Did Jesus Exist? Joseph Atwill Vs. Steven Crowder |386|

That is an interesting idea, that I certainly hadn't thought of - though I guess a phone would only correct a word to "Thelema" if that word had been encountered at least once. I know Thelema is the name of a god, but is it one associated with something satanic?

David, Hi, Thelema is not the name of a god. Crowley, like other members of the Gold Dawn, was into contacting ancient Egyptian gods, or god forces.It is better thought of as particular philosophical position. There's a bunch of stuff you can google, but I think it is mostly pretty incomprehensible to an outsider - its bad enough for insiders, frankly.

There is nothing inherently satanic about Thelema or Crowley, unless your POV is doggedly Christian. In essence it is based on the notion that if you find and follow your proper path in life all will be well. Its more elaborate than that, of course. There are claims that it has a deep foundation, but I suspect that is BS and it is no more than a flash expansion of Mills' proposition about liberty. At the time that would be a fresh and radical idea. The essential problem, for me, is that for the Thelemite philosophy to work it requires a very deep level of self-awareness. 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). This why I suspect Crowley appeals to power hungry psychopaths and other arseholes (assholes to Americans) who love wealth and influence.

In reality, discerning the nature of Love, Law and Will is probably a life time of deep thought and meditation - before you figure you can act in the confident knowledge that you understand the creed. That is not something you will find any Thelemite into.
 
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.
 
I would guess that for him, it just means a group of people that try to invoke non-existent evil spirits by doing vile things to other people

BTW, It is good to see you here again, Philemon!

David

It's good to be back, David. Thank you.
 
So there you have it folks, Crowley is just being a good ol' Christian boy and preaching some St. Augustine of Hippo. :D

Hey Philemon great digging! Thank you. I think St Augustine's line is better, with the injunction to 'Love' first. But I suspect Crowley, typical of his age, took to Love with a head, rather than heart perspective. It would be nice to think of him as merely a follower of Augustine, but maybe a little wild and a bit off the rails at times. But I really don't think we can quite fo there.

'Love, and do what you will' trumps the later versions - so long as you sort out Loving before you go doing what you will. Pity the Thelemites and the Wiccans didn't read wider.
 
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.

The NDE stuff is only half the story. The other half is the OBE perspective - the non-traumatic (well sometimes) introduction to being conscious and out of one's body. I have had only one potent and compelling experience, so I am no expert, but my partner was a regular and I have read on the subject to a sufficient degree.

Essentially what you get is what you expect, when you die. Robert Monroe (Ultimate Journey) describes a kind of zone of pleasant fog (my words) in which the departed dwell in the illusions of their belief systems until they get bored, or otherwise wake up. Beyond that there are realms of clarity, and of a different character.

So all the experiences recorded in Long's fascinating book are expressions of expectations - but if you read that book with care there is a hint of something deeper.

Actually I am wrong - NDEs and OBEs are only a 1/3rd each. The final 1/3 is the post mortem accounts when the departed talk back to the undeparted - Betty in the Stewart E White books and Rita in the Frank DeMarco books, for example. But I suppose you have to add Jane Robert's books expressing the thoughts of Seth and see this as an instance of me being wrong again - now there are 4 parts to the story.

There is actually a whole bunch of stuff about the reality of what we call death -and, well, Heaven really is a kind of Hallmark movie to be mercifully grown out of.

I recall telling my horrified Pentecostal brother-in-law that his vision of heaven was so horrific with its endless vista of utter tedium dripping with flaccid niceness drawn out for eternity I would cheerfully take my chances in the far more lively prospect of Hell. He doesn't like me much.
 
David, Hi, Thelema is not the name of a god. Crowley, like other members of the Gold Dawn, was into contacting ancient Egyptian gods, or god forces.It is better thought of as particular philosophical position. There's a bunch of stuff you can google, but I think it is mostly pretty incomprehensible to an outsider - its bad enough for insiders, frankly.

There is nothing inherently satanic about Thelema or Crowley, unless your POV is doggedly Christian. In essence it is based on the notion that if you find and follow your proper path in life all will be well. Its more elaborate than that, of course. There are claims that it has a deep foundation, but I suspect that is BS and it is no more than a flash expansion of Mills' proposition about liberty. At the time that would be a fresh and radical idea. The essential problem, for me, is that for the Thelemite philosophy to work it requires a very deep level of self-awareness. 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). This why I suspect Crowley appeals to power hungry psychopaths and other arseholes (assholes to Americans) who love wealth and influence.

In reality, discerning the nature of Love, Law and Will is probably a life time of deep thought and meditation - before you figure you can act in the confident knowledge that you understand the creed. That is not something you will find any Thelemite into.
Yes my instructor went over the Golden Dawn or as they called them the Golden Yawn and what was "wrong" about them. It was to help from fellow practitioners now to join seedy cults, what to look out for etc
 

Love it! Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. Robert Monroe described belief zones where the dead go and inhabit the illusion of their belief system about the after life until they are driven by desperation or boredom to imagine there might be more than this. Likewise it is said that atheists/materialists end up in a similar state of nothing happening until they get curious or desperate. Strong belief can be as captivating as no belief.

I choose to accept Monroe (and others) on this matter because it chimes with my belief that it is a desire for truth, not belief or faith, that counts eventually. But that is, by my own admission, a belief - and what do I know? Interesting.
 
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.

IMO, Hallmark Heaven is not backed up by the majority of NDE reports. The picture painted by the data is far stranger, more varied, and, to me, compelling than the new-age version.

It is still a broadly positive picture, though.
Essentially what you get is what you expect, when you die. Robert Monroe (Ultimate Journey) describes a kind of zone of pleasant fog (my words) in which the departed dwell in the illusions of their belief systems until they get bored, or otherwise wake up. Beyond that there are realms of clarity, and of a different character.

A reading of the after death communication literature (particularly the older stuff), where the after-life is depicted as a pleasant version of earthly aspiration (a cottage by the sea and time to do your watercolours), would certainly fit this. But NDEs seem to regularly confound the expectations of the experiencer and seem much more psychedelic than I'd expect a pleasant self-reflecting dream to be. So I don't know. Anyway, I must read Monroe.

At the moment I like the idea that OOBEs, NDEs, psychedelic experiences, etc. are swims through various overlapping consciousness fields within which we are embedded - the personal, the collective, the transcendent.

EDIT:

Here's two pieces by author Michael Prescott exploring the personal dream model (which is different to my current thinking). His blog is great, btw.
These sojourns in what the Tibetans call the chonyid bardo and sidpa bardo take place ... on a lower plane where postmortem existence is largely dictated by the biases, assumptions, and limitations of the subconscious mind. Such existence is a virtual-reality simulation, real enough to be fully immersive and widely shared, but not real enough to withstand the direct apprehension that yields liberation.

http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2018/01/lost-in-the-bardo.html
In considering this, it may be good to remember that almost all communicators who exhibit any intellectual advancement remark on this next phase of existence as, in some sense, an illusion. Perhaps the most notable example ... referred to the next plane as "the plane of Illusion," "Illusion-land," "Shadow Land," and "the Lotus Flower paradise."

http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/...2017/06/summerland-dreamland-disneyland-.html
 
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The NDE stuff is only half the story. The other half is the OBE perspective - the non-traumatic (well sometimes) introduction to being conscious and out of one's body. I have had only one potent and compelling experience, so I am no expert, but my partner was a regular and I have read on the subject to a sufficient degree.

Essentially what you get is what you expect, when you die. Robert Monroe (Ultimate Journey) describes a kind of zone of pleasant fog (my words) in which the departed dwell in the illusions of their belief systems until they get bored, or otherwise wake up. Beyond that there are realms of clarity, and of a different character.

So all the experiences recorded in Long's fascinating book are expressions of expectations - but if you read that book with care there is a hint of something deeper.

Actually I am wrong - NDEs and OBEs are only a 1/3rd each. The final 1/3 is the post mortem accounts when the departed talk back to the undeparted - Betty in the Stewart E White books and Rita in the Frank DeMarco books, for example. But I suppose you have to add Jane Robert's books expressing the thoughts of Seth and see this as an instance of me being wrong again - now there are 4 parts to the story.

There is actually a whole bunch of stuff about the reality of what we call death -and, well, Heaven really is a kind of Hallmark movie to be mercifully grown out of.

I recall telling my horrified Pentecostal brother-in-law that his vision of heaven was so horrific with its endless vista of utter tedium dripping with flaccid niceness drawn out for eternity I would cheerfully take my chances in the far more lively prospect of Hell. He doesn't like me much.

Exactly, if you want to get an idea of what might probably await us after you die, you better off listening to the reports of all the prodigious Astral travelers, people with books and YouTube videos who seem genuine. These people visit these other realms consistently, whereas those who have an NDE visit it once, very briefly, so I believe that makes their experience likely to be misleading. I’ve learned a lot from OBE gurus like William Buhlman, Graham Nichols, Jurgen Ziewe etc. The realms these people report sound like the same realms people visit during NDEs, complete with the dead friends and relatives, and they visit them frequently. There is cohesion, sincerity, and vast simalariy in the realms these people report. I’m convinced that in studying the reports of successful Astral travelers, that we are getting the most potentially accurate glimpse of what might await us after death. It’s NOT the NDE accounts. Although those are clearly valuable as well for similar and different reasons.
 
Exactly, if you want to get an idea of what might probably await us after you die, you better off listening to the reports of all the prodigious Astral travelers, people with books and YouTube videos who seem genuine. These people visit these other realms consistently, whereas those who have an NDE visit it once, very briefly, so I believe that makes their experience likely to be misleading. I’ve learned a lot from OBE gurus like William Buhlman, Graham Nichols, Jurgen Ziewe etc. The realms these people report sound like the same realms people visit during NDEs, complete with the dead friends and relatives, and they visit them frequently. There is cohesion, sincerity, and vast simalariy in the realms these people report. I’m convinced that in studying the reports of successful Astral travelers, that we are getting the most potentially accurate glimpse of what might await us after death. It’s NOT the NDE accounts. Although those are clearly valuable as well for similar and different reasons.

To me what you say is so important. There is so much contemporary material about the 'other side' that is detailed and particular. I have had direct personal experience of talking with discarnate teachers, so I feel very comfortable with the idea that we have access to contemporary rational discourse about themes that have been dressed up in complex metaphysical and metaphoric language.

If I want to know about France I talk to somebody who has been there recently, not centuries ago. I read Frank DeMarco's books last year and they seriously bent my head because they challenged me to engage with ideas and emotions that were not comfortable for me in major ways. I am not saying these books are gospel, and I can readily imagine that for many the POV expressed is so OTT that is is easier to walk away. But if you do not expose yourself to the challenge to think differently then maybe all you want is a belief system and not knowledge.

For me DeMarco's work was so close to White's books like The Betty Book and The Unobstructed Universe there was a compelling sense of authenticity. White was writing in the first half of the 20th century and his style will not suit many readers now.

I like Jane Robert's Seth books for the same reason, and there are others as well.

I get the fascination for the NDE stuff, but it is still only trauma induced OOBEs - so OOBEs are the benchmark. And if you accept OOBEs you have to accept dead dudes talking back. This is where I want Skeptiko to go next (Alex, if you are reading, get an OOBE guy on soon).

There is an ecology, an environment that is consistently reported on - from the Tibetans to now. This isn't guesswork or speculation or metaphor. It is consistent and persistent and reliable reportage on the same theme.

How many folk have to go to France and report back the same thing before we think 'Okay, that is what France is like.' We don't need to send these reports to scientists or send a scientific mission to Paris to give us permission to accept the reports.

We really do need to understand that the 'doubts' are neither rational nor sensible but are planted in our minds by materialists who feed on uncertainty like vampires.

No! Damn it! I have been out of my body. It is real, and it is the very shore of an extraordinary adventure. Its where our gods, demons and many ET operate (maybe all - I don't know). Its the realer side of reality as we know it.
 
I remember reading one of Jurgen Ziewe's books and developing an uneasy sense that it was all a bit too glib, and he might be fantasising it all. Obviously if he really did manage to go OOB so extensively, his books, website, etc represent an incredibly valuable resource. Can anyone find a way to reassure me that this guy is for real?

David
 
Back to the original question for a moment. I was walking past a telly and this show was on. So I stopped for awhile and it seemed to be pretty much on the money in terms of what I have read. Its a couple of hours' worth of sensible examination of the Bible. The title is Christian Dilemmas - The Secret History of the Bible. The speakers seem to be credible academics.

 
I remember reading one of Jurgen Ziewe's books and developing an uneasy sense that it was all a bit too glib, and he might be fantasising it all. Obviously if he really did manage to go OOB so extensively, his books, website, etc represent an incredibly valuable resource. Can anyone find a way to reassure me that this guy is for real?

David
Now I am curious. I will take a look at him, I am not at all familiar with him.
 
I remember reading one of Jurgen Ziewe's books and developing an uneasy sense that it was all a bit too glib, and he might be fantasising it all. Obviously if he really did manage to go OOB so extensively, his books, website, etc represent an incredibly valuable resource. Can anyone find a way to reassure me that this guy is for real?

David

Had a very quick look - random moments of the BATGP interview. No alarm bells. Your reaction is understandable. After listening to Robert Monroe's books I had to go sit in a quiet place and adjust myself. I think dive in and try a number of informants. There should be essential continuity as well as things that make you feel really uncomfortable about allowing what you encounter is true.

This may also be interesting - http://www.iacworld.org/ (I know nothing about them - they just look interesting)
 
How about Bob Peterson? This guy walks the walk, he's done the practices and hes reviewed dozens of books on out of body experiences and written his own.
https://obeoutlook.blogspot.com/
Awesome thanks. I’m always on the lookout for new names to read about in the OBE/Astral community. I’ve resolved to attempt to Astral travel through my lucid dreams (which I on occasion have). It’s my understanding that lucid dreams are a great jumping point into the astral world. My ultimate goal is to contact my late mother and step-brother.
 
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