Alethiology, Part 2 Utilizing a Thelemic Therapeutic Orientation

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

In Alethiology, Part 1, I laid the foundation for what I believe is the beginning framework for a potential theoretical orientation in mental health grounded in the Law of Thelema. Along with the underlying Thelemic Cartography model, these form the initial core scaffolding for my approach to Thelemic identity and personal archaeology of lived meaning.

But if you want to skip backtracking to pick up reading those again, I’ll offer the bullet point version here of the foundation that theoretical orientation here without the additional commentary. This is extracted from the Alethiology, Part 1 essay.

Thelemic Psychology: A Possible Theoretical Orientation

A coherent Thelemic theoretical orientation for a psychology model of mental and behavioral health might read something like this:

1. The human experience can be explicated simply as Perfection-experiencing-Imperfection for the purpose of accumulating change.
2. There is only a single essential (authentic) self with a multiplicity of existential masks/garments or subpersonalities. There is no “higher” or “lower” Self/self dichotomy.
3. Each individual and each experience of the individual is an existential composite of the four experiential domains—objective, subjective, interobjective, and intersubjective.
4. There are interior and exterior modes of individual and collective expression for the sole purpose of aggregating experience.
5. Underlying these four domains is a sense of self-awareness and a sense of direction (True Will) that can be discovered and assimilated to best express our purpose (why) in life.

Defining Alethiology

My term for this approach is alethiology, the study of [personal] truth.

• A form of psychotherapy that focuses on the personal archaeology of lived meaning and purpose via integral, dynamic relationships across four experiential domains.

Alethiology: A Thelemic Modality of Mental Health

So, we’ve done the hard work of establishing that Thelema not only has room for mental health, it necessitates it. What we need now is some idea of how to apply this orientation. If Part One laid the metaphysical and epistemological scaffolding, then what follows is the brick-and-mortar of lived practice. Because all the insight in the world doesn’t mean a damn thing if you don’t live it, breathe it, do it.

To that end, we can bring the four experiential domains (Axes I-IV) into real, tactile engagement. These modalities offer a practical framework for alethiology: the study and pursuit of personal truth through lived experience. Granted, this remains theoretical because it’s not done in practice on any formal level—and the same disclaimers from the first essay apply here—but I believe the methodologies here to be sound.

 

Let’s get into it.

Axis I – Objective: Behavior and the Body

This is the domain of sweat, breath, and blood. If you’re not grounded here, no amount of therapy is going to hold. This is the space where the physical and behavioral expressions that embody your Will emerge. And if you don’t think mental health is connected to the body, think again.

Feed your brain—feed your mind. And, quite frankly, vice versa!

When we say “take care of yourself,” it’s not because we want you to be some kind of physical ideal, to live up to a Helen of Troy or an Adonis. It’s because we want you to be connected to the practical necessities of movement, of growth, of vitality. What is that line from Liber Librae again? “Worship, and neglect not, the physical body which is thy temporary connection with the outer and material world.”

 

Likewise, bodily autonomy is (ethically) related to how much you are connected to your food, to your place-in-the-world, to your physical connectedness of vocation (purpose). The sense of and the needs of the physical is not separate from the emotional, from the cognitive, from the spiritual elements in your life. It’s all related.

One of the first things I ask several of my patients when they sit down is whether they’ve eaten that day because I know them well enough to assume they probably haven’t. They’re getting better at it, and their journaling is showing them how it’s making a difference in their moods, their ability to accomplish the goals they set for themselves, and feel the shifts in their routines (i.e., knowing when they need to move, when to rest a moment, when to stop for the day, etc).

For example, when people discuss burnout, many assume there is something psychological or emotional at play. I’m here to tell you that it’s probably physical. Get some sleep. Not everything is a stress response or trauma or an emotional reaction. That’s not to downplay the emotions or past trauma or the effects of stress, but sometimes you’ve just been running on empty too long (which obviously feeds into all that other stuff too). Grab a sandwich and take a nap. You’d be surprised how much that will help you. Start with the basics.

Practical Work:

• Embodied Practices: Breathwork, yoga, somatic journaling. Tune in to how your body reacts in different situations—around certain people, in certain spaces. Develop fluency in the language of your body so you can stop treating it like a mute beast dragging your mind around.
• Rhythmic Structuring: Instead of rigid schedules or productivity traps, reintroduce organic rhythms into your day—waking with light, exercise in some way (regular movement is better than nothing, by the way; you don’t have to be a gym rat), setting routines that follow solar, seasonal, or vocational cycles. The body craves rhythm, not regimen (though, admittedly, sometimes these can be the same; you’ll have to figure out your personal style). Help it remember what a day feels like when you’re not surviving it.
• Find Your Own Diet: By ‘diet,’ I don’t mean some fad thing on the internet. I mean, find the right manner of eating for you that keeps you healthy, energetic, and fed properly. Everyone is different. Find the right plan for you. Twinkies and Diet Pepsi ain’t it, I assure you. But guilting yourself over that chocolate chip cookie after dinner is fucking stupid. Enjoy food. Love food. Be mindful of what you put in your body.

This is about restoring congruence. If our Will is grounded in Love, then how we touch our fork matters (and that’s not a Freudian misdirection!). How we move our bodies matters. Behavior is the final outpost of belief.

Axis II – Subjective: The Mind and Inner Life

Here we step into the interior palace (with four gates? Sorry I couldn’t resist!). Emotional pain, executive dysfunction, repressed desire, extreme spiritual states—everything you might pretend doesn’t exist because it doesn’t leave a bruise you can point to. But alethiology demands nothing less than full engagement. The subjective aspects of our mind are just as important as the meat packing plant of the brain.

I think how we approach these subjective aspects, both in the packing and the unpacking, is just as important as every other part of our body. This is where meaning is made—or unmade. Where grief gets named and mythologized. Where we argue with ourselves and come out the other side changed, or at least slightly more coherent.

Practical Work:

• Therapeutic Journaling: Keep a diary—but not the kind where you just rant or vent.

  Document internal states. Where did your Will go sideways? What caused you joy? What dreams came to haunt or seduce you?

• Subpersonality Rituals: Borrowing from IFS and Psychosynthesis, identify your inner voices (or parts)—your Wounded Child, the Judge, the Lover, the Masked One. Give them names. Dialogue with them.

  You can pull them out as well. Apply core techniques, such as “chair work” or naming and validating primary versus secondary parts (and/or emotions). Explore parts (and emotional) processing as a way to resolve internal conflicts and clarify values-based motivation.

• Feed the mind: Your inner life starves or thrives based on what you feed it. Curate your mental diet with care. Read challenging books—hell, just read fun books! Put the phone down. Listen to the Silence within you (I hate to say “go meditate,” but there are ways to do that without having to sit on the floor with a teacup on your head for an hour, trust me!). Engage with art that challenges you. Schedule time not to consume, but to reflect. You’re not just what you eat, you’re what you dwell on.

This is where the Work can go sideways fast because it’s easy to spiritualize our wounds instead of healing them. It’s easy to tell ourselves that we’ve done all the “inner work” because we read Mr. Nietzsche and Drs. Seuss and Freud, and then made it through the jungle with our bare hands. But have we really?

Alethiology does not permit bypassing. If it hurts, go further. That voice in your head that says you don’t have time to feel it? That’s the part of you most afraid of change. Find it. Move closer. Listen closer. Dance with it. Listen without stepping on its toes. It’s trying to tell you something. Listen with your whole body.

Axis III – Interobjective: Systems and Structures

Now we start to get uncomfortable. It’s one thing to explore your inner world. And most people stop there and think they’re done. But it’s another to acknowledge that your inner world has outer context and that the institutions in which you were raised contributed to your complexes.

Friends, family, fraternities, and factions, I call this. It’s all the shifting groups that vie for our attention, that shape the reality in which we move and exist every moment of every day from the cradle to the grave. Don’t you think they’re just a tad bit important in the grand scheme of things?

Unpacking these systems to understand their influence can be tough, trust me.

Especially for Americans who think we are the center of the universe already. Then throw in Thelema which is practically gift-wrapped for ‘center of the universe’ language. It’s hard to think that all these other influences might hold sway over our capacities in life.

 

Practical Work:

• Motivational Interviewing for Role Conflict: When patients are caught between roles (parent, partner, professional, artist), Motivational Interviewing helps elicit intrinsic motivation and resolve ambivalence. This can aid in re-aligning social obligations with personal Will. This is something I recommend for therapists to do with patients/clients more so than for individuals to do on their own—that said, there are a couple of self-paced workbooks out there that can help with this if you want to do it on your own.
• Cultural Genogram or Identity Wheel: Explore intersectional identities using tools such as the social identity wheel or cultural genogram. Unpack how ethnicity, gender, class, and other identities inform belief systems and relational dynamics. Develop insight into inherited moral assumptions.
• Environmental Grounding: Get tactile with systems around you—literally. Touch the ground. Participate in the shifting establishment of your city. Re-establish a direct relationship with your material environment to move out of abstraction and back into orientation. A grounded system begins with place.

This isn’t just therapy. This is revolution. It’s not enough to “heal your inner child” if the neighborhood she lives in is still on fire. You don’t have to fix everything. But you have to stop pretending you’re untouched by it.

I’ve had discussions with some of my patients who are women.

Let’s be straight about it. I’m an old white guy. We can sit here and work through all kinds of struggles and issues together. But two things are very apparent.

First, there are things you are going through that I will never grasp as an old white guy. I will do my best to empathize, work with you, offer guidance as I can, but your experiences in life are something I will never have.

Second, for all the good that we can do in this office, the moment you hit the door, you will be subjected to forces in this society that I never will. I will rarely, if ever, understand what it’s like to be looking over my shoulder when you leave my office at dusk, walk across the parking lot with your keys in your hand. I will never know what it’s like to go to work and wonder if I’m being paid as much as that man across the hall that does my same job. For all that we do today, we’ll start again next week to undo whatever society has thrown at you that it hasn’t thrown at me.

It’s harsh reality that the systems in which we exist are not all friendly, they shape our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual lives and the meaning we hold in those lives. It is up to us to dismantle those systems that are unhealthy, dangerous, and built to profit from our disconnection—and to build new ones that honor complexity, autonomy, and the sacredness of being fully human.

Axis IV – Intersubjective: Culture and Shared Meaning

Here’s where we stretch into the collective dream. These are the waters we swim in: language, symbols, norms, archetypes. The unconscious inheritance. You don’t get to opt out. You’re already in it. We all are.

Granted, I’m not a huge Jung fan boi. I know many occultists are. I just think he’s a bottom feeder of the psychological pond. But we got archetypes from him, so that’s nifty. But even if I find Jung a little overrated—more oracle than scientist—he wasn’t wrong about everything. Archetypes do shape us, whether we consciously buy in or not. They’re cultural bone marrow: old gods dressed up in new psychology, recurring characters in the myth of “you.” We inherit them the way we inherit eye color or debt. And some of them—especially the ones we don’t like—carry the charge of madness, of lunacy.

The term lunatic comes to us from the Latin, lunaticus, meaning “moonstruck” but really meaning something more along the lines of “epileptic.” We’ve used it to mean lunatic or crazy over the years since there was a time when humanity thought dis-ease was caused by the moon. And yet, I’m struck by a moving soliloquy from Kajsa-Stina Syren recently where she suggested a new term, solatic—“the madness of the sun,”

she wrote.

 

Perhaps what we fear is not the madness of shadows and tides, but the blazing clarity of being seen too clearly, burned by meaning, exposed by a light that refuses to look away. It’s a poetic reminder that what we call madness often depends less on biology and more on the stories we choose to tell about it.

Nearly all of our mental health diagnoses, though psychological in form (upper left quadrant, so Axis II territory), are really Axis IV creations. We, as a society, construct them, adhere to them, enforce them. Yes, some have biological origins and neurological structure. But we define, isolate, and treat them based on the cultural narratives and shared meanings we’ve assigned to those diagnoses. This is one reason I’m not a fan of diagnosis in general—or the DSM in particular—except as a necessary evil to satisfy insurance demands. I look at a patient holistically and work with the cluster of presenting symptoms which, as is normal, shift with time and circumstance. We address what we’re dealing with in the moment. Nothing more.

But this work is about our cultural imperatives, shared narratives, social identities, and worldviews.

Practical Work:

• Archetypal Excavation: Use dreams, tarot, and spontaneous imagery to uncover the symbols that repeat in your psyche. Who are your gods? What stories do you keep re-enacting? Map them.

  Then use ritual or art to alter their course.

• Narrative Rewriting: Write out the story of your life as if it were a myth.

  Identify the villains. Notice which parts you skip over. Then, rewrite it—under Will, not shame. This isn’t denial; it’s reclamation.

• Cultural Genogram or Identity Wheel: Explore intersectional identities via tools like the social identity wheel (on your own) or cultural genogram (with a therapist). Unpack how race, gender, class, and other identities inform belief systems and relational dynamics. Develop insight into your inherited worldviews.

You don’t become whole by merely going deeper into yourself. One part of wholeness is seeing how your self is a constellation of cultural, ancestral, and symbolic threads—and by choosing which ones to unbind and weave anew.

Meta-Practices: Binding the Quadrants

Alethiology is not about balance. It’s about right relationship—among the parts of the self, and between the self and the world.

Crowley makes a comment in his Commentaries, “Aspiration to the Higher is a dream—a wish-fulfillment which remains a phantasm to wheedle us away from seeking reality—unless we follow it up with Action. Only then do we become fully aware of ourselves, and enter into right reaction with the world in which we live.”

Right reaction, right relationship; tomayto, tomahto.

 

To that end, here are three bridging practices that thread across all domains:

• Alethiological Cartography (Map Making: Journey of Discovery): Once a month, sit down with your journal and assess your life across all four axes. Where are you over-invested? Where are you under-expressed? What is asking to be lived?
• Shadow Work (3P–2P–1P):
  • Third Person: Write about the dysfunction like it’s a character in a novel. Examine it externally.
  • Second Person: Speak to it directly. Ask it what it wants. Spend time working through a narrative with it.
  • First Person: Become it. Ritualize it. Integrate it. Find the truth in the shadow.
• Peregrinatio: The Wandering Ritual: Take a day and walk with no destination.

  Bring only intention. Use the world as an oracle. What you find is what you need. Make of it a ritual. Write down everything.

Final Thought

You are not a problem to be solved. You are not a wound to be sanitized or a project to be optimized. You are a Star. You are Perfection-experiencing-Imperfection for the sake of change.

That doesn’t mean your pain isn’t real. It means it’s personal, it’s yours, it’s to be experienced, lived, examined, and made real.

Alethiology is the process by which we treat life not as an error, not as martyrdom, not as sacrifice, but as an invitation to live, to love, to will, to become. It is not therapy as pathologizing, but therapy as pilgrimage.

Love is the law, love under will.