Lion of Light: The Blind Men and the Elephant

Dr. Timothy Leary looking into the future. 

 

Lion of Light: “Do What Thou Wilt” p. 134 – 156

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Aleister Crowley’s flamboyant personality and life-style sometimes overshadows his philosophy and work especially when looked at superficially. He’s been called the “archetypal villain in 20th Century.” We used to joke about someone receiving vague, unfair, criticism – “what’s the matter, did he kick your dog?” Yet, that’s exactly what W. Somerset Maugham has the vile character Oliver Haddo, based on Crowley, do in his novel The Magician to kick off the conflict. (Joyce has “shaddo” in Finnegans Wake.) Perhaps that’s where the expression originated, or maybe Maugham found it humorous to begin his caricature that way. I remember seeing an effeminate villain clearly based on Crowley in the Basil Rathbone, Sherlock Holmes film, The House of Fear. It’s not difficult to find other examples. This seems ironic given that Aleister spent considerable time using various devices in the attempt to get outside his everyday persona and tunnel realities. Wilson presents two such instances at the beginning of this section and quotes “Saint Aleister” as saying: “How can one hope to understand the world if one persists in regarding it from the conning tower of one’s own personality?”

Lion of Light devotes little attention to Aleister Crowley’s outsize and outrageous reputation though sometimes pokes fun at his critics. In this short 22 page section, Wilson compares Magick and Thelema to a wide variety of thinkers, researchers, disciplines and paths. The most prominent of these, perhaps, being the good doctor Timothy Leary, another character with a larger than life reputation. Wilson also references, in no particular order: Thomas Pynchon, Carlos Castenada, J.G. Frazer, John Lilly, Cleve Backster and telepathic plant research, Bhagavan Shree Rajneesh, Gurdjieff, Lao-Tse, John Lilly, John Allegro, Andrei Pujarich, R. Gordon Wasson, Weston LeBarre, Sufism and two of their mystics, Fariduddin Attar and Hazrat Inayat Khan, Wilhelm Reich, Francois Rabelais, Oscar Wilde, Hippocrates, Mordecai the Foul and the Master Therion among others. 

Apart from Leary, some of these other names seem equally controversial. P.D. Ouspensky felt that Gurdjieff was “evil” and possibly insane; he forbade his students from visiting Gurdjieff and his Institute while preaching and practicing G’s system his entire life after coming to know it. Oscar Wilde got imprisoned in extreme harsh conditions for loving the wrong person and being indiscreet about it. Wilhelm Reich got imprisoned for research the American Medical Association didn’t approve of which lead to his mental instability and eventual death in prison. Many people seem certain that Carlos Castaneda was a fraud who made up Don Juan out of thin air. Wilson quite perceptively quotes Castaneda appearing to address this in part, a quote that also applies to Crowley and his masks: “Little by little you must create a fog around you until nothing can be taken for granted, until nothing is any longer for sure, or real . . .” I suspect Don Juan was based on a real person or a composite of real people which Castaneda greatly embellished. This suspicion in part comes from hearing an unreleased interview of Claudio Naranjo who was best friends with Castaneda when they both went to U.C.L.A. The morning before reading this section to write this post, I was moving firewood with an old friend I see seldomly who happened to mention Journey to Ixtlan, the book quoted here.

This section initiates the student with an examination of the word THELEMA and its correspondence with AGAPE. We get a sense for why it’s known as the “93 current.” I found the comparison with Khan’s version of Sufi philosophy regarding will, love and consciousness insightful and unique to Thelemic exegesis. Wilson extolls the benefits of a positive outlook with a quote from Khan’s Cosmic Language: “It is an optimistic attitude toward life which develops will; the pessimistic attitude reduces it, robs it of its great power. Therefore if there is anything which hinders our progress in life, it is our own selves.” This gets followed by an interesting bit that compares the lack of telepathic ability to the widespread Victorian belief that women were unable to have orgasms. Wilson calls this “trained impotence.” He makes the claim: “it has been easier and easier for magick students and others to unleash their own telepathic powers.” This holds true for me. RAW prefaces this riff with pertinent quotes from Magick in Theory and Practice the last of which states: “WoMan is ignorant of the nature of hir own being and powers.  . . . There is therefore no reason to assign theoretical limits to what she may be, or to what she may do.” (translation mine). We have been programmed with sets of limiting beliefs by our cultural. Though not mentioned here, a useful practice for getting past these limiting beliefs is “Beliefs Unlimited,” a metaprogram written by John Lilly that can be found online or in his book The Center of the Cyclone.

I disagree with RAW and the Golden Dawn on one point: the aphorism that “Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure,” a phrase that pops up from time to time in RAW’s fiction. I have a problem with the absolute inevitability implied by the word “is”. I agree that giving in to fear may lead to failure but not that it’s always a forerunner. In bardo training we’re told that it’s ok to feel fear but not to react to the fear by panicking. Speaking of telepathy, sometimes a fear sensation can be a warning of danger that thus may be avoided. The words “DON’T PANIC” appear on the cover of The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which serves as a science fiction Book of the Dead – very early on in the story, all life on Earth, including Earth itself gets blown to smithereens except for Arthur Dent whose initials, A.D. = after death. RAW also provides a definition of the Great Work related to the integration of the psyche which seems accurate enough. However, the Great Work has multiple definitions which gets acknowledged by RAW when he provides a different definition for it at the end of this section.

Wilson clearly doesn’t like to pay rent, who can blame him? He sounds a little ambiguous in what people should do about that. It seems like he may be playing with and/or challenging the reade. He first says it’s simply a matter of “waking up” and “stop paying” which gets immediately followed by a Rajneesh directive that when becoming enlighted to “go on behaving in your society as it requires” which, of course, includes paying rent. Then he rejects this “passive posture” and cites Jesus, Crowley, some early Sufis and Adam Weishaupt as examples, which sounds a little dubious, to me. Finally, he rails against rent again ten pages later as medieval exploitation. This ties in with his riff on the inequality of wealth between the “master class and servile class,” – still very relevant. It seems a little absurd to give the instruction “wake up and stop paying” unless he intends to communicate something else. “Stop paying” could be a pun for stop fighting or stop war. The Hebrew letter Peh corresponds with the Tower Tarot card also called War connected with Mars where all the war gods hang out. The paragraph before the rent diatribe has Gurdjieff saying that all that’s necessary to stop the current war of the time, WWI, is for people to wake up and stop shooting each other. Fighting each other seems completely counter-productive to progress of any kind, whether on a personal, political, or a global scale. On the personal level, contention and fighting seems very detrimental to any kind of alchemical construction. The instruction may simply be “stop paying” with rent presented as the context for saying it.

This section briefly goes into the energetics of Sex Magick, and tantra. On page 144 he cites what different researchers and cultures have called this phallic energy/life-force. Gilles Deleuze calls it “sense.” RAW presents a sex magick technique in the Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow quote.

Apart from Crowley, Timothy Leary gets the most airplay in these pages. In an earlier comment I said RAW called Leary Crowley’s heir, but I was wrong, I didn’t read the full context and assumed he meant Crowley. He quotes Leary writing about Hippocrates from his book Jail Notes, a pretty abstract book mostly from what I remember though this selection appears clear and on point of the subject of drugs, then calls Leary Hippocrates disciple and direct heir. However, you can find a You Tube clip of Leary saying something to the effect that he’s carrying on Crowley’s work. Rabelais, a medical doctor as well as a satirical writer mentioned earlier in this section as a Thelemic antecedent also consider Hippocrates a major influence. We can find a direct line of transmission connecting Hippocrates to Rabelais then to Crowley and finally to Leary. Wilson introduces the very important “game-concept of human behavior” given by Leary along with his Interpersonal Grid that identifies different personality types and the games people play. This section concludes with an early presentation of Leary’s Eight Circuit Model of Consciousness, so early that it only has seven circuits. This section appears very information rich.

Love is the law, love under will.

Oz