A Word about Belief: May 3rd, 2015
On the main page of this site is a "caveat" about what may seem obscure to casual reading ("the specialized usage of the word 'belief'...") as well as some comments about the differentiation in the usage of the words "self" and "Self."
I am hoping that the usage of the word "Self" and "self", especially in The Book of Anubis and in the somewhat later writing, BOOK TWO, can be understood, to some degree, from context and from the "caveat." What I should have emphasized decades ago is some commentary about the specialized use of the word "belief."
In general, in both these writings, "belief" is used to mean those things we believe unconsciously, that is, things we "believe" without "having to believe" in them. Austin Spare would have called them "vital beliefs" or "organic beliefs", in that they have a unconscious vitality which requires no cognitive effort or act of will to be experienced "as flesh" or "reality."
Examples abound precisely because they "enact" (as reality) without need for conscious thought or acts of will and intellect. When I go to flick on the light switch on the wall, I do not "stop" to consider whether I "should" believe in them or not. They have become "vital" or "organic" beliefs. This is a far different process and word usage then believing in "God", "Climate Change", that "pigs have wings" or "Unicorns." It comes close to being the exact opposite of the word "Faith." Magically speaking, the necessity for "faith" is magickal failure.
"Faith" is much like trying to believe what you can't "really" believe without an act of will or an abandonment, to some degree, of reason.
The above mentioned documents essentially describe what might be called a "primacy of consciousness" model of reality, that is, a model of reality that starts not with the assumption that "reality" exists "out there" which we "discover" and experience subjectively as entity, but rather it turns the "out there" to deep levels within what we call "ourselves."
All models of reality, to be cohesive, must account to both unity and diversity. In the the ordinary paradigm of our culturally instilled reality model (and reinforced by our biological hard-wiring), "we" or "I" exist in a particular place in space-time (at any given moment) with our own personal histories and memories, genetic code and bodily differences. "We" become the diversity and our "believed" reality becomes the unity (as in "the world").
It is entirely possible to turn this "default" perceptual paradigm upside down or inside out, that is, we are one "Self" in many different "worlds" or "universes", the nexus being those places where these "worlds" or "universes" overlap. These "places", then, become the sacred touching and communication of worlds within Self become possible.
Quantum Physics has largely abandoned the Newtonian notion (and Plato's Fallacy) of objectivity of reality and prefer to consider things and phenomena as "models." Magickians would be well served to follow suit.
In this light, then, the magickal models presented in the Book of Anubis and BOOK TWO involve the processes of freeing of the very energy invested in consensual reality (belief and "believing") from those beliefs that do not serve and their reinvestment in those that do.
Austin Spare wrote in his "THE BOOK OF PLEASURE (SELF-LOVE). THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY", "'This free entity of belief' and his desire are united to his purpose by the use of Sigils or sacred letters."