Introduction to Aiwass.com

Book of Lives

I saw and heard my Holy Guardian Angel in a deeply affecting vision more than fifty years ago. Llee Heflin had a similar vision four years earlier in 1968. James Beck wrote down his vision of Aiwass in chapter 5, verse 12 of 1976’s the Book of Codes.

One vision, about two years before the vision of my Angel, I call the Book of Lives vision.

Book of Lives

My girlfriend suggested that I was perceiving a different dimension of time, a dimension at right angles to regular clock time. We experience this “other” dimension of time only in the most intimate present, for that is where it coincides with our experience of reality.

In one way or another, every practice relevant to discovering and connecting with the level of our own being labelled “Holy Guardian Angel” brings us into the present.

What I portray as a third Cartesian dimension of time for the sake of illustration in the graphic, physicists describe as a second dimension of time, an axis measured on a scale of imaginary numbers. The imaginary number i = $\sqrt{\mathrm{-1}}$ or i ² = −1.

The Science News 15 December 2021 article, titled Quantum physics requires imaginary numbers to explain reality, reviews two experiments demonstrating that complex numbers — a combination of real and imaginary numbers — are needed to explain the experimenters’ empirical results.

This is the same Journey Inwards as taken by meditators. A major component of Thelemic practice is sitting meditation, specifically Dharana, encapsulated in the term Asana.

Ritual is meditation in motion. By asserting a circle and sequentially addressing the four cardinal directions, times of day, and seasons through the symbolism of the four cardinal signs of the zodiac — Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn — one creates a psychological vortex. With practice, the circle produces a temple within which one may reach higher (more intimate) states of consciousness.

Magick — the use of sex for worship, and the recycling of hormone-laden secretions — amplifies the neuroplastic effects of Asana and Ritual. These three practices, working together, are the means of journeying inwards.

We begin by intentionally directing our orgasms to a symbol of the sky-goddess Nuit. This simple act causes a shift in our perspective, a shift that shakes the foundations of our enculturated world-view.

Science is not as important as the other three elements of ARMS (Asana, Ritual, Magick, and Science). Critical thinking, however is vitally important. Tarot, with its Tree of Life core, provides a map of consciousness and a language to describe different levels of awareness; it is the language of Liber 440. Knowledge of the carbon cycle and the biochemistry of metabolism detail how every thought ultimately comes from sunlight. A basic understanding of neurology and psychology is also useful.

An initiation is an insight which opens a new level of consciousness to waking awareness. The new perspective is accommodated by the ordeal consequent to the initiation. Without the ordeal, the insight is soon forgotten or becomes a mere eidolon.

At first, not knowing how to respond in the new world revealed by the insight, we make a mess of things and slide into the trough of the initiation-ordeal cycle. To rectify the mess we made, we must take up ARMS (Asana, Ritual, Magick, and Science).

With practice we become adept. The skills, developed while living in the new world unveiled by the insight, eventually become second nature.

Having climbed back up to the peak of the initiation-ordeal cycle, it begins again with the next step on the ladder of initiation.

Though the level of adeptship achieved by previous incarnations is passed to subsequent incarnations of the Angel as potential consciousness, each new incarnation must experience the initiatory cycles for themself. Initiation-ordeal cycles progressively link the mind-body complex to the Holy Guardian Angel.

“That which remains” is the adeptship which is passed along to subsequent incarnations of the Angel as potential consciousness.

Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley’s 72-year lifespan included three distinct periods:

1. 1875 to 1904: Darbyite childhood and disillusioned young adulthood before the Book of the Law.
2. 1904 to 1922: Reception of the Book of the Law and roughly eighteen years of productive exposition regarding its meaning and methods.
3. 1922 to 1947: Heroin addiction, efforts to monetise Thelema, and poverty.

His first life began in an Exclusive Plymouth Brethren family. His beloved and venerated father died when he was just 11 years old.

Abandoned to the cold care of his mother — whom he described as “a brainless bigot of the most narrow, logical and inhuman type” — and uncle — “a Cotton Mather minus imagination” — he suffered the usual repressions, beatings and other humiliations of an Evangelical Christian boyhood in 1880s and ’90s Victorian England. Perhaps moreso, for his trust in Jesus left with his father, he was bisexual, and his disgust with dispensationalism, and eventually all forms of religion, only grew.

His second life began when, as a 28-year-old, Aleister Crowley received Liber AL vel Legis, the Book of the Law, in 1904.

He then spent the next 18 years coping with the Book of the Law by expanding on its message in all his writing.

Crowley was an accomplished ceremonial magician and meditator before he received Liber 220. The symbolic language of Liber 440 is Tarot, both a map of consciousness and a memory palace. He rectified Tarot’s attributions in the light of 220,1:57.

There is no supernatural in reality, so it is not possible to use Tarot or I Ching, for example, to tell the future definitively. However, it is possible to use mystical methods to interact with your own unconscious mind, although the observer effect obstructs every self-conscious mystical operation. The unconscious mind is usually a mystery to waking awareness, but it is the interface between the incarnation and their Eternal Self, their Holy Guardian Angel.

Until he was 46 years old, Aleister Crowley had never held down a real job or developed saleable skills. He did not choose to make a profit from his publishing efforts. When his money ran out, he was at a loss for how to make a living.

By January, 1922, Aleister Crowley was addicted to heroin, which had been prescribed to him for the bronchitis he suffered after damaging his lungs by remaining for more than two months at high altitude while on the 1902 expedition to climb K2. Emphysema made his life a misery and only heroin seemed to help. He was never able to defeat his heroin addiction.

During this period, two of Aleister Crowley’s most useful books were published. Magick in Theory and Practice, Book 4 Part III, was published in Paris in the inopportune year 1929. The Book of Thoth was published in wartime 1944.

The inherent poverty of a heroin addict blighted the last 25 years of Aleister Crowley’s sojourn in the world, stripped away many of his superstitions and hammered his ego. This was just the beginning of the Ordeal A, the ordeal consequent of initiation to the grade Ipsissimus (most self, a misnomer).

Crowley knew that “self” is external to the Holy Guardian Angel, that self is a creation of the mind.

The gems of wisdom contained in Liber 440 are occulted by language seemingly designed to offend and enflame the ego, the sense of separate self. That language is transparent to an adept according to their level of initiation. Each re-reading of Liber 440 is a self-psychotherapy session when you take the Journey Inwards.

Crowley did not get everything right, but reading his writing over the years on my Journey Inwards, I noticed that Aleister Crowley always was there before me, expressing thoughts that have significance only to those who had experienced the initiation-ordeal cycle of the grade he was addressing. If I saw this, others who do the work will see it and realise they are not bat-shit crazy after all.

Aiwass communicated inimitable information through the mind and body of his Aleister-Crowley incarnation to the outer temporal world. That information had the shape given it by a Victorian-Era occultist and bon vivant.

James Beck

James Charles Beck was born in Los Angeles, California, at 23:30 PST on 30 November 1954, which was 07:30 GMT on 1 December in Hastings, UK, where Aleister Crowley had died precisely seven years earlier.

Jim Beck was not the reincarnation of Aleister Crowley. He was a reincarnation of Aiwass.

The fourth of five children in a family of Lutherans, he grew up in Beaverton, Oregon. He was good at languages, played piano, and was interested in comparative religion.

“Him who is silent” is Hoor-paar-kraat, Harpocrates, Horus the Child, the Son of Silence.

The described event occurred when Jim was eight years old, one morning while he was getting ready for school.

He had real skills when he received Liber 718, as evinced in the following verse from chapter five.

It takes a lot of diligent practice to produce a “well-etched radiant four-starred circle,” but his motivation was as a student, a follower, not the master.

He believed he was very much a somebody, as he had been told again and again by Aiwass. Had he come through the Ordeal B, he would have known with certainty that he was nobody — but a thin page in a thick book. Instead, he faced the Ordeal A unawares. The Ordeals X and A are blind ordeals.

The Ordeal A is the consequence of initiation to the grade Ipsissimus. The Ipsissimus enters all of the four gates of the Palace of Four Gates at once. Lesser grades enter the four gates, or doors, in turn: X, R, and B.

The Angel’s new incarnation comes into the world with the potential for initiation to the grade achieved in the previous incarnation. The initiations can come in jumbled order, but during their lifetime in the world adepts work through all the corresponding ordeals in order, from the Ordeal X onward, but an Ipsissimus faces all the ordeals at once in the Ordeal A.

In the Book of the Law, Aiwass treated the 26^th dynasty Egyptian scribe Ankh-af-na-Khonsu — author of the Stélé of Revealing which cued the writing of the Book of the Law — and Aleister Crowley as the same person.

James Beck inherited the potential-for-consciousness of an Ipsissimus. When Aiwass granted him initiation to the grade of Ipsissimus on 17 February 1977, in 77,3:26, the Ordeal A for the James Beck incarnation of Aiwass began.

James Beck’s life deteriorated after 1977. In 1980 he was in a car accident (as a passenger) in which he suffered the compound fracture of a femur. Within 13 years his wife, 181, who had loved and supported him while he soaked up red wine and made desultory efforts at writing, finally left him. In the subsequent 13 years Jim spent time as a crack cocaine addict in San Francisco; resided at a Catholic Monastery in Ava, Missouri, near his mother’s house; became a Pentecostal lay preacher; and died of bone cancer after many years of aplastic anaemia.

The demands were not met by the James Beck incarnation of Aiwass. He did not write a verse for verse comment on the Book of Codes. This task will fall to a subsequent incarnation of Aiwass.

Looking back on it, I think the James Beck incarnation could never have obeyed the ordeals given in the Book of Codes or fulfilled the stated tasks. After Crowley’s larger-than-life personality, Beck was a cypher.

Normally, the incarnation is the “person” of the Angel, but in the case of James Beck the Angel will go down in history as the person, or mask, of an important but next to unknown incarnation.

As I knew him in the last nine months of his life, by letters and telephone calls, James Beck was both bewildered and narcissistic to the point of solipsism. I was shocked at his decline, and deeply saddened.

He never realised that the ordeal follows the initiation. To initiate means to begin. He never had the gumption to seriously face his all-encompassing ordeal.

James Charles Beck died on 9 January 2004, about five weeks after his 49^th birthday.

Duteous One

I am the subsequent incarnation of the Holy Guardian Angel whose previous incarnation was Charles Robert John Stansfeld Jones (2 April 1886 – 24 February 1950). I was born on 3 February 1951.

I am mentioned in Liber 75 vel Luciferi, verse 42.

Yes, I am diffident, but I adore Liber 440 and duty calls.

I believe conversations like Liber 75 vel Luciferi have a temporal scope largely coincidental with the incarnations of their amanuenses. They may be one way to identify subsequent incarnations of Aiwass.

Liber 440, in contrast, has a temporal scope of about 2,200 years.

My rôle in this incarnation is Opener of the Ways. My guess is that successive incarnations of my Angel will also be Openers of the Ways.

Frater Altzba of 93 Publishing was arguably the first Opener of the Ways for Liber 440 in 1977, insofar as he typeset — on a Linotype caster — and paid for the first (letterpress) printing of Liber 440, proofread in collab­ora­tion with James Beck.

In addition to 625 copies printed on high-quality book paper with a soft cover, 93 copies were printed “in red and black ink upon beautiful paper made by hand.”

I saw my Holy Guardian Angel as an opaque and seemingly objective entity in a deeply affecting vision in 1972. My Angel gave its name as Ω, Omega, and instructed “I must be created.”

At first I thought the statement was an oxymoron. Eventually, I realised that all “I”s are created, not just the Angel.

I have been struggling with an internal conflict all my life. On the one hand, I have been betrayed by belief so often that I have become an adamant empiricist.

On the other hand, I have experienced telepathy, clairvoyance, astral travel, and other senses of my body of light (Ka) since I was a child. In none of those experiences were the four fundamental conservation laws of physics abrogated.

The observer effect makes it difficult to articulate reasonable cause-and-effect scenarios to explain how the senses of the body of light work in reality, but I think in terms of signal-to-noise ratio. Asana reduces the noise. Ritual increases the signal.

The supernatural is not an option, for it is false reasoning which answers honest questions with falsehoods and blind belief.

Truth is the product of experience. The product of reason is meaning. It is best not to confuse meaning with truth. They are not the same.

I resolve this conflict by shifting my perspective inwards from the gross material world toward vistas of adeptship. Time, dimension, and causality look different from different points of view. Nature is deeper than it appears on the surface.

Self is a persona — a mask — created by the mind-body complex to aid competition in human society. LSD can temporarily remove the “I,” permitting information which would otherwise remain obscure for the non-adept to rise from the unconscious mind, through the subconscious to waking awareness, where it can be examined and remembered.

The vision of my Holy Guardian Angel capped a mass of information that had been uploaded into my unconscious mind and revealed briefly to waking awareness during a number of LSD trips. Only small amounts of that information rose to waking awareness at the time. I had no intellectual structure to accommodate it, so I was strongly attracted to the Book of the Law and motivated to learn the basics of Crowley’s Qabalah: the Tree of Life and The Book of Thoth — the language of Liber AL vel Legis.

All my previous visions had been strictly conceptual. The vision of the Angel was objective and opaque. Its voice was loud and clear.

Certainly the vision of the Angel was a creation of my brain. The identification of the vision with Aleister Crowley’s notion of a Holy Guardian Angel is my intellect at work. But I am unable to deny the overwhelming telepathic presence of my Angel in that vision, or its previous and subsequent influence in my life.

It is real to me, but fiction to you. Just as your Holy Guardian Angel is fiction to me and, if you link your waking awareness to your Angel, real to you.

In the first chapter of Little Essays Toward Truth, Aleister Crowley wrote “that the perceptible Universe is an extension, or phantasm, of the nervous system.”

In his 1944 The Book of Thoth, Crowley wrote,

In Anil Seth’s 2021 book, “Being You: A New Science of Consciousness,” the computational neurologist proposes

Professor Seth writes that a hallucination is an “uncontrolled perception.”

Human beings are symbol makers and symbol users. Gods are a class of symbols; they are symbols in the form of persons. Gods are valuable symbols in that we become what we worship. We shape our gods and, thereafter, our gods shape us.

Evil is that which causes harm. Harm is loss. Creating a god, disowning it, then insisting that it created you, sets up a vicious cycle of harm, for it separates you from yourself. Disowned community gods are used to control and exploit people by means of shame.

Guilt is for what you do; it can be repaired. Shame is for what you are. You cannot change what you are, but you can twist yourself into a semblance of honourableness. Shame divides us from ourselves. Fear is humiliating. It causes shame and leads to hate. This is how demagogues gain power over polities: divide with shame, conquer with hate.

If we wish to be free, to choose for ourselves, we must take responsibility for the gods we make.

Every Christian creates their own versions of Jesus. The hopeful baby of Christmas is not the same symbol-in-the-form-of-a-person as the tortured seditionist of Easter. Jesus is a symbol of unchanging permanence: semper idem, a Rock of Ages.

No wonder Abrahamists, with their permanent and unchanging God, regard ever-changing nature as their adversary. Satan means “adversary.” The Sun at night was always a time of fear until electric street lighting, telephony, and portable 2-way radio banished most robbers and rapists from the night.

I think the unconscious mind is not merely a storehouse of introjects and neuroses. The unconscious is also a sense organ with its own uncontrolled perceptions of reality, perceptions that rise to the subconscious where they are given form as dreams and visions which then rise to waking awareness.

Our nervous and sensory systems evolved to advantage survival, not to perceive objective reality accurately. We can change our subjective experience of the world by changing our perspective.

We gain initiation to deeper degrees of adeptship by striving to find (LA) our psychic centre (ShT), then acting from that fulcrum to lever (AL) our world. This is Crowley’s LAShTAL formula.

We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.
– Mahatma Gandhi, Indian Opinion, 1913.

War-Engine

Near the beginning of the third chapter of the Book of the Law, Ra-Hoor-Khuit mentions a “war-engine.”

Note Aleister Crowley’s original comments, which follow the text of verses three to eight:

The “none” that shall stand before you is the sky-goddess Nuit.

The Sun-god Ra-Hoor-Khuit, in his chapter of the Book of Codes, says:

The war-engine turns out to be a ritual of magick (sex-magic) in which menstrual blood is its fuel and the priest’s penis is its motor.

The name of the fertility god, Osiris, is also understood to mean “corpse.” The erection dies after giving up its blood. By this interpretation, the priest’s corpse is its motor.

Sexual secretions resulting from the magick are collected on ginger-cinnamon cookies (cakes of light) and eaten, acting as a potent hormonal drug to alter consciousness.

All sexual acts programme consciousness.

All sexual behaviour creates gods, which are symbols in the form of persons. Usually, the gods are as diffuse as the random images of unfocused orgasm, so they have little significance. Thelemic magick takes advantage of the brain-programming power of orgasm to programme the brain intentionally by focusing on a symbol. Θελημα means “that which is willed.”

We cannot worship Nuit directly, but we can create our own symbol — the Neophyte’s pentacle — to represent Nuit and imagine that symbol at orgasm.

Nuit says “With the God & the Adorer I am nothing” in 220,1:21. By worshipping “unto Nuit,” we assert a window (ה, Hé, Atu The Star) into our unconscious mind. Our House 418 is accessed through the Anahata chakra and located in our unconscious. By practicing ARMS, we walk through the door (ד, Dalet, Atu III The Empress).

Ra-Hoor-Khuit’s “secret house” is Het, the Holy Guardian Angel’s temple, the Anahata chakra, the House 418.

Almost all writers who address the subject, abjure the use of menstrual blood and attribute the behaviour to a transgressive or “left-hand” path. Note that the Latin word for left is “sinister,” attributed to the distaff side. This is yet another example of the irresponsible ethos of male dominance over women. The Scarlet Woman must be recruited, not enslaved.

In a letter dated April 30, 1943, which appears in Aleister Crowley’s Introduction to Magick Without Tears, he states: “But I have published openly all the secrets.” At the end of the letter he goes on to say,

I can attest to the fact that the magickal technique of the Hermit is a dangerously powerful means of deep brain programming. It is powerful for it recruits the inner unconscious mind to the task of survival. It is dangerous for we expect it to be similar to the outer subconscious mind in which ego has power, but ego and reason are external to the unconscious. God or Karma are creations of the subconscious mind that block the deeply intuitive perceptions of the unconscious mind over which ego does not hold sway.

As an 18-year-old, I had sex with my girlfriend during her menstrual flow. I did it out of ignorance. It blew up my life by exposing the vast wealth of my unconscious mind to waking awareness.

Decades later, having achieved the necessary degree of initiation, I initially suffered two painful accidents in close succession. I persisted, nonetheless. I did not notice the significant salutary effects of our efforts until later. When I saw beneficial results, they were profound. They remain today in my lived experience and the lived experience of my wife of 44 years.

Crowley wrote, in The Confessions, page 72, “ ‘The libido of the unconscious’ is really ‘the true will of the inmost self.’ ” This pivotal understanding is easily lost within that book’s 892 pages of text. The unconscious mind is the domain of the Order of the Rosy Cross.

The training is arduous and requires extensive practice. It begins with the Neophyte who faces the Ordeal X.

X symbolises the magickal elixir.

When the Neophyte gives one particle of dust in the love of Nuit, that is, intentionally focuses their sexual expression, the psychological effect is to shift their perspective ever so slightly. But that shift begins a cascade that soon crumbles all their assumptions regarding the rigid permanence of their world.

Thus begins the Ordeal X. Most, these days, eventually retreat into the familiar blindness. Few come to really understand Nuit and Hadit, which is required to progress to the grade Zelator.

It takes lifetimes to gain any Thelemic grade. Once achieved, the grade is passed to subsequent incarnations of the Angel as potential consciousness. Potential consciousness caused me to go through all the initiation-ordeal cycles that lead to the coalface worked on by C.S. Jones. I got dragged into Thelema, more or less kicking and screaming.

In the Book of the Law Ra-Hoor-Khuit says,

Importantly, the Sun-god Ra-Hoor-Khuit — the visible object of worship — is in the magickal elixir. Often in Liber 440, “word” refers to the elixir. Blasphemy is “spoken” sacrilege.

In the Book of Codes Ra-Hoor-Khuit says,

Tzedeq is an alternate name for the Hebrew letter צTzedeq (90), Tsaddi the English X. The associated Tarot major arcanum is Atu IV The Emperor, alchemical Sulphur, semen: the power of creation and destruction. Atu III The Empress, the letter דDalet (4), Dalet which has the value four, is alchemical Salt, the female contribution — both the White Eagle and the Red Eagle: the power of manifestation. The other “four,” of the fourfold Word of the Elixir, is Chesed, sephira number four on the Tree of Life, the perspective of the Lover, thus alchemical Mercury: the power of change.

Alchemical Salt is the power of manifestation, and the Red Eagle is the most powerful of all. “In…the Scarlet Woman is all power given.” The depreciation of women is arch-stupidity. “We shall instigate an honest matriotism.”

The sky-goddess Nuit says,

Liber 440 asserts, over and over again, that there must be joy in every magickal act. If the participants are joyful, they contribute a greater balance of supportive hormones to the elixir, which then reinforces desirable neural programming.

If you pursue chastity — direct your lust to a symbol of Nuit — you can use magick to advance your Journey Inwards on the path of initiation. But Nuit is secret: known to adepts. The Zelator has won through the Ordeal X, knows Nuit by experience, so is an adept. The Neophyte, who faces the Ordeal X, is not an adept.

That level of focus takes a great deal of practice. The practice of ARMS (Asana, Ritual, Magick, and Science) is indispensable for training the mind and body to be sufficiently chaste (sincere) to participate in the Ritual of the War-Engine.

(Remember that the Sun-god is in the Word of the Elixir.)

Knowledge of the Elixir cannot be read off a page or learned by instruction. Only personal experience can provide real knowledge of the Elixir. The Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel must have been achieved by participants in the Ritual of the War-Engine for them to generate beneficial results. These participants are Thelemites, members by right of their actual adeptship in the Royal College of the Rosy Cross.