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Wednesday, August 16, 2006

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Chaos Magic in Business Prospectus

P e t e r
C a r r o l


5 week course

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Five Weeks of Chaos Magic in Business.
At age 30 I realised that I wanted my own business. I wanted to become my own boss and to achieve financial independence. I knew nothing about business, or what type of business I wanted, but I knew that I just had to strike out on my own.
Not knowing anything about business and not having an idea for a business did not actually matter, I had spent the last 18 years playing around at college, doing many odd jobs, a bit of school teaching, and quite a lot of travelling, but I had spent all my spare time studying magic.
My partner wanted to settle and reproduce. I had no time in which to start studying how to do business or to save up much capital; I would just have to use my magical knowledge to make it happen.
With a little ingenuity I found that I could find everything I needed for business within the ideas of magic, and I have never looked back. Twenty two years on I have a substantial business and property investments and two delightful and expensively educated children. But most of all, I have my Independence, and I have the joy of having created something. As my own master I can do pretty much as I please and keep hours to suit myself.
I have probably made every mistake possible in business at one time or another, wrong products, wrong staff, wrong bank, wrong accountants, you name it, but I learned to read the signs and change things before they became fatal.
Self employment has allowed me plenty of scope to practise magic usefully in support of my chosen career, and it has also given me the leisure to develop my ideas on the subject. I would probably have had far less opportunity and motivation for these activities if I had continued to work for others.
In the old days only those born to wealth and position usually had the opportunity to pursue magic beyond the Hedge Witch level. Now we have a different social structure with better education and cheaper books, but far less ancestral wealth or free-lunch social niches.
The contemporary magician may nowadays often need to work at something for a living, that something may as well provide a challenge and a stimulus to magic itself.
This five week course will assume nothing but a desire for Independence and some sympathy for the idea of magic amongst participants. My two books on magic, Liber Null & Psychonaut and Liber Kaos will form part of the recommended reading list, but the list will also contain an eclectic collection of other material that you may choose to dip into. I shall not recommend any of the conventional get rich quick books or any of the silly tomes of management consultancy gobbledegook.
Outrageous luck and sheer pretence can sometimes create wealth, but not often. On this course we shall concentrate on the patient application of magical ideas and practice to find a niche in a marketplace, and to give us an edge there.
Each week we will look at one of the core techniques of magic to see what it has to offer in business and then try it out practically.
In any deal or transaction, always try to understand the reasons for which both sides participate.
I will put my cards on the table. I want the fun and the exchange of ideas.
Running the Maybelogic Eight Weeks of Chaos Magic courses gave me a big blast of both, and it has inspired me to write a further book on pure magic.
Most people have work that they do for money, and then some hobbies that they do for pleasure, meaning or enlightenment. I find myself in the happy position where I have a business that feels like a hobby that makes my money. I consider that thinking and writing about magic and related ideas and talking to those interested in such subjects constitutes my real life's work, even though I make negligible money from it. However that means I do not have to make any compromises with my life's quest.
Very few successful ideas in business have such a limited applicability that only one person can profit from them. You can borrow any of my ideas presented on this course and those presented by other participants. I may borrow some of yours. You can submit business plans for peer review, advice and criticism from all participants. Perhaps some business partnerships or collaborations may arise between participants.
In business you need to talk, you need to make contacts, you need to know how and where to find things out, who to ask. Business these days has become intelligence driven and contact driven, but it still depends on imagination and inspiration to make it happen. We shall attempt to stimulate all of these things on this course.
Participants will need to construct six boxes to serve as magical weapons; these can consist of anything from nicely painted cardboard cartons to jewelled cases fashioned from appropriate precious metals. Whatever does it for you in terms of belief, as we Chaos Magicians say.
Nautical analogies proved popular in the previous course, and I enjoyed maintaining a Captain's Log thread, so we can regard these magic boxes as our treasure chests, as we fill them up with valuables on the five week voyage of The Independence. I look upon this voyage as more of a raid than a leisurely cruise; we have just five weeks to grapple with the techniques and to loot as much information as possible.
Some of the crew may need to carry their treasures ashore and do a bit more work with them before they feel ready, but some may feel ready to start independent enterprises as soon as we land.
The question will inevitably arise; did I actually go through all the magical operations that I have presented for participants on this course?
Well yes I did, but not in a mere five weeks. Many of my conjurations continued well into the start of the business and still continue in various ways. My magic boxes consisted mainly of coloured folders, some have mutated into filing cabinets or computer files, and some have evolved into departments full of people. Nevertheless I have attempted to distil the essentials of the magical approach to the foundation of an independent enterprise down to a crash course. Hopefully this will save others a lot of the time that I wasted myself, by focussing, with hindsight, on what actually worked.
Initial preparation. Participants will need six boxes in which to put various small pieces of paper, card, or parchment bearing spells and sigils and various written affirmations and negations and assorted notes as aids to memory.
Cubic shaped boxes no more than about eight inches on a side should prove ideal.
As a magical act in itself, get these boxes to look as good as possible, use stout good quality card as a minimum. Paint them in the following base colours and adorn them with further designs as you will as our voyage progresses.
Illumination - 2 boxes, one white, one matt black

Divination - green.
Invocation - blue.
Evocation-yellow
Enchantment-red.

For each week.
1) Read the 1 or 2 pages of written introduction on adapting Chaos Magic techniques to business.
2) See the relevant chapter references from Liber Null & Psychonaut and Liber Kaos.
3) Consider some readings and meditations from the Chinese Classics. See: -
http://www.chinapage.org/confucius/kungtze1.html
This site provides translations of classic works by Confucius, Lao Tse, Sun Tzu, and others. You may find similar materials on other sites. Browse them freely and feel free to cut and post extracts that you find relevant to our discussions. I shall may drop in a few choice quotes from these sources from time to time.
The Chinese have the oldest Nation State on the planet and have had organised systems of government, trade, and business for thousands of years. Except for a brief interregnum over the past couple of centuries, the Chinese have always had about a quarter of all world trade, and they will rapidly regain it this century. They have been described as 'The Jews of the East' on account of their amazing ability to prosper wherever they set up shop.
Confucius commented on many aspects of what we might call Right Living, Lao Tse wrote largely on Mystical and Philosophical ideas, SunTsu wrote about Military matters. Some of what they wrote remains startlingly relevant today, some of it seems obscure and requires a bit of thought and interpretation, some of it remains cryptic or deceptively obvious.
The Chinese Classics have much to say about Conduct, Attitude, and Strategy.
Virtue remains supremely important in business. Nobody will deal for long with those that acquire a poor reputation or those who prove unreliable.
Calm persistence outclasses stress and greed in the long run.
Business resembles War in some important respects; it's just less painful and more profitable.
The recommended classics run to quite a large body of writings and reading the lot can take a long time, however their format makes them ideal for random dipping, and this can often function as a useful form of divination, or as a stimulus to lateral thinking.



http://www.maybelogic.org/petercrsCMB2.htm



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