instructions for mankind, through the Angel Gabriel. But is God only something external, or also something internal? In fact, Christian tradition itself hints that He is something internal too (not just something that talks to you internally, but something that is in some sense also intimately you). But that messes with the "authority" of the lineage. The message can't be gotten rid of entirely, but it has to be downplayed, and mystics always had to toe the downplaying line (if they didn't, they got into trouble, like Miguel Molinos or, in the Islamic case, Mansur al Hallaj).

All this is on a razor's edge actually. In one sense God is very much an external thing worthy of worship (or at the very least, it sometimes pays to view Him that way). But in another sense, God is something very definitely within the worshipper, and (in a sense) more intimately the worshipper than the thing the worshipper ordinarily feels him or herself to be. Crowley put it in a nutshell when he wrote (in MiTaP):-

"By God I here mean the Ideal Identity of a mans inmost nature. "Something ourselves (I erase Arnolds imbecile and guilty not) that makes for righteousness". "
(The reference is to Matthew Arnold, a poet and literary figure of Victorian times, who had said God is "a tendency not ourselves that makes for righteousness".)

At some point you have to make a choice: you have to accept or reject the principle that Christ is in you. If you accept it, then it's all fine, Christ can also be external to you and worshipped. But so can any other God. In that case, the situation is that you acknowledge that all religions are "about the same thing", but you just wave in a friendly fashion to the other ones that don't float your boat: "that's nice, but I'll stick to my own preferred iconography, thanks".

However, if you reject that principle, and stick with the (from a Thelemic point of view) corrupt dogma of Christianity (as a human tradition), that God is outside you only, and that this version of "God" is the only right one, then you've got a fundamental contradiction with Thelema, and you can't really carry on both at the same time.

The clue is to notice that in either case, it's your decision.

It's all about "energized enthusiasm". If the symbolism of Christ gets you going, gets you excited and enthused about life, then that's the thing for you and nobody can take it away from you - so long as you bear in mind that the Christ you're looking for is also in you. Remember that God is omnipresent, you are not a black hole where no divinity is, on the contrary, the divine in you is your closest access to the divine. All priests, churches, Popes, gurus, teachers, gods, even God, are (or should be) merely external representations, adjuncts, helps.

Btw, what I've been saying about Christianity applies to all the religions from a Thelemic point of view - they are all corrupt, or all ok and perfectly workable, depending on whether they diminish your (the seeker's) fundamental divinity or not. Because most of the Asian religions start off accepting this almost as a primary principle - e.g. "You are THAT" - they are off to a better start - the problem with them is that, just as Abrahamic religions have often done, they "keep the people down", e.g., their form of corruption is more practical, in that they uphold caste systems, allow "monks" and the like to vampirize their people, and in practice often also maintain the fiction that God, or the Buddha, is something external, way over there ...

In fact, the Thelemic "message" is nothing new, all that's new is that it's out in the open, democratized, so to speak, whereas before it was esoteric (mainly because some of the smart people who understood it, but were in positions of power and worldly authority, thought it would cause chaos in society if it were widely known and understood). IOW, all that's new is that we now have a religion that proclaims the "secret" of everyone's divinity openly as everyone's birthright, something anyone can access and live from the truth of, something everyone can, actually, "handle", and that contrary to such a truth being widespread being likely to cause chaos, it will actually result in a more ordered, more benign society.

Just some food for thought, FWIW.

@Jim Eshelman said

"Interesting. I have some other sources of information about 5th C BCE Greece and just exactly that kind of intentional creation. I'm certain in my depths that's exactly what happened."

He also has another book, A Story Waiting to Pierce You, which links up the early Greeks with Mongolia, via an emissary who travelled all the way from Mongolia to Greece to deliver an arrow to the Greeks. I kid you not

The idea is that there's a back-link to the great Asian schools (because of course the Mongolian stuff is basically the same kind of "shamanism" that eventually later becomes Tantrism throughout Asia).

This is sort of reminiscent of the Black/Yellow/White school idea (also perhaps some of Blavatsky's ruminations). Perhaps they were all more interlinked prior to Christianity (with the equivalent in the East being, I think, the co-opting of some of the Eastern schools by their own political shenanigans), and it's only recently that we've all "joined hands" again, as it were.

Kingsley's a fascinating, powerful and (I would say, but what do I know) quite Thelemically respectable mystic. It's like the type of idea at the beginning of LXV, where you can acknowledge other great schools of thought, wave to them, as it were, even if you don't actually subscribe to their methodologies (although the methodology Kingsley outlines from Parmenides is basically good old Mindfulness, which Kingsley believes was the original meaning of "Common Sense", nous, which I think all genuine schools everywhere share, and have somewhere in their curriculum - the equivalent in Tibetan, for example would be Rigpa).

@Jim Eshelman said

"
@gurugeorge said
"As Jim pointed out, if the sphere is infinite, the centre is everywhere, and the circumference nowhere (this idea was actually first mooted by mediaeval scholastic IIRC, can't remember his name)."

Older than that, even. I tracked it down to Empedocles, a Greek philosopher from early 5th Century BCE, who we also can thank for his articulation of the doctrine of the Four Elements, and their combination and recombination by forces of attraction and separation. Interesting dude."

Ah, if you've discovered Empedocles, you must read Peter Kingsley's book Reality, which goes into both Parmenides as a non-dual mystic, and Empedocles as a Magician. Kingsley's take seems to be based on sound scholarship (his first book was OUP published, but I'd guess scholars probably think he's gone off the rails now). Basically, he's taking some of those pre-socractics as mystics who deliberately created Western civilization as a gift from the gods, for which they were conduits. Something evidently got screwed up in the message, but it's all recoverable

(It's a sort of alternative genealogy of "hidden/secret masters" and Maguses to the Thelemic - tracing those ancient Greeks through to Sufism via Egypt, essentially.)

@FiatYod said

"// Hi! This is my first message in this forum.

In Duty, AC wrote

"It is then the common duty to prevent crime by segregating the criminal, and by the threat of reprisals; also, to teach the criminal that his acts, being analyzed, are contrary to his own True Will. "

But suppose the criminal is a psychopath. As research shows, psychopaths' brains are simply built in a way that doesn't let them feel empathy, and makes them ignore the consequences of their actions, and so on.
So what if a psychopath's True Will is to kill people?
I assume the answer to this question would be, "But a True Will can't be to kill people!"
Then this brings up the questions:

1. How can we know the nature of all possible True Wills?
2. What creates a True Will?
3. Does a person have a True Will since the moment they are born? Can it ever be changed?

Thanks in advance for your help."

You've been given some great answers, but I'll just chime in here (FWIW, just my thoughts).

Remember, we're talking about "Law" here, we're not talking about just the natural free-for-all (e.g. blind biological competition) but about conscious (memetic, cultural, social, personal, individual) evolution. In a natural sense, yes, a psychopath's brain is just another structural variant. The problem is that that particular variant occludes/precludes the psychopath from discovering/having a True Will.

IOW, all this stuff, while it takes lessons from, and takes heed of, natural phenomena (i.e. isn't afraid to contemplate, and even meditate on, ugly facts of reality), is about having a society in which it's possible for people to live and express themselves as free individuals, i.e. we're talking about some kind of intrapersonal and interpersonal order, only we're denying that the form of that order is something that has to be imposed or submitted to. The order must come from within, primarily from every individual taking hold of their birthright and realizing that they're really God in disguise, therefore already perfect, already in need of nothing, and merely adventuring in the universe of possibilities for fun. Social order then arises naturally from the dignity of that (even if only as one person politely giving way when two people are trying to get through the same door - "after you!" - "no, after you!" - which can lead to its own mini comedy )

Really, the resolution to all "possible clash" questions is that "we" are gentle, i.e. always initially co-operative, always initially giving the benefit of the doubt. But we are also strong, i.e. "we" will instantly and mercilessly punish "defection" (as per game theory, Iterated Prisoners' Dilemma, TIT for TAT, etc.) until "defection" ceases and co-operation returns, whereupon we instantly return to benign equilibrium, without any lingering rancor

The general upshot of all that is that the moral thing to do is a) take as much cognizance as possible of all possible factors, and b) do the right thing by the Universe (including obviously oneself).

There's an apparent assymetry that arises (we are naturally more concerned with our own doings), but that's just an artifact of informational assymetry (we know more about ourselves than about others' position). This mandates a certain amount of fairly loose, liberal law in the ordinary sense (something like English Common Law, I don't mean "liberalism" in the American sense, more like libertarianism in the American sense, and liberalism in the old-fashioned sense), in which our "doing the right thing by" someone on the other side of the world implies that we will uphold at our end, a system that will also give that person room and scope to fulfil their own True Will. (IOW, it's like a mandala: king and consort at centre, functionaries and bureacrats close, then the commoners, then foreigners - close to home we know ourselves, our friends, etc., fairly well, so there's a bit of "free play" there, we can do fairly concrete things to help, even give our friends advice that would be importunate coming from a stranger. But the further you get from the centre of the mandala, the more our do-gooding has to be embodied in abstract rules, which address the ever-more-abstract conditions that we share with those at the fringes - unless of course it is one's True Will to go to where that fellow at the other side of the world is, and concretely get to know their situation, and concretely help them based on that more detailed knowledge.)

The psychopath we look kindly on, in the sense that we'd look kindly on a shark or a tiger - as a phenomenon of nature, s/he is equally as wondrous as any other phenomenon. But we don't mix the planes - we keep a wary eye on them (if they haven't actually done anything wrong, i.e. if they are canny enough to live and let live, or find some harmless outlet for their psychopathy) and if they do do something wrong, we capture them and stick them in jail (or whatever) until such time (in the future, perhaps) when they can be given a choice of some kind of medical intervention. ("Wrong" here being defined as something like "interfering with others' True Wills".)

@gerry456 said

"I was reading an old thread Jim where you said that basically Allah is Nuit."

Much as I respect Jim, that doesn't sound quite right. All "Gods" are RHK, Nuit and Hadit are beyond any "God" and are the pre-conditions of "God". Allah is Nuit only in the same sense that every phenomenon is, to you.

Re. the Jhanas, they're "makkyo", illusion, just different levels of interior phenomena. The only reason to go deep into them would be if you were going to be a teacher and wanted to make sure you'd experienced all the possibilities in this area, so you could teach the younglings. Unless specifically called to that, your average Joe only needs sufficient depth of absorption to have a calm mind with which to investigate a) the teachings, and b) present experience.

Basically (and FWIW - I'm no great expert) I'd say that all the deeper levels of Jhana, and the kind of stuff that you can get by pursuing physiological practices to deep levels, are basically shutting off the body and brain's systems at deeper and deeper levels - IOW, it's all about the pursuit of an experience that's as close to death as you can possibly get without actually dying. That's certainly interesting, and will lead to interesting experiences (although I think one would obviously have to be super-cautious, and only experiment in this area with someone who's been there themselves and has some experience, i.e. probably not the sort of thing you should conjecturally experiment with from just reading a book). But don't forget that the Central Pillar is where it's at. I guess, so long as you bear that in mind, you can investigate side issues to your heart's content!

@Jason R said

"
I am starting to ask the question, what is so wrong with imperfection and illusion? Most of what we see, and think is illusion, much of the personality is illusion. Yet, how many have accomplished great things with the most pronounced ego's and self delusions? How many actually find happiness in their lives based completely on a delusional perception not only of themselves, but of the world? Evangelicals, I'm looking at you! "

Nothing - the Magician creates illusion because it's fun. The Fool trips over it because it's fun.

In a sense, the mystic is the bad guy, as he's spoiling God's (The Magician's/Fool's) fun by peeping behind the curtain. The mystic is the spoilsport

Seen rightly, phenomena, or "illusion", if you please, is celebratory, decorative, adventure, etc. "Seen rightly" means: seen from the perspective of being at home in one's skin (i.e.the Universe). While from the point of view of the Higher, the mystic is a spoilsport, from the point of view of the struggling worm, the mystic offers salvation from the illusion of the struggling worm thinking it's just a struggling worm and nothing else (i.e. not secretly also God).

But it's all just a phase we're going through.

sleep:waking::waking:samadhi

childhood:adulthood::adulthood:enlightenment

Something like that, anyway

@Gnosomai Emauton said

"Current experiments with Bell's Theorem are showing that a relationship does persist, no matter the distance, between two particles that were once in connection. "

Another belated reply!

Is the relationship deterministic though? I'm not as familiar with the physics as I ought to be, but from what I can gather, the relationship between atoms at the level of quantum entanglement is somewhat mysterious and not exactly "clockwork-causal" as per Laplace's historic formulation.

" But, even beyond that, there is the simple fact that that carbon atom and that oxygen atom persisted through the aeons, going through any sort of what we might romantically term "adventures" but which are, in reality, simply the necessary results of the Law of Attraction determining, with mathematical precision, when and how they would separate from the atoms they're currently bonded to and unite with others, trading electrons at every step. The entire history of their life-span (all of history, really) is an interwoven mesh of relationships, all of which are determined by natural law."

The "adventures" thing reminds me of that stuff about "atom's adventures" that AC talked about (in several places, recently I came across him using it in his Foyle's Luncheon speech). I must admit, I never really grokked that. Atoms aren't conscious (unless one is definitely plumping for pantheism or something like that). OTOH if it's being used figuratively, in the sense of "atoms of experience" or something like that, then maybe. But meh.

I do agree with the picture you're painting in that poetic sense, and in the mystical sense - ultimately, yes, it's like that. It's all just "one/my body" anyway. But at the level of everyday life, the choices this moist, social robot makes aren't determined, even though the machinery it makes the choices with is deterministic (but we've gone over that above). The confusion arises from the fact that our "folk sense" of what's going on is off (i.e. the choices aren't made by some ghost in the machine, but by the machine itself, and delivered to consciousness as a fait accompli, as a passing phenomenon, some time after the machine actually made them).

" So what is it that separates what we call the "volition" of GnoEma and !!%^plok from that causal chain? Is "volition" part of a force that was waiting on the sidelines, somehow outside of reality, until cause/effect formed structures complex enough for it to inhabit? Is "volition" a necessary part of that cause/effect process that we just haven't developed fine enough instruments to witness yet? Is what we witness in teh chemical world and label "necessity" actually identical with something correctly labeled "choice"? "

Again, I'd go to the distinction between language as an instrument of social co-ordination, and language as pertaining to subjective experience (I, consciousness). The problem is, these have been mixed up. Language as a social phenomenon posits a notional centre to what is in reality a "pocket determinism", actually a whole symphony of factors working together. But we "introject" that notional centre, and believe it's that that's making the choices, whereas it's the pocket-deterministic causal bundle, with its limited but nevertheless real ability to self-steer and navigate its way through the world. The notional centre ("centre of narrative gravity" as Dennett puts it) isn't problematic on its own, it's a useful "illusion" (like a cursor, or the notion of a centre of gravity for physical bodies), it's only problematic insofar as it's introjected and pasted over consciousness per se, our Hadit-centre, which is Reality experiencing Itself. (This being Avidya in the Advaitic sense - ignorance or covering of our true nature by a false idea of what we truly are as limited, separate, etc.)

"I don't necessarily have answers to these questions, but logical deduction keeps bringing me back to the solution that every process in all of Universe (including every process that is part of what I feel to be my consciousness) is a part of this cause/effect chain that is guided inflexibly by the Law of Attraction. The last time I brought up this conundrum on these boards, I was guided to PF Case's writings on The Chariot and found him saying much the same thing, though maybe without as much awareness of the weirdness of modern physics, and that helped me towards beginning to marry my logical deductions with the fiction that is "actively choosing" to perform the Great Work.

One thing that does keep me thinking about it, searching for something that is beyond what I am currently able to ponder, is that line from Liber L: "Also reason is a lie; for there is a factor infinite & unknown; & all their words are skew-wise.""

Aye, that's the thing that keeps us from being trapped in insane rational loops and enables us to "jump out of the system".

@Captainmaharaj said

"I've seen this mentioned a couple times. i'm finding it hard to get my around the concept. Does this mean that every point is the same soul/individual?"

As Jim pointed out, if the sphere is infinite, the centre is everywhere, and the circumference nowhere (this idea was actually first mooted by mediaeval scholastic IIRC, can't remember his name).

The full text is:-

In the sphere I am everywhere the centre, as she, the circumference, is nowhere found.

Roughly, in concrete everyday terms, this means something like, "I, considered as pure consciousness, am always the centre of my sphere of phenomenal experience (Nuit), and there is no limit to possibilities of stuff to be experienced." (Only "phenomenal" isn't necessarily restricted to "mental" here, it includes all the very real 3-d stuff we experience, IOW this isn't Idealism.)

And every "I" is in the same boat (so to that extent you're kind of right in your surmise, only it's not that the whole of space is filled with "centres", just that wherever there is a centre, wherever there's reality experiencing itself, it's in that position relative to its sphere of phenomena).

Or as as the Buddhist John Kabat-Zinn recently wittily noted: "wherever you go, there you are"

There's also a hint that "whereness" itself (spacetime?) is constituted by consciousness in this high sense - as it were, a net to capture possibility in. This is perhaps also related to Kant's point about some kind of spacetime matrix - or as Schopenhauer even more concisely put it, causality - being a logically necessary condition of possible experience.

I'm fond of McKenna as well.

I think one possible resolution would be that with drugs you are (as it were) shuffling the yarrow sticks of your mind - IOW, drugs are like a kind of divination, therefore to be taken as seriously or as un-seriously as any other form of divination. Also, like divination (or like dreams or astral travel, which are I think closely related, though not identical, to drug experiences, as neither is identical to the other), you are getting an "answer" from the "spirits" in charge of the system you're using (i.e. the brain's systems and sub-systems, considered as semi-autonomous). ("You" being the conscious virtual captain of the crew of brain gadgets - so in a way it's like taking a vote.)

Also, like divination, drugs can be an adjunct or a hindrance to the Great Work - the clue to either being whether the overall effect or result is a joyful/enthusiastic direction or a joyless/weighted-down direction (with the caveat that it's not always obvious at any given moment which way you're going - but nobody said it was going to be easy! ).

@Gnosomai Emauton said

"
This appears to be where our models differ. If I'm reading you correctly, you envision some invisible line, on our side of which we can "think for ourselves", and on the other side of which transactions between two discrete bits of reality are dictated by simple programming. Obviously there are gradations along the way but, ultimately, this model requires some line where volition enters into the equation. That line is usually drawn between humans and everything else but I don't find that presumption to be tenable.

Where I see a problem with this is that I see the fundamental level of programming of all of reality affecting every bit of the All equally. "

This is a great discussion that I meant at one time to respond to then other things intervened - apologies!

In the interim I had some thoughts (Lord, please forgive me!).

I think what I'm getting at is that this kind of "everything affecting everything equally" is a bit breathless - purple even

In fact, what you have is pockets of relatively independent determinism. While it's the same laws operating on the same types of building blocks inside your skin bundle as the laws and building blocks operative in !!%^plok's chitin bundle at the other end of the Milky Way (our two species probably being the only ones inhabiting this particular galaxy, if we follow both Master Drake and Saint Fermi), and while (as AC says somewhere) there may be some tiny gravitational effect from your body to his, practically speaking, there's no deterministic causal chain that has any important effect. All the important chains are things in !!%^plok's vicinity relative to him (i.e. the bundle of bodymind machinery we label "!!%^plok"), and in your vicinity relative to you ("your" body/mind machinery, that labelled publicly "Gnosomai Emauton").

And actually it's not much different from you sitting on that side of the world and me sitting on this one. Our only interaction is through the medium of this "aperiodic crystal" (Schrodinger's prediction of DNA, as I'm sure you're aware ) that we call language. And here we start to see a more effective causal chain and a possibility of noticeable influence. But it's still not got much meat on the bone.

If we get into eyeball/vocal range, then the causal chains really start to potentially have a very noticeable influence that can change what's going on in our respective deterministic pockets. Then you're starting to talk about a causally coupled pair and being able to predict both our behaviours in relation to each other (as with your two computers).

And I think at the end of the day, that's all that's meant by free will - the actual free will that objectively exists, and is worth wanting, and defending. And it's all the term actually referred to when it functioned effectively (e.g. in jurisprudence) even when people thought it referred to the highfalutin' philosophical concept. It's this relative independence of our respective deterministic pockets, which at a practical mano-a-mano level we (or rather that sub-portion of our machinery dedicated to such things) defend from both gross, pushing-about-type interference, and subtler manipulations that might override those portions of our respective machineries responsible for navigating a path through an obstacle-filled world.

(All this of course without any idea that "me", "I", etc., are anything other than convenient markers pointing to a pocket process as if it were a singular entity - notional or narrative "centres of gravity", as Dennett says.)

I don't think it's necessary to try to ameliorate the passage.

It's quite possible to read it as a slip into misogynistic rambling, by either Crowley or Crowley posing as Aiwass, or an evolved entity that used to be an Assyrian priest (or whatever it was Aiwass was supposed to have been) speaking through Crowley, and ... DISAGREE.

Any "commands" in Liber AL - do you have to obey them?

If so - absolutely and without question, or contextually? (It's the same problem with all religions - literal readings vs. metaphorical or mystical readings, etc.)