Yet another weird SF fan


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Yet another weird SF fan
 

Saturday, December 12, 2009

God vs. Satan, Explaining the Results

A few years ago, I wrote:

On the one hand, there was Jack Parsons, a follower of the satanist Aleister Crowley, who was trying to create titanic explosions. On the other hand, other scientists not that far away were also trying to create titanic explosions based on the theories of Albert Einstein, a follower of the uncompromising monotheist Baruch Spinoza.

I think God won that round. God's explosions outclassed Satan's.

More recently, M. Simon of Classical Values wrote about Crowley's “Magick”:

In my experience it is a mixed bag. About 1/2 get it. i.e. the exercises are to focus the body and mind. You sill have to do the work. Or as the Zen folks like to say: chop wood and carry water.

………

It is a matter of attention. Total attention.

If what is called supernatural is a matter of focusing your attention, the lesson from God's explosions outclassing Satan's is that if you focus your attention on “causing Change to occur in conformity with Will” you might achieve your goals. If you focus your attention on finding out what the real world is like, you might find things that make your earlier goals seem trivial.

Query about Aleister Crowley: Was he actually a parodist? He might have started out by writing over-the-top parodies of occultism (in which absolutely everything could be called occult) only to find that people took his bullbleep seriously. He then found that being a cult leader paid better than being a comedian…

Come to think of it, maybe something similar happened to L. Ron Hubbard…

1 Comments:

Blogger Anton Sherwood said...

I wonder how the half-life of careers in cult-leading compares to that of careers in comedy.

(Here's something funny: the CAPTCHA for this entry is liblog.)

6:10 PM  

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