A Mythology of the New Aeon

arbor

Winter Solstice, 2006 e.v.

The themes and symbols by which humanity understands and explains its own straits to itself, whether they be religions or mythologies, Hollywood films or Hallmark cards, are falling victim all around us to the slowly growing malaise of a postmodern, existential, crisis of meaning. The news media which we are in constant exposure to bring us images and realities which appear ever more detrimental and chaotic- civil wars, unprovoked armed invasions, environmental destruction, CEO's with record-breaking quarter earnings and laborers with stagnating minimum wages, corrupt governments and crumbling familial and social structures. Believers the globe over clamor to churches and synagogues, temples and mosques, in the vain hope that their god will deliver their people from the approaching cataclysm, while the wealthy elite
bow before their neon gods, their technological saviors, their financial assets, in the vain hope that their mortgage will secure the safety of their future.

The general public lolls in front of perpetually-changing scientific findings regarding pharmaceutical products and food additives, while ninth grade teachers in the midwest battle over whether biology or the book of Genesis is a more astute authority on processes of biological development. Entire cultures are wiped out in the quest of the most powerful western countries to own the most important economic assets in the world, while entire memories are wiped clean nightly by the idiot box, taking its place as the new bard, the new poet, the new jester.

Life itself becomes bleak and empty, unaided, in this world of thieves, hucksters, rapists, killers, and diseased egos, of hysterically ubiquitous national flags and flash-in-the-pan popular trends, of java jackets with airline advertisements, of liposuction and transplanted hair, of genetically modified foods and water "treated" with flouride? Who can ignore that the way things are currently held to work is deeply flawed and perhaps poisonous, that somehow along the line, we went from industrial progress and the social contract to sinking ice caps and democratically approved torture? Who can fail to see that, although we have received so many teachers and "saviors," their message, their death, and their resurrection have changed so very little on a macrocosmic scale? Who can exist within our modern paradigm, at this so very late stage in its
existence, and not sense the serial wanting of moral definition, of a clearly understood system of absolutes, of a humane means of dealing amongst humans? When loudest and most powerful mouthpiece of christianity in the world today, the American president, has been found to be responsible for the pointless death of over 300,000 innocents in only three years, when the catholic priesthood has been found guilty of over 100,000 molestation cases in a decade, it appears that an evolution of morality is in order.

The issues with which our generation is dealing with are not of an unheard-of nature, however we have not had to deal with them for a very long time. At the time of Christ, the prevailing orthodoxy which Caiaphas represented was in a state of decadence and emaciation, and was blasted completely apart by Christ's revelations, which presented the people of his time with an alternative to the goat-sacrificing, dogmatically asphyxiated norm. His message was one of freedom from archaic law, which broke into pieces the prevailing, stale, orthodox form of the cultural-religious system he came from. A break had to occur between the finally busted-off barnacles of the morals of the past aeonic cycle, which represented the bloodthirstiness of Yahweh, and the eye for an eye mentality, whose tenure of validity had passed. The karmic
weight of that aeon, or spiritual epoch, had outlived its efficacy or meaning, and needed to be succeeded by that which was greater, that whose time had come, that city on the hill.
We find ourselves at a similar crux. All of the, priorities, systems, and ideas which we have inherited from previous generations are crumbling and falling apart, unless their appeal still proves to be profitable or fetishistic, such as home ownership or marriage. It indeed is a small world, after all, however its layers of complexity have manifested exponentially with the passage of the past hundred years. We teeter at the precipice of global fascism and infinite, cosmic freedom. The crowned achievement of the hardest science humankind has developed, quantum physics, is that the fundamental 'stuff' which constitutes all of material reality is the result of energetic wave patterns at a particular rate of vibration, which manifest, at subatomic speeds,
across all of the space/time continuum, as particular occurrences or happenings. We have indeed moved past the mechanistic view of the manifest universe which beheld mainstream science during the age of Newton, a universe which operated, through and through, according to established, calculable formulae, composed of solid structures with immutable presence.
Our philosophy has long become 'existential,' our social sciences 'post-modern,' our spirituality 'New-Age;' it is apparent that our focus is eschatological, that we are obsessed with time and our unwitting welcome of a new dimension of its passage- a new means of quantizing reality, a new means of mythologizing life's labyrinthine coils.

Regarding this same shift in consciousness, less than a decade after the Treaty of Versailles, Aleister Crowley wrote: "democracy dodders . . . ferocious fascism, cackling communism, equally frauds, cavort crazily all over the globe. They are hemming us in."1 Since the second world war, it has been obvious to all of humanity that we can be quite despicable creatures to one another, that we have not progressed or been 'civilized' enough to refrain from coldly slaughtering, en masse, our brothers and sisters. Crowley, echoing an almost conservative, libertarian voice,
further stated that "above us today hangs a danger never paralleled in history. We suppress the individual in more and more ways. We think in terms of the herd. War no longer kills soldiers; it kills all indiscriminately. Every new measure of the most democratic and autocratic governments is Communistic in essence. It is always restriction. We are all treated as imbecile children . . . they won't trust us to cross the roads at will."2

Well then, if we can note, with such perspicacity, that a new era is upon us, then can we do the same with where we have come from? It appears that, from roughly 2,000 B.C. to 500 B.C., a prevailing, general cosmology was held by most known cultures that was matriarchial in family structure, regarded the earth and its processes to be our means of comprehending the Divine, and worshipped the goddess, be she Innana, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, or Isis. It is from this time that we witness the paganistic or pantheistic cosmologies which represented, on the whole,
matriarchial government. Following this, about the time of Plato, Confucius, Buddha, and finally Jesus, the whole of creation had come to be conceived of as a divine tragedy, whereby an innocent must be sacrificed and mutilated in order for the sun to continue on its course. Order, adherence to dogma, and perpetual sacrifice define this particular aeon. And, although the lessons inherent within the frequency of consciousness to which we had evolved at that time had to be learned, we have demonstrably evolved to a novel frequency, wherein our hand-me-down traditions, benevolent as they may be, fracture and fall away in the face of our newfound
obstacles.

Many of Christ's teachings, although revealed two millennia ago, have yet to manifest in any consistent, widespread fashion of which he would seem to approve. Although there have been sporadic movements towards civil equality and world peace, they have been routinely stomped out by power interests the globe over. We have enmeshed ourselves in the deepest shadow-problems of the just-passed aeon, and are painfully dealing with the horrific vibrations of its death rattle. The kicker is that we are undergoing the activation of an even deeper circuit of our consciousness, what some might even call 'the new Christ-consciousness.'

Since the advent of the so-called aeon of Osiris, or that of the specifically dying and resurrected god, the theme of religious experience across much of the world, from the crucifixion of Christ and Krishna, to that of the dismembered Osiris, the submission (islam) to Allah, has been primarily to expedite the collective calibration of one group, tribe, nation, or mesocosm to some such supposedly exclusively correct Divine reality. We can see that currently another set of ideals are afoot; that perhaps it might be that the redemption of all humanity is a necessary precursor to the hopeful evolution of the species. Not only is this shift of focus simultaneously from the nation to the individual, from the family to the globe, but the raw material of the type of
redemption it affords has been removed from the summits of Sinai and Olympus and placed within the raw reality of the individual faced with its own individuality. This has been the staggering stage upon which we draft our life's meaning only recently, in literary form perhaps best described by James Joyce in Ulysses, or in the works of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. It is the undertone which fueled the anarchistic and socialistic movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the occult revival in western Europe at the same time, that of existential philosophy, the quantum, the cultural reunion of east and west, the drug culture, the countercultural movements of the beats, the hippies, the back-to-the-landers, the punks, the postmodern yuppies, and the uber-uber 'yutzies' (young urban trustfunded psychopaths).

Even though most of us have been allowed, by circumstances, to more or less watch life from the sidelines, it seems that we will not be able to so much any more. We will not be able to merely clap our hands to the song and mutter some of the words under our breath, to simply nod our heads at the sermon- the song must be of our hand, and the sermon of our lips. We do not have to save our tribe, nation, culture, or even globe- we have to save ourselves, from our own hubris, our own avarice, and our own weakness, ignorance and incompleteness.

The fundamental mythological structure which followed Christianity in the west, after it had a millennia to mature and implement itself sufficiently, is the grail myth, or the stories surrounding the existence of an holy grail, which caught the blood of Christ as he hung dying on the cross, and which was brought by Joseph of Arimathea, supposedly, all the way to Great Britain. Even though the grail legends are of knights, dragons, maidens and ailing kings, their importance to Christianity, perhaps more specifically to esoteric Christianity, are widely known. The grail is a symbol of the feminine, receptive, yin polarity of the universe, "that which receives, contains, and supports, of the maternal in particular."3 In her masterpiece on the subject, The Grail Legend, Emma Jung wrote that the grail "is so frequently considered to be life-giving or life-maintaining . . . when we realize how extremely important it must have been for earliest man to possess a receptacle in which, for instance, water, the stuff of life par excellence, could be transported or stored. According to Jung's definition, the archetypes represent innate predispositions to human behavior in certain life situations and the ability to grasp their meaning. The image of the vessel could therefore correspond to such a 'pattern,' to a possibility
inherent in the psyche of finding or producing a vessel and of discovering its uses."4

The mission of these mythic Christian knights which occupied the imagination of the west for centuries was to rescue and reclaim this sacred vessel, and become the new 'grail king,' or keeper of it, to ensure its safety and its ability to perform, ostensibly, its autonomously world-redeeming task. Perhaps the most well known of the grail legends is that of Parzival, the knight who went from being a complete fool to being keeper of the grail, through his manifold journeys and battles with riddles and adversaries. Parzival learns, by degrees, that there is a whole world out there of
knights and men at-arms, a reality which his mother kept him steadfastly hidden from as long as she could, as Parzival's father and uncles all died from battle as knights. He also learns that there is a whole world out there of women- women who are most definitely not like his mother. When he first sets out upon his quest, unknowingly, fatherless, to find himself- he greets everyone exactly the way his mother told him to, and sees each new phenomenon through this safe, innocent, and painfully naive vestige.

Without going into the entire story of Parzival and his triumphs and tragedies, I wish to place it in a particular place, then step back and look at how we may have advanced past the stage where mythologies such as Parzival have anything of detrimental value for us anymore. With the advent of the Christian church, the status of women, in Jewish, Roman, and western European locales, did not change in the least. Whereas the Jews required marriage for their rabbis and incorporated the feminine into their theology through such concepts and terms as the shekinah and the Elohim, and the pagan Romans accounted fully for the feminine in their cosmology by
the worship of Hera, Juno, Aphrodite and Ceres, among many other Goddesses, the Christian church which flourished from out of these cultures did not account at all for the feminine in the universe- except only vaguely by the presence of the holy spirit. This ignoring of the fundamental, life-giving energy and sanctity of the divine feminine resulted in one of the most patriarchial cultures the world has seen, and even if women's voices were stifled from birth for many centuries, while the mainstream culture only now begins to squeamishly realize this, the deep loss, pain, and separation that the Christian west has suffered from this is quite evident. The grail and the allimportant quest to find and defend it is symbolic of finding the divine feminine within each of us, and integrating it into our characters.

The holy masculine is exemplified by the figure of Christ, however there is no corresponding feminine figure or symbol to complement him. Christians regard as heretical modest claims that the man might have been married and sexually active, which would have been expected of a rabbi of Christ's time, leaving us the figure of Christ's mother, a virgin, as the only obvious feminine influence in the entire religion. Well, nature abhors a vacuum, and an unbalanced cultural system eventually finds the crutch which it intrinsically demands to stay equilibrated enough to survive, in one form or another. My conviction is that this vacuum of femininity within the Christian tradition found its life-support system through the grail mysteries, in that they supplanted the religion with a symbol of the divine feminine, without an exoteric manifestation of which the entire tradition might have dried up. The embrace of the feminine allows woman
and man to come to terms with this pole of their Self or Individuality. As Emma Jung wrote

In all of these movements a preoccupation with the problem
of evil of nature, of the feminine and of the divine in the individual,
was manifested in a form which sought to supplement
those elements that until then had been lacking in Christianity.
The natural symbols of psychic wholeness, or the Self, do not
fully coincide empirically with the traditional figure of Christ,
since the shadow is missing in the latter or else appears split
off into the contrasting figure of the Antichrist.5

As well as bringing into waking consciousness the sacred feminine, although esoterically, the grail legends also employed many alchemical or hermetic truths which, although deeply connected to the Christian tradition, had been rejected long before, by an ecclesiastical tradition which jailed its thinkers and burned its seers. The grail legends can be seen as having the office of supplanting the Christian tradition with the additives it demanded and almost starved without after a thousand years of formal, Roman, papal authority. This was the development of the Christian age after half of its time had passed- the mid point before it came back around on itself at the end of the Piscean era, the shambles of which we are currently trying, as a culture, to uncover and make sense of our lives from so long underneath. The mechanism which Christianity (not Christ himself, but the religion which named itself after him) gave its varied cultures was a type of safety net against the horrors of the shadowsoul, or 'original sin,' a type of flotation device with which to keep from drowning in the rapids of the darkness we all fear, which we now know to have inside of us as well as without, in the world at large. For, despite the admonitions of Christ that we turn the other cheek and love our enemies, we still find our own 'Christian' culture to be rife with licentiousness and blood thirst, with vengeance, rape, and murder, on a scale now
hitherto undreamt of by previous technological eras. It is obvious now that we need a new charge, a new model, a new schema by which to judiciously, compassionately, and wisely navigate our lives through their sometimes desperate and horrifying, sometimes euphoric and illumined, twists.

An element of our current global situation is that the paradoxes which follow our daily lives, from Porsches parked beside medians lined with the homeless, lawless invasions and wars fought to 'protect' and 'secure' the invaded population, to unexplainable, 'paranormal' occurrences such as crop circles and all the range of known 'psychic' phenomena, are an increasingly obvious and unsettling force in our evolution as a species. It is at this time, this aptly titled "age of information" that we cannot anymore escape the absurdities, ironies, and horrors of the 'postmodern' world, where borders for money are nonexistent and borders for people are adamantly enforced, where corporations have more freedom than humans, and government is
dripping with corruption and institutionally-supported avarice.

It is against this back drop that, between the first and second world wars, a small but persistent interest arose in the west in the psychoactive qualities of certain chemical compounds, natural or synthetic. In 1943, LSD was synthesized by the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, and soon after was being heralded as the new miracle drug among some European psychotherapists, allegedly reducing a year's worth of therapy into several sessions. Psylocybin, the psychedelic substance found in the amanita muscaria mushroom, was 're-discovered' by a group of Harvard psychologists in 1953, and after two or three years was being used, in Massachusetts, to successfully reduce the recidivism rate of the state jail system by seventy percent in three years.
Mescaline, the psychedelic substance which comes from a species of cactus native to the American southwest and central/south America, was the inspiration for Aldous Huxley's groundbreaking Doors of Perception, published in 1954.

These substances, which if used responsibly can allow us to fully know our hidden aspects or shadow material and the universe in clearer ways, allowing for rapid inner development and enhanced awareness of the sacred interconnectedness of all things, emerged into the collective consciousness at the same time of the holocaust, the atomic bomb, and the general upsetting of convention which the beat and hippie generations represented. Even though the first and most thorough researching institution into the uses and abuses of these substances was the United States Central Intelligence Agency, they became synonomous, by the "summer of love," with wild abandon, irresponsibility, carelessness, and eventually, permanent psychological damage. These substances do have a powerful affect on our nervous systems- and like any object or piece of technology, can be used wisely or unwisely. Their affect can easily be to strip away all of
our false pretenses and layers, the masks we hide behind, the boastful, selfish front which we all possess, and lay bare what is underneath. This can be, depending on the person, a highly unenviable experience. If you exist in a hall of mirrors, where your truest desires are repressed and hidden, and your greatest fears, underneath your constant smile of acceptance, are lurking around every corner, then taking away the mask can be a horrific trip. LSD is a technology which amplifies our consciences, and forces us to attend, either harshly or lovingly, to all of our faults and secrets. Of course, it needn't be about anything of more psycho-spiritual importance than several hour's worth of giggling and squirming around on the floor, exploding with laughter at the idea of low-fat salad dressings and whether or not the fundamental substance composing
the universe really is tension of infinitely varying colors. As in any situation, there are a wide range of variables which can affect the outcome and development of an LSD trip.

Beyond these pretenses, however, psychedelic substances have been the tool of many religious and initiatory orders at all times and places, such as the record that ergot, a fungus which is the chief ingredient of LSD, was used for visionary and oracular purposes at the mystery schools of Eulysis in ancient Greece, and the use of peyote and psylocybin by mesoamerican shamans since time immemorial, to name just two examples. They are re-emerging at the time that we are developing our new models, our novel cultural symbol systems, our new mythologies.

We find ourselves now to be at the helm of a new kind of ship, taking a direct role in the existence of good and evil, of order and chaos, versus the age when we believed it was quite alright to fold our hands and let the gods take care of things. We realize that every action we make is of vital importance- we can either be a good, noble, honest, life affirming person, or we can be otherwise; but there is no after party where one gets to finally do one's karmic laundry- the playing field is life- life, through all of its mind-splitting ecstasies and pounding agonies, its mundanities and its crises, where our work must be done, here on this earth, within these bodies. Anyone who acts decently to his fellow humans merely for the reward of heaven is a scoundrel and a con. The kingdom of heaven has been found within us, as well as the deepest pits of hell. We are the ones who mercilessly slaughter ourselves, not Satan or "the devil," or some other force 'out there.' And it is time for us to carry that weight and begin to bring some light into these
lives; this is what a new mythology is about: how to find meaning in the paradoxical absurdities of our time, and how to unite the dark and light we are coming to find the source of which to be ourselves, a task taking perhaps many lifetimes.

Psychedelic technologies and many other sundry subjects such as crop circles, the Mayan calendar, shamanism, depth psychology, and current political events people the book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, written earlier this year by journalist and author Daniel Pinchbeck. In the book, Pinchbeck probes into the phenomenon of UFO abduction cases, and our culture's continued obsession with futuristic, technological advancement, coupled with its apocalyptic undertones. Referring to the supposed 'aliens' as "visitors," he writes

In the saga of the visitors, we are witnessing a return of the
repressed, the mythic world, surging into the postmodern
consciousness in a form that strangely fits our fixation on technology,
our space fantasies and genetic obsessions and dingy
beurocracies, and our terror of the unknown. The Grays exist
on the boundary of the sensible, seeking entry into our realm.6

In Pinchbeck's book, a shift of consciousness is described, occurring in the here-and now, in which we are absorbing our own cultural products, re-integrating them, and regurgitating them back out onto ourselves in the form of modern fantasies such as E.T. and the X-Files. Pinchbeck also focuses on the deep psychic imprint left on our lives by the 9/11 attacks, and places them into the context of living, mythic imagery, whereby the most powerful symbols of wealth and security in the modern world were toppled in less than half an hour.

The point made in 2012 which is the most pertinent to our purposes here is that we are embracing a new reality, which has found its way to us through the imagery of aliens and crop circles, through hallucinogenic revelations and shamanic adventures, whereby the soul is beheld in all of its infinitude, and a light is beheld within it which transcends the concepts of "on" or "off." Although the work is primarily in the form of a memoir, documenting certain events in authors life here and there throughout, there are particularly revelatory passages which were received by Pinchbeck during certain episodes described therein, which accompanied his shamanic, psychedelic journey, one addressing itself as Quetzalcoatl, the Mayan bird/serpent redeemer god who is to return by the closing of the present 'great cycle:'

I do not let anything interrupt me in my quest for truth neither
fear nor indifference, poverty nor cynicism. In the
realm of thought, I practice warrior discipline. As gravity
draws matter to it, I have pulled myself back into manifestation
in this realm, from the depths of cosmic space, piece
by piece and bit by bit, reassembling the component parts,
the sparks of thought, that make up my being- which is,
primarily, a form or vibrational level of consciousness.
Soon there will be a great change to your world.7

This passage, received by Pinchbeck during an ayahuasca-inspired, shamanic sabbatical in the Amazon, describes the detrimental truth it is the object of this paper to present to the reader: that we are arriving at a novel understanding in space/time, and that we are becoming increasingly aware of our own level of interconnectedness and interdependence with the rest of the spectrum of reality. The mythological structures which are emerging today are pointing us towards a mythology of more efficient technologies for accessing other realms of reality- a mythology which must address the soul in its torment, and its satiety, and teach it that neither of these states are 'true' or 'eternal.' The new mythology is one of the individual seeking salvation
through its own actions and thoughts, and on account and because of itself, and not to attempt the 'saving' of anyone else, such as one's family, nation, culture, or globe. No one can save us from our sins but ourselves. Some might view this as an egocentric or nihilistic perspective, but it is none of either. It is the acknowledgement of the fact that our personal redemption from our evil nature, which animates the evil 'without.' is necessary first if any of the larger, transpersonal issues are to be dealt with. The blind cannot lead the blind. You are responsible for your own actions; for your own sadness, and your own happiness. Vicarious atonement, a misunderstood idea from the start, can not exist as a viable option for us anymore, even in theory (which is as far as it can go anyways).

In 1904, in Cairo, the famed mountaineer, poet, and occultist Aleister Crowley received a message, channeled through his wife Rose, during the course of three one hour sessions over three days, which was called The Book of the Law by the transmitting intelligence, a praeter-human entity who called itself Aiwass. Believed by a small number of people the globe over to be the prophecy of our current aeon, supplanting that of the previous aeon's prophecies and teachings, clearing the way for new developments which they could not address, namely our growing sense of individuality and awareness as a species, and a newly and quickly globalized cultural mosaic, where old and new, orient and occident, were pushed face to face in a completely novel way. Sometimes cryptic, sometimes voluptuous, and sometimes vicious, the Book of the Law heralds a new age, an age that was seeing its initial saplings at the time of its reception, and occurred because of the fact that we were entering into a new aeon, and not the other way around. It teaches a somewhat novel moral system, a new ethic which applies to individual, inter-personal, national and even global concerns. This moral system can be summed up in the eleven words "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law," which grants that each man, woman and child has an eternal True Will, and must not only discover but follow and execute that Will, which is not of our conscious, temporal choosing, but was formulated before we were
born and which will exist after physical expiration; earthly life being just one stage among many in the career of that Will, or soul-identity.

The Book of the Law also states that "every man and every woman is a star," a unique being with his or her own particular trajectory and velocity, or orbit.8 This implies that we all have our own path, which is the wandering of the soul, and that, if we were to see its career played backwards from the final point of its dissolution back into the undifferentiated Almighty, we would be able to plainly see how the events of these and those lives affected the sequence which were the 'random' events of that one life, that nothing in the universe can be sanely conceived of as random, ever, though we have 'free will.' The will which we possess is the unique set of experiences we must be presented with and experience so that we might be purified of our own dross, and rise to the feet of the Almighty, in this lifetime or in an infinitude of them. Our ignorance of our True Will is what binds us in darkness. We may have a fleeting will to obtain a new car or a will to walk up to and charm that woman across the bar- but this could be called the 'conscious will,' which has to open up to and understand the higher True Will, or 'soul-purpose.' Crowley writes that

a man may think it is his duty to act in a certain way,
through having made a fancy picture of himself, instead
of investigating his actual nature. For example, a
woman may make herself miserable for life by thinking
that she prefers love to social consideration, or vice versa.
One woman may stay with an unsympathetic husband
when she would really be happy in an attic with a lover,
while another may fool herself into a romantic elopement
when her only true pleasures are those of presiding at
fashionable functions. Again, a boy's instinct may tell him
to go to sea, while his parents insist on his becoming a
doctor. In such a case, he will be both unsuccessful
and unhappy in medicine.9

If human beings, as unique individuals and as spiritual beings who are naturally, under healthy circumstances, well-meaning and communal in tendency, cannot be allowed to safely express or articulate their true, unique and incomparable character in whatever form they so desire, then entire cultures can become generally will-less. A perusal of the mythological portrayals of the world's heroes availed to me the knowledge that heroes can act by two agencies, in their influence upon individual and social development of cultures; they can distract and abstract, or they can clarify and inspire. In our culture, flash-in-the-pan pseudo-heroes are created, puffed up, sold off, and forgotten about quicker than I usually change my socks, and we have the blissful
alternative of attending to the comings and goings of these heroes, these celebrated personalities. These identifications have the demonstrable affect of distracting the conscious will of the individual so much so that even passing whims of the existence of one's own unique passage in life are kept locked in the dungeons of our dark, foggy, scabby shadows. Individual, here-and-now experiences of the one sacred moment that IS, through some shiveringly gorgeous, langourous and leaping union with the beloved, or by spirit-shattering terror, insidious cold-blooded evil, and grief of desert proportions, are stymied by our obsession with the 'over theres' and the 'back thens,' the beeping lights and the sexy girls.

Blaise Pascal said that all of humankind's problems came from our refusal to sit in the dark by ourselves every day. To discover our True Will, we must examine ourselves and seek to unearth and better understand what our particular mission is in this life. This takes time, effort, energy- and love. The idea that we are all one substance, from one source, and of one mind, one body, one spirit- one love- is pleasant and beautiful, however, once one begins to instill this habitually or 'think the world' through this lens, a bleak picture emerges, which can be terrifying if carried to its extremes. These ideas can no longer serve as pleasant distractions from the rusty brass tacks of modern everyday life- of car accidents and interest rates, rotten vegetables and intra-personal fascism. They must be taken, humbly and with quivering hand, like the tough medicine that they are. It is that time. It is that time in our development, as a probably very peculiar species in and amongst the manifested universes, where we are reaching an ecological, philosophical, spiritual boiling point and yet from birth most of us heard that common maxim "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" repeatedly, and we just can't quite get it together to be consciously aware of the predictable outcome of our actions, with care for all sentient beings around, and act accordingly. Our actions have infinite ramifications, and if they
are to mean anything of cosmic importance, within our own journey, if we are to accept the lessons which it is our lot in this humble life to learn, and delve deep within, to the rich, black, silt at the core of our being, infinite in and of itself, then we must live that life in humble prostration before the seeming triumphs and tragedies across all shades of reality, seeking out the mechanism and reasoning by which the universe seems to manifest itself, and extending our minds out always to its furthest reaches.

This review of several perspectives, from that of current 'paranormal' or apocalyptically-tilted phenomenon of the human psyche, resulting in what we call psychism, UFOs, crop circles, and the effects of psychedelic substances, to that of Thelema and the proposition of a True Will of each human being, inalienable and necessary, I have propped up as a response to our history of archetype and hero worship in myth and depth psychology.

We stand at a particular time in recorded history where all of our fundamental models and paradigms of the nature of the manifest universe and our place in it are being incrementally ripped from the surface of our sensorium like a scab from a wound, revealing a long-emerging, novel means of relating to psychic and mental, as well as material and physical realities. Our True Wills, or orbits, are free yet fixed; they are free in choice of word and deed- but fulfill a presence, process, and series of lessons which appear to be necessary and deterministic. If we can accept the reality of an inalienable, individualized, True Will for each human, existing in tandem, throughout, and beyond the conscious will, then if we can see that, perhaps, we each must actualize a necessary function in the universe- but we cannot know what it is if we refuse to seek and develop it. There are several systems suggested by the sages which seem to supply the practitioner which increasingly deeper understandings of hirself, namely yoga or meditation. Although this these types of practices are highly important and efficient ways of stilling and directing the mind towards the inner, True Will, and should be given honest investigation, one's spiritual path must include all of the observable phenomena which occurs to one's consciousness. Spiritual practice must include everything- from one's means of livelihood and self-fulfillment, down to the way in which you treat, on the most minutest of scales, the most foul and repulsive person.

The point is as simple as this: there is the potential at every moment wherein we can heroically grow creatively together, as unique expressions of the Almighty, as drops in the cosmic ocean, as thoughts in the Infinite Living Mind. Or, we can batter each other down for dollars and cents, or for words and ideas, until we become a tiny and obsolete presence on the face of the earth. We can create new weapons and a new war, new barbed-wire and new internment camps, or a new future and a new clarity- a one love and a one mind, of many bodies, and many thoughts- infinitely and with infinite forms transposing itself back onto and to itself, rushing towards the
quickening of days rapidly approaching.

Sources Used

Jung, Emma. von Franz, Marie-Louise. The Grail Legend. (Princeton UP, 1998).
Pinchbeck, Daniel. 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, (New York, Penguin: 2006).
Crowley, Aleister. The Book of the Law, (York Beach, Maine, Weiser/OTO: 2004).
1 Crowley, Aleister. The Book of the Law. (York Beach, ME, Weiser: 2004) p. 19
2 Ibid. p. 20
3 Jung, Emma. von Franz, Marie-Louise. The Grail Legend. (Princeton UP, 2004) p. 111
4 Ibid. p. 114
5 Ibid. p. 102
6 Pinchbeck, Daniel. 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, (New York, Penguin: 2006) p. 141
7 Ibid. p. 367
8 Crowley, Aleister. The Book of the Law. (York Beach, ME, Weiser: 2004) p. 25
9 Ibid. p. XV