Paradox and Nonsense: Crowley and Deleuze # 2

This continues the previous post.  Once again, the virtual anamesis of Robert Anton Wilson  has agreed to join us. Caveat emptor: it can get paradoxical and nonsensical explicating the function of nonsense and paradox; just the nature of the beast.

Gilles Deleuze supplies a metaphysics for Thelema, thank-you Gilles!  Aleister Crowley presented an orientation and methodology for the voluntary evolution and continuous transformation of the human animal.  They both emphasized the use of paradox and nonsense to introduce an element of disequilibrium for the purpose of breaking set; to shatter and destroy our habitual ways of seeing things in order to introduce something new.  Another way to put it, they use paradox in an attempt to blow apart commonly held belief systems in order to move around in bigger, better, more beautiful, humorous and creative reality tunnels.  (for an excellent essay that covers "breaking set," see Christopher Hyatt's Introduction to the Eye in the Triangle, by Israel Regardie.)  Robert Anton Wilson and his early associates took it further and developed a religion out of paradox and nonsense called Discordianism with its motto, "we stick apart."  Wilson's later development of the literary technique Guerilla Ontology shows a direct formative relationship to paradox and nonsense.

The books in which Deleuze and Crowley dive deepest into paradox are both considered tour de forces in their respective literary careers.  For Gilles Deleuze, this is The Logic of Sense, a title that appears paradoxical in itself.  Logic indicates a formal reasoning of some sort. How does reasoning formalize sense?  It might help if we knew what he meant by sense? (The sense of sense?  I'll try not to introduce additional paradoxes and confusion) He clearly indicates that sense represents more than the limited definition of sense as "meaning."  In the second paragraph in the Preface: From Lewis Carroll to the Stoics Deleuze tells us what sense "is": "We present here a series of paradoxes which form the theory of sense.  It is easy to explain why this theory is inseparable from paradoxes: sense is a nonexisting entity, and in fact,maintains very special relations with nonsense."

Every chapter in The Logic of Sense is called a Series with the first one being: First Series of Paradoxes of Pure Becoming.  They are series, not chapters, to convey a more dynamic, kinetic and nonlinear approach to both the writing and reading of it, as we shall see in a moment.

"Sense is a nonexisting entity" obviously sounds paradoxical.  It might even seem like nonsense making it even more of a paradox. How can something nonexistent have relations, special or otherwise?  Later in the book he tells us that sense is very fragile.  How can something nonexistent have a fragile quality?  So he doesn't really tell us what sense is, only that it has life, an entity is alive, and that it doesn't exist; two completely opposite meanings.  This could be the ultimate agnostic statement.  If you follow the meaning in both directions, it cancels.  That  proposition may appear like  nonsense paradoxically intended to convey what sense is.  Deleuze uses examples from Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass to show how Carroll uses nonsense to communicate a sense of something. In the Deleuzean formulation, nonsense can donate sense to a proposition. Also, the title of the Preface, From Lewis Carroll to the Stoics appears paradoxically out of time as the Stoics wrote nearly 2000 years before Carroll.

In the third paragraph of this short Preface Deleuze points out the nonlinear nature of the book:

 "Thus to each series there correspond figures which are not only historical but topological and logical as well.  As on a pure surface, certain points in one figure of a series refer to the points of another figure: an entire galaxy of problems with their corresponding dice-throws, stories and places, a complex place; a "convoluted story."  This book is an attempt to develop a logical and psychological novel." 

Later on, in a remarkably magical passage from The Logic of Sense (LS) I will demonstrate that Deleuze uses puns to communicate on multiple levels, as would any self-respecting fan of James Joyce.  I will also demonstrate that Deleuze uses qabala from time to time. If you were to substitute the word "series" in the above quote with either "sephiroth" or "path on the Tree of Life" then you get an excellently poetic and concise description of how qabala works.  The last sentence in the quote appears paradoxical in its common meaning, the book has no obvious resemblance to any kind of novel, postmodern or otherwise, and it's not presented as fiction.  Looking at it as a magical pun, it appears Deleuze presents the aim of transformation into something new: "...a logical and psychological novel;" logic referring to the logic of sense - the logic of "pure becoming" (known in its static representation, a state it never reaches, as being; the logic of being); novel = new; esoterically dramatized in film as the character "Neo" from the Matrix trilogy.  Deleuze puts "convoluted story" in quotes for some reason.  That the "c" and "s" initials add to 68 looks very significant to me.  The number 68 appears on the first page of both Illuminatus! and Masks of the Illuminati, by Robert Anton Wilson.  I've written about its importance before (Tiphareth + Hod, Christ + Mercury, The Sun + communication; see Crowley's, The Paris Working for the magical genesis of that concept). Taking this interpretation here in LS may appear like confirmation bias on my part, but in the subsequent post Deleuze and Qabalah  I will confirm that bias even further with examples.

Robert Anton Wilson reports keeping a copy of The Book of Lies by Aleister Crowley on his nightstand for years referring to it frequently.  It encouraged me to take up this practice, too. Wilson loved all the puns, literary and logical puzzles and the qabalistic riddles. He illustrates a few of the paradoxes therein in Cosmic Trigger I.  The full name of the book is: THE BOOK OF LIES WHICH IS ALSO FALSELY CALLED BREAKS, THE WANDERINGS OR FALSIFICATION OF THE THOUGHT OF FRATER PERDURABO.  A contraction of the full title sprang up:  The Book of Lies (Falsely So-Called).  This rendering highlights the title's paradoxical character.  A book of lies falsely so-called is a book of truth.  Why would a book of truth start with a falsehood?  Crowley has a commentary for the Title Page and jumps right in with what sounds like either nonsense, paradox or both, following it up with a statement he appears to contradict later.

"...However, the "one thought is itself untrue," and therefore its falsifications are relatively true.
This book therefore consists of statements as nearly true as is possible to human language."

A different view gets expressed in the Commentary to Chapter 45 Chinese Music:

"The Master (in technical language the Magus);does not concern himself with facts;  he does not care whether a thing is true or not: she uses truth and falsehood indiscriminately, to serve his own ends. Slaves consider hir immoral and preach against hir in Hyde Park."

This disregard for "truth" may seem wild and anarchistic, but as Deleuze points out in LS, the production of sense ("pure becoming; the event) has nothing to do with truth or falsehood.  A proposition can be factually wrong yet still give a strong sense of something.  Absolute truth requires an omniscient, transcendental agency of some kind to arbitrate and judge what is true.  Deleuze in his antipathy to omniscient transcendental agencies grabs ahold of Antonin Artaud's fiercely cathartic radio play title, To Have Done With The Judgement of God for a rallying cry.

The first page in The Book of Lies (BL) consists of a sole, centrally located question mark.  In the first book he ever wrote, Empiricism and Subjectivity, An Essay On Hume's Theory of Human Nature published in 1953, (ES) Deleuze says:

"... a philosophical theory is an elaborately developed question, and nothing else; by itself and in itself, it is not the resolution to a problem, but the elaboration, to the very end, of the necessary implications of a formulated question. " 

"To the very end," which Deleuze italicizes in the text recalls Aleister Crowley's motto, his subject for BL, Perdurabo, that translates as "I will endure unto the end."  After the question mark is a page with a central exclamation point - symbolizing the question taken to its limit?  These two pages also refer to Crowley's seminal essay, The Soldier and the Hunchback on the subject of skepticism and certainty. The commentary on the question mark and exclamation point calls it "The Chapter that is not a Chapter."  It begins with a paradox.

Alice in Wonderland

Is not Humpty Dumpty himself the Stoic master? Is not the disciple's adventure Alice's adventure?

- Logic of Sense p.142

Crowley called his feminine persona Alice.

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass appears highly regarded by many of the best contemporary esoteric writers.  Aleister Crowley included both books in the curriculum of the A.'. A.'. with the note "Valuable to those who understand Qabala."  Along with the Stoic philosophers, Gilles Deleuze makes analysis of the Alice books the basis for his study of sense and paradox in The Logic of Sense.  He also includes Carroll's adventure's of fairyland characters Sylvie and Bruno as part of the study calling it a masterpiece.  A complete reading of both parts of Sylvie and Bruno will show Deleuze's bias to what Crowley called The Great Work.  Crowley calls the Alice stories "Valuable to those who understand Qabala."  They were certainly quite valuable to Deleuze. I will assert that Deleuze understood and communicated using Qabalah in a subsequent post.  

The Stoic master Humpty Dumpty turns up in a clear reference on the first page of Finnegans Wake (FW), " .. that humptyhillhead of humself ..." right after "the fall" and Joyce's first hundred-letter thunderword that he then connects with a fall off a wall.   In the analysis of nursery rhymes in Magick, Book 4, Crowley says that Humpty Dumpty's fall symbolizes the descent of spirit into matter. This seems a good way to start an epic work like FW.  James Joyce has a line that renders a similar interpretation through the lens of Qabalah: "... sends an enquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes.." one = kether, the most refined spirit; toes = the material world by qabalistic reckoning that superimposes a human body over the Tree of Life for one of its rhizomatic tendrils of correspondence and association. "Humptyhillhead" suggests, to me, the climb up to the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, to use Crowley's nomenclature; "tumptytumtoes" suggests tummy, thus food and the sense of nourishment from spirit (we return to that theme in the next post); "humself" followed by the rhythm and rhyme of what follows suggests the flow of music.  The influence of music in the form of FW, as well as JJ's use of qabala seems well established in both academic and nonacademic circles.  Humself lets us know that he's not giving us a static subject, but rather one that changes and flows like the river that starts the book. It might also suggest the subject bringing itself into musical being/becoming, but perhaps I'm getting carried away.

Crowley quotes from Jabberwocky for the title of Chapter 48 BL: Mome Raths.  The whole chapter outlines a glyph for working hard.  In the note under the Commentary for this chapter, he quotes the whole line, " The mome raths outgrabe" and remarks that mome is also Parisian slang for "young girl" while rath = Old English for "early."  He then quotes a line from Milton that uses rath and communicates more information about what the early work hopes to produce.  It's a short, but important chapter worth studying.  When students of HGA conversation encounter the number 48 in unusual or coincidental ways, they will tend to attempt 'kicking it up a notch or two."  The "young girl" refers to the aspirant, an association that becomes more obvious when discovering that the BL explicates and implicates, using paradox and nonsense among several other techniques, a process that Delueze calls "becoming-woman."  This, of course, has nothing to do with human gender, but rather describes a necessary shamanic step for working beyond the normal body.

One quick way to demonstrate this claim to resonance with "becoming-woman," is to look at the very beginning of BL and the very end.  The first chapter title is O!, meaning chapter zero.  In the next chapter, 1, he begins with the exact same figure, O!, only this time indicating it as the letter O.  The full first line reads: O!, the heart of N.O.X., the night of Pan.  Right away, Crowley tells us to pay attention to puns, that the same exact image can have multiple meanings. O corresponds with The Devil in the tarot, the "medieval blind"  for archetypal male energy. The final chapter 91 only has one word, presented as an unanalyzed formula.  This word asymmetrically ends BL with A.M.E.N.; definitely seems a pun there, one that presents a view of the book as a journey of becoming-woman.

For a Crowlean interpretation of "outgrabe" (that's what the mome raths are doing) see Chapter 23 BL wherein he gives the O.U.T. formula.

Another interesting thing with that first line of Chapter 1 is that Deleuze maintains that the investigation into any process or cycle begins most productively in the middle and that's exactly what Crowley does with, N.O.X., the prime formula of BL.

So far we have established that three major artists at the top of their fields, the Occult, Philosophy, and Literature i.e. Aleister Crowley, Gilles Deleuze, and James Joyce, were profoundly influenced by Lewis Carroll's Alice stories.  I'm sure we could find dozens or hundreds references to \Wonderland in contemporary culture - I once saw an Alice play that put a strongly affective Gurdjieffian spin on the drama. I'll limit myself to a few more references of interest.  

The Matrix trilogy of films contains a great deal of esoteric knowledge.  This includes blatant qabala - for example, the female protagonist is Trinity; also next time watching, as a student of Magick or proactive Philosophy, pay attention to the beginning location, you'll see a sign that clearly labels the building.  A little later, as we get into the story, Neo begins getting obscure signs and coincidences directing him to some kind of hidden point of contact, as one might with the HGA.  His computer tells him to "follow the white rabbit," not long before he notices a white rabbit tatooed on girl inviting him to join their group on the way to a night club.  He first turned the invitation down, then saw the tatoo and changed his mind in order to follow the instruction.  Neo meets Trinity for the first time at the club and she gives him a piece of the puzzle.  The white rabbit is, of course, straight out of Alice In Wonderland; following the rabbit is how she got into Wonderland; following the white rabbit eventually puts Neo into a completely different world, it totally changes his life.

There's a great reference to Wonderland right off in Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus!: . " For instance, I am not even sure who I am, and my embarrassment on that matter makes me wonder if you will believe anything I reveal." (p.7)
 The phrase, "I am not even sure who I am" is a mirror reflection of  "I am that I am," Yahweh's answer to Moses when asked for his name.  This corresponds to Kether, the title of the chapter.  That phrase is also the gist of what Alice tells the hookah-smoking caterpillar when she is asked, "Who are you?"  It seems very helpful to read the first few paragraphs from the chapter in Alice, Advice from a Caterpillar to catch the transformational theme inherent to Illuminatus! In the very next sentence following the one quoted above, the Alice-like character describes being aware of a squirrel in Central Park "leaping from one tree to another."  That squirrel appears cognate with the white rabbit, and if this is true, then perhaps the authors are suggesting following this avatar from one Tree of Life to another; in other words, paying attention to Qabalah.  This interpretation may appear farfetched until one realizes that the alchemical motherlode strata of  Illuminatus! serves as a guide to Qabalah. 

About ten years ago, E.J. Gold asked if I knew Alice in Wonderland.  I did as a familiar story, but had never put much study into it.  He suggested I reread it and said I should revisit it every five years as a sort of barometer. About five years before that I recorded and mixed the album Alice for Tom Waits.  It comprised songs he'd composed for Robert Wilson's play of the same name about the relationship between Carroll and the real Alice the stories were told to.  It's an extremely evocative, mood-drenched album with slight echoes of the Wonderland otherworldliness in between the grooves.  It was mixed at lightening speed by high velocity; rushed through the bardo.

Paradox and Mirror Reflection

 In First Series of Paradoxes of Pure Becoming (the Kether chapter of LS, if you will), Deleuze starts by invoking Alice and Through the Looking Glass using her growing and shrinking to explain the nature of paradox.  "Good sense affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense and direction; but paradox is the affirmation of of both senses or directions at the same time." p. 1
 In this case, he means the two opposite directions of Alice growing and shrinking - to affirm them both at once.  "Good sense," in Wilson/Leary nomenclature = the societal/cultural belief systems programmed into us, i.e. our ordinary way of seeing the world; that which we try to peek past from time to time to go out.

Learning to affirm two opposite meanings as possible and true as well as looking at things backwards to FIND the opposite meaning, reversing directions, contemplating both directions at once becomes fundamental practices to students of Qabalah.  One of AC's exercises involves thinking and believing  the exact opposite to some strong opinion, or position you hold as a kind of waveform cancellation; another way to break set, to temporarily knock through belief systems and reality tunnels.  Affirming both senses or directions at the same time shines a lot of light on Crowley's mystique - the self-annointed Anti-Christ who said his school could produce Christs - as well as the Great Work in general.

We find a qabalistic lesson of reversed direction in The Book of the Law II 19: "Is a God to live in a dog?" An excellent example of looking in a reversed direction to unlock the sense of something occurs in the Marx Brothers film Animal Crackers when Groucho remarks that there is a dog missing in the fake painting put up to replace the one that's been stolen.  The plot of the film then revolves around the stolen painting.    The whole film appears a masterpiece of qabalistic transmission; highly recommended for regular study.   One can see Animal Crackers as a very literal title related to the BL/ becoming woman project of Deleuze and Crowley.

Schrodinger's Cat, RAW's continuation of Illuminatus! in its aspect of a guide to Qabalah, or, as it's literally put in the book, A Shamanic Manual, has the character Blake Williams - an obvious reversal of illuminated poet William Blake.  Wilson includes a subtler reversal between Williams' party dialog and the qabala implied.  The qabala sounds more like William Blake. 

More Nonsense

At the end of the Nineteenth Series of Humor, a chapter which nearly begins with a crack of the Zen Masters staff, with the word "staff" seeming like a pun on a musical staff, Deleuze describes a different relationship between sense and nonsense: "Becoming-mad changes shape on its way to the surface ... and the same thing happens to the dissolved self, the cracked I, the lost identity, when they cease being buried and begin, on the contrary, to liberate the singularities of the surface.  Nonsense and sense have done away with their dynamic opposition in order to enter into the co-presence of a static genesis - as the nonsense of the surface and the sense which hovers over it.  The tragic and the ironic give way to a new value, that of humor. ... humor is the co-extensiveness of sense with nonsense." LS p. 141

He goes on to say more about what humor does, basically saying that it leads to an enlightening state.

The use of nonsense and humor to produce sense appears to aptly describe the best works of two prominent occult writers, Robert Anton Wilson and James Joyce, but it also describes the writing style of Aleister Crowley and sometimes of Deleuze and Guattari.

In some of his works of fiction Wilson explored the cut-up technique which he picked up from Burroughs and Gysin.  This technique of cutting up any writing, from Shakespeare to the daily newspaper, then randomly rearranging it to see what new combinations get made by chance, becomes a way to generate sense out of nonsense.  This technique has been successfully used to come up with great song lyrics by both David Bowie and the Rolling Stones. 

Robert Anton Wilson quite brilliantly uses humor and nonsense, with a dash of paradox for flavor in his Introduction to the play Wilhelm Reich in Hell to communicate a particular kind of sense.  Our old friends the Mome Raths show up in this introduction - that's the only contribution from Alice which seems to echo Crowley's use of Mome Raths in BL 48

To be continued ...

Philosophy and Magick: Deleuze and Crowley with Special Guest Robert Anton Wilson

Magick could be called applied philosophy.  Philosophy can provide blueprints and start the ignis for affirmative action and intentional change. The two disciplines have been entwined dating back to antiquity.  The pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles introduced the division of matter into the four elements: Air, Water, Fire, Earth that continues as one fundamental principle of ritual magick to this day.  According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Empedocles: "has been regarded variously as a materialist physicist, a shamanic magician, a mystical theologian, a healer, a democratic politician, a living god, and a fraud."  Except for the democratic politician, that could pass for a description of Aleister Crowley.  The IEP goes on to say: "Empedocles did not make a clear separation between his philosophy of nature and the more mystical, theological aspects of his philosophy, and so may well have seen no great difference in kind between healing ills through empirical understanding of human physiognomy and healing by means of sacred incantations and ritual purifications."

An essential work of contemporary magical literature, The Tree of Life, A Study in Magic, by Israel Regardie, presents a clear and comprehensive overview of Golden Dawn-style magic.  The beginning of Chapter 3 starts with the section: "Necessity for philosophic training prior to undertaking practical work." Regardie makes the point quite clear:

Insisted upon by all the eminent Theurgists of past time of being of equal importance with practical work, and as a radical necessity giving precedence to that work, the august Philosophy which underlies the theory and technique of Magic is a prerequisite to any further discussion.  Indeed there can hardly be a real understanding of the rationale of Magic, and certainly no realization of the complexities taking place within and without the constitution of the Magician, if the corner stone of philosophy is not firmly laid in hir mind."

Couple of things about this quote: the subject "Theurgists" identifies the kind of Magic under discussion - magic to raise consciousness not magic to directly change something in the environment such as casting a love spell or winning the lottery.  Philosophy "as a radical necessity" squarely aligns with the approach of Gilles Deleuze - philosophy as a response to problematics.

Antecedents

Robert Anton Wilson, Aleister Crowley, and Gilles Deleuze share a common philosophical lineage in Friedrich Nietzsche.  I would add G.I. Gurdjieff  and P.D. Ouspensky to that list though in Gurdjieff's case it seems less verifiable.  We find much mythology over the sources of Gurdjieff's teaching and not much documented fact, to my knowledge.  Yet blatantly Nietzschean concepts find their way into his program to become elaborated and expanded upon.  We know from Ouspensky that Nietzsche was all the philosophical rage in Russian intellectual circles in the years immediate prior to Gurdjieff emerging upon the world stage in Russia.  Aleister Crowley candidly details his philosophic explorations in Confessions and elsewhere.  Several of Nietzsche's concepts get expanded into key points in Crowley's system: the crossing of the Abyss, the creation of the Overman, the revaluation of all values, etc. Crowley recognized Frederich Nietzsche's genius by anointing him a Saint in his Gnostic Mass. Nietzsche, in turn, was influenced by Baruch Spinoza.  Deleuze calls Spinoza the Christ of philosophers, "and we (i.e. other philosophers) are his disciples." Spinoza has been referred to as the first modern pantheist.  He was called an atheist in his time for rejecting the Judeo-Christian God in favor of an impersonal God of Nature - Nature's God.  This may have inspired the title for  third volume in Robert Anton Wilson's Historical Illuminatus series, Nature's God.  Wilson quotes Spinoza in Schrodinger's Cat at the beginning of the chapter Dancing Photons: "The intellectual love of things consists in understanding their perfections."

Nietzsche may have influenced Deleuze even more than Crowley or Gurdjieff.  Deleuze began his literary oeuvre with a series of historical portraits of, at the time, outsider philosophers like Hume, Nietzsche, Spinoza and Bergson.  He became known for using the history of philosophy for his own purposes, drawing out conclusions and interpretations to present a Deleuzean vision. Deleuze's Nietzsche appears quite different in significant ways then other interpretations.  Nietzsche has an image of great thinkers shooting the arrow of their work as far as possible with that arrow to be picked up by the next philosopher where it lands and flung further; building upon the work of your predecessors.  Both Deleuze and Crowley responded quite literally to this metaphor in different, but resonant ways. Deleuze wrote a significant and unique interpretation, Nietzsche and Philosophy, that revived interest in his philosophy in France just in time for the 1960's cultural revolution.  One of the last essays of his life beautifully summarized Nietzsche's philosophy.  In it, Deleuze claims to have found at least 12 different interpretations of the famous, " God is dead" proposition in Nietzsche's literary corpus. One of Deleuze's overall projects was to complete the concept of the Eternal Return which he said Nietzsche didn't have time to fully develop.  Deleuze notably does so at the conclusion of Difference and Repetition.  His interpretation disavows the common one, that everything repeats exactly the same, instead making the theory stand on its head to affirm difference as that which repeats.  The Eternal Return = repetition AND difference.  The film Groundhog Day provides an oversimplified example: it's always the same day, but there's always something different. The Eternal Return, as it appears in Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, became an early topic of discussion in the Tales of the Tribe course that Robert Anton Wilson gave. Finnegans Wake perfectly illustrates the difference and repetition of the Eternal Return.  Various cycles repeat themselves, sometimes frequently, yet they reveal something different every time.  Deleuze, for his part, borrowed the portmanteau term "chaosmos" - chaos + cosmos - from Finnegans Wake to describe the mixture of randomity and chance (chaos) with the ancient Greek philosophers who attempted to overlay order upon the world (cosmos).

 The Will to Power and Do What Thou Wilt.

It's said of some early 20th Century philosophers that one of their projects was to provide a
metaphysics for science.  We will offer a suggestion that Gilles Deleuze  provides a metaphysics for Thelema, the name of Aleister Crowley's agnostic religion.  It seems useful to look at Deleuze's interpretation of "the will to power, " a concept Nietzsche introduced, but didn't have time to fully explicate, in light of Crowley's "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" formulation. According to Ronald Bogue in Deleuze and Guattari, Deleuze defines the will to power as:

the genealogical element of force, both differential and genetic.  The will to power is the element from which derive both the quantitative difference of related forces and the quality that devolves into each force in this relation.  The will to power here reveals its nature as the principle of the synthesis of forces. (Nietzsche & Philosophy, p. 50, 56.)

Bogue gives an interpretation of Deleuze's interpretation:

It seems that Deleuze is here positing the will to power as a kind of inner center of force, a general orientation of becoming that only manifests itself in specific forces but goes beyond individual forces to link them in a line of development.

These two quotes are just an example of how the will to power can inform an approach to do what thou wilt.  The will to power, in this context, seems never about acquiring power over others, but rather getting power over yourself.  It seems you can acquire power over yourself through constant intentional change, or in other words, magick.  Through magick, you can gain self-mastery by making the self disappear.  Magick doesn't necessarily have to be exclusively improvised or directly followed from Crowley's rituals.  "Every intentional act is a Magical Act." (Magick, p.129). In the book Dialogues with Claire Parnet, Deleuze equates the will to power with the libido: "... an unbounded, free-floating energy which Freud called libido and which Nietzsche called will to power."  Crowley understood this same connection with his Do what thou wilt formula as evidenced by the sex magick instructions given in The Book of the Law, The Book of Lies and elsewhere in his writings.

Perhaps the core gist of Crowley's theurgic magick can be seen by how he composed his letters.  His correspondence to all and sundry always began, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."  This magically consecrates the letter with the collected forces and intentionality of this writing event (the letter) according to "the law."  After the body of the letter he tell us what law when signing off with, "love is the law, love under will."  In other words, no matter what they say, all of Crowley's correspondence used this magick formula to make them an intentional act of love under will; higher emotional, mental and somatic forces collected and given a specific direction; the preferred weapon of healers everywhere. At the start of Robert Anton Wilson's Crowley's 101 online course in 2005 ( the 101st anniversary of the reception of  The Book of the Law), Wilson began and ended his posts in the same way making them all acts of love under will.  He appeared quite fastidious about that for a time.

One of the biggest misunderstandings in Crowley's work to new friends and old foes alike is misinterpreting do what thou wilt for do what you want.  This seems completely wrong by the fact that it appears to inject the personality of the ordinary self into the equation.  "Thou" and "you" can't be exchanged without changing the entire sense of the statement.  A big mystery in the formula: who or what does "thou" represent?  What is meant by "thou?" If I recall correctly, it's somewhere in Illuminatus! where Wilson suggests that thou indicates the union of the personal will with God's will. Thou gets commonly interpreted as the source of the True Will  - the will of the deep self or true self as opposed to the human animal's will.  This still renders the meaning of "thou" as something mysterious, abstract, and difficult to grasp in a concrete way.

Deleuze's philosophy demonstrates the illusory nature of the subject - any subject, the idea of the subject as a real thing, a static entity transcendent and separate from its actions.  He takes this up from Nietzsche and other philosophers who say the common view of unchanging sedentary subjects who do things or have properties appears ultimately a consensual illusion programmed into us by the subject/predicate nature of language.  Loosening and getting more flexible with the programming of self, the world and God and of the ordinary way of seeing things seems an initial step in any mystery school. On page 3 of The Logic of Sense, Deleuze uses the "contesting of Alice's personal identity" in Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass stories as an example of language and identity.  Deleuze writes:

"But when substantives and adjectives begin to dissolve, when the names of pause and rest are carried away by the verbs of pure becoming and slide into the language of events, all identity disappears from the self, the world and God.'

Although it sounds like the subject due to the requirements of language, "thou" in do what thou wilt can't be a set subject because we have no set subject. (In Egyptian mythology the god Set, of course, becomes the enemy of Horus, the "crowned and conquering child" of Thelemic chaosmology). Crowley affirms this with a comment in The Book of Lies: "Man is only himself when lost to himself in the charioteering;" i.e. the subject gets lost in the process or what Deleuze calls the event.

The reason that Nietzsche and Deleuze and others don't like a static subject is because it implies something, a metaphysical critter of some sort, continuously and permanently transcendent (outside) the conditions of its existence; a ghost in the machine.  Gilles and Friedrich prefer immanence to transcendence on the grand scale.  Although I suspect he didn't pick the title, Deleuze's last slim collection of essays released posthumously was called Pure Immanence to reflect the nature of his passion.

Nietzsche vehemently opposed the Christianity of his time because it subjugated its victims to the oppressive rules of a transcendent philosophy.  It is said that God made man in his image, but it seems more likely that man ended up making God in man's image with the help of the transcendent philosophies propounded by Plato, Aristotle and their followers.  The Christian God became an abstract, anthropomorphic ideal outside and beyond human experience.  You could only get to God by transcending human life when you died, but only if you behaved in the proscribed way.  All life, to the true believers, became beholden and regulated to a set of abstract transcendental ideals.

The philosophy of immanence, on the other hand, supposes that nothing happens outside of natural life - no abstract ideals serving as models for how to live life.  With his historical profiles, Deleuze championed philosophers of Immanence, in particular Spinoza and Nietzsche and updated the concept in ways particularly productive for the theurgic practitioner.  Aleister Crowley's extravagant claim that his school can produce "Christs," (Postcards to Probationers) could only be realized if that circuit (C6 in Leary's model) has an immanent relationship to the student's process.  To have any effect at all, magick require a philosophy of Immanence.  Crowley's 12th Thereom clearly reflects the immanent nature of magick:

WoMan appears ignorant of the nature of hir own being and powers.  Even hir ideas of hir limitations appears based on experience of the past, and every step in hir progress extends hir empire. There seems therefore no reason to assign theoretical limits to what she may be, or to what she may do.

 - Magick, p. 130, (translation modified).

One of the most significant books in Aleister Crowley's secondary literature is Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.  On one level, the book presents a guide to qabala (or cabala as they quaintly spell it), the ten chapters are named after the sephiroth on the Tree of Life.  The first chapter, the first sephira is Kether which refers to God in a general way without indicating or advocating any specific theist belief system though later on it seems pantheism becomes resonant with Kether.  The first sentence in Illuminatus! reads: 

It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton. 

Wikipedia, the source of all knowledge, says that the phrase originated in 1952 as a political theory in Eric Voegelin’s. The New Science of Politics.  It means: “trying to make that which belongs to the afterlife happen here and now on Earth” or “trying to create heaven here on Earth.”  Wilson and Shea immediately align themselves to a philosophy of Immanence in alignment with the Thelemic current for which they contribute an unique exegesis.  Incidentally, the first narrator in Illuminatus! sounds remarkably like Lewis Carroll’s Alice when she’s unsure about who she is.  Illuminatus! begins right off with uncertainty about personal identity while, as mentioned, Deleuze confronts this point almost immediately in The Logic of Sense.  Uncertain personal identity challenges the reality and validity of the subject getting replaced by the dynamic process, or the event.  “I seem to be a verb, “ as Buckminster Fuller used to say.

For further research: this first sentence, "It was the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton."  adds to 80.

Repetition and Love Under Will

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze radically redefines the regular meaning of repetition.  He divides repetition into two kinds, bare and clothed.  A bare repetition is something that repeats in exactly the same way with no change.  A clothed repetition repeats something, but always in a different way which can include bringing in something  a little bit new, something different, or at the other end of the spectrum, a complete transformation.  Deleuze deals almost exclusively with clothed repetitions.  Whenever Deleuze uses the word repetition he means a clothed repetition unless indicated otherwise.  For him, repetition is how change occurs.  It occurs due to the difference each repetition can potentially bring.  When you add intention to the mix it becomes magick - causing change to occur under will.  You repeat the same ritual over and over and each time it's different in some way, different results, different affects and sensations.  Mix engineers naturally and instinctively know this.  Setting up an audio mix requires listening to the same piece of music repetitively for hours at a time.  Every playback has something different about it, something different gets perceived even if no changes were made to the mix. In general, over a lifetime you can listen to a song or a piece of music many, many, many times and hear it, feel it, sense it, and dance to it differently each time.  Never just repetition, always difference and repetition.

Repetition + Difference + Intention = Magick.

Difference and Repetition was Gilles Deleuze's first book devoted to his own philosophy. Up until that time, 1968, all his publications were historical sketches of other philosophers.  Difference and Repetition was his doctoral thesis.  On page 2 he writes:

The head is the organ of exchange, but the heart is the amorous organ of repetition.  (It is true that repetition also concerns the head, but precisely because it is its terror or paradox)."

The definition of amorous: "inclined or disposed to love, especially sexual love.  Practitioners of tantra, sex magick, and kundalini yoga maintain that sexual energy and spiritual energy refer to different uses of the same energy.  Calling the heart an amorous organ, giving it a sexual force obviously not a physical one, aligns with the efforts of the yogis to draw the kundalini energy up the spine  opening the heart chakra among all the others. The head as repetition's terror or paradox will get examined in a subsequent post that compares the use of paradox by Deleuze and Crowley.  It will be seen that creative repetition for Deleuze requires the cooperation of the head, the heart, and the somatic or sexual forces.  This appears to link repetition with difference to the will to power.  Combining repetition, as Deleuze describes it, with his interpretation of will to power seems an awful lot like love under will.

The way I see it, Deleuze beginning his doctoral thesis by identifying the heart as the organ of repetition (remember, he means clothed repetition, repetition with something different, repetition that brings change) seems cognate with Aleister Crowley insisting to students of the A.'. A.'. that all initial magical efforts should get directed to or focused upon attaining the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.  This operation represents one of the two main tasks in Thelema and takes place in the sphere of Tiphareth, the central Sephiroth on the Tree of Life, the Sephiroth connected to the heart chakra.  Illuminatus! begins in New York's Central Park, an obvious representation for Tiphareth.  Where else could you start if you're writing a guide to qabalah as one of Crowley's brightest students?  I suspect Wilson wrote most or all of the Crowley material in Illuminatus! unless it was Shea.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the Crowley/Deleuze show featuring the use of paradox.

Neuromancer, Leary's S.M.I L.E. and the 23 Enigma

"Technology invariably trumps ideology.  We develop ideologies as a way of coping with technologies; technology as drivers, ideologies as attempts to steer."

 - Mass Consensual Hallucinations with William Gibson  

The previous post gave information on the technology of Orb Running; more generally, it gave information on a technology for transformative brain change.  S.M.I.²L.E., an acronym devised by Timothy Leary, formulates an open-ended, endlessly ramifying ideology for the future: Space Migration + Intelligence Increase + Life Extension. It serves as a practical formula for individuals on any kind of evolutionary trajectory as well as providing a conceptual basis for the advancement of collective human endeavor; a reach for the stars.

Neuromancer, by William Gibson, gives a compelling and visceral literary expression of the S.M.I.²L.E. paradigm.  For example, the book populates the L4 and L5 orbital belts, where Gerard K. O'Neil and Timothy Leary wanted to establish space colonies, with worlds that resemble Leary's High Orbital Mini Earths (H.O.M.E.s), but with a realistic, gritty, human portrayal as opposed to Leary's more utopian vision.  That covers Space Migration in the conventional exterior sense. Space Migration also gets implied in the interior sense through the characters adventures in cyberspace.  Life Extension turns up in two prominent ways. The power-elite clan, the Tessier-Ashpools, keep their own meat carcasses frozen in cryogenic suspension with timed intervals of reanimation in order to extend their physical life span.  Online immortality gets a play through the character of Dixie Flatline whose mind and personality managed to get downloaded onto a storage device before his meat carcass died in a cyberspace misadventure.  Dixie seems mentally as sharp as ever when the personality/mind  recording  (a soul recording?) from his deceased body gets uploaded back into the matrix.  He frequently becomes Case's (main protagonist) guide and informant in the cyberspace realm whenever Case jacks into the matrix. Both of these forms of Life Extension get a dystopian treatment in Neuromancer, a radical departure from Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson's hyperbolic optimism on the subject.  The Tessier-Ashpools complain of the cryogenic cold they can feel, the patriarch ends up committing suicide to get away from it.  They are the richest, most powerful family and they are also the coldest.  They're almost all cold.  No social/political/economic metaphor there! Dixie Flatline hints at some dark existential suffering and asks Case to delete him after his duties have been discharged.

The central part of the S.M.I.²L.E. formula, Intelligence Increase, seems the least obvious, the most occult and hidden in the book, yet also the most optimistic.  Most of the events in Neuromancer get put into motion by a huge Artificial Intelligence named Wintermute, a veritable V.A.L.I.S. - a Vast Active Living Intelligence System.  In this regard, it's interesting to hear Gibson in a 2010 interview with Steve Paikin suggest that Google is an Artificial Intelligence; "[it's a] vast hive mind that consists of us."  Wintermute was designed and put into existence by one of the Tessier-Ashpools (3Jane if I remember correctly) to mute the winter, the incessant coldness that seeps into the bones of the cryogenically frozen.  This coldness seems more than physical discomfort and pain, a sense gets conveyed of emotional and existential coldness as well.  That the AI Wintermute becomes a solution to this problem implies that whoever designed it can transfer their awareness and cognitive abilities out of their frozen meat carcasses and into its vast active living intelligence system.  I would call that an increase in intelligence to have that ability.

Gibson borrows the idea of I.C.E., which stands for Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics, from fellow science fiction writer, Tom Maddox, to protect the architectonic structures of propietary corporate data.  To penetrate any large system of data in cyberspace you first have to cut through the ICE.  Qabalistically speaking, ice is frozen water and water always relates to emotions.  In this light, ICE becomes a metaphor for Wilhelm Reich's concept of emotional armor.  The name Wintermute suggests a shedding of this ice, this emotional armor, on a vast scale. Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics seems one of those puns with two completely opposite meanings.  The intelligence increase communicated in Neuromancer primarily concerns emotional intelligence of the higher kind; what Leary and Wilson refer to as circuit 6 in their model.  This emotional intelligence appears refreshingly free of sentimentality; sentimentality = sense the mental, not real emotional intelligence at all.

Gibson seems so tuned in and turned on to Leary's vision that I attempted to find out what kind of influence Leary had on him before he wrote the book.  I couldn't find any evidence that he'd ever read Leary or Wilson, but also didn't have much time to research it. Leary and Gibson certainly bonded after Neuromancer published.  Leary developed the video game Neuromancer based on the book.  He also included the two obvious life extension methods Gibson put in the novel in a 1991 essay for Magical Blend magazine: 22 Alternatives to Involuntary Death.  This got expanded and is currently available as the book Alternatives To Involuntary Death.

In an interview Leary did with Gibson, the good doctor mentioned that the only book he'd ever annotated besides Neuromancer was Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.  He went on to relate how he'd received Gravity's Rainbow in prison after a long spell of no books in solitary confinement; like eating an incredible meal when starving.  No wonder he took a strong imprint with that book.  Gibson related that when he got Gravity's Rainbow he retired from all other activity for several days to read and reread it; voluntary solitary confinement.  Neuromancer and Gravity's Rainbow are two very different books, but what they both have in common is the frequent and visceral portrayal of death, so much so that you could say it becomes a character or an underlying omnipresent condition.  Neuromancer (the name of the book, but also the name of an AI character in the book, Wintermute's twin, thus revealing the book as a form of AI) gives it away in the first sentence, "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."  Leading with, "The sky," ending with "dead channel" suggests viewing death as a transcendent change as opposed to an absolute nihilistic end or some other terrible thing.  The title Gravity's Rainbow commonly gets explained as indicating the rainbow-like trajectory of the V-2 rocket as gravity pulls it to Earth.  Pynchon, known for his multiple meanings and levels of writing as well as his expertise in qabalah (see Against the Day), could just as well have named it Gravity's Rainbow to indicate the trajectory of a person's life as it's brought back down to the ground through gravity of death.  In popular mythology, rainbow means God's promise or just hope, so if we see it as the gravity of death, then the rainbow indicates some kind of transcendent promise or hope.  Again, death appearing as as transcendent change.

In turn, Neuromancer appears to have influenced Pynchon, particularly in his last book, Bleeding Edge, in which the internet and the deep web play as strong a role in the plot's landscape as the matrix did in Neuromancer.  The powerful antagonist putting up great obstacles in Bleeding Edge is named Gabriel Ice. Pynchon would know that Archangel Gabriel represents the element Water in qabalah; Gabriel Ice reinforces the notion of water (emotions) that is frozen.  Pynchon seems to have to same intent as Gibson did with ICE though connecting it more with the everyday human world by making it a main character. 

There are 24 chapters in Neuromancer and there are 24 stages in Leary's 8 Circuit model of consciousness as given in his book The Game of Life.  I remember Leary prefacing a lot of the stages and circuits with neuro: neurosomatic, neuroelectric, neurogenetic, neuroatomic etc. then a few years later out comes Neuromancer which seems like a doctoral thesis on S.M.I.²L.E.

I believe this illustration is by Bobby Campbell, but I'm not certain.

We see more I² information in the names Gibson gives his characters.  One of them, Finn, is a surrogate used by Wintermute to deliver messages and help out Case.  He seems to pop up at random times throughout such that when he reappears you could say, "There's Finn again." I made the connection to Finnegans Wake in the first post, but there's more.  The initials of the main male character in Finnegans Wake is HCE, in Neuromancer it's HDC (Henry Dorsett Case). The H in Finnegans Wake stands for Humphrey.  We have Humphrey and Henry as the protagonists in the two books. We are told  HCE also stands for Here Comes Everybody in Finnegans Wake suggesting that James Joyce wrote the character to represent everyone or anyone.  Except for one instance, Case is always referred to by his last name.  The pun in his name seems obvious, Case could potentially be anyone, a test subject for the next step.  His middle name, Dorsett = door + set; that appears an obvious qabalistic reference to higher emotional intelligence; door = daleth = the letter "d" = Venus.  The difference between HCE and HDC is the letter D in the latter.  The main female character, Molly Millions, suggests Tiphareth because of the 6 zeroes in the numerical form of her last name.  Except for one mention, her last name is hidden throughout, she's only known as Molly.

At some point toward the end of my most recent voyage through Neuromancer I began to wonder if Gibson had ever read Robert Anton Wilson.  I knew he was very influenced by William Burroughs, it becomes quite obvious at times. The 23 Enigma represents one clear point of conjunction between Wilson and Burroughs.  Burroughs first noticed the coincidence of the number 23 in relation to two disasters, a ferry boat sinking and a plane crash he heard about on the radio.  No record of that plane crash has been found so it's possible he made the whole thing up or was implanted with a false memory to get the information out.  It certainly didn't stop synchronicities with 23 from wreaking ontological havoc with many otherwise skeptical minds.  Not long after I began this wondering, actually almost instantly, I came across the following passage on p. 189:

She smiled, but it was gone too quickly, and she gritted her teeth at the stabbing pain in her leg as she began to climb.  The ladder continued up through a metal tube, barely wide enough for her shoulders. She was climbing up out of gravity toward the weightless axis
Her chip pulsed the time.
:04:23:04

The character climbing up is Molly, with Case there virtually.  He has a device that lets him switch from the matrix to jack into her nervous system and experience everything she does. This is the first instance we see a time readout, it recurs about 4 or 5 more times though never again with a 23. I couldn't tell if Gibson was hip to the 23 phenomena until I read the first sentence of chapter 23. Most people, after they get afflicted by this condition, ask, "what does it mean, all these 23s?" Wilson writes in Cosmic Trigger, " I accepted the 23 engima as something I should attempt to decipher."  If we consider that this is one of those 23s and that it relates to her climbing out of gravity then a meaning is suggested that connects 23 with some kind of greater or lesser transcendent experience, climbing up the ladder one rung at a time.  I consider it a good sign when I encounter synchs with 23.

The opening sentence of Chapter 23 reads:

Molly fished the key out on its loop of nylon.

I could compose a whole 'nother blog about the qabalistic correspondences in this densely informational innocent looking sentence, but I'll try to restrain this tendency.
fish = Nun = death
both "out" and "on" represent different magick formulas in Crowley's language.
the key = death  ("fished the key") ???
the key = "out" ( the formula of OUT gets explained in Chapter 23 of The Book of Lies) ???
the key = "on" ( see the listing for 120 in 777) ???
the key = out on ???
All of the above, some or none of the above???
Robert Anton Wilson states unequivocally that 23 became an important key for him.

The single name Case always goes by reminded me of Neo from the Matrix trilogy. Case as a prototype, Neo as a prototype.  Molly and Trinity could be twins.  The blatant connection, besides the name, is a Rastafari one: the last human city in the Matrix is Zion, the name of Jah's promised land.  Zion is a small Rasta space colony in Neuromancer.  It's head operator, Maelcum, gives Case much help, eventually rescuing him.  Case has a death/rebirth experience at the end of Chapter 23:

And he woke again thinking he dreamed, to a wide white smile framed with gold incisors, Aerol strapping him into a g-web in Babylon Rocker.
And then the long pulse of Zion dub.

Again, some amazing qabalah.  For instance, "strapping him into a g-web" indicates the path of Gimel which connects Tiphareth and Kether; the heart with Zion.  The High Priestess becomes the guide for that path, in Thelema she is called Babalon and she does become a rock of stability through the nebulous, treacherous terrain of the desert Gimel passes through.  Molly Millions plays  the role of Babalon, the High Priestess, in Neuromancer.  Her last name gives it away. 

Interestingly, Gibson has said that he doesn't care for didactic science fiction stories.  In a 2012 interview with UNCUT posted on YouTube he discusses his writing process:

My job when I write a book is to access a lot of parts of myself that are magical, and they're not particularly remarkable, but they're not available to me ordinarily, they became available to me through the process of writing the book. So I sometimes get the strange sense of sitting there and watching it happening, which is great!  It's good work when you can get it.  I don't get it that often.