Thelema Revisited: A Critique
I am posting this for two reasons: lots of people seem to think I'm still a Thelemite and I wanted to explain why I no longer am. I have no interest in insulting anyone and I am happy for all those who find Thelema to be rewarding. At the moment, I don't have much time for drama, so I'm only willing to reply to thoughtful, even-handed comments. ( Read more... )
I'm not sure that I quite agree with the distinction that you're drawing there. ISTR that the passage from Liber Al along the lines of "thou hast no right but to do thy Will" was pretty knowingly cribbed from Levi's assertion that "thou hast no right but to do thy duty". Now I'm pretty sure that the notion of "duty" is quite abstract, yet it has managed to motivate no small number of young men to e.g. run directly into machine gun fire.
Now the number 6 might not be a particularly motivational abstraction, but I'm not sure that I'd want to discount any other similarities on those grounds.
To address your other point, values and ideals are also not physical objects, but no one would consider liberty or fairness to be supernatural.
Are you sure about no one considering liberty or fairness to be supernatural? If we look to the concept "justice" which is pretty closely related to "fairness" (though admittedly distinct), then we can see that both it and liberty have allegorical god-forms (both feminine) which are the subject of no small collection of devotional statues.
I found that I was getting into magick, I was increasingly of the opinion that the supernatural was actually quite commonplace, and that magickal work seemed to revolve more around noticing it and recognizing it for what it is, rather than bringing about the stuff of ghost stories.
Your final paragraph is well-stated. The reason that no assurance or benchmarks are possible is because there is nothing to assess. I suppose it's possible that certain bio readings might be possible in certain states, but there's no way to correlate such readings with the claimed mystical constructs. Even if someone could, it still wouldn't be evidence that it wasn't all in the mind.
The thing is that I'm not terribly concerned whether the work being done or most of its results are entirely in my mind. Recall that I have spent no small amount of time as a research mathematician (and working in pure mathematics at that). There was nothing even remotely tangible about my work (except perhaps the stacks of notes, dirty chalkboards, and eventual publications).
My concern was better exemplified by how, after a few months of doing LBRP 2-3x daily, my astral vision had developed to the point where I could see how poorly I was drawing my pentagrams. When I mentioned this realization to other Thelemites, it was met with a relatively matter-of-fact statment that such an observation is fairly commonplace when one's astral vision starts to kick in. Of course no one mentioned that there might be such an identifiable effect before I began my practice. No one even hinted that there might (our ought to) be identifiable effects so early on.
Now it's not too terribly difficult to fake matter-of-factness in order to pretend to expertise or understanding in an area. I'll admit to having done it myself at times. Consequently, I have a hard time believing the magickal experience of the Thelemic community to be all that more genuine than, say, the sexual experience of a group of teenaged boys.
I can't imagine what an utter crackpot I might have wound up being if I'd learned mathematics from a similarly experienced group of teachers. Why would I hold my standards any lower for magick?
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You are making an extrapolation that AC never himself made. Whatever his source of inspiration (or imitation), he never described Will as itself being a sense of duty. Based on AC's writings, and I believe the common understanding in Thelemic culture, Will is less like the duty to follow orders than the orders themselves.
Within THelema, people can, in principle, have a Will, but no one can have a six.
"Are you sure about no one considering liberty or fairness to be supernatural?"
I think you are trying to see how many angels can dance on the head of a pin here. But I'll state it another way: I've never heard of values or ideals described as supernatural and I myself do not believe them to be, nor do I see the concept to be a very useful one.
"There was nothing even remotely tangible about my work"
Tangibility is not a required trait for something to be real. An idea is real, even if it can't be touched. An example: the idea of Jesus is real, even if Jesus is not. Also, an idea doesn't come from outside nature, it has a physical substrate in the brain in the form of neural nets. We can have an interesting conversation about the nature of consciousness, of which an idea is a part, but its root is nevertheless a physical one.
"Now it's not too terribly difficult to fake matter-of-factness in order to pretend to expertise or understanding in an area."
Boy howdy. Essentially all reality-based occult statements are either postdictions or vague predictions (I too have been guilty of this). I will be impressed when someone can predict when my computer will crash three times in a row.
Why would I hold my standards any lower for magick?
Great question. I wonder if even die-hard magick-believers would go to a hospital when sick staffed by doctors who make decisions based on divination and by listening to their HGA. Of course most wouldn't (I imagine some still would) because when it comes to real-life situations, they would want the relevant disciplines to be thoroughly materialistic and based on mainstream science.
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Whether or not Crowley made the extrapolation is not terribly relevant to my point. My point was simply that nonphysical "forces" such as "duty" can act on human behaviour. The connection between duty and will was simply there to help motivate that particular choice of example.
I think you are trying to see how many angels can dance on the head of a pin here. But I'll state it another way: I've never heard of values or ideals described as supernatural and I myself do not believe them to be, nor do I see the concept to be a very useful one
It's a shame that you don't find that concept useful, as I've found it immensely useful for making rational sense of all manner of spiritual, religious, and magickal work and literature. As a simple example, a whole lot of Christianity made way more sense once I thought of the "spirit" part of the Holy Spirit as having the same nature as e.g. "team spirit", rather than being some sort of ghost walking through walls and whispering things to those worthy to hear them.
In fact, this is one of the areas where I feel that Thelema actually does pretty well. AC railed on against mysticism quite a bit in book 4 if memory serves me correctly. I read that as a criticism of the idea that the supernatural happens somehow out of or against nature, rather than sensibly identifying the supernatural to merely be the patterns or abstractions that we use to describe nature.
Of course, I come at this not only as a mathematician, but one who regularly entertains the idea that mathematics is actually a variety of mysticism (the only things we have evidence of humans or proto-humans having done as long as mathematics are ornamented graves and cave paintings).
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Well, you were trying to address my original arguments, which are based on the writings of AC, so I think that what AC intended is actually quite relevant to the conversation.
It's a shame that you don't find that concept useful
Thinking of abstract things as supernatural isn't useful because it doesn't actually explain anything. To say an idea is supernatural does nothing to understand how people form ideas, how ideas change, how ideas are communicated, or how ideas manifest in reality.
AC railed on against mysticism...
AC went back and forth on the subject depending on who he was talking to and what argument he was trying to make. Sometimes the HGA was a part of the unconscious and other times it was an objective, external being. We'll never know what he truly believed.
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I think we're looking at a different sort of usefulness (and even a different sort of identification of ideas as supernatural). My primary goal is to understand the supernatural claims by finding the real phenomena that they actually describe. Sometimes this can expose useful tricks in much the same way that one can often isolate useful drugs from traditional medicine.
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I have no argument here with the physical basis of these other phenomena. Of course, if were to discuss, say, the internet connections that allow me to post this comment, and you to read it, strictly as the actions of physical systems without introducing layers of abstraction on top of that, we would require several volumes, and it would be well beyond the capability of humans to design or use such a system. Alternately, we could introduce abstractions like "bits", "packets", "routing", etc. and probably keep it down to a few pages (maybe a book if we wanted to go into detail about e.g. the fabrication of CMOSFETs).
One should note that the term "supernatural" means "above nature", not "outside nature" or "against nature". If we consider these abstractions to be things that we layer on top of physical reality in our mind in order to get a handle on anything with complexity, then "supernatural" seems an entirely appropriate term to me.
Boy howdy. Essentially all reality-based occult statements are either postdictions or vague predictions (I too have been guilty of this). I will be impressed when someone can predict when my computer will crash three times in a row.
If someone successfully predicted three crashes of my computer in a row, I'd be much less impressed than I'd be concerned that they'd broken into my computer and were causing it to crash.
I remember a trichotomy of viewpoints presented in a course on the philosophy of probability and inductive logic a little over a decade back. In the scenario of a coin toss coming up heads several times in a row, the Fallacious Gambler would estimate the probability of the next toss to favour tails, because "tails is due"; the Dogmatic Rationalist would decide the probability to be 50/50 for either heads or tails on the next toss; finally, the Observant Scientist would suspect that the coin is somehow unbalanced, and estimate it to be more probable that heads come up on the next toss.
Great question. I wonder if even die-hard magick-believers would go to a hospital when sick staffed by doctors who make decisions based on divination and by listening to their HGA. Of course most wouldn't (I imagine some still would) because when it comes to real-life situations, they would want the relevant disciplines to be thoroughly materialistic and based on mainstream science.
I'd be really happy to have doctors who were relatively comfortable with both to be honest. If I were just having some mysterious symptom (or collection thereof), where the physician would actually be required to do a little creative problem solving, I'd be totally ok with them doing a tarot spread in their office to try and get some ideas for potential causes for the symptoms, even to the point of encouraging it. That said, if they didn't actually sanity check the ideas they got from their divination against their extensive training in the medical sciences, I'd be really deeply worried. I'd also get sketched out of they had to resort to divination to identify e.g. a common cold.
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I'll stick with my own general definition of "supernatural", which describes anything that exists or works apart from the universe of physical laws. Ideas exist within our universe of physical laws without need for further explanation. Human reason does not happen apart from physical reality but is a product of it. Ideas don't exist "out there" or "above nature", they exist as neural nets in our brains. They are therefore natural and not supernatural.
If you want to call ideas "supernatural", that's fine, but it is a radical redefinition of the word to the point of making the word useless as a descriptor. Either way, I don't see this point as affecting my general argument.
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Well an idea typically won't exist as a single neural net. After all, several (or maybe even all) people have certain ideas in common, so it would exist as an aggregation of all those nets. Moreover, it may have been written down, or stored on a computer, so we've got blobs of ink, alignments of collections of magnetic domains, charges stored in caoacitors, etc.. Finally it also has the difficulty of its physical manifestation being somewhat variable, as people with the idea die, new people have the idea taught to them, books are printed they fall apart etc.
Of course, a neat side-effect of describing such things as supernatural is that the term supernatural is no longer available to describe the various superstitions and misunderstandings that it's commonly used to describe. This forces the use of rather less forgiving terms to describe them, like "superstition" and "misunderstanding".
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