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There is a striking passage that is worth considering. Popper describes what he calls ‘the paradox of tolerance’: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies ; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force ; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument ; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal. Another of the less well-known paradoxes is the paradox of democracy, or more precisely, of majority-rule; i.e. the possibility that the majority may decide that a tyrant should rule.”

Never has this seemed more timely to me than our current historical moment. Plato believed that democracies were bound to lead to tyranny. I truly hope America will prove Plato wrong in 2024.

Okay I know this one isn’t very occulty, but it’s one I was reading when I joined and I just finished it. Been wanting to read this for a long time, one of a number of books recommended by Robert Anton Wilson. Just finished vol. 1 - ‘The Spell of Plato’ and wow it’s a great one! Plato the mystic is one thing, and Plato the political totalitarian is quite another. I’m still processing the distinction that must be made between the ideas of Socrates and the ideas of Plato. I remember in college reading The Republic and not being very impressed by Plato’s political theories. Popper skewers Plato’s political arguments, but also suggests possible reasons for Plato’s aversion to democracy. The story of Plato and Socrates’ relationship to the state, to tyranny and democracy in their own tumultuous time, is more complex than I ever realized. This is a book to reread. I need to digest it before moving on to volume 2 - ‘The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath’.

I was initially a little put off by the author’s style, but once I recognized that this was a very personal story for him, l could make allowances. He tells it in a rather slippery, roundabout way, very subjective; deliberately enigmatic rather than straightforward and academic. As the narrative proceeds, it makes more sense why he chooses to relay his account the way he does. I just hadn’t expected it going in. For a long time I’ve wanted a means to reconcile science and philosophy with mysticism. I began to study Eastern spiritual traditions because Western religions made no sense to me other than as systems of social control and mythology. Mystical strains of philosophy that flourished in the ancient world were driven underground by Christianity, only to survive as western occult traditions. I’m delighted to discover with this book another compelling argument for the mystical roots of Western philosophy — via the guy who invented logic, no less! I refer to Parmenides. The entire book seems to be a set-up for a more elaborate thesis about Parmenides and the tradition of which he was a part, and what became of it. It ends on sort of a cliffhanger. The author explicitly tells us at the end that it is really only the beginning, with more to come. I’m looking forward to reading the book that follows, called Reality.

Oscar Ichazo was the Bolivian mystic who founded the Arica School, which garnered some attention in the New Age scene of the early seventies. Ichazo taught a philosophy he came to call ‘Integral Philosophy,’ and a method for attaining enlightenment and higher states of consciousness, for awakening and integrating the Absolute and the Relative Minds. Ichazo passed on a few years ago, but the Arica School is still around, although they keep a low profile these days.

Religious Consciousness is an intellectual tour de force that offers a highly compressed account of the development of Western philosophy from the point of view of his Integral Philosophy. It’s not exactly an analysis of the history of philosophy as such, but rather what the author calls ‘a synthetic look at Western philosophy.’ Focusing specifically on the theme of the ‘Mind-as-such,’ Ichazo takes us from Homeric theology through the early Greek philosophers, Hellenistic neo-Platonism, ancient Egyptian religion, the Hebrew religion, the pagan Mystery Schools Zoroastrianism, early Christianity, the Grail mythos, the Renaissance, 18th century Enlightenment thinkers, 19th century psychology, and into modern 20th century philosophy, tracing through all these doctrines humankind’s efforts to reconcile the Divine Mind of the Absolute with the relative mind of the human being and the various forms this has taken as it has developed in history.

It is a dense read, with only occasional source citations, but an enthralling and illuminating one if you are familiar with the philosophical doctrines Ichazo cites, as well as with the author’s own method of trialectical reasoning. For what he has undertaken here is a trialectical analysis of the development of philosophy in the West. He considers the philosophers and their ideas in groups of three, placing then into the ’trialectical matrix’ of active / reactive / function / result. Trialectics is an important concept in Ichazo’s teaching, and is considered indispensable for understanding reality. In an explanation as compressed and brief as any in the book, Ichazo explains:

“Integral Trialectics demands that a full proposition has to be observed from three different specific angles because this is a structural reality and the points of view are each valid from their own angle of observation. I have to insist that Integral Trialectics is not a dialectical description of the Proclean ‘negation of negation’ or the successive processes of thesis, antithesis and synthesis where each supersedes and negates the preceding aspect. It is, instead, a structural pattern where the three aspects coexist simultaneously and, considered as a whole, they present a result rather than a synthesis, meaning that the whole of three aspects results in the stable and complete definition of something. In other words, here the relative aspect is formulated as a complete notion or a state of the process.”

So, for example, in his trialectic analysis of 19th century German Idealism, the ideas of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel are considered. “As we have seen in this bird’s eye view of the three great German Idealists, their main thematic is to equate the Divine with the Mind in itself,’ which in the final analysis is the Absolute thought or the mind in its Unity and Self-knowledge.” When it comes to consideration of ‘the philosophy of the Will that makes intentionality a fundamental and basic ground of the most inward nature of the Self,’ he cites the triad of Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. The triad of philosophers who ‘adhere to the idea of science as an alternative answer to the search for unity which, since the beginning of philosophy, has ended in an inevitable religious if not theological point of view,’ consists of Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and Henri Bergson. The triad of philosophers who represent the existentialist response to the fundamental questions of Being are Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre.

This is not a book for beginners. I really enjoyed it, probably because I’ve studied philosophy as well as the teachings of Ichazo. I think what I found inspiring about it was how the author teases out the underlying unity in the very diverse multiplicity of intellectual responses to fundamental ontological and epistemological questions. I also think the book could use footnotes and annotations for those of us who ain’t scholars.

Liber Aleph, or The Book of Wisdom or Folly, is one of Aleister Crowley's masterworks. It’s a tour de force through Crowley's encyclopedic mind, a sequence of 208 gems of magical wisdom written during his visit to the U.S. The book is written as an epistle to his magical 'son,' to whom he dispenses fatherly advice on a broad range of occult subjects, including qabalah, magick, yoga, mystical trances, the True Will, alchemy, drugs, sex, love, death, and the education of children, among others. Crowley writes here in a deliberately archaic style, which has the effect of exalting the mind into a kind of intellectual ecstasy. The arcane subject matter is raised to the sublime by the passionate poetic voice of its author.

Written during the winter of 1917 e.v., in his apartment in Greenwich Village, Crowley composed Liber Aleph as a series of brief letters or epistles, limiting himself to a single page for each epistle. Each one is titled by a topic description in Latin. Crowley considered Liber Aleph an extended and elaborate commentary on The Book of the Law. In it he gives us many glimpses of his vision of Thelema. The Book of the Law declares that every man and every woman is a star. So it is in De Luce Stellarum (On the Light of the Stars) that Crowley writes --

It was that most Holy Prophet, thine Uncle, called upon Earth William O'Neill, or Blake, who wrote for our Understanding these Eleven Sacred Words! --

                        If the Sun and Moon should doubt
                        They'd immediately go out.

O my Son, our Work is to shine by Force and Virtue of our own Natures without Consciousness or Consideration. Now, notwithstanding that our Radiance is constant and undimmed, it may be that Clouds gathering about us conceal our Glory from the Vision of other Stars. These Clouds are our Thoughts, not those true Thoughts which are but conscious Expressions of our Will, such as manifest in our Poesy, or our Music, or other Flower-Ray of our Light quintessential. Nay, the Cloud-Thought is born of Division and of Doubt; for all Thoughts, except they be creative Emanations, are Witnesses to Conflict within us. Our settled Relations with the Universe do not disturb our Minds, as, by Example, our automatic bodily Functions, which speak to us only in the Sign of Distress. Thus all Consideration is Demonstration of Doubt; Doubt postulateth Duality, which is the Root of Choronzon.

The prose is dense and rich with idea and imagery. Crowley succinctly elucidates the roles of the mind and the True Will in the process of accomplishing the Great Work. The thinking engine of the ego-mind, fueled by the psycho-energetic combustion of mental dualisms, is the source of our thoughts; thoughts that can gather about us like clouds, and veil the stellar brilliance of our essential Self from others and even from ourselves. For Crowley, True Will is expressed as a natural unself-consciousness, an ease that flows from being harmonious with the Tao.

There are chapters on the nuts and bolts of magickal force and its operations, but there are also ecstatic philosophical paeans such as are found in the chapter On the Universal Comedy which is called Pan --

So, therefore, o my Son, count thyself happy, when thou understandest all these Things, being one of those Beings (or By-comings) whom we call Philosophers. All is a never-ending Play of Love wherein Our Lady Nuit and Her Lord Hadit rejoice; and every Part of the Play is Play. All Pain is but sharp Sauce to the Dish of Pleasure; for it is the Nature of the Universe that hath devised this everlasting Banquet of Joy.

This passage offers a cosmic vision of the Universe as the ecstatic Love Play of the supernal Thelemic deities Nuit and Hadit. The imagery also exemplifies Crowley's legendary appetite for life. In the chapter De Virtute Tolerantia (On the Virtue of Tolerance), we find an example of Thelemic ethics:

Understand then heartily, o my Son, that in the Light of this my Wisdom all Things are One, being of the Body of our Lady Nuit, proper, necessary, and perfect. There is then none superfluous or harmful, and there is none honourable or dishonourable more than another. Lo! In thine own Body, the vile Intestine is of more Worth to thee than the noble Hand or the proud Eye, for thou canst lose these and live, but not that. Esteem therefore a Thing in Relation to thine own Will, preferring the Ear if thou love Musick, and the Palate if thou love Wine, but the essential Organs of Life above these. Have Respect also to the Will of thy Fellow, not hindering him in his way save as he may overly jostle thee in thine. For by the Practice of this tolerance thou shalt come sooner to the Understanding of this Equality of all Things in Our Lady Nuit, and so the high Attainment of Universal Love. Yet in thy partial and particular Action, as thou art a Creature of Illusion, do thou maintain the right Relation of one Thing to another; fighting if thou be a Soldier, or building if thou be a Mason. For if thou hold not fast this Discipline and Proportion, which alloweth its True Will to every Part of thy Being, the Error of one shall draw all after it into Ruin and Dispersion.

Love is the law, love under will. Thelemic tolerance is based on a respect for individual differences, founded on the mystical intuition of the unity ('the Body of our Lady Nuit'), and the recognition of the infinite interrelatedness of the manifold in the world of appearances. Thelema can be seen as that 'Discipline and Proportion' which artfully trains the will to establish and maintain its harmony with cosmic love, which is after all, the law. Ceremonial magick is a tool used by Thelemites for training the will to vibrate with cosmic love.

For someone seeking to learn more about Thelema as a magickal philosophy and a spiritual discipline, Liber Aleph is a good resource. It is a challenging book and, like many of Crowley's works, one which a novice might find rather a jump into the deep end of the pool, but it is one which yields mystical rewards for the effort of contemplating its 'Wisdom or Folly.'