Nobody is more game than the universe, man. So many lovers in my past who were incapable of picking up what I was putting down, but the minute I told the universe I wanted to live magickally she was like, “you rang?”
I have been processing something pretty paradigm-shifting lately about my magickal practice. Something that I knew I was experiencing but didn’t really understand on this current zoomed-out level.
In 2015 I declared myself a chaos magician because I liked the basic description that it’s about choosing your beliefs and practices based on the results they get you. This made sense to me and felt like a good investment of my time, because I was interested in magick as a means to create change in my reality, not as a study of an arbitrary tradition because someone else believed it worked. I bought some books on the subject, watched some YouTube videos, and specifically called in my teacher by launching a sigil to have lunch with them (which was super awkward when it worked, but I confessed to them what I’d done and they said they had no problem with it, even if it was technically dodgy on the free will aspect it was just lunch after all and I figured the worst case scenario was they’d be bored for an hour).
But then like, the effects of my sigil launches took over my life, and I didn’t really end up reading the books I’d started?? One of the first sigils I launched was a sigil to attract a soulmate relationship when I was still a pickup artist, and the twin flame path showed up and basically decimated my entire life.
And in order for me to solve the awakening that was happening to me, I ended up going down the rabbit hole of The Body Keeps the Score (trauma healing), Unbroken Brain (addiction/pattern formation – and also autism as it turns out), NLP (which I’d already been certified in but revisited with fresh understanding), the Post-Traumatic Stress Index, Wired For Love (attachment theory) understood through the twin flame perspective, The Ascension Manual for Planet Earth (XRisk as seen through a spiritual focus), Becoming Supernatural (hacking flow states and repatterning via the quantum field), mood-tracking, shadow work, dark night of the soul, and finally solving for ethical and sustainable financial freedom in late capitalism, and basically synthesizing everything I learned into a single body of work.
These are not specifically magickal texts or exercises, to be clear.
Between the mentorship and education I invested in and the results I was getting from my solitary casting, I felt really satisfied with my growth and understanding of my magickal practice.
But aside from my mentor’s introductory essay, I still hadn’t read the chaos magick books.
My mentor, in their introductory essay, had advised the following:
“HOW TO BE A MAGICIAN:Simple. Declare yourself a magician, behave like a magician, practice magic every day.”
So that’s what I had done. And when it started working, that’s how I began understanding it.And though I wanted very much to become a spiritual teacher – in fact, I had set an intention for that career transition at the Capricorn new moon at the very end of 2016 – the genuine spiritual transmission that came through me emerged not as some arcane magickal hermetic pronouncement, nor as the simplistic tarot and divination kind of classes I thought I’d be teaching, but as The Re-Patterning Project. (And in its book draft form as The Gifted Kid Program for Enlightenment: An Accelerated Study in Human Consciousness for the Creation of Sustainable Patterns.)
And neither of those are branded/marketed as “Initiate yourself as a chaos magician!”
But now that I’m catching up on some of the seminal chaos magick texts so that I can effectively peer-review myself now that I am being given opportunities to speak and write on magick more publicly and I want to make sure I’m staying informed…
[it should be noted here that in teaching sigil creation in my Myths & Magick course I created an “example sigil” of the intention “I embody my highest potential as a magician” because that’s pretty example-y, right, but then after putting it in the coursework I was like, “well, seems like a positive spell, may as well launch it” – and then just weeks afterward I was invited to contribute an essay to the new edition of Robert Anton Wilson’s Sex, Drugs, and Magick, which has since led me to a new degree of involvement in the magick community and a new degree of responsibility in my understanding of magick, so… funny how that works, and thank you universe for giving me what I asked for in a far more concrete sense than I expected]
…I am noticing that there is this common process of initiation into chaos magick that is sometimes referred to as “Deconditioning.”
For example. Here’s an excerpt from Condensed Chaos by Phil Hine, published in 1995:
“The Chaos paradigm proposes that one of the primary tasks of the aspiring magician is to thoroughly decondition hirself from the mesh of beliefs, attitudes, and fictions about self, society, and the world. Our ego is a fiction of stable self-hood which maintains itself by perpetuating the distinctions of ‘what I am/what I am not, what I like/what I don’t like.’ Beliefs about one’s politics, religion, gender preference, degree of free will, race, subculture etc. help maintain a stable sense of self, while the little ways in which we pull against this very stability allows us to feel as though we are unique individuals. Using deconditioning exercises, we can start to widen the cracks in our consensual reality which hopefully enables us to become less attached to our beliefs and ego fictions, and thus able to discard or modify them when appropriate.”
And the way I am reading it described, it really sounds a lot like everything I learned and synthesized into The Re-Patterning Project?
Like, the universe just fed my autistic brain all the left-brained, trauma-informed versions of the information it needed to understand my experience of spiritual awakening via the path of chaos magick? And basically because of my autistic gifts in pattern recognition, memory, and language, I was able to explain it by correctly sequencing and presenting the information exactly as I had absorbed it in order for it to be effective?
Anyway it’s definitely a very weird and wonderful recognition, and I don’t at all know what to do with this information. I am not really worried about it, but all of a sudden I did have the thought of, wait, have I been marketing this all wrong?
But essentially I am recognizing that I had a spontaneous initiation into chaos magick that I absolutely called in for myself by declaring myself a chaos magician and beginning to practice chaos magick, but which I didn’t really understand as a concept before it happened.
And that I documented the whole thing so that it can be learned exactly as I learned it.
Anyway. That’s what I mean when I say nobody is more game than the universe.I declared myself a chaos magician and she was like, “well alright then.”
This is why the first thing I teach about magick is that magick will teach you itself.
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