Faith and Doubt

"I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms on awaking; I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning." - Aleister Crowley, The Book of Lies.

Flemming just reminded me of this quote, which is Aleister commenting on one of the most powerful magickal techniques ever devised.

The idea is to invoke a belief system which is contradictory to your current set of beliefs. For example if you are a liberal, become a conservative; a theist, become an atheist, etc. The idea is to do it fully, to live and breath this new belief system until you have some kind of manifestation or epiphany, in which you come to believe in it with all of your heart. Once you've accomplished that, immediately proceed to doubt all that you just invoked, until you once again hold the belief with complete skepticism.

Rinse, repeat, recycle.

If you can manage to do this faithfully, you will eventually transcend dogmatic belief, and dogmatic doubt entirely.

As Aleister once said, "a true skeptic doubts his own doubt".

Posted by paul at June 11, 2004 12:20 PM | TrackBack