Daily Work :
Wednesday: LBRP in morning. Lunch 3 mile power condensing breathing with inner smile meditation walk ( LBRP with macrocosmic orbit).
Thursday: :LBRP in Morning, Afternoon Nothing
Friday ( yeah about that): 2 Readings and divinations for clients. ( 60 minutes a piece, my divinations involve heavy trance).
Saturday: 3 hours Gigong at Ho-I
Sunday: 1.5 hours Tai Chi and Gigong, Writing ( yep )

A fair critique of chaos magic is that Chaos Magic does not follow a grand narrative. For a minute, lets assume that the chaos magician is indeed actually diving into the mysteries of a paradigm, really exploring it, but has the ability to paradigm shift. One critique of chaos magic, and outside of the people doing chaos magic which you can critique their behavior, one critique that is a fairly accurate critique is that chaos magic has no grand narrative and that grand narrative is a spiritual technology that binds many of the systems together. The Grand Narrative is a term used by Soror Isis on Amazon when she left a book review ( love my book Hands on Chaos Magic, Leave a positive 5 star review at http://www.amazon.com/Hands-Chaos-Magic-Reality-Manipulation/dp/07387150... ). Left me define what is a Grand Narritive and while many of the critiques of Chaos Magic, are simply misunderstanding the conceptual premises or the behavior of outspoken internet chaos magicians, this critique of chaos magic is a valid one.
A grand narrative is as the term suggests a story. In religious terms, it is the all encompassing worldview and symbol set that becomes completely engrained in the practitioner. This includes a full adoption of the world view within the religion, and a complete internalized re-ordering of the individual inline with that religious symbol set and then using the internalized symbol set and complete immersion into the religion to use those symbols for religio-magical purposes. The Grand Narrative is a complete story about morality, afterlife, and how things work. A person who is a follower of a religion will usually have a Grand Narrative about how things work. It may be a correct assumption, that some mysteries of some religious ( or most ), can only be learned once you have adopted the Grand Narrative of the system, or a personal grand narrative. Since Chaos Magic would theologically see any Grand Narrative as undesirable, some types of experiences are off the menu of mystical and magical experiences right off the bat.

Recently, although I think of her as a friend and hopefully she will after I say this, Mona Magick said you can't really teach magic or really learn magic. She got a lot of support in that proposition. I can't disagree more and I will say why it relates to this blog. Time and time again, you can certainly model and teach people what seems to work across magicians in the way NLP has modeled and then teach the methods of the great therapists. This is a modeling process of what actually has worked for magicians getting results, and what seems to work across the board. Then at that point you can further, study which techniques of magic seem to work and like martial arts teach people training exercises which develop the needed skill to do magic. Sure some people have some more natural aptitude, but often that is more of a liability then discipline. Not all methods seem to work for all people when they are starting out, but as they develop, most serious and dedicated chaos magician would argue that you should be able to get the methods to work. People have biases in there personality and physiology which lead to certain methods working better at first. These can be overcome by dedicated practice. This doesn't leave much romanticism about the God or creative aspects within, or self-mystical experience. It essentially, discounts the importance of inner discourse and the notion of a greater story in which the magic itself unfolds, leaving a rather lifeless corpse of mysticism on the ground.

While you can teach the techniques, Chaos Magic in particular gives you no narrative or sense of sacred while using the techniques. In a way, Mona's comment you cant teach magic is also true, because you can not teach the internalized narrative that goes along with the experience of the techniques. The practitioner has to develop those while going along the path. Chaos Magic goes a step further and says that any narrative you have for any technique is completely arbitrary and thus changeable. That by definition is the “Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted”. Merely a convenient belief at the time, with techniques divorced from the original meaning and context. If you want to critique Chaos magic, it doesn't take to much to see this starting assumption is a horribly double edged sword.

Taking a religion on while ingraining yourself in the culture and making every effort to combine and integrate the cultural symbols while taking on the Grand Narrative of that system ( even if it is your own), allows you to restructure and re-write all parts of your own psyche in direction with an end goal, whether it is enlightenment, heaven, or whatever else you are moving towards. It provides a unified road map of ethics, technique, and symbolic metaphor that moves you forward in a coherent way.

Some authors, have stated this separation of religion and magic is a completely modern development. Fair enough, I will take that as fair point. It does not mean this is a bad separation. Chaos and Post -Modern magic, and the hosts of variants ( where people try to invent new systems that are chaos magic) tend to de-emphasize the importance of several things that come along with a grand narrative. Initiation, Truth, Guru's, Priests, Priestesses, Training, etc. Chaos Magic tends to lean towards all of theses things being completely unneeded in modern magical practice. I personally, except on the truth point, have mixed feelings that they are unneeded and lean against the dominant chaos magical trends regarding these points. More and More, I am starting to see they can be helpful. Chaos Magic however, is completely DIY. In America, Guru's Priests, and Priestesses who hold the keys to the Grand Narrative of whatever religion you are working in, tend to come at a high cost. Simply put, rarely (and you can feel free to argue this point) do those key holders either live up to their responsibilities or their expectations. Everyone has heard stories of Covens that went horribly wrong based on petty power structures and personal issues. Santero's paying thousands of dollars and still not knowing how to do jack. There are a lot of people paying a lot of money and not getting much out of it ( no training ). So when you deal with key holders of the Grand Narrative of the system your working with, its often a mixed bag of nuts, where you have to deal with their insecurities and you only get the training if you are liked, or if at all.

The problem with the Grand Narratives, outside of seeking the gurus to get one, because you can develop your own Grand Narrative, is that 99 times out of a 100, people will get more wrapped up in the narrative then any results. Although some mystical experiences that do translate into greater magical power are really only obtainable through the absorption of a Grand Narrative, in my humble opinion, this perverse tendency is actually far far worse. Where does the adoption of a Grand Narrative without any results lead? It leads to all sort of bad places where “demons tell people what to do” and integrate into their personality, where their “holy guardian angel” tells them to find a lover they have never met, essentially it leads to self delusion and either leads toward self-debasement ( through a corrupted and often demeaning form of what is referred to as enlightenment ) or self-aggrandizing ( the god / magus complexes). Its simply a lot harder to fall for your own bs, or the bs of a priest or priestess when the story around any techniques are arbitrary.

These lack of emphasis on results leads to a interesting component of many religious activities which Chaos Magicians are generally fast to criticize. Essentially, people do things for service reasons without any verification that they have connected to “divinity” or any other “spirit”. In fact, in most cases, there is no connection, since they have no metric for that connection. Ironically, serious dedicated chaos magicians, DO have some of the best techniques around across the board. Taking the parts of any Narrative, and working with them till they work. Essentially, I know something happened in a ritual, then argue about what that was. In ritual, I am clearly in a vastly different. From an Energy perspective, I definitely “connect” but then am free to argue what that means. But the techniques work.

In many cases, the Narrative has been so watered down, that it no longer has the techniques to be able to effectively bend reality. I, and you can argue with me on this too, feel this is the case with the Celtic system. Studying the evidence, certainly my rituals when I work with Celtic gods and goddesses look very different then I have seen in public. I have to fill in a tremendous amount of techniques to get that to work since the Anthropological evidence is missing from the historical logs as to techniques that would be pre-Wiccan based. Refining the techniques, often makes the systems more usable and powerful within a different culture ( we are the different culture from most of the popular believe systems currently in the metaphysical sphere). It allows for the teeth to come back into some of these systems of magic.

Serious Chaos magic fill a vital role to people who would subscribe to the Narratives. Where as a chaos magic, offers no real story or narrative and no certainty about any temporary narrative, it offers refined techniques to support those narratives. Those techniques often are critical in having the kinds of mystical experiences which translate into greater life power, and greater magical ability within the narrative. In a way, if the pagan/metaphysical/occult/new age community saw it this way, they would realize in fact, that serious chaos magicians are probably the single best sources of techniques from within and outside the box. We are in some cases the best friend of the Priest/Priestess or narrative builder since chaos magic is vetting techniques and methods with a far harsher metric then a personal narrative. Either we get results or we don't. Its much more like science then a religious experience, and thus it is also lacking in the same way science is. The Mystical story builds in the aspects of wonder, awe, and splendor. Simply get the techniques from chaos magic, then build your narrative using what you can from whatever preferred religion you are working on …. using the healthy skepticism ( but not extreme skepticism of chaos magic) to keep yourself from self-delusion.

Of course, you could build a lot of techniques from Hands On Chaos Magic, more then enough to comfortably and completely get your Narrative working for you, if you so choose. I won't tell you however, what anything means within any narrative in Hands On Chaos Magic, you will have to figure that one out on your own.