Recently, self-identified Thelemites have announced on social media that “everyone is obligated to be politically active.” I just want to remind everyone that “[t]here is no law beyond Do what thou wilt” and, on the other hand, “thou hast no right but to do thy will” (L III:60 and I:42).
In other words, any time someone tells you that you must (or must not) do some certain thing–I don’t care how much it sounds like a good idea–that’s not Thelema. And if it were, then Thelema would be just one more ideology, not the divine Law it actually is.
Your True Will is the Will as it would flow through your incarnation if you were to live authentically. It is not some rigid rule that a clunky, human mind (they’re all clunky) has thought up for you. Your job is to be perfectly yourself. Full stop. If you are moved from the ground of your own being to be politically active, then, yes, you must do that. Otherwise, you must not.
I am reminded of the many Victorians who believed that girls and women must wear corsets from the time they are toddlers or else their internal organs would be unsupported. They had no faith in nature.
I am also reminded of the fundamentalist Christian I once worked for as a home health aide. One day, the fire alarm rang in our building, so I helped him to get outside. He expressed shock that I would try to save his life while I was off-duty, since he knew that I was not a Christian. In his mind, the only reason that someone helps a fellow human is because an authority (God in this case) told them to. Similar to the Victorian, he had no faith in nature.
I wish these pundits would remember that authentic people are moved to treat others as fellow stars (one way or another) without being browbeaten. And, ironically, those who would believe and obey them will never treat others as fellow stars because they have first failed to recognize their own divinity. Guess how that will turn out….
If you assiduously study your true nature and embrace it, you will do exactly what you are supposed to do in a given moment. While you do, the Universal Will will be done through you.
Doing Your Will Does Not Require Certain Conditions... and If It Did...?
Apart from quoting Crowley as an authority, those who argue that everyone must be politically active assume that certain physical and economic conditions must prevail before people are free to do their Will. As much as I want to see those conditions prevail, their premise is false.
Luckily for all of us, the Will is not this flimsy thing that depends on you being well-fed, leisured, etc. Rather, you must be true to yourself no matter how harsh the conditions in which you find yourself. Famously, Karl Germer achieved the Knowledge and Conversation of his Holy Guardian Angel while interred in a Nazi concentration camp.
If the Law of Thelema really could not work unless certain physical and economic conditions were first met, then it would not be a divine law. Rather, it would be a social convention propped up by ideology. Basically, we would be attempting to bootstrap a “Thelemic world” into existence by convincing everyone to act as though the Law of Thelema were true. If you want to know how well ideology is working so far, look around. They want to change the wallpaper in a burning building.
The real Law of Thelema acknowledges that everything falls apart–Change is Stability. Everything the little monkey mind tries to engineer is doomed to fail. That’s why the “word of Sin is Restriction” (L: I:41). The whole point of Thelema is to stop trying to impose order by fiat and to finally allow all things to be what they essentially are. Allow the divine order to emerge. Far from being some lazy failure to engage, that would require extreme effort and result in a radically changed world.
The order of causality is the reverse of what these pundits are saying: if people begin to do their Will, then (and only then) we will produce a just world.
Should You Be Politically Active?
Of course, it may very well be the case that you (in particular) must be politically active in a given moment or for your whole life. I’d even go so far as to say that the chances of your Will requiring that you be politically active at some point are increasing now that Neptune has transited from the contemplative sign of Pisces into the active sign of Aries.
But the fact remains that you must do your Will and nothing else, whatever it is. God is within you.
