Theos-Talk Archives (December 1999 Message tl00156)

In a message dated 12/14/99 10:26:59 AM Central Standard Time,
Drpsionic@aol.com writes:

> There's a difference?????
>
>  Chuck the Heretic
>
There once was a Christian ascetic and follower
of Origen who held the apparently paradoxical
Socratic view that all evil is done involuntarily.
This is because the madman (everyone) has
not the internal integrity of being to be fully
in self-control of their manifestations.  Lacking
such soyphrosyne, we have impulses (theleses)
but no single willpower (thelein, thelesis).  Do
to our inner fragmentation, we cannot really
willfully do.  This was later taught by Duns
Scotus.  We have the potential to will just
as our normal I has the potential to realize
the Self.  Only Self has will.  Ordinary I has
impulsive little willings that conflict with each
other and keep "me" inwardly divided.  That
is why new years resolutions and diets don't work.
This was later picked up again by Boehme.
>From there, Aleister Crowley got it.  The difference
between the real saint (not some "official" one) and
the madman is the former can wholly will and the
later cannot because one has the integrated willpower
of self-control and self-mastery and the other does not.
Even Nietzsche taught same.  Ordinary man is a tension,
a half yes, and a half no, and thus, not really anything
at all.  The ubermensch is the one who has become wholly
a yes and a no, and who has developed self-control/self-mastery
to such a degree (evolving through the stages of camel - a
servant/beast of burden, a lion - that has gained strength thereby,
to become the child, who plays in eternity - Zarathustra's motif),
he is truly will.  He is voluntary human.  Ordinary mass men
are the involuntary passive shadows of their potential selves.
Madman are just a little bit lower than normal person in the
degree of what Augustine called the bondage of the will and
the Greeks called the incapacity of one who has not created
his or her will.  Potential for will is part of original equipment
but to be actualized, will must be created just as someone
may be born with athletic talent but must train to become
athlete.  In mastering impulses and reactions in cell,
saint _creates will_ (I think people take this metaphorically
when it is meant literally) while madman looses it.
But no need outer cell.  It is the inner cells that defeat
or make us.  LSD trips, remember most LSD research
was done in Prague and not by State, manifest your
own mind.  What you do with your own mind determines
the kind of trip you have.  Americans experimented with
Esalen Lilly-tanks.  Under sensory deprivation, the mind
is left to its own devices.  How it manifests reveals its
habits.  How mind deals with itself/habits determines
what sensory deprivation experience will be.  In essence,
mind and will, in how mind-will deal with self, determines
what mind-will will be.  It is process of on-going creation
that is either up and ascending or down and descending.

Grigor