Take part of the Thelemite creed that says "Love is the Law, Love under Will." WTF does that really mean? You can decide it means what you say it means, which is what most adherents seem to do - in which case it is no more than a license to do pretty much as you please (this is the same problem the Wiccan creed has).
The whole thing about Crowley being a "bad person" I get. He wouldn't be my first choice for someone to hang around with. Plus, I'd be skeezed out by him for any number of increasingly less PC reasons. Nonetheless, I don't fully get the allergic reaction to him around here. The guy ultimately championed a robust non-materialist worldview that he celebrated as being capable of liberating himself and others from the snares of both materialist and consumerist streams in our world - streams that are still very much large and in charge today. I'm not a Thelemite and have no affiliation to any Crowleyan lodge, etc., but I do own a book or two of his.
Anyway, as Crowley comes with so much baggage, I've elected to seek out other spiritual cartographers whose maps I'd feel less uneasy studying and employing on my journey. Just the other day Franz Bardon's Initiation Into Hermetics arrived in the mail, I opened it up, turned to a random page, and saw this written there:
...the magician may observe the activity of the
phantasms, and he will be able to form such specters himself. But do not forget: sooner or
later, he always will run the risk of being influenced or mastered by them. He knows what is
happening in the average individual, and how to produce these phantasms consciously in the
magic way, but never will he be induced to execute such practices himself, always
remembering the magic sentence: “Love is the law, but love under a strong will.”
I wondered to myself, did Bardon crib this from Crowley? It is not attributed to Crowley in Bardon's IIH. So, I googled around and found
someone responding to this very question about Bardon/Crowley and why Bardon was saying this "Love is the Law" stuff...
Regarding Crowley's statement 'Love is the Law, love under a strong will';
It has been compared to St Augustine's 'Love, and do what thou wilt'. No doubt
there are many also similar.
A little more searching around for the full statement of Augustine kicked this up:
“Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; whether thou spare, through love do thou spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.”
So there you have it folks, Crowley is just being a good ol' Christian boy and preaching some St. Augustine of Hippo. :D
Continuing to go off topic here (not really)... but... can't help it...
So I've been listening to Skeptiko for nearly as long as it's been around and that's like a decade now because I remember having to use Audacity to cut some episodes into portions so I could burn them on CDs to listen to in the car. I was in my mid-twenties then and am now in my mid-thirties. Back then, I was reading anything I could get my hands on regarding NDEs and was totally buying into the whole "It's all about love" message the NDErs were talking about in all the books. Trying to find some other worldview than the one pushed at my local childhood church, I pretty much was left with the same thing - "Be a good boy and you'll go to heaven when you die." But, now, after growing up some more and getting some more life experience under my belt, I'm really finding the whole love and light thing to be some weak tea. I know that True Love is profound but much of what you see in the ways these accounts are pilfered off in mass market paperbacks reduce them to just more of the same ol' contemporary evangelical Christianity with a little bit of "Oh my God! It's really real, though!"
Anyway, I guess my point is, people like Crowley acknowledged and apparently attempted to contend with a lot of the aspects of our being that a lot of people don't want to even acknowledge exist. He did some effed up stuff. I don't mean to downplay that. But he wouldn't accept a George Noory type of spirituality for himself. I don't know about anyone else, but I know my own thoughts and heart well enough to know that it's not all love and light inside of this experience I call "me." Sometimes I'd like to take a cinder block and smash a person's face in. But like they say in AA, acceptance is the first step. With magic of any stream I've encountered you are truly, literally allowed to accept the darkness in yourself - generally as a first step toward learning how to keep it from coercing you to do all the awful things none of us like to see ourselves or anyone else doing. And you may find that some of that "wickedness" isn't really all that wicked after all and maybe needs to be given an outlet for proper expression. Jung says much the same thing.
I'm not sure where that leads me in terms of what this whole NDE/Skeptiko journey means for me - just to more questions like usual. What is heaven then?-A made for Hallmark movie where it's all hugs and pumpkin pie and people achieving their milquetoast dreams and non-selfishly feeling good for one another? That's just not doing it for me anymore and no matter how many NDEs tell me its so, it's just ringing false. My BS meter is going off full blast. Or, perhaps I'm going to the place Maurice Rawlings liked to write about.