From: lapena@athena.cs.uga.edu (Chito Lapena)
Newsgroups: alt.magick
Subject: Re: What is reality?
Date: 11 Apr 92 22:30:58 GMT
Organization: University of Georgia, Athens

In article <joshua.703007676@coombs> joshua@coombs.anu.edu.au (Joshua Geller) writes:
>lapena@athena.cs.uga.edu (Chito Lapena) writes:
>
>>In article <1992Apr5.223050.10775@mailer.cc.fsu.edu> rose@fsu1.cc.fsu.edu writes:
>
>>Will is the only reality.
>
>huh? I thought reality was the interaction between the individual point of
>view and the perceived universe. wherever do you get this one?
>
Where do I have to get it from?


>>                          But you must realize that there 
>>are several different levels and different kinds of will. 
>>Take for instance, the hierarchy from  individual will, to 
>>communal will, to societal will, to the will of the species. 
>
>let's see, I know what individual will is. what is communal wil
>and societal will? how do you differentiate between them? howtdo
>you know what they are (take a poll?) ?this is very sonorous and
>rhetorically sound; I don't seem to extract any meaning from it, though.
>and the will of the species? come on now. 
>
I referred to an individual's relation to society for the sake of example. 
I was thinking along the lines that communal will would be that will
that is common to the people that are closer to you (like your friends
and family) and societal will being things like trends of ignorance
or whatever, perpetuated through television, etc. It's up to
the individual will to decide which wills are above or below its own.
but the hierarchy exists, nevertheless.

It's good that you ask about the will of the species. Now if a homosexual
sees this, he/she might say "what a backwards kind of guy you are," presuming
that what I mean by this is that homosexuals must die. 
One of the aspects of the will of the species, 
referring to sexuality is this: when man and woman copulate, they can make kids,
if man and woman do not copulate, they do not make kids. By that,
the species will doesn't care if anyone is homosexual but if the entire species
were to survive, everyone must not be homosexual. That is not the same as 
the delusion that nature is intolerant of homosexuals. Neither
does it imply that heterosexuals must bear heterosexual kids. The nature
of this will was understood and we were able to change the boundaries
through artificial insemination.


>>The higher wills set boundaries as to where the lower 
>>wills   may freely move about. If a lower will wishes for 
>>its boundaries to be somewhat altered, it must negotiate 
>>with the higher wills. You can work out an example using 
>>a societal model. 
>
>sounds pretty communist to me. are you just making this up as you go
>along? what is this, the greatest good of the greatest number? 
>subordinate yourself to the greater good of the whole? what total shit.
>
The trick is that your individual will perceives what these levels of
will would be. You decide on what is good and you decide on the 
meaning of the numbers. If your perceptions actually model a different reality
(ie a different will) then you will gain an understanding of that
will and perhaps also the ability to exert influence on it in some way.
Otherwise the perception will be a delusion, which is quite different
from a good illusion.



>>                                      Hermetic philosophy 
>>organizes substances into the four elements of matter: air, 
>>water, earth and fire. These four elements (taken at their 
>>less mundane interpretation) may be seen as wills at an 
>>equal (or close to equal) level, whose interactions form 
>>substances. The Air of the wise is the abstracted form of 
>>an object (its concept, its DNA, its crystal lattice structure, 
>>blueprint, etc.) the Fire of the Wise is the abstracted 
>>energy that holds the object's form together (tendons and 
>>ligaments, the rivets in a building, electronic interaction, 
>>etc.) the Water of the wise is the medium (the land, the 
>>womb, the clay, the metal), and the earth of the wise is 
>>the stuff extracted from the medium used to form the 
>>substance (the extraction is made as a result of the 
>>interaction of the above three wills, forming a new object
>>with a new will. eg: the baby, the tree, the mountain, the car).
>>The definition of an object as earth, air, fire or water 
>>depends on its use. No earthly object is any one of the 
>>above but is made up of proportions of them.
>
>15 years of study of various hermetic writings have left me ignorant of
>this particular interpretation; perhaps you'd like to share with us all
>your sources for it? a justification for it might be nice too.

I would be curious to know which Hermetic writings you have studied. I am
presently working on the Musaeum Hermeticum (I confess that 
on an earlier post I made an incorrect reference to the first page
of the introduction. The stuff about sensationalism is actually later in the
in the introduction).

The ideas are solid within matter but the particular *correspondences* 
to the elements were from Dion Fortune's _The Mystical Qabalah_ and
from Mary Anne Atwood's _Hermetic Philosophy and Alchemy_. The
definitions I give above are only one of the variants of the element set.
Also, keep in mind that they had to be simplified for the sake of clarity.
Saying that the elements only stood for a single set of things is like
saying that a single mathematical formula can only be applied to one thing.
It's only a model- a useful one, I think. Justification would take up
a bit more space and I will e-mail you if you're interested.


-chito


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