From "The Great Work" to "The Great Hobby"

Aleister Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson are where I started at with my whole "journey" when I was about 12 when I read the Illuminatus Trilogy for the first time.  I fell in love.  Then I read the satanic Bible and that steered me to Crowley.  All this was before the internet when I had to order books from the publisher and go to the library and the book stores.  There were no Barnes and Nobles or Borders either so there were no mega book stores where you could find everything you wanted or have them order it.  I mainly would find things to read through quotes and references in other books.  RAW was extremely useful for that.  The Cosmic Trigger books had lots of quotes and therefor lots of people for me to get into and find through reading his books. 
 I also got a LOT of my knowledge from newsletters, mailing lists and underground magazines (zines). I got most of them at Reptilian records owned by Chris X.  Then I would find other ones in the ads in the back of the ones I had bought.  I also went to every estate sale I could find of Freemasons. They always had amazing libraries.  The best score though were their personal journals that were bound like books.  They laid out their path and what they were reading and connections and observations they made in these journals.  They were VERY hard to find though because on the inside it says to return to the lodge if found or at the time of death.  SO you would have to find an estate sale where the family had no idea what was going on or what to do or there were no family left.

Gaining knowledge and THE PATH and THE GREAT WORK were exactly that... work... a path. You would meet awesome, brilliant, eccentric, cool people along the way.  It was like a journey.  It took effort, time and dedication. It was difficult. 
Imagine spending all this time (sometimes years) looking far and wide for a certain author or a particular book and then finally getting it (and spending a METRIC SHIT TON of money on it sometimes) and it sucking.  It was like an adventure.  Driving to another state to go to some crazy bookstore... talking to some way out there guy in Europe somewhere on the phone about his collection and trying to haggle with him to sell and mail to you one of his books from his personal library that has been out of print for a hundred years... belonging to groups that would have meetings that really felt secret, like you were getting hidden knowledge.
The internet has taken that whole experience away. There were no Youtube videos to tie things up and present them in an entertaining passive multi-media way.  You had to read.. and read and read.  Sometimes you could get a hold of tapes (yes cassette tapes) of lectures or videos (VHS) of them but they were EXTREMELY hard to come by and you had to know someone who knew someone who knew someone who had a copy.   And they were just that, lectures.  Not exciting videos with dramatic bombastic, emotional music and effects and sound bites and snippets.
Trial and error became much less painful as one could just click another link after reading a few lines, taking a quick look and judging based off of a persons entire body of work. It's made the esoteric and occult ( by definition) accessible and available to anyone who can do a google search and put minimal effort into it. There were no facebook groups or message boards where you could find like minded people to discuss what you were thinking and learning. You had to actually meet real people and talk to them on the phone or meet in person and finding such people was like finding the holy grail.  I don't know if the internet makes it better or worse to tell you the truth. It has its upsides and down sides.
Upsides being that this knowledge is no longer hoarded and squandered and hidden away.  Anyone who seeks it out can have access.  Its free. There aren't a select few chosen people in control of the flow of information who get to judge who is worthy and who isn't of obtaining such knowledge.

The downside though is of course exactly the same.  The Great Work can now instead be The Great Hobby. All this information is no longer hidden.  Its no longer hard to find.  It doesn't take any real effort anymore therefore people take it for granted and don't value the magnitude, value and power of what they are learning.  Its no longer treated as sacred.  Anyone can find it without having to show how truly bad they want it.
So there's my rant about the good old days when the esoteric was actually hidden and how I had to walk 5 miles to school uphill both ways in the snow with no shoes and you ungrateful kids have no idea how good you have it.


One of my favorite stories from RAW was the monk who took his students down to the riverside to meet the sacred chao (cow).  Then the student got there he asked the chao what THE answer was.  The Sacred Chao slowly lifted his head, looked at the students, and the Chao said Mu (moo).

Chao means chaos and Mu means Nonexistence; nonbeing; not having; a lack of, without. [2] A negative. [3] Caused to be nonexistent. [4] Impossible; lacking reason or cause. [5] Pure human awareness, prior to experience or knowledge, in Chinese.