The Value of Divination (in my opinion)

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

I first picked up a deck of tarot cards when I was about 12 years old, a friend of my mothers had the Rider Waite pack which I was shown one night and it entranced me immediately. I subsequently borrowed books on the subject from the local library and even clumsily painted my own deck, since I had no money to buy one. I would say that this was my introduction to the occult, and more importantly, to the qaballah. 

Following from this, I explored other areas of divination, the runes and various other types of throwing stones, dice, the sticks and coins of the I-ching, geomancy, probably other things as well. Scrying came a little later when I was exploring witchcraft and experimenting with magical circles and other accoutrements of the craft.

Of all of these methods, the only one that I retain and always have to hand is a deck of tarot cards. I use the same rather worn Thoth pack that I received for Christmas at some point in the early 1990's, which was really my introduction to the depths of qaballah and Crowley's system even before reading any of his books. After about 28 years of experimentation I have reached some conclusions about the tarot and divination, based purely on my own experience, which I would like to set out here.

My first observation: 

Divination doesn't work.

That is quite a bald statement, and seemingly at odds with my claim to still use the tarot. Let me clarify: objectively, my predictions made using the tarot over all of that time, both for myself and others, have never been significantly different to what I could have guessed, either about another person or about a situation in my own life about which I might consult the tarot, without simply sitting back and paying attention. Others will disagree, and some might even foam at the mouth at the heresy, but that doesn't matter. I've yet to see evidence of consistent and accurate divination results, at least in myself or those I have worked with, so pending further data I classify predictions using tarot or other methods as inconclusive at best.

So, if it doesn't work, why do it? Simple, the training of the mind, or perhaps the taming of the mind puts it better. Students practicing divination are classified as walking on the path of Qoph, that is the realm of the subconscious mind, which is open partly for the Neophyte, but brought to a higher pitch later in the grade work and so of increasing importance as we progress. 

Swimming in that sea of images, thoughts, feelings, the lower astral, often touching the shells, we need to learn how to navigate. Five minutes of meditation will show a shower of images. Astral and etheric work multiplies this, opening the floodgates, and learning to navigate these straits is critical. Divination teaches how to define images, recognise structures and complexes of imagery and emotion which are the very stuff of the mind at this level. In addition to this, tarot provides a useful filing system, making it the most valuable of the various options in my opinion, we are able to use it to classify and analyze the images that arise. 

But experience and the words of the sages throughout the ages tell us not to accept any of these images as 'true'. I know I've made that mistake a few times. Others have and will continue to accept personal revelations based on astral imagery, visions, and 'spiritual experiences' as true, ignoring the warnings of the Chaldean oracles:

Stoop not down, therefore,

Unto the Darkly-Splendid World,

Wherein continually lieth a faithless Depth

And Hades wrapped in clouds,

Delighting in unintelligible images

Precipitous, winding,

A black, ever-rolling Abyss

Ever espousing a Body unluminous

Formless

And Void.

 This warning cannot be stressed enough I think. Not that one should be terrified of the subconscious, or the astral, on the contrary, fear only feeds fear. But we must train the mind, the intuition. It should never be forgotten that the goal of the Outer College is the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, not the entertainment of the ego or hanging around in the lower astral like a young man about town. Without a sharp intuition and a clear sense of purpose this is impossible, and instead ones own dark images and phantoms will happily take the place of the Angel, and lead you along their own paths. The same can be said of astral work, which really approaches the same area in a different manner. The aim is not divination, or astral travel for its own sake, the aim is always the Angel, the unification of mind and body, self and other, one and all.

The practice of divination serves as training for the greater divination, that of understanding one's own life and the path one is on, that is, the name and form of the Angel. These known, all that is necessary is known. These unknown, the initiate is a blind animal groping in the darkness, prey to every whim and passing amusement. The path is not a matter of speculation and logical reductionism, but nor is it a flight into fantasy and following ones bliss.

(Other spokesmen of Thelema, the occult, and the A.'.A.'. have championed "following your bliss". I respectfully but strongly disagree). 

It is a matter of accurately seeing both the world and oneself as they are, unvarnished, the very person you are in yourself, and your life, as it is, with its potentials and possibilities, in the clear light of day, not the darkling light of fantasy. Divination can be a dangerous tool, since if taken incorrectly it can actually make matters worse, one starts to believe ones delusions, and rather than obtaining the result, we end up getting sucked into the moonlit worlds of our own delusions, following the will'o the wisps of imagination, calling that True Will, never realising the mistake, we end up mistaking the first 'entity' that presents itself as an angel of light.

The correct method, I feel, is to practice divination as a sort of game, let the method itself lead you along storylines, allow the intuition to make connections and weave narratives, not judging them but also not attaching much importance to them. While we must always keep the central purpose in mind, to seek too ardently for an answer, accepting any that comes along in our divinations or early magical work, as universally valid is a good way to get entrapped in our own delusions. There is always the danger in divination, astral and magical work, and in life as a whole of mistaking ones own ideas for objective reality, so the correct method of divination can be a real help in overcoming this, an important part of the Great Work and the most common stumbling block on the path.

I would always advocate that initiates persist in the work in a systematic manner, just as a researcher, however pleasing the preliminary results may look, will nonetheless continue his research to its end and await the whole dataset before reaching a conclusion. So the initiate should, all the while enjoying the ride, abstain from concluding anything until the work is complete. 

Love is the law, love under will.

Prisms and Filters

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

Recently I came across the concepts of prisms and filters in daily practice. The concept comes from the Zen teacher Dainin Katagiri. He talked about how in our practice of zazen meditation we have to pass through a sort of filter, but what we really want to do is pass through a sort of prism, which is much more interesting and fun, and therefore addictive, but ultimately take us away from reality as it is in itself. This comes from a Buddhist perspective, and personally I feel it has a lot of merit, but I would like to think about it in terms of A\A\ practice.

Within the A\A\there are ultimately two main paths recognised, that of the magician and that of the mystic. The magician is one who analyses, takes apart, extracts information, goes on astral journeys through the practices of rising on the planes and so on. This to me is like using the mind as a prism. Learning the correspondences of the tarot and the tree of life is a way of breaking the whole into manageable parts, we can then isolate these and explore them separately, and this is a great thing to do. It is particularly important in the early grades, especially up to Practicus, where this analysis is brought to high degree. By passing through this prism of the mind we need to learn not just to break things apart and extract meaning, but to understand the whole, and how the integrity of the whole depends on the integrity of the parts. If I am running a scientific enquiry, I have to make certain assumptions, I have to theorize, and the accuracy of my results and the conclusions I make about them will be affected by the accuracy of my assumptions. We might see this process as one of “making a difference between things”. Useful, but not the final goal. In daily life, most of us spend a good pat of our time life this, in our interactions with others, endless talking about this or that concept whether or not it is relevant to our lives, making fine shades of distinction, categorising, and criticizing. Truth be told, it’s a lot of fun.

So, we have to pass through this prism, which is the mind, but it is not enough to simply separate out all of the colours and enjoy the rainbow effect. The process should teach us something about the mind, about the prism itself. It is easy and all too common to get caught up with one or another colour, lost in a maze of circular logic or obsessed with a particular thought pattern, and failing to understand that it's just a prism. I mean here more than just intellectual assent; this is not enough. What is needed is real understanding, properly digested. Only in this way can the understanding of the prism be integrated into our lives. Until then it remains just a theory.

As for filters. This is much more difficult. Katagiri says that when we sit in zazen, the aim is to just be a filter. What does this mean? In the practice of zazen, yoga, meditation, we just sit. If one’s meditation brings visions and interesting ideas, then it's really just a sort of prism, so we need to be careful. Anyone who has meditated for a while will understand that sometimes meditation is very boring. This is because we are used to the prism, we want distraction, conversation, the excitement of passing through the prism, the medley of colour and form. However, this filter of meditation is very important. By using the mind as a filter, we filter out all that is not essential to us. Sit quietly, count the breath, let the thoughts come and go, this is the filtering process. Sometimes when we sit in meditation, we may have the idea that we should sit in some ancient temple, or by a waterfall, or that by assuming this posture we are becoming more holy. This is all just prism, separating one thing from other things, it is not real meditation. This is ok, the filtering process includes these things. When you filter water, some tiny particles that you didn't notice before can get stuck in the filter itself, making it clog up. This is ok, we can just clean the filter out and continue to filter water. When the eyes are closed, thoughts come up, this morning I noticed my filter caught images of a film I saw last night. It could easily be other things, I just return to the breath, open my eyes, realise where I am, continue to filter.

Although it might seem that way, I would not say that filter is more important than the prism. Both are necessary, yet they serve different ends, and in terms of practice they fulfil different roles that within our system play complimentary parts. I feel that passing through the filter is more direct but more difficult, more austere, while the prism is more interesting, more practically useful, but more prone to distraction and deviation. In A\A\we practice both, some aspirants focus more on one or another, others are more balanced between the two. This is ok, we all follow our predilections in the path, sometimes analyzing and exploring, sometimes reflecting and filtering. The same goes for daily life as well as our practice, we take active and passive roles at different times. The thing I think, is to recognise the difference, to be aware of it and not to worry about it, then our whole lives become like a big filter and it becomes apparent that even those times when we seem to be involved in the prism, this too is a sort of filtering.  

Love is the law, love under will.

On the expectations of students

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

These days I have little contact with the occult community, and don’t personally take on students. That is to say, I am not in a position to choose or allocate from a pool of prospective students. That job is left to a more capable person and I have little input in the matter, except perhaps as a sort of consultant. This is probably just as well, since I have proved incapable of holding on to students for any length of time, all of those who have signed their Probationer oaths in my presence have since resigned. Some of these I roundly accept, were probably through my own fault, although the majority simply found the work impossible for a variety of reasons. These latter I can’t do much about except to accept that for most people, the Great Work will be a passing thing, a source of diversion left to one side as soon as life gets complicated. Those for whom it really gets under the skin are relatively few and far between.

Of those who left the Order because of me, I have had a lot of time to reflect on what went wrong, a sometimes uncomfortable process but a necessary one I think. What I notice is that they usually resign because of personality clashes, they can’t help but put a supervisor on a pedestal, and when they get to know the person, and realise that he is human, has his failings and quirks of personality, and even, (the horror) disagrees with them, they feel that they can no longer work under the supervision of such a person and must therefore resign. The unvarnished truth of it is that they just don’t like or respect me enough to consider me a teacher, and so go off in search of somebody who fits the mold better, or else return to solitary practice. They are correct of course, I'm no guru, I realise that much, so I don't try to be, but instead confine myself to administering the syllabus as it was presented to me.

For me, this repeated process of aspirant post-mortem has been an exercise in humility. Nobody likes rejection, especially on the spiritual plane where one’s deepest predilections and sense of what it is to be, are exposed. It is not without some discomfort that I put this in writing, but I know it must be done for the analysis to be complete. However, I do feel that those who have resigned because of me miss an important point, that so long as the syllabus is adhered to, ones personal beliefs are of little import. 

If one’s supervisor insists on practices or activities that are not part of the core curriculum of the A\A\,, or is manipulative, then one should indeed depart. If s/he insists that you agree to a given point of view, for instance theism or atheism, or flat-eartherism, or anything else not part of the core A\A\ curriculum, then one should probably walk away. I would assert strongly though that if one's supervisor agrees with you on every point, tells you how great you are and never challenges your views then you are unlikely to grow except in your own conceit. If on the other hand, you feel compelled to walk away because of a difference of opinions that is in no way insisted upon and does not affect your path, then walking away is a sign of being influenced at a much lower level than that of the spirit, instead one is operating and basing their decision of the sphere of the personality. In such instances I feel that the Great Work devolves into a sort of tea party, a social exercise only. That is not what the A\A\ is for. For this reason it becomes clearer with every year that associations with other initiates should be relatively distant, even with those one regards as friends. Crowley said as much somewhere, that an initiate should go into fits of horror if he catches a glimpse of another initiate through a telescope, or words to that effect. In practice, I find that I need to be careful when engaging students and other initiates, not to get too involved at the level of the personality, an incredibly difficult maneuver and one that I am still learning, and a key reason why I don't associate with initiates or the occult 'scene' in general. 

As an  A\A\supervisor sometimes these things can't be easily avoided and engagement is necessary. I may challenge the opinions and viewpoints of an aspirant, if they seem to be influencing his or her path. Not so much to refute them as to expose them. The A\A\path is first and foremost a path of scepticism, and that scepticism must extend even, especially in fact, to ones deeply held beliefs. The deepest splinters are not felt, but slowly infect the flesh, and must be excised with the scalpel of analysis if the flesh is to heal. Being a solitary path, this is intensely introspective, but we must be careful that it doesn't become an exercise in naval gazing, or else caught in the mirror of self reflection, we end up worse off than we were before we started. Nor is the process over at any particular grade, but continues day after day, year after year, forever. 

When a supervisor offers sceptical response to a students expressed certainties, this is likely to be not so much a refutation, but an invitation to look more closely. While of course he may disagree with a point of view, he should be open to persuasion if presented with verifiable facts, but unprovable opinions don't deserve that sort of respect, they remain opinions only, and to insist on such without providing valid evidence is the opposite of the method of science. Immature students may receive this as a personal attack, insofar as they are incapable of separating themselves from their opinions. Our opinions are ours, we identify with them, they may come to define us, thus becoming a source of separateness, which is really alienation, yet we cling to it. I feel now that those students with whom I have clashed have largely done so on the matter of opinions when I offered a sceptical response (irrespective of my own opinions on the matter), and unwilling to compromise, or thinking that differing opinions imply fundamental incompatibility. 

In any case, I suspect I never really find out the real reasons for student departures, I can only go by what the student tells me and that may not be the whole truth of a thing.

They are probably correct as far as their needs go, so despite disappointment on my part, I have to accept that they probably made the right decision for them. I am unlikely to pat a person on the head and tell them they are a good boy. I am quite saturnine by nature, and if I see a person doing well, I am likely to expect more of them, test them further, exactly as I do myself. I don’t coddle or sooth, at least not those I consider to be adults, although I do have compassion, and challenges to ones thinking are of course optional insofar as they are not directly covered in the syllabus. Life has a way of presenting its own ordeals, there is no need for me to invent more. 

Finally, while I am genuinely sorry for those students who felt that they could not continue to work with me, I can only applaud their decision to do so and look on with a sort of grim pride at those ex-students who took True Will at face value and acted on theirs. This is the first and last lesson. After all, if you meet Buddha in the road, you must kill him.

Love is the law, love under will.