I suppose I should preface this installment by apologizing to the seasoned magician for focusing so much on religious terms. This is directed to those who may have never seriously considered magick a solution to the world's problems. To quote The Prophet: "The Law Is For All." I hope you will nevertheless read through these small installments, perhaps as a reminder of something you may have forgotten or overlooked or maybe remind you of when you first began exploring the occult and didn't have the language to communicate it.
Pax
"... the religions of the world are but symbols and veils of the Absolute Truth. So also are the philosophies." - VVVVV, Liber Porta Lucis
So, what does this mean? It means that Truth, in so much as we can experience it on a personal level, or gnosis, is beyond language. It cannot be communicated the way religious leaders have told us. Again, I must point to the Tower of Babel or The Tower tarot card. But why would these religious leaders lie to us about what they can't deliver? It shouldn't take long for you to answer this question yourself. Give it a minute.
Are there legitimate teachers, gurus, or religious authorities? Of course. A legit teacher will tell you from the very beginning that all they can do is to bring you to the Truth through the use of symbols, numbers, and initiation. Ultimately, the candidate in such a school initiates themselves. They are the ones who must do the Work and are responsible for their own enlightenment. But if someone tells you they can teach you the Truth, they are trying to sell you something. These people usually ask for money or other favors.
Truth, like "God," will manifest differently from one person to the other. Yes, even if they go to the same Church and believe the same things. That is the nature of Truth. It is a highly personal experience, and you will experience it according to where you are in relation to everything else. This is why I feel religion is blasphemy against the Truth.
Confused? Hang on. I've only just started to confuse you.
Priests, ministers, and other religious leaders dedicate entire sermons about how profoundly mysterious God is and how complex his plan (usually he) is, and how we must accept everything as it comes because our puny brains cannot comprehend the magnificence of his (again, almost always he) omnipresence and omnipotence.
Religion is an insult to The Divine they say they adore because it seeks to identify, quantify and trap the idea of God in the puny little brains mentioned above. They do not notice the irony of expecting everyone to have the same experience, results, etc. The belief that a god's message could be codified into a neat one-fits-all package is to assert some superiority over that God by assuming to understand It in its entirety. When one comprehends something, one transcends it. I think even the most faithful would agree that God cannot, by definition, be transcended. The best we can hope for is to understand God's plan for each of us as individuals.
To explain this, I used an example of two people looking at the same pencil in the book I wrote for my children.
Two people can look at a pencil and agree that it is a pencil because our senses have sent our brains similar information. However, since two objects cannot occupy the same space simultaneously, our perceptions will vary because our positions relative to the pencil will differ. This illustrates the great fall of conventional religion. Every sect's perspective of God differs from other denominations, and they will not allow any deviance from their viewpoint. They fail to realize that the experience of the knowledge of God is different for everyone depending on where that person is in relation to the rest of the universe.
As Above, So Below
You hear this phrase a lot. But what does it mean? Our world is a reflection and image of that which is above. It suggests a relationship between those things we think of as divine and mundane. Division only appears to exist because it is challenging to rise beyond the duality of our reality. This, of course, is metaphorical. In a way, that is one aspect of The Great Work: the union of opposites to reveal Truth.
The idea that we must not only accept but embrace inelegance if we are to have the experience of beauty is well known and accepted.
So where does that position put God and the idea that He (again...) is all good? The easy answer, which requires the least amount of brain power, is to simply declare that if God exists, so must the Devil. Nasty business, this duality.
But if only "one God" exists, how can a being like the Devil be equally powerful? Isn't God omnipotent? Like I said: Nasty.
The unexamined mind is incapable of reconciling opposites. Two thousand years ago, man did not have the luxury of time for leisurely pursuits like the Greeks did after creating civilization. This leisure gave birth to Philosophy and the opportunity to question one's beliefs.
Back to God. So, if two omnipotent beings cannot exist, as the Abrahamic religions claim, why does God allow so much evil in the world?
Here are your choices:
There is no God (and therefore no Devil)
God is not the only God
God is both Good and Evil
God doesn't care for humanity
There is no god but man
It's evident that standardized religion has struggled so much with these mysteries and has come up with many justifications. The most insulting and damaging is the idea that when God allegedly created humans in His own image, he made sure to exclude our brains. Curiously, the lack of brains in canopic jars suggests Egyptians didn't think the brain would be necessary for the afterlife. Again, we cannot know what God is to all people. If God exists, we can only understand how it exists to us, if at all. In other words, God resides in man, and this is not a new idea. For me, this is the only idea that makes sense and does not require spiritual gymnastics or cognitive dissonance. This is why I embrace Thelema. (yes, I know. I promise I will get around to it.)
Sufi Poets, Muslims, and Christian Mystics, Oh My!
There is no way to give these stories the respect they require in such a short treatise as this. I ask that you keep this in mind as you read, and I encourage you to dedicate some time to determine what these characters have in common beyond the point I am making in this writing.
Al-Hallaj was considered an "intoxicated Sufi". He would often blur the lines between The Divine and himself, becoming so enraptured in ecstasy by the presence of his Beloved that he was prone to a loss of personal identity. He claimed, "I have seen my Lord with the eye of my heart, and I said: 'Who are You?' He said: 'You." During his arrest, he uttered "Ana al-haqq," or "I am the Truth" (meaning God). This statement was and is highly inappropriate in Islam. Those three little words would mark the beginning of the end for al-Hallaj. After eleven years in confinement in Baghdad, Mansur was brutally tortured and crucified. Many witnesses reported that al-Hallaj was strangely serene while being tortured and sincerely forgave his persecutors. He is referred to as "Love's Prophet." Today Al-Hallaj is one of the most influential Sufi writers and an essential character in Islamic history.
Joan Of Arc. Her story is somber and unfortunate, as are the stories of all martyrs. She was 14 when she first began seeing visions that she believed were divinely inspired and claimed to be in direct communication with God's angels. During her own time, she was used when convenient and then discarded by the very country and Church she served. On May 30, 1431, at 8 am, she was taken to the marketplace and burned at the stake. Her last request was that a cross be held out before her eyes as she burned. She was nineteen years old. Most scholars overlook her life as a testament to intense human courage, faith, and strength, focusing on her controversial political and military endeavors. They paint her relation with The Divine as some form of Schizophrenia because it is easier to accept that someone is mentally ill than for a bunch of lazy religious posers to admit that those who do the Work succeed.
Jesus of Nazareth. He is a subject of much controversy. In the New Testament, God allegedly becomes a man in a carpenter's son named Yehoshua, Yeshu, Yeshua, and Jesus. Whether or not he used the words "I am God" is unknown. He did say, "The Father and I are one," and when Jews heard him, they threw rocks at him for blaspheming. He also said, "Very truly I tell you, before Abraham was born, I am!" The Jews took that to mean he was claiming preexistence to be Yahweh of Exodus 3:14. On this occasion, too, they tried to stone him, and not in a fun way, I might add. Both Paul and John proclaimed that Jesus created the heavens (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16–17). But Genesis 1:1 plainly declares that God created the heavens and the earth. All of this adds up to Jesus being God. God in Man. One of the most significant questions about Jesus's story is whether or not a man can make such claims without including all other men? I don't believe that question will ever be answered in a way that will satisfy Christians unless the answer verifies what they already think. No offense intended, I have known too many Christians.
So what do these examples have in common besides recognizing that The Divine is to be found INSIDE and not outside? They were all killed by their own people. Nasty business, religion.
"It is more convenient to assume the objective existence of an "Angel" who gives us new knowledge than to allege that our invocation has awakened a supernormal power in ourselves." - Crowley
So you may be asking yourself what religion is good for and whether or not it serves a purpose at all, at least in terms of "finding God." Surprisingly, yes. For all of their faults, religion allows us to interact with other people who are presumably trying to accomplish the same things. This is especially important in a post-Covid world, where we have had to adapt from being social creatures to an environment of isolation. We have suffered through a loss of social activity and engagement. Religious and fraternal organizations can help us with that. Another way they serve us is to provide an illusion of The Divine or a focus point for our Work. Just make sure you wear a mask.
It is essential to remember that despite the best efforts or intentions of the organization's founders, it will eventually become about the institution rather than the people it was designed to serve.
Projecting our notion of God externally is much easier to experience with the senses than by simply making the assumption that whatever God is, exists within the human being. It's an adjustment period some never graduate from. You must be able to unite with your Higher Self once you understand that the only way it can exist is within.
Ritual Is A Personal Matter
Using another person's rituals with the intent of contacting their own Divine Self is like dialing the phone number for a pizzeria and expecting to speak with one's mom.
When I first said this, I received a barrage of hate mail from people claiming that I thought I knew more about magick than someone like Aleister Crowley. The implication was that I was telling people to discover their own way rather than copying Crowley. There are a couple of reasons I did this.
1. If you perform one of Crowley's rituals and receive a different result than the one Crowley recorded in his diaries, you will likely disregard your results as genuine and see the ritual as a failure. In other words, the goal of discovering one's Truth should not be overshadowed by trying to be like someone else.
2. Crowley lived over a hundred years ago. Our brains don't even work the same way anymore. For better or worse, our culture has a new set of values, and scientifically we have evolved light years since Crowley. This means that we know more about the cosmos now than we ever did in the past, and refusing to move on from Crowley's timeline means ignoring newly found scientific data which can be used to our advantage. One can hardly call that Thelemic.
All this said, your magical Work should begin with a solid foundation. Should that foundation be flawed in any way, it is possible to be decades into magical Work only to realize that all of it was based on a false premise and that it no longer complies with nature. Thelema is the foundation for my magical Work. It requires a scientific method, recordkeeping, and occasionally penetrating the veil of The Shadow. I can move without fear knowing, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my magical roots are firmly planted in a system that does not run contrary to physics or science.
Regarding my feelings about the man Crowley: I think of him as a relative that was wise beyond words and was way ahead of his own time, but not mine. Someone important to my heritage lived too long ago for me to have known in person. But I know more about him than I do about many of my actual genetic family members. To say my feelings for Crowley are anything less than tremendous admiration, respect and gratitude is to completely misunderstand my reasons for showing others the way to Thelema's life-changing philosophy. Such is the practice of people for whom extended families were more accepting than blood ties.
Stay tuned for more. Eventually, I will write about Thelema and present magical practice recommendations. Trust me, what I am telling you are things I wish someone had told me when I first began.