Thelema: Knowing & Doing one's Will

TO KNOW ONE'S WILL IS TO DO ONE'S WILL

There is always much talk about the Will in Thelemic circles and consequently about how to know what one's Will is and further how to perform that Will.

I submit that, like Plato proclaimed "To know the Good is to do the Good" for his ancient ethical system, Thelema asserts an identity between the knowledge of and the doing of one's Will.

This knowledge is not the knowledge of ideas and facts, where one knows an object to be large or small, a color bright or dark, etc. But this is the Knowledge of Gnosis, the experiential understanding and identification with one's True Motion.

To Mega Therion wrote, "Thou must (1) Find out what is thy Will. (2) Do that Will with a) one-pointedness, (b) detachment, (c) peace." Once we know our Will, our true Self behind the phantom-self of ego, this knowledge expresses itself in action, in Doing & Going.

This Will is naturally one-pointed by virtue of both its supreme Force and that one has destroyed all Duality in the Great Work. Further, it is worked with detachment because all moments are a joyous end in themselves, worked without "lust of result." Finally, the Will is worked in peace for this Movement is One, having united one's conscious will with the inertia of the Universe, wherein even the greatest Conflict is a harmonious facet of the All.

What is "Do what thou wilt"?

Thelema is not about labeling oneself.

The term "Thelemite" is only used once in the Thelemic Holy Books when it is said, "Who calls us Thelemites will do no wrong, if he look but close into the word." (Liber AL I:40) It refers only to others labeling those who follow the Way of the Crowned & Conquering Child...

This same line ends with the eleven words, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law"

"Do what thou wilt" is negative & destroying in the sense that it cuts through all

• Morality (as an a priori truth) [AL I:40; III:60]  
• Dogma (metaphysical sophistry as binding to our Going). [AL II:27-34]
  

But it is also positive & creating in the sense that

• it inherently leads us to the ancient injunction, "Know Thyself"
• This is the Great Work wherein we come to know ourselves as Ourselves, without limit and infinite.

 

We must perform the operation of Solve, dissolving into the formless Unity which is Naught, so that we may consolidate our Will in our Way, Coagula. In this, each moment is a new Sacrament, and a new branch of Joy. [AL II:9, 42-44, 66]

Then - being "chief of all" [AL I:23] - the Child of Thelema works her Will, guarding against the phantoms of Morality and Dogmatism with the merciless red flame which is as a sword of Ra-Hoor-Khuit [AL III:38].

Dispersing the Clouds

The Sun of Truth and Unity shines eternally beyond spatial and temporal dimensions.

Certain types of thought are correlated with 'forgetting' this inherent perspective - ignorance, 'avidya' (Hinduism & Buddhism), or 'sin' (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).

These clouds of darkness should be dispersed:

* God as intelligence that intervenes with humans, judges them, is entirely 'Good' - the Judeo-Christian conception, not pantheistic

* morality as an absolutely condoned course of conduct, sin

* purpose, teleology

* reason (as royal road to Truth)

* free will/agency

* self, ego

* * * * *

God is already largely dying as an idea. Nietzsche proclaimed 'God is dead' about a century and a half ago, the French Revolution enshrined Reason as their Goddess, and the new-Atheist movement has taken hold in America & Europe. It has already been torn down, acknowledged to be a false idol... though we have erected Science in its turn.

Morality was destroyed, also, by Nietzsche again and again, though his flaming sword spoke concisely when it was written, "There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena." This is how one steps beyond Good & Evil - rather, they then become the playthings of the Self. When we destroy the notion of absolute values, sin becomes nonsensical.

Setting goals may be economical and efficient but it is a false step to attribute any ultimate purpose to ourselves, let alone to various other animals' actions, the course of evolution, and all 'inanimate' objects like stones, mountains, hills, and rivers. If anything, they are all actualizing their inherent potential, which is simply another way of saying they are doing what they must do. A "law" isn't 'adhered to' by anything, it is simply a description of predictable movements of things. This is why teleology is doomed. Goals inherently limit us, and engender attachment to the intended results; one who can set (and re-set) goals but not be limited by or attached to them walks the Razor Edge.

Reason was erected as the new sacred edifice, the Royal Road to Truth. The problem is that Reason works with Language, and Language has implicit ideas lodged subtly in it that are not necessarily true in themselves. A subject distinct from its predicate; an object separate from a subject; a subject performing a deed distinct from a deed being done, etc. The commonality between the most nefarious presupposed truths in language is "distinction..." or duality. "Things" - or "creatures" in the Judeo-Christian sense - could not exist unless there was some faculty of distinction (the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge & the naming of the animals in Genesis). Again, it may be useful to manipulate these arbitrary distinctions - as Science has shown clearly - but that does not mean there is any inherent truth in it. We create various useful but ultimately arbitrary distinctions - substances and forces, etc. - and manipulate their relations for utility's sake. Reason is only put in its rightful place when the 'self' is annihilated and the new Perspective is seen to be beyond the limitations of dualistic language (treated later). Reason leads to the false conclusions of teleology, free will, and self and therefore is a harsh master but a useful servant.

Our free will may be an extremely strong intuition from our subjective perspectives yet these are just strong affects arising and interacting. There is no 'free agency' in anything, let alone in your choices or behavior. In other terms, all conscious things are conditioned by unconscious factors. The real power of the psyche lies in its unconscious potency, and therefore all religions have counseled giving up the 'self-will' to the 'Lord,' which is simply that True Self beyond the ego-notions of self, including all things. This is why it was written that one who gives up everything, gains everything. People don't want to give up free will out of a strange pride in agency, but it is completely possible to continue functioning without entertaining this myth. It is a difficult balance between knowing oneself to be the receptacle of forces - no, the forces themselves - and yet using language which insists on implicitly asserting a subject distinct from its doing.

And this sense of agency is also predicated on the fact that we all think we are an 'ego,' an 'I.' We include the body and mind (with its faculties of reason, memory, imagination, feeling, etc.) in this concatenation, but there is no point in claiming ownership beyond utility & economy... That is, there can be a body and thoughts but why claim "they are mine" because there is an awareness of them? Even if we reduce the sense of "I" to this awareness beyond thoughts and body, this consciousness is destroyed in the Mystic Trance of Unity where no difference made between one thing and any other thing. Only in this experience can we know that the old sense of self, the ego containing what we are consciously aware of and remember ourselves to be, is understood to be a small fraction of the new reality of the self, unhindered by duality and any of the above ignorances.

And this Steady Movement - the wheel of Dhamma... the Tao... this Sun of Truth and Unity - continues onward, unhindered by these clouds of ignorance. It is the Path of Power, it is Thelema.