think that you call the habit of mind of geometers and the like “dianoia” but not
“nœsis”, meaning by “dianoia” something midway between doxa (accepted
opinion) and nœsis. (Plato: Republic, VII, 6, 511c-d).
Pistis (belief) and eikasia (conjecture = a conclusion arrived at from evidence that has
grounds for reasonable belief) have for their fields of objects the individual and particular
instances which manifest the Forms, and imitations or reflections (paintings or sculptures
for example) of instances manifesting the Forms, respectively. It is very important to note
and remember that these two dynameis are considered by Plato to be cognitive activities,
activities of the mind, of the philosopher, particularly in this time when ideas surrounding
“faith” (implied in “belief” and “conjecture”) are derided as non-rational.
Plato describes a process through which one becomes capable of nœsis: first one
begins by contemplating the physical manifestation of the Form Beauty: a beautiful body.
Then through dialectical discussion and the full activation and use (“energia”) of all the
faculties, the Philosopher-King candidates finally learn to apprehend the Form of Beauty
itself. This is a process, a way of knowing or a way of thinking. Each faculty has its own
way of knowing, or process of thinking, and thus generates its own way of behavior. 62
Hence the challenge facing a new initiate is not simply the absorbing and accumulation of
new information, but an entirely new way of approaching that information - indeed the
awareness and selection from among several new modes of addressing it.
5. Ouspensky’s “Psychology of Possible Consciousness Evolution”
In 1934 Peter D. Ouspensky, that brilliant student of Gurdjieff, referred to this same
initiatory process as “the psychology of man’s possible evolution” and summarized it in a series
of five lectures. He began with perhaps the most irritating [to the noninitiated] question: Why
cannot all people become authentic initiates? Why only the Elect few?
His answer, blunt in its simplicity: Because most people don’t want it. They don’t want
it because it is incomprehensible to them from the outset, it doesn’t promise anything of
material/tangible value, and finally it is frankly frightening. Ordinary people prefer their
thoughts, like their physical lives, to be comfortable, reassuring, predictable, and peaceful. They
do not want to venture into any kind of “unknown darkness”.
Unsurprisingly, and as needs little exemplification here, they also view with mistrust,
suspicion, and occasionally outright alarm and hatred those who do so venture.
Ouspensky divided human consciousness into four “states”, which he called sleep, waking
sleep, self-consciousness, and objective consciousness:
Sleep is the purely passive and automatic state in which the human body functions [whether
biologically awake or asleep] without any mental awareness or effort. In ordinary humans this is
62 Ware, Bruce, A Survey of Platonic Epistemology. Temple of Set, 2004.
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routinely interrupted and augmented by waking sleep, what most people are when they consider
themselves “awake and conscious”. Comments Ouspensky:
It is necessary to understand here that the first state of consciousness, that is, sleep,
does not disappear when the second state arrives, that is when man awakes. Sleep
remains there, with all its dreams and impressions. Only a more critical attitude towards
one’s own impressions, more connected thoughts, more disciplined actions become added
to it.
Because of the vividness of sense impressions, desires, and feelings - particularly the
feeling of contradiction or impossibility, which is entirely absent in sleep - dreams become
invisible exactly as the stars and Moon become invisible in the glare of the Sun. But they
are all there, and they often influence all our thoughts, feelings, and actions - sometimes
even more than the actual perceptions of the moment ...
The second state is less subjective. Man already distinguishes “I” and “not I” in the
sense of his body vs. objects different from his body. And he can to a certain extent
orientate among them and know their position and qualities.
But it cannot be said that man is “awake” in this state, because he is very strongly
influenced by dreams and really lives more in dreams than in fact. All the
absurdities and all the contradictions of people, and of human life in general, become
explained when we realize that people live in sleep, do everything in sleep, and
do not know that they are asleep. 63
To this point Ouspensky’s “unawakened man” does not advance past Plato’s eikasia, since his
“waking sleep” is merely a more sensory-aware state of responsive behavior.
What happens when Ouspensky’s man “awakes” [through an initiatory school], however, is in
somewhat different focus than that of Plato. Plato’s dianoia is characterized by rational
reasoning concerning all phenomena, but Ouspensky first requires man to develop a coherent
realization of himself. Only then can he reliably turn his new vision outward towards the
objective universe:
These two states, sleep and waking sleep, are the only two states of consciousness in
which man lives. Besides them there are two states of consciousness possible for man, but
they become accessible to a man only after a hard and prolonged struggle.
These two higher states of consciousness are called self-consciousness and objective
consciousness.
We generally think that we possess self-consciousness - that we are conscious of
ourselves, or in any case that we can be conscious of ourselves, at any moment we wish.
But in truth “self-consciousness” is a state which we ascribe to ourselves without any
right. “Objective consciousness” is a state about which we know nothing.
Self-consciousness is a state in which man becomes objective towards himself, and
objective consciousness is a state in which he comes into contact with the real, or
objective, world from which he is now shut off by the senses, dreams, and subjective
states of consciousness ...
Another definition of the four states of consciousness can be made from the point of
view of the possible cognition of truth.
63 Ouspensky, Peter, The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950, pages #32-33.
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In the first state of consciousness, sleep, we cannot know anything of the truth. Even if
some real perceptions or feelings come to us, they become mixed with dreams, and in the
state of sleep we cannot distinguish between dreams and reality.
In the second state of consciousness, waking sleep, we can only know relative truth,
and from this comes the term relative consciousness.
In the third state of consciousness, self-consciousness, we can know the full truth
about ourselves.
In the fourth state of consciousness, objective consciousness, we are supposed to be
able to know the full truth about everything; we can study “things in themselves”, “the
world as it is”.
This is so far from us that we cannot even think about it in the right way, and we must
try to understand that even glimpses of objective conscious
ness can only come in the fully
developed state of self-consciousness.
In the state of sleep we can have glimpses of relative consciousness. In the state of
relative consciousness we can have glimpses of self-consciousness. But if we want to have
more prolonged periods of self-consciousness and not merely glimpses, we must
understand that they cannot come by themselves, they need will action. This means that
frequency and duration of moments of self-consciousness depend on the
command one has over oneself. So it means that consciousness and will are
almost one and the same thing, or in any case aspects of the same thing. 64
M. MindStar and Body Interaction
The general key which the Temple of Set applies to this problem is what Eric Hoffer refers
to as “the unnaturalness of human nature”. The MindStar or self does not behave as though it
were merely a “sum total” of the brain’s sensory and manipulative capacities, combining and
recombining inputted information as though it were an “organic” electronic computer. It has a
sense of identity, a sense of uniqueness, a sense of distance and differentiation from everything
else that exists. It has characteristics which are something more than instinctive and something
less than logical; these are called “emotions”.
Most significantly, perhaps, are the creative MindStar’s thought prerogatives and
dispositions. We don’t just think to survive or to react to external stimuli, B.F. Skinner
notwithstanding. We think creatively, spontaneously, abstractly, and æsthetically. We conceive,
design, and construct non-natural concepts, arguments, processes, and objects. And we can
distinguish between the natural and the non-natural - something that would be a logical
impossibility if the consciousness itself could not extend beyond the natural.
To demonstrate this capacity to yourself, consider something as simple as a Möbius strip.
Your consciousness rebels at a phenomenon which it perceives as “against the law”. As a matter
of fact, the various Möbius phenomena are not “against the law”; there is an entire field of
mathematics - topology - which is concerned with the properties of geometric configurations
subjected to various transformations. But here it is not the phenomenon itself but rather your
reaction to it which is significant. The revulsion you feel is a manifestation of something in you
which possesses the power to view the order of the OU from outside.
The philosopher Immanuel Kant approached this power of the MindStar from a somewhat
different angle. He referred to it as humanity’s ability to assign meaning to natural
phenomena - to recognize, appreciate, define, categorize, rank, and otherwise determine the
importance, relevance, and significance of an event or object in nature. “Objects of experience,”
64 Ibid., pages #35-36.
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he said, “are never given in themselves, but only in experience, and have no existence outside
it.”
Arthur Schopenhauer went a step further, holding that the individual will is the source of
causality itself, of which space, substance and time are mere derivations.
Friedrich Nietzsche discussed the power in terms of the higher intellect’s ability to build
horizons for itself beyond mere recombinations of the known. Plato defined this suprarational
quality of the mind as nœsis and held that it was capable of perceiving the eternal, transcendent
principles of all existence beyond even the most rigorous reasoning ( dianoia): the Forms or
First Principles.
This power of the soul is thus both apprehensive [reaching beyond the limits of the OU]
and creative [enabling one to generate meaning, to initiate existence]. This creative aspect may
be called the Subjective Universe (SU) to distinguish it from the OU.
The SU and the OU contain mutually-incompatible elements of definition, but they also
blend into one another. For example, we use the SU to assign meaning to the OU, and we
regularly rely upon our knowledge of phenomena in the OU to give us “building blocks” to
construct objects in the SU. [Many “fantasy creatures”, for example, can be broken down into
“parts” of natural animals.]
The ability of any intellect to generate and operate the SU is not automatic [beyond the level
of ordinary imagination]. It must be deliberately learned and exercised. The experience of such
perspective and power can be exhilarating and stimulating; more often - to those unprepared for
the sensation and psychologically unable to accept it - it has been frightening.
Man does not like the idea that he doesn’t fit wholly and completely into the natural scheme
of things. Hence he has sought an ally in a personalized “God” that created him as a wholly
natural pet project [for example, pre-“fallen” man in the Garden of Eden]. He has invented
religious and social codes that give him a sense of conforming to the natural order of the OU. He
has built cathedrals and monuments to reassure and reinforce this sense, and he has even had
his dead body buried with rites commemorating his inclusion in it. These very acts, ironically,
expose his secret dread that his conscious self - his MindStar - does not belong to it. When that
part of him which does belong to it - his physical brain and body - separates from his
consciousness and remains purely a component of the OU [through physical death], he fears that
his consciousness, unlike his physical shell, will not obey the [OU] law of conservation of matter
and energy. Rather it will cease to exist.
While fearing the death of his self-consciousness, ironically, man has also sought to punish
it for its existence. He has mythologized it as devils or, in Western Judæo/Christianity, the Devil.
He has tried to drive it out of his mind through psychological coercion as well as through
physical punishment ranging from simple fasting to the tortures of the Inquisition. And of course
he has tried to pretend that it is really not there at all - that any activity by the MindStar which is
not harmonious with the OU is simply disease: madness and mental illness.
Nonetheless the soul endures. It has survived all efforts to destroy, distort, disguise, or
sublimate it - for none of these efforts has ever actually succeeded in touching it. At most they
have succeeded in damaging only the physical medium for its expression.
N. Immortality of the MindStar
Perhaps the most important contribution of the original Church of Satan (1966-1975CE)
was its focus upon and glorification of the soul or psyche, even though its original ambition was
to downplay that concept in favor of mere fleshly gratification.
As we Satanists explored the implications of Anton LaVey’s initial, dramatic statements in
the Satanic Bible, it gradually became evident that any focus upon oneself presupposes the
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separateness of that self from everything else. Flesh is found to consist of natural substances,
and most of our lower-level thought processes - what Plato would class as pistis and eikasia - are
similarly found to be little more than conditioned responses to external stimuli. As the Satanist
continued his search for the “thing that was exclusively himself”, he was forced to increasingly
more complex introspection, resulting ultimately in a philosophical and metaphysical cri
sis that
would only be resolved in the more precise philosophy of the Temple of Set.
In the Temple the psyche became the acknowledged focus of the Setian’s initiatory quest.
The logical mind and the fleshly body were not disdained, but seen rather as interpretative and
communicative devices both between the psyche and its existence in the OU, and between
various psyches (i.e. between individual Initiates). Subsequently this led the initiated psyche to
confront the implications of an existence which is radically distinct from the OU. The existence
of the psyche as something not the product of natural forces - created and energized by Set -
necessitates comprehension of its future beyond finite interface with the natural/material.
Historically the issue of the psyche has been gradually oversimplified into a “this-life-
only” (TLO) vs. a “life-after-death” (LAD) debate. As the debate has raged throughout many ages
and mythologies, these two alternatives have tended to become mutually exclusive.
The TLO proponents have passionately denied that anything of “this life” can continue past
the destruction of the fleshly shell, even though they have no positive proof of the simultaneous
extermination of the psyche. Since they can no longer detect its presence through their own
fleshly interfaces with the OU (the five senses), they presume that it no longer exists. When
challenged on this over-extension of logic, they retort that the burden of proof is on the
challenger ... to prove that a posthumous psyche exists by establishing a material/5-sensory
channel of communication with it.
Most publicized efforts to do exactly that have been predictably ludicrous at best and
fraudulent at worst: seances, reincarnation fantasies, and “ascended master” rubbish.
Materialists have felt secure in ridiculing such antics, and one cannot entirely blame them for
claiming that their own position has thus been validated by default. But by strict scientific and
logical criteria it has not.
At the other extreme are the LAD advocates. They have faced the interesting problem of
trying to make a convincing and attractive case for something whose existence they cannot
demonstrate to any of the five OU senses. Rather than address that challenge directly [as the
The Temple of Set I Page 30