“I am a god of War” — Liber AL vel Legis, Aleister Crowley.
Spirituality is not pleasantness, and the gods do not confer peace. Instead, the Divine makes things difficult for His favorites.
Indeed, those who live easy lives do not seem to learn much, and, often, those to whom things come easily give up prematurely. Continue reading “Daily Meditation: The War of the Spirit”
“Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation” — Oscar Wilde.
Today, nothing solicits more applause than someone announcing that they are true to themselves or that they will be from now on. It is the stuff of prime time television. The assumption of society is, of course, that the individual has bravely freed themselves from the assumptions of society.
Today, “individuality” is, above all else, a collective act. Continue reading “Daily Meditation: Becoming Yourself Against the Pressures of Conformity”
“A free life cannot acquire many possessions, because this is not easy to do without servility to mobs or monarchs” — Epicurus.
I have moved country a few times in my life. This is not a particularly easy thing to do, since it means giving up not only routines, seeing friends in that part of the world, and so on, but giving up possessions. I am not a particularly materialistic person, and have given away paintings that I have painted, books — in what had seemed to be an ever-expanding library — and so on.
One of the many great things about researching (as I do whenever I am writing a book) is that if you push far enough, and do actual research rather than just ego-massaging, you have a different worldview at the end as you did at the beginning. It is, perhaps, a bit like leaving one country for another.
We treat knowledge as a possession — as something, that, like our clothing, car, smart phone, etc., shows who we are. But it is, in fact, a discipline. It is getting ready for war — an internal war with our self. It is getting ready to battle knowledge that has become stuck and has been transformed into the ego. Continue reading “Daily Meditation: Acquiring Anti-Books”
The Spiritual Survival 