Friday, October 8, 2010

Simulations of God

This is a PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT brought to you by Radio Station

KGOD



AROUND THE CLOCK...................................... AROUND THE DIAL




Oh my god!, am I here all alone?

- Ballad of a Thin Man, Bob Dylan from Highway 61 Revisited

It's purely coincidental that the Highway Dylan chooses to revisit is 61 , the same number that Crowley uses as the keynote to begin the Naples Arrangement which is his Qabalistic model of the Universe and of how Creation and Existence manifest out of the Void.

In the Tree of Life, therefore, is found the first attempt to connect the Ideal with the Actual.

Then what is the true meaning, in the category of the Real, of these planets and signs? Here again is one faced with the impossibility of exact definition, because the possibilities of research are infinite; also, at any moment in any research, the one idea merges into the other and clouds the exact definition of the images. But this, of course, is the objective. These are all blind steps on the way to the Great Light: when the Universe is perceived as one, yet with all its parts, each necessary and each distinct.

- from The Book of Thoth

The other day I was editing an audio file of actress and blues singer Cynthia Henderson reading the new Introduction to the new edition of the HBM aka The Human Biological Machine as a Transformational Apparatus by E.J. Gold and came across a passage on the nature of God which reminded me of John Lilly's book Simulations of God.

In that book, Lilly looks at the various models people have of God and defines these models not as their religious beliefs but of what they hold most dear and precious in their life; what they choose to make their God. For instance, if someone spends all their time and is most concerned with making money, then their simulation of God is Money despite whatever religious denomination they may belong to. Some people make their family God, others chase after sex, or status or fame. It can be anything. As Crowley says, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Buddhists will say they don't believe in God, but their God, their Highest Ideal, is unlimited compassion for all beings.

What is your God?

By the way, I highly recommend picking up this latest edition of the HBM even if you already have the first edition because the new Introduction encapsulates an overview of the entire body of Gold's work and the Teaching he transmits in a holographic, information rich way.

The passage I saw goes like this:

God is actually more of an activity than a person, place or thing. So you think of God as a verb rather than as a noun, and you'll get closer to it.

Buckminster Fuller used to say, I seem to be a verb and this is cognate with Burroughs, Gysin and Crowley's aphorism, We are here to go.

Thou art God, is the greeting people give to one another in Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein's science fiction novel intended to popularize and present Thelemic philosophy.

God as a verb, an omnidirectional vector of endlessly Becoming seems in line with how theoretical physicists model the Universe.

Of course, a pantheist ( pan = all, theist = God) can be pan-devotional or pan-worshipful to just about anything. Or no-thing at all.

Crowley, in the aptly titled Liber Oz, declares There is no god but man right below the quote, Every man and every woman is a star. In an online Crowley class with Bob Wilson I changed it to There is no god but WoMan. He replied that his wife Arlen had made the same change in an article she wrote. The way I see it, that statement puts the onus on us.

There's also beautiful new Charcoal illustrations in the new HBM. The drawing that follows the Introduction is called Seeing The Invisible, a multi-perspective zen essence portrait that shows the beginning key. On the next page is a drawing of of an Angelic figure playing either a harp or an uprite bass with both hands. The neck of the bass, or top of the harp continues up past the figure's head to morph into its wings. It's called Music of the Heavens.

For me, music, when it reaches that magick space, when it's the real thing, is one way that God says, here I am.







No comments:

Post a Comment