I'm not going to quote the entire marvelous post by obnoxion above. But this is a direct response to it. I am beginning on this Midsummer's day a project. My project is to go through this entire process above, the one by Crowley. Following the link, one finds he recommends one do this for a minimum period of 9 days per stage of love times the 7 forms of love. That's how I plan to proceed, at least at this stage.
Right now, I have begun the 9 days of being a slave to Satan, as best I understand Him and that terminology. But I have some thoughts that maybe some of you can shed some further light on. Now, Crowley says one during this stage delivers an imprecation to his Master, in this case Satan. I know my native tongue quite well and I even looked up the word "imprecation" and it most certainly means "a curse." So, my thought is, this curse is combined with awe. That awe, to me, is the kind of awe spoken of in Psalm 111:10: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom." Crowley putting this curse and this awe at the beginning is interesting to me. Many theologians of all stripes would say that Love and Wisdom are equivalent or at least dependent in some ways upon each other.
So, I begin with a curse to One I am in awe of/fear. This is the beginning of my path to Wisdom and it is also the first stage in this road of varying kinds of Love for the Divine. I realize I'm not making any solid conclusions with this post... I am leaving a lot of very open-ended statements here. Mostly because I'm not sure I feel qualified to state anything too emphatically. I am mostly musing aloud in the hopes that those of you who post here might have some wisdom of your own to share with me. Any thoughts on all of this?
P.S. obnoxion: Do you mind if I use this "The miracle of unity that is Love can be the most horrifying thing in the three worlds when it is distilled to its purest forms. So we could say that Satan is Compassion, but in the most demanding sense of the word." that you wrote as my signature as long as I give you credit? I find it profoundly inspiring and deep.
Alocer wrote:P.S. obnoxion: Do you mind if I use this "The miracle of unity that is Love can be the most horrifying thing in the three worlds when it is distilled to its purest forms. So we could say that Satan is Compassion, but in the most demanding sense of the word." that you wrote as my signature as long as I give you credit? I find it profoundly inspiring and deep.
Yes you can. And you don't need to give credit for it.
Alocer wrote:I am beginning on this Midsummer's day a project. My project is to go through this entire process above, the one by Crowley. Following the link, one finds he recommends one do this for a minimum period of 9 days per stage of love times the 7 forms of love. That's how I plan to proceed, at least at this stage.
I've always thought that this is perhaps the most reccommendable of all Crowley's workings, and I've wondered why Liber Astarte isn't more central to Thelema. I actually woke up to it when Black & Hyatt published it as an appendix to their "Pacts with the Devil". It certainly is Theurgia.
It is also a quite lengthy working, though. And it does require a state of affairs where one is able to take some private time for one's self. But it seems that you have everything in order. If after the working you wish to share some of your experience with us on the Forum, we would be most grateful. Perhaps you can even teach us a lesson in Love. What a welcome lesson that would be!
One day of Brahma has 14 Indras; his life has 54 000 Indras. One day of Vishnu is the lifetime of Brahma. The lifetime of Vishnu is one day of Shiva.
I definitely have the time and space and all that. My life is borderline monastic as it is! I will gladly respond with any results I end up with. I certainly hope I learn something, even if it is something you all already know and have known for years! Learning is the most important first step to doing anything that I can think of. I thirst to learn more and more and that's why I am here at all. It's good to be among like-minded people.
So far, I have learned that it is both easy and hard to swallow one's pride and take the role of a slave in a mental state that has as its base an opposition to the Abrahamic religions and their insistence on total submission. The hard part is obvious. The easy part is that I feel there is a calling in myself, and perhaps in humanity in general, to devotion of a spiritual nature. I will actually be referring to this a bit more in a thread I am just about to create, so I will leave this statement be for now.
So, I wanted to share some of what's been going on with this working. Perhaps it would be better to do this after it is completed but I'd really like any feedback anyone has to give regarding it.
I have moved from slave state to vassal. This occurred Sunday. In the slave state, perhaps the greatest lesson I learned is that to say, whether to a God as seen by the typical Christian, or to Satan as seen by a Satanist on the Path of Ascension, "Thy Will Be Done," is leaping headlong into a terrifying Abyss. One does not know if the slave's Master will command the slave to do something possibly life threatening or even suicidal, or if one will be commanded to enter into a passionate embrace, possibly longed for by the slave throughout the entirety of his servitude. This Thy Will Be Done I uttered as a slave brought me face to face with the fact that, at times, ALL TRUE LOVE MUST SPEAK THOSE WORDS. And mean them. If, in a deeply loving and committed romantic relationship, one never says to the beloved, "Thy Will Be Done," there is no deeply loving and committed relationship.
In the Vassal state, I was walking today, and listening to music that put me in the right frame of mind to contemplate, Finland's own Lantern, incidentally. And I realized something. Perhaps this jumps ahead too far in the working but... all love is contained in the level prior to it. The slave is promoted to vassal-dom. He (all gender specific references in this are solely because I'm a male) discovers that his Master has always longed to be his Lord, to raise him up from abject slavery to manhood. Still a servant, but a servant on his own two feet. This was the Master's desire, His test of His slave, to see if the slave had the mettle to rise that high.
All the great mystic Catholic saints worked their way up through various levels of this working it seems. Therese of Lisieux stayed mostly at the level of childhood to her God, and enjoyed few consolations, as she referred to mystical ecstatic states, but her love cannot be questioned. And then there's the other great Carmelites, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, they rose to the level of lovers, and experienced mystical marriage to thei demiurgic God. As appalling to me as the object of their worship is, I admire them for the majestic power of their love.
And there you have it. It matters not where this love is directed. All the possibilities of love are contained within each human animal, to determine how far we will love and what we will love. If you love a bloody chair, you can be a slave or a comrade or a lover to it. When that love turns to humanity as a unity and to the Divine, to my current Lord Satan, to be my Father Satan and on and on, you realize that it is like the Matryoshka dolls. One love, nestled inside the next. And all in the human heart and soul. We determine the parameters of all our loves. And we can easily let them grow to ever deepening levels, because despite appearing on the outside as a diversity of varities of love, as one progresses deeper and deeper, one realizes the essential and impossible to avoid unity at the heart of love. At the end of the road, lovers are equals but they are equals in accepting slavery sometimes and Mastery at another. Thus, we unavoidably become what we love. I have leaned among these other things... be careful what you love.
That was much more clear and concise in my head on my walk. Bottom line, I feel that all the varieties of love in this working are shades and blending of a number of colors into a painting, not separate paints in separate jars on a shelf. They are a living, breathing, diverse unity.
I think this must be the ultimate realization of the first stage. And in the end, when we speak of Love, at the last stage there must be a sense of real unity between all the realizations of the seven stages. I suppose it could be an adventure of love between two unities, with moments of separation and unification. But I am hesitant to comment an unfinished working, as it would propably be either useless or disruptive influence on the Workings hermetic purity. So i think it is best if we deal with the results only after the work is complete.
One day of Brahma has 14 Indras; his life has 54 000 Indras. One day of Vishnu is the lifetime of Brahma. The lifetime of Vishnu is one day of Shiva.
I am keeping a series of notes on any kind of thoughts, realizations, feelings, anything that comes along. So, I'll distill those when the time has come, the working done, and toss them out there for people to see and comment upon. Right here, I just wanted some feedback on the concepts that had already arisen in the working and I think we see it in a similar way, thus far. I'll post back in on this topic once I've gotten deeper into the working, or once its complete.
It's invigorating, even when it is TERRIFYING, or even when it is, conversely, dry and barren. Which, in its own way, is far worse than terror. At least terror is a "visible" sign that something is happening within. Barrenness is a sign that something is happening within, of course, but its very nature is to make you THINK the opposite. It's a clever deception. Underneath the dust of dryness and barrenness, more is probably occurring, a la Juan de la Cruz's Dark Night of the Soul, than is actually occurring when the senses are engaged with the love and "feeling" it.
Not getting too deeply into the current working but there are some relevant thoughts to both the topic of Love and the concept of how Love fits in with humanity's concepts of Divinity.
Basically, I have passed the part of the practice where one thinks of the God as a parent, into the part where one thinks of the God as a God specifically, and oneself as a priest of that God. And it occurred to me why it is ordered in this way, with the parent/child relationship coming before the priesty/Godly relationship.
As much as the Catholics like to say that parenthood is a gift granted by God, and that all families are models of the Divine, it's exactly the opposite. Our concepts of parenthood, especially in male-oriented, patriarchal, monotheistic traditions, are grounded on our own experiences of the Love or lack thereof that we received from our own parents, in particular, our fathers. We see "God," the way we see our own fathers, as either loving, distant, absent, or cruel and judgmental. In childhood, I viewed Him as distant or absent. As I grew older and got closer to him, I started to view God as judgmental and manipulative and cruel, a perception that is abundantly clarified in the Bible, and thus my Catholicism was bound to be a nightmare. I was, because of elevating my own parental/paternal relationship to the level of Divinity, seeing the Love of the Divine poisoned by the lack of kindness of my own earthly father. The words, "Our Father," became a source of dread.
So, in this practice, we learn to Love or Hate our own parents... and that becomes the model upon which our ability to Love or Fear or Hate God is partially based. It makes sense that Crowley put the parental realtionship before the Divine.
There's more going on, but I just wanted to run this thought by people. This working is proving very deep, powerful, and enlightening. I'd like to thank obnoxion for making me aware of it.
Aspects of love concerning parenthood you wrote on is of course as well understood by me in a specific way and I would like to share couple of words on this topic here. Love needs to be naturas as natural is weather not manipulated because manipulated and abused can turn into hate which is the other side of the same coin and then the stability between partners or parents decrease and therefore there is no more co-operation anymore and I am not a specialist who claims that understand love perfectly but it is my only experience. I found my true love with a wife that I love and this is a true love for me and I experience this since the every second that I met her this is something absolutely wonderful. Do you know how to recognize the true love? I don't and I was living and I was convinced that there is someone who is worth to wait for that will create with time the new life and I am not writign here about having a child but taking a life into much more advanced and worthy level. In love there is absolutely powerful and unmeasured potential for the spiritual works that is the most important part for me on my way toward godhood.
