I feel so overwhelmed by a new discovery.  Well.  Not new, I mean I've known about Chaos Magick since I was a kid, but I never looked into it back then.  I forgot all about it, till yesterday.  I went on Amazon after my last blog entry, just to replace some of my lost books.  I found a LOT of them, and I basically spent my entire paycheck on books.  But not just old ones...I found one called Practical Sigil Magic that jumped out at me.  I bought it, and discovered that it was the author's interpretation on Austin Osman Sphere's sigil methodology.  Blown away. I am blown away. That was my first encounter with A.O. Sphere and his teachings.  In a nutshell, it's the missing link between what *I* am, where I fit into the occult universe, and where I've left off with Crowley's teachings.  Like, this is my thing.  I've always eschewed the idea of the OTO or A.A. as a fulfilling path for myself.  I've always said "If an organization or order or church doesn't 100% represent your personal spiritual ideas, then it'll hold you back"  While I'm a self-initiated Thelemite, dedicated for life, I am not 100% in line with what the organization represents.  I'm not for ceremonial magic. I'm not all about big Hermetic rituals.  Fuck systems.  

I wrote this deceleration on the topic two years ago.  It holds true now, more than ever.  I've been feeling in a rut, because when you kick "systems" and their respective dogmas out of your life...it sort of leaves you pinwheeling out there in the ether. I realize, now it's not a flat-out rejection of systems, its more of a flat-out rejection of commitment to any one of them.  I am reading cards again, of course I am. Doing better with it now than I ever have in my whole life.  I am still a practicing magician, witch, whatever, and I feel at my most powerful.  I'm kinda out of stuff to study, though.  I went on Amazon last night thinking "there really is nothing new out there for me to tackle, the closest I have is the OTO and Crowley and cabbalistic teachings."  I mean, that's nice and all...  Then I found that sigil book, which led me to other books, which led me to googling Chaos Magick, which led me to discovering the IoT.  Which...fuck.  Mindblowing.  I was up all night reading. I caught fire again.  I haven't been this charged up about a new thing in maybe six or seven years.  It's everything I've done my whole life unofficially...but official.  
Luiz puts it best when he says "I'm so happy for you! You found your magickal heritage!"  FINALLY.  I now have people that I can read, and maybe eventually  join with, and talk to who have been doing it the way I do it since before I was born.

The key tenant of Chaos Magic is "Nothing is True".

I'm going to quote Phil Hine directly here, this comes right out of Condensed Chaos.

1. The avoidance of Dogmatism. Chaos Magicians strive to
avoid falling into dogmatism (unless expressing dogmatism
is part of a temporary belief system they have entered).
Discordians use ‘Catmas’ such as “Us Discordians must stick
apart!” Thus Chaos Magicians feel entitled to change their
minds, contradict themselves and come up with arguments that
are alternatively plausible and implausible. It has been pointed
out that we invest a lot of time and energy in being right. What’s
wrong with being wrong occasionally?


2.  Personal Experience is paramount. In other words, don’t
take my word that such-and-such is the case, check it out for
yourself. Magick has suffered extensively from ‘armchair
theorists’ who have perpetuated myths and out-of-date
information purely due to laziness of one kind or another.
Sometimes it’s interesting to ask awkward questions just to
see what the selfappointed experts come out with. Some will
emit a stream of verbal diahorrea rather than admit to not
knowing the answer, whereas a true adept will probably say “I
haven’t a f*****g clue.” Quite early on, Chaos magicians came
to the startling discovery that once you strip away the layers of
dogma, personal beliefs, attitudes and anecdotes around any
particular technique of practical magick, it can be quite simply
described.

3. Technical Excellence. One of the early misconceptions about
Chaos Magick was that it gave practitioners carte blanche to
do whatever they liked, and so become sloppy (or worse, soggy)
in their attitudes to self-assessment, analysis, etc. Not so. The
Chaos approach has always advocated rigorous self-assessment
and analysis, emphasised practice at what techniques you’re
experimenting with until you get the results that you desire.
Learning to ‘do’ magick requires that you develop a set of
skills and abilities and if you’re going to get involved in all
this weird stuff, why not do it to the best of your ability?

4. Deconditioning. 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 ones politics, religion, gender
preference, degree of free will, race, subculture etc all help
maintain a stable sense of self, whilst 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 egofictions, and thus able to discard or modify them when
appropriate.

5. Diverse Approaches. As mentioned earlier, ‘traditional’
approaches to magick involve choosing one particular system
and sticking to it. The Chaos perspective, if nothing else,
encourages an eclectic approach to development, and Chaos
Magicians are free to choose from any available magical
system, themes from literature, television, religions, cults,
parapsychology, etc. This approach means that if you approach
two chaos magicians and ask ‘em what they’re doing at any
one moment, you’re rarely likely to find much of a consensus
of approach. This makes Chaos difficult to pin down as one
thing or another, which again tends to worry those who need
approaches to magick to be neatly labelled and clear.

6.  Gnosis. One of the keys to magical ability is the ability to
enter Altered States of Consciousness at will. We tend to draw
a distinct line between ‘ordinary consciousness’ and ‘altered
states’, where in fact we move between different states of
consciousness - such as daydreams, ‘autopilot’ (where we carry
out actions without cognition) and varying degrees of attention,
all the time. However, as far as magick is concerned, the willed
entry into intense altered states can be divided into two poles
of ‘Physiological Gnosis’ - Inhibitory states, and Excitatory
states. The former includes physically ‘passive’ techniques
such as meditation, yoga, scrying, contemplation and sensory
deprivation while the latter includes chanting, drumming,
dance, emotional and sexual arousal.



So, that's what Phil Hine has to say on the matter.  I say...that is SO FUCKING ME.  Compare what I wrote in 2011 to what I just found last night...I've been looking for this for a long time.

Alright. Enough writing. I have way more reading to do.