These things are symptoms of political inefficiency. In a properly organized society like ours, nobody has any opportunities for being noble or heroic. Conditions have got to be thoroughly unstable before the occasion can arise.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World [Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
Did our ancestors go peeping about with dark lanterns, and do we walk at our ease in broad sunshine? Where is the manifestation of our light? By what symptoms do you recognise it? What are its signs, its tokens, its symptoms, its symbols, its categories, its conditions? What is it, and why? How, where, when is it to be seen, felt, and understood? What do we see by it which our ancestors saw not, and which at the same time is worth seeing?
Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey [Amazon, Internet Archive]
Commentary (ΛΖ) on ΚΕΦΑΛΗ ΛΖ Dragons in Liber CCCXXXIII, The Book of Lies by Aleister Crowley.
“In this chapter, the idea is given that all limitation and evil is an exceedingly rare accident; there can be no night in the whole of the Solar System, except in rare spots, where the shadow of a planet is cast by itself. It is a serious misfortune that we happen to live in a tiny corner of the system, where the darkness reaches such a high figure as 50 per cent.
The same is true of moral and spiritual conditions.” [via]
Commentary (ΛΕ) on ΚΕΦΑΛΗ ΛΕ Venus of Milo in Liber CCCXXXIII, The Book of Lies by Aleister Crowley.
“The female is to be regarded as having been separated from the male, in order to reproduce the male in a superior form, the absolute, and the conditions forming the one absolute.” [via]
I Make Myself Invisible in Articles by Aleister Crowley.
“I always think of Mr Wells’ First Men in the Moon. How to act when the fundamental conditions of life are changed? The danger of making fatal mistakes is always present.” [via]
Recent article “Occupy Wall Street and the Poetry of Now-Time” by Aaron Gell at the New York Observer links to CHAOS: THE BROADSHEETS OF ONTOLOGICAL ANARCHISM from T. A. Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism in Hakim Bey and Ontological Anarchy
“In his 1985 cult anarchist treatise T.A.Z., Hakim Bey, aka the poet Peter Lamborn Wilson, described what he dubbed the temporary autonomous zone: ‘a guerrila operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination).’ Which is as good a description of Occupy Wall Street as any.
Such zones have flourished, however briefly, around the world, often in secret, Mr. Bey wrote, but in in contemporary America he thought such a space would most likely emerge after three conditions were met. First, people needed to understand not only how the State (Wall Street, the One Percent, whatever) had enslaved them but also ‘the ways in which we are ensnared in a fantasy in which ideas oppress us.’ When the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek showed up in the park a few weeks back, he compared this process of awakening to the John Carpenter movie They Live, in which the protagonist, Nada, finds a pair of special sunglasses which reveal that the advertising billboards all around him carry hidden messages: submit, stay asleep, conform, consume. The dollar bill? This is your god. (And spoiler alert: the rich are all aliens.)
The second condition was that the internet would need to evolve into a useful tool of dissent and organization.
And third, Mr. Bey wrote, ‘The State must progress on its present course in which hysterical rigidity comes more and more to mask a vacuity, an abyss of power.’
Check, check, check.”
and also suggests
“If you really want to understand Occupy Wall Street, you have to talk to the poets.”
β De Arte Kabalistica from the Book of Wisdom or Folly in The Libri of Aleister Crowley
“The Tendencies of thy Mind lie deeper far than any Thought, for they are the Conditions and the Laws of Thought; and it is these that thou must bring to Nought.” [via]