XVII-Star

Hating Christianity

2011-04-10T12:26:00.000-07:00

Above the old dark forest of Christianity, Thelema is manifesting its own Light and nourishing itself on the rotting matrix below.

One of the least attractive, and most disabling features, of conventional-wisdom-Thelema is its pronounced, juvenile fixation on hating Christianity. This is a sub-current of a similar hatred expressed by so many neopagans, many of whom are recovering Christians.

Of course Crowley himself was just that, survivor and recoverer from the most absurd and extremist Christian convictions, who as a child was so tortured by the dogma of his sect, the Plymouth Brethren, that at one point he thought his entire family had been raptured up to heaven and he, evil boy that he was, had been left behind.

Now, this is Christianity of the dumbest order, little better than a carnival sideshow religion, which Crowley was right to resent and abandon. However, and this is the case with many neopagans, including Thelemites, abandoning the old religion is not so easy to do.

For one thing, being the still dominant faith in the culture Thelema (initially) aims to conquer, Christianity influences, or infests, every aspect of that culture—or at least it allegedly does this. In fact, modern culture is almost entirely driven by soulless consumerist ideologies of "freedom of choice" amongst the very limited capitalist options, and has little to do with any spiritual manifestation or exercise.

For another thing, Christianity, being in the West the matrix against which one is rebelling, in many cases by enthusiastically adopting the "side" and policies of the chief Christian rebel, Satan, continues to command (if negatively) the mind and heart of the rebels. Indeed, counting oneself as a rebel from something, necessarily binds one to the hated source of repression.

People truly free of this sort of resentment posture, or resentiment, do not concern themselves with rebellion. They are governors of a true will and its landscape. They further understand, relative to Thelema and the 93 current, that nothing false can stand, regardless of what they do or do not do about it. Thus, if Christianity needs to wither, it shall be diminished by the current, naturally.

With this in mind, we can refer to some of the more allegedly explicit Christianity-hating elements of Thelemic dogma, and see if they were ever intended by Crowley to be literally hateful of Christianity and the hated Christians (obviously, what people really hate are people, the multifarious cross-bearing rats, and not just Christian slogans).

Chief amongst the anti-Christian doctrine of Thelema are the several precepts or laws given in Liber AL, for example:

AL II, 21: "We have nothing with the outcast and the unfit: let them die in their misery. For they feel not. Compassion is the vice of kings: stamp down the wretched & the weak: this is the law of the strong: this is our law and the joy of the world."

To this Crowley commented: "There is a good deal of the Nietzschean standpoint in this verse. It is the evolutionary and natural view…Nature's way is to weed out the weak. This is the most merciful way, too…The Christians to the Lions!

Crowley goes on to say in this comment: "humanitarianism…is the syphilis of the mind" and "Let weak and wry productions go back into the melting-pot, as is done with flawed steel castings. Death will purge, reincarnation make whole, these errors and abortions."

As has been pointed out by a number of commentators, there is not much separating that kind of rhetoric from something Adolph Hitler might have said, or maybe something an adolescent boy would think up in learning his way about the trolling-runs online.

It is rude, confrontational, particularly outlandish and insulting to a largely Christian audience reading it back in the day of 1904, and even today for that matter.

Now, what is this "Nietzschean" standpoint?

Well, it is simply—or not so much so—that Friederich Nietzsche, who has influenced some of the most tedious haters in the last 150 years, was of the mind that much that had gone wrong with the world, particularly his world of Germans, had been perpetrated on a kind of weak-strong elite by the masses forcing them to adopt the morality of slaves. Recall Crowley's comment regarding Seven of Swords (Futility): "a contest between the many feeble and the one strong. He strives in vain."

Ultimately, this slave-religion was that of the dependent, universally despised, Jews, but as refined, so to speak, by the worst offenders, the Christians. These latter had spread across Europe a religion intended to raise up the morality of the lower classes (blessed are the POOR in spirit after all), and particularly slaves, to the dominant religion, which replaced the old, noble virtues of killing, raping, pillaging, and lording it over anybody one could dominate by force or virile charms.

For Nietzsche, and so also for Crowley, the manly virtues had been emasculated, in other words, by the feminizing faith of Christianity. This was especially galling to Nietzsche, since he, being basically a fan of the Dionysian principle of finding joy even in the horrors of life, saw in Christianity a disgusting, life-hating affirmation of weakness and simpering, feminine sentiments.

Nietzsche, we should point out, was not so lucky with women. For that matter, neither was Crowley, unless you count as luck in sexual relationships the ability to repeatedly find (or often purchase) women aching to be humiliated by a fellow seeking salvation by embedding himself permanently in the darkest part of (her) Malkuth. In any case, these noble boys were pretty much trainwrecks when it came to relationships with women, and no doubt this served to enhance their already antagonistic view of the female ethic and influence.

For his personal part, Crowley specifically blamed his mother for forcing the much-hated Plymouth Brethren version of Christianity down his throat for far too many years. It was she of course who, either in jest or to torture Aleister, began referring to him as the Beast 666. Thus, even in the most literal symbolism of the matrix of his formation as a spiritual being, his mother and mother-religion were right there guiding and cattle-prodding Crowley towards his destiny with the Egyptian Secret Chief Aiwass in 1904.

When Crowley repeats in his Liber AL commentary three times (for all three components of the Christian Trinity) "The Christians to the Lions!", it is in part a joking allusion to the noble (but never FINAL) solution to the Christian problem, but also a way of pointing to the 93-current solution of the problem, the spiritual drowning of the Christians and their morality in the Lake of Fire of the Lions of Leo (symbolic of Hadit in the Aquarian Age).

And this is why Crowley made the statement: "We are infinitely tolerant, save of intolerance. It is not good, however, to try to prevent Christians from meddling, save by the one cure: The Christians to the Lions'."

The "cure" for Christians is to allow the 93 current to naturally process them—to the Lions of Hadit—thus to their new, Thelemic, identities. This cannot be forced upon them, nor is it even good to attempt to prevent them from continuing their perpetrations of falsehood.

This is further explained in the one place in Liber AL where Aiwass specifically recommends the proper solution for the Christians:

AL III,51: "With my Hawk's head I peck at the eyes of Jesus as he hangs upon the cross."

Crowley's comments: "Thus it is the eyes of 'Jesus'—his point of view—that must be destroyed".

And the main thing about that point of view that Crowley sees as false for the New Aeon is Jesus' Magickal orientation of self-sacrifice. Of course, this is a technical dispute, since Thelema also expects self-sacrifice, but the difference is that Christians are expected to obtain salvation via an impersonal self-destruction (i.e. a submersion of the true self in the one great FALSE one of the body of Christ). Thelemites obtain not salvation, but full consummation, of their true self (Hadit) joined in superconscious intercourse with the body of Nuit.

The Christian life does not demand any works, except that dictated by the Christian ethic of true-self-hating righteousness. The Thelemic life ideally should be two-fold—discovering one's true self, and the way or life implied by it, and successfully living that life. The Thelemic ethic is literally universally endless in the multitude of points of view it implies and brings forth for fruition. And in this way, Nuit's children worship her, and are bound to her, and finally in death are returned to her embrace.

Both Christian and Thelemite are thus lost in the body of the deity, but the Christian seeks death IN LIFE, while the Thelemite does not seek it, but is given death as a gift for a life lived in furtherance of the current or Way.

Finally, there is much a Thelemite can learn from observing the implications of Christian scripture. These are not in any way all negative lessons either. Jesus' life, in fact, was Thelemic, and courageously so. He did his will, according to the greater Will of "thou", and gave up his material existence to cure a rift in the divine covenant between creator and created. This rift is of course risible—the God whose dignity was offended by Adam and Eve seems weak and petty—but it allows Jesus to make a point of showing us one way of Do what thou wilt, with extreme emphasis on THOU.

Thelema allows for this as well, but the emphasis is infinitely varied, and so the example of Jesus' performance of will is just one of the possible, and not the only acceptable, means of being righteous. That is especially the case now that the divine administration and relationship between it and its citizens has been adjusted to a more rational collaboration.

Glenn F. Wright

Return of the Guillotine

2011-04-09T09:25:00.000-07:00

Guillotine Redux.

The Simple Truths—or Tsunamis

2011-03-15T07:12:00.000-07:00

Before one of the Simple Truths, it doesn't matter what your religion is.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote the following entry in my Hadit journal (these are rough notes, but interesting in their metaphors, all things considered). I have added a few notes in red.:

The Simple Truths [e.g., HATE and LOVE]—are like the forces of Nature, e.g., a tidal wave washing over a coastal town. It cannot be stopped, or negotiated with. It has no hatred, no mercy, no compassion. The fact that some people are situated to survive, and others not to—is no judgment on the value of their choices—it is the result of random occurrence, where they happened to be when encountering the force. [That in fact does seem like some kind of judgment or critique anyway of their choices.]

So it is when people encounter the Simple Truths, which while simple, can be very difficult and destructive. They threaten our confidence, the things we feel we know to be true. They disturb our understanding, upon which our faith is built; they drown the unlucky [ideas]; they terrify the surviving elements of our understanding.

We are forced to admit in the face of the Simple Truths, that a few aspects of our world are immutably, inescapably TRUE [i.e. transcendently, impersonally so]—and we naturally hate and rebel against this, like children, and demand that the truth it may be, but it is only a relative thing, experienced differently by everyone—thus true only in a personal way, and TRUE only as a collective of errant points of view. [the Unity of the absolutely dispersed Nothing] This is the Great Lie of human perception and understanding, the result of our congress as a species on the question—only in this way must it be TRUE—so in other words not simply so. [and so the multitude of dictionaries exist to give voice to the lies in all languages...except possibly mathematics]

But this ignores the power of the TRUTH outside the context of human understanding. [e.g., the TRUTH of space which is beyond the reach of human vision and instruments can only ever remain a much conjectured upon mystery. Nevertheless, this should be understood to have a natural connection to the myriad truths and false starts in understanding of known or accessible space.] Many people standing before the tidal wave may pray that it should stop and spare them—this faith is baseless and can save no one. [of course if someone is spared, it is natural to think the person was especially chosen by the gods to continue on, often inspired to do greater things than they would have otherwise. This is a useful illusion.]

The Blessings of Hate and Love

2011-03-13T09:53:00.000-07:00

Most people want this kind of life. That is why most people are fat stupid pigs.

Many people, especially those who love to pour gobs of high-fructose corn syrup on the buttery pancakes of their lives, feel that if only hate could be drowned by enough love-syrup, the world would be a better place.

Truly, these monsters hate humanity and wish it made into something it clearly is not.

For Hate and Love have always gone together, been married to one other, and are equally important blessings and curses upon humanity.

You don't think they are both blessings?

Well, check your Bible, especially your KJV, for that is what we shall reference today.

The word "hate" comes before the word "love" by three chapters in KJV Genesis, and both of them come rather late, deep into the history of Isaac and his wife Rebekah.

Now, technically, it is true the word "loved" is used three times prior to "love", but it is in a personal, selfish, way, having to do with superficial affection. The kind of "love" and "hate" that matters, deals with blessings, and sacrificing personal bonds to liberate or reward a soul to move on to fulfill its destiny.

Rebekah is blessed in Genesis 24:60.

"And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, Thou [art] our sister, be thou [the mother] of thousands of millions, and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them."

This "hate" then becomes a means for establishing the measure or value of the conquests the seed of Rebekah will perpetrate upon their enemies (those who hate them, and whose city gates will fall to the Hebrews). They after all do not need to possess the gates of those which shall love them. Those gates are open to the loving-hater without need of conquest. The resultant joy in slaughtering one's enemies, in hanging them on five trees, as Joshua did with five enemy kings he had conquered, would be lost if all one had in the emotional toolkit was sweet, vain, love.

It is of course out of a kind of love or lust that this seeding and conquering will come about, and it should not be forgotten that the chief product of the groping and grunting and sperming around of the naked monkeys of humanity is mass murder, of themselves and billions of creatures. Life is a constant conquest and theft. It is a holocaust that people pray for and bless, in full hatred, every day.

On the other fake-hairy hand, Isaac refers to the method of achieving his blessing in Genesis 27:4

"And make me savoury meat, such as I love, and bring [it] to me, that I may eat; that my soul may bless thee before I die."

So, we should note that despite the fact that Isaac's love has been discussed respecting Rebekah and his chief filial squeeze, Esau, what he demands to get his blessing, and his authority, is a bowl of stew. He wishes Esau to go out and kill something and make this stew and bring it to him. Esau is all about grunting around and killing things. He is a brutish, hairy, ape who takes after lions and bears.

God decides this alpha-yang is not going to be the channel of the chosen, and picks momma's boy Joseph to run a scam, along with his mother Rebekah (she of the seeds of Hate), to produce a bowl of kid-meat stew to beat his brother Esau out of his blessing. The Bible thus suggests to us that power and destiny, in God's eyes, is far more important than the cheap sentiments and affirmations of personal love.

For how much does Rebekah's love for Joseph, also indicate a hate for Esau, and hatred for her husband as well? It is not the first or the last time, the treacherous wiles of women would betray the trust (or stupidity) of their men in the Bible.

Hatred is so bound up with love in blessing that they can only be separated by a spirit of enervation, often expressed by insipid moderns, that they want every creature to be a "winner", and will not hope in any way to be the downfall of another. This is such an inhuman and really vain suppression of a coequal passionate virtue, that it of course results in untempered outbursts, no different than when the sexual drive is suppressed (e.g. in Catholic priests) as a sinful and threatening desire.

It is the Christians, the ones who blather the most about God's perfect love—ignoring the more popular divine expression of perfect hate—who passionately exult in or aggressively ignore the slaughter of God's (or really their) enemies, especially when these victims are members of a competing brand of religion.

The key point about all this is to recognize that while personal affection is useful in securing assistance in doing one's portion of the Work, it is a means to an end, and no end in itself, any more for example than are hallucinatory drugs or savory stews.

And everyone is always bringing their share of hate. They may suppress it, out of a mistaken sense of civility or as a means of conning fools, but it is there, on display usually just as brilliantly expressed if not more so than their holey buckets of cheap love.

Learn to detect hate, and not to resent it, and learn to measure the wise mixture of hate and love in your own Work in the world.

Glenn Wright

Big High Tim—or Lon

2011-03-09T17:40:00.000-08:00

Lon exults over yet another fiery mess he got himself into.

As Lon Milo DuQuette pushes on towards his Greater Feast, he has the pallor and the presence of someone who has been left ripening just a little too long. In fact, in his new stab at dissembling on Thoth Tarot, he seems in the promo video to be melting away, mentally and otherwise.

He puts off such ungainly, irritating vibes I had one friend shout—"He makes me want to punch him in the mouth!"—she was exasperated with his pixilated pretentiousness, Whereas, back in the day, Lon used to come across merely as a slightly sordid and serious version of Art Fern, now he is channeling Timothy Leary, the problem being that Tim was a lot smarter and higher than Lon.

In any case, while there is plenty of alchemy all over Thoth cards, even if Lon knew any of it, he is pledged not to tell you the secrets, so what exactly can he say?

Well, as usual, he hints about super secret sex stuff—of course that's hardly a secret, is it? Except in Thoth it kind of is. What is the sexual secret being veiled? Again, Lon cannot tell you this because he is a member of OTO and he would violate his secrecy oath if he told mere infidels such as yourselves.

Of course, presumably you get something for your $200 or whatever it is Lon wants people to pay for his DVD.

Here he explains the power of Thoth Tarot: "It's big magic…it's big, big, big, big BIG magick!"

Here is an example, in additional to, you know, THAT, of why I think you'd be better off spending that $200 on better writers.

Update, Tuesday, November 15, 2011: OK, I was re-reading this material. It seems to me at this point unnecessarily mean, like picking on poor Herman Cain for being befuddled over foreign policy or for trying to recall one of the many women he's sexually harassed. After all, when Cain demonstrates his utter contempt for the basic requirements of performing the task of POTUS by making fun of needing to know boring stuff like Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan, we all know (or should know) that Cain is just joking with us, I mean about the idea anybody could ever seriously consider him a candidate to control a giant stockpile of nuclear weapons. For one thing, if he can't even find the target on the map, who knows what the hell he'll end up blowing to kingdom come?

But then, like Lon, Herman Cain is chiefly interested in peddling his personality, and his brand, not in worrying himself over whether naive people, of which there is no shortage, might end up actually electing him president of the United States. After all, Cain has been telegraphing his true intentions all along, at least to anyone paying attention. There is no difference in the intent of a straw dog like Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan and Lon's "big, big, big, big BIG magick!" These are cynical but intentionally revealing mockeries of the arcane knowledge neither man possesses, and which their fans understand is only boring minutiae, inhibiting the enjoyment of clowns poking fun at the possibility of there being any truly enlightened opinions.

Thelemic Non-Attachment

2011-03-06T14:08:00.000-08:00

Classic failure of attachment, Darth Vader, whose selfish love destroyed his true self—or so it seemed—the Force or the Way is inscrutable in its Work.

Consider the profane man, how he preeneth, as if at feast, or gazing upon Spring from a tower! But as for me, I am as one who yawneth, without any trace of desire. I am like a babe before its first smile. I appear sad and forlorn, like a man homeless.

Dao De Jing, chapter 20, Crowley Translation

Non-attachment is not really the same thing as detachment, which since it is the opposite of attachment, both in a sense refer to a relationship to some particular object or idea. To be attached is to be bound. Detachment is the state of being unbound, but it implies being so as a liberation, i.e from a previous attachment. In any case, one has to be attached to a perception of an object or idea as a separate and separative agency in order to detach oneself from it. The attachment does not really wane in that event, but one instead adopts a detached attitude or posture towards it—however still anointing it with undue importance by so doing.

Non-attachment on the other hand is the notion of having never soiled oneself with any personal engagement at all. You might in fact say it is an expression regarding the one virtuous attachment, that to nothing. It is both a way of proceeding and a way of succeeding in the world. Nothing being the ultimate expression and destination of everything, it is the one true way, or really the none true way.

Non-attachment is a state not merely of being detached, but of being invulnerable to either attachment or detachment. The "vulnerability" of attachment is the idea of losing oneself, and herein is a paradox—in order to establish the measure of self and its borders beyond which beckon the myriad attachments, one has to become attached to some illusory aggregate called "Self". The only way to escape this error, is to collapse Self to nothing (Hadit) or to expand Self to everything (Nuit). In either case, the remainder of the subtraction problem ("Self" minus "Non-Self) is a number invulnerable to attachment.

0 - 1 = -1

1 - 0 = 1

The sum of these Selves (i.e. Hadit plus Nuit) is zero.

All that is left then is the pure, unassuaged, explosion of energy, which we call Ra-Hoor-Khuit, an all-conquering annihilation of separation, and thus of any possibility of attachment.

In practical terms, these ideas are not merely difficult, but for primitive creatures such as human beings, they are abhorrent to the very essence of our beings. For example, where does Love operate in these seemingly impersonal, really demonic, processes?

Of course, the unfolding of annihilation could never work without equal parts Love and Hate, so Love is fundamental to the process. The problem however is in not seeing and understanding Love as part of a self-annihilating process, and instead turning it into an object of attachment, which is manifested and symbolized in the object—the "beloved".

If you think about it, when we reduce people to mere objects of our personal interest and emotion, we sacrifice their individual worth, their Star and its meaning and its potential, to serve our own ends. We do this both to distract ourselves from our own non-attached purpose, but also to bend the object to our personal (debased) will.

Personal attachment is a sin against ourselves and others, and also an obstruction to our ability to perform our portion of the Work. Thus, two souls are destroyed when we love selfishly.

This is why "Do what thou wilt" is such a sacred commandment, for it is a commandment to surrender to the current, and to allow Love to flow correctly, along with its lover Hate, so that these fundamental forces manifest (in) the Cosmos, through us, the agents of the Great Work.

Why Do You Smile?

2011-01-25T07:12:00.000-08:00

George Carlin, demonstrating the idiotic

smile of dead people in heaven, "looking
down on" and after the living.

So much of smiling these days is all part of selling bullshit, especially the bullshit of our endlessly eroding and escaping fake selves.

How many times a day do you dredge up a fake smile to plaster over your fake face to pretend to give a fuck about some stupid moron you have to interact with in life?

Maybe it's your husband, or your wife, or your boss, or your professor, or just the stupid fucking brat you managed to inflict on the world by reproducing your worthless DNA.

So many people miming fakery to so many morons is such a huge part of each day's social networking. It is why so many people gratefully dispense with civility online. It is why more and more people dispense with it altogether even in their "real" fake-times with others. We simply cannot bear to endure and dispense so much bullshit to so many people any longer.

And when everything in our lives is mere appearance, labels and slogans intended to advance interests somebody else sold us as worth pursuing, is it any wonder the fake smiles harbor deep resentment, angst, and massive festering lakes of hate?

Why do you smile?

It isn't because you're really happy. Because happiness does not actually connect to or resonate from anything externally. It is of course merely a drug, one of many which craft our way of viewing the world. It is a particularly seductive one, capable of making one long for death actually, so as to freeze what seems perfection into an unchangeable condition.

In this way, happiness is also a poison, which kills and cures (like bacon), sapping the blood out of purpose, and dulling the edge of one's mind. It is a thing which consumes itself inside any restive intelligence, as eventually that great need to cut down what grows and offends the critical perception will demand the resupply of one's purpose and the resharpening of one's blades.

Love can withstand this process, but only in a fake-smile form. It is so different to look upon one's beloved while being poisoned by happiness, compared to doing so when the beloved has been moved over by a mindslice to being yet another customer lined up to be affirmed and approved and anointed by one's fake smiles.

The pawing animals and their intense demanding teeth give no respite. The furious specter kindness is a slave-master, beating our solitary snarls and fangs into the acceptable, ovine cluster hugs—note well the difference between being torn by a canine and mushed by a molar.

"...consider that every motherfucker selling anything to
the dumbasses of the marketplace, first and foremost loads
up his shitgun with fake pleasantries and insipid grins."

Finally, if one needed any other evidence for the stupid avidity that fosters the virtue of smiling, consider that every motherfucker selling anything to the dumbasses of the marketplace, first and foremost loads up his shitgun with fake pleasantries and insipid grins. A smile is the slogan of empty-headed peddlers, who sucker you into feeling they are on your side, right there suffering or enjoying along with you.

But it has no basis in any fact of any life.

The smile is a figleaf covering the most profound and true terror of humanity—the awareness of the only real reward of the cosmos, so well deserved, for our ever having drawn even the sweetest, sustaining, breath—oblivion.

gfw

______________

I reel back beneath the blow of her breath

As she comes smiling to me, that disgust

Changes her drunken lust

Into a shriek of hate—half conscious still

(Beneath the obsession of her will)

Of all she was—before her death, her death!

______________

Man of War

2010-11-06T09:35:00.000-07:00

Many Thelemites imagine that what distinguishes Thelema from Christianity is that the Thelemic gods are martial in spirit, strong and virile and not like Jesus and his wimpy dad—who forgives people.

But in fact, martial warrior gods are a dime a dozen.

Yahweh, Jesus' dad, is a war god.

As is said of Yahweh, or the LORD:

"Yahweh is a man of war."—Exodus 15:3

And the benefits of serving this man of war are many. Conquest of other people's lands (which you can claim were promised to you by God); killing all the obviously evil leaders of the people whose land you're liberating; and best of all, girls!

Yep, God knows what it is like, going forth and warring, and men need a little break at the end of a busy day of slaughter. So, as God says (in Deuteronomy 21), if you see among the captives from your conquest "a beautiful woman", one you would like to keep around for a while instead of just rape once or twice, you bring her into your house, let her mourn her family for a month to get all the weepy crap out of her system, and then you can treat her as your wife.

Lucky girl, huh?

And that's Jesus' dad.

No wonder Jesus acts like he's got something to make up for.

Jesus isn't saving us from the Devil.

He's saving us from God.

And that act of rebellion fuses the idea of Jesus (XIII-Death) with Satan (XV-Devil), who are twins, making them both persecuted saviors.

Similarly, war and peace are fused as twins, with the liberating synthesis producing the deadly balance called LIFE. Indeed, that is the fundamental conflict and balance of the Cosmos—the war and the peace struggle—producing the endless process of ever-terminating mortal existence.

We stand in line as particle aggregates, waiting our brief opportunities to fight and love and shine.

For the most part, we shine for others.

Thelemites shine for themselves, illuminating others, and serving others fundamentally by showing the way to acceptance of one's divine nature and Earthly mission (or Great Work).

There is then not really an essential conflict between Christianity and Thelema, except that Thelema dispenses with the now vain concern for artificial uplifting of the masses to equality and independent power. While acknowledging the righteousness of this idea—every person is a star—Thelema acknowledges also the reality of the current situation. Most of the stars are dark, worshipful of fear foremost, and incapable of safely or successfully working greatly.

Thus, they must be guided and represented by brighter lights.

A critique has therefore developed—how is this dictatorship of the enlightened any different from any dictatorship in history.

In this sense: no value judgment is laid upon the masses. If any one of them can stand up and shine, let it be so. No Thelemite shall block their way.

But, given their chance to think for themselves, if they produce nothing but endless waves of democratic muck, they sacrifice the full measure of their rights, for they do not have a sanction from God to inflict their lesser understanding on their betters, nor even on their lessers.

Christianity is easier on this point, for it expects all Christians to find utility and equality by the surrendering of their individual wills and spirits to the mass, the Body of Christ.

Thelemites pointedly serve the body of Nuit, as members of her vast array of possibilities, but also independent cosmoses, devoted to the promulgation of the way and the truth, according to their point of view.

They are thus, brother and sisters of the Way, but also free spiritual agents of its perfect and omnipotent current.

gfw93

Violent Beauty

2010-09-30T06:12:00.000-07:00

INADEQUATE VIOLENCE SPELLS FUTILITY

Often in our lives, our spells, our derivations, we ask what is the right amount?

What is adequate? What is futile?

Another question. Since every moment you live and breathe is based upon unimaginable scales of violent acts, just to enable you to continue, multiplied by billions upon billions of creatures, motives, and modalities, how does anybody understand or limit the flow of the Holy Spirit in and through our beings?

When I was twelve years old, in 1967, my grandmother took me to see Bonnie and Clyde. She liked to go to the movies every Sunday, and I always accompanied her. The posters for the movie made it seem like a light comedy, with some guns and robbery. Looked like fun.

It was at this time, and really with this movie, that things were going to start changing in American cinema. I could tell that was true especially because my grandmother started having a really hard time taking me along with her to see things. For example, we saw The Trip together, and while I was disturbed and intrigued by what I saw, she just kept emitting "Oh my god!!" though the whole thing, in a deep, melodramatic, Mississippi drawl, intended to let God know she was a good person, forced into cinematic impiety by the demon child next to her.

But, you know, at least she took me along. And I got to see a lot of movies other kids really didn't.

Including, maybe unfortunately, "Bonnie and Clyde".

While I loved the movie, and still do, and while it is certainly very funny, it is also an experimental vehicle for the notion of aesthetic violence. It was so influential in that respect, and in many others of course, that even an allegedly groundbreaking film like "The Matrix" owes its slow-motion shootout look to the final scene of "Bonnie and Clyde".

That scene, in which the lovers in crime are finally bloodily dispatched after being betrayed to a roadside ambush, is one of the classic scenes in all movies. Watching it as a twelve-year-old was deeply disturbing, not just because the young, pretty criminals died—which I considered a great injustice—but because their deaths were not easy, but horrific. They were torn to pieces by scores of machine-gun bullets, in slow motion.

You might think, so what? But remember, it was 1967. None of us had ever seen anything like that before. Not in movies. Not anywhere. It wasn't real life. It wasn't any other movie, either. It was the new way, or new wave, of seeing violence.

It was really that moment when America elevated violence to a holy worship, where it had always been, but now it was celebrated in the church of movies, and so became officially recognized, and hallowed.

We have never stepped back from that invocation, and consecration, of the Holy Spirit of Kaos and Justice. Violence-porn is so naturally a part of our culture, that we expect young children to be drenched in it, even in the allegedly educational video games we give them, which have to be violently ornamented just to keep their attention.

Our movies are pushed out to the limits of violent imagery, in 3-D. All that is missing from our culture is arming football players with swords and spears, and regular features of Christians to the lions, which I know many of you who read this page are impatiently awaiting.

Anyway, the director of Bonnie and Clyde died this week. So long Mr. Penn. Thanks for helping me to see at a young age, what the function of violence in life and death was all about, and how young and pretty dies too.

The Punching Man

2010-09-08T06:16:00.000-07:00

There is this thin little pauper, who spends his days sitting in the Elements, and slowly but surely they dissolve him.

This is why he sits, waiting for the promise of dissolution.

But as he sits, the Elements combine from time to time to push him about, to treat him in ways that remind him why he sits and waits to die.

He cannot process the massive layers of hypocrisy which fuel the whole wild world that wraps him up and reaps vitality out of the very Elements which scatter the ashes of his soul.

And this creates the only Fire in him that is left.

And he punches out—at the Air.

He would never punch a person.

He knows that would be the end.

But when the destriers of the knights of death take form, the little man punches out, yelling their names that he has learned from watching them harvest his friends and his familiars.

Punching man stares at his reflection. He laughs.

And punches out the windows.

Justice and Mercy—for the Children

2010-08-23T04:06:00.000-07:00

Since we spent last posting taking a bit about blending ethical assignments between conviction to a cause and responsibility to the greater social fabric to make sure you weren't a cure worse than the illness, let us look at this question in another way.

A simpler and more accessible way, for those of you with children.

Let us say we are talking about what you owe, perhaps respecting your children, for the nature of your actions in the world.

"...a woman and two children were killed in an airstrike that was aimed at insurgents..."

What I mean is best explained by my asking you a question:

Why do your children, or let use say in a greater web American children, rate safety, happiness, and a life protected from the shadows, when you pay your military proxies to rob thousands of children of these things?

Every day you get up and do exactly what George Bush ordered you to—you ignore the truth. Why? Because that way you and your children can keep sailing on the surface instead of sinking down below, where "they" reside. There are so many of "them" now, and you know they really do not like you, or your children.

And you would do anything, right, to save your kids.

You would torture somebody else's kids, gladly, putting them through nightmares of having their fathers dragged away in the night by military goons; or seeing their brothers and sisters blown to hell by one of your expensive euphemisms; or just being torn to shreds themselves this way.

But most of all, you would take that poison called "hate", which you can barely keep your own children away from, so immersed in it is the culture in which they breed, and you pour it generously down the throats of so many of the world's children, the ones you don't kill.

Yet you imagine, well it is not YOU, because YOU wouldn't choose to do these horrific things, it is that damned government that just keeps acting like monsters, out of your control.

Well, just a little question then. You live in a democracy right? So, the will of the people is either being expressed, or it isn't—in which case isn't the remedy apparent?

Oh right, you think that means move to Canada. Yeah, well that might work if it were just an American sin, an American blight upon the world. But it's the whole stinking idea of the West and its violent hatred of just about anything and everybody that won't pay or slave.

So, you can either "escape" to a perpetrator or a victim.

Meanwhile, what about the bill for your own perps and proxies, and their butchery?

And what will your kids think when they finally begin to do the math on you and your cowardice?

I imagine a lot of people figure it is God's judgment to be merciful to the Western Way, and hateful and "just" to everybody else.

The good thing about those people, and their path, is that they have an almost unlimited potential to be taught the error of their assumptions.

You should hug your children, right now, and don't bother telling them why you are incapable of stopping crying, just right now.

They'll figure it out, if they're lucky.

Thelema and Max Weber's Ethical Dichotomy

2010-08-19T06:22:00.001-07:00

Max Weber's views of the dichotomy between Great Works and social responsibility are relevant to Thelemic wills and ways.

Yeah, I know, the title of this thing alone is sufficient to send you running for the exit, or any possible excuse not to expose your brain to something that sounds SO bloody boring!

Except, follow me for one more paragraph and see if you can stand it.

Thelema says "Do what thou wilt." It says this without crutches, or aids to understanding. Those are provided, allegedly, by a lot of people, but Thelema doesn't say you should use any of them, but rather that in a natural way, the truth will bubble up through, and generally via the destruction of, your intellectual and other limitations. But what if your conviction to do what thou wilt clashes with your sense of social responsibility about what is the right thing to do—to other people?

Then you have engaged the dichotomy discussed by the philosopher Max Weber, between what he called the ethic of conviction, and the ethic of responsibility.

In Weber's view, the ethic of conviction views life as a kind of constant and essential relationship between "values" and the "meaning of life". That is, it is an ends-oriented approach to things or deontological, which does not ignore the virtue of the means, but sees these as naturally pertaining to the ends they enable. In simple terms, the ends justify the means.

The ethic of responsibility, which implies to a great extent social responsibility, considers the consequences of actions, and thus is often called a "consequentialist" approach. This means the consequences of pursuing ends, the choices one makes along the way, are the bulk of the important ethical considerations. In simple terms, the ends don't always necessarily justify the means.

There is a tendency for any rules-based system, or absolute system, such as one finds in a lot of religions and occultism, to be interpreted deontologically or with a concern for achieving what occultists call the Great Work.

That Work is viewed as so important, and in fact fulfilling of one's purpose for being, that responsibility is understood to be solely pertaining to its achievement. Any complaint about who might get hurt along the way will certainly be explained and often explained away by a Thelemite as a disabling concern with Old Aeon ethics.

But what that view misses is that certain, basic, ethical considerations transcend aeons. Caring for one another may have different expressions through the aeons, but the need for caring as an ethical basic operating stance is transcendent.

In Thelema, the "caring" is individually oriented, in that a Thelemite seeks to respect and not to thwart the Work of another being, or at least another Thelemite, or one doing the the Work of thou. This points to a basic problem in all faiths, and Thelema is no exception, that because the rule book (Liber AL) is written in cryptic language, which can be interpreted at many levels and in many ways, this makes it difficult if not impossible for one person to know that another is truly doing the will of thou or Thou.

And if that is true, respect for the consequences of one's actions regarding others would seem to be of paramount importance, except of course what is really of paramount importance in Thelema is achieving the Great Work of doing the work of thou.

The apparent contradiction is one that has occurred to people studying Weber's work, and who have seen the basic ethical dichotomy as naturally in contradiction to each other. Weber did not see it that way however, and argued that the chief goal of anyone seeking to achieve a great work in life was to assure that this purpose was consistent with the ethic of responsibility.

Failure to take into consideration the impact one's Work might have on others and on the greater social collective, could lead to the effect Crowley describes in 10 of Swords in Thoth Tarot:

"reason run mad...the logic of lunatics and (for the most part) of philosophers. It is reason divorced from reality."

Now, this "reality" is of course changeable in some ways, but has a great and powerful consistency over the ages as well. In fact, you may say there is a Great Work of evolution transpiring in every species as well, such that any individual Great Work which attacks this could be viewed as pathological.

That alone does not argue against the individual will being right for that person, if it is "true". But it does again illustrate the difficulty of determining one's own will and its true way, much less that of or for another person.

Lastly, anyone who thinks the consequences are not as important as the end he seeks might consider that how you reach the end may very well determine its nature once you get there. This is not to say it is the journey mainly, but it is to say if the journeying were not at least of equal importance, what would have been the point of time in the first place?

Seek thou thy will, and do it responsibly.

Getting the "Right" Kind of Attention

2010-08-12T04:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I got my first death threat for what I write at examiner.com.

Naturally, it came from someone upset I wasn't being respectful to the corporate killing fields planted at Arlington National Cemetery.

If there is one thing that unites conservatives, and many Americans as well who otherwise claim to be liberals, it is that every one of those dead people in the gardens of stone, died for something instead of absolutely nothing. Or more to the point, they would allege they died for something virtuous, instead of something ignoble.

So long as we accept this idea, that killing other people is the basis of a noble profession, we will be stuck at "Medieval" on the civilization-meter.

Let us examine for a moment the usual pro-warrior arguments:

1. These men (and women too) died to GIVE us our freedoms.

This is one of the stupidest excuses for killing I have ever heard. No soldier ever gave anybody any freedom. They exist to rob people of freedom. Now, let us say they rob this person of freedom, while they claim to be giving it to another person. This is a false transaction. No freedom was missing, until the soldier intervened to rob it from one of the people. Of course, having robbed freedom and often land and resources, the soldier can then transfer these to his masters, and so war has often been a useful tool of Ferengi-type acquisition.

Therefore, it would be correct to say these men (and women too) died to defend and to PROMOTE the interests of the rich.

2. These men (and women too) volunteered to defend their country, and had NO choice but to do what they were told.

Sure they had a choice. Just like Nazis soldiers had a choice.That is because, unless you are wrapped up with chains and straightjackets, you still have choices. Now, your choice might be unpleasant, but if you are going to argue that US soldiers HAD TO kill Iraqi and Afghan babies because otherwise something bad might happen to the soldiers, all you are saying is that the soldiers surrendered ALL their freedom so that they could be robbers of freedom from everybody else. Freedom is the last thing being defended or promoted in that event. Freedom is in fact the most hated and dangerous thing in the world to a soldier. Free people resist. Slaves obey. Simple.

3. Our country, right or wrong, and if you don't like it, MOVE!!

But people never really mean "our" country when they say this, they mean THEIR country, and they mean if you disagree with their conception of what that means, you should get out. That is pretty much the underlying moral basis for the racist anti-immigration movement in the USA right now.

And it is one of the most severely anti-American sentiments anybody could have. That is something we should consider, how the conservative sentiment is essentially anti-American, precisely because it is anti-revolutionary, and opposed to rights and the diversity that suggests. If all we have is the right to chant uniform affirmations of a greedy and murderous nation and its military, we should raise the swastika over the USA and be done with it. Otherwise, if you don't like it, STAY and FIGHT.

Of course, it is an odd thing to fight against fighting, against war as an acceptable instrument for expressing national policy, especially in such a war-mongering horror as the United States of America, but that is my right, and my pleasure.

The USA is a violence-junkie nation. It walks around in the world looking for somebody or something weak to pick on. It is sick, and needs an intervention. Obama, to point to an example, was a step in a better direction, but so diseased is the thinking in this country, that Obama has the politics of what used to be a Republican.

Far, far to the Left we need to go. And maybe up to something better than left and right would be good too.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

2010-08-10T16:22:00.000-07:00

“You are not fleeing mankind, but avoiding—and with good reason—the yahoos.” —George Keith to J.J. Rousseau

The funny thing about freedom is that it isn't something you pursue; it's something you do.

Or, even more to the point, it is something that happens to you, almost against your Will—except it is of course precisely in accord with that, or it isn't really freedom.

And when this freedom invades your mind, wrecking your ability to any longer think in accord with the rules and reasons of your society, you had better be ready for some serious blowback, especially if you choose to act upon, or worse, write about, your clarified perception.

Rousseau simplified the problem, when he recognized that he did not see as other men. He saw deeper, and at the same time he saw in a way that was uncluttered by the complexity of social propriety. So, he seemed wild and out of control, like perhaps he should have just moved to the frontiers of America, where perhaps he would have been very happy.

But, in those frontiers he would have been writing for an audience of indians and bears, who would not have understood his genius, nor the problems that required it, for the source of them would then have been across the Atlantic, in another world altogether.

So, for Rousseau, personal happiness was simply never going to be in the plan. He spent his life, pissing off one host country after another, which is to say writing things that disturbed one royal host after another. He was homeless, threatened, dependent upon an ever-diminishing group of friends and colleagues, who could barely put up with him as a houseguest. At some point, Rousseau decided to go off to the live with David Hume, in "safe" Great Britain, where they had already established that if kings did not behave themselves, they would be given the hook, and the blade.

Now, Hume recognized and remarked about Rousseau's genius as a writer, but he saw Rousseau's personal problem, of being too sharp and too effective in his criticism of social and religious institutions, as of his own making, and an inherent defect in his skills as a writer. Basically, Hume felt that the more gifted the rhetoric, the more likely the writer would take flight with brilliant barbs, which could only bring him into danger from the authorities:

“[Rousseau] has not had the precaution to throw any veil over his sentiments; and as he scorns to dissemble his contempt of established opinions, he could not wonder that all the zealots were in arms against him. The liberty of the press is not so secured in any country, scarce even in this, as not to render such as open attack of popular prejudices somewhat dangerous.”

The dangerous part for a critic of popular prejudices is that ultimately he will create rifts between himself and just about everybody and everything there is. And he shall at that point be alone. If he has carved out space and a place for himself prior to this, the hermitage can be enormously rewarding. Otherwise, it can make him feel abandoned, and utterly alone in the world; and perhaps reveals to him the enormous downside of making people realize just how deficient are their opinions, their passions, and their minds.

That is a lot of karma to bear, a lot of pain generated by a writer just to make a rhetorical or philosophical point.

And yet, so long as one is right and true in his analysis, it is correct to crack the empty noggins of the yahoos.

Indeed, if anything, given the sluggishness of progress on that count, and in general, Rousseau is open to criticism for being far too merciful.

Collecting Materials Isn't Learning

2010-08-04T13:41:00.000-07:00

1…2…3

As you may know, I am teaching a class in Thoth Tarot next Monday.

Now, what I mean by that, and what you may think I mean by that are likely two different things.

If you were teaching a class on Thoth Tarot, maybe you would have an idea about what that would entail. Maybe your idea would be based on a reasonably good level of expertise, i.e. about Thoth Tarot and the ideas of Aleister Crowley. Or maybe you would base it on pretty much no knowledge at all.

Now, in Tarot, pronouncing "truth" sans knowledge of what the hell you are talking about is quite a common thing. In some parts of the Tarot world or stage, it is part of a modus vivendi, that allows the Tarot community to absorb all manner of questionable notions into its warehouse of authorized or at least tolerated beliefs and practices. Unfortunately, pretty much anything is allowed in, except notions that are themselves limiting of what is allowed to be true or acceptable or likely.

The key point is that some time ago Tarot was taken over from the occultists and gypsies by various kinds of glorified hustlers—shrinks, self-help book-peddlers and gurus, and the like—all of whom sought to cash in on the presumed mystery and power of Tarot by claiming they understood the special (but strangely universally accessible) secret of the cards. This secret is so obvious, even an amateur could understand it. In fact, that was the alleged secret—that Tarot was instantly and easily accessible and usable by anyone, no matter how stupid and ignorant they might be.

That's great for business of course, and you might say expressive of a certain hippie-headed compassionate outlook. But it really isn't great for learning Tarot, particularly not for learning the truly inaccessible occult version of it, and that is especially true for Thoth Tarot, the most intentionally obscure Tarot deck ever made. Now, you will find Crowley and Thelema advocates or pushers, who will argue that on the contrary, Thoth Tarot is designed to penetrate instantly and naturally to a person's chakral centers. Unconsciously, it begins a deconstruction of their false selves, like a poison, setting the person up to be destroyed and remade truly, or Thelemically.

If that were truly the case, and there is no way to prove it is or it isn't, Thoth Tarot would absolutely be what a lot of people assume it is anyway, the most dangerous pack of cards in the world. But even if Thoth images do not possess the power to unravel your self from the atomic misapprehensions out, it often disturbs people who operate within normal ranges of perception. Whether or not that disturbance is resisted or rejected, or alternately welcomed and pursued, will usually distinguish whether a person naturally likes or hates the Thoth Tarot.

Even if a person is in the first group, a Thoth-hater, this doesn't mean they cannot grow to appreciate the deck through study and reflection and use. In fact, any good Tarot pack should have this quality, like a great book, of being a drug capable of producing profound changes, but only in those determined to work through the intentionally difficult swallowing and digestion process.

So, this brings me finally to a few points about this class I will teach. One person responded to my Facebook group for the class, asking "...the $50.00 covers what materials please????"

OK, yes, that sounds innocent enough, and the person probably just wanted to know exactly what she was going to get before she forked over the cash.

Well, precisely. But that is precisely why she wouldn't be a good choice for the class.

As I told her, the $50 doesn't pay for any materials, or for any time exactly. It doesn't really pay for the class itself. What it pays for is my expertise, in other words it provides her with something she is very unlikely to get in any other class alleging to teach this deck—a teacher who understands what he is talking about.

But what she wants are materials. That is, some tangible proof she took the class. And unfortunately, all I have to offer are intangible and perhaps very inaccessible benefits.

That is because I am teaching Tarot, and not auto mechanics.

I can hand out a lot of charts and things of course, to illustrate the ideas I am talking about, and I suspect some of those will work their way into the pdf lesson I will be distributing. And maybe it will open somebody's eyes just a little better than they were before. I hope so.

But what I really hope is that the people who take the class will stop aspiring to be masters of the Universe, and will instead just try to count 1...2...3.

I have my doubts that many or any of them will be able to tolerate that overwhelmingly simple level of accomplishment.

But it is the only way they stand any chance of learning the most profound ideas about Tarot.

The Domination Map

2010-08-02T05:33:00.000-07:00

People tend to talk.

Why?

What purpose is achieved by all the blather?

You might say—well, many good things can come from exchanging ideas.

Just look at the world we have made!

Precisely!

And again—why?

Well, maybe one day all this talking will yield a truly better world, one without such horrible side effects.

Maybe so, and then what will we do? Talk about how fucking boring it is.

But back to the question—why?

Because we have this deep, omnivorous need to explain to other people, and maybe to ourselves as well, what we think we are seeing, that is the map of the cosmos we are making as we go along.

Here, THIS is what I think I'm seeing, what about you? Of course, the latter question is usually posed out of politeness. We don't really care about what the other people are seeing, since they can only give us their point of view, which is necessarily not our own. What good can that be? It would only serve to acknowledge diversity, and then how could we dominate the conversational landscape? What would be our justification?

It is funny, to listen to the roar of 7 billion maps being mashed together to try to make the one human map of this mote space and time(s). Why do some get listened to? Or looked at more than others? In this war of the mapmakers of experience, why do a few win, and most everyone else lose? And why is losing this war so utterly dehumanizing?

Because we are born wanting to be heard, approved, obeyed.

Not obeyed? You want to dominate nobody, you say? You have evolved, and only want everyone to do their will, or what they want or should for themselves. And you will do likewise and won't we all be pleased as punch?

Well, when everybody is podded, and blue-pilled, yeah it should be easy for everybody to get his fill of self. Of course it won't quite be the same then, will it?

The thing is, we come into this world wanting only one thing—to get instant gratification for every sense of deficiency we experience. We suck out the very life of the cosmos, like vampires. Its spirit, its blood, its air, its bread.

While the blood curdles up around the corners of our mouths, and the air turns into a storm of ideas we spin into lights and circuses, we become aware of the absurdity of our existence.

But this does not stop us. We do not do the one thing that would make sense at the moment of such enlightenment.

Shut the fuck up.

Nope. On and on and on we blather, wanting to share what we have learned. Supposedly, this comes out of an essential "love" for others. We want them to come to the better place we have found.

Of course that is crap. We want them to die and be reborn in our vision, as pieces of our ideascape. Our political and religious masters are the worst in making this homicidal tendency a gross and mass reality. They talk about how we are ONE people and ONE faith and how the ONE—they describe of course—is the number to which we must surrender our being.

Why not three or four or better, NONE?

Because that isn't the right number, jackass. They know this because one is the loneliest number, where they feel the deficiency better than they ever can in their lives. And the yearning for domination is the strongest there. No one sacrifice can ever satisfy the need for the consummation and smashing of other minds and lights. Eventually, the one-talkers have to suck in every single "other" to prove the one is not just another idea, among endless possibilities.

And so they want to suck every person into the Body of Christ, the American people, the people of the Earth.

What if instead there were a Universe of every potential ONE-NONE, none of them dominating the others, but instead being complete and righteous unto themselves?

Would we then have a need to talk? To bend wills to our own? To mash their maps into comforting chants affirming the authority and rightness of our own?

Shut up.

Do it now.

Do it often.

Do it even as the most beautiful idea crosses your mind, and you wish to share it, or that is bludgeon it, into the faces of these hideous others.

Shut up. Do not share. Do not say anything—not even to yourself about what a good boy or girl you are, being silent.

And just as you are thinking, what a good idea is that, I have mashed you into mine.

Idiots.

You cannot be saved.

Bleed out. And drink up.

Thinking Like The Phoenix

2010-07-29T12:33:00.001-07:00

I note before we start that the following mnemonic is not especially relevant to the imagery on the Star card, but that is part of Crowley's purpose, inverting and mirroring the imagery and meanings of the Emperor and Star cards, which are married in his system.

The card mnemonic for XVII-Star of the Thoth Tarot:

Use all thine energy to rule thy thought: burn

up thy thought as the Phoenix.

So, "ruling" is "burning up" and also "as the Phoenix".

Now, this seems at once a simple and basic command, especially so since it refers to the employment of "all thine energy".

And yet, clearly it is suggesting a complex of movements and associations and calculations---definitely a formula and the most important spell of all, which as the last bit of smoke rises from its censer, indicates all of YOU has been burned up completely.

But NO, not YOU, but rather "thy thought". Now, "thine" and "thou" and "thy" are archaic ways of suggesting that the pronouns certainly do not refer to the mere personal energy and thought and burning of these, but instead to one's higher being, one's divine essence or connection, or god.

Let us recall something Jesus is alleged to have said: "Is it not written in your law, I said, Ye are gods?"

And in fact GOD says this, to what is called "the congregation of the mighty", in fact he is preaching a sermon to his heavenly servants, pointing out to them that their actions as well will determine the course of their own divinity, and he says this could result in their dying "like men". This is a way also of suggesting the course of all created, artificial, existence in the cosmos, that it all has a timer on it, and even angels and demigods, or powerful and wise human beings, are mortal and temporary.

When Jesus alludes to this however, he specifically indicates he is talking about the right of every human to claim his own divine connection, and his starry origin, to call himself a god, as Jesus has essentially done at that point. And Jesus says something else very relevant. He says do not believe him merely because he makes a claim of his own divinity. Instead he says "believe the works". We should note that this point, the Jewish crowd is said to have bumrushed Jesus, who escaped "out of their hand". The truth often does enrage the dumb animal parts of humans.

So, we know then that merely alleging one is divine is insufficient. There has to be evidence this is the case in "the works". This is the meaning of the idea of the Thoth Three of Disks, by the way, titled Works. It is all about guiding or ruling thy thought in conjunction with thy will and the Way, so that one does not waste energy for mundane or vulgar purposes, but applies it devotionally doing the Great Work---in other words one's part in it.

What about the Phoenix, which you are supposed to burn up AS?

We should note this useful explanation of the Phoenix, offered in a book entitled "Animal Symbolism in Ecclesiastical Architecture" (1896):

According to the Physiologus, the phoenix is a native of India and Arabia. When it is five hundred years old, it flies to Lebanon, and fills its wings with the fragrant gum of a tree growing there, and thence hastens to Heliopolis in Egypt, whee it burns itself upon the high altar in the temple of the sun. When the priest comes on the next day to offer sacrice, he removes the ashes from the altar in the temple of the sun. When the priest comes on the next day to offer sacrifice, he removes the ashes from the altar, and finds there a small worm of exceedingly sweet odour, which in three days develops into a young bird, and on the fourth day attains its full size and plumage, and greeting the priest with reverance returns to its home. But if the phoenix, adds the exegetist, is able to destroy itself and to come to life again, why should the Jews murmur at the words of our Saviour, when He said: "I have power to lay down My life, and I have power to take it again"?

The perfume which fills the two wings of the phoenix symbolizes the sweetness of divine grace, as diffused through the books of the Old and New Testaments. Other expositors of Pelagian tendencies discern in these perfumes the good works which the righteous man accumulates, and by which he earns eternal life; and as the phoenix kindles the fire which consumes it by the fanning motion of its own wings, so the saint, mounting up on the wings of heavenly meditation, has his soul enkindled and renewed by the flames of the Holy Spirit.

Imagine all that merely reduced to what it really means, that divine employment of the masculine principle, to achieve the flames of the feminine Holy Spirit. In other words, it is a description of the magickal employment of the penis, and its seeds (or potential works) of the Great Work. Of course, that is merely one aspect or angle of the interpretation, but if you read the above description, and think of it in those terms, I think you will see how easily it fits.

And certainly that is what Crowley had in mind as well, not in the simplistic reference, but in the sense of the penis acting as a metaphor for the engaged and engorged magickal instrument of one's self.

The female principle is about enveloping this instrument or wand in the loving, destroying, blanket of creative fire. It is into this maelstrom that the works will be deposited, nurtured, and applied to their Greater Mission. And once the working is finished, the penis has his soul "as his soul enkindled and renewed", in other words resurrected, to work again.

Madness 55

2010-07-27T08:32:00.000-07:00

Madness—struggling to avoid the inevitable.

On a day when the ongoing national madness of the USA is under consideration, I wish for a moment to discuss the personal sort I am experiencing.

In a way, all madness is, as Wikileaks puts it, "an extraordinary secret compendium". And it is in the leaking of those secrets, via the cracks and crevices of personality and measured delivery (of self), which "sane" people use as a shield and a billboard, that the often ugly truth reveals itself.

My madness was born the moment I was, in the sense my mother, gripped by complete dissociation from my very existence in her body, squirted me out 55 years ago today, after teaching dance into her ninth month and barely showing a shade of difference in her slim shape. She hoped the dance of death would flush me out of existence. She hoped anything short of actually getting an abortion would extinguish my horrible symbolism from the face of the earth. Why? Because I was the product of her being raped, she alleges, by my father.

At least that is a story, one I have heard. My father, when I asked him about it once, said wearily he supposed it was true. Generally, he had been too drunk to remember back in those days, but it sounded possible to him.

So, 55 years ago today, Satan was pleased to welcome into this world one of his own, and indeed from the moment I was born, I think the old Accuser and I have certainly been on the same page. What a worthless and horrible species is this humanity! If it weren't for all the beautiful and magnificent things a few of them do, they would rate the Deathstar. And you know, maybe they do anyway. Regardless, they seem bent on self-destruction.

On the other hand, every generation of humans starts with the potential to be better than their predecessors. Unfortunately, they also have the potential to be worse. Much worse. If you do not fight for your idea of "better", you welcome "worse". How you fight, to what extent you endanger your comfort for your freedom and wellbeing is of course one of those personal choices everyone gets to make. Some people make it mindlessly, utterly ignorant they are making a choice at all. Others make it mindfully, and still choose sinful comfort, as most Americans, or indeed Westerners, are trained to choose.

My story, my recent story especially, is certainly one concerning choices between justice and mercy, doing the right thing versus doing the comfortable and affirming thing. Constantly this year, the message has been that attempting to hold onto what was merely materially dear, physically comforting, and temporally supporting, was only going to result in vain outcomes, and bony fingers of Death pointing back to a different, materially harder, course that had to be taken.

Another, very upsetting, aspect of all this, has been the increasing awareness of just how badly so many of my old friends are doing. Wrecked by bad decisions of every sort, their mental stability ravaged by bad starts and too many wasting finishes, they are falling like hail from their Towers. Nothing much can stop their plummets. Even in my own poor conditions, I often feel better off somehow than so many people with homes and cars (sometimes even with jobs) and seemingly endless pits of worry in which they are drowning.

I know that in many other parts of this world, people are still living the American Dream, and not the Nightmare. But their best efforts have produced and maintain a national Nightmare, which they work very hard to ignore and affirm. The Terror Wars are just the most obviously ghastly of the outcomes of this deadly dissociation. The result has been a kind of national depersonalization disorder: "a sense of automation, going through the motions of life but not experiencing it, feeling as though one is in a movie".

More and more people I know complain of these feelings, or lack of them. It is very much as if everyone is struggling to escape the Abyss of the horrors of the national, and their personal reality. Gustave Doré illustrated this a long time ago. As a child, that image of struggling, naked, people, frightened and excited me greatly, as all images of Death have always done. Mainly, I was fascinated by how the god I worshiped could at any moment, and even if I hadn't been personally all that evil, wipe humanity off the face of the Earth—and NAKED.

Of course now I realize that the nakedness is just a symbol, for everything being revealed, for every person being stripped down to their carnal cores, where the God of the West condemns everyone. Thankfully, being essentially pagans, the God of the West has never made a convincing argument to most of the people whose ancestors worshiped Bael and Ishtar and Thor.

I worship Hadit, part of a comic-book Trinity of gods invented by Aleister Crowley, and colored by every person who takes these demons into his or her soul to command and obey. Christians, or a certain sub-righteous nature, are horrified by the thought of people inviting demonic possession. Artists of course do it every day, as part of their preparation to daily break and remake the Earth.

And so I go, a year older once more, and for a while longer it seems, to do my part in the ancient tradition.

What doesn't kill you, does you no favors.

Mass-Murderers of Change

2010-07-21T11:13:00.000-07:00

You are a mass-murderer. And not merely metaphorically. And you have been this monstrous, or human, thing, since you were conceived. Really, before that, if you count legacies of mass-murder that connect you to and endless run of forebear killers.

Of course, that kind of consideration is how most people mask their own cupability respecting their ghastliness. They say things like "Yeah, if you go far enough back you could just blame the cave-people or something." And they mean to say that they are but a tiny speck on a pebble on the great beach of blameworthiness. Further, so what if we could find and assess just the right amount of blame for one's acts? Does it matter that your own deeds of death-dealing are relatively minor compared to the great cosmic process of Death? Most people, after all, are but foot-soldiers in the army of Death.

Yet, even though your contributions are likely so individual and miniscule, your personal track record of inflicting change upon the Cosmos, or that is enforcing Change throughout the Cosmos, is impressive and definitely damning.

Think for a moment how many lifeforms would not have died if you had simply not been, every fucking day of your life, such a giant open mouth of voracious hunger.

Did you ever stop to think of what this means, the unrelenting drive to find and gobble that euphemism—food? Of course once something becomes food, and obtains for itself that label of necessary sacrifice, we do not have to think any longer of its life having had any other purpose, any other value really; including the moments of the experience of life which are not obviously of less value just because it was in the bag of the poor foody fools you count as inferior to YOUR lifeform.

In fact, is this not a fundamental way in which we establish inferiority in a lifeform? If we can capture it, kill it, and most especially eat it, then this supposedly establishes us as the superior creature. If and when we might get eaten, after all, the only difference that might momentarily manifest itself would be that the human loser would whine about the injustice of it all, and never break any ironic smile doing it either.

I suspect a lot of you imagine you are very smart, because perhaps if somebody raises an issue about which to blather at a party, you can hold your own spewing big words. Yet, imagine how useful that would be while a lion munched you for lunch. In a moment, all that alleged intelligence would be evaporated, as the truly smarter creature lived to hunt another day, and you became the useful stuff gardens are made on.

Now, all of this is really about the process and the doctrine of Change.

In the Tarot, as for example in Crowley's Thoth deck, this concept is explained through the Two of Disks, entitled Change. The ruling decan of this card, that is the astrological correspondence of this card, is Jupiter in Capricorn. What that is supposed to convey to us is a central truth of Tarot, and the occult in general, which is summed up by the phrase, "Change is Stability", and also there is the indication that Stability is IN or THROUGH the process of Change, because as Crowley points out, the serpent's "tail is in his mouth." This seeming paradoxical notion is central to an understanding of the occult worldview. As soon as one grasps any central tenet of the cosmos, a Law, or Truth, or Basis to anything, on the other hand of his considerations, these ancient edifices are destroyed, annihlated by their exactly opposite propositions. So, 0=2, with the "=" the key point of a formula using annihilation as the glue and the yeast of Life.

What does that mean? It means Truth bends in upon itself, and so like a circle, constantly falling away back into the center and opposite of its external implications, or like a color wheel constantly seeking complementary correspondences, the Truth is constantly balanced with a destructive continuum of lies. Many of these are seductively beautiful, and thus seem through this to be transcendentally True. From certain points of view, certain Hadits* if you will, they ARE true. Perhaps in a few rare, twisted cases, they possess a brief transcendent Truth. But the very nature of Truth in the Changing Cosmos is that it must be annihilated.

Let us take an example. Gravity. This is a phenomenon and a view of Cosmic behavior of matter and energy that is as close to being unquestionable FACT as anything we can think of. The rules describing it, and naming it of course, are famous. In the occult, and in Crowley's brand of this, the idea of gravity is intimately linked, in deed indentified, with the concept of Love. The two of them are equally undeniably experienced as powerful forces, and yet also completely misunderstood in any comprehensive, deep, way. You may argue that at least with respect to gravity, it is well understood, but this is not true in the sense of it being open to a deep and encompassing comprehension.

See, for example, this article discussing how the continuing questioning into the nature of the unknown through string theory may in some future time yield an understanding of the cosmos, and change, that will throw the concept of gravity as we have known it, into the dustbin. Ultimately, and really not so ultimately but in everything we do every moment of our lives, truth depends on your point of view.

**********

*-"Hadit" is, in the Thelemic system, the cosmos of particular points of view, seen however from each one AS the cosmos. The corresponding idea is "Nuit", the cosmos of infinite space into which the potential universal points of view of the infinite Hadits can expand, or change. In doing this, the remain changeless and unmoved, yet penetrating the space with their clouds of potentials, they change the course of actual developments.

Sweet Smell of Nihilism

2010-07-19T09:47:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I attended a party for alumni of a Bay Area college radio station.

For whatever reason, maybe an essential comfort with my own, I ended up talking to a pack of middle-aged, male, dj's. While I enjoyed talking about our shared cultural experience, I particularly liked getting wafting assistance from the chillum smoker, who was kind enough to explain to me exactly how I could successfully apply for a medical-marijuana card.

I have to say, not being a regular drug addict any longer, that I LOVE doper culture. But I love it like I love a lot of things, in carefully managed and measured dosage. Fortunately, the whole medical marijuana movement is precisely about that: smoking as much weed as you need.

I can totally see how some people might say I have need of a mountain of weed. I am suffering from all kinds of mental and emotional issues right now, having been homeless and bounced about by life and in dangerous ways pretty much this whole year so far. And that's just frosting on a cake of insanity called my life.

PTSS, anxiety, anger, depression? Oh yeah, all of that and more. I wear them like comfy clothes. And yet I see little point in seeking remedies for this wardrobe, since THAT would mean shielding myself from perfectly good reasons to be fucking pissed off and depressed. And I'm not just talking about my personal problems, but you know the greater sphere of cosmic shit working itself out and through too.

In fact, if I could achieve this weedly comfort, smiling about EVERY fucking thing in the universe, because after all I would be feeling fine thank you, I would want to overthrow it in pretty short order.

Because—being stoned and OK with the world—as it is—is FUCKING BORING!

Somebody asked me the other day—why don't you stop hanging around all these psychotics?

And the answer is a simple one. I'm a writer. And the palette of the normal is just not all that interesting to me.

Yet, to meet me, you would likely think me to be the sweetest little rattlesnake you ever met.

Anyway, my point here is that this very kind gentleman whose approach to life is so different than my own, told me something that I have heard of late from a lot of people, and ones who are not similarly dosing themselves with piles of narcotics—WHY should he give a shit about stuff he can't do anything about?

What he meant by this was why should he care about some of the things the larger crowd ended up discussing that evening:

A. The godawful wars.

B. The godawful oil spill.

C. The godawful stupid people.

D. The godawful pointlessness of existence

Seriously, it was a pleasantly fun party—well for people not hanging around me anyway.

Yeah, it is always important to realize that giving a shit about the larger, somewhat impersonal, world out there, is a very definite and personal choice.

I fully understand the attractions of the other choice.

But I can't really do that any longer.

So, I will miss the peace and sweet smell of chillum-nihilism.

I choose war.

Hanging Yourself With The Right Idea

2010-07-18T08:05:00.001-07:00

The great thing about the mind is that, if you let it work as intended, it will spew thoughts and angles and angels really, until finally you hit on the right mood and reason to just do everybody a big fucking favor and kill yourself.

Lately, I have heard so much crapulous nonsense about suicide from people who quite frankly suck at it. They excel on the other hand at talking about it, and how in a sense their whole lives are just one long, REALLY dreary, suicide.

Well, so wha? you may ask. Isn't life just that, a long dreary suicide?

After all, if you KNEW a particular wrong or right turn was finally going to carry you out of this horrorshow, are you sure you'd turn away? Or are you afraid, or enthused, that maybe you'd just speed up a bit to get to hell all the much sooner?

Now, I might be sounding like a preacher, setting you up for the big altar call, which of course ends with my hand out, begging you for a reason I should keep going telling you stories.

"Blame it all on a simple twist of fate."

Anyway, hey that's just the Sunday morning sermon preface to this thing.

What I am talking about today is actually Tarot reading, and skepticism, and how everything around you is ultimately like a card you can read, or ignore. The latter is done to your peril, which of course you may truly desire, as noted.

Let us consider this possibility. If you could see ALL the angles in play, and understood precisely why you were born, how it is you can achieve your purpose, Death would cease to have any meaning for you whatsoever. It would simply be the last stamp on your Life's passport, with a bony happy-face, greeting you back to the black blanket of unconscious freedom.

Such a life is fully lived, pushed to the very limit of its meaning and power, because that is the only point of it. Of course, if you think about it, such a life, which sounds programmed and robotic and like slavery, is quite inhumane. Yet, the spiritual ways of the world often suggest to us that these "calls" we are supposed to get are the liberators from the slavery of confusion and desultory poking about we exploit in our free drudgery.

So, what is true?

Well, I'll give you a clue.

Destiny has a break room.

And if your life is REALLY properly lived, you will have a personal and a greater obligation, to yourself as a relatively private aggregate of particles in the first place and in the second to the cosmos for it utility and Great Work.

The simple but also profound fact of life---and yes it is so because I declare it so, but there is a long tradition behind this way of thinking, and it is of course consistent with a Thelemic worldview---is that you have a certain potential ALL, and yes you can have that.

But what we tend to do is to set the old mind working at what we see the be the deficiencies, of the revealing premise and ourselves, and this is particularly true if we have experienced lots of defeats and disappointments, and if we have declared a certain dogma of nihilism, so that we are not obliged to believe in anything, or to BE anything.

So soulless in fact are most allegedly intelligent and educated Western people, they have to legislate the expressions of morality into competing systems of values, because moral contents extending beyond the personal and often hateful-personal have declined to the point masses of people continue to pay taxes into governments they KNOW are nothing more than vast criminal enterprises. They pay for torture and murder, into Molech's mouth, so they can have the freedom to get drunk and watch one more night of flickering idiocy in their opium dens.

The moral exhaustion one sees all over is symbolized by the shrug one sees when mentions of "the wars", "the tortures", "the extinguishing of rights". Only when one speaks of things that seem personal, like bailouts for rich bankers, do people once more manage to get a little riled. And then of course their anger is aimed at anybody but themselves. It in fact often, weirdly, gets aimed at the poor! and the notion that in such times as these, the poor need MORE assistance, not less is alleged to dangerous socialism---whereas millions of sacrifices to the vile values of capitalism are just fine.

More searching for that Right Idea

Finally, what happens is that, confronted with the compressing, possibility-excluding, truth, the mind rebels against the one thing it does have the power to control---its perception of reality. And that works great, especially aided by all manner of chemical aids, until the day that old friend and liberator, Death, does finally come to call.

He, or she, pulls out a silver bag, opens it tactfully, gently, and reveals strands of ropes, all different colors, with a different excuse for being a LOSER printed on each one. And you go digging, just like a child aiming to get that right piece of candy from the bag of banes, till you find the one you imagine will taste just perfect as it dangles you from the last rafter of delusion.

No altar call today. Maybe a phone call or two.

Go bravely and bare-fanged into that good night. And bite somebody!

The Land Of Oz

2010-07-16T10:50:00.000-07:00

I look into the land of Oz

That is the Devil's red domain

And here the wicked witches rule

And Martians reckless rain

But never do they cheerless go

While spelling evil and delight

The rulers of the ruddy glow

Sing joy and horrors of the night

In the Land of Oz, the people would rush about seeking answers from flashy frauds, and finding solace in being told "Come back tomorrow!" they would go home and live to work and shudder another day.

Yet, they had the joys of craft and cunning, living as they did in what passed in that world for civilization. Their Wizard was after all a con-artist, and they, naive as the newly grown blades of grass, nevertheless held him down like a poor sacrificial beast, with their unadulterated faith in his power to soothe and seethe.

I used to think it could all be changed.

I used to think YOU all could be changed.

I used to think if change could just be affected, then my feelings could be effected, for the better.

I used to give a good crap that Oz would no longer be ruled by devils and wicked witches.

But in the end, as the Devil says, people get the government they deserve; and especially when they crave lying wizards over the self-incriminating truth, you have to say the Devil and his witches are well-placed by God to rule this silly-ninny Nod or Oz.

Build me a Tower, master Cain, unto the enduring faith of fools.

Every Person is a Star

2010-07-13T10:12:00.000-07:00

That sounds like poetic hyperbole, huh?

You know you are not a star. Maybe Johnny Depp is a star. Or Angelina Jolie.

But you're more like a space pebble, looking for an atmosphere in which to burn up unseen.

How wrong you are.

For not only are you a blazing star, illuminating the space and time you have carved out of the cosmos with your unlikely life, you are in that sense a mini-cosmos, a MICROCOSM of the whole in which you exist.

Here is how this is so. I look out upon a man, wrapped tightly as an expensive Christmas gift in his Lexus, his comfortable leisure jacket, and his shades which wrap all the round to China, where they were not made. He is so wary of every potential risk, every step, he is like the post-neo expression of Prudence. If Love has ever touched this man, it has only left roadkill in its wake, and did not have the Mercy to finish the job.

Yet, I see in him a gigantic empire of stars and planets, a world he thinks he rules, his struggling self so alienated from the joy of life, we may as well be in Hell already. Of course, in his phase of things, he already is, and so I could walk right up to him and right through him, as I am but a ghost here anyway. He would barely notice, as he barely notices my drilling a hole through his dense emptiness. I take pity and do not photograph him to illustrate this astronomical inquiry.

All around are these same or similar systems of storied stars and their impacts and influences. You have one, a great one in its way. You do not have to be like this rich, blind man. You can open your eyes, as Christ and others have so often advised, to see the brilliance of your own Light.

This is not a demand or a permission to feel good or better, by the way. You should not require it. You already won the biggest lottery there is. You got life. If you're not living it according to how you thought it should go, you are still breathing, still moving, still (we hope) thinking.

CHANGE your ways, your orbits, your relationships, according to their needs.

You have this power, and many others, Lord of your Life.

Twisted Seasons

2010-07-08T08:10:00.000-07:00

I have no clue about what to do.

Neither do you.

Now, it is certainly true that people with jobs, stable homes and families, and you know...calenders with plans...figure they have a clue about what to do, but that is just the program for each day's drudge. We highlight those calenders with happy faces and hearts and special activities, so we can pretend the whole affair does not add up to pretty much nothing. But, what about your point of being here? Your destiny? Your purpose? And you know the PATH that melts all the others and all the drudgery too?

Yeah, I know, you don't believe that exists, do you? Maybe once you did. Back when you were young and a dreamer. But all that silliness has died, especially in your eyes, which can only see the stones on the path in front of you. You may argue that a lot of those stones are necessary, or result in good acts, say like bringing up your children not to be monsters. How is that not a purpose and even a thing that should inspire some pride in your accomplishment?

Here I think you have a point, except I look about the world, as it has always been, but particularly as this is magnified in our ever-accelerating processing of the Earth, and I wonder this: what have all your non-monsters wrought here? What good do they do? Clearly not enough. So, maybe you have simply made a less-obvious brand of monster, a polite, cowardly herd member; who nevertheless consumes us into oblivion just as well as any serial killer. For every one who supports our clueless careening, by action or inaction, is killing the planet and its inhabitants. Maybe, as has been suggested, this is the purpose of humanity. Certainly, as I have pointed out, it is not the one the purely fictional character God commands in Genesis.

God had high designs for the planet and the people, and especially for the abundance of Life God assigned to he management of humanity. As was often the case, God was a lousy hirer. And he spends a LOT of the Bible whining about how his creations didn't turn out OK, and sometimes he decides to punish them horribly, or sometimes he rewards them by having them perform horrible acts of mass-murder and ethnic cleansing. This is when he isn't torturing them by testing their faith. Job comes to mind on that count certainly, and that little "kill your son" trick he pulled on Abraham with Isaac. Seriously, is that a god that inspires LOVE? Or pure hatred?

So, what clue will come to me to guide me? I actually worship a giant, non-existent, winged disk called HADIT. It is an invention, actually a mistake originally, of Aleister Crowley. Hadit flies about pointing my way out to me. He argues with me when I go astray, but he doesn't punish me. He simply allows the Way to play, which is the most loving thing to do. Also, it is the easiest thing to do, since it is going to happen anyway. I realize therefore his arguments are merely a way to pass the time.

The Way is the general impulse or current of the Cosmos. It is not a moral current except insofar as what is certain to be is rightly established. Arguing with the Way is even dumber than arguing with God. The Way will not strike you dead. Why should it? You are as good as dead anyway, right? You're just waiting for Death to call you for that last dance. The Way doesn't care how you feel about it. Or what you think about it. It goes forward, without any concern for the right outcome. That is guaranteed. What isn't guaranteed is that any one of us will have spent our lives in accord with our mission and purpose, which is mainly in accord with where the current of the Way will carry us, and where it was always intended to carry us.

Does our will about this matter? Does it matter if we have a clue? In a way, no. Any choice is as good as any other. The path tangles here, unravels there, but in the end we end up pretty much where we were intended. So, what difference does it make if we do one thing versus another thing? Only that every time we do this, we have a sense of rightness in what we do. When we perceive this sense to have been wrong, and to have led us down the bad, destructive, path, what are we supposed to do about it? After all, does it really matter if some people lied and colluded and then continued doing so to kill the Gulf of Mexico? What if they hadn't done that, and had behaved more in accord with some other, kinder, way of living?

The only difference is that millions of living creatures, and millions of human lives would not have been lost or ruined.

Every day we slaughter millions of living creatures. We eat for example. We live upon the corpses of billions of creatures every day. But this does not bother us. In our competitive system of economics, we KNOW millions of people will be lost in the wake of the general battle for blood and profit. But this does not bother us.

We walk the world, bleed the world, utterly clueless. But this does not bother us.

How do these insights help anyone, most particular myself?

Well, once again, I look for a convenient cliff off of which to blithely walk. There is no clue to be found in the Air or the Earth, but there is motion, and there will be new visions on the way down. I am in a land that has extended and twisted the seasons into endless spring. And the spring is the time of the Fool. The beginning and initiating impulse of all Nature and the Way.

Do what thou wilt is impossible without thou.

Yet seek not even that in your plummet.

Life Doesn't Make Any Sense

2010-07-05T20:30:00.001-07:00

So I said to a young woman for whom I had just read cards. Note that it wasn't the case that the cards made no sense, but rather the life they described was inconsistent with her desires, and what she understood to be the common and practical sense of things.

Fortunately, Tarot, and particularly her Tarot reader, operate divinely well outside the province of the common and practical sense of things. Eventually, she understood one way the strands of the improbable, or unthinkable, could actually twist into the cord of the likely and desirable.

Still, deeper than I explained to her, because the eyes of her boyfriend were watching me for any betrayal of his interest and his truth, there was another way of reading the whole affair; which spoke to how the special qualities of some people trump even their own need to practice what the common people affirm to be wise and right. One cannot hide or feint about if one is too revealing of deeper and higher aims and motives. One cannot play both or triple sides or more against some movable middle if he makes the always fatal error of being honest with his girlfriend, or the part of himself he needs to be satisfied with what was expected of him.

And so, while life certainly doesn't make any sense, especially if you can't see the whole picture, it does make a kind of narrative that breaks towards an end or a conclusion and thankfully an exit. And that termination smells like sensible spirits to a woman seeking soothing instead of speculations about what could happen. She doesn't care and nor does it matter that it is mere opinion which bolsters his purpose to be something particular and even virtuous. The news report will begin "He so wanted them to be happy together...relatively forever." That was sufficient for a silly Tarot reading.

But he was too intelligent to let sentiment rock the irrational boat of possibility. His eyes kept darting about the gaming table, seeking all the other colorfully adorned ways out of Dodge and Tombstone. And as she flew off into the great dimming distance, he felt sad a bit certainly, but only appropriately and hardly in any way that ruffled his austere feathers. Tomorrow the future would unfold far from the seashore of obligation and kindness. Alas, the poor girl needed a karmic thumping, to awake her from her trustful stupor. But, was he the sort to render that brand of kindness?

No one likes to be the sort who would be thought a bad person. But no one likes to be told what to do by convention either. And in America, where the myth of freedom still lives, anything selfishly wrought has a chance to be the next great work of the mart.

How much more sense did you really need?

Mexico

2010-07-01T12:39:00.000-07:00

I am sitting back in civilization, in a Palo Alto Starbucks on the first day of 24-7 free WIFI!

Very different from 24 hours ago, attempting, forever, to leave Mexico. I suppose some people might call this almost drowsy or narcoleptic reluctance to terminate the stay an indication of being seduced by some poisonously lazy quality of the Mexican landscape and people.

But in fact, our problem in getting out was personal, calculated, almost Machiavellian. The benefactor was engaged in networking, which in her worlds, and even in this remote little enclave, involves considerable and intimate stage directions and performance reviews. If you think it's time to go back to California, because maybe something pertains to getting there sooner rather than never, she'll grab you by arm, or crotch, and inform you that there will be no leaving until you have seen the plesiosaur thighbone. And you'd better like it just as much as she does.

Meanwhile, back at the ranches, or the various abodes of this remote brand of paradise, melodramas aplenty were hatching, and pretty much rotting right out in the open. Nobody should be surprised to learn that gossip is an industry in a small village, nor that people's eccentricities would be more pronounced, and more freely expressed in such an uninhibited, almost abandoned, environment. But the benefactor sees opportunities to meddle abound at every address. And if meddling can not achieve the proper level of melodrama---well, she up an slapped the owner of the great orange fortress! Just because he had jokingly called his wife a bitch. Of course, maybe it wasn't meant entirely in jest. All the more reason to stay the hell out of somebody else's business.

The benefactor claims this is part of building her rapport with the natives, and better than this, that anybody who might stay in her madhouse is obliged to aid her in the cause of meddling, gossiping, and choosing a divisive side. I looked around at one point, and believed for a moment she looked something like a Valkyrie in a Confederate general's uniform, but you know, as that would be depicted in the Dukes of Hazard.

I will say nothing here of the barely-averted slide off a mountain road, the poor human sacrifice, the dryness of everything, including Death's humor, the dirts or pigments that will never come out, and the rustling critter symphony. Use your imaginations.

As the poor human sacrifice noted: "I never thought I'd be so glad to see fucking San Jose!"

One Post To Bind Them

2010-06-25T13:59:00.000-07:00

This may be a very short and empty blog. That depends upon how connected I will be able to stay in the course of the next few weeks.

I am "transitioning" in my life, which means I am looking for a place to settle, which means I am homeless. Now, I am homeless staying...meaning homeless with somebody else's roof over my head for the time being and for the time presumptive. So not street grease yet. But you never know. Not even YOU know when you might end up there.

Right now, at this particular moment, I am staying in Palo Alto, California. In a few, I may be someplace altogether different. Working on that.

A few reflections about Palo Alto---

...VERY wealthy-white with an Asian frosting. Black people need not apply. Mexicans STAY down in LA, out on the farm, or hang on the street corner peddling fruit. It is starting to show some age in lots of ways, like a still-good place to be that may not be so in 10 years or less. Lots of buildings are empty, but still downtown has good business. The library is closed for LONG "renovation".

The people are mostly friendly. Why wouldn't they be? They've won the American lottery. Other than the fact they will all die in the big one, this is a very pleasant place to live and exist. It does however give a sense of Stepford, or Brave New World. I'm pretty sure most people here are wearing their happy-face implants.

One person not doing so is my benefactor and roof-over-head supplier. She is at war, and always has been. With herselves. With her friends, who are still plentifully supplying her entourage or army, despite her harsh and whimsical sense of discipline. With the world, which won't behave itself.

Her best friends in the world are a parrot and a very canine cat. I think half the women in Palo Alto probably have those same kinds of best friends. They don't do chores. But they don't make value judgments either, like fathers and friends-with-obligations often do.

Soon we will hit the highway in a rickety-looking van, and head south into the extreme darkness of unlikely prospects. That is just one of the reasons I may not talk to you beyond this post, or possibly one tomorrow if I can manage it.

If I can settle in a few days and maybe next week can speak to you in keys and tongues, I will happily do so. You might send anonymous good thoughts to my benefactor on that count.

Be good or effective anyway.

And I shall be loose in the world.