WHAT STUART WILDE CAN TEACH CHAOS MAGICIANS

I have spoken numerous times before about how Stuart Wilde was one of my early and lasting influences and yet I am always surprised by how few people actually recognise the name. He was a huge deal back in the day but now his name draws blank stares.

Admittedly this has probably a lot to do with the circles I am in these days – Chaos Magicians really don’t like getting too close to any sort of New Age ideas just in case their friends see them hanging around with the nice kids. That New Age stink is very hard to remove.

I understand this, of course – the New Age Movement is basically an area where absolutely anyone with any sort of wild or crazy idea AT ALL can talk about it with authority to an eager audience. It’s full of crazies, white lighters and special snowflakes. While Chaotes don’t want to sit with New Agers at the lunch table, New Agers don’t want to sit with them either – Chaotes are, after all, in league with Satan and want the world to burn!

To my mind, however, Stuart Wilde is as much a Chaos Magician as you can get, although he wouldn’t have seen or described himself as that. He preferred the terms Fringe-Dweller or Warrior Sage, which have their own charm. His books were funny, irreverent and practical, but for me the best bit was that they were exciting. He told you how to do cool stuff like put thoughts in people’s heads and get Dogs to stop barking with your mind. He talked about travelling down the Near Death Tunnels and how you could do it too. He talked about Mirror worlds and how to make loads of money.

Wilde was fun, practical and adventurous – all the while dismissing all the boring old rules, elitism and pompousness of spirituality – which are also the exact things that I love about Chaos Magick!

But the reason for this post is that he was big into Etheric Exercises, and I feel these may be of interest and use to a Chaos Magician.

As you probably know, Etheric has as many definitions as the people you ask for one, but in Wilde’s case the Etheric is a human energy field or energy body that can be, in some ways, directed by the mind to cause effects in the material world. You can read more about it what it is traditionally described as here, but I’ll probably come back to the idea in future posts or more likely in the Magick Primer series.

Now on to the fun…

THE ETHERIC GAMES

One of Wilde’s early books called The Quickening, contains lots of ideas and exercise about what he calls Turbo-thought (using your mind to affect material reality), such as a technique to insert an idea into someones mind. What Magician doesn’t want that ability?

The process involves sending a ball of energy (with your idea nested inside) from your Etheric body into the brain of another person via their Muladhara Chakra. Best done at night or when the person is distracted or pre-occupied – although can be used in situations like Job Interviews. Wilde describes how to use this technique in a job interview (from The Quickening)…

“…you would concentrate solely on their forehead at the space between their eyes…. As he talks, pull a quantum of Life Force up from your root chakra and… see yourself inside that ball of energy. You are going to fire that turbo-thought into the interviewer’s mind. Thus, you visualize a line of light entering the interviewer via his root chakra, running up his spine into his right brain. Fire your thought-form along the line of light, expelling a short breath as you do so. Have the thought-form explode in his brain, like a shower of God-Force. Once the thought is fired, back off.”

I have had success doing this sort of Turbo Thought on people on a one to one basis, but nothing of any great importance. I have at times gotten people to say words unrelated to their current topic, or got them to talk about a particular memory or song or film or things like that. Nothing hugely significant though and I’ve pretty much stopped doing it because I found I wasn’t really listening to people any more when they talked to me – I was just playing a game, which was rude and eventually boring.

When I was at College studying Holistic Health, a few of us used to play a game using Turbo Thought to try to get the Lecturer to say particular words or phrases. We weren’t too successful but we certainly seemed to have some effect as we often appeared to make the Lecturer confused, muddled or totally lose their train of thought. Again of course, confirmation bias is a factor here but it really did feel like it was doing something.

That all said, It’s worth trying to see what you can experience with it yourself. Like all these things the proof is in the doing.

Another interesting Etheric game from brother Stu, is the Turn Around Game. Basically the idea is to look at someone who is facing away from you and get them to turn round to your direction. Wilde says he got this from a spiritual teacher of his who…

“…recommended I concentrated on the back of the neck of those targeted, and to create the feeling that I was, in fact, standing right up close to that person, breathing down his or her neck. Once this feeling was established, I was to imagine licking the back of the person’s neck. Sounds awful, but it isn’t, really. I tried it. Amazingly enough, I found that I could get almost all of them to turn—some more readily than others. It was only when the individual was engaged in some activity that dominated his concentration, that he failed to notice my etheric maneuvers. Try it for yourself; you’ll be amazed. Lest you think it an infringement, suffice it to say that I don’t feel that having people turn around is an act that greatly affects them. I feel fine about it.”

I got really good at this one. So much so that I would bet with friends about it. You should really try this one, it’s lots of fun and when people start to turn around and look at you it gets really exciting. There is an element of practice involved in it though, it seems. I stopped doing it for years (no reason, just forgot about it really) and I can’t really do it that well anymore – it does improve if I do it frequently though.

Another Etheric exercise that Wilde suggests is an Etheric Tripping People Game. I wasn’t as successful with this one as the Turn Around Game, but I was able to do it. Again, this needs some practice to get working. Over to Brother Stu…

“[F]ind a park bench that is beside a footpath

and to sit there absolutely still, moving not a muscle, not a hair, blinking as little as possible. The idea is to establish an area of energy around you that is outside normal reality—an etheric free zone. Nothing animate is ever completely still. Once that motionless calm is around you, imagine yourself holding a stick across the path at the height of a few inches. Then, keeping your concentration solely on the stick at all times and reinforcing that image with your mind, watch the passersby trip on the nonexistent stick! If you find this hard at first, grant yourself an added boost: As they approach, imagine your open hand giving them a hefty shove in the back. That’ll do it. They won’t fall on their nose. At best they will stutter-step, but that is enough, and you won’t necessarily get them all, but you will get some. When you do, you will know that you can easily create turbo-thought, and that that thought can be used in many fascinating ways.”

HOW TO DO WILDE STYLE MAGICK

People ask me when I first got into Chaos Magick and my usually answer is “when I saw Grant Morrison’s Disinfo lecture“, but I don’t think that’s really the truth of it. I got into Chaos Magick as a teenager when I first read Stuart Wilde and listened to all his audio lectures. I just didn’t know it was Chaos Magick.

And like I said, Stuart probably wouldn’t have called any of his ideas Magick, but if the following excerpt, again from The Quickening, is not a brilliant and perfect working description of how to do Magick, then I honestly don’t know what is:

“…in a meditative state, place your concentration at the root chakra, at the base of the spine in the genital region… and slowly pull from that base, with your mind, a quantum of energy. You can visualize it as a ball of light. See that energy moving slowly up an imaginary line through the center of your body, like an elevator. You will have decided, prior to this, which of three chakras—heart, throat, or third eye—is your strongest. (You can’t use the crown chakra for turbothought.) Then, as you move the Life Force up your body, stop it once it reaches the chosen chakra, and hover it there for a moment. Allow the energy of the chakra and the energy that you have raised from the root to mix. By now, that image of light will be held slightly outside your body at a distance of about an inch. Place inside that pellet of energy your visualized intention. Allow the etheric energy that you have collected from the root to infuse your image so that the visualization becomes a hologram, so that within every atom of the etheric energy there is contained a complete image of the whole. Feel that image excited and intensified by the Life Force. Then, when you have held that image inside the pellet of energy and you have hovered it there for a brief moment to stabilize it, you are ready to fire the turbo-thought. In firing it, you explode it all around you, top to bottom, left to right, behind and in front, so that the energized hologram of your visualization enters every molecule of what you are. In this way, every minute part of your mind-body-spirit now contains the image of your new circumstances. Your destiny pattern, which lays all around you in your etheric, now contains the new possibility as fact. To explode the thought, expel from your mouth a short burst of air that you originate from the lower diaphragm. It is like a forceful sigh. As you express it, your stomach muscles will contract. The sigh will be akin to a sniff, except that you are exhaling rather than inhaling. Simultaneously, see the pellet with your image in it, explode, blasting and radiating through your entire being. Once the explosion is completed, release the idea, and do not think about it for at least 72 hours.”

I’ll be coming back to good Ol’ Stu a lot in the future here on the blog as I think he has lots of interesting ideas that can be easily applied to the Chaos paradigm. Besides his stuff is fun and we need more fun.

However, I will leave you with a bit of a warning about him, or more correctly, a concern – towards the end of his life his writings got very dark and doom porny. He seemed to go to a very dark and negative place in his mind and outlook. It was all about demons, the end of the world, Aliens, conspiracies and they’re-out-to-get-you type stuff – think David Icke but with extra woo, if that’s possible. Which in itself is fine, but from reading some online reports about how his behaviour changed at this point in his life, you could guess that maybe something was really getting to him on a fundamental level – the most common touted reason is drugs, but I have no idea.

I did meet him once and managed to spend an amazing few hours with him and a group of people after a lecture he gave in Glastonbury in July, 2000. He actually mentions this night in one of his audio lectures, but for most people who saw him that night the memory will be that he gave the lecture while drunk and upset a lot of people who expected him to be the playful scamp he was known as.

That said, he was by far the most impressive spiritual person I have met in my life and he did have that “something” to him that you can’t explain, so much so that upon hearing of his death I dedicated my book THEM to him.

I want to talk more about that night in another post so I’ll leave it for now. It was an absolute landmark night for me and I don’t just want to squeeze it in at the end.

In the meantime, If you want to delve further into his ideas then I will absolutely and unreservedly suggest you read, or better still listen to the audiobook of Infinite Self.

Until next time…