Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 230: Chaos Magic Part I - The Basics

Episode Date: July 1, 2016

It's the first part of our long awaited series on Chaos Magic this week as we cover, as simply as we possibly can, the origins, the core tenets, and just what Chaos Magic can do for you if you decide to give it a shot. Music credit for the Pentabarf: Piece for Disaffected Piano One Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? Alright, should we just start the show? Let's start the show. Alright, welcome to the show everyone.

I am Ben Kissel. That's Marcus Parks. And then the other guy. He's all the way in Atlanta. Woo! Woo! It's hot out there. Woo!

Got away a handkerchief, because if not, the sweat gets into my Atlanta Braves jersey. Oh, wow. Everybody loves the Atlanta Braves here down in Atlanta. Actually, they suck. They're a very bad baseball team. Maybe that's because their name is racist. No. Oh, is it now?

Someone told me it was. I don't know. Oh, they didn't call themselves the Atlanta Brown Cowards. That's a good point. That's a much more racist name. Good point, Henry Zabrowski. I'm going to tell you a little story that I think actually folds deep into the cast magic story.

So today we're doing chaos magic. Yeah, finally. At long last, after talking about it for what, a year now? Maybe well over a year. Yeah, we did our right handpath episode. We did our left handpath episode. We planned to do chaos magic, then realized we are idiots and needed about two to three to maybe 12 months of studying.

And then we discovered that we actually need five to 10 years of studying after that. And so I went out to my apartment complex where I'm staying in Atlanta has a pool. So I go out to the pool and I'm sitting and like, you know, and I'm covered in specks of paint. I'm a monster. Everybody there is looks really very attractive. It's like it was like a couple of hot women, like too big, like rapper looking guys, big guys, a lot of chains on.

When you say rapper, what do you mean? Black men with lots of jewelry. Oh, I see. Okay. Interesting. Hard. They seem stronger than the others. And so I literally was like, so it was like, whatever.

So I saw next to the pool, there was a hot tub and there was a little ram and it's a little like, like bubbles coming out and I was like, you know what, I deserve to relax. I've been working really hard. I went over there, slipped in there and I was like, man, this hot tub is really shallow. And I was like laying in there and I laid there for about 15, 20 minutes just laying in this. So like, but I couldn't really sit in it. I literally had to lay like I was doing the body float, like a dead body float in this

hot tub. And then that night I come back and I was like, I go to work and I was like, I tell the guys, I was like, guys, there's a hot tub at the apartment complex. We were saying they're like, Oh, that's awesome. That night it came and I show them the hot tub and they're like, that's not a hot tub. That's a fountain and I laid. So I'm a man with black nail polish and I'm covered in just sores and like weird flecks of red paint.

And I was just laying in a fountain, like 20 minutes, like the most relaxed man in the world. I was sitting there being like, I can't believe no one else is using this hot tub. And that shows the power of magic using perspective. I changed the fountain into a hot tub, a lunatic, complete madman. I'm very excited to learn about chaos magic today. All right. So right up top, let's say that this is definitely going to sound a little weird at times.

Things, oh, it's going to be weird things. They're probably, they're not going to make sense at first. A lot of this stuff isn't going to make sense at first, but hang on because we have made every effort we possibly can to simplify it as much as we possibly can using as many real life comparisons and examples as possible. Because we've had to do that in order to understand it ourselves because we're total amateurs. We're absolute amateurs. Nothing we should, that we say today should be taken as authoritative.

And by the way, if anyone says that they are the authority on chaos magic, then they have completely missed the point of chaos magic. It's the point, dude. You've been thinking about it too much. The whole point is not think about it. It actually goes all the way back to H.H. Holmes. Yeah, of course. So the best way that I can put is that, you know, we're talking about, we've started it

for so long. We've been studying it for probably a year now. And the best way I could say is that if you look at chaos magic as a video game, pretty much all we've done here with this episode, we beat the tutorial. Like the real game hasn't even begun for us yet. And if you're going to go ahead and if you're going to want to even dip your toe in the world of chaos magic, read Condensed Chaos by Phil Hine, and it's great. It's very, very easy to understand.

And this is us trying to break it down in a style the last podcast on the left can break it down with fun examples. But otherwise, I think the point is to not understand. That's where I've come through. That's my late night realization to be like, we're not even supposed to understand it. So the foundation of chaos magic comes from an English artist named Austin Spare. He was the first occultist in modern times to completely reject the use of paraphernalia, overly complicated rituals and secret societies in order to make shit happen.

And apparently he was a very awkward guy. He was extremely, he just hung out in bars all the time. He, you know, he was a surrealist artist. All of his art shows were done in bars. He just kind of hung out at the end and would blab on anybody who would list to him about like the keepers at the silent gates of memory and shit like that. But he was actually a brilliant person. He's the guy that came up with the whole system of magical sigils that we've talked

about in here again and again. Sigils are something that a person could create in order to focus their will. And sigil, and Austin Spare creating these sigils, giving them to the masses, he made magic something that literally anyone could do as long as they kept an open mind. Now while Spare is often referred to as the grandfather of chaos magic, the actual creators- Can we actually, can we say more that he's the crazy, locked up, isolated old man in a shack of chaos magic? No, he had a very nice close knit circle of friends.

There's nothing wrong, there's nothing wrong with being a guy that has a close knit circle of friends that you only hang out with in a bar, one bar that you go to every night. Technically that's us. But also what he did was he rejected all society because he became famous for his nudes, like he would draw all these crazy nudes and incredibly technically detailed things. And then people started wanting to pay him a lot of money for his stuff. And he was like, I hate money. I hate people.

I want to hang out with the derelicts of society and would go and hang out all night with prostitutes and sailors who are still at near the bottom. Sailors are probably still near the bottom, right? He hated money and he hated people, but he forced himself to hang out with people he had to pay for. No, he just hung out in a Tom Waits song all day. So he didn't pay the prostitutes, he would just be friend of them. He's just their friends, like Jesus Christ, Ben.

Oh, I see. That real person, I forgot. So now while spare is often referred to as the crazy uncle locked up in the basement of Chaos Magic, the actual creators of the discipline were a couple of dudes from Yorkshire named Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin. Carroll and Sherwin founded the Illuminates of Thanateros in 1978, the same year that Carroll published the first ever book on Chaos Magic, Libre Null. And ironically, the first book about Chaos Magic is probably the last book about Chaos

Magic that you should read. It is almost incomprehensible. It is very dense. It is extremely dense. And same thing with Austin Spare's book, The Book of Pleasure. Yeah. Austin Spare also did not really know how to write in a coherent fashion. He was no Stephen King.

Stephen King writes a page turner, but his soul's stopping like, low, I have received the winds of chaos and it says like over and over and over again and then at some point there's instructions in there. Yeah. But I have no clue how he did it. Well, it's beautiful writing. Austin Spare is a beautiful writer. It's very poetic.

You got it, but you have to think about it. You have to really sit down with it for a while. Certainly can't have a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Yeah. It doesn't sound like a book of pleasure to me. A book of pleasure is when you open and then a dildo pops. You know, kind of a pop up. What kind of books are you buying?

Oh, different kinds of books. It's like from Adam's Family Values. Yes, you should see my library. So, remember, magic of any kind can be dangerous and chaos magic is no different. Do not try chaos magic just from this episode alone because you will most definitely fuck it up. See the left hand path episode interview with Ragnar and how this shit can go wrong. As Henry said earlier, we used condensed chaos.

That's how we came to understand all of this sort of stuff. So if you decide to do this, don't take what we're saying from this episode like, okay, these guys are going to talk about sigils. I'm going to make a sigil. I'm going to focus my will. It's not going to work or you're just going to be harmful to yourself and the universe at large. So go recondense chaos before you try any of this shit.

See, I've come through the other side and believe that like, because that's how the beginning of Lieber Knoll is of being like, chaos magic starts with an egg that births in the darkest reaches of magic. And it was like this whole, and I actually think it's more, you know, in the end we'll talk about perspectives, but in my head, it's way more about dealing with the universe and hacking the code behind the universe and understanding that we're at a hologram. And you can just change shit anytime you like, any time you like, if you just really fucking convince yourself.

Hey, mom, is that a large fat man with black nail polish? It's women in the fountain? Mom, why is he in the fountain? It is my will that you will give me three free donuts this day. Do we give him the donuts? It is my will that I will also receive a large coffee with hazelnut flavoring for free this day. Interesting.

Okay. But I do agree that it is definitely about rearranging the universe, but if you don't know how to do it right, then you might rearrange the universe in a way that will either fuck you or fuck the life of the people around you. But maybe we all need a dose of that chaos, man. Mix it up. Yeah. Mix it up.

Dude, fucking toss them nice, bro. It does kind of sound fun. It is really fun. And that's the thing, Ben, is that while all this is, it could be dangerous. Chaos magic is just about having fun. Oh, okay. Just have fun with it. That's what Phil Hine added to Chaos Magic.

That's what he was talking about. That was what Chaos Magic is supposed to be. The major tenet of Chaos Magic is that you're taking control of it. It's not like the right hand pathway of to be a part of a series of masters that can judge you and tell you when you've done something right or left hand magic where you've got to eat so much pussy blood and it's all about like talking to Egyptian gods. This is about you doing you and adding a little fun with it. Magic's supposed to be kind of funny and weird.

You're going to find out the universe is a really funny sense of humor. So a lot of times if you wish for money, but if you don't do it really specifically, you're going to get hit by a car and you're going to get money from a lawsuit. It's like that kind of shit. Is it like wearing crocs and eating ice cream in the wintertime fun? Yes. Yes, whistle. That's your magic.

That's fun. Yeah. Now you're a food magician. Wow. I love it. And speaking of fun, you know that one of the biggest influences on chaos magic is a group of people called the discordians. Now discordians can be annoying.

They can be very annoying, but they're kind of, but they're fun. It's kind of like an acapella group or an improv troupe. They remind me of, it's like improv at some shitty local comedy club. Yeah. So discordians believe that order and disorder are illusions by the human brain or discordians believe that order and disorder are illusions created by the human brain. Therefore, order and disorder do not exist. Fuck yeah.

That's right. Hulking them. And despite this, or possibly because of it, discordians worship Eris, the Greek god of chaos to give you an idea of the structure of discordianism. Here are their five rules known as the pentabarf. Technically, this should all be written in comic sans, Marcus. I will say that. It's called the pentabarf.

The pentabarf. It's five rules. Well, that sounds like a pentabarf. It sounds like a tavern you don't want to go to. Number one, there is no goddess but goddess and she is your goddess. There is no Erezian movement, but the Erezian movement. And it is the Erezian movement and every golden apple core is the beloved home of a golden worm.

Two, a discordian shall always use the official discordian document numbering system. Three, a discordian is required during his early illumination to go off alone and partake joyously of a hot dog on Friday. This devotive ceremony to remonstrate against the popular paganisms of the day of Catholic Christendom, no meat on Friday, of Judaism, no meat of pork, of hendic peoples, no meat of beef, of Buddhists, no meat of animal, and of discordians, no hot dog buns. Four, a discordian shall partake of no hot dog buns, for such shows the solace of our goddess when she was confronted with the original snub.

I'll do number five here. Our discordian is prohibiting from believing what he reads. Always. So that kind of really nullifies the first four. That's the whole point it is. Oh my God. Ben. My mind is getting blown.

Ben, how fun is that? That's fun. It's fun. That is fun. This is like the entire like religion is based upon like when you're done taking a series of pictures and the very end of a talk verse like have fun with this one. That is fun. It's really fun.

Yeah. It's like a Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy sort of sense of humor. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. Because discordianism really like the what discordianism is known for in, you know, somewhat popular culture is the Illuminatus trilogy, Robert and Tom Wilson, which is fucking great. It would be as if the Bible just like had J.K. LOL at the end of it.

And I think the final thing is just not, you know, just joking, just kidding around. Yeah. BTW still killed the gaze. Oh, wow. That's not right. So we're saying here, it's all fun. Just have fun with it. But before you can start having fun with sigils and masks and alters and all that, you've

got to know exactly what chaos magic is because it's, you know, it's fine for us to just say chaos magic, chaos magic. But really, there is actually a lot to this. First of all, chaos magic is about the randomness of the universe and each individual's dynamic relationship with it. Everything is permanent, there are no absolute truths, and all fixed beliefs are illusions. The thing to always remember is nothing is true, everything is permitted. Yes.

Which we will get into later on. Chaos magic is the first post-modern magical system, which means that it pretty much has the attitude of fuck everything that came before, we're doing our own thing, and further more, fuck you too, I'm doing my own thing. See, that's very similar to a satanic edge to chaos magic. A lot of chaos magic is more like, we're going to do our own thing, you do your thing, sometimes I'm going to do your thing, I hope you'd like to do my thing. I think this is how they sold the population on Brexit.

He was very isolationist, isn't it? No, it's not isolationist. Well it can be if you choose it to be. I see. I mean, well that's also the thing about magic is that once a man has reached a certain point of magic abilities, then he does see that he has isolated himself from the world. In low, there is woe in his heart, for his innocence has been lost. Henry, do you agree with that as you sat in a fountain with like Neil Paulichon?

What is he doing? Yes I do. Why is he in the fountain? Chaos magic can be described as a technology of consciousness, and while scientists are all about observable results coming from work in the physical realm, a chaos magician strives for observable results coming from work in the metaphysical realm. The metaphysical realm, which essentially means you can make up anything that you want about your own personal philosophy.

You're basically picking things and smashing them together to make your own sort of religion for yourself. And again, chaos magic is about what you can get in this life. It's not about ascending different spiritual planes, because really in the end, a man doing the right hand path is just sitting alone in a room surrounded by candles, and that's all it is. Like in the end, it's like he may be seeing shit, and going to a crystal palace of understanding in the center of his fucking mind, none of that matters, if it's not making him any cash

buddy. That's a good point. Yeah, exactly. Because that's the thing, is that there's definitely a point where this stuff starts becoming fantasy, where you just sort of live inside your own head, and you believe they actually call it magisitis, where these guys walk around believing that there's these all-powerful beings that are making things happen. And in reality, they're just playing a little game inside their heads and still doing jack

shit with their lives. So if you do accidentally kill a family of five and you're sent to solitary confinement, this would be the magic for you. Yes. Yeah. And you can create- Yes, actually, that's a great idea. So for all of our listeners in solitary confinement, first of all, congratulations on sneaking in

the podcast. I don't know what to think about it. Why choose this? Choose something else. Send an email. To a lawyer. My God. But yeah, use chaos magic.

Absolutely. And chaos magic says that even though we may feel as if we are receiving messages and powers from the gods, in reality, these things come from nowhere but ourselves. Or as Joseph Campbell said, your God is a manifestation of your own level of consciousness. All of the heavens and all of the hells are within you, Luke Skywalker. My God makes me want to hit you in the head with a baseball bat. What is it? What is it?

Well, that's up to you whether you want to listen to your God or not. Oh, I see. Yeah. And in fact, Joseph, yeah, Luke Skywalker, Joseph Campbell, the hero's journey. If you really, if you want it like Joseph Campbell does have a lot, we don't have time to go into Joseph Campbell, I wanted to, but decided that we didn't have enough time for it. But-

This is not an entire course in English history in a college, so. Well, maybe one day I'll be a professor and then none of you people can stop me. No, professors live by a very strict rule of law, more rules than you have now. And I also take resentment at you people. Yeah, I don't know. You'll be a great college professor, Marcus. Oh, well, thank you very much. So, Joseph Campbell, what are you saying?

All the heavens and all the hells are within you. But that power that is within you still needs an engine to drive it. And what that engine might be is entirely up to you. It's what you invoke. It's what powers you pull from. It can be anything. It can be Jesus. It could be Satan.

It could be the Flash. It could be Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights. Sad. I mean, Donald Trump, that didn't just say sad. That's not sad. He's a great man. I don't like that. He's a good family man.

You know what he does for those kids? He loves those kids. I think he kind of makes it. He runs them into the ground. He should have, if he was a theater teacher- Tell that to Smash Williams. I don't think that his name isn't good. He's an actor.

He's an actor and he is being filmed. But you are missing the entire point of Chaos Magic because- Oh no, unless I flip it to my side. So Chaos Magician is allowed, if not required, to accept or reject beliefs or gods or whatever according to how useful or relevant those gods are to them at that specific time. So in fact, one of the core tenets of Chaos Magic is that we can treat the entire established systems of magic as completely optional. If you'd like to use Kabbalah, Tarot cards, or Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn rituals,

you're totally free to do so, despite what old school magicians might tell you. Never follow an old school magician into some sort of basket or into some sort of coffin because they will try to stab you or saw you in half. Yeah, they're full of tricks. Now, the belief that magic is only for the quote-unquote initiated is a way to keep magic from the masses. In fact, traditional magicians have been running a decades-long smear campaign against Chaos Magic, even going so far as to call it the blackest form of dark power.

Sounds racist. Yeah, it really does. But it's very interesting because that's, again, it's like our government, right? Our government probably wouldn't be psyched about a bunch of people who all can collectively understand that we can change the universe according to the jelly in our fucking dome pieces. Yeah, you know what? I think every single day Obama wakes up, he gets his national security breakdown, and

they are constantly talking about dickheads discussing Chaos Magic. This is really screw Isis. Well, the government has used the powers of the mind in the past. I mean, have you ever read Men Who Stare at Goats? The government has definitely, I mean, the CIA, we talked about it in the Edgewood episodes as well, like the government has definitely tried to harness the power of the mind for their own purposes. And they have done magic ritual as well.

They mixed it into the MK Ultra stuff in order to kind of fuck with the results and see if something would happen with it because they knew that symbols are really important to the human psyche. They understand that. They know that. Yeah. Fuckers. I mean, there had to be-

Fuckers know that. There had to be somebody who was just like really down on their luck and they didn't have money for acid and they did get picked up by a CIA van and they just had a trippy weekend and a wonderful time. Dude, I just say we fucking rule with it. You got it, Dr. Puss. He's having too much fun. Get him out of here.

What's really interesting too is that I think it goes back to the back in the day when Martin Luther fought against when he tried to change the Christian church, where he was saying that they- it's an ego problem. The old school magicians wanted to hold all the secrets themselves. They never thought about the rest of the universe. They thought that again, that's a part of magicitis, where you believe that you're lofty. You believe you're above everybody else and they thought that that's where they were because they did all this inner work and nothing was outer and so they held onto these secrets

for so long until finally these guys who stepped out of the OTO or stepped out of the Golden Dawn saying like, no, anybody can do this shit. We're just doing a lot of homework for nothing. You know, it reminds me of the great Fox producer who brought to light magic's greatest secrets revealed, which is now on Netflix. I watched it the other night. It's pretty great. It's so good.

By the way, the women do all the work and the guy takes all the credit. Oh yeah, the women do every bit of the work and they're all dancing sexy within the music and what they're dancing to, there's no music playing, so they just look like a bunch of idiots. Whoever- And then the girls do their dancing. They say it ultra-ricively. They're the only people with skill in the whole bunch of things.

The narrator is just rock hard the whole time anyway. I get off topic. I'm behind the mask. Who? Lorenzo Lamas. Really? Renegade? Oh, I didn't know that.

So these guys calling Chaos Magic the blackest form of dark power. It's not only a gross misunderstanding of what Chaos Magic is about. It's also exactly what the powers that be say when any kind of DIY movement comes about because Chaos Magic is nothing if not DIY. For example- Take the power that's yours. Yeah. For example, punk rock.

It definitely isn't a coincidence that Chaos Magic developed in the late 70s and early 80s. The same time that the English punk movement was at its peak and here's how those two things were late. See a lot of kids in the 70s, they believed that rock music was something that only professionals could do. Like these big arena rockers. The only way you could make it is if you had like a 20 minute Emerson Lake and Palmer

Jam. Because you need oven gloves if you're going to handle riffs that fucking hot. That's a good point. But then a bunch of guys and gals just said, fuck it, we're going to pick up some guitars. We're going to head back to the early days of rock and roll when anyone could pick up a guitar and form a band and write a song about whatever the fuck we want to write it about. Chaos Magic is similar in this that it harkens back to people like Alistair Crowley who created

his own form of magic and his own way of doing it using whatever influence that he wanted to use. But I can't stop thinking of the turd in the pool of David Bowie's house. Well, that's not necessarily, I get why you're mine. It wasn't a turd, it was a demon, Ben. It was a demon. It was a demon. It was not a turd.

It was not a stain. It was not a poopoo stain. I know you want to say it's a poopoo stain. Go to listen to our David Bowie in the occult episode if you want to hear compelling evidence as to Angela Bowie didn't think it's a poopoo stain. The real estate agent didn't think it was a poopoo stain. Well, maybe a poopoo stain is a demon in David Bowie's world. Again, it's about flipping perspective.

Why is that guy in the fountain? What's he doing in the fountain? So the thing is about, you know, Rock and Roll and Alistair Crowley. So Crowley, you know, Crowley was a big influence on all this stuff. And regardless of the terrible, awful things that Crowley did, we know he's a bad person. We know he's a terrible person. He also technically was where that quote from There Will Be Blood came from with a, I will drink your milkshake, but technically I will drink my milkshake.

Hmm, sounds more appropriate. Well, despite all this awful shit, you can't discount his ideas at their most basic level. Because remember, Jerry Lee Lewis fucked his 13-year-old cousin, but that does not negate the musical influence of Great Balls of Fire. But we're going to go deeper into that type of logic. I mean, technically Woody Allen only made three good films, but then he married his daughter. And what about Michael Jackson? You know what?

I don't pull the evidence. The proof is literally in the pudding, which I think is the worst way to talk about child pornography. Are you happy with yourself? Are you pleased that one of our most beloved musical artists has been sullied, has been proved to be a monster, a terrible monster? The caesarean lamplight of honesty spares, no shadow. I didn't read the documents.

So I still believe he's innocent. I read them. It's quite damning. Jimmy Saville? Saville? Saville? Saville. You put babies' heads, you put kids' heads on the bodies of full-grown women in porn,

so that's weird. No, if the body is of age, you know what, the mind is the problem, the mind is the problem. We're going to arrest everyone who does clip art. What's next? It's a slippery slope, okay? We're in the artistic world. He is right, Henry. It is a slippery slope.

I forget, that is technically surrealist art in the strangest way possible. Now, chaos magic, as far as the established magicians went, chaos magic also provided those magicians with an enemy. Enemies are always fun for everyone. It gave those established magicians an adversary. It gave them a Satan, while also giving them a sense of superiority. Or as Phil Hines said, it bolsters up their fantasies of being, quote, unquote, whiter than white.

So, in other words, chaos magic was blacker than black, wow. Actually, I would prefer if you called it chaos magic. I think that that is, it's more pronounced as, it's like mejike, when you pronounce it with like M-A-Y-G-I-C-K-E. There's an umlaut over the A. Yeah, but these guys, yeah, it just gave them even more superiority feeling because now, not only can they feel superior over regular people, they can now feel superior over an entire discipline of magic. But then the best part about being a chaos magician is that then you can take my own

personal satanic perspective on chaos magic and love being the adversary. Yeah. Now you get to be the adversary all the time. You're the villain of the story, and the villain's always the best part. Yeah, but they always lose. Yeah, well, not 9-11. Well, we're not going to discuss 9-11 here. No.

And you could argue they did lose in the long run. In the long run, yeah. Now, as far as what chaos magic can do for you, here's an approximation of what Phil Hine has to say in condensed chaos. Chaos magic essentially allows you to rearrange your mind to free yourself from the attitudes and restrictions that have been instilled in you that prevent you from becoming a fully realized person or, more specifically, the person you want to be. Now remember again, chaos magic, and this was like right hand and left hand a lot more

sort of hard data and things to discuss. Chaos magic is pretty much all analysis. It's very self-helpy. It's about breaking your mind free. The most pretty much the most important tenet of chaos magic is the principle of deconditioning, which is the idea of separating yourself from all dogmas. It's the same thing as accepting no dogma and doing the same. You have to believe that nothing is a hard truth at all, which actually in the end helps

your life because anybody who's that stubborn, who refuses to change, refuses to move is never going to fully live to their potential. Well, you know, when we were flying on the airplane, it's really important to remember the wings bend with the winds and that way the plane doesn't crash. So our wings have to bend as well. That's very beautiful. Thank you. You're the new Robert Frost.

Isn't that nice? I love Robert Frost and I love Frosties from Wendy's too. Well, before you can start to decondition and fix that shit in your brain that keeps you awake at night, you've got to actually identify it. Magic helps you identify those thought patterns that prevent you from being you and it helps you to break them. And once you've done that, you can start using magic to increase your confidence and personal charisma.

For once you achieve those two things, many more doors can open up in your actual life and even further than that, chaos magic can help you widen your perceptions to discover doors you didn't even know you wanted to open or finding pathways to doors you never thought you could open. I got to tell you using the power of chaos magic, I added two inches to my pecker. Two full inches. Look at that. It's in my mind.

Oh, I see. But it comes out in my attitude. Yeah, it would come out in your attitude. It's like in your mind, his pecker is two inches longer. Right. He's got more confidence in his love making him because he's more confident in the bedroom. He fucks better. There's nothing worse than someone with a three inch penis with a five inch attitude.

You know what? Be who you are. I added a couple of bushes to my root. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a magician. I work at the subway.

The restaurant or the MTA subway? It's kind of both. I don't. The subway in the subway. Oh, I do not want to eat there. See, that's a thing. Chaos magic, it's all about change in accordance with your will. Whatever you want to happen can happen.

Chaos magic is all about possibility. Getting laid, getting paid, getting made. She just rhymed. He loves rhyming. Johnny Cochran. I'm the Johnny Cochran of this podcast. Now let's go through some of the core principles of chaos magic. First, as Henry said earlier, at all costs avoid dogmatism.

What dogmatism is that you should never adhere to a strict, unchanging belief system unless of course a strict, unchanging belief system is a part of your temporary belief system. You follow me? I got you. No. See, it's about flipping and reversing. I know that's very confusing. So let's define what temporary belief systems are actually all about.

Now a lot of magicians will set up temporary belief systems in accordance to whatever ritual they're into at the moment. A chaos magician should not only be able to, but is required to be flexible. Now let's talk about these temporary belief systems. Let's go for an example here. Keeping in mind that in chaos magic you can use anything and everything that has ever existed, let's say this week, you need to be Batman. Ooh, okay.

You need Batman's drive? What kind of Batman am I, am I George Clooney Batman? You can be any Batman you want. No, no, no. You're never George Clooney Batman. All right. Technically no one is ever wrong in chaos magic ever, but right then you were wrong. Well then I'm going to be Val Kilmer Batman.

Oh God. Oh God, I don't know. You need his drive. You need his perseverance. You need his cold logic. So you believe in Batman with everything you have. You believe in Batman. Batman is real.

You invoke Batman using ritual. Of course, you're going to have to look up and learn that ritual, but you invoke Batman using ritual and you let Batman inhabit you until your task is done. What about the innate bias that Batman has, just being a wealthy white person who grew up? Interesting. That's interesting. Interesting issues.

Well that's actually a part of chaos magic is that unless you are very specific about what you want to bring in as far as these characters go, if you bring in the entire person, then yeah, you might have those innate prejudices. I want to be racist Batman. Yeah, look, it sounds like you just want to be racist Batman. I think you got that. I think you already got all of that. You got the attitude and technically if you just wear a cape, you're a racist Batman right

now. Oh, okay. But actually this is also about the type of ritual too, like using, let's say you want to be Batman and you want to use a servitor, right? The idea is you're creating a thing that is a symbol of Batman that you apply qualities to. Chaos magic also talks about is that if you use an entity that you're creating outside of your head, if you have the gall to think that that entity doesn't have its own fucking

agendas that can come into your life and then you're up shit's creek without a paddle my friend or without a bat paddle. Oh my God, I've got my batarang. I have. I forgot my bat paddle and now I'm in shit creek. I knew I was going to end up in shit creek and of course I don't have my bat paddle. But it's also about the type of ritual. There were times, Phil Hein was using an example of he had a woman that asked him to create

a ritual to protect her home and he was like, well, I could do it. If I were to do it on my own, I would place little symbols and I'd know what it would mean. I would put like ruins places and I would do this tiny little thing, but because I'm doing for her and she doesn't necessarily believe in the process of magic, but she's very superstitious, I'm going to do a grand big ritual where I'm going to wear a costume and I'm going to read from the fucking Golden Dawn book. I'm going to read from the key of Solomon and I'm going to do this stuff so that she

is then convinced that it works. So the idea is that you could, it's about the things you use and it's about how you use. Exactly. They should get slo-man shield. Slo-man shield. I believe that's a house protecting company. I think it's called slo-man shield.

They might, they might. Let's say you do that ritual. You do the Batman ritual or you do like the Kabbalah ritual like Phil Hein did for a friend. Next week though, you need to do something completely different. Next week, you need to be Superman. You need his compassion. You need his strength and his overwhelming need to protect those around him. So you drop Batman.

You don't believe in Batman anymore. Get Batman out of your head. Okay. Now bring Superman out of your head. Believe in Superman. And by the way, this is all also ridiculously simplified, but you bring Superman into your head. You do the same ritual, but instead of Batman, now Superman's your guy.

And what's also just as relevant, let's say your Batman ritual is that you took a couple of candles and you carved the bat symbol into them and then you lit them and you did a meditation about Batman. That's one way. If you then felt you needed more power from the Superman ritual, what you could do is literally put on some red underwear, tie a fucking tablecloth around your neck and fucking try to jump out the window and see if you can fly. It's like, honestly, that sounds ridiculous, it is sort of a bit, but you can do that.

No, you cannot do it. You can do anything, Henry. You can die. It's mostly falling. No, what do you do, you set out mattresses, think about that kind of ritual, spray paint an S on your chest, like seriously, spray paint an S on your chest, wearing a tablecloth, know that what you need is his fucking bravery, you set up a bunch of mattresses, like outside of a balcony and then you jump into the mattress.

So basically you're describing exactly what Mick Foley did when he was, he was backyard wrestling. Oh my God. You want to talk about a magician. Mick Foley is a magician. I agree. I mean, he's the David Bowie of the wrestling world. I completely agree.

He envisioned himself as dude love and then 20 years later, he was dude love on Monday Night Raw. It's really true. Yeah. He's dude love. He's cactus jack. He's mankind. Oh yeah.

All right. So let's go back. I'm racist Superman. You can be racist Superman if you want to be. There it's, I'm sure if you look in the anals of DC comics history, you can find an example of racist Superman and you can bring them in there and you could use them. Now, the second principle of chaos magic is that personal experience trumps all. For example, it does not matter if an hermetic magician tells you that you're a quote unquote

doing it wrong when it comes to magic. If it works for you, then it works. End of story. That is a very important thing to remember. All that matters is that it works for you personally. And if you have hermetic magician ever tells you you're doing it wrong, you can just tell him, Hey, please, we just make my latte. Yeah.

Clam it down. And third, one must hold themselves to a high standard of technical excellence. If you're going to do it, you should do it right. Assess yourself after each ritual, analyze the results or lack of results and keep practicing until you get the results you want. This is actually incredibly important because the whole point is that the whole argument against chaos magic that the right hand path people have is that there's no way to tell if you're doing it right or there's no analysis or you're a bunch of undisciplined people

just running around doing shit willy nilly. What's really important if you want to do chaos magic from the very beginning is you have to keep a journal and you have to keep several journals. You have to keep a dream journal and you have to keep a journal, which I find really interesting. They're talking about a condensed chaos and I started doing, which is a composition book. You divide it into columns and then what you do is day, time, and you put temperature, weather conditions, things you did that day, little things that you do all throughout the whole day that involve magic, including tiny rituals, like doing easy, paying attention

to yourself. And then if you do an actual ritual, basically you draw it out into a journal and then you put down exactly what your statement of intent was and then you have to put a time limit on it and I'm expecting this result by this time and then you constantly assess it. That is exactly what you do to make sure the meat is the right temperature when you work at Arby's and to make sure it's the right date so you throw it away if it's past the cell by date. You mean like the liquid tubes that you used to squeeze out?

Comes in liquid. It quickly solidifies. It finds it's own. This is an actual question. If you don't have any results, how do you know what to look for if you do it and you get nothing? What do you even think about to create something? What they have said is that basically, number one, the universe has a sense of humor and

the results may be a thing that you don't really, it flips around. Like what I said, you wish for money but instead you get hit by a car and you get money in a lawsuit. That could possibly happen. Or it just kind of pops out of a nowhere. What Austin Spear talks about with sigil magic is that a part of the end of the ritual is that once you fire the ritual is that you have to forget it. You have to forget you even wished for it because you have to release it to the universe

and then hopefully it comes back and it could come back at any time. So sort of like Milton's character in office space, when he tries to kill himself, he gets hit by the car and he's very wealthy and doesn't have to go back to work ever again. Yeah. Is it Milton's character? No, it wasn't Milton. Somebody else's character. Tom.

Tom. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He made a million dollars. No. It's a jump. It's a conclusion. It's a conclusion. The next core principle, something that we mentioned earlier, deconditioning.

In order to properly perform chaos magic, you've got to shed the beliefs, attitudes, and fictions that have been weaved into your psyche over the years. For example, say you grew up evangelical, like Ben. It's like even if you now know that all that is bullshit, there can still be shit deep within your psyche, which influences your thought patterns and emotions, however small. All extreme trauma when it comes to being physically abused. Yeah, that's it. That's a big one.

That's a big one. That's quite a large one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like me, I had to get over my, I didn't like olives. Which is, that's pretty absurd, although olives are always trying to kill you. Yeah. I mean, I know what you mean, Henry. I used to be having all consuming fear of hell that, you know, would haunt my ever waking

hour. I know it's like... I now like olives. Why is that guy in the fountain? What is he doing? No one wants to join me, huh? Must be too hot to handle. It's actually kind of lukewarm in here.

See, the whole thing about deconditioning and all of this stuff is that that's part of the point of chaos magic. You wouldn't be doing chaos magic if you were satisfied with who and where you are in life. You want to change. And if you are, and if you are, fuck you. Yeah. Yeah, you want to change.

And in order to affect that change, you need to change the way you think. Because chaos magic is about making reality malleable. And if you can't make your own mind malleable, then you're never going to be able to be Batman one week and Superman the next. If you're stuck in dogmatic thought, then you'll only be able to hold one idea in your mind and chaos is about being able to switch between ideas and beliefs. But it also isn't necessarily about being other people. You're still you.

At the end of the day, you'll always be you at your core. What it's more about is turning your mind and turning your beliefs from marble into clay. Interesting. Good analogy. Also, it's about art, right? Because art is very a great example is that people, you look at Picasso and those people who change stuff all the time.

They change the way they go from realism to cubism and they're constantly digging and searching, and again, it's just about a great tenet of how someone could live their life in the most fulfilling way possible, which is don't be stuck in one place, don't be stuck in a rut, change your shit, but come at it from another perspective. You know, it's kind of essential. Chaos magic to me now is essential to my thinking about how to do comedy, how to do my work, how to live my life. Isn't it just go with the flow?

Well, it's not only going with the flow. It's making your own flow, my friend. Yeah, it's going with the flow while still making your own flow. It's like peeing your own river and then jumping the river and then swimming in your own river. I see. Yeah. Yeah. And once you guys, once you do all that, once you really decondition yourself, once you

take care of those other core principles, you're able to take whatever you want from any magical system, in addition to themes or characters from literature, TV, movies, religions, cults, whatever you want, and again, it doesn't matter what you use as long as it works for you. And lastly, as far as the core tenets goes, you must be able to enter altered states of consciousness at will, what is known as gnosis. Is it gnosis or gnosis? I think it's gnosis.

Gnosis. How is gnocchi pronounced? Gnocchi? Gnocchi. It's... It's filled like gnocchi. The food? It's gnosis.

So let's say gnosis. Gnosis. Gnosis. Gnosis. I'll order it. Yeah, that's the other thing about all this stuff that we're reading. We've never heard anyone say these words out loud. They make up this shit.

And again, it's like it's all made up. All magicians just make up words and throw it at us, and so that's the whole point, is understanding and kind of dancing on the idea that it all possibly could be fake. It's gnosis. There are two types of altered states of consciousness. The first is inhibitory, which involves things like yoga, meditation, and sensory deprivation. The other is excitatory, which involves chanting, drumming, dancing, or sex. Probably not surprisingly, Henry is more of an excitatory type.

Well I go more for inhibitory. I meditate. I explore the silent gates of memory of my mind while Henry's excitatory state is reached through comedy, improv, that sort of thing. And I really do believe that. I believe I enter into a trance state at some point when I'm doing pretty face at a high level and it feels when you're in the flow and you're really in it, and like last night I had a bra and I was pouring myself, covered myself with beer, pretending me a sexy lady,

and I was really feeling it. But I would like to also put out here too, I think a big thing that held me off from once I started reading about chaos magic and the amount of work that is involved, I think how everybody is about anything that you start, because I feel that way, is that you want to be like, man, I want it the end result. I want to be at the place where I can make a hand motion and all of a sudden magic shit happens and like my life's amazing and I feel focused and I feel driven. But it's really about the journey.

It's really about learning how to do it. And then once you're in the middle of the journey, when I'm starting to realize as the more and more we read and research about chaos magic, that I'm really starting to see, oh wow, it's got nothing to do with the end result. It's got nothing to do with any of this. It's about, that's the whole fucking point, it tricks you into being like it's about living your life day to day more present and in touch with the universe. Absolutely.

It's like a bodybuilder and they're like every day I'm working out so when I go to the beach I'm going to flex my pecs and all the women are going to want me and you get to the beach after working out and you flex your pecs and you realize the women want you, but then you realize you're gay. You didn't want it at all. You don't even need it. Yeah. But that's the whole time.

But that's the thing though, Ben, is that he's still got the muscles to get the dudes. That's right. He's still got the muscles to be slobbering all over his fucking dry stick. So that's the thing. So even though, and that is actually one thing that Phil Hines says again and again in chaos met or in condensed chaos is that a lot of times where you end up will be completely different from where you set out to go. There you go.

So yeah, so that's going to be, that's our, actually we're going to have to do two parts on this. Wow. It's like dumb and dumber. Remember when they wanted to go see the Rocky Mountains, they didn't make it. They went the wrong, they drove halfway across the country in the wrong direction. I gotta say, you guys have done a great job of putting this into context that the layman can understand.

Thanks. So good work because it's a very confusing subject matter and I think you did a great job, Marcus Parks. Oh, thank you. Yeah. Henry as well. And you know, wait till you get this. We both had like a couple of late night calls where you're like, my dream spirit told me

that I was wrong. I can't find my dream spirit. I mean like, let him go, man. You got to let the dream spirit go. I'll come back when he's fucking ready, dude. No, that was an actual conversation that we had and it's my dream self. I was hacking away at people the other night in my dreams. I like olives now.

Well, yeah, next week, next week we're going to come back. We're going to get into fractal logic and you're really going to see whether we pulled off being able to translate this stuff. We're going to get into a magical models. We're going to get into actual sigil magic and we're going to talk about a little bit more about Austin spare. And me and Henry are going to talk about some like personal rituals and personal things that we've done in our life and how we sort of have been approaching all this stuff.

But thank you guys so much for listening. This has been a lot of fun. We've been working on this for months and months and we really hope you guys have enjoyed listening to as much as we've enjoyed researching. And we have to give a very special thank you to everyone who came out to our show at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Yeah. It was such an amazing weekend last weekend.

Thank you. It was so many gifts and everyone was so cool and the shows were incredible. So thanks. And the people at the Kennedy Center seemed to be a bit upset when we started screaming where the child prostitutes. I did. I did feel that. Do you guys all feel the tension after the Kennedy Center from the Kennedy Center people?

Because we were talking about like how Kennedy's head was made into a back door. And then we were just kept saying like, suck my dick, Kennedy, suck my dick. And we got really upset. I think they got, I think they may be devoting their lives to the memory of this man. Yeah. And we may be sullying it. No. They loved it.

Finger-banged every intern in that building. Oh my God. They worked there. They're employees of the Kennedy Center. They hate JFK. Yeah. I also feel like too, especially when I was, I was watching Kitchen Nightmares last night with Gordon Ramsay.

And when he has all the staff get together and he's giving them a speech about how they got to pull together and they get to, it's like, I remember being a worker at, when I was working at Borders or when I was working at Hollywood Video. And if I had Gordon Ramsay come in there and be like, you guys need to pull together as a team. I'd be like, what do I give a fuck if this place closes? Doesn't matter to me one bit. I'm just here for the free DVDs.

Absolutely. So if you guys, oh, and also other upcoming shows, of course, we got a Baltimore coming up in August. Go to the Auto Bar website and get tickets for that. We're very close to being sold out on that one, so get it soon. We will definitely sell that out. We're, of course, we're coming to England in October. There's a few tickets left for our second show in London.

I think Glasgow might be sold out, but it might not be. Go check it out, gigsandtours.com, everything that you need to know is there. We'll see you guys in Los Angeles here in like two weeks. That's going to be fucking amazing. Yeah, we're going to do the whole accent thing. That's going to be great. And of course, the only reason why we're able to do all of these awesome out of town shows is because you guys give to our Patreon, patreon.com slash last podcast on the left is where you

can go, if you want to go contribute a little bit to the show every single week, or excuse me, every single month, and you get cool rewards with every level. Go check it out yourself. Everyone who has given so far, we so very much appreciate it. And the more you guys give, the more out of town life shows that we can do, so thank you. And we have our live show right here, July 2nd, this Saturday. Yeah, tomorrow. So if you're around, come and check it out.

It's going to be super fun if it's not sold out. If it is sold out, just hang out here, and we'll have a good time regardless. Just a cool place to hang out. Yeah, you can definitely drink at them. You can definitely drink and stare at Marcus and Kiddler. Did you just say they can drink at us? Yes, that's kind of creepy, I will say. I did get drunk last night, and I was on iTunes, and I looked at reviews of all the shows here

on CCR, and I will just say, it was amazing. Everyone is so unbelievably nice. There was one guy. There's always... Everyone was so unbelievably nice, and it was for all the shows. So thank you. Thank you very much, everybody, for listening to everything we do on K-Comedy. Hey, and I'm shooting your pretty face, going to Hell Season 3 right now.

We're going to... The first six episodes are coming out in October. I saw cuts to the first four that we did from the last block, and I think it's legitimately the best stuff we've ever done. It's really fucking good. All right, hail yourselves. Hail Satan. Hi, Algeen.

Hail me, as well, if you would. You bastards. You cute little bastards. For more shows like the one you just listened to, go to cavecomedyradio.com.