TheLOLma
So remember how I said a bit back (#6.5.5) that I should write a big honkin' post on why I'm being drawn to Thelema? I'm tired, I'm bored, I've spent all day browsing related foo on the 'net and have Crowley on the brain, and next time I'm at the temple I'll be asking for both baptism and Minerval apps.
It's about time.
Mostly this post is for those of you (er, yes, phoenix_rinna, looking in your direction, but I'm sure there are others) who have been liek all
(A note in interpretation: it's phenomenally rude, and "against the rules," inasmuch as us crazy folk have rules, to interpret The Book of the Law (henceforth L.AL for convenience, which is in no way related to LOLs) for somebody else. This I take as a very deliberate attempt to prevent an interpretive priesthood from forming and distorting the texts, as happened with Christianity (hence some love-is-the-law hippie dude being turned into an excuse for, say, the Inquisition), and I respect it as such. I may go a little into my own interpretation here, but only inasmuch as is necessary to chart the impact some of this shit has had upon my psyche.)
So. Let me look back at myself and take stock of where I was about the time I first read L.AL. (Well, not precisely. The first time I read it, I was naked in bed with hoath_iaida in the afterglow, I don't quite remember when, and my reaction was, by and large, mmm, good porn. I mean, to pick semi-at-random, "Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you. Put on the wings and arouse the coiled splendour within you : come unto me!" (1.61) Hhhhhot. But I digress.)
So about the time I start seriously reading it:
- thrown out on my ass by somebody I'd loved for being irresponsible
- and that was after a previous disastrous two-year relatioship in which I'd been tossed away by an abusive partner after becoming too depressed to be convenient
- and everything blamed on me
- and terrified that everybody I loved would wind up hating me because I hurt them without meaning to
- and, to go deeper, afflicted with a massive perfection complex but only with regards to myself
- and the tendency to hold myself to obscenely high standards while being forgiving to others
- and the hatred of myself
- and the disrespect of myself, the base assumption that I wasn't worthy of a job, survival, happiness, simply for the crime of...being me
- oh, the hatred
I wasn't even letting myself feel it at all, because I was pretty sure that if I did, I'd just up and kill myself. They'd find me somewhere with all my crimes carved into my skin, and Cyn would think...oh, I don't even know what. So I went into survival mode. Stripped myself down to blind optimism. My life will go on, no matter what (and you all were there to catch me from that first sudden fall of homelessness, give me warm comfy places to sleep). Shucked off layers of emotion.
Naked again, I suppose.
"Remember all ye that existence is as pure joy ; that all the sorrows are but as shadows ; they pass and are done ; but there is that which remains." (2.9)
And I was joyous, then, but for a few hours or days of Bad Times.
I got myself a copy as a present once I got into some funds left over from my childhood; that was after four days of having nothing to my name but the seventy-eight cents in my pocket, after the breakdown at Intercon that some of you may remember, after I was rather seriously close to calling the nearest escort service and asking if they took fat chicks because I was getting just that desperate.
And I read, and re-read, and re-read.
I can't, looking back at it, pinpoint anything. Not a moment, not a sentence (though the above encapsulates it), when I realized how my attitude towards myself was changing, what degree of comfort I was finding in that strange little red book.
(For it is comforting, intensely so, to me. Funny thing to say about a book so elusive, controversial, at times terrifying. But I take solace in it. I curl up in bed (whatever bed I'm in) and read bits before I go to sleep, at times, when I feel shakey.)
"Every man and every woman is a star." (1.3)
But somewhere, in all that survival mode, all that stripping away or denying of emotion, something clicked. Every man and every woman is a star. Even me.
I hadn't dared think that for years. Years. And I'm young. That's just sad.
Am I saying it's all gone, all that I listed above just blown away? Am I saying reading trippy shit some rich horny bastard wrote when he was hopped up in the desert a century ago cured my depression? Can't say that yet. But--I am free, I am strong, in ways I haven't been for years, or have never been before. There was something carrying me through that month of homelessness, the job-hunting, the loss of my last few ties with Cyn (and some other dear friends as well); something just keeping me going, keeping me rational, wading through one piece of shit after another; some pillar of congealed flame, and I found myself thinking, that, that must be Will.
Huh. So that's what that's like.
Whooooaaaaaaa.
It was as if something had been unlocked inside me. Not that new ideas were put into my head, but that old, buried ideas were brought forth, validated, set into ascendance. Holy fucking shit I'm a star. Me. L'il old me. ME. Somebody who I've more than once wanted to murder. Myself. I. STAR. Sure, yeah, everybody else is a star, I've always believed that, though perhaps not in those exact words; but me? I'd never dared. Not until now. I thought I knew myself and I thought I was horrible. ZOMG I'M A STAR.
I told that to hoath_iaida, and he laughed and said this would be about the time when Ole Beastie would yell over from his afterlife of choice and be liek all
So. Yeah. Reading up on Thelema has done very unexpected and very good things to my brain. Now, that doesn't necessarily compute into joining the OTO, true. The fact that I felt kinda like I was coming to a home when I went to Mass, yeah. (Not home, singular; I'm not sure I'll ever have one home. But the concept holds. I R polyhomorous.) That computes in. The sense of coming home in other ways, when I read mah book, that I went into above. That computes in.
But what it comes down to, I suppose, is: I take all of the above as indicators that I belong here. Somewhere on one (or more!) of the various related paths. Somewhere in one (or more!) of those brotherhoods. Yeah, I've got my concerns with some stuff, but they mostly have to do with reconciling the Norse magic which I'm strongly connected to (but also don't know as much about, due to the relative lack of non-bullshit sources; one advantage of hanging out in a "religion" founded by somebody who died less than a century ago and was stupid prolific is that it's easy to go straight to the horse's mouth, as it were; and I'm sure that at some point I'll be contact Odin directly, but no time soon, and that was a long parenthetical remark) with the western-ceremonial-egyptian-qabalah-astrology-bits-of-yoga-sex-sex-let's-not-forget-the-sex clusterfuck that is Thelema, and some concerns with certain things of Whether I'm Ready. Because the Norse magic, from what I can infer of the actualy system in between the lines of the variously unreliable material I've been reading, is radically different in some fundamental ways; it counterchanges a lot of things in the whole tetragrammaton-fire-water-air-earth-father-mother-son-daughter-etfuckincetera formula, and the numerology and universe model and alphabet origins and functions is modelled similarly, but very different, I think...
...and that's another post, and one that I won't know enough to write for a while. Hell, maybe that's a fuckin' book.
But what I was getting at is: no, I'm not running off in the direction of some whackjob pseudo-religion because their central holy book cured-I-bloody-well-hope my depression. I'm taking that fact, that change it precipitated, as a sign that I'm onto something. That I've found something that jives with me.
...........
Sortof a second half to the post now, a little more sober:
Something that I had noticed, during the last few days of fighting and spats before Cyn kicked me out, was the following vicious cycle:
- Cyn thinks I'm irresponsible and that she has to take care of me
- as a result, she treats me like a child
- I resent that immensely, can't or don't know how to express it properly, and act up
- thus I act like a child
- thus she thinks I'm irresponsible...
For me to even start growing up, for that change to start--and I think, I dare say, much knocking on wood, that now it has--somebody, somewhere, had to have faith in me. To even imagine a possibility of a Grown-up Tory. I certainly never did. I hated myself, remember? I felt--still feel, though to a lesser extent--about nineteen, and utterly lost. And Cyn--I'm not sure she ever had that faith, certainly didn't at that point. Nobody else close to me did either; or if they did, they didn't express it in a way that was able to pierce through the endless layers of doubt and self-hate (which, I might add, is virtually impossible, so please don't feel bad; I can think of maybe one or two people who've done it in my life).
Except hoath_iaida. To him, I was somebody very different than I had been to anyone else. A beautiful, brilliant woman--woman, not girl, mature, independent--with the potential to be a great magician, and a fantastic lay to boot. And I knew it, gut-level--and I know so few things about other people gut-level--that this was who I was to him; and I saw the positive impact I had on his life.
Positive impact. When I expected myself to poison everything I touched.
I thought I'd known myself, and I thought I was a piece of shit. A decent writer, sure, but only fanfiction; sortof good at a lot of useless things, like music and being eccentric and clever; but ultimately useless; and a huge burden on those she's close to, and social poison. This woman who he knows--she sounds pretty awesome. I'd like to get to know her better.
To switch books, there's a bit in The Book of Thoth:
"Redemption is a bad word; it implies a debt. For every star possesses boundless wealth; the only proper way to deal with the ignorant is to bring them to the knowledge of their starry heritage. To do this, it is necessary to behave as must be done to get on good terms with animals and children: to treat them with absolute respect; even, in a certain sense, with worship." (p. 97)
To digress (sortof), I was talking with hoath_iaida, while driving him home from Salem, about various aspects of magic and the masochism involved--we were just laughing and geeking away as usual--and he said something along the lines of "spiritual initiation is the Hand of God coming upon you...fucking you up the ass, pulling out your intestines, tearing them to little bits, and leaving you to put yourself back together." And then, after a pause, "Do you still want to take your Minerval?" And the conversation wound on; it's more when you get to first or second degree that things start getting screwy, etcetera.
Later: I had pulled into his mom's driveway, and had just laid down across the emergency brake with my head in his lap. Wanted a bit of comfort. And I was thinking, and said, very slowly and hesitantly, that, concerning his earlier question: yes, I'm fairly sure, for a lot of reasons that haven't quite crystallized yet, and one that has. I don't know how strong I am. I don't know what I can survive. I don't know what I'm capable of.
He said that was a good reason, which surprised me at first. That it sounded like I was trying to know myself.
This life I've led, this peaceful (relatively) and complacent and pampered world I live in, has only used some tiny portion of my capacity. Only some tiny portion of me is active in it. Time to start finding the rest of my capacity, the rest of my ability. The rest of me. My current theme: know myself. And, maybe, eventually, love myself.
Well. That ended rather more seriously than it began.
Love is the law, love under will.
It's about time.
Mostly this post is for those of you (er, yes, phoenix_rinna, looking in your direction, but I'm sure there are others) who have been liek all
(A note in interpretation: it's phenomenally rude, and "against the rules," inasmuch as us crazy folk have rules, to interpret The Book of the Law (henceforth L.AL for convenience, which is in no way related to LOLs) for somebody else. This I take as a very deliberate attempt to prevent an interpretive priesthood from forming and distorting the texts, as happened with Christianity (hence some love-is-the-law hippie dude being turned into an excuse for, say, the Inquisition), and I respect it as such. I may go a little into my own interpretation here, but only inasmuch as is necessary to chart the impact some of this shit has had upon my psyche.)
So. Let me look back at myself and take stock of where I was about the time I first read L.AL. (Well, not precisely. The first time I read it, I was naked in bed with hoath_iaida in the afterglow, I don't quite remember when, and my reaction was, by and large, mmm, good porn. I mean, to pick semi-at-random, "Pale or purple, veiled or voluptuous, I who am all pleasure and purple, and drunkenness of the innermost sense, desire you. Put on the wings and arouse the coiled splendour within you : come unto me!" (1.61) Hhhhhot. But I digress.)
So about the time I start seriously reading it:
- thrown out on my ass by somebody I'd loved for being irresponsible
- and that was after a previous disastrous two-year relatioship in which I'd been tossed away by an abusive partner after becoming too depressed to be convenient
- and everything blamed on me
- and terrified that everybody I loved would wind up hating me because I hurt them without meaning to
- and, to go deeper, afflicted with a massive perfection complex but only with regards to myself
- and the tendency to hold myself to obscenely high standards while being forgiving to others
- and the hatred of myself
- and the disrespect of myself, the base assumption that I wasn't worthy of a job, survival, happiness, simply for the crime of...being me
- oh, the hatred
I wasn't even letting myself feel it at all, because I was pretty sure that if I did, I'd just up and kill myself. They'd find me somewhere with all my crimes carved into my skin, and Cyn would think...oh, I don't even know what. So I went into survival mode. Stripped myself down to blind optimism. My life will go on, no matter what (and you all were there to catch me from that first sudden fall of homelessness, give me warm comfy places to sleep). Shucked off layers of emotion.
Naked again, I suppose.
"Remember all ye that existence is as pure joy ; that all the sorrows are but as shadows ; they pass and are done ; but there is that which remains." (2.9)
And I was joyous, then, but for a few hours or days of Bad Times.
I got myself a copy as a present once I got into some funds left over from my childhood; that was after four days of having nothing to my name but the seventy-eight cents in my pocket, after the breakdown at Intercon that some of you may remember, after I was rather seriously close to calling the nearest escort service and asking if they took fat chicks because I was getting just that desperate.
And I read, and re-read, and re-read.
I can't, looking back at it, pinpoint anything. Not a moment, not a sentence (though the above encapsulates it), when I realized how my attitude towards myself was changing, what degree of comfort I was finding in that strange little red book.
(For it is comforting, intensely so, to me. Funny thing to say about a book so elusive, controversial, at times terrifying. But I take solace in it. I curl up in bed (whatever bed I'm in) and read bits before I go to sleep, at times, when I feel shakey.)
"Every man and every woman is a star." (1.3)
But somewhere, in all that survival mode, all that stripping away or denying of emotion, something clicked. Every man and every woman is a star. Even me.
I hadn't dared think that for years. Years. And I'm young. That's just sad.
Am I saying it's all gone, all that I listed above just blown away? Am I saying reading trippy shit some rich horny bastard wrote when he was hopped up in the desert a century ago cured my depression? Can't say that yet. But--I am free, I am strong, in ways I haven't been for years, or have never been before. There was something carrying me through that month of homelessness, the job-hunting, the loss of my last few ties with Cyn (and some other dear friends as well); something just keeping me going, keeping me rational, wading through one piece of shit after another; some pillar of congealed flame, and I found myself thinking, that, that must be Will.
Huh. So that's what that's like.
Whooooaaaaaaa.
It was as if something had been unlocked inside me. Not that new ideas were put into my head, but that old, buried ideas were brought forth, validated, set into ascendance. Holy fucking shit I'm a star. Me. L'il old me. ME. Somebody who I've more than once wanted to murder. Myself. I. STAR. Sure, yeah, everybody else is a star, I've always believed that, though perhaps not in those exact words; but me? I'd never dared. Not until now. I thought I knew myself and I thought I was horrible. ZOMG I'M A STAR.
I told that to hoath_iaida, and he laughed and said this would be about the time when Ole Beastie would yell over from his afterlife of choice and be liek all
So. Yeah. Reading up on Thelema has done very unexpected and very good things to my brain. Now, that doesn't necessarily compute into joining the OTO, true. The fact that I felt kinda like I was coming to a home when I went to Mass, yeah. (Not home, singular; I'm not sure I'll ever have one home. But the concept holds. I R polyhomorous.) That computes in. The sense of coming home in other ways, when I read mah book, that I went into above. That computes in.
But what it comes down to, I suppose, is: I take all of the above as indicators that I belong here. Somewhere on one (or more!) of the various related paths. Somewhere in one (or more!) of those brotherhoods. Yeah, I've got my concerns with some stuff, but they mostly have to do with reconciling the Norse magic which I'm strongly connected to (but also don't know as much about, due to the relative lack of non-bullshit sources; one advantage of hanging out in a "religion" founded by somebody who died less than a century ago and was stupid prolific is that it's easy to go straight to the horse's mouth, as it were; and I'm sure that at some point I'll be contact Odin directly, but no time soon, and that was a long parenthetical remark) with the western-ceremonial-egyptian-qabalah-astrology-bits-of-yoga-sex-sex-let's-not-forget-the-sex clusterfuck that is Thelema, and some concerns with certain things of Whether I'm Ready. Because the Norse magic, from what I can infer of the actualy system in between the lines of the variously unreliable material I've been reading, is radically different in some fundamental ways; it counterchanges a lot of things in the whole tetragrammaton-fire-water-air-earth-father-mother-son-daughter-etfuckincetera formula, and the numerology and universe model and alphabet origins and functions is modelled similarly, but very different, I think...
...and that's another post, and one that I won't know enough to write for a while. Hell, maybe that's a fuckin' book.
But what I was getting at is: no, I'm not running off in the direction of some whackjob pseudo-religion because their central holy book cured-I-bloody-well-hope my depression. I'm taking that fact, that change it precipitated, as a sign that I'm onto something. That I've found something that jives with me.
...........
Sortof a second half to the post now, a little more sober:
Something that I had noticed, during the last few days of fighting and spats before Cyn kicked me out, was the following vicious cycle:
- Cyn thinks I'm irresponsible and that she has to take care of me
- as a result, she treats me like a child
- I resent that immensely, can't or don't know how to express it properly, and act up
- thus I act like a child
- thus she thinks I'm irresponsible...
For me to even start growing up, for that change to start--and I think, I dare say, much knocking on wood, that now it has--somebody, somewhere, had to have faith in me. To even imagine a possibility of a Grown-up Tory. I certainly never did. I hated myself, remember? I felt--still feel, though to a lesser extent--about nineteen, and utterly lost. And Cyn--I'm not sure she ever had that faith, certainly didn't at that point. Nobody else close to me did either; or if they did, they didn't express it in a way that was able to pierce through the endless layers of doubt and self-hate (which, I might add, is virtually impossible, so please don't feel bad; I can think of maybe one or two people who've done it in my life).
Except hoath_iaida. To him, I was somebody very different than I had been to anyone else. A beautiful, brilliant woman--woman, not girl, mature, independent--with the potential to be a great magician, and a fantastic lay to boot. And I knew it, gut-level--and I know so few things about other people gut-level--that this was who I was to him; and I saw the positive impact I had on his life.
Positive impact. When I expected myself to poison everything I touched.
I thought I'd known myself, and I thought I was a piece of shit. A decent writer, sure, but only fanfiction; sortof good at a lot of useless things, like music and being eccentric and clever; but ultimately useless; and a huge burden on those she's close to, and social poison. This woman who he knows--she sounds pretty awesome. I'd like to get to know her better.
To switch books, there's a bit in The Book of Thoth:
"Redemption is a bad word; it implies a debt. For every star possesses boundless wealth; the only proper way to deal with the ignorant is to bring them to the knowledge of their starry heritage. To do this, it is necessary to behave as must be done to get on good terms with animals and children: to treat them with absolute respect; even, in a certain sense, with worship." (p. 97)
To digress (sortof), I was talking with hoath_iaida, while driving him home from Salem, about various aspects of magic and the masochism involved--we were just laughing and geeking away as usual--and he said something along the lines of "spiritual initiation is the Hand of God coming upon you...fucking you up the ass, pulling out your intestines, tearing them to little bits, and leaving you to put yourself back together." And then, after a pause, "Do you still want to take your Minerval?" And the conversation wound on; it's more when you get to first or second degree that things start getting screwy, etcetera.
Later: I had pulled into his mom's driveway, and had just laid down across the emergency brake with my head in his lap. Wanted a bit of comfort. And I was thinking, and said, very slowly and hesitantly, that, concerning his earlier question: yes, I'm fairly sure, for a lot of reasons that haven't quite crystallized yet, and one that has. I don't know how strong I am. I don't know what I can survive. I don't know what I'm capable of.
He said that was a good reason, which surprised me at first. That it sounded like I was trying to know myself.
This life I've led, this peaceful (relatively) and complacent and pampered world I live in, has only used some tiny portion of my capacity. Only some tiny portion of me is active in it. Time to start finding the rest of my capacity, the rest of my ability. The rest of me. My current theme: know myself. And, maybe, eventually, love myself.
Well. That ended rather more seriously than it began.
Love is the law, love under will.