Not as I will, but as Thou Wilt

The core principle of Thelema, the religio-philsophy founded by Aleister Crowley, is “Do What Thou Wilt Shall be the Whole of the Law. Love is the Law, Love Under Will.”

This is typically shortened to simply Do What Thou Wilt and while Crowley himself explains that this statement is not saying that one should do whatever they want but is much more akin to figure out your dharma and do that. True Will is a high priority and spiritual directive associated with Thelema, as True Will is the practitioner’s dharma. While Thelemites dismiss the criticism that Do What Thou Wilt is a call to hedonistic, nihilistic, and existential thought and living I think that instead of defending their position as I have oft done in the past, since I came to Christianity from the well-traveled Thelema to Catholicism pipeline I want to offer a different view.

This view is part of the natural course my spiritual development has taken and while a part of me feels it may be betraying the communities that helped shape my direction to where I am now it feels like a betrayal of the present and future to hold a position that no longer seems applicable. Do What Thou Wilt has a few main concerns that Thelemites do a fairly good job answering with the main arguments being that Do What Thou Wilt justifies selfish behavior, moral relativism, and the shirking of social responsibility.

The idea behind these arguments can be either seen as an ignorance toward the Thelemic True Will or the questioning as to whether one’s True Will might be in conflict with social mores and the moral codes that we as a society follow.

From my standpoint, it does not really matter whether one has a low or high degree of understanding when it comes to Thelemic principles and as far as Do What Thou Wilt is concerned the problem is not necessarily an outsider’s passing awareness of the core teaching of this axiom, what it means, and how its applied (or even found), because the issue is how this particular teaching has become a part of the non-Thelemic zeitgeist of our current culture.

It’s like how the West bastardized the teachings about reincarnation to become associated with a you-only-live (this life)-once. It does not matter that Do What Thou Wilt means to be bound to a spiritual dharma and that life is about nothing less than pursuing it and achieving it. Do What Thou Wilt has left those philosophical circles and become a battle cry to follow one’s own pleasure.

It does not matter that it originally was intended for spiritual endeavor, because now it really does mean that one is living in the flesh. It is fair to say that all spiritual modalities have this issue of core tenets being lifted by bad apples within those communities or co-opted by the larger culture such as non-theistic Christians and atheists calling Christ a socialist and wisdom teacher to further their own agenda that has as much to do with the Gospel as Do What Thou Wilt does.

We are currently living in a post-Crowleyan society where hedonism and nihilism are the motivations behind a good amount of peoples actions. We aren’t chasing spiritual truths (unless those truths fit in with our preconceived biases that we bring in to spiritual spaces), we are not trying to become obedient to our dharma much less anything that we would deem commandment; people are living for themselves, consumptively using other people to satisfy their lust and egoism while using substances to numb themselves to their choices and so not to take responsibility for their lives.

I’m saying this bluntly because I am not sitting on a high horse looking down, but in a hole, I’ve spent the better part of my life digging alongside all us other ditch-diggers refusing to take a step outside ourselves and consider that we might be created for something more than casual sex and substance abuse.

But Do What Thou Wilt.

We’ve reached the point in our culture where to call that kind of behavior out, even if I directed it toward myself, someone would take offense and claim that I was judging them… That I could not possibly know what it was like to be such and such or do such and such. We have reached a point where even wondering if strict hedonism and nihilism are not the best lens to view the world is taken as an attack on people’s lives, as if the one wondering is acting holier-than-thou.

And you know what, that is exactly what I am trying to eradicate out of my head, currently. I have been working through that which I Wilt… Anger, Resentment, Pride… I’m a sinner in the worst way. My passions inflame me throughout the day, and I really do notice how they pull me away from the present moment, how they pull me away from the people I love, and certainly pull me away from God. There is a clear wall that goes up when these passions are enflamed and it is so, so hard to penetrate them. The Walls of Jericho are erect, and no amount of trumpet notes can make them fall, yet I see how far away I am from others. I can see how far I am from myself, wrapped in a blanket of ego masking as self-protection.

Furthermore, the more I can see my own sins the more apparent it is that we all are living with sin in some way, and I think for a lot of us who reach that point it is easy to remain stagnant while pointing the finger of shame at our fellow sinners instead of, you know, dealing with our sins. It is for this reason that I am trying to use this Lenten season to be the Publican rather than the Pharisee. It is a product of our Fallen State to know the difference between good and evil, and because of our spiritual maturity at the time of the Fall, and certainly us sinners in contemporary times, we use this knowledge against our fellow man and God, too.

The combination of the Pharisee and the Publican yields the old man crawling back to his former position on our shoulders, whispering tantalizing things into our ear,

“Why are you the only one crying over your sins? Why isn’t anyone else? Do they know something you do not?”

And then, suddenly,

“Maybe have a drink. Everyone else is drinking. Shoot, your friends are doing coke, don’t you remember how much fun coke was? Relax… Why do you have to do all this hard stuff?”

Yeah… Why do I have to do all this hard stuff!

Suddenly, neither the Pharisee nor the Publican both need to be in the temple.

They don’t need God.

They leave together. Impenitent and renewed in their own resentful way of viewing the world uttered by the war cry, If you can’t beat’em, join’em, and Do What Thou Wilt!

Lent is a season to remind ourselves of the cost of discipleship. That grace, not unlike sobriety, is hard-earned every day, especially because, like sobriety, God’s grace is free which means it costs everything.

I don’t want to do all this hard stuff, but I must. When I look at others’ sins that’s the old man trying to get me to take my eyes off my own issues and sit in the judgement seat of stagnant spirituality. My cup overfloweth with passion and it’s like a natural spring rooted deep down with pride in my heart. Lord, God, how do I mortify my flesh not only to deaden my sinful nature, but my harsh judgement towards others’ sinful nature?

We are all fallen, and we all suffer by this account. We suffer via the self-seeking; the punishment for sin is death and we find death in this life by chasing after what is, ultimately, meaningless, “Wanting to escape the oppressive experience of pain we sought refuge in pleasure, attempting to console our nature when it was hard-pressed with pain’s torment. Striving to blunt pain’s spasms with pleasure we merely sanctioned against ourselves a greater debt of pain, powerless to disconnect pleasure from pain and its toils” (St. Maximus, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ 135).

Do What Thou Wilt is a form of slavery.

It is actually from the Bible (the demons love to contort the Word of God to fit the whims of non-being), coming out of Ecclesiasticus (32:12) and then being popularized by St. Augustine in his “Confessions,” writing “Love, and do what thou wilt,” meaning love God and act in accordance with that love. St. Augustine’s formula: Love; Do what thou wilt. Crowley’s formula: Do what thou wilt; love. The axiom later was used as the motto for the sacrilegious Hellfire Club where ceremonies mocking Christian rites were held, the point of this gentleman’s club was to ridicule religion to the point where they set up the Devil as their de facto club president.

I come from the world of magic which means that I look at the symbolism as wholly important, and maybe even more important than anything else. All of this mockery and symbolism speaks to the subconscious mind, where these “gentleman” may have treated it as a joke consciously, their subconscious minds do not understand sarcasm or nuance.

To the heart all of this is very real.

And the Devil exploits that.

The motto then was used in the early 20th century by the French, Christian humanist François Rabelais in his book, “Gargantua,” about a fictional abbey called Thélème where the monks and nuns, all living together, live by one single axiom: “Do What You Want.” The Abbey of Thelema would become a real thing, lending much credence to the magic of the written word, under the guidance of Aleister Crowley, who took the ideas of religious mockery from the Hellfire Club, the tenets of the abbey in this French novel, and crafted a religion.

Not for nothing, but Aleister Crowley indirectly inspired L. Ron Hubbard (a tangential Thelemite) to follow in short step behind him in this way.

This is not meant to be a history lesson, merely a look at the process of history and how language and phrases certainly change as they are moved through time by different groups.

So, Do What Thou Wilt in our modern day may, to some people, mean what St. Augustine meant when he wrote it; it may mean the same, to some people, as it meant to Crowley; sure, it may mean, to some people, what it meant to the Hellfire Club.

I would suggest a fourth position, though, that this axiom does not belong to any one person nor does it belong to any one intention, but rather that it belongs to this age of spiritual deprivation: self-seeking pleasure, disassociation, egoism, and moral relativism. It is as if the motto came under the dominion of the devil when he was thrusted to the throne of the Hellfire Club and since then we have seen the degradation of His Will and the Love that Man has for God.

We have seen, in the last hundred years, the steady decline of temperance, wisdom, justice, and courage.

I should know, these virtues are far out of my reach, too.

I do not want to point the finger at anyone (unless at myself), but to point out that the current culture that we live in is a place where pleasure is like water to a fish. We live in an age where instant gratification gets us everything we want, whenever we want. We live in a world where porn, Instagram, and twitter exist within a few thumb clicks of each other where we can indulge in sensory pleasure, get wrapped up in wrath, then close our phones after we give into envious thinking that only sets the process back in motion from the beginning. If we are hungry, we have fast food; if we are thirsty, we have water with plastics in it or the choice of liquor, wine, and beer. All of this we can get delivered to us should we decide that it’s too much trouble to walk or drive to it.

Let’s look at addiction, briefly, to understand how indulging in habitual consumptive behavior modifies brain patterns.

Survival instincts is our baseline, how we come out of the womb ingrained in our system like software. These survival instincts are neither bad nor good; they are neutral until we act on them, and depending how we act on them that can qualify as good or bad (even in a moral relativistic world). When we are hungry, we eat. That’s just A to B, straight path, normal survival.

However, when we eat too much, we may feel sick and eventually if we do that too much, we may harm our bodies in irreversible ways. An addiction is a habitual overindulgence*, a physiological imbalance where one feels their survival is predicated on the indulgence of a particular substance (this does not exclude process addictions like gambling or sex).

The physical body and incorporeal mind becomes so attached to the substance it is as if they might die if they do not have it: in extreme cases the body will actually shut down and die if they do not ingest what, through the process of addiction, sustains their physiology. For those who are reading that have not dealt with a physcial addiction such as alcoholism or heroin, it is very difficult to explain, because it manifests differently in different people. There is a real risk of getting sick if a substance is not ingested, at some point down the rabbit hole of addiction.

But Do What Thou Wilt…

We all have the potential to become addicts; most of us are unaware of our addictions because they do not manifest as explosively as twelve shots of Jager and six or seven vodka sodas before a leisurely drive through Atlanta every night.

Maybe not every night.

Maybe it was only four shots of Jager most nights.

No, no that sounds too low.

Somewhere between four and twelve.

Selah.

To be concluded on Ash Wednesday.

Si comprehendis, non est Deus

*Doug Stanhope defines addiction as something you enjoy doing more than life, which is idolatry by any other name.