Non-Being:

 

Non-Being:

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

DE STELLA MACROCOSMI.

“Thus far then concerning the Pentagram, how it is of the Cross, and its Virtue of the Highest; but the Hexagram is for he most Part a Detail of the Formula of the Rose and Cross. Already have I shewed unto thee how the Most Holy Trinity is the Yang; but the Spirit, and the Water and the Blood, that bear Witness in the Inferior, are of the Yin. Thus the Operation of the Hexagram lieth wholly within the Order of our Plane, uniting indeed any soul with its Image, but not transcendentally, for its Effect is Cosmos, the Vau that springeth from the Union of the Yod and the He. Thus is it but a Glyph of that first Formula, not of the others. But of all these Things shalt thou thyself make Study with ardent Affection; for therein lie many Mysteries of practical Wisdom in our Magick Art. And this is the Wonder and Beauty of this Work, that for every Man is his own Palace. Yea, this is Life, that the Secrets of our Order are not fixed and dead, as are the Formulae of the Outer. Know that in the many thousand Times that I have performed the Ritual of the Pentagram or the Invocation of the Heart girt with a Serpent, or the Mass of he Phoenix, or of the Holy Ghost, there has not been one Time wherein I did not win new Light, or Knowledge or Power or Virtue, save through mine own Weakness or Error.”

Liber Aleph: Aleister Crowley

The object of magick is first to formulate the Pentagram expressed in the figure of the Christ and after to unite with the Hexagram, which Crowley interestingly enough, points out, does not comprise the whole. The point he makes, that the nature of the six rayed star is cosmic and thus not transcendental is rather interesting, and leads me to question what he actually means by this. Hence the Cross is man and the Rose is symbolic of the Hexagram, and their union symbolizes what in Thelema is called Knowledge and Conversation with one’s Holy Guardian Angel, or is sometimes called Genius or Gnosis. What this entails is that the magician has harmonized and united every element of his being, psychic, emotional and physical thus perfecting himself under will and by doing so has become a reflection of the macrocosm which now sympathetic to him, is united with by the momentum of his True Will. He goes on to say that the Holy Trinity, as he calls it, is outside of the world of contraries and relates it to Yang, which is the masculine aspect of the Dao, and in so doing he ascribes the entire Supernal Triad to Yang and the world below to Yin. Any Thelemic qabalist worth his weight knows, that Binah is related to Sakti and Chokmah to Siva, or in a more Western parlance Babalon and the Beast respectively, which means that we must look at how the Supernal Triad corresponds to the worlds below it, in order to see what exactly makes it the Yang of the above-mentioned equation.

It’s clear then that what Crowley is doing is comparing Yin and Yang, not as it is usually compared, but instead is showing the nature of L.V.X. below the Abyss, and comparing the ancient Chinese idea to the qabalistic worlds instead. Following this idea, it suggests that L.V.X. as emanating from Binah into the Creative world is what is referred to as Yin and the reason Crowley states that the Hexagram is not transcendental, and it can’t be as it forms the world of contraries, which insists to us that L.V.X. subsists outside of the world of opposites. We already know that L.V.X. governs abstract reality and it is within the light that everything is united and the reason that the macrocosm is in fact, not transcendent, that non-being is necessary to be realized in order to raise man to union. The opposites are real, monism is a lie, it is not as if the mind of the magician is somehow dissolving the physical properties of the universe and himself in order to unite with every element therein, no, that’s impossible, but what he is doing is harmonizing with the above-mentioned substratum of reality, which could be called pure-consciousness and from where everything exists in union and from which his sense of separateness is dissolved. Hence the light, in fact, does not merely trickle down, but instead is forced into the Creative and Formative Worlds where it, in its finality, manifests in the Material World as the Daughter, who is the first Yin principle of the light that man encounters and must be wedded with in order to rebirth creation. The forceful manifestation is symbolized in the original Unity and may be seen as Kundalini's rise towards Samadhi, as a positive climb towards its realization and the expression of the Yang principle, which is a requisite for the attainment of K&C. After union the light must again settle back into the lower for the attainment to be rendered functional, thus it is mimicking the same process as symbolized by the light bringer's fall from heaven, and illustrates that the magician becomes the reflection of heaven upon earth. Man—the Pentagram, must in order to attain Knowledge and Conversation become a reflection of the Father and the embodiment of the Yang principle in order to impregnate the Daughter, alluding to the formula of Yod-He-Shin-Vau-He. Crowley goes on to tell us that the work in the Outer is fixed, that doing forms part of the attainment and thus gives us the creative character of the grades in Briah, and he says that the secrets of our Order are not dead and fixed, and points out the secret nature of the work and in this context "secret" must be interpreted as relating to the Adeptus grades and progressing our tradition by new Gnosis. Obviously, the Outer Order grades are there to prepare one for the influx of Light in the higher grades, an experience that will culminate with divine intercourse, and are not meant to be a springboard for self-aggrandizement.

“Love is the law, love under will.”