As
some of my readers know, I have – for the past month and a half – been making
posts on the Temple of Thelema Forums (also known as “The Thelemic Fruitcake
Factory”).
My
time at the Fruitcake Factory has proceeded pretty much exactly as expected.
Though earlier this year, I declared that it would not be my intention to post
over there, I revised that point of view after seeing one “Frater Potater”
unceremoniously expelled for asking the wrong kinds of questions in the wrong
kind of tone and also seeing Jim Eshelman state that dissenting viewpoints
would be tolerated there if they were presented graciously.
I
decided to take him up on that offer and present a dissenting viewpoint on the
forums. You can read my first post on the forum here: “Experience Has No
Explanatory Power” [link]
It’s
a somewhat interesting thread, notable in part for Eshelman’s refusal to
participate in it, other than to offer an obligatory response or two to my
initial post. He claimed in his second post not to have the time to participate
in it further, and then he later briefly popped in to say he had no interest in
the subject of the thread – while it might seem odd for a supposed Thelemic
teacher to have no interest in a subject fundamental to Thelema, this claim to
have “no interest” also seems to be true, since Eshelman is on record in that
very thread as stating that he doesn’t think it’s necessary for a student of
the Great Work to understand “what is actually happening”:
I
challenge the idea, in most situations within the Great Work, that there is any
need at all to "figure out what is actually happening."
In
one sense, it’s not unexpected that Eshelman would say this. After all,
a main idea expressed in many of his posts is simply to trust whatever it subjectively
feels like is going on. But in another
sense, it’s somewhat interesting that I got him to say it so explicitly.
As
I immediately go on to point on in that thread, “figure[ing] out what is
actually happening” is vital to doing any kind of task, including the Great
Work:
Well,
people who perform the Great Work make all kinds of factual claims, including
claims like, “This practice helps a person discover the True Will.” Practices
might include endlessly repeating rituals dreamed up by Victorian freemasons,
imagining having chats with goblins, balancing plates of water on their head,
eating cakes made out of cum, and imagining all sorts of things really hard with
the power of the mind.
But without taking the crucial step of investigating to see if any of these
things really *do* enable a person to discover the True Will – i.e.
investigating to figure out what’s “actually happening” when they do this stuff
– all of this stuff is just a bunch of religious devotion to practices that,
frankly, are outdated, weird, and largely ineffective for granting people
insight into themselves.
Now,
to be fair, Eshelman’s quote above continued with this sentence: “Explanation gets
in the way of person mating with moment; and it's that variety of
coition that transforms.”
The
argument he was making was that “figuring out what’s going on” can distract
someone from paying attention to the moment, and it is thus unnecessary to figure
out what’s going on.
And
let’s be fair: the actual work does require the individual to turn off the mind
and pay attention to the Self in the moment. But, in terms of what we were
talking about – evaluating practices -- Eshelman's argument is retarded: on the most basic level, a
person would have to figure out at least enough to know that the goal involves
“person mating with moment” (note the lame, imprecise phrase), how to go about
“mating with moment,” and how one knows that one has succeeded in “mating with
moment.”
Without
figuring out what is actually happening at least enough to know what the goal
is, what one is supposed to do to achieve that goal, why doing
these things will make it possible to achieve the goal, and how one can
tell that one has achieved it…the student is just blindly trusting stuff. It’s
not even proper to call the student a “student” at that point. “Wacked-out
religious devotee” might be a better term.
In
other words, Eshelman’s advice, as so often, disparages the idea of bothering
to understand what’s actually happening in favor of how stuff subjectively
feels, which is both antithetical to Thelema and deeply revealing about his
version of Thelema – and it helps explain the prevalence of the insane nonsense
posted by a majority of participants on his website.
Anyway,
feel free to read my posting history over there. A few of the responses I got
are literally incomprehensible gibberish, and many more were a bunch of
religious resentment at my pointing out how nobody has any valid grounds for
accepting any of the kooky things they discuss there as if they were
self-evident fact, but there actually were one or two decent responses that
developed into actual conversations. My introductory thread gets sort of
interesting in the middle, when one of the regulars over there agrees to a test
of his supposed powers by attempting to “remote view” two words I have written
on a piece of paper on my desk. You can obviously guess how it goes without
reading the thread – spoiler alert: there’s still no reason to think that
anybody has super powers – but it might be entertaining.
The
only other thread really worth reading – if you’re bored and need something to
do – is this one, where I school a clod who calls himself “Mephisto.” The
argument he presents is the standard “Let me use reason to demonstrate that
reason is unreliable” stuff, but it’s made a little funnier by the fact that it
takes this kid an embarrassingly long time to twig to how stupid his argument
is.
I’ve
been posting at the Thelemic Fruitcake Factory for under two months now, with only
around 350 (mostly very) short posts (if I have an hour to kill, I can easily
rack up a dozen quick posts pointing out the latest batch of logical errors) yet
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that my short posting history
contains more information about practical Thelema – and has stimulated more
insightful conversation relevant to practical Thelema – than years and years
and years of all the other posts on the forums put together. Even when I was
hovering around 100 short posts, I was saying the same thing – and it was still
true then.
So
yeah, that’s how I’ve been entertaining myself lately. But never fear – new
content is coming for “Thelema and Skepticism” very soon, so look forward to
that.
Enjoy
the spring.
