essays

5 Responses to essays

1. Robert Crow says:

   04/05/2011 at 6.26 am

   Having read your article “Anti-Tao” I must say thanks for trying to tackle a tremendously interesting and obscure piece of comparative religion. I found it a very interesting read. However, I must say I totally disagree and wonder if your numerous mistaken facts are evidence of a general ignorance of Thelema. Rather than making a point-by-point argument against your critique I will offer a few points of insight.
   1. Crowley’s consideration of LaoZi is contextualized by his Aeonic system in which LaoZi is identified as a Magus, an initiator of an Age. Crowley’s understanding of LaoZi’s historical relevance can be studied in select passages of The Heart of the Master and a few chapters in Liber Aleph.
   2. Crowley did not translate the DaoDeJing from the Chinese and never claimed to have. His introduction to the same explains that he paraphrases Legge from an initiated vantage. Rather than sell his understanding short, Crowley is bold enough to be assertive and explicative with his translation.
   3. Crowley connects the DaoDeJing to hermetic symbology as a means of describing its initiatory relevance. These would be useless to the Chinese person, but the esoterically inclined English audience would benefit from these referential gems.

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   • Vered says:

     04/05/2011 at 10.21 am

     wow, thanks for the feedback! that’s awesome!

     i wrote this as a freshman in college. at the time, i encountered a document that was presented to me as “crowley’s translation” of the dao de jing. so that’s very interesting to know that it isn’t actually his translation. all this time i’ve been under the impression that he somehow knew mandarin! the document i was working with might have been missing the introduction? it came from the internet, not from a proper book.

     i’ve read a lot more of crowley since then, but at the time i wrote that essay, “a general ignorance of Thelema” is an appropriate description of me. “Liber CLVII” was among the first things of his that i read, so in retrospect i really didn’t understand his context well enough. thanks to your comments, i’m gonna seek out “Liber Aleph” and “The Heart of The Master” now. i’m not sure if i’ve read “The Heart of the Master” at all! it’s been literally almost a decade since i read crowley. i’m looking forward to revisiting his writing.

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2. Ben Louie says:

   05/10/2011 at 10.24 am

   Hi Vered,

   I really enjoy reading your essay Zen in the Brain. Can you let me know when it was written? I want to reference this essay in my paper.

   Thank you in advance.

   Ben

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   • Vered Talor Arnon says:

     14/10/2011 at 3.47 pm

     it was written in 2002, i’m pretty sure.

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   • Vered Talor Arnon says:

     14/10/2011 at 3.47 pm

     and thank you so much! wow! sweet! i’d love to read your paper!!!!

     Reply