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stolide
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« Reply #63 on: May 20, 2012, 09:31:23 PM » |
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Since my personal journal today was entirely related to magick, and this forum sees little activity, I'm reposting it here. I guess I'll post the rest of my thoughts on Crowley's Eight Lectures on Yoga in this thread as I write them.
May 20
Working through Crowley's Eight Lectures on Yoga.
“Organisms developed by specialising their component structures
have not achieved this so much by an acquisition of new powers, as by
a restriction of part of the general powers. Thus, a Harley Street
specialist is simply an ordinary doctor who says: 'I won't go out
and attend to a sick person; I won't, I won't, I won't.'
Now what is true of cells is true of all already potentially
specialised organs. Muscular power is based upon the rigidity of
bones, and upon the refusal of joints to allow any movement in any
but the appointed directions. The more solid the fulcrum, the more
efficient the lever. The same remark applies to moral issues. These
issues are in themselves perfectly simple; but they have been completely
overlaid by the sinister activities of priests and lawyers.
There is no question of right or wrong in any abstract sense
about any of these problems. It is absurd to say that it is 'right'
for chlorine to combine enthusiastically with hydrogen, and only in a
very surly way with oxygen. It is not virtuous of a hydra to be
hermaphrodite, or contumacious on the part of an elbow not to move
freely in all directions. Anybody who knows what his job is has only
one duty, which is to get that job done. Anyone who possesses a
function has only one duty to that function, to arrange for its free
fulfilment.”
Do what thou wilt takes on an interesting light with the above text in mind. What thou wilt is not moral, but the way in which energy flows through the matter that one decides to include as part of the “self.” Much pain can be caused by attempting to bend an elbow backwards. The elbow is not aware of the pain, but the higher power directing the muscles surrounding the elbow is. In the same sense, if one performs actions against one's “true will,” then one brings about pain, at least in some metaphorical sense.
“Love is the law, love under will.” Love, in this case being union, attraction. I presume law here is used in the same sense as physical law. That is to say that union after the fashion of the involved parties as the universal law; all laws of physics come to this. In conjunction with “do what thou wilt,” this probably means that what one must do is some form of love, the precise form dictated by one's “true will.” True will is not merely what one wants, or wills in the mundane sense, but the higher dimensional understanding of the relative positioning of one's life to the lives of others.
Text supporting moral conclusion: “I wish to thunder forth once more that no questions of right or wrong enter into our problems. But in the stratosphere it is 'right' for a man to be shut up in a pressure-resisting suit electrically heated, with an oxygen supply, whereas it would be 'wrong' for him to wear it if he were running the three miles in the summer sports in the Tanezrouft.”
“Sir Richard Burton said: 'He noblest lives and noblest dies, who makes and keeps his self-made laws.”
Crowley is familiar with the great Sir Francis Richard Burton!
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