Tag: Chaos Streams

Enhancing Your Portfolio: Facts and Fictions

A magician shares this with entrepreneurs: see the world and change the world. And just like an entrepreneur, if your endeavours are not profitable you are in the shit.

Your portfolio of investments, comprised of actions and beliefs, should serve to better you. Profit you. Develop you. Enhance your life. Improve your experience. Allow you to do more. You get the idea. Investments which do not perform should be cut.

Why the business talk? Because the world provides performance feedback: profit, loss, expense; capacity, resistance, and you will gain from using it. If your actions are not delivering desired results, change them. You owe no loyalty to weak investments and weak returns on those investments. Feedback can be grounded in what is true regardless of your opinion of it.

Example: if your eating habit neglects certain key acquisitions required for high level performance, hampering your efforts in other spheres of life, then your eating habit needs to change. Say you eat raw greens exclusively. You’re getting vitamins and minerals but no macros. Your body shrivels up. This makes you sad. Literally. And weak. Literally. You change your eating habit. You add in macros. You feel happy. You grow strong. Your portfolio has improved. Your life has improved.

However, a purely factual approach is not enough. We seem to need the addition of personal meaning. This is expressed in the artworks we create, the quests we undertake, the stories we tell with our rituals of symbolic actions, and with the narratives of our lives.

Best practice demands both facts and fictions. Without our fictions we risk living in a meaningless universe. Without facts we live in fantasy, with no anchor to the real, and suffer the consequences for it.

Reality does not care about our superstitions. Those that value falsely pay the cost and those that value truthfully reap the reward. It is incumbent then upon the magician to familiarise oneself with and engage with and put into practice both the active acquisition of new facts upon which to base decisions and the active acquisition of new and greater degrees of skill through which to better perform one’s will.

(Frater Tarod, from Chaos Streams 01)

In the Circle with Heroes of Practice

“Personally I’m privileged to be on excellent terms with folk from many traditions; druids, Setians, native shamans, Initiates of the Ordo Templi Orientis, Freemasons, radical Goddess feminists and others. I’ve met many fabulous people in the magical culture I inhabit, and I’ve found a very high density of fabulousness within the IOT.

When I stand in a circle with these people and look around at my Brothers, Sisters and Sators I am amazed. It’s like being in a graphic novel. Here are these heroes of practice, each one with amazing abilities. We are an assembly of archetypal forces. In part this is a consequence of my relationship, over many years, with these other magicians and I’m sure members of many other esoteric groups get a similar buzz at their gatherings. For me the people of the IOT provide a wonderful community of research, experiment, morphing ‘tradition’, fellowship, support and of course laughter.

While a few people stay with the process for many years there are many, many more who come into the IOT, benefit from that space, and who move on to pastures new. There are many occultists out there who have been members of the IOT and have encountered a new style or approach in that setting, and then go on to pursue that in more depth outside of the Pact setting. There are some who return years later to the IOT circle, bringing with them the experiences they have gained. The Pact acts as an experimental space, ideal for people who have come to some kind of spiritual and/or personal crossroads, and for many it is pivotal in their journey of Illumination.”

(Julian Vayne, Chaos Streams 01, from the Introduction)

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