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Gnosis or Bust!

Created on 2002-05-24 14:01:20 (#570317), last updated 2009-10-27

2,894 comments received, 7,445 comments posted

Basic Account [Gift]

656 Journal Entries, 87 Tags, 5 Memories, 0 Virtual Gifts, 6 Userpics

Basic Info

Name:	Mendax Veritas
Birthdate:	1966
Location:	California, United States
Website:	Ad Consummationem Mundi

Bio

“Mendax Veritas” is a pretentious little pseudonym I invented in my teens during a brief fling with Discordianism after reading Shea and Wilson's Illuminatus! trilogy. It is Latin, and is meant to mean “treacherous truth” or “deceptive truth,” but may not quite since my Latin was atrocious then and is not much better now. By “deceptive truth” I had in mind the traditional mystical assertion that truth cannot be expressed in words, and that attempts to do so will inevitably be flawed and misleading. Not that I had, in my teens, any idea what that meant.

These days, this LJ account is used mostly for essays related to Thelema and/or Ordo Templi Orientis, plus the occasional personal anecdote. The essays are often published almost simultaneously on my web site, Ad Consummationem Mundi. The site also has an RSS feed for those who like to subscribe to such things.

It is desirable that the student should never attach to any result the importance which it at first seems to possess.

—

Liber O vel Manus et Sagittae, I:5

The many change and pass; the one remains.

—

Liber Porta Lucis, 20

The sin which is unpardonable is knowingly and wilfully to reject truth, to fear knowledge lest that knowledge pander not to thy prejudices.

—

Liber Librae, 15

In the beginning was Initiation. The flesh profiteth nothing; the mind profiteth nothing; that which is unknown to you and above these, while firmly based upon their equilibrium, giveth life.

—

Liber Causae, 1

This also is compassion: an end to the sickness of earth. A rooting-out of the weeds: a watering of the flowers.

—

Liber Tzaddi vel Hamus Hermeticus, 26

This Path is beyond Life and Death; it is also beyond Love; but that ye know not, for ye know not Love.

—

Liber Cheth vel Vallum Abiegni, 20

By “devotion to Frater Perdurabo” is not meant sycophancy, but intelligent reference and imaginative sympathy. Put your mind in tune with his; identify yourself with him as he seeks to identify himself with the Intelligence that communicates to him the Holy Books.

—

Commentary to The Book of Lies, ch. 87

Wherefore, O Zahid, so afraid
To see the Maker in the Made?

—

Bagh-i-Muattar, XXX

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
—	The Gospel of Thomas
The individual will is either asserted in creation or lost in neurosis.
—	Otto Rank

Representative government cannot express the will of the mass of the people, because there is no mass of the people; The People is a fiction, like The State. You cannot get a Will of the Mass, even among a dozen persons who all want to go on a picnic. The only human mass with a common will is a mob, and that will is a temporary insanity. In actual fact, the population of a country is a multitude of diverse human beings with an infinite variety of purposes and desires and fluctuating wills.
—	Rose Wilder Lane

Western civilization has two roots: the Bible and Greek philosophy. Let us begin by looking at the first of these elements, the Bible, the biblical element. Modern rationalism rejected biblical theology and replaced it by such things as deism, pantheism, atheism. But in this process, biblical morality was in a way preserved. Goodness was still believed to consist in something like justice, benevolence, love, or charity; and modern rationalism has a tendency to believe that this biblical morality is better preserved if it is divorced from biblical theology. Now this was, of course, more visible in the nineteenth century than it is today; it is no longer so visible today because one crucial event happened around 1870-1880: the appearance of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s criticism can be reduced to one proposition: modern man has been trying to preserve biblical morality while abandoning biblical faith. That is impossible. If the biblical faith goes, biblical morality must go too, and a radically different morality must be accepted.
—	Leo Strauss

Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste. They are opportunities to do big things.
—	Rahm Emanuel