(no subject)
My principle interest is the study of revolutionary movements and the epistomologies which allow these movements to successfully take advantage of historical opportunities presented by political, geographic and ideological shifts around the world. It is natural that this study should soon come to focus on "terrorism." The term is a means of maximizing the subjective perception of malice behind any act of violence. It derives legitimacy from the conditions in which the violence takes place. As such, any meaningful judgement of whether or not the label of terrorist is appropriate to one group/person or another is predicated upon a sophisticated understanding of the historical and cultural conditions which contextualize the acts of violence they have committed. Careful attention to this point is instructive:
"...the existence of evil is fatal to philosophy as long as it is supposed to be independent of conditions." -Aliester Crowley, Liber V
What we have seen, the international war on terror is a result of the attempt to create an abstract definition of "terrorist." Ontologically speaking, this has the same problems as trying to define evil as independant of condition. Any one act of violence (in the broadest sense of the word) could concievably be defined as an act of terrorism under the right conditions. Crowley notes here that an ontology of evil is in itself "fatal to philosophy." What does that mean, exactly? What are the consequences of an ontology of evil?
If evil has a definate quality, the reference point for any ethical epistomology shifts radically from the system's telos or end, to antelos, or avoidence. Instead of seeking to create particular conditions in pursuit of a desired end, one seeks to avoid or destroy any conditions which could concievably contribute to "evil," as it has been ontologically situated by the system. The most disturbing consequence is one that I am unsure how to fully substantiate. It seems to me that in practice it is impossible to have two reference points, one of attraction and one of repulsion, without creating internal philosophical conflicts in a system. In other word, this inner struggle is generated by a system that tries to have a telos AND an antelos, both clearly defined and independant of conditions or, most importantly, defined independantly of each other. Any system which makes a point of specifically defining evil is damned to be ruled by it, and reckon all of it's calculations by that light, rather than in pursuit of a good. I am unclear what quality precisely that evil has which makes it impossible to ontologically define without upseting a system, indeed, the question is itself an ontological one under the influence of which I find myself plunged into a labrynthine epic of self-contradiction, so I'm going to let that one go for now. What this suggests to me, and the theory that I hope to elucidate here, is that there is something inherently overpowering about the urge to destroy. The existence of an ontology of evil enables that urge in a very dangerous way. What this suggests to me is that evil has inherent properties that make is more powerful than "good," in the same sense that a machine gun is more powerful than a can opener. The former will totally fuck up a can of tuna... way more than even the most mighty can opener. You probably don't want to eat that shit afterward though.
In the interests of full disclosure, I would like to relate four personal experiences, all definitive for me, of evil in it's conditional sense.
1. The Most Fear
2. The Most Pain
3. Two sides of terrorism (age 12 and age 21)
4. Cacogenisis- what have we learned?
1.
The Most Fear
My experience of the Most Fear was an illusion. I made the decision to try to discover how much fear I could "handle" before I lost the ability to function after my first successful evocation. Without going into full detail, I was mostly doing it to prove to myself that it wouldn't work. I was a committed materialist in my beliefs until this episode, which climaxed with a very severe telekinetic manifestation that, aside from drawing blood, scared the bejesus out of me. Rather than even attempt to communicate with the entity in question, I more or less hid and cowered. The next day I was quite dazed and very ashamed of myself. I wanted to make sure that when this happened again I didn't freeze up, so I needed to condition myself against fear. It seemed foolish to put myself in threatening and dangerous situations to this end, so I settled on using LSD to terrify myself. This was the beginning of my "terror tripping" work. It did have a clear high point...
Unfortunately this isn't much of a story because it is just about fear. The crucial componant was that I did not consciously take the acid. I set out my dose and started to read some Lovecraft, waiting until I got lost in the story. The idea was that, as one would reach out for a glass of water and drink without interrupting the flow of the story, I would do the same with the acid. I would continue reading and think about it as little as possible. Then I figured that I would just read until I was attacked by some crazy phantasmagoric hallucination.
That's not what happened though.
I thought about fear a lot, especially it's relationship to time. Fear is, after all, necessarily conditional upon an awareness of the future. It is anticipatory. This is why fear is so dangerous: by virute of our existential being we travel through time and fear itself makes that journey uncomfortable. It causes us to fight the current, and that gets us nowhere. This was all speculative though. I lost track of the book without noticing and slowly, something very strange began to happen. I lost the distinction between the thoughts about fear and the fear itself. I was getting more afraid every second, and I didn't know of what or why.
It was awful. Everything I looked at seemed to be somehow horrifying but there were absolutely no visual aspects to the hallucination. Rather than hallucinating something to be afraid of, I just hallucinated fear in itself, without a reference point or an existential anchor. If there's a tiger in the room you might be afraid of it's claws or it's teeth. You see the claws and the teeth and you're afraid, and that's probably pretty smart because those claws and teeth will fuck you up. If you're trained to control fear, that's one thing. If you're not, trying to control it too hard can result in panic. This was very different though. Fear was primary to existence. Fear was the predicate to the notion of threat. I kept trying to rationalize why my desk or my chair or my poster could be threatening to me, not because they were evidently a threat in themselves, but because I was swarmed by dispersed fear that I needed to give a point of focus so I could actually run away from it.
I failed, but I tried to run anyway. Out of the basement into a nearby baseball field. It was about 3am by that time. I looked up at the moon and just about shit myself. At that point I had what I can only describe as a fear orgasm, in the sense that the fear reached a climax and abated. It was still there, just as desire remains after a sexual orgasm, but in the background. Less pressing. After an indeterminate amount of time staring at the moon I "realized" that the only way to "fix things" was to get some water from the stream a few blocks away and carry it back to my bedroom in my hands. I did this, doing my best to avoid being seen by the moon. When I brought the water back to the basement I was able to sleep. I note this point because this was before I drank or smoked pot. I had no means by which to "come down" and had only been tripping for a few hours. Under normal circumstances I would have been up and unable to sleep for another twelve hours at least.
This experience was my first encounter with the threshold of fear. It was not my last, but it was very informative. Like evil, fear cannot have it's own ontology. That was what put me into the state I was in: the fact that I first had fear, and so fear generated a sense of threat. This is an epistomology which places the abstract realm before the existential realm. In a healthy view, one percieves an existential threat and experiences the aversion which, when handled in the usual way, it is appropriate to describe as fear.
2.
The Most Pain
This was not something I did on purpose.
starmae and I were in the process of moving. We had occupied a large five bedroom house on Reid St. uptown with a varying number of roomates. People were always fighting, coming and going, and there were numerous changes in the house lineup, some more welcome than others. Toward the end of the experience it was really just her and I. Of the total nine occupants, many left things behind. Mae and I pretty much got stuck cleaning up and preparing the whole place as well as moving our own stuff to King Street downtown without much in the way of transportation. It was summer. It was hot. I was wearing my shirt open to get the night air on my skin. It was four in the morning.
Before leaving with our last burden, I had thrown the contents of the spice rack into a duffle bag and was holding it against my body. As some of you know, I am a fan of very hot, spicy food. Among the contents of the spice rack was a bottle of habanero extract. The label bragged that it was over 500 times more powerful than tabasco sauce. I had once ruined an entire pot of chilli (well, TVP chilli...) by putting in two squirts rather than two drops. I made it to bite five, no one else made it beyond two. It wasn't hot like "oh my, I need some water," it was hot like "fuck, my head feels like it's splitting in two, I have to go lay down." Over time, the liquid around the cap had corroded the plastic top, which came off in the duffle bag. The sauce began to soak through the bottom of the bag, which as I mentioned I was holding against my stomach. When this stuff comes into contact with your skin, you don't notice right away. It has to eat into you for a while before it starts to burn, which is one of the reasons it's impossible to just wash off. It will burn you for hours and hours and hours once it starts. The only way you'd notice right away is if it gets into a sensitive place.
The sweat rolling down my stomach carried great streams of the habanero extract directly down the front of my shorts. It reached a sensitive place.
I charged down York street at full speed, (which was pretty fast, considering I had to run bow-legged) holding my fly open. For the first few seconds my mind was racing. I tried to figure out what the hell was happening to me. Those thoughts quickly dissapeared. There was room for nothing but pain. I almost collapsed three times before I reached the apartment. I kept trying to block it out, reaching for a mantra or a visualization. I was unable to put anything together in my head. All pictures, all words, everything that was not ACTION TOWARD MY GOAL (the ice pack in the freezer at our new apartment) was ejected. It's not just that I was focused on the ice pack, I was incapeable of being distracted, even though I desperately wanted to be. I couldn't even think to myself "man, I want that ice pack." Words and thoughts were impossible. I just went after the ice pack on pure instinct.
In many ways, no experience of mine has been more instructive as to the nature of True Will. True Will is a choice though, and that's the real difference.
After approximately ten minutes of holding an ice pack on my balls I realized that I was in incredible pain all over. I realized I was covered in the sauce (I still didn't know what it was). I really just could not FEEL the invisible flames licking my torso and legs while my bird was being cooked in that horrible shit. Now that my nuts were numb though, I felt the hell out of it. By the time that Mae arrived I was shaking, all white and shedding sheets of sweat. I had lost control of the muscles on the right side of my body, which locked up my right leg and arm, causing them to rise up in a stiff, dead-beetle pose. My bowels had emptied themselves accompanying this loss of muscular control, so I was sitting in a pool of shit for an added bonus. Retching from the smell of the bag, Mae cleaned out the bathroom and ran a cold shower. Eventually she managed to get me in there.
That was when things (if you can believe it) took a turn for the worse. Naturally, the hot sauce did not affect my body temperature and I was immersing myself in ice cold water and I was going into shock. This was the beginning of an hour long nightmare which involved holding myself in the water for as long as I could (which means: until I started shaking so hard that I fell down) at which point I would try to warm myself for as long as I could stand the burning from the habanero sauce (read: until the pain drove me back to my feet). Eventually, fearing for what would happen if she left me to these devices, Mae pulled me out of the shower and I went on the play out the same drama with blankets and a fan. I would let the fan blow on my skin until I couldn't take the cold, and lay under the blankets until I couldn't take the burning. I tried to distract myself with everything, meditation, music, movies, books... nothing worked. I couldn't think of anything but the pain. Everything else just annoyed me. It was a long night, but after about seven hours it stopped enough for me to sleep.
In the morning I was left without a mark on my body. There was no lasting damage of any kind. It was just a surface irritant, after all, although a remarkably effective one.
3.
Two Sides of Terrorism
Twelve years old, I was with my mother and brother at a train station in London. It was 1993. The IRA has been busy. I used to wander off (or sneak away, I don't remember for sure) from the group constantly while we lived in Europe. This time I made sure to tell my mother that I was going to the bathroom at the McDonalds in the food court. I took a comic book with me because, well, I can't go without something to read. If I recall correctly, it was Spectacular Spider-Man from the days when the Hobgoblin (Macendale) was working with Kingpin. Anyway, it was good and I got lost in it. I was in the bathroom for a while. It was afternoon, probably four thirty. The rush was coming upon us. The place had been filling up with people before I went to the bathroom. I suspect that I was in there for at least twenty minutes.
When I emerged, the entire train station was empty.
I wandered around in a daze. I wasn't sure what to do. Was the whole world like this? Where the hell was everybody? Did I get shifted into an alternate dimension? Am I about to be abducted by aliens? What the HELL?
I heard heavy booted footsteps and turned around. Two men in some kind of armor (I am not going to describe my mental picture in detail because I doubt very much that it is what I actually saw) were running toward me, one with an outstretched hand. I shrieked and ran. I didn't make it far and he grabbed me, slung me under his arm and ran for the exit. I was unceremoniously tossed out the door into the arms of two other police officers, who eventually brought me back to my mother. I later learned that someone had found an unattended bag in the station that was discovered to contain a bomb. This was either a few weeks before or after a hotel had been bombed in London and everyone was a little bit on edge. I didn't understand the IRA or the political situation, but I knew that something very fucked up had just happened.
When I was twenty one, Seann and I were visiting our father in Jordan. He had rented a car and we were off to see the Dead Sea, the Tomb of Moses and eventually to Petra (experiences for which I had come prepared with low doses of LSD... low enough to hide the fact that I was tripping, but high enough so that my mind was quite thoroughly blown). The car we had rented, however, had an empty gas tank. We ran out of gas in the desert, not far from a refugee camp. I had seen the camps, but didn't know what they were. Being from New Brunswick, I saw them and thought "trailor parks," which shows how aware I was of the world around me. I really knew nothing about any of these things at the time. This was toward the end of my third year of university, when I had suddenly become extremely active in the religious studies department at STU. Until september eleventh, I had been virtually the only student interested in Islam on campus. There were only three people enrolled in the Koran course that we had, and "Islam II" was on the verge of being cancelled because I was the only person enrolled (or maybe one of two,can't remember exactly... Shelly are you reading this? Were you down for that class?). After 9/11, however, both of these classes became full to capacity. It was March 2002, approximately one year before Iraq. The economy of Jordan was still reeling. It was a huge tourism destination for all of it's holy sites, but the people were not coming. All of the touristy spots that we went to were virtually deserted. In Petra there were more people selling crap on blankets than there were visitors. It was a period of transition, and most people were aware that it was transiting to a very bad place.
That night I asked my father about the "parks" and he gave me a hell of a look. He explained a little bit of it to me, but I really wasn't getting it. A Palestinian friend of his helped out a little. He told me that the point was that their land had been taken, and that they were now being exterminated. He insisted that the world did not care. Although I knew nothing I decided that it would be appropriate to argue with this, and said that there were people who did care (although I was obviously not one of them at the time- I really just assumed that there must be such people out there somewhere). To the suprise of my present self, he did not contradict this. "Perhaps they care," he said, "but we will all be dead before they care enough to actually do anything about it."
I could not prove him wrong then and I cannot prove him wrong now. I suspect that this is because he is right.
4.
CACOGENISIS
When evil is defined as a thing-in-itself, this is cacogenisis. Evil has no such reality on it's own. In a very real sense, to concieve of evil independant of conditions is to CREATE evil. Evil does not exist. It is an illusion created by circumstance. A shadow created by our position in respect to the light.
In the case of fear, it seems to me that to concieve of a defined state of being as evil creates an imparitive to determine who fits into that state of being and destroy them. In all cases, because fear of the evil action is an anticipation of what someone with a particular set of predicates and beliefs will do, to posit a state of being as evil relies on a knowledge of motivation and intent. Any such analysis is fruitless. Motivations of all kinds produce results of all kinds, depending on how one is situated in respect to the particular temporal event in question. Even worse, trying to accurately determine another person's motives is impossible. It's hard enough to figure out one's own motives without worrying about others. Any such analysis would rely on the subjective perception of malice behind a person's actions. When evil is concieved of independant of condition, it becomes something else. This unconditional evil is to conditional evil what paranoia is to fear. It will search for a focus, a body in which to manifest, but it's manifestation can never be sustained. Existential reality cannot support this kind of evil, and as such a subjective interpretation must be decided BEFORE the evil is encountered in it's existential form, lest that encounter shake one's faith in the antelos. The antelos requires an info-phobic commitment to the particular subjective interpretation. That interpretation can never be reevaluated. It's not hard to see how this is "fatal to philosophy."
In the case of pain, we can see how a negative imparitive that is extreme to the threshold of tolerance can be utterly destructive to the Thelemic way of thinking. The pain which I felt was certainly conditional upon being covered in hot sauce, but it hit a level at which it blotted out my consciousness entirely. Through pain, I entered a state what had an epistomological structure not unlike that of one moving totally with the current of their True Will, although the teleological end was drastically different. This is the other problem with placing evil above conditions. If taken to the same extreme it can generate a set of predicates for action which create an imparitive every bit as strong as the imparitive toward Will. True Will, as I said, is a state in which there is only one real choice that one ever has. This is key: Crowley makes it clear that Will indicates the correct path, and it will go well for you whether you want to take it or not. You can take a path that looks better, but things will not go well and you will regret it. For every individual, however, that choice is different, even if they are operating under the same conditions. When PAIN occupies this place it inverts the relationship between the individual and the conditions in which that individual exists. Every participant in the undeniable pain-driven epistomology becomes exactly the same. To be absolutely clear: pain makes homogenizes us. When the psyche is broken down the only course of action possible is the avoidence of pain by whatever means are necessary. How we avoid pain is defined by the conditions we operate under, therefore the same conditions reqire the same course of action from everyone. True Will makes us all individual. We each have our own "correct next step." We look for people whose next step is the same as ours, we compete with people whose next goal is similar to ours, but this undeniable force carries us all in different directions. Under the same conditions, the "correct next step" for most of us is different. Competition for the same "next step" does occour, but according to Thelemic theology if the conditions of the next step are, in Crowley's example, to eat a particular apple and two people are competing to eat this apple, it is only truely the Will of one person to eat the apple. The other person's Will is to try and eat the apple and be beaten in competition. This is very different from the kind of union of direction that pain generates. Pain, if allowed to generate the frame of reference for the whole system, makes all force converge into one path of pure avoidence with no positive end.
The last two stories are about conditions. If the larger point that I am making in the first two is understood, their role in this analysis should be perfectly clear and lucid.
What does all this mean for the "fight against evil"?
NOX
I stood up to heaven
when I got down on my knees
I finally stopped pretending
when I started to believe
my head went up in smoke
my heart went up in flames
my holding on was broke
no more time for games
I go to war with God
I go to war to win
maybe when Hell's thawed
I'll rewrite all this sin
all this chilling distance
all this cold corruption
I'll break down time's resistence
to history's abduction
all the flaws in all the laws
dance before my eyes
offense itself shook with applause
while tears came to my lies
so I filled up with fire
I flew to the fight
and with the damned conspired
to at last blot out the light
shadow reigned for far too long
clumsy, crude and artless
deeper when the light is strong
so plunge us into darkness
empty empty
hear my prayer
destroy destroy
till nothing's there
empty empty
move, appear
destroy destroy
till nothing's here
and I pray to let it linger
this justice in my hands
as I dip all ten fingers
in the blood of all God's lands
"...the existence of evil is fatal to philosophy as long as it is supposed to be independent of conditions." -Aliester Crowley, Liber V
What we have seen, the international war on terror is a result of the attempt to create an abstract definition of "terrorist." Ontologically speaking, this has the same problems as trying to define evil as independant of condition. Any one act of violence (in the broadest sense of the word) could concievably be defined as an act of terrorism under the right conditions. Crowley notes here that an ontology of evil is in itself "fatal to philosophy." What does that mean, exactly? What are the consequences of an ontology of evil?
If evil has a definate quality, the reference point for any ethical epistomology shifts radically from the system's telos or end, to antelos, or avoidence. Instead of seeking to create particular conditions in pursuit of a desired end, one seeks to avoid or destroy any conditions which could concievably contribute to "evil," as it has been ontologically situated by the system. The most disturbing consequence is one that I am unsure how to fully substantiate. It seems to me that in practice it is impossible to have two reference points, one of attraction and one of repulsion, without creating internal philosophical conflicts in a system. In other word, this inner struggle is generated by a system that tries to have a telos AND an antelos, both clearly defined and independant of conditions or, most importantly, defined independantly of each other. Any system which makes a point of specifically defining evil is damned to be ruled by it, and reckon all of it's calculations by that light, rather than in pursuit of a good. I am unclear what quality precisely that evil has which makes it impossible to ontologically define without upseting a system, indeed, the question is itself an ontological one under the influence of which I find myself plunged into a labrynthine epic of self-contradiction, so I'm going to let that one go for now. What this suggests to me, and the theory that I hope to elucidate here, is that there is something inherently overpowering about the urge to destroy. The existence of an ontology of evil enables that urge in a very dangerous way. What this suggests to me is that evil has inherent properties that make is more powerful than "good," in the same sense that a machine gun is more powerful than a can opener. The former will totally fuck up a can of tuna... way more than even the most mighty can opener. You probably don't want to eat that shit afterward though.
In the interests of full disclosure, I would like to relate four personal experiences, all definitive for me, of evil in it's conditional sense.
1. The Most Fear
2. The Most Pain
3. Two sides of terrorism (age 12 and age 21)
4. Cacogenisis- what have we learned?
1.
The Most Fear
My experience of the Most Fear was an illusion. I made the decision to try to discover how much fear I could "handle" before I lost the ability to function after my first successful evocation. Without going into full detail, I was mostly doing it to prove to myself that it wouldn't work. I was a committed materialist in my beliefs until this episode, which climaxed with a very severe telekinetic manifestation that, aside from drawing blood, scared the bejesus out of me. Rather than even attempt to communicate with the entity in question, I more or less hid and cowered. The next day I was quite dazed and very ashamed of myself. I wanted to make sure that when this happened again I didn't freeze up, so I needed to condition myself against fear. It seemed foolish to put myself in threatening and dangerous situations to this end, so I settled on using LSD to terrify myself. This was the beginning of my "terror tripping" work. It did have a clear high point...
Unfortunately this isn't much of a story because it is just about fear. The crucial componant was that I did not consciously take the acid. I set out my dose and started to read some Lovecraft, waiting until I got lost in the story. The idea was that, as one would reach out for a glass of water and drink without interrupting the flow of the story, I would do the same with the acid. I would continue reading and think about it as little as possible. Then I figured that I would just read until I was attacked by some crazy phantasmagoric hallucination.
That's not what happened though.
I thought about fear a lot, especially it's relationship to time. Fear is, after all, necessarily conditional upon an awareness of the future. It is anticipatory. This is why fear is so dangerous: by virute of our existential being we travel through time and fear itself makes that journey uncomfortable. It causes us to fight the current, and that gets us nowhere. This was all speculative though. I lost track of the book without noticing and slowly, something very strange began to happen. I lost the distinction between the thoughts about fear and the fear itself. I was getting more afraid every second, and I didn't know of what or why.
It was awful. Everything I looked at seemed to be somehow horrifying but there were absolutely no visual aspects to the hallucination. Rather than hallucinating something to be afraid of, I just hallucinated fear in itself, without a reference point or an existential anchor. If there's a tiger in the room you might be afraid of it's claws or it's teeth. You see the claws and the teeth and you're afraid, and that's probably pretty smart because those claws and teeth will fuck you up. If you're trained to control fear, that's one thing. If you're not, trying to control it too hard can result in panic. This was very different though. Fear was primary to existence. Fear was the predicate to the notion of threat. I kept trying to rationalize why my desk or my chair or my poster could be threatening to me, not because they were evidently a threat in themselves, but because I was swarmed by dispersed fear that I needed to give a point of focus so I could actually run away from it.
I failed, but I tried to run anyway. Out of the basement into a nearby baseball field. It was about 3am by that time. I looked up at the moon and just about shit myself. At that point I had what I can only describe as a fear orgasm, in the sense that the fear reached a climax and abated. It was still there, just as desire remains after a sexual orgasm, but in the background. Less pressing. After an indeterminate amount of time staring at the moon I "realized" that the only way to "fix things" was to get some water from the stream a few blocks away and carry it back to my bedroom in my hands. I did this, doing my best to avoid being seen by the moon. When I brought the water back to the basement I was able to sleep. I note this point because this was before I drank or smoked pot. I had no means by which to "come down" and had only been tripping for a few hours. Under normal circumstances I would have been up and unable to sleep for another twelve hours at least.
This experience was my first encounter with the threshold of fear. It was not my last, but it was very informative. Like evil, fear cannot have it's own ontology. That was what put me into the state I was in: the fact that I first had fear, and so fear generated a sense of threat. This is an epistomology which places the abstract realm before the existential realm. In a healthy view, one percieves an existential threat and experiences the aversion which, when handled in the usual way, it is appropriate to describe as fear.
2.
The Most Pain
This was not something I did on purpose.
starmae and I were in the process of moving. We had occupied a large five bedroom house on Reid St. uptown with a varying number of roomates. People were always fighting, coming and going, and there were numerous changes in the house lineup, some more welcome than others. Toward the end of the experience it was really just her and I. Of the total nine occupants, many left things behind. Mae and I pretty much got stuck cleaning up and preparing the whole place as well as moving our own stuff to King Street downtown without much in the way of transportation. It was summer. It was hot. I was wearing my shirt open to get the night air on my skin. It was four in the morning.
Before leaving with our last burden, I had thrown the contents of the spice rack into a duffle bag and was holding it against my body. As some of you know, I am a fan of very hot, spicy food. Among the contents of the spice rack was a bottle of habanero extract. The label bragged that it was over 500 times more powerful than tabasco sauce. I had once ruined an entire pot of chilli (well, TVP chilli...) by putting in two squirts rather than two drops. I made it to bite five, no one else made it beyond two. It wasn't hot like "oh my, I need some water," it was hot like "fuck, my head feels like it's splitting in two, I have to go lay down." Over time, the liquid around the cap had corroded the plastic top, which came off in the duffle bag. The sauce began to soak through the bottom of the bag, which as I mentioned I was holding against my stomach. When this stuff comes into contact with your skin, you don't notice right away. It has to eat into you for a while before it starts to burn, which is one of the reasons it's impossible to just wash off. It will burn you for hours and hours and hours once it starts. The only way you'd notice right away is if it gets into a sensitive place.
The sweat rolling down my stomach carried great streams of the habanero extract directly down the front of my shorts. It reached a sensitive place.
I charged down York street at full speed, (which was pretty fast, considering I had to run bow-legged) holding my fly open. For the first few seconds my mind was racing. I tried to figure out what the hell was happening to me. Those thoughts quickly dissapeared. There was room for nothing but pain. I almost collapsed three times before I reached the apartment. I kept trying to block it out, reaching for a mantra or a visualization. I was unable to put anything together in my head. All pictures, all words, everything that was not ACTION TOWARD MY GOAL (the ice pack in the freezer at our new apartment) was ejected. It's not just that I was focused on the ice pack, I was incapeable of being distracted, even though I desperately wanted to be. I couldn't even think to myself "man, I want that ice pack." Words and thoughts were impossible. I just went after the ice pack on pure instinct.
In many ways, no experience of mine has been more instructive as to the nature of True Will. True Will is a choice though, and that's the real difference.
After approximately ten minutes of holding an ice pack on my balls I realized that I was in incredible pain all over. I realized I was covered in the sauce (I still didn't know what it was). I really just could not FEEL the invisible flames licking my torso and legs while my bird was being cooked in that horrible shit. Now that my nuts were numb though, I felt the hell out of it. By the time that Mae arrived I was shaking, all white and shedding sheets of sweat. I had lost control of the muscles on the right side of my body, which locked up my right leg and arm, causing them to rise up in a stiff, dead-beetle pose. My bowels had emptied themselves accompanying this loss of muscular control, so I was sitting in a pool of shit for an added bonus. Retching from the smell of the bag, Mae cleaned out the bathroom and ran a cold shower. Eventually she managed to get me in there.
That was when things (if you can believe it) took a turn for the worse. Naturally, the hot sauce did not affect my body temperature and I was immersing myself in ice cold water and I was going into shock. This was the beginning of an hour long nightmare which involved holding myself in the water for as long as I could (which means: until I started shaking so hard that I fell down) at which point I would try to warm myself for as long as I could stand the burning from the habanero sauce (read: until the pain drove me back to my feet). Eventually, fearing for what would happen if she left me to these devices, Mae pulled me out of the shower and I went on the play out the same drama with blankets and a fan. I would let the fan blow on my skin until I couldn't take the cold, and lay under the blankets until I couldn't take the burning. I tried to distract myself with everything, meditation, music, movies, books... nothing worked. I couldn't think of anything but the pain. Everything else just annoyed me. It was a long night, but after about seven hours it stopped enough for me to sleep.
In the morning I was left without a mark on my body. There was no lasting damage of any kind. It was just a surface irritant, after all, although a remarkably effective one.
3.
Two Sides of Terrorism
Twelve years old, I was with my mother and brother at a train station in London. It was 1993. The IRA has been busy. I used to wander off (or sneak away, I don't remember for sure) from the group constantly while we lived in Europe. This time I made sure to tell my mother that I was going to the bathroom at the McDonalds in the food court. I took a comic book with me because, well, I can't go without something to read. If I recall correctly, it was Spectacular Spider-Man from the days when the Hobgoblin (Macendale) was working with Kingpin. Anyway, it was good and I got lost in it. I was in the bathroom for a while. It was afternoon, probably four thirty. The rush was coming upon us. The place had been filling up with people before I went to the bathroom. I suspect that I was in there for at least twenty minutes.
When I emerged, the entire train station was empty.
I wandered around in a daze. I wasn't sure what to do. Was the whole world like this? Where the hell was everybody? Did I get shifted into an alternate dimension? Am I about to be abducted by aliens? What the HELL?
I heard heavy booted footsteps and turned around. Two men in some kind of armor (I am not going to describe my mental picture in detail because I doubt very much that it is what I actually saw) were running toward me, one with an outstretched hand. I shrieked and ran. I didn't make it far and he grabbed me, slung me under his arm and ran for the exit. I was unceremoniously tossed out the door into the arms of two other police officers, who eventually brought me back to my mother. I later learned that someone had found an unattended bag in the station that was discovered to contain a bomb. This was either a few weeks before or after a hotel had been bombed in London and everyone was a little bit on edge. I didn't understand the IRA or the political situation, but I knew that something very fucked up had just happened.
When I was twenty one, Seann and I were visiting our father in Jordan. He had rented a car and we were off to see the Dead Sea, the Tomb of Moses and eventually to Petra (experiences for which I had come prepared with low doses of LSD... low enough to hide the fact that I was tripping, but high enough so that my mind was quite thoroughly blown). The car we had rented, however, had an empty gas tank. We ran out of gas in the desert, not far from a refugee camp. I had seen the camps, but didn't know what they were. Being from New Brunswick, I saw them and thought "trailor parks," which shows how aware I was of the world around me. I really knew nothing about any of these things at the time. This was toward the end of my third year of university, when I had suddenly become extremely active in the religious studies department at STU. Until september eleventh, I had been virtually the only student interested in Islam on campus. There were only three people enrolled in the Koran course that we had, and "Islam II" was on the verge of being cancelled because I was the only person enrolled (or maybe one of two,can't remember exactly... Shelly are you reading this? Were you down for that class?). After 9/11, however, both of these classes became full to capacity. It was March 2002, approximately one year before Iraq. The economy of Jordan was still reeling. It was a huge tourism destination for all of it's holy sites, but the people were not coming. All of the touristy spots that we went to were virtually deserted. In Petra there were more people selling crap on blankets than there were visitors. It was a period of transition, and most people were aware that it was transiting to a very bad place.
That night I asked my father about the "parks" and he gave me a hell of a look. He explained a little bit of it to me, but I really wasn't getting it. A Palestinian friend of his helped out a little. He told me that the point was that their land had been taken, and that they were now being exterminated. He insisted that the world did not care. Although I knew nothing I decided that it would be appropriate to argue with this, and said that there were people who did care (although I was obviously not one of them at the time- I really just assumed that there must be such people out there somewhere). To the suprise of my present self, he did not contradict this. "Perhaps they care," he said, "but we will all be dead before they care enough to actually do anything about it."
I could not prove him wrong then and I cannot prove him wrong now. I suspect that this is because he is right.
4.
CACOGENISIS
When evil is defined as a thing-in-itself, this is cacogenisis. Evil has no such reality on it's own. In a very real sense, to concieve of evil independant of conditions is to CREATE evil. Evil does not exist. It is an illusion created by circumstance. A shadow created by our position in respect to the light.
In the case of fear, it seems to me that to concieve of a defined state of being as evil creates an imparitive to determine who fits into that state of being and destroy them. In all cases, because fear of the evil action is an anticipation of what someone with a particular set of predicates and beliefs will do, to posit a state of being as evil relies on a knowledge of motivation and intent. Any such analysis is fruitless. Motivations of all kinds produce results of all kinds, depending on how one is situated in respect to the particular temporal event in question. Even worse, trying to accurately determine another person's motives is impossible. It's hard enough to figure out one's own motives without worrying about others. Any such analysis would rely on the subjective perception of malice behind a person's actions. When evil is concieved of independant of condition, it becomes something else. This unconditional evil is to conditional evil what paranoia is to fear. It will search for a focus, a body in which to manifest, but it's manifestation can never be sustained. Existential reality cannot support this kind of evil, and as such a subjective interpretation must be decided BEFORE the evil is encountered in it's existential form, lest that encounter shake one's faith in the antelos. The antelos requires an info-phobic commitment to the particular subjective interpretation. That interpretation can never be reevaluated. It's not hard to see how this is "fatal to philosophy."
In the case of pain, we can see how a negative imparitive that is extreme to the threshold of tolerance can be utterly destructive to the Thelemic way of thinking. The pain which I felt was certainly conditional upon being covered in hot sauce, but it hit a level at which it blotted out my consciousness entirely. Through pain, I entered a state what had an epistomological structure not unlike that of one moving totally with the current of their True Will, although the teleological end was drastically different. This is the other problem with placing evil above conditions. If taken to the same extreme it can generate a set of predicates for action which create an imparitive every bit as strong as the imparitive toward Will. True Will, as I said, is a state in which there is only one real choice that one ever has. This is key: Crowley makes it clear that Will indicates the correct path, and it will go well for you whether you want to take it or not. You can take a path that looks better, but things will not go well and you will regret it. For every individual, however, that choice is different, even if they are operating under the same conditions. When PAIN occupies this place it inverts the relationship between the individual and the conditions in which that individual exists. Every participant in the undeniable pain-driven epistomology becomes exactly the same. To be absolutely clear: pain makes homogenizes us. When the psyche is broken down the only course of action possible is the avoidence of pain by whatever means are necessary. How we avoid pain is defined by the conditions we operate under, therefore the same conditions reqire the same course of action from everyone. True Will makes us all individual. We each have our own "correct next step." We look for people whose next step is the same as ours, we compete with people whose next goal is similar to ours, but this undeniable force carries us all in different directions. Under the same conditions, the "correct next step" for most of us is different. Competition for the same "next step" does occour, but according to Thelemic theology if the conditions of the next step are, in Crowley's example, to eat a particular apple and two people are competing to eat this apple, it is only truely the Will of one person to eat the apple. The other person's Will is to try and eat the apple and be beaten in competition. This is very different from the kind of union of direction that pain generates. Pain, if allowed to generate the frame of reference for the whole system, makes all force converge into one path of pure avoidence with no positive end.
The last two stories are about conditions. If the larger point that I am making in the first two is understood, their role in this analysis should be perfectly clear and lucid.
What does all this mean for the "fight against evil"?
NOX
I stood up to heaven
when I got down on my knees
I finally stopped pretending
when I started to believe
my head went up in smoke
my heart went up in flames
my holding on was broke
no more time for games
I go to war with God
I go to war to win
maybe when Hell's thawed
I'll rewrite all this sin
all this chilling distance
all this cold corruption
I'll break down time's resistence
to history's abduction
all the flaws in all the laws
dance before my eyes
offense itself shook with applause
while tears came to my lies
so I filled up with fire
I flew to the fight
and with the damned conspired
to at last blot out the light
shadow reigned for far too long
clumsy, crude and artless
deeper when the light is strong
so plunge us into darkness
empty empty
hear my prayer
destroy destroy
till nothing's there
empty empty
move, appear
destroy destroy
till nothing's here
and I pray to let it linger
this justice in my hands
as I dip all ten fingers
in the blood of all God's lands