Thelema is still a minority among minorities as sects, faiths and movements go. But because of its core concept - that each of us discover and live by the innate code, the true Will, that we carry within us - it is fragmenting quite splendidly. As, I stress, it was intended to do by its prophet, Aleister Crowley. Crowley's mystical and magical system in A.A. is quite prescriptive in its early grades, and has a full curriculum for most of the Tree of Life's phases. But he acknowledged that this was not going to appeal to everyone, and that one could do one's True Will without joining this fraternity, or even knowing of its existence.

But, with no Pope, no Congregation of the Faith, no second Prophet (except for a few flakes with websites filled with ungrammatical English) and no Global Board of Examiners, Thelema will always have a myriad variants of its own orthodoxy. There are various orders and fraternities that offer their own versions, but they are constrained by their own ordinances not to interfere with others too much. Whether their emphasis is socio-political (the Ordo Templi Orientis is partly in this camp) or mystico-magical (the Thelemic Order of the Golden Dawn, or the Temple of Thelema would fit this), they offer what they offer and look for people who want to join.

My own bias is towards the mystical, magick being of relatively marginal practical interest to me: though that inner configuration changes from time to time. But I have never felt impelled to become a great Adept, even though the wisdom and transcendence of inner division that Hermetic Qabalah offers always preoccupy me and draw me on. Almost inevitably, living in such a zone of predisposition, I find myself not perpetually enraptured by so-called reason.

Reason, as I comprehend it, involves a certain series of mental procedures for dealing with sense data and intellectually derived information that the reasoner endeavours to use to separate himself from his own emotional reactivity and prior biases. I employ it myself on this blog, attempting to avoid over-statements or ludicrous positions. I also find that in the end, I need to fail in this, because I agree with Crowley (and the Book of the Law) that the True Will is supra-rational. As the Book says, “Also reason is a lie; for there is a factor infinite and unknown; & all their words are skew-wise.” This has always seemed to me self-evident. Still, it's not hard to see how any number of near-fascists (or actual fascists) have been enticed by Thelemic or quasi-Thelemic philosophies. The True Will dispenses with reason as anything more than a series of arbitrary processes based on pre-existing biases, needs, anxieties and obliviousness. It is ineluctable: it will not be denied, being “the flame that burns in every heart of man and in the core of every star. I am Life and the giver of Life, yet therefore is knowledge of me the knowledge of death.” Thus, it makes us miserable until we grasp what it actually means to us.

That said, there is still the material world to be dealt with. I work for a large company whose goals are little related to those of my True Will, save that the job enables me to earn my living, and continue trying to accomplish my own “death” as I look to express that True Will. Doing so rationally is Thelemic in its facilitating my irrationality, or hopeful supra-rationality.

Perhaps paradoxically, the rationalistic wing of Thelema, which would include my transcendental materialist, is one of the more significant groupings. There are some very articulate bloggers in this area, whose words are worth exploring. I'm not saying such “rationalists “ (I need a better term, but can't think of anything other than “materialists”) do not accept the wayward wildness of the True Will, but the views they formulate are often at odds with the dissolution-and-ecstasy philosophy Crowley expounded. He was openly agnostic about such topics as reincarnation, the immortality of the soul or the existence of God (as understood in the Abrahamic faiths, at least), but this faction appears actively antagonistic to such notions, and sometimes antagonistic to those holding them. To cite one example, I've taken this from a post on www.erwinhessle.com/blog:

A recent discussion over on heruraha.net about reincarnation saw Jim Eshelman make the following statement in response to the statement that “There are innumerable arguments against reincarnation”:

Which I’m not going to rehash or enter into. My experience confirms to me, with certainty matching or exceeding that of any other certainty in the whole range of my experience, that reincarnation is a simple fact. Take it or leave it, I’m not going to get dragged into that discussion.

....We can make a statement such as “my experience confirms to me … that the Sun goes around the earth.” In fact, of course, my experience tells me nothing of the sort. All my experience does is provide me with observations of the Sun at different stations of the sky. It is my reason, my rational faculty, that ties those observations together and infers not only a circular path in the sky, but a correspondingly circular path “under” the earth. In this particular case, of course, my own reason tells me that the earth actually goes around the Sun, which nicely demonstrates the fallibility of experience even if it were true that it could provide any kind of explanation, which it can’t.

Either way, it should be clear that any statement along the lines of “my experience confirms this as fact” is quite simply untrue.

Here I must admit I know Jim Eshelman (though not Erwin Hessle) and the man is quite capable of distinguishing between a provable scientific fact (the earth's motion in relation to the Sun) and something almost impossible to verify factually, which is the existence and significance of past lifetimes. Hessle, like so many “rational” people does not seem to recognise that his own criteria for rationality are as much a belief system, or part of one, as Eshelman's criteria for reincarnation. Unconsciously for the most part, we choose a set of parameters for our assessment of life, and proceed thencefrom.

Further, Eshelman did not use the form of words - “my experience confirms this as fact” - that Hessle attributes to him, only saying his experience confirms to him, with certainty matching or exceeding that of any other certainty in the whole range of his experience, that reincarnation is a fact. Hessle seems troubled by the idea of beliefs that conflict with his own. If my perception of his attitude is correct, he supports a notion that goes against the most fundamental principle of Thelema.

Thelema Philosophia http://thelema.ashami.com is an avowedly atheistic blog that “views Liber AL vel Legis as a product of Crowley's subconscious, on a par with other channelled texts such as Blavatsky's The Voice of the silence, or the Alice Bailey and Seth materials.” The author seems to be one J. Ash Bowie, who writes and thinks well, and has sharpened some of my own opinions in doing so. I say “avowedly” atheistic because the writer is capable of mystical flights: “Let your connection flow through you, that True Will of glorious ancestry unbroken from the first moment of time, that Will which is incredibly and perfectly You.”

But I begin to lose him when he writes on Apophenia (the perception of apparently meaningful connections derived from otherwise unrelated phenomena or data) :

“On the whole, I’ve come to the conclusion that occultism has limited utility in developing a mature sense of self and meaning. While it can play a beneficial transitional role, as it did for me, in the end occultism’s tendency to induce apophenia prevents seeing actual patterns in the environment and within the self, overcoming any issues of inadequacy, developing personal agency, and living a fully genuine life. Moreover, occultism doesn’t solve real problems, whether global, social, or personal.

My instant response when I read this was, To what type of occultism are you referring? The mystery schools with which I've had personal contact aim very much to break down infantile and limiting patterns of selfhood, to permit a broader understanding to emerge (not I hasten to add, be “created” by the occultist). I'm not sure that occultism (as I've encountered it) aims to solve global or social problems, except as a very broad kind of goal, but I've seen it remove some personal ones. But logical analysis of both the teaching and praxis within such schools will often reveal both to be gobbledygook by socially accepted standards. They are designed to help transform the pre-rational self, the subconscious mind, not produce “solutions” to conventionally conceived “problems”. Most people fear such a process because it is non-rational, and unyielding of comforting analysis. The connections practitioners form in their minds are not expected ones. Therein lies its power to transform.

The rationalist-materialists (I'm still looking for a better phrase that's non-derogatory) are a part of the Thelemic spectrum as much as any other views are. The fact that many of them aim to present a coherent philosophy only helps Thelema as far as introducing to newcomers. But long ago I clued into the fact that what we call reason is always highly subjective, and thus arbitrary. As a result, it limits itself to its own horizons, when it should be the place whence we go out into the more unexpected regions of our personal universes. There, our ideas of what is so and not so will lose their clear definition, and the supra-rational can peep through our own cloudbanks.