Crowley Quote

[Wricker Dreadtemper]

"Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.

(Illustration: It is my Will to inform the World of certain facts within my knowledge. I therefore take 'magical weapons', pen, ink, and paper; I write 'incantations' — these sentences — in the 'magical language' ie, that which is understood by the people I wish to instruct; I call forth 'spirits' such as printers, publishers, booksellers and so forth and constrain them to convey my message to those people. The composition and distribution of this book is thus an act of Magick by which I cause Changes to take place in conformity with my Will.)

In one sense Magick may be defined as the name given to Science by the vulgar."

—Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, 1929


From what I gather (and I could well be mistaken in my interpretation), Crowley took on a monistic (if not pantheistic) worldview. In line with this, the significance of the capitalized words "Will", "World", and "Changes" would seem to imply a distinction between them and their lower-case counterparts.

My question is two-fold in nature: first, might that implied distinction ultimately be indicative of the line between the lower 'personal' (or singular aspectual) and the greater interpersonal (or multi-aspectual), such that "causing Change to occur in conformity with Will" would in fact be an act of awakening others to the reality that the greater Will...is theirs as well; and secondly, IF that's the case, then wouldn't this form of Magick simply be a matter of convincing One's higher Self that its many lower selves are illusory but only insofar as they appear to be separated from one another...and from Oneself?

[Wricker Dreadtemper]

Sorry, if the OP is hard to follow (I'm not at all confident I understand it very well, myself!); such ideas have proven to be notoriously difficult to put into words even for better educated people.

An analogy: imagine one of the 7 billion billion billion atoms that together compose the average human body trying to convince not only its fellow atoms that they're part of a greater whole...but also trying to convince the "greater whole" that the apparent separateness between it and its seemingly infinite many building blocks is just that - a phenomenal apparition. Daunting, to say the least.

[SnowCat]

I think one could spend a very long time coming up with numerous interpretations of what Crowley was saying. It reminds a bit of the idea that all time is now. The past and future don't really exist, they're just our way of trying to explain something that we perceive as linear. And I'm not sure that made sense either.

Snow

[random417]

Will as a capitalized Thing in Crowley s writing always refers to the True Will idea. I could write a book on just that but basically, it's that point where your will and "God's will" become the same thing... Kinda... "For pure Will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result is in every way Perfect" (AL 1:44)