They Shoot Gurus, Don’t They?

Dark Guru Complex & Getting the Ancestral Ducks in a Row

In Steineromics, the development of the individual “I” involves shutting down the spiritual senses and experiencing a correspondingly more material world of objects, and ourselves as an object (and a subject!) among objects.

For Steiner, this corresponded with—made possible, as well as necessary—the development of a moral core. He taught that we have to develop internal morality precisely because we lost the psychic porousness by which we were receptive and responsive to the divine powers moving us. But also vice versa: “the Fall” was the perquisite towards free-will and autonomy. Sin came about, that grace would abound.

We had the external Law, socialized morality, via the Hebrews; but this was only a transitional matrix within which we were confined to develop this internal sense of morality, the core or Christ-I.

Simply put, Steiner’s “evolution of consciousness” entailed an aeons-long movement towards being guided internally rather than externally. Whether it was spiritual powers that were guiding us or social powers, the training wheels had to come off, for the Holy Spirit, the Mind of Christ, the Kingdom within, to begin guiding us.

Crowley’s M.O

I am currently rewriting Vice of Kings for its reissue next year. This means I’ve gone from Castaneda straight to Crowley, organically enough, without conscious foresight. As I see it, Crowley’s malevolence stems directly from his occultist mentality. The mere fact he was trying to live a life as the perfect occultist, to organize everything according to occultic principles, seems to be inseparable from malevolence, or rather, from psychosis that eventually leads to malevolence.

It seems insane to me to be getting up in the morning and putting on magical robes and going through rituals and ceremonies, day after day. This is even without the sex magic, the drugs, and everything else that was thrown in, all of which made it the most unholy mess imaginable.

Yet, by the time this airs, I will (God willing) be six days into a ten-day Vipassana retreat. Clearly, two forms of discipline could hardly be less alike; yet are they at least on the same continuum—that of using the will to transcend mundane reality? (I will let you know when I get back.)

The way I understand Crowley’s modus operandi is this: he was seeking to annihilate everything within him that gave him a sense of being distinct or separate from everything else. This precept is in The Book of the Law, and he never tired of quoting it: “Bind nothing! Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & any other thing; for thereby there cometh hurt.”

This idea that we’re all one, that God is one consciousness, is what Crowley was trying to force to happen in his own consciousness. And he did so by committing all the acts most abhorrent to him, to annihilate both his sense of morality and his sense of being a separate being (without which there is no basis or need for morality).

From what I can see, his philosophy generated his methodology, and did lead to the most morally abhorrent acts, by definition. Logically, it is easy to see how it would, but also historically, it seems that it did.

What all the Crowley scholars who ignore my emails are not acknowledging is that, even if you can’t prove it evidentially with a smoking gun (though there is a dead child), it is all-but necessary to deduce this, logically, from his own works, and what history we do have to refer to. It is even almost unavoidable that it involved the violation of a small child, Poupée, his infant daughter, who died during the most out of control period, at the Abbey of Thelema.

Can we allow ourselves to see how, in Crowley’s own consciousness, violating his baby daughter, and even her death, might help to annihilate the “illusion” of difference, and/or itself be a form of acting upon the belief that there is no difference to begin with? If we’re not objects, if everything is infinite consciousness, divine awareness, “Strike hard and low!” Whatever we do is okay. Do what thou wilt—everything is permitted.

Resist Not Evil

It doesn’t work to condemn the other as evil, because that is scapegoating. This is psychology 101. It’s the way to avoid seeing our own affinity and complicity with so-called evil.

This is the hardest thing, for me personally: why am I drawn to all these unsavory characters? Initially, I was drawn to them by a desire to emulate them. I saw them as examples to follow; then slowly, I realized what a horrible mistake I’d made, with Crowley, Castaneda, Strieber, de Ruiter. It is an unpleasantly long list.

I am almost 60, and I still haven’t got to the bottom of why I keep letting myself be seduced by something unwholesome and unhealthy. Why? Because it gives me a sense of being special, of being better than others.

Now the ducks are getting lined up in a row. I seem to be seeing so many different iterations of the same pattern, the same complex: the dark guru complex. And the only reason I’m still examining this question is because I don’t want to be a dark guru myself.

I’m back at the Abbey of Thelema and Cefalù for The Vice of Kings, right on the heels of the Castaneda series. Lucifer is the archetypal dark guru, and last week I talked to Peter Grey, an actual Luciferian (as far as I can tell in a sane, intelligent way). Last week, I also talked to Terry O’Sullivan for the Jobcast.

Terry is a soul rescuer who handles people’s entities. I first and last saw him in 2002, 24 years ago, in the middle of “the Lucifer working.” I didn’t go to him about that—I was quite confident about getting intimately acquainted with Lucifer. But I had other entity problems, ones he helped me with.

Whatever I’m trying to resolve, here, now, with “Lucifer 2.0,” it corresponds with all the dark gurus that I’m putting under the microscope, again. They’ve all turned out to have feet of clay, or worse. They are all on the spectrum between malevolent, seriously fucked up, and just a bit disappointing (e.g., Lyn Birkbeck, Mitch Fraas, Dave Oshana). For a mentor to be disappointing is fine: mentors are supposed to disappoint us in the end, otherwise how can we move beyond them?

I talk in the podcast with Terry about my brother and my father, their sex addiction, and how I feel it’s stuck to me in some way. Not that I’m a sex addict, but that there’s something still “riding” my sexuality. He talked about getting back to the time when the ancestors took a wrong turn, when some traumatic event occurred and things really started getting bad.

This long line of dark mentors behind me seems to be symbolic of that ancestral line. When did it go wrong? And who was my last mentor? That was the one I was sure broke the dark guru pattern. But did he?

It occurred to me this week to wonder why I was so quick to think that this last one was so completely different. If my own traumatic imprint kept magnetizing these dark figures, all the way through to John de Ruiter, and then Dave Oshana comes and rescues me, is it realistic to think that I magnetized somebody completely different? Or was he just sufficiently different to end the cycle? (Which it did: Dave cured me of seeking gurus.)

When you go through a series of partners, hopefully you’re developing awareness and getting closer to healing, so that eventually you end up with somebody you can really heal with. But even so, their teeth are still going to fit your wound. They’re not going to be Mother Teresa (who was probably CIA anyway).

I always believed Dave got enlightened because he was relatively trauma-free; but if he is one in a long line, then this seems increasingly unlikely; and if he was traumatized, maybe his enlightenment was also trauma-based?