Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Aleister Crowley quotes

Thanks a lot to t3dy for gathering these

"The Tree of Life has got to be learnt by heart; you must know it backwards, forwards, sideways, and upside down; it must become the automatic background of all your thinking. You must keep on hanging everything that comes your way upon its proper bough."
Magick Without Tears, ch. IV

"The art of using it consists principally in referring all our ideas to it, discovering thus the common nature of certain things and the essential differences between others, so that ultimately one obtains a simple view of the incalculably vast complexity of the Universe. The whole subject must be studied in the Book 777, and the main attributions committed to memory: then when by constant use the system is at last understood — as opposed to being merely memorised — the student will find fresh light break in on him at every turn as he continues to measure every item of new knowledge that he attains by this Standard. For to him the Universe will then begin to appear as a coherent and a necessary Whole."
Little Essays Towards Truth, "Man"

"In Magick, on the contrary, one passes through the veil of the exterior world (which, as in Yoga, but in another sense, becomes "unreal" by comparison as one passes beyond) one creates a subtle body (instrument is a better term) called the Body of Light; this one develops and controls; it gains new powers as one progresses, usually by means of what is called 'initiation': finally, one carries on almost one's whole life in this Body of Light, and achieves in its own way the mastery of the Universe."
Magick Without Tears, Ch. 81

"It should never be forgotten for a single moment that the central and essential work of the Magician is the attainment of the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. Once he has achieved this he must of course be left entirely in the hands of that Angel, who can be invariably and inevitably relied upon to lead him to the further great step—crossing of the Abyss and the attainment of the grade of Master of the Temple."
Magick Without Tears, Ch. 83

"Now, on the other hand, there is an entirely different type of angel; and here we must be especially careful to remember that we include gods and devils, for there are such beings who are not by any means dependent on one particular element for their existence. They are microcosms in exactly the same sense as men and women are. They are individuals who have picked up the elements of their composition as possibility and convenience dictates, exactly as we do ourselves... I believe that the Holy Guardian Angel is a Being of this order.
He is something more than a man, possibly a being who has already passed through the stage of humanity, and his peculiarly intimate relationship with his client is that of friendship, of community, of brotherhood, or Fatherhood. He is not, let me say with emphasis, a mere abstraction from yourself; and that is why I have insisted rather heavily that the term 'Higher Self' implies a damnable heresy and a dangerous delusion."
Magick Without Tears

"It is impossible to lay down precise rules by which a man may attain to the knowledge and conversation of His Holy Guardian Angel; for that is the particular secret of each one of us; a secret not to be told or even divined by any other, whatever his grade. It is the Holy of Holies, whereof each man is his own High Priest, and none knoweth the Name of his brother's God, or the Rite that invokes Him."
Book 4, One Star in Sight

"IT IS OF LIBERTY that I would first write unto you, for except ye be free to act, ye cannot act. Yet all four gifts of the Law must in some degree be exercised, seeing that these four are one. But for the Aspirant that cometh unto the Master, the first need is freedom. The great bond of all bonds is ignorance. How shall a man be free to act if he know not his own purpose? You must therefore first of all discover which star of all the stars you are, your relation to the other stars about you, and your relation to, and identity with, the Whole.
In our Holy Books are given sundry means of making this discovery, and each must make it for himself, attaining absolute conviction by direct experience, not merely reasoning and calculating what is probable. And to each will come the knowledge of his finite will, whereby one is a poet, one prophet, one worker in steel, another in jade. But also to each be the knowledge of his infinite Will, his destiny to perform the Great Work, the realization of his True Self. Of this Will let me therefore speak clearly unto all, since it pertaineth unto all."
Liber CL

"For concentration does indeed unlock all doors; it lies at the heart of every practice as it is of the essence of all theory; and almost all the various rules and regulations are aimed at securing adeptship in this matter. All the subsidiary work — awareness, one-pointedness, mindfulness and the rest — is intended to train you to this."
Magick Without Tears, ch. XVI

"The most common cause of failure in life is ignorance of one's own True Will, or of the means by which to fulfill that Will."
Magick, Book 4, p. 127

"A man who is doing his True Will has the inertia of the Universe to assist him."
Magick, Book 4, p.128

"One cannot do one's True Will intelligently unless one knows what it is."
Magick, Book 4, p.174

"Know firmly, O my Son, that the True Will connot err; for it is thine appointed Course in Heaven, in whose Order is Perfection."
Liber Aleph, p. 13

"True Will should spring, a fountain of Light, from within, and flow unchecked, seething with Love, into the Ocean of Life."
Little Essays Towards Truth, p.76

"Every Magician possesses an Astral Universe peculiar to himself... Let the Magician therefore adventure himself upon the Astral Plane with the declared design to penetrate to a sanctuary of discarnate Beings such as are able to instruct and fortify him, also to prove their identity by testimony beyond rebuttal. All explanations other than these are of value only as extending and equilibrating Knowledge, or possibly as supplying Energy to such Magicians as may have found their way to the Sources of Strength. In all cases, naught is worth an obol save as it serve to help the One Great Work... The 'reality' or 'objectivity' of these symbols is not pertinent to the discussion...
The Magician must not accept [my] account of the Astral Plane, [my] Qabalistic discoveries, [my] instructions in Magick. They may be correct in the main for most men; yet they cannot be wholly true for any save [myself], even as no two artists can make identical pictures of the same subject...
What one sees and hears is 'real' in its way, whether it be itself, or distorted by one's desires, or created by one's personality... The true, the final test, of the Truth of one's visions is their Value. The most glorious experience on the Astral plane, let it dazzle and thrill as it may, is not necessarily in accordance with the True Will of the seer; if not, though it be never so true objectively, it is not true for him, because not useful for him."
Crowley,Book 4, Apx. 3

"The student, if he attains any success in the following practices, will find himself confronted by things too glorious or too dreadful to be described. It is essential that he remain the master of all that he beholds, hears or conceives; otherwise he will be the slave of illusion, and the prey of madness."
Liber O

"Magic is the Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with
the Will."
New Comment to Liber AL vel Legis (II,28)

"There are no 'standards of Right'. Ethics is balderdash. Each Star must go on its own orbit. To hell with "moral principle"; there is no such thing."

"In Liber II: The Message of the Master Therion, the Law of Thelema is summarized much more succinctly as "Do what thou wilt--then do nothing else".[76] The author also describes the pursuit of Will as tireless activity without attachment to result, writing "The conception is, therefore, of an eternal motion, infinite and unalterable. It is Nirvana, only dynamic instead of static—and this comes to the same thing in the end."
" 'Do what thou wilt' implies self-adjustment, so that failure cannot occur... No individual can ever by aught than himself, or do aught else than his Will, which is his necessary relationship to his environment, dynamically considered. ... Error in thought is therefore failure to understand, and in action to perform, one's
own true Will."
Magick in theory and practice pg 78

"The Great Work is the raising of the whole man in perfect balance to the power of Infinity."

"One must find out for oneself, and make sure beyond doubt, 'who' one is, 'what' one is, 'why' one is... Being thus conscious of the proper course to pursue, the next thing is to understand the conditions necessary to following it out. After that, one must eliminate from oneself every element alien or hostile to success, and develop those parts of oneself which are specially needed to control the aforesaid conditions."

"Far be it from any apologist for Magick to insist upon the objective validity of these concatentations!... The Master Theorion does not care a scrap of yesterday's newspaper whether he was Marius de Aquila, or whether there ever was such a person, or whether the Universe itself is anything more than a nightmare created by his own imprudence on the matter of rum and water. His memory of Marius de Aquila, of the adventures of that person in Rome and the Black Forest, matters nothing, either to him or to anybody else.
What matters is this: True or false, he has found a symbolic form which has enabled him to govern himself to the best advantage. 'Quantum nobis prodest haec fabula Christi!' (How we are helped by this fable of Christ!) The 'falsity' of Aesop's Fables does not diminish their value to mankind."

"The above reduction of the Magical Memory to a device for externalizing one's internal wisdom need not be regarded as sceptical, save only in the last resort. No scientific hypothesis can adduce stronger evidence of its validity than the confirmations of its predictions by experimental evidence. The objective can always be expressed in subjective symbols if necessary. The controversy is ultimately unmeaning. However we interpret the evidence, its relative truth depends in its internal conditions. Anything which throws light upon the Universe, anything which reveals us to ourselves, should be welcome in this world of riddles."

"In one form or another, everything that exists is derived from some previous manifestation. Have it, if you will, that the memories of other incarnations are dreams; but dreams are determined by reality just as much as the events of the day. The truth is to be apprehended by the correct translation of the symbolic language. The last section of the Oath of the Master of the Temple is: 'I swear to interpret every phenomenon as a particular dealing of God with my soul.' The Magical Memory is (in the last analysis) one manner, and, as experience testifies, one of the most important manners, of performing this vow."
Magick, Book 4, by Aleister Crowley, Ed. by Symonds/Grant, Arkana (Samuel Weiser), 1973; pages 190-1.

"For many years I had loathed being called Alick, partly because of the unpleasant sound and sight of the word, partly because it was the name by which my mother called me. Edward did not seem to suit me and the diminutives Ted or Ned were even less appropriate. Alexander was too long and Sandy suggested tow hair and freckles. I had read in some book or other that the most favourable name for becoming famous was one consisting of a dactyl followed by a spondee, as at the end of a hexameter: like "Jeremy Taylor". Aleister Crowley fulfilled these conditions and Aleister is the Gaelic form of Alexander. To adopt it would satisfy my romantic ideals. The atrocious spelling A-L-E-I-S-T-E-R was suggested as the correct form by Cousin Gregor, who ought to have known better. In any case, A-L-A-I-S-D-A-I-R makes a very bad dactyl. For these reasons I saddled myself with my present nom-de-guerre --- I can't say that I feel sure that I facilitated the process of becoming famous. I should doubtless have done so, whatever name I had chosen."
from the Confessions

"In this connection there was also the point that I was anxious to prove that spiritual progress did not depend on religious or moral codes, but was like any other science. Magick would yield its secrets to the infidel and the libertine, just as one does not have to be a churchwarden in order to discover a new kind of orchid. There are, of course, certain virtues necessary to the Magician; but they are of the same order as those which make a successful chemist."
Confessions Ch. 64 para. 5

"I admit that my visions can never mean to other men as much as they do to me. I do not regret this. All I ask is that my results should convince seekers after truth that there is beyond doubt something worth while seeking, attainable by methods more or less like mine. I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle."
Confessions Ch 66

And finishing with a RAW quote about Crowley:
"Whenever I think of the sheer information content of a typical page of Crowley - defining information in the strict mathematical sense as dense unpredictability - I remember Carl Jung's initial response to Finnegans Wake. 'This is either mental illness,' Jung said, 'or a degree of mental health inconceivable to most people.' You have not fathomed all that is going on in a Crowley poem or in a single prose sentence by him until you have a similar reaction. The great Zen koan Crowley has buried in all his writings, for those who can see deeply into them, is precisely that: Which is it - lunacy or the highest sanity possible to a human being?"
Robert Anton Wilson, pp. xv-xvi, Foreword to Scott Michaelsen's Portable Darkness: An Aleister Crowley Reader

Thanks a lot to t3dy for gathering these

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm left handed. I use to type with only my left hand before I took a typing class to utilize both hands. I'm a poet. My poems were abstract, intuitive, emotional when I used my left hand. I started typing with both hands and my poetry changed completely. I was amazed. I wouldn't believe that such a simple thing could matter so much. I was using more concrete imagery in my poems. I was less abstract, more grounded but still kept the emotional/intuitive. It improved my poetry. I learned this at a young age and it changed my life. Thanks for the interesting post!

Dedroidify said...

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

I think this was supposed to go on the comments of the Circuit 3 megapost however?