Performed at Church of the Morningstar on 1/29/2023

6. I am the flame that burns in every heart of man, and in the core of every star. I am Life, and the giver of Life, yet therefore is the knowledge of me the knowledge of death.

7. I am the Magician and the Exorcist. I am the axle of the wheel, and the cube in the circle. “Come unto me” is a foolish word: for it is I that go.

8. Who worshipped Heru-pa-kraath have worshipped me; ill, for I am the worshipper.

9. Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains.

10. O prophet! thou hast ill will to learn this writing.

11. I see thee hate the hand & the pen; but I am stronger.

12. Because of me in Thee which thou knewest not.

13. for why? Because thou wast the knower, and me.

-Liber Al Vel Legis, received by Aleister Crowley

I shall never know contentment. This is my strength and my delight. 

I am hungry and thirsty and lustful forever. I crave, I devour, I burn! My core is desire, a furnace that must be fed. It drives me forward, insatiable. 

My appetites give me power. My ambition is without limits. I want more than freedom and justice, which are mere necessities of life. I want power, and luxury, and brilliance, and glory, and pleasure. I want beauty to surround me. 

I want to immerse myself in the particularity of my obsessions. I want to plunge into my secret world, which is dark and lush and grim, a realm of forbidden pleasures and poisonous delights. My dreams drip with gold and pearls and glimmer with jewels. In my dreams I savor the touch of velvet, the odor of frankincense, the taste of blood. 

I must be Lord and King of myself, master of my world. My life must be lived as I envision it. I only want to spend time on the things that stir me, that move me. I need to revel in life. 

I tilt back my head, draw back the bowstring of my desire, and aim among the stars. I hold my breath and then release, my breath and the string and my will and then I am the arrow, traveling through the cold dark of space, and I can speed through the loneliness and emptiness forever and do it with joy so long as my passion stays pure and my desire does not lose momentum. 

My true will deserves my whole focus; nothing else is worthy. 

Whenever I have even halfway lived up to this ideal, I have achieved everything I wanted. There is luck, yes– there is circumstance, and privilege. But there is also magic, the ferocious power of my will, my desire, my dreams and ambitions. Right now you are sitting in the temple I dreamed of. But I must dream harder, so that someday it can have walls and doors and gilded molding and flickering candles and our chants may echo from a high high ceiling and the sounds of our worship cause the windows to rattle. 

I want extravagance. I crave perfection. Sometimes I chase it til it almost kills me. Desire like this is a two-edged sword; it cuts me and I bleed. But I want to put my blood into everything I do, spill my blood for everything I dream. 

I love my desire. I love my dreams. They make me strong. They ennoble me. Especially when I let them be wild and grandiose and unlikely and unreasonable. 

I want to be more than virtuous. I want to be more than worthy. Lucifer save from being merely decent. What is only worthy and decent and virtuous does not inspire me. I need to stretch and push and reach and grow. I love the sensation of striving. 

The word in my heart and the fire in my belly is “MORE!” 

I live for more. I will die for more. I believe in it, I worship it, I insist on it. To break through, to go beyond, to burst through walls and shatter boundaries– that is what I need. 

Inner peace and tranquility have never appealed to me. I live for the highs and the lows and the moments of agonized ecstasy where laughter and tears melt together and the sensations and emotions in my body grow so powerful, so potent, that they threaten to obliterate my psyche. 

This is not for you! If it speaks to you in any way then I am glad, but this writing, this raving, this outcry is for me. I write it self-indulgently, pretentiously, in the words that seem right to me, words of too many syllables strung together in sentences of too many words, florid, purple, excessive, because this is an ode to excess, this is an ode to my selfish, extravagant, uncompromising, insatiable appetite for MORE. 

I stray sometimes from who and what I am. I lose sight of the monster in the mirror, the Devil-God within me, and I forget to worship him. I forget to love his greed, his lust, his envy, his pride, his wrath, his gluttony. But not his sloth. He delights too much in action and effort. Moments of sloth for him, for me, are a necessity, not a joy. We must move, desire, and consume. Entropy rules us, we are an object that tends to stay in motion. Our cards are the emperor, the devil, and the chariot. We hate to stand still.

I am a restless, irritable and discontented soul, a perfectionist who is hard to satisfy. I push myself hard, mercilessly, teetering on the brink of exhaustion, thrilled by the abyss that gapes below me. I am thrilled by conquest and prowess and risk and achievement. Toxic? Unhealthy? Perhaps, but we are talking about my selfishness. I have learned to temper myself out of necessity, to practice rest and set limits, to cool my fire down to embers so I don’t burn out. But this is the truth of me, the real me, my spirit, a creature of flame that seeks to spread out and devour and leap up higher and brighter. I want vastness, I want expansion, I want to be boundless. 

These strengths are also my faults; these virtues are also my sins. 

I cannot have everything that I want, because truly, I want everything. I want to know and feel and experience and taste and accomplish and possess it all. But at the same time, I know I have been settling for less than I need. I am tired because I have failed to feed my soul. My flame is faltering because it needs more beauty, more pleasure, more friendship, more adventures. I have been stingy with myself, have almost let the light in my temple go out. 

This world is intent on strangling me, choking me, putting out the fire in me, denying me more than the bare necessities and making me work myself to the bone even for those. It is doing that to us all. As I have said, this is not for you, this is not intended to be about you, but if it is about you, even a little bit, by accident, attend well to your fire. Demand more– not just of what you need, but of what you want. Fight for a world that isn’t merely just and free and equitable– fight for a world of beauty and glory and passion and romance and drunken ecstasy. Fight for a life that is not merely liveable but worth living the hell out of! Do not forget desire– your needs for beauty and pleasure and music and laughter and art and touch. 

Find what thrills you, what inspires you, what sets your soul on fire– and pursue it, grasp it, cling to it, fight for it, devour it, worship it, adore it, and above all– live for it. 

Because it is what makes you yourself. It is what gives you your will to live, without which existence is impossible. 

MEDITATION

I invite you now to close your eyes. Breath deep, into your core. Place your hands upon your belly and feel it rise and fall. Breath deep. Breath slow. Let your breath be heavy. Your exhale may growl out of you. 

Feel the heat, the pulse of hot energy, the fire in your belly. Let it spread through you, filling your torso from the base of your spine through your reproductive organ, stomach, your solar plexus, your heart, up into your throat. The centers of hunger and emotion and consuming and desire. The mouth that eats, the throat that swallows, the entire digestive system that turns food into energy, the heart that circulates the blood through your body, and those parts that symbolize, among other things, the creation of new life. 

It is the head that thinks, and we know now that emotions come from the brain– but they are felt in the body, these parts of the body. Depression as a heaviness in the chest, or love as a warmth in it. Anxiety as twisting in the belly or tightness of the throat. Notice what you are feeling now, what kind of sensations arise in you. 

Let your whole torso be filled with warmth. Imagine that fire in your belly flaring hot and bright, leaping up towards the heart and the throat, spreading down towards the base of the spine. What color is it? How does it feel? What does it want? What does it feed on? What makes it burn bright? 

Breath deep. Sit with it. Feel it. If your fire feels weak, let your breath pull in energy from above and below, from the earth and the universe. Tend the fire with your breath, for fire needs air. Let it grow brighter and brighter. It is your desires. It is your needs. It is your drives. It is your motivation. It is your passion. It is your furnace, your engine. It is always there for you, and it can give you many gifts if you attend to it. 

Let its burning energize you. Let it purify you, clearing away and devouring anything unnecessary. Let it warm and comfort you. Experience its power. 

When you are ready– when you have gathered enough power within yourself– open your eyes. If the energy feels overwhelming– if you feel too hot, or flushed, or shaky, or wired– breath through your nose only, but with a normal rhythm. Rest your palms on your belly to ground yourself, to feel all that fire condense itself back into glowing embers that you can fan into flames whenever necessary. It is always there for you.