crowley BIP?

[Mangrove]

Does the following count as AC's attempt at BIP? (from his intro to Liber AL)

THE UNIVERSE

THIS BOOK explains the Universe.

The elements are Nuit - Space - that is, the total of possibilities of every kind - and Hadit, any point which has experience of these possibilities. (This idea is for literary convenience symbolized by the Egyptian Goddess Nuit, a woman bending over like the Arch of the Night Sky. Hadit is symbolized as a Winged Globe at the heart of Nuit.)

Every event is a uniting of some monad with one of the experiences possible to it. "Every man and every woman is a star", that is, an aggregate of such experiences, constantly changing with each fresh event, which affects him or her either consciously or subconsciously.

Each one of us thus has an universe of his own, but it is the same universe for each one as soon as it includes all possible experience. This implies the extension of consciousness to include all other consciousness.

In our present stage, the object that you see is never the same as the one that I see; we infer that it is the same because your experience tallies with mine on so many points that the actual differences of our observation are negligible. For instance, if a friend is walking between us, you only see his left side, I his right; but we agree that it is the same man, although we may differ not only as to what we may see of his body but as to what we know of his qualities. This conviction of identity grows stronger as we see him more often and get to know him better. Yet all the time neither of us can know anything of him at all beyond the total impression made on our respective minds.

The above is an extremely crude attempt to explain a system which reconciles all existing schools of philosophy.

[P3nT4gR4m]

I'd always thought of the bip as the logical conclusion extrapolated from this model (which to all intents and purposes is accurate enough to satisfy me) Namely the inherent human tendency not to realise it and to mistake the universe and their interaction therewith for something other than that which it is.

[LMNO]

This is one of the handful of Important Ideas Crowley had.


However, I would call it only a bar, or a wall, of the BIP, because it conentrates on the observable universe that we do not see, and says nothing of the unobservable.

[Mangrove]

good point there LMNO.

crowley said 'all possible experience'.

BIP says that there's lots of stuff in the universe that i can't experience.

not that i want to say 'nah nah nah nah nahh' to uncle Al though. when he wrote this (1920s?), Einstein was still new & wacky and quantum insanity hadn't gotten underway.

so we're extending his idea owing to the fact that we can reference more advanced science than he could.

[LMNO]

Hey, Maxwell built on Einstein who built on Newton.


I still think AC has good ideas, I think if he were alive, he'd concentrate on the "hard" Quantum physics (what we can actually say about the universe), and not the "soft" (the similies and thought experiment we try to extrapolate from Quantum physics).

[Mangrove]

Hey, Maxwell built on Einstein who built on Newton.


I still think AC has good ideas, I think if he were alive, he'd concentrate on the "hard" Quantum physics (what we can actually say about the universe), and not the "soft" (the similies and thought experiment we try to extrapolate from Quantum physics).

he referenced einstein in some of his work. i've not found much to suggest that he had read about quantum physics though, like you, i think he would've dug it.

[P3nT4gR4m]

This is one of the handful of Important Ideas Crowley had.


However, I would call it only a bar, or a wall, of the BIP, because it conentrates on the observable universe that we do not see, and says nothing of the unobservable.

I never like to say never. Sure it's highly (and I can't stress enough how highly) unlikely that you'll observe a lot of stuff but I'd never like to remove it completely from the realms of possibility. I think this was Crowleys take on the universe too. He liked to make out he could see more than he probably could but I think he also liked to think it was possible to see more than he did. Maybe even all of it.

[LMNO]

Minor point, silly, but it is physically impossible to see some of the things that go on in the Universe.


Other than that, rock on.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Sorry man, kneejerk reaction. As soon as I see things like 'can't my dogmaphobia kicks in.

[LMNO]

I hear you, but damn, you have to admit, you can't lift a ton of weight on this planet using only your own muscles.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Sez yuo 
       \

[LMNO]

No. fcuking. way.

[Triple Zero]

good point there LMNO.

crowley said 'all possible experience'.

BIP says that there's lots of stuff in the universe that i can't experience.

but he wasn't specifically talking about human experiences, right? he just gave humans/friends as an example.
he was talking about these Hadits, points that experience. so one could equally well reason that a "point" of iron-fillings "experiences" a magnetic field (which a human, sort of, can't).

he says every event is the unity of such a point and an experience. sounds like a reasonable thing to say, but a human is made up of many many points which all experience things to eachother. some of these experiences and reactions result in muscle contractions, others result in braincells firing, firing in intricated and complex patterns that somehow happen to make up a (limited) representation of the sum of all experiences of all points, the "current subset" of Nuit.

i like the way he describes Nuit as both Space and the total of possibilities of every kind. probably in both space and time -- this is probably the very same idea of that 10th dimension animation (if any of yuo remember that 98%-bullshit presentation) that has every possibility in all time in all parallel possible universes, in one point.
whether it manifests as one point or not -- doesn't matter, that's just a matter of mapping, and you won't notice it from the inside anyway. mathematicians and physicists call this the phase space.
i always envision a level of "enlightenment" as somehow becoming "aware" of one of the phase spaces we can represent ourselves in.

[Mangrove]

good stuff 000.

i did wonder if the idea of a monad (a hadit) was anything capable of experience, so i started to think on small scales like single cells or even atoms.

from reading this passage, i also felt that maybe the typical thelemites have overlooked the point that crowley was saying that: Hadit & Nuit were 'literary conveniences'. elsewhere in the same intro to liber AL, crowley talks about 'gods' as facts of nature personified and that they were 'accretions of experience'.

what you talk about in your post fits what he was saying. he does point out that not all of our experience are conscious ones. i mean, we're getting hit with radiation from space that i am certainly not aware of consciously. i'm probably not even subconsciously experiencing it either, but it's still happening.

[P3nT4gR4m]

i did wonder if the idea of a monad (a hadit) was anything capable of experience, so i started to think on small scales like single cells or even atoms.

Hadit is the only thing that is capable of experience, all else is experienced by hadit. Ask yourself "Who am I?" and keep asking until huge complicated chunks of biological and chemical manifestations stop trying to convince you that it's them.