The Role of Gnosis in Thelema

“I give unimaginable joys on earth: certainty, not faith, while in life, upon death” – AL I:58

“Wipe your glosses with what you know” – Finnegans Wake

 

What is gnosis, and what does it have to do with Thelema?

The word “gnosis” literally means “knowledge” in Greek, and it’s usually used to refer to spiritual knowledge or knowledge of an esoteric nature. Occultists seem to use the word in various ways, ranging from certain trance states (“I intone a mantra to generate gnosis before I begin the ritual”) to daft poetry (“What’s that? Your magical order doesn’t produce laughable poetry? Ha! Looks like you guys have no new gnosis!”) to certainty about spiritual claims (“I know that reincarnation is true because I have acquired gnosis!”).

One way that some kinds of supernaturalists often use the word is to contrast their beliefs with those of other religionists. The argument they make goes something like this: “Most religious people – like those Christians! – just have a bunch of beliefs that the priests tell them and that they are expected to believe. So they take it on faith. Bleh! But we superior supernaturalists don’t take our ideas on faith – we know. You see, we get into our trance states and achieve gnosis. We don’t just believe that we have had past lives. We experience past life memories, and we therefore have direct knowledge that reincarnation is true. No belief required! We have knowledge!”

Unfortunately for these supernaturalists, they are incorrect.

Read on for a discussion of knowledge, belief, and gnosis in the context of Thelema.

Mailbag: Why I Am Not a Supernaturalist

Following my predictable banning from the Fruitcake Factory (aka The Temple of Thelema forums), a relatively new regular engaged with me briefly in private message correspondence regarding my lack of belief in the supernatural (by the way, to be fair to Eshelman, he tolerated the presence of critical questions on his forums much longer than I thought he would, even if he refused to answer them. So, credit where credit’s due. I definitely made my point).

In the thread right before the banning took place, I was explaining how I didn’t start off life as some rabid materialist: for a time, I even believed in supernatural things. And, as I said on the thread, one of the reasons I don’t believe in this stuff anymore is that I wised up and realized that daydreams and subjectively trusting how it all feels to me doesn’t demonstrate the actual existence of “powers” or “other worlds.

This prompted a question from my interlocutor: “How did you go about ‘wising up’? What was your process of ‘realization’?

He follows this up with speculation about me, musing that perhaps I was “not able to manifest results and so [I] determined that results are not manifestable.” Ah, classic believer script "you aren't doin' it right!"...

The question he asked, though, is a really good one, and one I’m not sure I’ve written about on the blog before. My response to him resembled an answer I gave to a similar question elsewhere on those forums, so for this post, I’m editing my responses together to give as comprehensive an answer (and hopefully as instructive an answer) as possible.

Read on for my answer to this question.

Name That Fallacy!

A reader recently posted a comment to this post of mine – regarding my lengthy debate with Donald Michael Kraig on his blog – that contained the following point, attempting to draw an analogy to claims about magical “results”:

I have never seen Paris.  All I have is admittedly massive amounts of anecdotal evidence that it exists. You could, I am sure, tell me how to get there, and if I followed your directions, and they were correct, and nothing unforeseen interfered, I could go to that location myself.  However, if I had decided beforehand that it did not exist, I might not see it then, even if it were there.

What this commenter is arguing, essentially, is that he (and everyone else who has never personally seen Paris) is accepting the claim “Paris exists” on the basis of anecdotal evidence. For that reason, the implied argument here runs, it is inconsistent to accept one claim (“Paris exists”) on the basis of anecdotes (lots of people who claim to have seen Paris) yet deny another claim (“Ritual magick can cause coincidences to happen”) on the basis of anecdotes (lots of people who claim to have had ritual magick “work” to cause coincidences).

Perhaps I’m overstating the argument. The commenter might not claim that it’s “inconsistent,” per se, but he is suggesting that most people accept a large number of claims not on the basis of personal experience but anecdotes. Therefore, it is at least unfair – if not completely inconsistent – to object so strongly to a claim that only has anecdotes to support it.

Well, I’ve done my best to give this argument its due. Needless to say, it’s a very flawed argument, so it’s time to play…

NAME THAT FALLACY!

See if you can figure out what’s wrong with the argument. Read on for the correct answer.

Gems from the Forums IV: A Crystal Clear Understanding

This is the last one of these “Gems” that will be posted for a little while. New content will be up on the blog in another day or two.

This entry consists of two posts made very recently in this thread in which a “Typhonian” named Chris asked the forumites for help in interpreting a nonsense word he received as a “communication” (that is, daydream).

When he posted later on in the thread with an additional “communication,” he correctly apologized for his posts not being “the most AC related thing.” Taking the opportunity to question him gently about how he thinks these “communications” are related to the True Will – or even whether he thought they were related – I quickly discovered that Chris was incapable of offering a coherent explanation of how his practice was supposed to work to reveal the True Will, why anyone would think that it would reveal the True Will, and what criteria he would use to judge that his practice actually was revealing the True Will.

This discovery prompted the following two posts from me about the necessity of interrogating one’s methods of practice.

You Will Respect My Author-it-tay!

There are a number of people who call themselves “Thelemites” who seem to have a love for the concept of what we might call “spiritual authority.” We can witness this affection for authority in the interminable arguments that constantly arise between members of different organizations over which group is “legitimate” or has a “link” back to some figure like Crowley.

This idea of authority, however, is completely and totally ass-backwards. It’s as if the worth of a group should be determined solely by the question of whether its leaders studied with people who studied with people who studied with Crowley. The idea underlying many of these love affairs with the concept of authority is a dumb supernatural one: the idea that there is some kind of magical “current” that is transferred from teacher to student, that there is an ooky-spooky force that Crowley transmitted to his students (along with anything else he may have transmitted to them….) and that aspiring students in the modern day can be, er, infected with that force…if they find the right teacher who has the correct “lineage.”

This idea is so utterly stupid and gives rise to such an enormous waste of time (trying to figure out who has the right “spiritual pedigree” and such) that it barely warrants a mention at all.

But this entire phenomenon of loving the concept of authority is directly related to the subject of this post: the authority to say what Thelema is.

Skeptical of the True Will?

It seems odd that anyone would want to reduce Thelema – the philosophy that holds an individual’s nature, as opposed to arbitrary rules, should be the only guide of conduct – to a position of faith, thus making it indistinguishable from any ridiculous supernatural claim.

Yet this is precisely the position of many supernaturalist Thelemites, who cannot fathom that something like the existence of a true will might be demonstrated as true (which, of course, begs the question of why they would ever choose to adopt a position that they don’t think can be demonstrated to be true).

One poster at Lashtal.com phrased the position like this:

I'm intrigued as to the correct skeptical approach as laid out [on Thelema and Skepticism] to the claim "I have a True Will". Many 'rationalists' (a majority?) would consider this to be just as suspect as "I just met a real demon" or "Reincarnation is real".

What this poster is saying is basically that he doesn’t think that the idea of the true will can stand up to skeptical scrutiny; thus there is no evidence to convince anyone that there is such a thing as a true will; thus there is no reason for anyone to believe that it exists; thus believing in the true will is purely a matter of faith – as much as any religious claim is –  and thus Thelema is utterly and completely indistinguishable from any run-of-the-mill wacko religious claim and no one has a legitimate reason to be a Thelemite, any more than they have a legitimate reason to be a Hare Krishna.

Obviously, the above position is totally incorrect, and it is the intention of this blog post to demonstrate how to apply skepticism to the claim “I have a True Will.”

Believers Say the Darndest Things: “We know so little!”

One of the things I’m interested in exploring on this blog is the variety of “scripts” that religious believers employ when conversing with atheists and skeptics.

One believer script relies on an estimation of the amount of knowledge that humans have of the universe. It goes something like this (note: although I have created the exact wording of the passage below myself, it is a close paraphrase of several real arguments I have encountered over the years):

If you consider how much knowledge that humans could potentially have of the universe, the amount of knowledge that humans actually do have of the universe is almost infinitesimal. If we were to assign percentages to it, we could say that humans probably know less than one percent of all of the possible knowledge that there could ever be of the universe.

How arrogant of atheists to presume, on the basis of that less than one-percent knowledge, that there are no gods. Isn’t it very possible that indeed there may be gods lurking in the 99+% of the knowledge we haven’t acquired yet?”

Setting aside for a moment the fact that atheism is not a position of certainty nor a positive claim that there are no gods, the above argument confuses the theoretical possibility of the existence of gods (or demons or occult powers or whatever the supernatural claim is under discussion) with the currently available evidence for the existence of gods.

As we will see, just as believers routinely confuse the impossibility of having absolute knowledge with the process of evaluating claims on the basis of currently available evidence, believers also confuse the impossibility of “complete” knowledge with the same process.

What's the Default Position, Anyway?

Over on the Lashtal.com discussion thread about this blog, one responder noted that

I think that agnosticism flows more naturally from skepticism than atheism, as the agnostic says, "I can't be certain" whereas the atheist says "certainly not," to say certainly not to something you have no means to be certain of is a failure to apply skepticism in all areas, such as your own certainty.

This objection was addressed in the introductory post of this blog.