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If you need to put down people who hold different views as having ‘a playschool understanding.’ Then go for it. Might I suggest that it’s a playschool understanding according to your model of the world and the values you hold dear.
No, you just haven't evidenced a particularly sophisticated understanding of the things you are dismissing and I am calling you on it. You come across like a child throwing toys out of a pram without giving any real sense that you know why the toys were there in the first place or why you chose to throw them out - aside from the whims of a monstrous ego. I would personally criticise this, as I think the ego is a fairly shaky foundation on which to build a magical practice or worldview. The onus is on you to defend your position, really. Your response above amounts to: "Well... That's just your way of thinking about things! So there!" and is perhaps not the strongest refutation of the playschool accusations that have been leveled at you.
Might I suggest that you form a stronger argument to defend your position, rather than avoiding the meat of the criticism completely and telling me I just have "different views" from you. Obviously I do. Quite a few other people in this thread have also expressed a similar level of migraine inducing despair at the seemingly ill-thought out content of your above posts. You are not doing a very convincing job of conveying any sense that you've really put a lot of your own thought into any of these perspectives you are parading. A lot of it has the ghastly stench of second-hand received information that you have adopted from other sources, be they Peter Carroll, Nietzsche, or any of the other weighty names with which you have peppered the above posts.
Give me a single good reason why you have decided that there is no currency whatsoever in the notions of a Thelemic True Will, or the idea of the Great Work as it appears in the bulk of western magic, or the broader concept of elevating the human organism to a higher state - whatever that might mean - which appears in the occult traditions of virtually every culture in the world in various forms. Or even just demonstrate that you have a fully developed understanding of what these things mean, and explain the reasoning behind why you have chosen to reject them.
I will probably still disagree with you, and challenge any holes that I might find in that reasoning. But that is, after all, the purpose of this forum. By exposing our ideas about magic to our peers and contemporaries we get an opportunity to refine our understanding and look at our accrued raft of theories and assumptions from outwith the limiting perspective of our own ego.
If you're not going to do that, if you just want to walk into the room and make huge sweeping statements about magic, but you don't actually have the balls to intelligently defend your statements against the inevitable criticism that will ensue. Then go for it. Go for your fucking life, mate. You will just come off looking like yet another occupant of the magical special bus. An overcrowded, knackered old vehicle that should be driven off the road.
Alternatively, you could start a new thread that questions the value of "The Great Work", or the Thelemic True Will, or the idea that magic should involve some attempt to develop ourselves beyond the whims of the ego. Lay out your stall, explain your position, show that you know what you are talking about, that this is something you have put a lot of thought into, that you have a really convincing, intelligent argument backing up your statements on this. It could be a really great thread. Yeah, your ideas will come under fire, but any really solid idea will be forged in the flames of debate, not destroyed. If you really believe this 100%, why not put your money where your mouth is? It's your call. |
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