Descriptions:
Video Description
The title sounds like gossip, but the real subject of this video is far gentler: why compassion matters in magic. Lyam Christopher begins not with Aleister Crowley but with a friend, and with a small misunderstanding about what it means to be an initiate. In the Golden Dawn, he explains, the secret handshake reaches for a hand, misses the first time, and then grasps it on the second try. A true initiate, in other words, is always someone who has failed and reached again.
Then Crowley becomes the cautionary mirror. His writing can fascinate, but it is also booby-trapped, he says, full of obscurity, ego, and the feeling of being kept outside a special circle. Reading him without noticing those traps can teach a person hedonism and pride rather than mastery. The lesson is carried with care: Crowley’s life shows what happens when the heart is missing from the work, and why students who chase power alone so often fail the Great Work.
The rescue offered here is not a rule but an attitude. Magic, he suggests, should not be a machine for poking the universe until it produces treasure. It is a relationship, and like any relationship it asks for respect, patience, and a little love. When compassion returns to the practice, the psyche becomes more than something to exploit. It becomes alive, surprising, and far more interesting than simple getting ever could be.
Full Video Transcript
Alright, this week we are talking about was Crowley a sociopath? Sorry for that clickbaity sort of title there. The actual focus of this is going to be why compassion matters in magic, right? And we’re going to use Crowley as an example. So he’s someone to learn from in this regard, right? I’m sure this video is going to get me into a little bit of trouble for criticizing Crowley, for criticizing chaos magicians, among others.
like Stephen Skinner, possibly, those kinds of magic.
I’ll be talking about them briefly
as we talk about the importance of compassion
in the initiation process.
So first, I’ll tell you a little story
about a friend of mine.
I made a reference to him and to myself
as failed initiates.
And he took it in a way that was maybe
like a a bit of a jab against him like you know like i was implying that he was not an initiate
or i was pointing out that he was not a true initiate or something like that and i guess the
maybe i wasn’t being very sensitive when i made the comment but it was i was basically alluding to
the idea of the true initiate being a failed initiate so if you really know what it means
to be an initiate you have failed and this is captured in the neophyte secret handshake when
the neophyte secret handshake which i’m going to tell you now it’s no longer secret is it
is um you reach for somebody’s you reach for the person’s hand and you miss the first time and then
you try again and then you manage to grab their hand um and that’s the secret handshake okay um
it’s the secret handshake in a coded form in a occult initiation type form because it conveys
something very important about what it means to be a true initiate you have to know what it’s like
to fail to fly up to the heavens to miss the mark and come crashing back to earth crash and burn
right so you have to know what that’s like in order to be a real initiate okay we’ll talk
about that in a bit uh i think this image uh is called this image is called the fall of day
it’s by william rimmer uh it was sketched in 1870 so it’s in the public domain so led zeppelin can’t
come after me for using this image because they took it and changed it a bit and then used it as
their swan song logo and it very well it very well depicts what it’s like to reach for the heavenly
heights to fail and to tragically and catastrophically fall back to earth which is
is what many zeppelin songs sound like so i propose to people that i do consults with i propose that
when they read alistair crowley they read him as an example of a failed initiate as a as the perfect
example of of a failure in on the magical path because he exemplifies something that is pretty
much key to all the myths about magicians or wizards, and that is hubris, the inability to
get past concern for oneself. Selfishness, hubris, pride, pretty much the same kind of pride that
caused Lucifer to fall to earth, that kind of pride. And then the magician tends to be guilty
of that kind of pride, especially in the medieval Christian sense, because Christianity tends to
regard all magic as evil and diabolical, and therefore of the devil. And so the pride,
kind of the idea is that if you have the wherewithal or the gumption to assume that you
can work the same kind of magic that God can do, that’s a major act of hubris, okay? And the
christians do have a point with that okay but of course the way that magic is is really done
let’s say in a golden dawn framework uh can be done in a method called theurgy
also known as god working okay where it’s not you usurping the throne of god to basically
exert his authority it’s different okay so theurgy i’m not going to go into that okay
but so uh yes magicians and witches and sorcerers are endlessly guilty of pride and they come
crashing back down to earth right but the interesting thing is that um the initiation
process really involves that the initiation process involves ego inflation and then the
bursting of that eco bubble and then the crashing back down to earth again and then wow something
really important happens then okay maybe if you’re capable of experiencing it and alistair crowley is
someone who is an example of somebody who was virtually incapable of experiencing something
that was crucial to success in the great work so there’s a new way to read crowley so i would
propose this to you guys too because if if i’m to say that he is a good lesson in failure in
self-initiation then you can read him and look for signs of him being a sociopath or a psychopath
or a narcissist okay these are three types of the anti-social personality disorder all right
and the way that he behaved his notorious behavior to my mind it indicates that he was pretty much a
classic narcissist okay um but all these three the sociopath the psychopath and the narcissist
um they share one major theme in common and that is they lack empathy they are unable to feel
empathy or they are severely um deficient in the ability to feel empathy okay it largely results
from something called alexithymia which is um a lack of awareness of the full spectrum of emotion
okay somebody with alexithymia can have various emotions happening and erupting through their
bodies but not be aware of it they might even do things like say i am not angry why do you keep
saying i’m angry and they don’t even know that they’re a that they’re angry except maybe for
the sound of their voice it’s like oh i’m yelling i think i’m angry so very hard for us to understand
when we have a full you know range of emotion but a full range of um the ability to sense emotion
right um it’s very hard for us to understand how one cannot be aware that one is angry okay but
this is kind of the world that the psychopath lives in psychopaths are born that way okay
apparently they uh is it brain damage i’m not so sure they might have evolved that way there might
be maybe one or two percent of the population that is psychopathic and um they tend to have a certain
charm to them all three of these do the sociopath the psychopath and the narcissist they have a
certain charm and charisma to them um and there’s a reason for that which we’ll go into okay and
crowley definitely had that charm and charisma which he still maintains to this day over his
many followers yeah and so to fall for crowley uh very much is akin to falling for the charm
of a narcissist or a psychopath i think it was peter carroll peter carroll one of the founders
of chaos magic in the 70s uh referred to crowley one time that i saw as a sociopath that he kind
of thought crowley was sort of sociopathic and there is a theory that it’s pretty cool theory
i don’t know um that since crowley contracted syphilis when he was young in college um there
wasn’t a cure for syphilis or there wasn’t a very good cure for syphilis back then they really had
very dangerous treatments for syphilis like treating you with mercury and things that are
really toxic to the body okay and so there’s a theory that um since if syphilis when it’s prolonged
can cause brain damage um that it and no it’s possible that’s that syphilis can cause
pseudopsychopathy and and it can damage the amygdala of the brain and then produce um what
appears to be a psychopath where psychopaths are more or less just born that way but it’s possible
to be sort of brain damaged also and then lose the ability to feel empathy okay and now when
you lose the ability to feel empathy you start acting in ways that are inexplicable to many
people around you and the ways that you act are very much the way that crowley acted in his
personal and public life we can go into these things a little bit so a new way to read crowley
you can read him for the signs of lack of empathy okay but mainly the reason you would do that is
to see is to explore why he failed to initiate himself and so you can recognize the importance
of empathy to the ability to achieve initiation or self-initiation okay or the ability to work magic
at all okay i’m being a bit harsh it’s mainly about initiation here or about attainment okay
um clearly crowley was a magician he was able to do magic to some degree and uh but we can
go into that too the kind of the type of magic that he was doing maybe in a bit so when you
read him you can mainly read him for try to find empathy in any of his writing okay and in fact i
have uh fiction you can get this book the drug and other stories this is uh the collected fictional
works of Alistair Crowley. Pretty cool. By Alistair Crowley. Okay, so you can read his stories. And of
course, when you read fiction that’s written by someone, you get to see firsthand whether or not
they’re capable of experiencing empathy, which is so incredibly important to a work of literature.
And when it’s not there, what does that literature look like? He’s a good example of that. And I
challenge you to find examples of genuine empathy in his writing okay not just lip service to
empathy and love and brotherly love and all compassion not because remember a psychopath
can blend in pretty well and pretend okay so i challenge you to find examples of it there are
some examples i believe he wasn’t a complete psychopath or he wasn’t a complete narcissist
like he was apparently capable of feeling some empathy but that’s rather interesting the way
that it came about was very self-involved we’ll talk about that so lack of empathy is the main
thing you can notice as you read anything he’s written okay um one exception might be book four
if you read book four some of that seems to be genuinely concerned about the audience actually
but almost everything he tells is written is very self-obsessed of course this is his autobiography
funny thing is this is just a paperback and i think it’s now quite expensive to try to get one
of these so i should take care of this shouldn’t i uh and you can open this book to any page
and be witness to crowley’s narcissism okay one of the one of the symptoms of narcissism is that
that when they behave in narcissistic ways,
they don’t even notice.
Probably because they tend to assume
that everybody else is this way
and that the rest of us are just pretending not to be, okay?
Maybe a narcissist cannot conceive of somebody not being,
I don’t know, self-promoting or self-obsessed.
And yeah, many of us have narcissistic tendencies too.
It’s quite normal, natural to have some self-concern
and all that.
Yeah, he nearly constantly aggrandizes himself
and he does it in very clever ways sometimes
where he’s not really talking about himself,
but you can tell he’s talking about himself, okay?
Yeah, if you count the number of I’s and me’s and myself’s
that appear in his, oh my God, it’s just like phenomenal.
And it’s funny too, because he was hyper aware of that.
In fact, he was so harsh with his students
about their use of the personal pronoun
that he even would dictate that each time
catch themselves themselves using i that they slash their arm with a razor yeah so you can tell
he’s kind of projecting his own flaw upon his students and punishing them for it kind of you
know and it’s quite amazing too that the charm of a narcissist would actually have somebody doing
that i’m your teacher you will slash your arm with a razor every time you catch yourself using
the personal pronoun oh okay right there’s a reason there’s a there’s an interesting reason
why they hold such a powerful charisma over their audience okay and you might even look at um
uh other narcissists like donald trump to see we just can’t understand how people can fall for
you know um somebody who can’t almost constantly lies and this leads um the public uh and uh i’ll
talk about that in a bit i think i know one of the the juiciest bits of the narcissist’s charm
crowley often confuses love with sex i often gleefully i think because he he was had a lot
of fun you know talking about sex because it was so victorian times you know um but uh very often
when he discusses love and compassion it turns into an appreciation of the female body and you
know erotic imagery and stuff like that it’s like i wonder if there was any really real empathy
going on real compassion going on there um apparently very little um he was very often
bored which is a um a sign of somebody extremely intelligent and also a sign of so it’s like one
of the symptoms of psychopathy the constant need for distraction and he had the habit of reading
detective novels yeah so like Sherlock Holmes type uh detective novels um of course um Sherlock
Holmes novels I believe were written being written during the time while they were set
during the time of Crowley so Crowley probably I don’t know he did he even know of those stories
he might have known of one or two Sir Conan Doyle was alive at the same time as he was
but there were other detective novels also that he was very much into it’s kind of the
it’s kind of like being fascinated by shallow thriller mystery novels that we have that like
thriller mystery section in the bookstore where it’s just like oh adrenaline pumping action you
know and of course the interesting thing about Crowley’s love of detective um fiction was there
was always someone super smart guy who is totally in control and knew everything uh very much like
Sherlock Holmes detective type the genius who sees 10 steps ahead of the murderer or something like
now. His writing almost always lacks the audience centered approach, which is a definite sign of
lack of empathy or concern for his audience. In fact, his audience, he often excludes his audience
and you get the sense reading his stuff. That’s like, if you’re not intelligent,
if you’re not intelligent enough to understand these references, then to hell with you.
You don’t deserve to be in my inner circle. This is part of the charm actually, believe it or not.
His humor comes at other people’s expense. Yeah. I found it interesting one time I had an
acquaintance who apparently had strong narcissistic tendencies that I suspected, you know, and she
suffered a lot from it too. And eventually I was helping her get a book published. And I noticed
when she was describing something about humor, she was describing humor as something that we need to
learned an important lesson about she was basically saying we also need to learn that
humor is about making fun of ourselves too not just making fun of others and i thought that was
so striking and it really said volumes about her and the kinds of things i have had observed about
her because yeah a lot of her humor seemed to be uh making fun of other people at their expense
it would a lot of it was funny you couldn’t help but laugh but at the same time it was ouch
you know and so her lesson was that sometimes it’s you should be able to put fun at yourself too
but my response to that is that there’s so much in life that’s hilarious other than just the folly
of other people so to make humor just about um other people’s follies and so you can laugh at
them and feel relief that you are not them you know that you’re superior to them or whatever
like that i thought that was really interesting and of course crowley does this constantly
many of his characters are thinly veiled references to people that he was
detesting and attacking he was trying to eviscerate people in fiction he did it to israel
rigardi uh he did it to um arthur edward waite he referred to him as edward arthwaite one of the one
One of Crowley’s characters was Edward Arthwaite.
And of course, it was a ridiculous, bombastic, pedantic character.
Yeah, he made fun of people in his fiction.
And he, of course, talked poorly behind people’s backs,
things like spread gossip about them, things like that.
He was preoccupied with status.
He made fun of most of the members of the Golden Dawn as being middle class
when he first joined the Order.
and uh uh what and his if you read his um his short stories there is an overwhelming um obsession
with power and with perfect love perfect love is really telling okay because if you really
understand compassion love is anything but perfect it’s it’s everything that’s not perfect it’s a
It’s a broken thing, right?
It’s tragic, right?
It confuses self-actualization with self-mastery.
Okay, there’s this idea of,
it’s like confusing, trying to better yourself.
Let’s see, there’s aspiration or self-improvement, okay?
So I would propose that self-improvement
is actually a vice,
And then aspiration is more of a virtue
and then leave it to you to hash that out.
Like what’s the difference?
Like they’re both through the same thing, right?
So if you are constantly working on yourself
as though you’re not good enough, that is self-defeating.
It’s causing lots of problems.
And that’s usually why we’re suffering so much.
Like I’m not good enough, I’m not good enough,
I’m not good enough, okay?
And so Crowley suffered a lot from that.
I think he was really hard on himself, hard on his students,
extremely disciplined sometimes, but in a harsh way
because it was like mastery of the self,
like riding on top of himself and whipping himself
and flagellating himself, like get into shape, be disciplined,
do your magical work, concentrate really hard for a very long time.
Yeah, so self-actualization is quite different.
it’s much more relaxed it’s uh it’s a lot of devotion um concentration is not really all
that important okay it is important not very important baiting students with the inner circle
this is i’m theorizing this is part of the charm of a psychopath or of a narcissist where they
always seem to be holding something about themselves back there’s an element of mystery
to them that’s they never really show you but that’s mainly because that mysterious element
that seems to be missing isn’t there okay but they can dangle that in front of you like it’s
like an inner circle well if you really get to know me then that wonderful things will happen
but i’m going to hold back i’m going to show you everything about myself maintain my element of
mystery and the real horror the real horror of getting to know a psychopath then is to once you
get into that inner circle you realize there’s nothing there there’s no heart yeah this is
it’s kind of like what edgar allen poe was trying to portray in his stories about psychopaths
it the most horrible thing about the most horrifying thing in his stories about psychopaths
is not being the victim it’s being the psychopath of not having a soul or not having a heart
right yeah so um and with crowley was like well if you really do you really work hard to please
me i’ll let you into my inner circle and then everything from that point on will be golden
and you’ll be an initiate and as many people discover when they do the when they when they
studied under him there was nothing on the other side just him and him profiting off of you and
making fun of you while you weren’t around those kinds of things right now was he capable of of
feats of amazing selflessness um i think regarding said he was and i’m suspicious of that i
have a feeling that he occasionally would um go out of his way to do amazing acts of kindness but
probably probably in a way that was to um show you how wonderful he was i suspect uh there is one
story in his uh in this book by alistair crowley i think it’s called only a dog it’s pretty short
it’s called only a dog and he apparently in that story shows compassion for a dog that has been
murdered has been killed yeah now it’s very interesting though that of all the animals
that psychopaths tend to like dogs are it mainly because dogs are so unconditionally loving and
adoring of you and you can’t do anything wrong and they’re always going to be loyal and loving
to you pretty much right um it’s like well so the dog pretty much becomes an extension
of the human master they’re so loyal and so devoted to you that they just become like a tool
for you to use okay and you can become quite attached to that it’s like you’ve lost your own
appendage you know and so yeah but you know um uh hitler himself was noted oh the ultimate
psychopath right was noted for um loving dogs uh and the number of other psychopaths um have even
been able to cry if their dog died yeah and um now um how do you think a psychopath or a narcissist
would feel about cats since cats don’t they kind of act like they don’t care about you right um
or they don’t really do anything you say it’s like why do you even own a cat right
um and so of course now the the ability to appreciate cats definitely involves empathy
because you you just marvel at them like what’s it like to be a cat to be so cool and collected
and chill like that the way that they can relax and be so regal but you have to have empathy in
order to feel and you know understand that uh and and of course um there’s a story from the
Abbey of Thelema, where apparently Crowley killed a cat. I think the Abbey of Thelema was
pretty much a hovel anyway. He was living in poverty there anyway. It was a pretty
poorly maintained place, overrun with wild cats. And apparently he killed one of those cats,
at least one of them, right? And doing a ritual or something like that. I’m bringing this up
Because, you know, psychopaths, one of the symptoms of psychopathy or the signs of psychopathy is that killing of animals, especially in childhood.
Interesting, another thing to bring up with Crowley is for a while he was a big game hunter, which is another sign of psychopathy.
You know, it doesn’t mean that if you hunt big game, it doesn’t mean you are a psychopath.
But, of course, it certainly fits the profile.
shooting animals for sport really like shooting lions you’re not going to eat them you’re not
going to do it maybe you’re going to take their skin i don’t know something like that and of
course then many people would argue that well he was a product of his time yeah yeah i think uh
psychopaths had it better back then they could kind of blend in pretty well or well narcissist
or sociopaths whatever how to become a crowley fanboy okay or maybe you know these are warning
signs because people really fall under his spell easily and it’s interesting too because his
writing can be quite difficult mainly because he tends to exclude his audience a lot and the
attitude seems to be if you don’t understand this then to hell with you like you you are banished
to the outer circle right because and then he was always dangling that that juicy bit of maybe you
can come into my inner circle if you finally figure out what i’m saying here as i throw all
these obscure nuggets at you kind of interesting actually too because he throws a lot of golden
dawn stuff out there in his writing without explaining it uh and and when you know the
golden dawn stuff that he’s putting out there you can see clearly for yourself the way that he’s
doing it is pretentious and it and it it’s a it’s a way of excluding the audience of dangling a
mystery in front of them and saying you can’t have this and i have it and if i have it you don’t what
does that mean? I’m awesome and you’re not. That seems to work on people because they want to be
in that awesome inner circle. This is part of the fanboy charm, isn’t it? One of the things,
so to become a Crowley fanboy, you can claim that initiation isn’t necessary. Now, Crowley did value
initiation quite highly because he was a student primarily of the Golden Dawn. And most of what he
developed was fueled entirely by the engine of the Golden Dawn. Many of the things that are
apparent innovations of his are borrowed from other sources mainly from the golden dawn system
of magic but um uh one of the things though that crowley followers tend to do is they tend to chase
after altered states of consciousness in order to do magic all right and this includes the um
magicians like uh the chaos magicians and um or followers of stephen skinner’s uh approach to
magic where they’d say all you need to do is do these rituals you don’t need to be initiated just
do the magic and something will happen okay now there is something to that obviously yeah we won’t
go into that but what I assert on this channel is that magic is primarily the practice of self
initiation whether you do magic to get a certain result if you’re doing magic you get to get a
particular result um you probably are misusing it probably okay magic is primarily used for
initiation and once you get that initiation magic starts to happen but you don’t have to do anything
to make it happen necessarily anymore like it’s more like you you enter a magical lifestyle and
the magic just starts happening you start attracting auspiciousness okay it’s not like
you’re not in control but it’s more of that co-creating thing going on now okay i shouldn’t
really get too deep into that a lot of the other parts of the channel of this channel are about
uh that type of magic and of course the type of magic i’m advocating for is theurgy
which uh which is more i guess many people would call it white magic
uh theurgy can be quite dark though um as well uh but it is not all about me
it’s not it’s not all about what i want that’s the important thing about theurgy is just not
it’s not my will but thine will not my will but thine okay and this is something that doesn’t
sit well with people who want to do magic because why do we get into magic because we want to make
things happen magically in fact one of the problems with magic is that we engage in magical
thinking and so the magic of initiation magic goes much deeper than magical thinking okay
but i’m getting too much off track here i think i probably should make a video soon about the
problem of magical thinking and magic all right another well in order to be a crowley fanboy you
need to be a joiner to begin with it’s like you’re looking for a club to join it’s like
looking for a temple i must find a temple to join because i can’t do magic unless i’m a member of a
temple or something like that right now that can be important because magic is primarily a system
of initiation. But the most interesting thing that I found when I joined Raha Rakti temple
years ago, which is a golden non-temple, almost all of my work was done alone. It was mostly
self-initiation under the guidance of a teacher and would occasionally go to meetings, to go to
retreats and things like that. And it was done through correspondence. Okay. Back before there
was email for a while later there was email in my in my training but yeah we were doing it before
there was email actually another thing that would be helpful is to become a crowley admirer is to
disdain the weak because crowley eventually came out with the philosophy of philema which is based
on the book of the law which ostensibly um uh looks down upon weaklings um and that’s that can
appeal to people who don’t like their own weaknesses and don’t know it okay or or they
fall for the whole outward appearance of might is right you know that sort of thing right so
um and that makes crowley’s magic um at least well ostensibly it makes his magic um appealing
and there’s there’s something refreshing about valuing raw power again i understand that that’s
definitely something that is overlooked in our um it’s like in chivalrous attitudes of defending the
weak um it’s like you don’t but if you were weak and kind and and simple then you’re good right
and if you’re strong you’re you’re bad nonsense okay um but there’s a very important element
to golden dawn magic that crowley wasn’t able to understand or wasn’t able to benefit from and he
came out of the golden dawn disappointed because one of the reasons he was disappointed was because
well all they did they promised me incredible secrets and all they gave me was the Hebrew
alphabet and stuff I already knew about the severe oath of the tree of life things like that right
um so he complained about that um and what people who actually do the curriculum discover is that
the secret knowledge comes through working with those things in a particular way yeah and that
secret knowledge can only be obtained if empathy exists, if you have the ability to experience
empathy. If you don’t have that, then the magic of the golden dawn will not work and you will
not be able to enter the inner order, which is largely a Christian style myth order, mainly
because of the dying and resurrected God. A narcissist cannot die and be reborn. It’s
impossible because they cannot experience enough empathy to do that. In fact, I’m wondering if
somebody cannot experience empathy, I don’t know what they could do to advance spiritually. I
really don’t know. I have some weird theories about it, but I don’t think that’d be much good
anyway. Another thing about in order to become a Crowley devotee, you have to rail against outward
limitations. Probably, you know, you’d be very political minded and say, I hate all of these
restrictions on my freedom. I want to be able to do this and that, blah, blah, blah. Do what thou
wilt, right? I want to do what I want, right? This is a misunderstanding. Yeah, the external
freedoms are important but the magical work is really about the inner freedom okay so you’ve got
a lot of um monsters out there in the world which are restricting our freedoms and things like that
yes that’s that’s that’s a problem okay um but these things exist mainly because of the lack of
inner freedom okay and so another thing that would make you a good crowley fanboy is if you are
unable to notice the things inside you or the thing inside you that is keeping you bound up
that is keeping you that’s keeping you locked up okay in other words the monster maker inside you
that is conjuring up all those evil forces out there that you think are against you if you are
not aware of that inner monster maker then all you have left to rail against is the outer monsters
the monsters on the outside. I’ve talked about that a little bit in regards to the LBRP,
and I’ll talk about that later in this video to really clench that point for you, hopefully.
Another thing that you can do to basically fall under a Crowley spell is to affect confidence.
In other words, you achieve confidence that isn’t authentic, otherwise known as arrogance.
okay so if you really want the confidence of a magician or a realized mystic or a tibetan master
um you’re not going to pretend to have that confidence okay put on airs and honors or
whatever that is right and so um to look at the confidence and the freedom and the status
of a legitimate like mystic or whatever like that so you look at that and then you try and
affect that becomes your affect right you you try to imitate that then well then you’re just a
pretender okay and that’s kind of what Crowley was doing a lot he was very good at it though
because he was very smart okay one of the reasons he was smart may have been because his amygdala
was damaged I’m theorizing because the amygdala when we get stressed out tends to shut down our
higher brain function okay and so the cool thing about a psychopath is that the amygdala doesn’t
shut down their intelligence. They can remain highly focused and they have all their reading
faculties intact, even as you are giving them electric shocks. They can actually stay pretty
focused and keep their intelligence, whereas most of us would get dumbed down very quickly by the
stress response. It’s one of the reasons that Crowley, maybe why he was so incredibly intelligent
because his intelligence was never shut down by stress.
It’s the theory I have.
Another thing is you have to adopt the attitude
of taking heaven by storm.
We can force enlightenment to happen, can’t we?
Yes, right.
I love that idea.
And of course, Crowley would wield that idea
as sort of just to piss off the church authorities
and things like that
and the established religious norms of his time.
but i think to some point he believed it and and if you look at his his if you experience some of
his magical systems they have a very powerful punch to them they’re harsh you know um forceful
uh another thing you could do to um become a crowley fan is to confuse pleasure with joy okay
that is um do it do do with that wilt right do i do whatever i want and now that means i’m
enlightened so um and crowley was a hedonist okay that impulsivity that he um had um it’s very
interesting because um one of the things that’s notable about a somebody with antisocial personality
disorder is that they um have no remorse or they don’t even really consider the repercussions for
the actions that they’re taking right now they don’t really consider what damage is going to do
to them themselves later on very interesting that’s very liberating too because then they
can do whatever they want to do without wilt right so um but what it indicates to me is that um that
crowley lacked compassion even for himself okay it’s not hard to understand that because when
you think of yourself in the future that’s another person over there and then but then you imagine
how if i do this one thing now how is that person in the future going to feel oh i don’t want to do
this but so if you don’t have empathy you can’t even feel compassion for your future self and
this this would explain some of his behavior you know like not paying his rent and then being kicked
out and then going into a new place uh establishing a a new lease not paying the rent getting kicked
out and over and over again right um this this was possible at that time because there was no
internet and no you know records of you know people um people’s credit um hardly at all
uh of course you you would also confuse love with sex and then um the kind of love that’s involved
with high magic let’s say or compassion by magic it kind of can easily become debased into sex
okay i’m not saying sex is bad and magic but um to to not have a um i don’t know a healthy
distinction between love and sex to realize that pure sex itself is not love okay um comes with
one of those virtues that we pick up in malkuth called discrimination or discernment probably the
more modern word for that and of course you would learn to laugh at instead of with people okay that
might be one thing that you are prone to do and then of course if you join a circle of these
cruelly types who are enchanted by his razor sharp wit then and of course they seem to enjoy
laughing at other people along with him at those people’s expense right um that if that kind of
appeals to you then if you like laughing at people instead of with people then yeah you want to join
that group because we make fun of everybody else because and we feel good because we are better
This would also tend to show why people who are in white supremacist groups or Satanist groups that advocate for white supremacy and things like that, why Crowley is, why these people are also fans of Crowley.
because he disdained weakness ostensibly he did anyway and um and he uh was regarded himself as
superior and you had to be special like him in order to understand him at least that was his
kind of the way he comes at you in his writing you must be special too in order to understand
what i’m saying to you so there is something that is very validating about crowley’s attitude
about morality and goodness and that is it is really tiresome especially if you read books on
Tibetan Buddhism how much emphasis they place on being a good person and how much emphasis they
place on compassion it gets really kind of tiresome because if you don’t know why compassion
is important in magic it simply becomes a lecture on how to be a good person and a lot of the Dalai
Lama’s works come across that way they go much deeper than that but he tends to appeal to the
let’s be a good citizen of the world sort of mentality right which can be very frustrating
when you’re really after the deeper deeper secrets of magic so I’d really understand uh and I get
exasperated too when people try to make uh wicca or ceremonial magic about how to be a good person
and how to be a responsible member of this internet community and things like that, right?
It can be very annoying because there’s something much deeper and much more important about
compassion than being a good person or putting on the airs of being a good person,
being a well-behaved citizen, okay? Now, religion is what developed from magic. Remember the way
back when the king of the city state killed or banished all the shamans because they were such
a nuisance because they kept trying to empower all the individuals all the people around them right
and but what the king wanted a bunch of slaves working for him or citizens that were loyal to
him right so he replaced the shamans with priests which he appointed and they acted in very shaman
like ways but basically their system of magic was now a system of moral control in order to create
well-behaved citizens and so thus we developed religion instead of magic okay and of course this
is one of the things that crowley railed against and rightly so because religion it’s a very time
honored story where the political authorities will usurp the spiritual tradition of a particular land
and then convert that system of magic
or whatever it is into religion,
which is designed to now control the population
and get them feeling guilty about being bad people,
things like that.
So if we’re going to restore religion back to magic,
well, we try to make things like Thelema maybe, right?
But I don’t know, it could work still.
I think I know a number of Thelemites
who are actually you know really cool people and they know that crowley had serious issues you know
and they’re fine with it a good manners another thing right so focus having good manners especially
when one is getting into deep mystical practices it’s really important because they’re going to be
liberating aspects of yourself that are problematic and you have to be diplomatic and you have to be
able to express yourself and maintain good good behavior i guess um while you’re dealing with
with these difficult issues, okay?
So you have to be able to put on a good face,
pretend everything’s okay sometimes
in order to maintain your silence and secrecy
to insulate the inner work that’s going on.
You have to have these good manners.
It’s painful to admit that, but yes,
it’s important to have pretend behaviors
so that you can maintain some semblance of decency,
even while on the inside, you don’t feel decent at all for a while. And I guess the point I want
to make after this is that this kind of compassion about being a good person and helping others,
that misses the point. Okay. It’s perfectly fine to feel compassion for others and empathy for
others. That’s very important. Okay. But in the real benefit of compassion in magic is not
compassion for others not primarily and for the longest time i never understood what people meant
when they said you can’t love others unless you love yourself seems like such a silly platitude
that i and i really to this day think that when people say that they don’t know what it means
either okay but when you do magic um the magic of initiation and magic of self-transformation
this becomes very important okay and it has to do with the true nature of the LBRP the lesser
vanishing ritual of the pentagram okay so when you do the lesser vanishing ritual of the pentagram
you’re supposedly banishing evil forces out of your life right so and what actually happens
though is that those evil forces get pushed out into the periphery of your awareness where they
can where they can become more visible to you more discernible more tangible to you so they
actually get worse they actually get stronger or more noticeable let’s say they’ve always been
there they’ve always been causing havoc in your life but now you can see them and now you can
deal with them which makes things seem like they’re getting worse okay right so long story
short when you do the when you do a banishing ritual like the lesser banishing ritual the
pentagram yes it does banish negative evil forces from your life but it pushes them out into a an
external realm an imaginary external realm where you can now um experience them and objectify them
and see them and talk to them yeah okay but when you’re doing that that’s the big mistake that we
make when we draw the magic circle and we banish the evil forces the big mistake that we make is
that we think the real primary demon that we’re dealing with is out there okay that is not the
primary demon that’s that needs attention here okay that’s the secondary demon the primary demon
that we’re dealing with once again we draw the magic circle we banish the evil forces right
it’s a mistake to view the evil forces out there as a problem okay there’s just a part of the
problem that’s fine the real primary demon is arising in the circle it’s attempting to arise
as you in response to that evil wicked thing out there okay so when something is arising outside
the magic circle it’s oh wow that’s really annoying or that’s really scary or frightening or
i don’t think i can handle this trauma image right it’s just too much for me well it this
the thing that’s out here is not really um the demon that needs the attention the demon that
needs the attention it’s what’s attempting to arise as you in response to that it’s right here
it’s right it’s right here right and of course um it’s not as hard to deal with by the way because
it’s it’s a wretched little thing okay and in order to handle this thing that’s attempting to
arise as you and react you have to have empathy for it if you don’t have compassion and empathy
for these things that attempt to take you over and control your behavior at least for these things
that attempt to rise up in you and possess you, if you don’t have empathy for these things,
you cannot deal with them properly. I’m sorry. Because what’s going to happen is you’re going
to end up like the evil medieval magician who says, oh, demon, I banish thee, I exercise thee
from my soul, get out of my soul and go back to hell. Okay. Well, if you do that, guess what
happens. It just gets stronger. It’s going to reconstitute and come back even worse. If you
need evidence for that, just look at anybody who suffers from PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder,
and what do they do to drive the demons away? They drink alcohol usually, right? And that’s
very effective. But of course, the demons come back stronger and stronger and stronger because
they keep pushing them away. The true response is to feel, to feel the horror, the pain, the lust,
whatever it is that you can’t seem to handle. And of course, that involves empathy. If you cannot do
that, the separation between you and the things out there becomes even stronger and worse, which
causes ego inflation. Ego inflation is a normal part of the work. All occultists experience it
because it’s part of how things get puffed up but the rescuing factor that comes in as that’s
happening is the empathy and the compassion it’s like oh i can see why you i can see why this thing
is attempting to arise and take me over i can see how it evolved to do what it does it’s an
evolutionary mechanism it it wants me to go do this thing okay um and and so when you see that
you can say thank you evil spirit thank you spirit for sharing that urge with me um well i’m not
going to let you take me over anymore because i see you now okay um but i am going to start
speculating as to what the purpose what your purpose is how how have you arisen to do these
things to compel me to do these things and as we work together like this a couple things can happen
You can dissolve and disappear back into the ether, right?
Or you can become one of my pets, one of my familiars.
We’ll get on good friendly terms, okay?
Now, there are many spirits that people have
that cannot be dissolved entirely
because they’re too deeply ingrained within human nature, okay?
So the adapt simply makes friends with those, okay?
But a majority of spirits can be dissolved entirely, yeah,
and to never bother you again ever it’s possible and for somebody like an adept a single evocation
ceremony can take care of a troublesome spirit forever something that’s been bothering you all
your life can be destroyed destroyed can be um helped to evolve into non-existence
um through compassion in a single application it’s possible more than likely it’ll take a few
applications um either that or you will become on very friendly terms with it in either in either
case the suffering goes away the main task of the of any magician or any mystic is to
eliminate suffering that’s a little bit of a blind wrote that right there okay because the way that
we eliminate suffering is to experience that suffering but when we allow it in when we allow
the painful visions to emerge, it’s not really suffering anymore. It’s an act of courage,
an act of adventure, an act of compassion. And this is the importance of compassion in the work
because these are all broken and damaged things that we’re looking at. And the only things in
the universe that really require our love and compassion are the broken and the damaged things.
And there’s a lot that’s broken and damaged because after the Big Bang, a lot of stuff got
confused and messed up right apparently and now the universe is sort of looking at itself
through all different kinds of eyes trying to figure out what the hell happened as we evolve
into these various forms spirit forms or human forms looking around look this is a big great
big mess everything has exploded what happened oh okay let’s try to find the unity behind all this
again and in order to do that in order to experience that unity that inclusiveness you
need to have compassion and love great big universe universe hug okay um that’s very important
and the interesting thing about the narcissist or the sociopath or the psychopath
is that they apparently have evolved upwards in their body like the rest of us have right
and now they’re stuck in their heads everything is pretty much in the control tower of the head okay
and of course the way back to where we came from is back down down down in falling back
down into humility like basically you if you’re stuck up you become like a dickhead basically
right you’re basically stuck up here now right and you can’t seem to recognize the humble origins
from where you came from okay and if you can’t experience empathy of the heart let’s say there’s
no way back you’re trapped here forever or at least while you’re alive in this body can’t get
get out of the head anymore unless unless you’re destroyed basically right uh so and the way
empathy is the is through the heart back down into the humble origins of our existence where
we came from from the universal slime or whatever we are we evolved from right the so the gateway
between our stuck up position in the head the gateway between this and the slime that we evolved
from is the heart. And if this is not awake, you’re trapped here, like Crowley was, apparently.
Very intelligent man. He understood the nuances of magic very well in his head. Was he capable of
the initiation of the heart? I haven’t seen any evidence of that, other than giving lip service
to it. And this is why the Golden Dawn was a disappointment to him, because the inner order
of the Golden Dawn is a heart initiation. So when I refer to myself as a failed initiate,
it it’s there’s a bit of a blind there because the experience of initiation involves reaching
up to some great grandiose height failing to maintain it and come crashing back down to earth
again that really is kind of what happens there and this is why the crucifixion and the sacrificed
god are so important to golden dawn mythology that one has to fail and die in order for the
true self to emerge you’re trying to aggrandize yourself and in the process of doing that you’re
poofing it up and poofing it up and poofing it up and then it just falls apart all the pieces come
crashing down you hit rock bottom and then you look around and you’re like oh i’ve been here all
along. Another way to portray this is in the grade system. If I go into, we start out in the
zero equals zero grade, but then in the first grade of the golden dawn, which is the earth
grade, it’s one equals 10. Okay. So the first grade equals number 10, because the first grade
of the order is the sphere number 10. So one equals 10, that simply means the first grade
is the 10th sphere of the tree of life, okay?
And then of course, when you get to the next grade,
it’s two equals nine and then three equals eight, okay?
But that’s a very tricky reference to the fact
that as you rise up, you also descend down, okay?
And it’s a very subtle reference
to the true nature of hierarchy,
which is not really like what you see here.
The true nature of hierarchy is more like this, okay?
And these are the four worlds of Kabbalah,
Asiya being the material world, Yetzira being the astral plane,
Berea being the world of creation, it’s hard to understand,
a world of pure darkness, and then Ataluth, a world of pure light.
Okay, so conceivably what happens in the creation of the world
is that Ataluth, that’s sort of God himself more or less, right?
Ataluth is pure light.
The light and the darkness are now commingled,
And when they co-mingle, they form Yetzirah, that gray area, which is white and black combined, right?
And then things get even more tangled up and confused in the world of Asiyah, where now things can grow.
I mean, that color green.
And so as one evolves, one goes from Asiyah to Yetzirah to Berea to Atzaluth.
And then in Atzaluth, you touch the pure universal ground of being, which is ultimate enlightenment.
and then you return back down to a sia it’s kind of the hero’s journey okay the hero’s the hero
starts out very narrow-minded goes that goes out into the world experiences all kinds of
wide world adventures has an expansion of consciousness a broadening of horizons wow
and then he goes back home to a sia and decides to take up a particular task he’s going to take
out back the lessons of all he’s learned and pretty much now apply them to some kind of a task
okay well um it’s sort of like the you know the hero goes off and slays the dragon and brings
back a magical sword and now he can use it to do something really important in in his home country
or something like that right um and here the idea is that when you get to the highest level
and you come crashing back down to earth again okay so like oh i failed i can’t seem to maintain
that, okay? But in your return back to the outer world, what you notice is that Atzaluth, Berea,
Yetzirah, and Asiyah, they’re all one, they’re all part of the same thing, okay? So Atzaluth
and Berea, Atzaluth bodies forth Berea, which bodies forth Yetzirah, which bodies forth Asiyah.
So when you’re looking at the things in the outer world, you are, or you’re actually looking at
atzaluthic forces okay though you do it’s hard to recognize them okay but if you’ve experienced
all the different levels of the tree of life suddenly you can look at ordinary things and
see the divine light in them okay it doesn’t mean you get up to atzaluth and you stay in atzaluth
forever and everything’s wonderful it means that you you come back into the outer world and you
recognize that all of this is that okay so that’s what i mean by a failed initiation it’s part of
a plan for you to reach those, I don’t know, altered states of consciousness, but you come back
changed forever. That’s the real task. You don’t enter an altered state of consciousness so you
can cast a spell. That is possible, okay? You enter deeper and deeper levels of experience
so that you are permanently changed, at least for as long as you’re alive in this form, okay?
and so you don’t need an altered state of consciousness anymore you are magic itself
and your whole lifestyle becomes magic you don’t need to enter an altered state of consciousness
that will come anyway you occasionally will drift in and out anyway um but uh the most ordinary
tasks become filled with enchantment as they always have been as they always will be okay
The point is to experience the lowest and highest worlds and then come back down again and say, oh, I don’t really need to be an absolute that’s already here.
Then you can live your life for real this time instead of some kind of fear driven trauma, trauma infested life, you know, running from one desire to the next or fleeing from one monster after from one monster after another.
okay those things go away and you can actually start living an actual life that’s based on
deeper knowledge okay and that is accomplished by compassion if you don’t have compassion empathy
these things are not possible maybe one more thing to say about the exoteric view of magic
is to view magic as something that you keep locked up in your closet tied up you don’t show it to
anybody but occasionally you go open your closet and you poke at it so that it puts out for you
and you learn how to poke it in just the right way so it gives you the results you want then you go
away it’s like oh i’m satisfied and but then you get dissatisfied you come back let’s well let’s
let’s open the closet again and poke this thing some more see if i can get some more good stuff
out of it this is the the way that most chaos magicians tend to view magic nowadays that i
that i’ve met okay i know it’s not the way that peter carroll saw it and he and i know that peter
carroll the one of the founders of chaos magic um he didn’t like what had been done with his
idea of chaos magic actually what people were doing with it um it’s partially his fault for
for writing in such a scientific style maybe because science is largely about you know poking
nature to see what you can get out of it you know so um what i propose here is that the rescue to
that mindset is to um let magic out of the closet it’s still important to keep things secret for a
while okay but but to respect it okay the universe doesn’t take very kindly to being prodded so that
it can put out for you all right um it needs compassion and there’s what’s actually happened
is what’s actually happening in the psyche, like it or not, is much more interesting than you
having something to poke to get something out of. It’s much more interesting than that. And if you
try to think about that, just doing magic so you can get what you want, that’s kind of boring.
How long is that excitement going to last, right? All right. Well, until next time.
Source: Lyam Christopher