The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Because those who profit from chaos have intentionally ramped up fear, injustice, and cruelty, more occultists than ever are tempted to leave their orbit to try to “fix things.” Tragically, when you oppose something on the rim of the Wheel of existence (i.e., do Malkuthian magick to suppress it), you unwittingly strengthen it. Worse yet, in so doing you transform yourself into the very thing that you hate. Luckily, quietism is NOT the only alternative.
As Swami Vivekananda brilliantly lays out in Jnana Yoga, all things are bathed in duality. But he insists that the two poles of good and evil are inextricably linked. When you invoke good on the external plane, you inevitably invoke evil too. Likewise, to stop evil is to suppress the good along with it. When you pull the pendulum one way, it swings back just as hard. 0 = 2, not 1.
Unless you side with the profiteers, it’s time to navigate ethics in a different manner: move from the hub of the Wheel (0), not the rim (2). In the Piscean Aeon, most people were externally focused. Bathed in Cartesian dualism, people believed in the objective separateness of things. Under the spells of their own minds, they believed in things and people outside of themselves as more than just artifacts of conventional speech. They put all their faith in external cause and effect. They believed in truth below the Abyss. Evil lay outside of themselves, and they lusted for results accordingly. As a result of unconscious creation, the world became more and more imbalanced. The pendulum swung wildly from one extreme to the other. The chaos we are now witnessing is the death pang of that outmoded Law.
Remember, to *react against* hatred only ever creates more hatred, misery and confusion, which is precisely what the profiteers want. Don’t be their pawn.
In the dawning Aeon of Aquarius, the answer is not quietism. It is to unite the poles of good and evil by going within and manifesting one’s deepest values ONLY from one’s own center. The commandment “thou hast no right but to do thy will” means that you ONLY have the right to do your True Will. Everything else you do will come to naught. Your “will” is not synonymous with what you want, no matter how good. If you are motivated by the desire to attain some result, by definition that act is not your True Will. In one Holy Book, True Will is characterized as “aimless winging.”
The Will is the undifferentiated Universal Force, Above the Abyss. To channel it in the precise way you came to do, you have to forsake all other ends. No, the answer is not quietism, but a fierce pursuit of your unique “orbit in eternity”—whatever that involves. To resist the hurricane-force winds of those who would tempt you from your Path requires courage, focus, fortitude, and tremendous discipline. It begins with admitting you don’t know.
The magickal path is to make the manifested self an empty vessel for the Will. To do so, grasp BOTH sides of any polarity and birth from their internal marriage what only you can birth. All is of is God, and all that you see around you IS you, albeit most of it in disguise. To fight from a place of disunity is to disintegrate yourself, to shatter the holy Grail. When that potential is gone, the Choronzonic forces win.
If you look at the lives of those whose True Will clearly involved relieving suffering and injustice, you’ll notice that they buckled down and worked organically within a particular community. The work begins with “me” and spreads out locally. They rolled up their proverbial sleeves and become identified with a Word, pouring every last thought, word, and action into their authentic Cup. They took their orders from Above, not from their egos or those of other people. They certainly did not live in their imaginations.
True magick is progressive Oath-taking in which one subjects oneself progressively to one’s OWN Law (Binah). All else is built on quicksand.
Be of courage and patience. Work diligently to discover that one thing you can contribute which is of lasting value. Then do so. “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” –L, I:40
Relevant Quotes
Tao The Ching, CHAPTER XIXRETURNING TO THE PURITY OF THE CURRENT.
1. If we forgot our statesmanship and our wisdom, it would be an hundred times better for the people. If we forgot our benevolence and our justice, they would become again like sons, folk of good will. If we forget our machines and our business, there would be no knavery.
2. These new methods despised the olden Way, inventing fine names to disguise their baneness. But simplicity in the doing of the will of every man would put an end to vain ambitions and desires.
Swami Vivekananda, Jnana Yoga:
Life has its shadow, death. They must go together, because they are not contradictory, not two separate existences, but different manifestations of the same unit, life and death, sorrow and happiness, good and evil. The dualistic conception that good and evil are two separate entities, and that they are both going on eternally, is absurd on the face of it. …
This is a world of good and evil. Wherever there is good, evil follows, but beyond and behind all these manifestations, all these contradictions, the Vedanta finds out that Unity. It says, “Give up what is evil and give up what is good.” What remains then? Behind good and evil stands something which is yours, the real you, beyond every evil, and beyond every good too, and it is that which is manifesting itself as good and bad. Know that first, and then and then alone you will be a true optimist, and not before; for then you will be able to control everything. Control these manifestations and you will be at liberty to manifest the real “you”.
“For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect.”— Liber L vel Legis, I:44