Being & Non-Being in Occult Experience Vol. 1 (deluxe edition) by Ian C. Edwards

Being and Non-Being in Occult Experience is a projected series of four volumes. The series serves to introduce readers to a spirituality, philosophy, existential-phenomenology, and depth psychology of occult experience through the lens of the dialectical relationship (the play) between becoming, being, and non-being. The author purports an anti-foundational “language” through which occult experience can be translated, transformed, transmuted, and ultimately (ex)communicated.

In Volume I, the author, in his participatory epistemological encounter with Liber AL vel Legis, writes the Abyss into manifestation by transforming speech acts into magickal acts; moving from Idea to Form and from Form to Idea in a circular, bidirectional fashion.  Herein lies a “key” to understanding the Cosmos’ own emergence from and disappearance into the Abyss; the becoming of Somethingness from No-thingness; the One from the None; the Logos in an eternal dialogue with the Void.  

Only the heretic, the seer, the sorcerer can hold this “key”.  This is a path not for the many but for the few, as this heresy is structural and methodological; a negation of all systems that are anti-organic; systems that highlight static notions of being and non-being at the expense of becoming.   The Book of the Law embodies its soul into the reader, incarnating itself with each spoken or unspoken utterance, transforming itself in the act of reading, so that subject and object are inverted, displacing self and other through an engagement with radical alterity

The Book of the Law affirms an absence that erases the “who” or “what” we understand to be the subject in favor of an otherness that becomes the subject’s own most possibility for becoming; the dialectic between non-being and being as the place of presence.

The author shows how The Book of the Law is a Book of Love, a Book that tells a story; a unique mythology which describes the intimate relationship between Being and Non-Being through the use of signifiers that present and represent a myriad of archetypal images and universal notions; all the while inviting its readers to embrace the totality of the Law itself.  The Law is for All because Love is All and the All is Love.