Granny Wolf

09:55 pm: Faith in the Gods
Objective, independently motivated, self-aware ideas?

“The fact is that certain ideas exist almost everywhere and at all times and they can even spontaneously create themselves quite apart from migration and tradition. They are not made by the individual, but they rather happen-they force themselves upon the individual’s consciousness. This is not platonic philosophy but empirical psychology.”

-C.G. Jung, Psychology and Religion, p. 4

Jung observes that complexes which spring from this forceful presence are better understood as separate from the individual that experiences them. Attempting to incorporate them into the self intellectually posits a division within the self. The first step in resolving these complexes is to distinguish them from the core essence by recognizing that they originate from outside sources.

In magick and yoga, understanding and ceremonially articulating this separation allows the adept to recognize their core essence, their True Will, by distinguishing it from all other apparent motives and agendas. This arduous process determines a definite “center of the universe” which makes an intelligible conception of the “all” possible. From there, the adept’s idea of the universe is expanded to include all objects and phenomena with reference to this absolute point of origin. When we try to confront these complexes without True Will as a frame of reference, we mistakenly try to include external influences in our conception of ourselves, and become subject to spontaneous unconscious actions and emotions that spring from our struggle with these Self Aware Ideas that are forcing their agenda on our consciousness.

As Aleister Crowley observes, we will restore our faith in the Gods by getting to know them. Instead of trying to block them out with mindless repetitive tasks, or drugging ourselves senseless, or drowning them out with media noise, we have to learn to realize their independent existence, and confront them on that level.

How can the people of this culture ever hope to know themselves when they believe that everything in their head comes from them?

Tags: aleister crowley, s.a.i.s

02:09 am: The Flesh of the Mongols
“The Mongol concept of a universal empire differed from that of the Chinese. The latter regarded the adoption of Chinese culture by the defeated nations as an essential part of the concept, whereas only economic interests were important to the nomads.”

-Paul Ratchnevsky, Genghis Khan, His Life and Legacy

The Mongols were important enough to be included along with the Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists in the rather striking passage in Liber AL III:53, but they seem to be the odd ones out. The creeds and the empires of the other peoples mentioned span centuries. The dominance of the Mongol empire, though it was geographically the largest contiguous empire in human history, lasted less than two hundred years. The creed of Genghis Khan, and the vital essence the first nomadic warriors used to realize this massive achievement, did not endure.

I believe that there is an analogy that can be drawn between the more or less irreligious character of the Mongol empire and our own modern imperialism which can help us understand out own culture’s relationship to religious nationalism, particularly as it occurs in Islam. There is a demonstrable isomorphism between the rise of Muhammed and the rise of Genghis Khan. Both men united previously conflicting nomadic tribes under a single ideology. Both men were struggling against larger empires, the Romans and Persians, and the Chin dynasty respectively, both empires expanded along established trade routes with the help of the merchant class, and there are other distinct characteristics that both Islam and the Mongol creed have in common. The religious character of Islamic imperialism, however, creates some interesting differences that are relevant to our understanding of modern Liberal Secular Humanism’s imperial efforts.

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Tags: aleister crowley, ethics, genghis khan, politics

07:42 pm: Jung for Occultists: The Personal and Relative vs. The Abstract and Absolute
When discussing the difference between his own methods of dream interpretation, and how they differ from Sigmund Freud’s, Carl Jung makes the following distinction that, I think, raises a number of very important questions. How do we relate to our complexes? Do we gain power over them by identifying them and “naming” them, so to speak? Or do we assert our Will over theirs by understanding our particular relation to them?

“Freud is seeking the complexes, I am not. That is just the difference. I am looking for what the unconscious is doing with the complexes, because that interests me very much more than the fact that people have complexes. We all have complexes. It is a highly banal and uninteresting fact. Even the incest complex, which you can find everywhere if you look for it, is highly banal and uninteresting. It is only interesting to know what people do with their complexes; that is the practical question that matters.”

-C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology in Theory and Practice, p. 93-94

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Tags: aleister crowley

11:25 pm: Quote of the Day: What is good for philosophers? For Gnostics?
*in response to the question, 'How big is this sphere, which is the four-dimensional self?'*

"This is really a philosophical question, and to answer it requires a great deal of theory of cognition. The world is our picture. Only childish people imagine that the world is what we think it is. The image of the world is a projection of the world of the self, as the latter is an introjection of the world. But only the special mind of the philosopher will step beyond the ordinary picture of the world in which there are static and isolated things. If you stepped beyond that picture you would cause an earthquake in the ordinary mind, the whole cosmos would be shaken, the most sacred convictions and hopes would be upset, and I do not see why one would wish to disquiet things. It is not good for patients, or for doctors. It is perhaps good for philosophers."

-C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology in Theory and Practice

A beautiful illustration of why the therepy/ self-help model is totally incompatible with Gnosticism, magick, real yoga, or Thelema.

Tags: ethics

07:26 pm: Scientific Fact
I have determined that Toronto is the opposite of China. That is to say, that everything everyone says about Toronto is false.

Tags: axiomatic

11:51 pm: Al Khem- Silver
WARNING: POETRY

This is not really an indication of my mental state. Its just a damn good poem. I’m not trying to say anything other than “I make intense sounding rhymes.”

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Tags: poetry

09:32 pm: Jung's Flaw
My beef with Jungian psychology is something that I’ve had a hard time articulating. When I was reviewing his Analytical Psychology in Theory and Practice today, I finally figured it out.

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Tags: aleister crowley, ethics

07:10 pm: Thelema: This Life and Beyond
For Thelemites, what we do in this life is very important. To enjoy the pleasures of our present incarnation, endure the pain of life while appreciating its beautiful necessity, and celebrate the passionate violence that living according to Will brings to our lives is all vital to the authentic practice of Thelema.

This injunction doesn’t mean that we don’t live for what’s beyond this life. We do, but we live for this life as well. That’s the point of the idea of re-incarnation. Life is a process that includes multiple deaths, and multiple births. Crowley is very clear that, in order to alleviate accumulated karma to make certain attainments (whether spiritual or material) possible, a karmic space has to be cleared for those. He goes so far as to suggest that some of the most powerful stars (human spirits) have had to endure numerous incarnations in which they experienced profound sorrow, weakness, and suffering. They were, in every sense, living FOR something beyond the life that they had at that time.

It’s easy to take these ideas too far in either direction. On one hand, we can commit the fallacy of materialism and say, “Thelema is about THIS life, the pleasures we can have in THIS incarnation, and nothing beyond! We hold no truck with castles in the air!” That’s one I’ve heard from a lot of people who should know better. I think it makes them feel “better” than the religious people they grew up being intimidated by. It’s sort of sad.

On the other hand, we can commit the fallacy of evacuation and say, “this life is just a preparation for the REAL big time! It doesn’t matter if I’m not capable of doing the practices vital to Thelema now, I’ll do them in some other incarnation.” Although people don’t usually explicitly own up to this idea, I think a lot of the movement away from actually DOING the A:.A:. curriculum in any kind of regular, disciplined way is motivated by the idea that “all that hard work is for OTHER people who do only that. My Will is to play guitar/paint/write my thesis, so I don’t need that stuff.”

The curriculum is for everyone. Whatever one’s Will is, these practices refine it, define it, and forge it into a weapon of acid and adamant. If people hit a ceiling, as Crowley asserts that some certainly will, that’s fine. But it’s their job, as Thelemites, to throw themselves against that ceiling with all of their might for the rest of their natural lives.

Tags: aleister crowley

10:04 am: Quote of the Day: Information Age
“Africanus took note of this and said, "I see you're still stuck on the place where mortals live. Don't you see how insignificant this earth is? Think on the heavenly regions! You should have nothing but scorn for mortal things. For mortals can't give you any fame or glory that is worth seeking or having. Look, the inhabited portions of the earth are tiny and few, the rest is vast desert dividing one inhabited area from another. The inhabitants of earth are so removed from each other that they cannot even communicate with one another. The place where you live is so very far away from other populated areas; some people live in areas on the opposite side of the globe. Do you expect them to honor or glorify your name? Look at all the different zones enveloping the earth; the two most widely separated from one another, at opposite poles of the heavens, are fixed with an icy cold, while the midmost zone burns with the heat of the sun. Only the two zones between these extremes are habitable The zone which lies south of yours has no connection or means of connection with your zone, because they are prevented from crossing the midmost zone. If you look at your own northern zone, you can't help but notice how small a section of this region can be regarded as yours.
…
"So where do you get the idea that your fame, or anyone's fame, can ever be so great that it would extend beyond these inhabited lands? Your fame could never cross the Caucasus mountains you see there, nor could it ford the Ganges river. Not one person in these eastern regions, or the remote western regions, or the far north or south for that matter, will ever hear your name, let alone desire to remember it. Once you leave all these people out, you can see how small and trivial an area your glory will spread over.
…
But putting all this aside, why do you even want people who have never even been born to talk about you, people you will never know. Think about it: all those multitudes of people who preceded you in life never spoke about you—there are as many people who preceded you as will follow you, and the early generations were better than later generations, for humanity continues to degenerate.”

-Cicero, The Dream of Scipio

Tags: propaganda

06:42 pm: Drinking Games
In University, drinking was frequently combined with reading. As I've been trying to purge myself of paperwork (didn't I throw out all this shit the last two times I moved? I guess not. I still have undergrad papers, notes from girlfriends, and whole notebooks on Aesthetics, Political Religion, and Existentialism which have SOMEHOW managed to stay with me this long) I recently discovered these. From my pre-Crowley, devil-may-care Goetia days, back when verifying a spirit's authenticity meant telling it to start fires and preparing for a ritual meant doing bong hits and snorting PCP, these may not be sophisticated, (or, possibly, all that funny) but hell, they're good for a whirl.

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Tags: humor, joking

03:13 am: Quote of the day
"But that man, like other beings, as far as in him lies, strives to preserve his existence, no one can deny. For if any distinction could be conceived on this point, it must arise from man's having a free will. But the freer we conceived man to be, the more we should be forced to maintain, that he must of necessity preserve his existence and be in possession of his senses; as anyone will easily grant me, that does not confound liberty with contingency. For liberty is a virtue, or excellence. Whatever, therefore, convicts a man of weakness cannot be ascribed to his liberty. And so man can by no means be called free, because he is able not to exist or not to use his reason, but only in so far as he preserves the power of existing and operating according to the laws of human nature. The more, therefore, we consider man to be free, the less we can say, that he can neglect to use reason, or choose evil in preference to good; and, therefore, God, who exists in absolute liberty, also understands and operates of necessity, that is, exists, understands, and operates according to the necessity of his own nature. For there is no doubt, that God operates by the same liberty whereby he exists. As then he exists by the necessity of his own nature, by the necessity of his own nature also he acts, that is, he acts with absolute liberty."

-Spinoza, Political Treatise

03:43 pm: The Evil Satanic Conspiracy
The only possible way to hate God is by hating yourself.

We are created in the image of God. Although the word “God,” causes problems for some people because of their social conditioning and the way that the word is used in our society, (i.e. to refer to an imaginary disapproving parental figure) I’m going to assume that my readers know the difference between what people think words mean and what they actually mean, and that if they insist on misunderstanding it is due to their praiseworthy stubborn natures. We know what God “is,” by knowing ourselves. Some people try to tell us that God is something apart from us, an alien standard that approves or disapproves of various aspects of our being and psyche. This is, essentially, diabolism.

There is an evil, literally “Satanic,” movement at work in the world. It disguises itself as religion, although everything that it does demonstrably contradicts the basic premises of the religions that it claims to represent. People, especially in the secular west, believe that it IS religion, and by and large they either despise it, or distort themselves to live by its principles. The purpose of this evil “Satanic” movement is to make people hate themselves, and by extension, to make them hate God too. This is how we know the enemy. It doesn’t matter whether they call themselves Christian, Muslim, Cool, Hip, or Big in Japan, we can RECOGNIZE EVIL by recognizing THIS. If the thing is making people hate themselves, it is evil. Only by loving what we are, in truth, can we aspire to Love under Will. If we hate ourselves, we create division in our essential nature before we even conceive of the possibility of uniting our individual essence with an event or another being.

There are people, silly as it sounds, who THINK that they hate God, but actually love God. The thing that they hate doesn’t exist. It’s a mask on a crude cartoon devil. If they love themselves they love God, whether they like it or not. Ha ha! Suckers!

Here’s the real goose though: the devil has no goal. No final purpose. It’s just trying to PREVENT the goal from realizing itself. To prevent the purpose of creation from being accomplished. But that can’t last. Our present society is practically designed to create self-loathing, hatred of religion, (that could actually lead people to real knowledge) and a determined lack of discipline, discipline being seen as a concession to The Man.

What clarity of purpose! The Lord be praised! Those who cultivate self-love, true religion, and self-discipline in this society are truly the strongest, the smartest, and the most fit to lead.

“Consider the Bond of a cold Climate, how it maketh Man a Slave; he must have Shelter and Food with fierce Toil. Yet thereby he becometh strong against the Elements, and his moral Force waxeth, so that he is Master of such Men as live in Lands of Sun where bodily Needs are satisfied without Struggle.”

-Aleister Crowley, Liber Aleph cap. 37, “On Cultivating Strength Through Discipline”

Tags: propaganda

12:20 pm: Do I talk too much about myself? About my magick?
People shouldn’t interfere with or influence each other! New people, being exposed to dangerous ideas, can sometimes take them, run with them, and come to stupid conclusions! So don’t talk too much!

Pfft.

If you ask Orthodox Jews and Muslims why they don’t allow men and women to pray together, they will tell you that the women, particularly, will distract the men with sexual thoughts. Aleister Crowley, our Most Holy Prophet, thought that was weakness. He thought that the men who would be so distracted were not fit to accomplish the communion intended, and this attempt to artificially level the playing field of concentration would create infirmity. Everyone doesn’t deserve attainment. If someone ends up reading magical books like pornography, and never practicing magick, fine! They’re losers who were never meant to practice in the first place. If someone is meant to do this, no force on earth can stop them. If someone is not meant to do this, no force on earth can make them. If a sincere Muslim is at prayer, it doesn’t matter whose ass is in the air in front of him, his mind is on Allah. If the man is not sincere, it doesn’t matter if he’s alone at the dome of the rock, Allah will not hear him.

‘ya feel me?

Tags: ethics

02:34 pm: Nietzsche on Initiation
"The intellectual haughtiness and loathing of every man who has suffered deeply—it almost determines the order of rank HOW deeply men can suffer—the chilling certainty, with which he is thoroughly imbued and coloured, that by virtue of his suffering he KNOWS MORE than the shrewdest and wisest can ever know, that he has been familiar with, and ‘at home’ in, many distant, dreadful worlds of which ‘YOU know nothing’!—this silent intellectual haughtiness of the sufferer, this pride of the elect of knowledge, of the ‘initiated,’ of the almost sacrificed, finds all forms of disguise necessary to protect itself from contact with officious and sympathizing hands, and in general from all that is not its equal in suffering. Profound suffering makes noble: it separates."

-Beyond Good and Evil, 270

Tags: ethics

10:44 am: Demonology
“Now, metempsychosis, which has been misinterpreted frequently, has a perfectly true side; for animal forms communicate their sympathetic impressions to the astral body of man, which reacts speedily on his lineaments according to the force of his habits. A man of intelligent and passive mildness assumes the inert physiognomy and ways of a sheep, but in somnambulism it is a sheep that is seen, and not a man with a sheepish countenance, as the ecstatic and learned Swedenborg experienced a thousand times. In the kabalistic book of Daniel the seer, this mystery is represented by the legend of Nebuchadnezzar changed into a beast, which, after the common fate of magical allegories, has been mistaken for an actual history. In this way, we can really transform men into animals and animals into men; we can metamorphose plants and alter their virtue; we can endow minerals with ideal properties: it is all a question of willing.”

-Eliphas Levi, Doctrine and Ritual of Transcendental Magic part II p. 77

I thought about this passage a lot when I read Malachi Martin’s introduction to Hostage to the Devil. Martin is in the difficult position of confronting a real problem with occult forces. If you talk about the way these things REALLY manifest, it is hard to get people excited about it. Occult forces manifest their intentions through unconscious spontaneous human action. There is no massive satanic conspiracy in the literal sense of the word. But the same eyes that might see a sheepish man as a sheep, when turned to our culture, might see just that…

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Tags: aleister crowley, doe, ethics

01:49 pm: Levi on Sexuality
"The Astral Body is not always of the same sex as the terrestrial, that is, the pro-
portions of the two forces, varying from right to left, seem frequently to belie the
visible organization, producing seeming aberrations of human passion and
explaining, while in no wise morally justifying, the amorous peculiarities of Ana-
creon or Sappho. A skilful magnetizer should take all these subtle distinctions into
account, and we shall provide in our “Ritual” the rules for their recognition."

-Eliphas Levi, D&R

This is sort of interesting, isn't it?

This idea caused a lot of problems for me when I saw it in theory. It didn't really fit with my view of gender and sexuality, as it assumes a certain static identity in a place where I saw fluidity. These days, I'm not so sure...

Tags: sexual revolution ii

02:52 pm: Ego and Philosophy
Is Philosophy itself egotistical? What is the status of Philosophy with reference to the Great Work?

Two quotes which caught my attention…

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Tags: aleister crowley

01:31 pm: Sexual Revolution- Patriarchy and Seduction
There are numerous ways to obtain power. None of them are easy, and all of them require Will and brains. A select few are merely born into their station. Others are elevated through a hierarchical system for reasons other than their being fit for the positions they hold, which would be a sign of a diseased hierarchy. We need not concern ourselves with either category for the purposes of this discussion.

Most of the upward movement in any power structure, but particularly in a Patriarchal power structure, happens because of seduction. If we grew up in a family unit, a parental paradigm forms the psychological backdrop for our understanding of authority. This paves the way for two forms of seduction: father/son seduction, and daddy/daughter seduction.

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Tags: ethics, sexual revolutionii

12:36 pm: Writing and editing
As Phoenix began to reach its final stages, I made a discovery that helped the editing process a great deal. It wasn’t something I would normally have thought of, but I found a way to approach text that I had been reading over and over with fresh attention. There’s a “speaking text” function for the visually impaired on my computer, and for the last edit, I had the machine read the text out loud to me while I bounced around the room. This helped me catch a great many small errors that I would otherwise have been oblivious to. If you look at the same piece of writing enough times, you become too familiar with it, and your eyes naturally skip over parts because you “know” what they say. By shifting from a visual to an auditory medium, one can revitalize the attention.

It is also cool to hear that weird answering-machine voice deliver lines like “put that boy under a little pressure, and he’s useless as balls on a dildo.”

Tags: phoenix, writing

10:03 pm: No God But Man- Identity and Religion
Our identities are important. Not just to us emotionally, but to the project of doing our Wills and expressing our individual essences. A carefully constructed identity serves as a medium between Being and Society, guiding our conduct and helping us remember why we are what we are and do what we do. A poorly constructed identity restricts Being in unnatural ways, deforming it, causing fear, shame, and neurosis. With the exception of religious identity, healthy links of identity are formed by authentic self-recognition. We see a symbolic category and find that it helps us to realize something true about ourselves. These bonds are forged because the symbolic category, whatever it is, has increased our self-awareness.

Unhealthy links of identity are formed, for the most part, for two major reasons, which are kind of the same reason. Either the subject suffers from social pressure to appear to be something that he or she is not, or they are trying to blend into a group to avoid social predators, hence these protective identities have been called herd mentality. These bonds are not forged because of authentic self-recognition. They are actually self-obfuscation. Whether there are socially unacceptable aspects to one’s character, or one merely lacks the courage to stand alone as an individual, the subject is trying to hide themselves in their identity, not express him or herself with it.

But what about religious identity? Religious identity has been so thoroughly co-opted by herd mentality, that people almost forget that authentic religious identities exist. Suppose for a moment that someone does not practice a religion to be thought of as “good” and therefore protected from criticism, but rather, out of sincere commitment?

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Tags: ngbmii