I've also heard it said that alcohol and drug addiction is no respecter of age, race, sex, wealth, poverty, or any other measurable social division or indicator. Except Intelligence. If your IQ (only a reliable measure of what your IQ score would be) is in the two hundredth . . . I mean the upper one-half of one percent -- yes some of the least among us walk in "the Other One Percent" -- you start to accept that it will be more and more seldom that you hear an idea that is truly original, new and meaningful, that you haven't already thought or heard or read before. I became an active, cultural Thelemite with the unalloyed joy of knowing that I might meet as many as three people who knew more than me, If I were an extrovert, that would sound like bragging. But since the Inner Life of the Mind was my need, my vocation, my "subject," my "teacher," and my Goal, I needed these, or their real-life counterparts, or the isolation and hopelessness would have done me in long before. So thank you again, Thelema, for being such a positive alternative to self-ending. I have made many friends, enjoyed the love, beauty, friendship and sheer athletic stamina of some lovely and memorable lovers, and have even found a spouse or two. For me, Liber 101 has been a "map" that describes a "territory," and while no honest ontologist would expect the correspondence between the two to be one hundred percent, still, the "world," the "place" described in Liber 101 is a real place, and anyone who wants to "move" or "live" there can do so, and in so doing, becomes a co-creator in the re-making of the possible. Thelema has good built-in feedback loops, the pipes flush themselves regularly. Most other "faiths" have deliberately fire-hardened their "Dogmas" so that when they throw them at people -- their chunks of hardened dogma, I mean -- they Hurt. I'm sure more than one person reading this has been bruised by flying dogma before, maybe in the faith of their cradle, which caused them to seek another way. In "Illuminatus!" an inmate asks John Dillinger what is for some minds the first, the truest, the only question worth asking: "Say, friend, do you think there could be such a thing as a True Religion?" If so, the "truth" in the new "teaching" must combine and ferment with the inner knowing of the one, the self, the user, the monad. And everyone's ferment and flavor and combination will be unique, because everyone's inner knowing is unique, by design. In Thelema, in common with the Creation, our individuality, our uniqueness and its consequences, have always been a feature, not a bug.
And as for true teachers, or leaders-out, those who understand the teachings, and have had experiences with the practices, and can show by their example -- not to mention their survival -- what a good case of magickal progress should look like, I'm pleased to say I was wrong, I think I may have met as many as five.
And now, I will stop here and fulfill the implied social contract by going and actually reading the article. Thanks for listening.
Love is the Law, Love Under Will.
<{: )}>
