Over the past 2,000 years, this self-analytic imperative evolved through the Catholic confessional and protestant witnessing of the declaration of sinful acts to the modern focus on the secular confessions of psychiatry and self-referential identity discourse. The West has limited itself to the knowledge of the subjective “I.”
The Eastern conceptions of the soul developed along somewhat similar lines, though the fragmentary nature of Eastern practice (lacking Pope or Patriarch) allowed for marked divergence as well. The focus on absolute interiority was not as disproportionately pronounced as it was in the West. The Hindus posited a self as a fragment that resided in the body along side a Supersoul, which was nothing less than the face of the Godhead. This fragment, being part of the divine, was not changeable. The Buddhist sought through meditation to dissolve the self—more appropriately the reification of self—by the full and experiential realization of emptiness. In contrast to the Hindu belief, the Buddhists held that the soul, or self, is constantly undergoing change and is, therefore, ultimately empty of inherent existence. But even in the Buddhist context there is the nominal notion of a continuity of self—even if it is a concatenation of selves.
The modularity of the modern age is quickly developing along lines distinctly contrary to those of the previous aeon. Increasingly, the seeker is no longer concerned with the soul as object. In this new age, there are those who perceive the productive Path in actuality moves in the opposite direction. This can best be characterized as a process of expansion rather than contraction. The dimensionless point moves outward reaching toward the circumference, instead of the worldly projection turning inwards seeking the essence of self. The core manifests the world, rather than the world seeking the core. This develops into a cosmology based on the counter relation of two principles: the limitless limit and the empty center of origination. The first is the iconographic expression of infinite expansion. Iconographically, this principle may be viewed as a maelstrom of stars arched to form the night sky. The latter, on the other hand, is the dimensionless point, unextended, the stars within the infinite machinery of night. The first is the circumference, while the second is the center of the circle.[i]
Questions of subjectivity and self have arisen as the driving questions in the dialogue of modernism and postmodernism. Is everything relative to the subjectivity of the perceiver? Does subjectivity exist? If so, is subjectivity relative, empty or absolute? What is the relation between self and other? Does such a relation even exist and if so what are its constituent parts? This philosophical (and political) dialogue has been paralleled by the increasing personalization of the spiritual quest. As the Golgotha of institutionalized religion has slowly eroded, the rise of subjective relativist spiritual agendas has grown—either in small to medium groups, the so-called “New Religious Movements” or on a completely personal individuated level. More often than not this has resembled the postmodernist artistic aesthetic, creating a heterogenous amalgam of appropriated imagery, icons and philosophical precepts. The trend has been to center these historical and cultural fragments around a drive to discover one’s essence—whether termed Being, self or inner child.
In direct contrast to this flood of disparate self-searching philosophies are the starry night (infinite space), the star (the dimensionless point) and the energy that arises through the tension between the two. In this tripartite image is encoded a model for the correct view of exteriority, interiority and subjectivity.[ii] Building from the analogy of the sphere, the night sky, representative of the circumference, is the limit of personal expansion; the stars are each a central, originating point; in the space between the two there arises a synergy from the correct, direct experiential (as opposed to inferential) apprehension of inherent emptiness and limitless potential. In this model, one perceives that the center is everywhere and the circumference is ultimately nonexistent. We are each the center of our own universe. The unseen force that is through the interaction of these two (like matter and anti-matter in a sci-fi universe) is the projection of personality that correlates the projection of self outwards and the push of inertia (perceived limit) inwards. The ability to move forward, create and develop is our ages true Holy Grail. This process is not a unification of the one into the all but rather a dynamic play of expansion and contraction that results in the agency of the individual. To functionally exist within the world means that the complete dissolution is not a place of permanent abiding—but may, rather, be more an attainment of an accessible realization, moment of equipoise or meditative nexus point.
[i] Crowley, Liber AL vel Legis, II:3.
[ii] These three principles are actually hardwired in the three chapters of Crowley’s Liber AL and the godforms that personify they: Nuit, Hadit and Ra-Hoor-Khuit.