Crowley has three laws, which read as follows:
1. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.
2. Love is the law, love under will.
3. Every man and every woman is a star.
These ideas are very difficult for the average person to understand. People tend to reduce them to lawlessness elevated into a law, excessive indulgence, and the glorification of the Ego.
Sometimes the difficulty in understanding these laws lies in the sequence: they have been set out from the top down, rather than from the observer’s point of view, from the bottom up.
And then it becomes clear:
3. Everyone should have a higher idea, a god, a principle—whatever it may be—that leads them forward. This higher principle is the Star, the Guardian Angel, your Self. And you are That.
2. The path to it lies through Conscious Love. Not through sexual excess, but through an understanding of actions, through love for everything in clear and definite terms, rather than the attitude of ‘I love the whole world and it loves me’—a position belonging to the first stage. But ‘love is the law’ means understanding that ‘love thy neighbour’ rests upon the principle ‘as thyself’. This is precisely the principle of love through Will. Love is feeling; Will is logical and conscious. Their union is the union of two principles: conscious ecstasy.
1. And having attained this conscious ecstasy, you come to the foundation of the Law: Do what thou wilt. But who is it that wills? The very same Star that you are. Without the principle of the Star, there can be no understanding of the Law.
So, to begin with, find your own principle. Only then will you be able to say that you are exercising Will.
Everything else is merely the scurrying of insects, because people greatly overestimate the importance of their outward affairs.