Initiation as an Operating System

Egregors--easy to build all by yourself, right? No.

The line to burn me at the stake for violating modern ideas about initiated traditions (Golden Dawn, many forms of Wicca, Thelema) will soon be forming. Why? Because I am willing to say things like this:

You need both--individual and group work--to fully understand and use the [initiated Golden Dawn] system as it was designed to work. This is how it was designed--it is not a bug; it is a feature. Initiation (in a group) is like installing the operating system of a computer. The members of the group itself is like the circuits in a computer. The individual work, rituals, and study, are the programs and the owner's manual...which work best if you have the proper operating system installed, along with the suggested hardware (aka you are not working alone), and the right settings (godforms). And lineage is the official "I did not pirate this software" seal and code which (in my "healed lineage" experience) can be paid for after the fact, and allows for software patches. You would not expect a single unplugged circuit board to be able to run computer programs, so why does everyone expect the rituals of Golden Dawn to work without the set-up that was designed into the system in the first place?