One still needs to have Chaos inside to give birth to a dancing star.
F. Nietzsche
What´s up with all that Chaos?
Chaos has a bad reputation. Most people think of Chaos as a force of destruction and to be avoided by creating and maintaining Order as its opposite. I hold the believe that life at its core emerges from Chaos and that Chaos serves as a force of evolution. No matter how much Order we create, life will always find chaotic ways to unfold and evolve. As an Agent of Change I embrace Chaos as a catalyst and I dedicate this project to showing a different perspective on this primal force of evolution.
My playing with Chaos, Order and Disorder comes from Discordianism which can be seen as a religion disguised as joke or a joke disguised as a religion, what ever appeals more to you. I find it dadaistic and absurdly illuminating.
Chaos Magick informs my practical approach to psycho-spiritual development, Chaos Engineering and Psychonautics. The 8 Circuit Brain Model works as my map to navigate the territory of altered states of consciousness.
From this I will develop my Chaosophy for surfing Chaos and my own coaching style.
The Sacred Chao
The Sacred Chao is the key to Illumination. […] The Sacred Chao symbolizes absolutely everything anyone need ever know about absolutely anything, an more! It even symbolizes everything not worth knowing, depicted by the empty space surrounding the Hodge-Podge.
Principia Discordia 00049
The Sacred Chao as a symbol represents the CHAO (the singular unit of Chaos), which holds similarity to the TAO. It balances not the Yin and the Yang but the Hodge and the Podge: Order and Disorder. Pure Chaos itself resides beyond that what we can grasp on the conceptual level. On the level of man-made concepts we can perceive Order and Disorder as the two sides of the polarity of Chaos. Depending on what kind of cultural paradigm we use to look at reality, some Chaos appears ordered and some Chaos disordered. If we change the paradigm the same Chaos will appear differently ordered and disordered.
Chaos Magick
Chaos Magick for me works as a path of liberation and illumination. This approach reduces psycho-spiritual practice to that what works for the individual, cutting down the autoritative narratives of different Belief Systems (BS). Using belief as a tool we can get hacking our own operating system to alter our reality tunnel by using sigils and rituals to bypass the conscious rational mind and anchor the change we want to manifest deep in our system.
The most basic technique used by chaos magickians involves the creation of sigils. We create sigils from a statement of will and transform them into a symbol or non-sense mantra and then use altered states to charge them into the subconscious. This aim can also be achieved by creating rituals that allow access to altered states. Whatever your imagination can bring forth can be used to design ritual experiences. This works way more effectively that telling yourself positive affirmations into the mirror, when there are parts of your system that do not buy the BS you are telling yourself.
I believe a variety of paths towards illumination and liberation can be taken. There is no ultimate map or road to enlightenment, but a lot of BS peddlers that sell you that. Chaos Magick allows for the freedom to play with anyone of those paths and choose whatever works best for you – because you are your own authority and the map is never the territory!
The 8 Circuit Brain Model
To know how your system is wired, empowers you to reclaim your existence!
The 8 Circuit Brain Model is a map of personal and transpersonal consciousness and was first proposed by Timothy Leary, further developed by Robert Anton Wilson and brought into embodied praxis by Antero Alli. I love this map for its agnostic and integral flexibility. You do not need to buy into any Belief System (a.k.a. BS) to use it. You can make it your own with whatever BS floats your boat and use it to practice psychonautics in a balanced way.
The model does not represent state of the art scientific mapping of the brain and nervous system. The new scientific research on neuroscience and neuro-biology, cognitive science, developmental psychology, attachment theory and trauma research can be integrated into the understanding of this model. As a philosophical model it has its merits in mapping psychological development and experiences of altered state of consciousness. It allows for the exploration of self and provides some approaches to integration of life’s shocks (a.ka. Waves of Chaos) and consciousness expansion.
Surfing the waves of Chaos
tldr: ChaoSurfing is about creating balance in your system by shifting around order and disorder in the different circuits to increase the response-ability to the uncertainty of shifting territory and about having fun surfing the unexpected waves of Chaos life provides us with.
When surfing the waves of the seas, there is not much we control. We cannot control the waves if they are big or small how fast they break or how long they roll. We cannot control the weather, the currents, the wind. The only thing we can control is how we are standing on our board, how balanced we are, and how well we respond to the signals of the outside territory, in this case, the ocean and its moods.
The same applies to the waves of Chaos. Life has its way of hitting us with the unexpected and delivering shocks to our system. And as the Disorder in our world increases – due to climate change, a financial system is kept alive by infusing it with the creation of money ex nihilo, and by the pandemic game and the sometimes more or less absurd responses to it calling to increase the totalitarian Order of our systems, – the territory becomes even more uncertain. So uncertain that many of our maps might soon not apply anymore and we might have to rely even more on trusting our inner guidance systems.
Surfing the waves of Chaos differs from just going with the flow in the sense that you decide to playfully take action, set intention, and decide direction and more of all have fun while doing so, even when you get bitch slapped by the big waves. Going with the flow will bring you wherever the current is going. Surfing the waves of Chaos looks more like deciding which waves to catch, if you are going to swim for it or let it pass, if you are going under the wave or over it and when you catch your wave you get to play and have fun with it. Sometimes you might get thrown off your board and have a wild ride and you might need to take a break at the shore to catch your breath, listen in on the mood of the ocean, and decide when you wanna get back in. The experience brings more playful agency, at least over that which you do actually have control over. What you cannot control, you best let go.
So how can we go about balancing that inner order and disorder to surf the waves of Chaos?
First, we need to bring up the courage to become explorers of our consciousness and get to know the wiring and imprinting of our lower circuits (a.k.a inner order). Then we need to do the work of integrating the needs of these circuits and the work towards liberation of limiting programming and shitty imprinting (a.k.a. developmental trauma and social conditioning).
The better integrated our system is at the base, the easier it becomes to expand consciousness in the upper circuits, navigate the chaotic experiences of altered states (a.k.a. inner disorder), and to absorb the shocks from expansive or traumatic experiences.
In my experience, the crucial balance needed to navigate uncertainty and have fun playing with the waves of Chaos can be achieved by working on integrating and balancing the second circuit (emotional territorial programming). To do so we need to trust and follow the heart’s guidance, the courage to face the storms of grief and rage it holds, the courage to follow our deepest joy and passion, and the courage to sit with one´s fear and allow it to expand the fields of perception to calculate the possibilities. Like this, we can increase response-ability and reclaim our sovereignty!
Also…It helps if you do not take yourself and life too seriously and accept that sometimes the cosmic joke is on you.
Dive deeper
You wanna go deeper into the rabbithole of my take on Discordianism, Chaos Magick and the 8 Circuit Brain?
If you are looking for companionship on a journey of transformation that is informed by this edgy approach, my coaching style might be for you.
As the arch-traitor Bluefluke, I too believe Illumination should be free. If you want to dive into Chaos Magick as a seeker on your own, I recommend The Psychonauts Field Manual by Bluefluke as a comprehensive and humorous guide to Chaos Magick as consciousness hacking.
If you want support, you know where to find me.