You certainly did flower during the course of the day. This is an interesting point of view. You put a lot of thought into this article, that is obvious, and I have to say I did enjoy reading it, it held my attention throughout.

While I personally think your essay could have been boiled down to a much shorter article, I do agree with some points.

I do believe in the teachings of Jesus. I do believe in God. I don't believe He's actively involved in whether we buy Jiffy or some other brand of peanut butter. I don't think that God takes an active role in the daily lives of every person on this little planet. I'm sure He has a lot of other things to do.

I try to live by the teachings that Jesus tried his best to impart to us. I do fail a lot of times, but hell, I am human. I don't believe that God is some old bearded man sitting on a throne someplace outside this universe observing everything each of us do every day. That would be very boring.

I like to think of God as some scientist or an other-universe Edison that experimented with a concept and is observing the results. Somehow I think shit and piss aren't realities in His universe. After all, we are filthy creatures after all.

To: MasonM



It's exactly as long as it needed to be to address the points I wanted to make in the way that I wanted to make them. As little whip says, I write for me, to explore at leisure certain ideas, and do so without paying attention to whether or not anyone else will derive understanding or benefit.

So I bloviate. Sue me.

To: little-whip



As ever you're the only one who gets anything of the reality of what I'm talking about (which isn't surprising as you were my first teacher in these things and have experience of them yourself, which these others don't).

I remember that, as the first shock of my first conversion wore off, I noticed a distinct change within myself. I was no longer free inside my own head. I had invited something else within me and, as I viewed that something through the lenses both of my early training as a Catholic and later through the veils of teaching thrown across the experience by my fello believers, I found it to be antagonistic, constraining, a thing to be supplicated and bribed.

Whereas before I had been King over myself (but had had no idea what to do with that Kingship) now I had been ousted and a new King had come - or so I thought because so I was told by people I assumed to have had the experience that I had had.

Now I'm not so sure we had any experience in common except a shared confusion, which we each tried to reconcile and dispel by filling our heads with 'teaching'. Teaching accepted, mostly, because others had accepted it before us, vouched for it, and made it popular. Teachings that changed over the months and years that followed as schools of thought became fashionable and then fell out of favor.

I was told that a good Christian is responsible to God before anything else - but never responsible to himself, and that part of that responsibility is abandoning the self to God, to be lead by the Holy Spirit like a whipped dog on a leash.

And soon enough that ceased to satisfy and I began to think and ask for myself again. And every time I asked and was answered I felt more and more that to be a Christian was to be a slave - not to God, but to the prevarications, contentions, disputes, fears and follies of men who knew no more (and often less) than I did.

Being a Christian is the death of thought and insight, unless that thought and insight follows approved paths and comes to approved conclusions. So far from being set free by the truth of Christianity, I had simply become another kind of slave.

I don't say that Magickians are not slaves; it's just that the bars of their cage are set at an infinite remove from them and the space within them is theirs to do whatever they can desire and will to do, without consideration (unless they choose to consider such things) of right and wrong.

It's so much easier to just be a Christian, because then you don't have to face these choices, you don't have to own your morality (it comes pre-packaged and pre-defined) and you certainly don't have to take personal responsibility for anything, ever. All blessings come from God, all evil comes from Satan and mankind is just a helpless little pawn in some cosmic competition to see who can get the most souls.

What makes a magickian any more responsible for their morality? How do they define morality? Personal choice? What makes a magickian responsible? How does law come into play? What would will them to follow the law?

To: Question of the Day

What makes a magickian any more responsible for their morality?

You're partly answered in the response above. But to be explicit - if belief is a tool to be consciously used in the pursuit of effects, then the one responsible for actively using those beliefs, and for the consequesnces both intended and otherwise of those effects, is the Magickian. There is no one else to be responsible, no one else to blame in excuse, but the Magickian himself. Insofar as he understands his position and exercises his choices in the light of that understanding he is automatically honest and automatically has integrity.

Honest, because all his choices and actions can only be attributed to him without possiblity of disguise or excuse. And having integrity because all his choices and actions are formed out of his desire and his will.

How do they define morality?

They? I can only speak for myself. I define morality by what I want - in the final analysis. Most would not consider that moral. But I'm not bound by your standards - except inasmuch as it's in my interest to appear as if bound by them.

How does law come into play? What would will them to follow the law?

What 'law' are we talking about? The 'law' of magick? There are such laws, but I refuse to acknowledge them. The law of the land? Of course I'm motivated to obey the law - especially in those instances where the chance of being caught and punished outweighs whatever benefit I might gain by breaking the law.

Magick works in accordance with the realities (including legal reality) of our existence, not against them. Which is why you should always be careful what you wish for. Go read 'The Monkey's Paw' if you doubt me.

To: Question of the Day

Honesty and Integrity are hard traits to come by. Most people I know aren't either on many occasions - Christian or not (Including myself) - even when held accountable regardless of by self or other (law/God). I have a hard time believing that there is anything automatic about either.

There is nothing else for honesty and integrity to be, except automatic, in the way that I've formulated it - which is simply a less compact form of the line in Hamlet : This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou cans't not be false to any man.

If you know that you alone are responsible for everything you do, and act with that in mind, you are honest even when you lie. If you know that everything you do has its source in your desire (not in circumstance, or in pressure placed on you, or in anything external to you) then you have integrity even as you deceive everyone around you. And if you know that the 'law' of your behaviour resides in you and in nothing else, then you are free even as you appear to others to be in chains.

Many people are not honest with themselves. What do magickians say about self-deception then?

They say (or this one says) that they are as prone to self-deception as anyone else. But this one, at least, is more aware of that tendency than most and combats it the only way one can - through honest self-examination. And no, I haven't read 'The People of the Lie'.

It sounds to me like your 'morality' is simply free will, but doesn't something guide your behavior besides the threat of law?

Would I kill someone? Yes, if killing a person was worth enough to put all my liberty at risk for it. If someone's death was worth so much to me then I would kill even without the certainy of escaping punishment. As I said in my 'I was a Childhood Bully' thread, I came close to killing another child - what stopped me was a well-developed sense of survival and the knowledge that, in that instance, the satisfaction of doing what I wanted wasn't worth everything I would have risked.

If by 'free will' you mean capricious, ungrounded choice then I completely disagree with you. If by 'free will' you mean a pattern of decisions that are generally consistent over time and which are motivated by character (which itself is a pattern of behaviour that is generally consistent over time and which constitutes an overall attitude to the world - a Weltanschauung) then I would agree with you. My character determines how I respond to the world: I am my own guide to conduct, because there is no one else to guide me.

OK, so you refuse to acknowledge them, but what are they?

If I refuse to acknowledge them why would I devote any time to discussing them? And yes, little whip is my wife - as to whether we are monogamous or not: mind your own damn business.

To: Quote of the Day

Where does one draw the line? Is there no line?

Of course there's a line. It's where you put it, because there isn't anyone with true authority to tell you where it goes, except yourself.

I'm going to bed now. But I'll get back to this tomorrow.

There appears to be an unformulated thought (or, if not unformulated, then unexpressed) at the back of your questions. That thought, it appears to me, is this. You appear to equate the moral and ethical position I've described with unfettered selfishness. If that's indeed so, then your questions become intelligible since all of them have been about the kinds of relationship were selfishness is not thought to be beneficial.

Hmmm... Interesting interpretation. I certainly wasn't thinking of selfishness at all...just curiousity.

because it's a neighbourly thing to do but because it's to my advantage to have my neighbour in my debt.

Now you're assuming that your neighbor would feel indebted to you. Isn't this a form of moral code that you're adhearing to? tit-for-tat?

You have it the wrong way round. I never knowingly lie to myself - but when it serves my turn I'll happily lie to others. A lie is always a lie in relation to those who hear it. But an honest liar is one who knows which lie to tell and why he's going to tell it, and so goes about to be deceitful while being totally honest with himself. As I said, you had it the wrong way round.

Of course you don't knowingly lie to yourself.. That's my whole point - that lying to the self interferes with self-examination.

To: Question of the Day

Of course you don't knowingly lie to yourself.. That's my whole point - that lying to the self interferes with self-examination.

But what point is your 'point' making? I agree entirely that self-deceit defeats (if unrealised and unchallenged) self-examination.

How can self-examination be of any benefit if one lies to his/her self?

But throughout I've insisted that the Magickian is in an unusual situation. In order to know what you want (as opposed to knowing what you are supposed to want because you're normal, or what others think you should want) you have to engage in self-examination. The position of the Magickian is unusual because the performance of Ritual almost compels self-examination as a consequence. The knowing, self-aware Magickian never lies to himself because to do so defeats the object of Magick - which is the realisation in the world of the Will of the Magickian.

You asked earlier about the 'laws' of Magick - one such 'law' is the dictum that the purpose of Magick is to achieve acquaintance with and knowledge of one's Holy Guardian Angel. As an objective, a Magickal goal, there's nothing to be said against such an ambition - though for clarity's sake (though not brevity's) I would drop the 'Holy Guardian Angel' and substitute instead 'manifestation of the Aeon in which the desire and will of the Magickian are located'. But as a 'law' it's nonsense. Nothing is a law to the Magickian but his desire, and nothing can compel his obedience in Magickal matters - unless his desire is to be obedient, in which case he 'compels' himself.

Now you're assuming that your neighbor would feel indebted to you. Isn't this a form of moral code that you're adhearing to? tit-for-tat?

Hardly a moral code. More an observation that, generally speaking, those you help feel a sense of indebtedness after receiving that help. At most, this is merely a manifestation of what might be called 'schoolyard justice'. That sense of fairness that children express when they say that something is 'against the Rules'. At most, it's against the Rules to not feel indebted for a favor received. I suppose some might dignify this idea by calling it a 'moral code' - but if it is such then it's of the simplest kind and its origin lies in the necessarary reciprocity that governed the lives of human beings when they lived in tiny communities and relied upon each other absolutely for their survival. I think this is something we all share as a background assumption about how the world works (not about how it ought to work, ideally, but how it actually works) and as such it's no more a moral concept than is the idea that if you drop something it wall fall to the ground. That's just how things work.

Hmmm... Interesting interpretation. I certainly wasn't thinking of selfishness at all...just curiousity.

What made you curious?

Now, if you'd thought to put a pancake beneath the lil bunbuns as well, I'd have my lunch problem all sorted.... and the pups could play with the skin afterwards.