My friend told me a hilarious story the other day. He belongs to a Thelemic intentional community. There, he and his housemates are assigned weekly cleaning tasks for the common areas.
My friend told me that one of his housemates, new to the community, asked what was involved in her assigned task–dusting. He said, “Oh basically, just dust all the surfaces in the living and dining areas–shelves, TV, whatnot.”
His housemate responded by telling him, “I’m only going to dust the shelves with open areas and the ones that I use, not the ones with knicknacks on them.” The knicknacks belong to a different member.
When he told me this, both he and I chuckled. How well I can recognize my own ego’s fearful tendencies in this pronouncement!
He said, “I was so tempted to say, ‘I’m going to vacuum the couch later today, but I’m only going to clean up the crumbs that I made, not the ones made by your son,’ or, ‘I’m taking out the garbage, but only the stuff I made because you use too many cans.'” Again, we laughed!
What’s funny and at issue is not whether a knickknack shelf gets dusted or not. The chores, while minimally important for health and safety, are mainly magickal tools for them to train themselves how to allow, as Jack Parsons said, everyone else to do their will first. At issue is the ego’s tendency to fence itself off in this completely abstract way and thus to “fall down into the pit called Because” (L, II:27). My friend’s housemate made this policy completely abstractly from any given actual occasion. How dusty is the shelf right now? What else do I have going on? Am I ill or incapacitated? Do I feel particularly peevish or lazy? Even that! I mean, maybe one day, she pauses at the shelf, smiles, and says, “Why the heck not?”
Something else: the statement is brimming with guilt. She’s essentially saying, “I don’t choose to have knickknacks, because I don’t like dusting. So tough if you have them in the common area.” Maybe she even has knicknacks but only chooses to dust her own because she’d rather spend her spare time studying! In any case, as a Thelemite, if she chooses to do something for which she fears criticism or even knows to be wrong, she should do it boldly. There is no sin, there is no guilt: the only law is Do what thou wilt. Take responsibility.
I’m just using this chuckle to remind myself to surrender to the unknown.