College of Thelema: Thelemic Education

I'll go off and work on this independently for a while before responding further. I can see how this sort of discussion could get tedious quickly, if it hasn't already Thank you both for the replies!

I apologise if this is frustrating; I appreciate the response nontheless.

I am not presupposing that the attributions are incorrect. I am saying I do not see how a visions concordance with pre-memorised attributes demonstrates that those attributes are natural as opposed to conventional.

I agree that this is probably something best resolved through further experience rather than speculation, but I'd just like to give an example of why I find myself thinking about this.

Mercury's colours in the 777 attributions are given as (KS) Violet Purple (QS) Orange (ES) Red-Russet (EsS) Yellow-Brown flecked white. The precious stone given is Opal / Fire Opal.

I'm happy to learn these attributions. If I was to look at how Mercury 'appears' in Tantric / Vedic systems however, he appears as Budha, who is associated with the colour green, with emerald as his precious stone, and the number 5. In some depictions, he has 8 horses, which is more consonant with the Hod attributions, but yet, the rest of these, if encountered in a vision, would suggest some bleedthrough of Netzach into the vision.

I understand that the A.A is not a Tantric or Vedic system, but if I'm looking at these two sets of attributes - what is it that is supposed to demonstrate one's accuracy, in the sense of reflecting a natural, universal, non-personal, and in some sense 'objective' facet of reality over the other?

If both are correct, and are simply different cultural overlays producing different astral manifestations, then surely both systems of correspondence are conventional, as opposed to natural? Surely both are aiming at the same Mercury on a briatic level?

If I invoke Mercury and see emerald green dominating a vision, rather than any of the colours of the four scales associated with Hod in my vision, by Liber O, this would be a poor result. And yet, I would not be able to give a good reason for why I had not successfully invoked Mercury as Hod, rather than Netzach, other than it not matching up with the 777 correspondence, despite other attributions given to Mercury existing elsewhere.

""He is tested in “the Spirit Vision” or “Astral Journeying” by giving him a symbol unknown and unintelligible to him, and he must interpret its nature by means of a vision as exactly as if he had read its name and description in the book when it was chosen.""

This test can only be performed if those conducting it have an agreed consensus of symbols to draw upon. It makes absolute sense to me that this is useful, in terms of being able to direct one's visions to a definite place that others can interpret according to their convention. It does not however, at least for me, advance the idea that these attributions are in any way natural, or provide a reliable means of testing knoweldge past the synthetic aspects of the tree.

"Maximum convenience is our canon of truth!" - is one response to all this; in which case, that the attributions work well enough for ceremony and within the A.A system seems fair. To which I'd say - well, what else works? And why?

Despite growing up in London, my family is Hindu, and I see no reason to adopt the attributions given to certain forces in the associated Indian traditions over the ones given in the GD / Crowley systems. I also see no reason to assume one is more natural than the other!

After a few minutes of relaxation, I can induce visions with symbolic content that seems to modulate between mental ephemera and translations of surface personality vikalpas, to symbolic content that seems to resonate with deeper portions of myself as an individuated consciousness; much in the same way that dreams seem to appear along an axis between my everyday concerns, desires and anxieties, to those parts of me that feel ancient, pristine and towards the transpersonal. Would it be right to suppose that this is moving between the lunar - solar axis, and with repetition and practice, will lead to something like the Sleep of Siloam trance? Or is that practice entirely distinct?

Whether in dreams or trance, it seems strange to me to subordinate those symbols that the subconscious throws up fairly fluidly to a semiotic system I had to learn, and ensure visions conformed to.

Hi Jim, thanks for your reply.

This line of questions actually comes as a result of reading 'Rehabilitating Subconsciousness' and trying to enter into a more productive relationship with aspects of myself which I feel have been throwing up obstacles. I notice one part of my mind has a tendency towards stereotyping experience, systematising and ritualising, and another part of my mind resists the former viciously, resisting any such attempts to 'impose' a system, and is especially hostile to the idea of adopting any set of symbols that have not arisen spontaneously. The first side of my mind might find a dream dictionary interesting and informative, the other side would find it hopelessly conventional and an affront to the intimacy of mind required to interpret one's dreams and their personal symbols usefully,

This obviously brings up issues with my study of Qabalah and ceremonial magick. I can accept this conflict represents an immature stage of development, but when approaching my subconscious in dialogue, asking why it seems to find this conflict so loathsome, I got a response that had me thinking about Liber O, the testing of visions and the evaluation of knowledge more generally.

Crowley's advice on the kind of delicate agnosticism he finds important in pursuing the practices seems appropriate. But if the correspondences are natural or universal, why is it required to saturate the mind in those symbols prior to invoking the vision first? If I'd never seen the Statue of Liberty but had excellent directions and could follow them well, I could discover she was a lady for myself. If that saturation is required first, is there any certain way to know whether one is 'tuning' consciousness to a universal, public, symbol or simply recreating it in conformity to an act of subconscious memory?

Let's say Mars is invoked in the body of light, one sees a landscape that is of the correct colours, mythical creatures, smells, materials associated with Gevurah etc. Is the value in the exercise in being able to tune the mind to a natural reality or to be able to recreate an adopted convention faithfully, and ultimately, how could you tell the difference? Is it perception or recreation?

Similarly, you question a spirit and ask its name, which you calculate a value for later, finding it to be consonant with the force invoked. If the spirit is an aspect of your personal portion of the reef, what's stopping it from using aspects of your intellectual structure around gematria in a non linear fashion to simply calculate the value you'd agree was significant after a manual calculation later? Dreams seem to display all kinds of non linear ingenuity while representing portions of my subconscious, why couldn't astral visions be similarly non linear in their calculations, and still be delusory?

My sense is that there's an intuitive knack that develops after a while of practice, but if that knack can't be systematised, where is the value in the common methods of testing visions qabalistically?

It makes sense to want to be able to invoke pure forms of force, elemental or astrological, but I'm not sure why the test of the successful invocation of that force shouldn't be more peculiar to the individual.

I am particularly interested in the Sleep of Siloam, in contrast to the lunar sleep, and the perception of images fashioned by the true will. I imagine to recognise such a distinct trance requires a much more demanding, much more spontaneous intimacy of mind and self; it seems somehow absurd to think these visions' symbolic contents would never deviate from the traditional correspondences, or that at such a stage, such considerations are necessary to be 'double checked' for their veracity.

I hope these don't sound like entirely idle thoughts!

1. What would one expect to see and experience in using the hexagram ritual to invoke a planetary force in the Body of Light, and having done so successfully?

2. Why are the tables of 777 memorised first prior to making invocations of particular forces? If the correspondences represent facts of nature in some way, wouldn't they be able to discovered without prior memorisation? Wouldn't it be better to attempt to invoke the force/idea, observe results, and then compare them to the correspondence tables afterwards?

Apologies if I have misunderstood the nature of the exercise here. If the idea is, in testing particular aspects of a vision, to ensure that the right idea has been invoked cleanly and effectively, surely memorisation makes the exercise more one of testing the congruence of the vision to subconscious memory, rather than anything more 'objective', which might be better tested without the aid of memory prior to receiving the contents of a vision.

If each aspirant has an astral universe peculiar to them, are the correspondences an attempt at establishing a conventional, consensus set of interrelated pieces of information? Why is knowledge of a convention that has to be pre-memorised valuable?

What do you make of the following passages from Liber Aleph? I'd be particularly interested in how female Thelemites approach and understand these selections:

DE VERITATE QUEM FEMINAE NON DICERE LICET.

My Son, I charge thee, however thou beest provoked hereunto, tell not the Truth to any woman. For this is that which is written, Cast not thy pearls before swine, lest they urn again and rend thee. Behold, in the nature of woman is no truth, nor apprehension of truth, nor possibility of truth, only, if thou entrust this jewel unto them, they forthwith use it to thy loss and destruction. But they are ware of thine own love of truth, and thy respect thereunto, so therefore hey tempt thee, flattering with their lips, that thou betray hyself to them. And they feign falsely, with every wile, and cast about for thy soul, until either in love or in wrath or in some other folly thereof, thou speak truth, profaning thy sanctuary. So was it ever, and herein I call to my witness Samson of Timmath, that was lost by this error. Now for any woman, any lie sufficeth; and think not in thine extremity hat truth is mighty, and shall prevail, as it does with any man, for with a woman her whole craft and device is to persuade thee of this, so that thou utter the secret of thy soul, and become her prey. But so long as thou feed her with her own food of falsity, thou art secure.

DE NATURA FEMINAE.

The nature of woman, o my Son, is as thou hast learned in our most Holy Qabalah; and she is the clothing in sex of man, he magical image of his will to love. Therefore was it said by thine uncle Wolfgang von Goethe: Das Ewigweibliche zieht uns hinan. But therefore also hath she no nature of truth, because she is but the Eidolon of an excitement and a going of hy star, and appertaineth not unto its essence and stability. So then to thee she is but matter and to her thou art but energy, and neither is competent to the formula of the other. Therefore also thy will is itself imperfection, as I have shewed thee aforetime, thou art not in the way of love except hou be dressed in that robe of thine which thou callest woman. And thou canst not lure her to this action proper to her by thy truth; but thou shalt, as our grammar sayeth, assume the mask of the spirit, that thou mayst evoke it by sympathy. But thou shalt appear in thy glory only when she is in thy power, and bewildered utterly by ecstasy. This is a mystery, o my Son, and of old times it was declared in the fable of Scylla and Charybdis, which are the formula of the rock and the whirlpool. Now then meditate thou strictly upon his most worthy and adorable arcanum, to thy profit and enlightenment.

93 FiatYod!

Thanks for the welcome. I haven't heard from him since summer 2014. I have a great deal of respect for him, but, as far as Goetic evocation goes, I would approach things very differently now.

www.astro.com > Free Horoscopes > Natal Chart, Ascendant / Extended Chart Selection

It also gives you the option to select a variety of zodiac and house systems. Free, and if you register you can store quite a few charts there.

I'm also currently trying to improve my visualisation skills using Liber E. Different people have different approaches towards visualization, and it might be an idea to change the order you approach the tasks in section 5.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_systems_(NLP

Perhaps your preferred representational system is more auditory than visual, for example. Section 8 asks you to imagine the sound of a waterfall, the smell of roses, the ticking of a watch etc. You may find one of these immediately easier, and once you have a feeling for the sort of mental knack involved, you might be better able to apply that to the representational system you are less fluent with, the visual.

What happens when you daydream? Think of the prettiest girl (or guy) you know giving you a blowjob. Is that easy to picture? Make the daydream as vivid as possible, and engage as many of your imaginary senses as possible. If you don't enjoy blowjobs, maybe try to recreate a scene from a film you like as vividly as possible. Which senses do you find it easy to recreate, which do you find more difficult? Once you have an idea, focus on the weaker aspects until they improve.

For example, I find it a lot easier to visualise the moving systems Crowley describes (pendulum swinging, a wheel revolving, etc) but am fairly terrible at holding the Tattwas still in my mind, but I'm practicing! Good luck.

Moment to moment awareness conditions a lot of our relationship with the body, and speaking as someone who has experienced depersonalisation, a great deal of the time I think it's due to an inability to accept certain elements of the 'content' of those moments that creates the detachment that leads us to feel disconnected from the body.

Unwillingness to confront emotional aspects of one's everyday reality can manifest as fantasy, of which the complexes involved in anxiety are a subset. Rumination over the past, an impatience with the present, and projection into desired or feared future scenarios all can pull awareness from that less than ideal present, and once developed into a habit, depersonalisation can be an extreme result.

Personally I have found the Buddhist loving-kindness meditations to be extremely helpful. Superficially, it seems to be a wishy washy feel good bland sort of thing, but past the more shallow presentations of it, metta-bhavana has more profound aspects rarely articulated. The practice usually goes something like: think of someone you love, and feel a genuine sense of warmth, love and compassion for them, a friend, family member, etc. Once you have generated this feeling palpably, then move onto someone you like a little less, then someone you like even less, until you come to people you feel little of anything for. Past that is where it can get interesting. You then focus on people you find casually irritating, and then people you've had confrontations or more significant problems with, and try to generate the same level of compassion and love for them. Bland, simpering compassion works, but as a creative exercise, it's worth trying to find a perspective on the person in which you feel genuine, authentic kindness for that person. The practice is then extended to larger groups of people, the world, and eventually, all sentient beings.

Superficially, the practice is about being nicer to people. The effect it ends up having is rehabilitating one's relationships to mental objects (including one's perception and experience of the body) as all the people you think of during the practice are mental objects. This bleeds out into your moment to moment awareness more globally, as well as your perceptions of the world, so often conditioned by fear and other barely perceptible traumas that more methodical, rational analysis are far too slow to uncover. Further to that end, Jim has an essay in Pearls of Wisdom called Rehabilitating Subconsciousness that I found extremely helpful, and your friend may too. I hope she's doing better now.

For anyone interested, here's a paper in which researchers applied Buddhist loving-kindness meditation to treat schizophrenia, whose cluster of symptoms frequently include depersonalisation. Researchers found the practice to greatly reduce baseline symptoms in patients.

ocrates.berkeley.edu/~akring/JCP%20Johnson.et.al.2009.pdf

93 Hermitas!

Thank you for the welcome. I think you're right to identify the Neptune-Saturn configuration in Sagittarius, as Pluto in Sag would have been transiting conjunct those planets at around the time I had my episode last year. The Sun-Neptune trine in my chart would have been inflamed by the Pluto contact in a fire sign, aggravating tendencies towards self delusion and a confusion of "inner/outer" projections.

You've also identified my misunderstanding of that aspect of the oath; Jim's comments elsewhere on not interpreting every phenomenon as a communication were also helpful, and pinpoint exactly what my mind was doing at the time. My mind was stuck in a strained state of overanalysis to the point that symbols, mental shorthand, were becoming confused with the realities they represented. There's a certain validity to this, in that I feel that a perceived 'logical' connection between any two ideas is largely aesthetic, and agreed upon for the sake of convenient manipulation and navigation of the physical world. Pushed to the absurd points I took it to leads to a breakdown of the membrane between conscious and subconscious content, the ruach assuming any appropriate form to express unacknowledged unconscious content in the most direct way possible, associative rather than logical; evocative narratives as opposed to accurate apprehension. Dust devils! I believe this explains the reason for the rapid ego-inflation along very mundane lines, and I think paranoid schizophrenic delusion works along similar lines.

Though these tendencies existed in me prior to this event, I think to a large degree my 'lust of result' and careless employment of the Mahavidya Yantras and Mantras lead to a premature kundalini event, which further exacerbated all of the above. Though the experience was embarrassing, the psyche's equivalent to shitting one's pants in public, past being necessary, it was useful. Humbling. I am trying to attend to a much more basic set of disciplines now and building on them in a less impatient way.

Eventually, I would like to look at the tantric Mahavidya tradition (the mantra and spells, the obeah and the wanga...) again, as I feel there is much there that may compliment Thelemic thought. I know Crowley wrote a poem on Kali, though the other formulations of shakti energy in the Mahavidya tradition I feel will be more appropriate to explore when I am more balanced and established in the preliminaries.

I appreciate your concern about the crazy, but I will say I've been stable for quite a while now, and have no desire to unleash anything on anyone. Your pointers are appreciated - most posters on the board strike me as friendly and helpful, and I would hope to contribute to that atmosphere.

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