Stuart Wilde is less well known than he really should be, particularly in Chaos Magic circles. He would never have labelled himself a Chaos Magician, or even claimed that what he did was magic, but looking at his work through a Chaos Magic lens you can quickly see that his ideas and tech would be super useful and applicable to Chaos Magic. He was also my very first teacher, though I met him in the flesh only once. Over the next few posts I will talk about his various techniques, such as Turbo Thought, excursions up the Near Death Tubes, and his Etheric exercises, but I want to start by talking about who he was and how I met him.
Stuart was a huge sensation in the New Age in the 80s and early 90s. He was up there with the big New Age names such as Wayne Dyer and Deepak Chopra. But if you talk to people about him now—which I have done a fair bit over the years—very few people seem to know him any more. I think one reason for this is because he got very weird, and dark, and frankly a bit dodgy towards the end.
In his final batch of books, he really got into the dark conspiracy stuff around UFOs, aliens, demons, the matrix, and secret elite governments and all that stuff that, to be fair, seems a lot less conspiratorial and more acceptable these days. That said, he took on a very negative world view, which I think is the bigger issue than the content itself. His teaching radically changed from being a very uplifting self-empowering style to more of a Doom Merchant and purveyor of Doom Porn and making countless predictions about world events that never came true.
As his later ideas progressed they got fairly complicated. He started talking about The Morph, which was an energy descending onto this dimension. He also talked a lot about mirror worlds and Hell worlds. In one of his later books, there’s a whole thing about how demons can get into your body up your rectum. I just thought it all got a bit silly, really.
There’s talk on the internet, so take what you want from this—I do not know anything for sure—that he got very heavily into drinking and drugs in his latter years, and it warped his sense of himself and the world a fair bit. There’s also talk that he was cursed or that he was attacked by a demonic force.
All I can tell you is that when I met him he was very drunk.
I first came across Stuart Wilde when I was probably 12 or 13. My aunt Patricia lived in London but she used to come home to Ireland every year or so, and come visit us. To me, it was a great big occasion because I found her fascinating. Conversation with her would always turn to topics that no one else seemed to ever want to talk about such as ghosts, God, spirituality, life after death. She was big into Theosophy, particularly the Alice Bailey flavour of it, and we talked a lot about that. A few years later she bought me the entire collection of Alice Bailey books as a gift, which led to me joining Bailey’s Arcane school twice over the years before finally retiring as a part-time Theosophist a couple of years ago.
She also gave me these books written by Stuart Wilde. Well, technically she gave them to my parents to read, but I really latched on to them.
The first book was called Miracles.
Miracles is a very short thin book which is a very standard teaching of the law of attraction, or The Secret as it became famously known. Shoot for the moon, make your list, and ask the universe for it, and it will be delivered. This was the first time I had ever heard of anything like this. It opened up the idea that the world could be something very different from the Irish Catholic view that I’d been taught.
I enjoyed Miracles, it opened the door to the possibilities that might exist in the world. It was mind-blowing, this was all new to me, and it was so interesting.
My Aunt would also post books over to us a lot. One day, and for some reason that I never truly understood, I ended up looking in the tumble dryer in our house. I just had this compulsion just to go look there, and I found two new Stuart Wilde books that she had sent over. I don’t know if my Mother was trying to hide them or had just put them there to sort for later—I asked her about it recently, and she has no recollection of the incident at all.
The two books were The Force and The Quickening. The Force talks about the Four Disciplines of the Initiate, and The Quickening is more how to actually do all this Woo stuff, like putting thoughts into other people’s minds, getting people to turn around and look at you, or getting people to trip over. He was big into the Etheric, which is similar to prana or life energy. But we’ll come back to all this juicy stuff in later posts.
Over the next years I really got into Stuart Wilde and devoured everything I could get my hands on. He did all these self-help subliminal tapes with nice music and affirmations underneath. I listened to a lot of that, and his audio lectures, too. I was totally sold on his whole ethos—don’t take things so seriously, and have a spirituality that is practical and improves your life right now, not in some distant other world. There was tremendous humour to this Wilde view on life.
I ended up in Glastonbury for the Goddess Festival one year when I was 22, so mid-2000 I reckon. A friend and her mother were Druids and very big into the Goddess, so I got invited to go over with them.
Glastonbury is really cool, full of bookshops and New Age shops, which was great because it was very hard to get any of those type of books in Ireland at the time. As soon as I arrived I saw in the window of a bookshop that Stuart had a new book out. It was called The Sixth Sense, which got me really excited. It had been years since I had come across any new Stuart material.
But then I saw a poster on the window that he was also going to be giving a lecture in the local town hall the next night. I had just happened to arrive in Glastonbury the day before he was giving the lecture. I thought, this is meant to be, what a synchronicity, this is a sign. This is it…
IT’S HAPPENING!
I rushed straight down into the Town Hall and said, I’ll have tickets for Stuart Wilde tomorrow night, please and thank you. They said, “Are you having a laugh? No chance.” I thought, oh, this isn’t a sign at all.
They said that if I wanted, I could still come the next night and sit in the waiting room. If people didn’t turn up, I’d be let in, but not to get my hopes up as it was highly unlikely. I said okay, fair enough, I’ll try that.
The next night I arrived early. I ended up sitting in this kitchenette area. There were five or six people already ahead of me, and then five or six more came in after. Everyone was being friendly, hoping we’d get in. Every now and again someone would come into the kitchen and call out a name to let someone know they got their golden ticket. I was so excited, nervous, and hopeful.
Eventually my name was called. I got in, and I was like, yes, this is back to being kismet.
There was a warm-up act of a woman doing crystal bowl meditation which was really nice. As a group, we did some chanting the vowels of our names which I found very settling. Once that ended we were all geared up ready for Stuart to come on. To me, it felt just like a rock concert. I can’t overstate how much Stuart meant to me at this time. I couldn’t believe this was happening, he really was my spiritual hero. This was like I was meeting Jesus Actual Christ, or John Lennon, or I dunno… the Dalai Lama or someone.
Then he came out on stage, and he was drunk, belligerent, not making much sense, and aggressive.
This is not what I expected at all. In his books and tapes he was funny and positive and uplifting, but here he was quite angry. At one point he was pointing at people in the crowd saying, “You’re an asshole. You’re okay. You’re an asshole.” Which looking back now, is quite funny, but at the time people were walking out. One guy had a pyramid on his head and Stuart was really taking the piss out of him—which again in hindsight seems fair, but at the time the whole thing just felt very, very odd. The lecture was part of a series of lectures on Crop Circles, but all Stu was talking about was the legends of Camelot and Parsifal, and he didn’t get too far into the story.
But even with all this, I was still just happy to see Stuart Wilde, even though it did feel like a huge let-down.
Then, something very strange but very cool happened.
There was this moment where time slowed down entirely and everything became hyper-focused. The whole room disappeared, and I was just looking at Stuart’s face. All these other faces just flashed over his face, no colour just grey faces flowing in front of his face. Total silence. Total oneness. I was completely gone and all that was there was this one thing.
After a couple of seconds, I noticed he had stopped talking too. There was just total silence, and then he just went, “Oh, a moment of peace,” and his face went back to normal. Looking back on this now, I feel this was some form of “transmission”, in the spiritual sense, not the aliens putting thoughts into your head sense. I have had this sort of experience again a couple of times, so I recognise the flavour. It’s the idea that by being in the presence of someone who is more self-realised than you, you are able to experience your own higher or true nature. There is a massive sense of oneness to it all.
As part of his teachings Stuart did this thing where he bashed his head off something hard like a door or glass to show that you are capable of doing something more powerful than you think. It’s a similar idea to walking on hot coals. However on this night in the Glastonbury town hall he tried to do it with the whiteboard that was on stage with him, but didn’t realise there was a wall directly behind it, so he bashed his head and the whiteboard into the wall, clearly hurting himself and making the opposite point to what he was trying to make.
It was all a bit weird.
He ran over his time, and people were getting quite vocal, giving out to him—scolding him, for the non-Irish among you. At the end, a lot of faces were not happy, but some people were going up to the stage to try to meet Stuart, so I thought, I’d take a chance if I could go up and see if I can shake his hand. I’ve met a number of famous people over the years, and I always try to shake their hand because it feels like a real contact rather than just seeing them across a room.
I was halfway towards the stage and loads of people were now gathered around him. I thought to myself that maybe I won’t bother, but a woman’s voice from behind me went, “Go up, come on, go up.” I just went, I don’t care if I made a fool of myself, I was going up.
Everyone around him was treating him like this sacred messiah figure. All the angry people had left, and it was just the true believers flocking around him. At that point he seemed quite frail and weak. People were trying to hand him letters and written petitions, and he was saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t read letters.” Then a guy beside him turned around and said to me, “We’re all going to head back to the pub across the street.”
I pulled back from the crowd, walked outside, and waited down the street a bit until the entourage came out. And then came Stuart, only now being helped down the road by being propped up by this younger guy, looking like a frail old man, full of drunken angry energy not ten minutes ago.
We go into the pub and sit down the back, and I’m sitting directly in front of Stuart fucking Wilde. I’m very nervous, very excited. I’m sitting there, my heart’s racing, and he says, “You need to fucking chill out, man.”
Then he got one of his helpers to sit beside me and do a healing thing, where she put her hand on my head to lower my energy and chill me out. She whispered in my ear, “Stop being worried about dying. Dying is the easy part, living is the hard part.” I thought to myself that yea, I know that already, but then wondered was this just a random thing to say to me that sounded deep, or did she actually pick up on something in me? Who can tell.
Stuart was trying to finish his story about Camelot, and an old guy sitting beside him was giving out to him to just get on with the story. Finally, Stuart finishes the story, and we get thrown out of the pub—pretty aggressively, too. Lots of Mars energy floating about.
We all went outside and sat around by a monument in the town centre and talked with Stuart for a few hours. There were between 10 and 12 of us, and Stuart went through everyone, energetically reading them and telling them a lot about their lives. He was really accurately describing people and telling them deep, heavy stuff about themselves with details he could have never known. I’ve never seen this sort of ability since or before.
At some point a few local lads came over and were being aggressive—Mars again! I don’t think they knew who he was. Stuart’s sitting down, but he just grabs one of the men and gets him in a chokehold. Stuart choked him a little, got a weird look, then started telling us some of the things this guy had done in his life—some horrible abusive things—before he let him go. Stuart also gave a strange piece of advice to him that I couldn’t quite hear that really spooked the guy. The guy didn’t run off, but he was definitely freaked out.
For a long while Stuart was going through all the people sitting around him, telling them different things, speaking very low. He chain-smoked nearly all my cigarettes. I smoked at the time, and he smoked most of mine, which was cool—Stuart Wilde smoked all my cigarettes! Good times.
Then he came to me and asked me was I Irish. He looked at me, and take this whatever way you want, he said to me, “You are a master, and you will lead people.” This was really weird because when he went around to other people he mostly told bad or disturbing stuff to them. Like, you spend too much time in your heads, you don’t listen to other people, you’re really lazy, you play the victim. But, when he came to me, it was nice, super positive stuff.
He then wanted to do some healing on me, but his crystals had been packed away so I missed out there.
He said, “You will lead people. I love what you have to give.” He also said something about having lots of sperm to give out first which I didn’t quite understand, though I suspect it was just a weird way of saying I have to go live a bit first.
I was like, what do I do with all that?
And what I take from it is that I met Stuart Wilde, and he thought I was cool. I don’t feel I’m a master of anything. I just take it as an interesting, nice thing to have met my hero, and it made up for the fact that he was a human who smoked, drank, and was a bit of an arsehole.
Even with all the negative things, he was by far the most impressive energetic or spiritual person I have ever been in the company of. No one has come close to it. He had an aura or presence that was unmistakeable. It felt like being in the presence of someone who was more than human, not quite a God or a Messiah, but not quite us either. Very hard to explain. I have been around other cool spiritual people who had a similar flavour, but not close to the same level.
And I’m glad I met him. They say not to meet your heroes, but I’ve met a number of mine, and mostly they’re as cool as I hoped. Stuart certainly was.
Anyway, the night came to an end. Stu wandered off to have a piss around the corner. All night he’d been telling this story about a guy in a boat where as soon as he turned around to piss, the rest of the passengers jumped out. I realised the next day that’s exactly what I had done. As soon as he went to piss, I took my cue to leave because it was late, and I was a guest in someone’s house and didn’t want to arrive back too late and wake everyone up. He talks about this night in the Journey Beyond Enlightenment audio series as well, which was nice that it was also a significant enough event for him to mention it in one of his teachings.
So that was the one and only time I met my first spiritual teacher. Over this series I will delve into Wilde’s teachings themselves and how we as Chaos Magicians can best adapt his techniques and ideas for our own needs. Trust me, there is a lot of powerful stuff in them.
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And that’s it for this time, I hope you got something good from it. If you’d like to chat about it, you can leave a comment below, or come find me on Bluesky, though I’m not terribly active over there.
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So, until next time,
MAY YOUR BEST DAYS BE AHEAD!
Tommie