We’re gonna go deep on this one. And I’ll state upfront that this is one person’s opinion and not OTO U.S. Grand Lodge policy per se. Ya disagree – complain to me, not the Most Holy King!
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. ”
One might suggest that this could imply that a Thelemite should act solely upon their True Will and not according to personal whims, social convention, religious dogma, civil authority or any other received wisdom; that is the one absolute, universal law recognized by Thelemites. One might imagine that\in order to do that, one must actually discover that Will and liberate oneself from the control of all other influences, a process which is gains focus and intensity when one undergoes our initiation rituals complemented by the study and practice of Thelemic theurgy and thaumaturgy.
The observance of these Thelemic Ethics perhaps ought not be based in fear of punishment or expectation of reward from an exteriorized Deity or temporal authority but with the goal of harmonizing external action with True Will and thus to center one’s existence in True Will.
In his essay “Duty: A note on the chief rules of practical conduct to be observed by those who accept the Law of Thelema” Aleister Crowley gives this list of practical conduct.
Meanwhile, the New York Times ran a think piece earlier this year about behaviors in the U.S. which are predicated largely, I’d suggest, upon personal whims, social convention, religious dogma, civil authority and any other received wisdom. I’d further suggest that this has manifested as an unprecedented amount of ongoing unfraternal behavior between those self-identifying as Thelemites and OTO members – primarily in social media. I’d further suggest that individuals of all political persuasions might read this article consider how it applies to themselves (not the folks on the other pole of the political spectrum), and then whether they might want to alter their posting habits at all. And entirely possible they won’t. And that’s fair enough.
The article ends:
“This is the landscape of our broader political wars. What’s fascinating is that it’s also the landscape of our innocuous pop-culture battles, over which films are underrated and which celebrities overappreciated. Social media, in particular, is almost perfectly designed to turn mundane exchanges into ferocious moral dust-ups. Questions of taste and aesthetics have always been intimately bound up with questions of status and character and overarching cultural values. Even the most humdrum disagreement resolves itself, through one wave of backlash after another, into the same central question: Why does ‘everyone’ believe the wrong thing? ”
