THE ARCANE ARCHIVE
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Subject: IPSISSIMUS
                                       
   nigris (tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com)
   Thu, 29 May 1997 06:53:39 -0700 (PDT)
   
   49970529 AA1 Hail Satan! (what a glorious way to spend a morning; have
   at it)
   
[...]
   
   E6
   
in _Magick_ it is written of the Ipsissimus Grade:
   -------------------------------------------------------------
   _Ipsissimus._ Is beyond all this and beyond all comprehension
   of those of lower degrees.
   
   But of these last three Grades, see some further account in
   'The Temple of Solomon the King,' *The Equinox*, number I to
   X and elsewhere.
   
   It should be stated that these Grades are not necessarily
   attained fully, and in strict consecution, or manifested
   wholly on all planes. The subject is very difficult, and
   entirely beyond the limits of this small treatise....
   
	   4. The Grade of Ipsissimus is not to be described fully; but
	   its opening is indicated in Liber I [B] vel Magi.
   
   There is also an account in a certain secret document to be
   published when propriety permits. {NOTE: Crowley is referring
   to his diary or _The Magical Record of the Beast 666_, the
   first volume of which has been edited, annotated and introduced
   by John Symonds and Kenneth Grant (Duckworth, 1972).} Here it
   is only said this: The Ipsissimus is wholly free from all
   limitations soever, existing in the nature of all things
   without discriminations of quantity or quality between them.
   He has identified Being and not-Being and Becoming, action
   and non-action and tendency to action, with all other such
   triplicities, not distinguishing between any one thing and
   any other thing as to whether it is with or without conditions.
   
   He is sworn to accept this Grade in the presence of a witness,
   and to express its nature in word and deed, but to withdraw
   Himself at once within the veils of his natural manifestation
   as a man, and to keep silence during his human life as to the
   fact of his attainment, even to the other members of the Order.
   
   The Ipsissimus is pre-eminently the Master of all modes of
   existence; that is, his being is entirely free from internal
   and external necessity. His work is to destroy all tendencies
   to construct or to cancel such necessities. He is the Master
   of the Law of Unsubstantiality (Anatta).
   
   The Ipsissimus has no relation as such with any Being: He has
   no will in any direction, and no Consciousness of any kind
   involving duality, for in Him all is accomplished; as it is
   written 'beyond the Word and the Fool, yea, beyond the Word
   and the Fool.'
   -----------------------------------------------------------
   _Magick_, by Aleister Crowley, ed. Symonds/Grant, Arkana,
   1973; pp. 328-330. [333 comments]
   _________________________________________________________
   
   
and also
---------------------------------------------------------
   
   15. Now the grade of a Magister teacheth the Mystery of
   Sorrow, and the grade of a Magus the Mystery of Change,
   and the gread of Ipsissimus the Mystery of Selflessness,
   which is called the Mystery of Pan.
   
   16. Let the Magus then contemplate each in turn, raising
   it to the ultimate power of Infinity. Wherein Sorrow is
   Joy, and Change is Stability, and Selflessness is Self.
   For the interplay of the parts hath no action upon the
   whole. And this contemplation shall be performed not by
   simple meditation -- how much less then by reason! -- but
   by the method which shall have been given unto Him in
   His initiation to the Grade.
   
   17. Following which method, it shall be easy for Him to
   combine that trinity from its elements, and further to
   combine Sat-Chit-Ananda, and Light, Love, Life, three
   by three into nine that are one, in which meditation
   success shall be That which was first adumbrated to Him
   in the grade of Practicus (which reflecteth Mercury into
   the lowest world) in Liber XXVII, 'Here is Nothering
   under its three Forms.'
   
   18. And this is the Opening of the Grade of Ipsissimus,
   and by the Buddhists it is called the trance of Nerodha-
   Samapatti. {NOTE: One of the highest Buddhist trances.
   It is the equivalent of the Hindu Shivadarshana in which
   the objective universe of name and form is totally
   dissolved.}
   
   19. And woe, woe, woe, yea woe, and again woe, woe, woe,
   unto seven times be His that preacheth not His law unto men!
   
   20. And woe also be unto Him that refuseth the curese of
   the grade of a Magus, and the burden of the Attainment
   thereof.
   
   21. And in the world CHAOS let the book be sealed, yea,
   let the Book be sealed.
   ------------------------------------------------
   Ibid., p. 488 (APPENDIX VII; LIBER B vel MAGI).
   _______________________________________________
   
   
in his autohagiography, Crowley writes of his experience of
'the trance of Nerodha-Samapatti', 'Shivadarshana'. the
first is included in his description of his 'Abra-Melin
Operation':
   -----------------------------------------------------------
   On the ninth, having prepared a full invocation and ritual,
   I performed it. I had no expectation, I think, of attaining
   any special success; but it came. I had performed the
   Operation of the Sacred Magick of Abra-Melin the Mage.
   
	   It is unlawful to speak of the supreme sacrament. It was
	   such, as the following entry shows, that I found it hard
	   to believe that I had been permitted to partake of it. I
	   will confine myself to the description of some of the
	   ancillary phenomena.
   
		   Oct. 9 Tested new ritual and behold it was
		   very good! Thanked gods and sacrificed
		   for -- In the 'thanksgiving and sacrifices
		   for...' I *did* get rid of everything but
		   the Holy Exalted One, and must have held
		   Him for a minute or two. I did. I am
		   sure I did.
   
	   Such is the fragmentary account {NOTE: Captain
	   Fuller's.} of what was then the greatest event
	   of Fra. P.'s career. Yet this is an account of
	   the highest trances -- of Shivadarshana {{Eds.
	   NOTE: Literally the vision (*darshana*) of the
	   God Shiva. It is the highest of the Hindu
	   Trances and the equivalent of Nirvikalpa-samadhi
	   and Neroda-samapatti.}} itself, as we know from
	   other sources. The 'vision' (to use still the
	   name become totally inadequate) appears to have
	   had three main points in its Atmadarshana {{Eds.
	   NOTE: A Sanskrit term meaning vision (*darshana*)
	   of the Self (*Atma*).}} stage --
   
	   1. The Universal Peacock.
	   
	   2. The Universe as Ego. 'I who am all and made
	   it all, abide its separate lord,' i.e. the
	   universe becomes a single and simple being,
	   without quantity, quality or conditions. In this
	   the 'I' is immanent, yet the 'I' made it, and the
	   'I' is entirely apart from it.
   
	   (This is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity,
	   or something very like it.)
   
	   3. This Trinity is transcended by an impersonal
	   Unity. This is then annihilated by the Opening
	   of the Eye of Shiva. It is absolutely futile
	   to discuss this; it has been tried and failed
	   again and again. Even those with experience of
	   the earlier part of the 'vision' in its fullness
	   must find it totally impossible to imagine
	   anything so subversive of the whole base, not
	   only of the ego, but of the absolute behind the
	   ego.
   
   The very next day the enemy struck home below the belt, as
   described in the previous chapter. The blow could not shake
   my soul. For over three weeks I bore the stigmata of my
   Operation physically. I visibly radiated light. People
   used to turn in the street to look at me; they did not know
   what it was, but the impression must have been irresistable.
   ----------------------------------------------------------
   _The Confessions of Aleister Crowley_, eds. Symonds/Grant,
   Arkana, 1979; pp. 532-3.
   __________________________________________________________
   
   
and in a period of time wherein he was engaging various
god-summonings with Victor Neuberg, going on at some length
about how he had perfected the ability not to let off the
odd "miracle" and the "summoning to manifestation" of a
variety of spirits, he begins describing this same trance
state:
   
   ------------------------------------------------------------
   Materialists claim that the senses are the sole source of
   knowledge. Good! Then the most absurd and impossible idea
   of a madman or a metaphysician must be derived from sensory
   impressions no less than a brick. We habitually use our
   mental faculties to criticize and correct our sensory
   impressions. At what point, then, does our judgement cease
   to be reliable? Which is more real; the brick, the facts
   indirectly learnt from the brick, such as its chemical and
   electrical properties, the laws of nature which I deduce
   from the sum of such facts, or the mystical moonshine which
   meditation on all these evokes?
   
   In my great initiation in the Sahara, I was told in one vision,
   'Above the Abyss' (that is, to the intelligible intuition
   between which and the intellect there is a great gulf fixed),
   'a thing is only true in so far as it contains its own
   contradiction in itself.' The initiate must learn to use this
   faculty. Its first advantage is to deliver one from the
   dilemma set forth above. We need no longer doubt that white
   is white, because that proposition implicitly asserts that
   white is black. Our new instrument assures us that the
   whiteness of white depends on the fact of its blackness. This
   statement sounds more than absurd; it is a meaningless
   assertion. But we have already seen that the axioms of the
   intellect involve absurdity. They only impose upon us at
   first because they happen to be our personal property. The
   intuitions of the Neschamah are guaranteed by interior
   certainty, and they cannot be criticized for the simple reason
   that they have themselves completed the work of criticism of
   the most destructive kind before presenting themselves at all.
   Buddhist psychology has analyzed many of these characteristics
   of super-consciousness and even arranged them in an order
   corresponding with spiritual development.
   
   ...
   
   The Buddhists describe the closest approximation to true
   observation of anything by saying that it is seen in the
   four-fold formless state, which they define in the following
   terms: Any proposition about an object is simultaneously
   perceived as being both true and false, but also neither
   true nor false. To perceive an object in this manner implies
   that the observer has attained the last possible degree of
   spiritual development which permits any positive point of
   view soever. Such a man is but one step from the threshold
   of Arahatship. He has only to destroy this conception of
   things, as is done in this four-fold formless state, to
   attain the trance Nerodha-Sammapatti, in which all being and
   form is absolutely annihilated, so much so that the trance
   is only distinguishable from Nibbana by the fact that one
   comes out of it.
   
   It was on October 2nd, 1919 that I first attained to this
   Pisgah-sight of the promised land, Pari-Nibbana. I was
   spending the night in Fleischmann's Turkish Baths in New
   York. It was my custom in all such places to practise the
   tenth clause of my vow as a Master of the Temple, 'To
   interpret every pheneomenon as a particular dealing of God
   with my Soul', by forcing advertisements and other public
   announcements to yield some spiritual significance. I
   would either apply the Cabbala to the words and manipulate
   the numbers so as to reach a state of mind in which some
   truth might suddenly spring in the silence, or I would play
   upon the words as if they were oracles, or else force the
   filthy falsehoods of fraudulent dollar-dervishes to
   transfigure themselves at the touch of my talisman into
   mysterious messages of the Masters.
   
   I had awakened at dawn and meditated awhile upon this four-
   fold formless state. I was merely trying to make out what
   could possibly be meant by piling contradictions on
   contradictions, as the definition did. I did not under-
   stand it in the least, and I had not the slightest intention
   of trying to reach realization of it. At that time all such
   meditation was entirely out of my line, but accidents will
   happen even in the best regulated magical circles and the
   following extraordinary experience knocked me sideways.
   
   I quote verbatim from my Magical Record:
   
	   I was putting on my bath-robe after weighing, and
	   turning a sleeve inside out, when my masseur, an
	   holy man positively trembling on the brink of
	   Arahatship, cried to me that both sides of it
	   were inside, and both outside. I replied humbly
	   that I was seeking for a side that was neither
	   inside nor outside -- and then like a flash I
	   saw that I had it! Oh Glory Ineffable of
	   Realization! (Oh Right Thinking!) For either
	   side is both inside and outside because I can
	   use it as such, and it is neither inside nor
	   outside with regard to the discrimination which
	   might be made by an uninitiate between any one
	   thing and any other thing.
   
	   Now this quality is not in the robe, which has
	   two sides easily distinguishable by hemmings,
	   machining, etc., to say nothing of orientation
	   in space, but in me, and arises from my positive
	   determination not to notice whether my back reads
	   'Stolen from the Fleischmann Baths' or no. Now
	   I am not indifferent to comfort. I notice whether
	   the robe is thick or thin; its observed qualities
	   depend upon a weakness in me. All qualities
	   soever in the robe must therefore disappear as
	   soon as I am strong enough to ignore them; and
	   thus any self-sufficiency or 'attainment' destroys
	   my consciousness of any separate existence.
   
   
   I sincerely believe that I have adequately described a state
   of mind, in itself utterly incompatible with ordinary
   intellectual apprehension, in the above account, and correctly
   observed and intelligibly expressed its characteristics in such
   a way as to give at least some rudimentary idea of one type of
   intuition with whose laws those of the reason have nothing
   whatever in commmon.
   -------------------
   Ibid., pp. 590-2.
   _________________
   
   
and yet we are given to understand that this trance-condition
or state of consciousness is the OPENING to a particular state
or quality of *being*. 
   
from Grant:
----------------------------------------------------------
   *Ipsissimus:* Lit. "His own very self", the *Atman* of
   the Hindus. Kether is the Sphere of the Ipsissimus (see
   the Tree of Life). In the Hindu system, a *Paramahansa*
   is the highest grade of spiritual enlightenment and it
   corresponds to the Ipsissimus Grade, 10'=1~, in the
   Western Tradition. Crowley describes himself as a
   *Paramahansa* in his *Eight Lectures on Yoga*, published
   by the O.T.O. in 1939....
   ----------------------------------------------------------
   _Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God_, by Kenneth Grant,
   Skoob Books, 1992; p. 211.
   _____________________________
   
and
  
----------------------------------------------------------
   The *Ipsissimus* alone is free of all fetters. One who
   has attained to the 'Knowledge and Conversation of the
   Holy Guardian Angel', although having passed far beyond
   the average state of human consciousness, is yet vastly
   remote from the pinnacle of attainment reprsented by that
   of the *Ipsissimus*. Even so, the *Adeptus Minor* has so
   far stilled the agitations of his personality-complex that
   he receives glimpses, veiled and fleeting, of the ultimate
   goal that requires the total abolition of personality and
   egoidal consciousness.
   
   The *Ipsissimus* is described as having 'no will in any
   direction, and no Consciousness of any kind involving
   duality.' ... Crowley hints but once only in his published
   writings at this supreme initiation which he underwent in
   the Spring of 1924. In his Magical Record, however, he
   reveals that he took the Oath of an *Ipsissimus* on
   May 23, 1921 and, for the following three years, the Great
   Initiation ran its course:
   
   The climax of the dealings of the Secret Chiefs
   with Therion came in the weeks immediately
   preceding and following the Spring Equinox of
   1924. At this time he lay sick unto death. He
   was entirely alone, for They would not even
   permit the presence of those few whom They had
   Themselves appointed to aid him in this final
   initiation. In this last Ordeal the earthly
   part of him was dissolved in Water; the Water
   was rarified utterly, until he was free to make
   the last effort, and to pass into the vast
   caverns of the Threshold which guards the Realm
   of Fire. Now, naught human may come through
   these immensities. So in the Fire he was
   consumed wholly; as pure Spirit alone did he
   return, little by little, during the months
   that followed, into the body and mind that had
   perished in that Great Ordeal of which he can
   say no more than this: 'I died.'
   -----------------------------------------------------------
   _Cults of the Shadow_, by Kenneth Grant, Samuel Weiser,
   1976; pp. 113-4.
   ___________________________________________________________
   
   
   Crowley sums up the passing of the pylons on the Path of
   the ultimate Initiation into the Zone of the Fire Snake
   in the [previously quoted passage from page 113]. He
   transcended the Grade of Magus and was reborn as the Son
   of the Lion (Leo), after which he ascended to the Grade
   of Ipsissimus through the pylons of the final Initiation.
   
   The Zone of the Fire Snake is illumined by the Magick
   Light, or electrical Fire, *Od* (*AVD* = 11). Eleven is
   the number of Magick, or 'energy tending to change'. The
   Snake or Serpent is *Ob* (*AVB* = 9). Nine is the number
   of the lunar or Yesodic power-zone. *Ob* is therefore the
   shadow or dark aspect of the Fire Snake and the true
   '*Couleuvre Noire*'.
   
   The Aeon of Isis glorified Matter, the Mother, the Body;
   the Aeon of Osiris, in denying the body, glorified Spirit.
   The balance of these extremes is effected by the realization
   of the identity of Matter and Spirit, Body and Mind, Female
   and Male. Such realization occurs through the 'passionate
   union of opposites'. Isis and Osiris combine to produce
   Horus, who is not a mere projection or reflection of his
   parents on the same plane but, because of his twin brother
   Set -- hidden within him -- is a projection in a further
   dimension of the powers of I and O (Isis and Osiris). There
   is thus a movement out of the horizontal and into the
   vertical direction.
   ----------------------
   Ibid., p. 124.
   ________________
   
   E6/6/6
   3 3 3
  
[edited from a larger file with irrelevant material - 333]