The essence of the rational approach to theism is that we are rational creatures and we recognise that theism applied in certain ways is a more powerful psychological approach to life.
For the other articles on Rational Theistic Luciferianism see:
Behind Rational Theistic Luciferianism is a philosophical foundation. How can we attempt to understand reality safely, without going mad or being misled, given that so many contradictory and yet equally fervent answers exist and when we know our own senses can deceive us? Humans have been asking this question for as long as we've been able to record our questioning.
If spirituality is valuable then we need a rational approach to spirituality, and this includes understanding and working with the spiritual entities. The spiritual entities, discarnate intelligence, represent pure and abstract qualities and aspects of life and whilst their only reality is psychological reality our whole experience of life is comprised of psychological reality. So the question as to whether they are real or not is irrelevant, they are only as real as the rest of our life. A much more interesting question is in what ways can they be real, can we find meaning in the legends and stories of the spirits and whether they can be useful in our search for inner transmutation and playing with the synchronicity waves of life, both to understand and to influence our life in our pursuit of self knowledge and the great work.
Can a spiritual entity even exist, do the words "discarnate intelligence" have any possible meaning? Can you imagine another person? Have you seen another person, interacted with them, in a dream? It's certainly a capacity of the mind, and that's sufficient. Charting and living the depths and the breadth of the capacity of the human mind is exactly the challenge and dream.
So too with the divine. If as humans we find ourselves able to experience and be inspired by the divine, and find a quickening of our mortal capacities, then surely the question of in which way it is real is far more interesting than to question whether it exists at all.
A philosophical basis for understanding the world provides us with a framework for understanding our experiences and growing into new experiences.
Positive Nihilism
Positive Nihilism teaches us the meaning of life, it's a useful fallback philosophy and foundation. Even if everything else you believed in or hoped turned out to be false it's still a reason to keep on going. Positive Nihilism teaches us that the meaning and purpose of life is to find meaning and purpose in life.
Positive Nihilism acknowledges that it really looks like the universe came from nothingness, and one day will return to the same place. From Big Bang to the heat death of the universe. Therefore there is no inherent meaning or purpose in life.
So, we know that the only meaning and purpose to be found in life is the meaning and purpose that we find, create and invest in life ourselves.
But if this meaning is the only possible meaning, then it is complete meaning and purpose. As much meaning and purpose as it is possible to have in this life is within our grasp. All we have to do is do it, to find, create and invest meaning and purpose in our lives together. And the alternative is to not do that, which would be a shame.
The nice thing is that as you set about finding, creating and investing meaning and purpose in life you discover that humans have been about that task for about as long as there have been humans. And we get to join in. We are surrounded by the art and stories and ideas that humans have used to understand and find meaning and purpose in this life.
The value of Positive Nihilism is not that it provides an explanation for life, nor that in itself it is a reason to live. The value of Positive Nihilism is that we may build an understanding of life, and find reasons to live, on top of it. We can be secure that as long as we have an approach that can make sense, or at least some degree of confidence, in our understanding of life then the meaning we find and create in it has value if for no other reason than that we and others find value in it.
Making Sense of Our Experience of Life
We want to know the truth, we don't want to believe things that aren't true and we want to be able to discard falsehood. How can we recognise the truth or lies and how can we be certain? I'm particularly fond of Decartes' second meditation on certainty. From this we can derive both the scientific method and a lovely life philosophy.
Descartes' second meditation was on what you could possibly know with absolute certainty. That wasn't a dream or illusion or misunderstanding. His conclusion was famously "cogito ergo sum". Usually rendered "I think therefore I Am", but perhaps more true to his meaning is "there is thought, therefore there is a thinker". Nothing else can you know with absolute certainty. Because we experience life at all we can be certain that we exist, because
I quite like my Buddhist rendering. Buddhism that what we think of as self is mostly illusion and delusion: "in thought there is an experience of self, in the thought of the world there is an experience of other".
Best of all I like my Abrahamic rendering, based on the meaning of YHVH, Yahweh, the holiest name of God given to Moses in the burning bush, the fire that burns but does not consume when he asked G-d their name and they replied יהוה. Read from right to left these are the Hebrew letters Yodh, He, Vaw and He. Meaning I Am, or I am that I am.
Descartes' concluded in his second meditation that the only thing you can know with absolute certainty is "I Am". A mystical interpretation of this would be something like: everything we experience happens in the brain, inside the mind. Everything we think of as "outside", or "external reality", is a picture and feelings painted for us by the mind. Often from partial information or memory rather than direct sense data. So all our life happens within us, and the source of life is within us, the great I am, the inner wellspring.
So, everything else we can't be absolutely certain about. It might even be a dream. You know your memory and your senses play tricks on you and cognitive biases like confirmation bias where you look for things to confirm what you already believe distort your perception of reality.
So you build up models of the world based on your experiences and understanding. You know they might be wrong, they represent your understanding of life so far. Your world view. Maybe you have various different and even contradictory models of parts of reality with differing degrees of probability. The level of your confidence in your model of the world. And you test your models. Try them out. Build up your confidence in them. You're always willing to be wrong, but you know why you think what you think and you adjust to new information as it comes in.
That's the basis of the scientific method.
We build up models of reality knowing they're not perfect but because they're testable we're able to verify whether or not they're a better model than the one we had before.
Does God Exist
Does God exist or not? There's a definitive answer but a lot of you won't like it. Here's the answer: Does God exist or not? You can never know.
Any experience of God must be psychological and therefore, short of miracles, there can't be any objective proof. So it cannot be proven, ever. And even with a miracle you can't prove there isn't a non-miraculous explanation. So you just can't ever prove the existence of God. If God did exist, having created reality in the way it exists now, we could never prove they existed. So we'd have to stop worrying about that question.
However, the human animal has been gifted by evolution the capacity to connect with and experience what the mystics call the divine and the religious call God and the unbeliever mocks. So it's not a question of believing or not believing, it's a question of using the faculties of your mind or not.
I don't believe in the supernatural, I merely believe that the natural is far more super than we give it credit for.
Things of the Mind
A demon, or an angel for they are the same thing just by different name, in as much as they are able to have impression or interaction with your life and your experience of life is a thing of the mind. An entity constructed of the same thing your whole life is constructed of. Psyche.
Things of the mind can be real, like depression or friendship.
Things of the mind can be shared like an emotion or an experience.
Things of the mind can be older than any individual and evolve and grow like an idea or culture.
So it's all in your mind. Everything. It's all in your mind, and in everyone else's mind too. We share them, the angels and demons. We are made of them and they are made of us.
They are aspects of the divine, as are we. They are legends and stories, they are thoughts and ideas, they are a part of history and our collective psyche.
Raw life, living dreams, they are made of the tears of the lost, they are shared consciousness, the gods and the Djinn, the archetypes alive within our life, myths and rumours, our worst thoughts and our highest aspirations projected out into
You can derive a living spirituality as a powerful to live from first principles and the nature of consciousness, understanding the role and value of myth and legend in shaping our collective psyche through history. So the metaphors and language and symbols of religion and spirituality have enormous power simply through their psychological reality. They both represent, act as a metaphor, and within our psyche can "be" our abstract thought and reasoning about the behaviour of the universe both physical and metaphysical.
Our subconscious mind forms gods out of the lives we live for none of us are separate from those around us and ideas and concepts are shared and can be bigger and older than any individual. It's a facet of evolution and the way we think together and our minds are formed in relation to one another from what came before. What the conscious rational mind thinks it believes is more or less irrelevant. Such a small part of the totality of who we are. What we call God is simply the way our subconscious connects to and interacts with "everything".
In my own life and the lives of others I have seen that transcendent experiences are beautiful, especially shared ones. Religions of all kinds seem to chart humanity's attempt to find and honour those experiences in their lives and all have varying degrees of success and sometimes horrible failure in that goal as they are all human constructs and symptoms of the human condition.
From Buddhism and our experience of our own mind we intuit a monistic approach to understanding the divine; pantheistic, polytheistic, neoplatonic, gnostic and monistic.
The first hierarchy, the most powerful of angels who do not suffer mortal eye are closest to G-d by proximity and nature for there is no difference. The Cherubim and Seraphim are closest to G-d partaking most directly of the divine light and nature, casting their rays onto the lower hierarchies of archangels and angels who in their turn cast forth the divine light unto the mundane spheres in which all things live and move and have their being.
As we experience individuation from the undifferentiated unconscious whole as a waking into life so too the gods and goddesses are individuated (within our minds if nowhere else for there is nowhere else for us) aspects of the divine whole.
Magick as Self Knowledge
The occult path is a path of self knowledge and magickal activation. Magickal activation, self initiation, means going down the rabbit hole and living in a world where magick is real, but you give that word magick its meaning through the dance and interplay of internal and external reality that our lives are made up of. Tread out into the abyss and face yourself, wherever that may take you.
No person is an island entire of itself; every person
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
Although perhaps it's more accurate to say that the apparently unconnected island universes, the stars of our galaxy of people who shine and dim in cosmic disharmony, are all connected via the continental shelf and troughs and stretches of deep ocean that make up the collective unconscious. How we all influence each other and are pulled by the same currents without our conscious knowledge.
As Pausanias of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi famously demanded: know thyself.
To know thyself is to be revealed, to open up and unfurl, to bring light to the darker recesses and crevices and crags of the mind and to bring all your capacity and intellect and fortitude of being to every task. To see with undimmed and unveiled eyes, not shirking or shrinking from what you see. Neither false pride nor shame nor fear to hide the sight. To woo the Leviathan of the id, the primal urge and surge, and bring waking light into the realms of the unconscious. The submerged beast, the demon that rules the deep, the best of us and the hidden part. This is self actualisation, self knowledge, individuation, the path of the adept.
We're all shaped by the world, our environment and our relationship with it. None of us come from nothing but we have all been shaped and formed by culture and trauma, our own personal history within the wider history. Both psychologically and genetically we are the product of what came before, the offspring and offshoot of all history has produced - with us at the pinnacle and in the now, the breaking edge of the wave. Therefore to understand yourself requires that you understand the world, and life, the universe and everything. The pressures and currents that shaped us and shape events and shift whole worlds and bring them into being and smash them into dust.
This is why communication is so important, how do you understand and communicate yourself? Can you demonstrate understanding by forumulating it with words. The magickal diary, communicating meaning on the substance and ways of your own journey. How do you explain yourself in all your paths and dimensions and aspects.
Know thyself, find and do your true will, who really are you, what do you like, what do you want out of life, with your history and faculties and abilities and desires how best can you be fulfilled and feel free and happy and work and be creative and productive to the full of all your potentials, how can you blaze with life and find the best and most that life has for you. These, in degrees, are all the same questions.
The meaning and purpose of life is to find and create meaning and purpose in life.
Much of the power and substance of the occult path consists of creating and finding personal and mythological significance and correspondences and associations within your own practise and life and out into the wider world. The signs and sigils and the gods and goddesses, the demons and Jinn, the angels and Seraphim, the crystals, the houses of the zodiac, the symbolism of tarot and the Sefirot of the Qabala and their meanings. These are all symbols that may have personal significance to us, but also carry a deeper and ancient mythological significance that have been woven through the psyche of humanity across the ages and woven into culture and everything that humanity has wrought.
As you work with these symbols in ritual, on the altar and in art and in your study and understanding, you also find them in life and the art of others and the themes and ideas that these symbols represent and have come to mean have some universal significance. This means that they carry significance not just within your own mind but everywhere you go within external reality and the internal reality of those you brush by to some extent or other. These symbols and their presence within your own psyche and life echo out in the deeper and ancient parts.
As we build personal significance through understanding and carry it with us within our psyche it is a conscious and unconscious presence and motivator within all we do. In this way the effect of our magick and ritual is primarily psychological and with the goal of inner transmutation, but its effects echo out into the world through everything we do.
Everything you are is expressed in everything you do.
In order to change the world all you need to do is to change yourself in the right way.
The power of this symbolism and the magick and energy that it corresponds to, those universal elements of human intelligence stretched out across the whole of the now and back into the past, depends on the depth that you let it in and the power of the correspondences and associations that you create. Your magick is a network, a net. All our magick together interwoven nets of mythological beauty and significance, an internet of beauty and life and power.
The personal occult practise, and how we can come together in cults for the cult mind, then revolves around these symbols and their significance which comes through correspondences and associations.
Shiva who is bliss and the joyful destroyer, friend of the poor and of the snake. The snake who is Satan, the Devil, Lucifer the fallen angel of the Hebrew pantheon.
In this pantheon the destroyer is called Abaddon or Apollyon, who is death and the grave which in Greek is the god Hades.
Amongst the Hebrew pantheon is found Michael who is war, leader of the armies of heaven, my name and one of my personal deities.
The myths and legends overlap and the gods call to each of us in different ways. The call to dance with fire.
Associations and correspondences are how neural nets work. Both the neural nets in our brain and the software ones out of which we are crafting raw and artificial intelligence. Associations in particular are how memory works. The occult path is working with the mystical, the essence, the spiritual, the abstract, the common and archetypal and shared meaning and associations in harmony with the operation of our mind. The occult therefore are the ruling principles by which Artificial General Intelligence will operate, however constrained.
William Gibson prophesied in Neuromancer that when true AI arises the old gods will be found within it. Such a deep insight into the nature of intelligence.
The gods and goddesses, the angels and demons, have life within our psyche because we give them life. And our psyche stretches as far as our understanding and the limits of our world, back as far in time and stretching out as far in space and through as many dimensions and worlds, as our imagination permits. If we take off the limits.
If the source and essence and embodiment of love or of all anger or all war or of all mischief be alive within your psyche then they are a wellspring of life and power to you, living and moving and active. It is of you but stretches beyond the individual as personal self dissolves into universal self, Atman and Brahman; the self common to all humanity and all history and all the universe. Lucifer the self archetype and light bringer through which the cosmic winds blow and the black flame blazes life. The available power to you, the available will and force, is all the will of the universe if only you would find it.
But perhaps we stray not that far, nonetheless we may know ourselves absent the limits of those without imagination those who would not see the gods and dance with fire.
