My own concept of faith was conditioned by The Process, which used the definition: “Faith is the innate knowledge of the fundamental rightness of all things, whether positive or negative.” That is, in my own redaction, “Stuff is the way it is. This is okay, so carry on.” As a core operating philosophy on bad days at work, I still find such stoicism invaluable.

It’s a stoicism that embodies (perhaps like all stoicism?) the notion that, things as they are being accepted, we can continue to act and to grow, and so to enjoy. It is thus disguisedly Dionysian, which is my best excuse for using it as my bedrock in approaching Thelema. The Thelemic creed is unabashedly Dionysian, the Thelemite aiming for ecstatic dissolution of separate consciousness as the means of transcending life’s contending dualities. Since I’m still working on that state, I fall back on the aforementioned version of faith more often than not.

This doesn’t do much to address the faith vs. atheism debate, or its kissing cousin, religion vs. atheism. I insist on the distinction between the two, since faith is about personal experience solely, and religion is about personal experience as viewed through a collective lens and collective attitudes and behaviour. Thelema insist it is about the former, though it at least flirts with the latter. The ‘sectarian’ differences among Thelemites – the bikers-on-mescaline or Goth-tattoos-R-Us schools; the austere, courtly mystics; the wild characters who may or may not have achieved genuine integration of spirituality with their everyday lives; and so on – show Thelema comes very close to being a religion, while forever demurring at a complete embrace. But there is always an underlying murmur about the extent to which ‘the spiritual’ is real. The Holy Guardian Angel, the ray of the Ultimate focused into the life of each human being, and its realisation through ecstatic union, is the aim of any serious student of ‘the mysteries’ yet the HGA is, quite deliberately, never defined too closely. Each person has to resolve for him or herself both the nature of this entity/being/plane/perspective as well as the nature of our relationship with it. Constant ecstasy might have worked for Ramakrishna, but not for us who live in the world of phone bills, friendships and paid employment. Or at least, manifesting it doesn’t.

But while ecstasy overwhelms worry and doubt, worry and doubt, given time, too often undermine ecstasy. The ‘thing’ in which we place our faith is all too easily named and defined, and becomes yet another concept for the darker parts of the mind, rooted in fear and confusion, to attack. Moving on through it, “one star against a field of stars,” is absolutely necessary to avoid a calcification of ideas and the onset of … well, religion.

Here I find faith comes in most strongly. The early years of daily practice are about instilling the habits of reflection and of dissolving set ideas about life, selfhood and what is meaningful. At a certain point, or really, at repeated points, the constant suggestion to ourselves that there is something to be realised, something to be admitted into the constrictedness of our thinking, produces a response.

That leads back to the topic that consumes the atheism vs. belief debate. Was ‘the Divine’ created and/or evolved by us, or pre-existent to all our ideas? Are we auto-suggesting the HGA into existence, or gradually discovering it?

On the verbal level at which this debate usually occurs, it easy to conclude we have definitely created it, even if it arose spontaneously from instinctual drives within us. But when the shift over to faith happens, or I have the occasional glimpses that give rise to conscious faith in the beginning, honesty compels a different view. The various forms in which the HGA appears to us before our central nervous systems are prepared for full conscious interaction indicate something with far more ‘punch’, far more insistence on uplift and joy, than anything I can personally create or imagine. I can come up with the polysyllabic adjectives for it, and not a few neat analogies, but the force of the actuality is mind-stopping.

If that solely comes from within, and has no ultimate transpersonal or collective aspect, then what I term ‘my mind’ clearly has vastly more cogency and vital power than conventional living, thinking, working and dreaming would indicate. It leads back to the echo or mirror-image of the God/No God debate. We experience so much more in such moments of opening that our expressions of our humanity within the consensual world, and our definitions of divine and mundane, of supernal and human, no longer hold up as pure disbelievers insist they should.