This is the second post in a series about Stuart Wilde, who was once a huge name on the New Age circuit, but who almost nobody seems to remember now. He would never have called himself a Chaos Magician, and he would probably have laughed at the word Magic being applied to anything he did, but if we look at his work through a Chaos Magic lens there is an enormous amount in his teachings that is useful, testable, and applicable. And in this series I want to introduce his ideas to my fellow Chaos Magicians who may be unaware of them.

The first post, Stuart Wilde Smoked All My Cigarettes, was about how I met him in Glastonbury, where I got to see my spiritual hero be drunk, belligerent and aggressive on stage, before ending up sitting with him outside a pub at two in the morning while he chain-smoked my cigarettes. He was still by far the most impressive energetic presence I have ever been in the company of. Both of those things are true at once, and I’ve made my peace with it.

Wilde’s ideas that I feel best translate to a Chaos Magic paradigm all stem from his foundational belief in something called the Etheric. So in this post I will tell you how he described what the Etheric is, and then give you some of his exercises so that we can all start experimenting with it right away.

But first I want to point out that I am not saying I totally agree with Wilde’s views on all this, some of it I do, some I don’t, but even on the bits that feel off to me, I do appreciate how useful an outlook it can be.

Onwards!

WHAT EXACTLY IS THE ETHERIC?

The short version is that there’s a field of living energy around us and within us, that this is where our actual feelings happen, and that reality responds to that rather than to our thoughts, our intentions, our affirmations, or our carefully constructed sigils. The rest of reality is made of this Etheric stuff too.

Worth saying up front that when Wilde talks about feeling he doesn’t quite mean what we normally mean by it. He’s not talking about moods. He means it as a sense, in the same category as sight or hearing, and the Etheric is the organ we do it with. It’s not emotions either, which for Wilde are only ever the ego’s scoreboard, our personality setting rules about how things ought to go and then being happy or sad depending on whether life complied. Perhaps I am not fully grasping his teaching correctly here, but I find it hard to really pin down what he means by feelings—is grief, for example, a feeling or an emotion to Wilde? My best guess is that when Wilde mentions feelings he is really talking about feelings that are more than us being happy or sad that life is going the way we want it to, and that these other feelings are our real feelings, the ones that reside in the Etheric.

That aside, Wilde’s best description of our personal Etheric field is at the start of his book Silent Power:

“Around you is a subtle electromagnetic body of energy… The ancient Greeks called it the etheric body. This is where the real you resides. It’s also where your real feelings reside.

Imagine it to be a faint energy field like a colorless mist. But, unlike a slow wafting mist, the etheric is moving very, very quickly. Flashing through it are mini-lightning bolts of energy, and fingers of flamelike etheric sunbursts that shoot out from you in all directions… You walk inside an amazing glowing bubble of light that sometimes projects three to four feet away from you in every direction.”

Wilde tells us that the Etheric radiates two to three feet out from our bodies, and is weakest around our legs and strongest at our chest and head. Our mental activity comes off the top of our scalps in fast flashes like a volcano erupting. Emotion rolls down the front of us in waves from the neck and chest and fades out somewhere past the knees. We leave a ghost image of ourselves hanging in the air as we walk. And when two people pass close by each other, “the etheric of each leaps across to the other. An intermingling takes place. You can watch it.” And then, because he is who he is, he immediately follows that with: “If a pretty girl passes a group of men you can actually see their etheric try to follow her up the road.”

Wilde says that how strong our Etheric field is comes down to four things.

1. How fast it oscillates. This is what decides what we can and can’t perceive, and what we can and can’t experience.
2. How much is going on in it. The sheer intensity of the thing at any given moment.
3. Whether it’s contained or leaking out all over the shop. Untrained, Wilde reckons it’s “wobbling and slopping about like an enormous pile of jelly on a plate.”
4. How elastic it is. Normally “stiff and sticky… like dough” until we work on it.

And therefore, in Wilde’s eyes:

“The subliminal feeling you exude is the real you. Life responds precisely and exactly to the subliminal feeling you emit. That’s why sometimes your mind expects one thing, and life gives you something else.”
— Silent Power, ch. 6

I have done plenty of Magic that came back with sweet nothing, and Wilde’s view is that I was probably standing there Etherically radiating the feeling of want and worry the entire time, and the world responded to that, exactly and precisely, and gave me more of it.

The feelings we radiate out from our Etheric bodies are reflected back to us by the world. I mean, we are definitely now in “it’s all just vibrations, man” territory here, but that’s how Wilde sees it. We vibrate Etherically at a certain energetic level, and we come into harmony with similar vibrations around us.

Wilde goes on a lot in his books about how it’s us oscillating at certain Etheric frequencies that causes us to have certain experiences. An example, and possibly a bad one because it lacks nuance, is that we can’t be millionaires if our Etheric energy is vibrating at the level of a poor person. To be fair, I reckon there is something to this idea, but it drifts very easily and quickly into the New Age trap of victim blaming, where bad things only happen to people who have the wrong thoughts or vibes. There is probably a longer post needed here, so I’ll park all the vibration talk for another time when I can go into the positives and negatives of this outlook in more depth.

THE ETHERIC IS EVERYTHING

In The Quickening Wilde says “the etheric is the true world. Your physical body and the planet are a solid manifestation of the etheric,” and that the Etheric around our bodies is the same substance as the Etheric around the earth, only denser.

Which, for me, turns the whole thing from an energy-body model into a cosmology. If the Etheric is the actual substrate and the physical world is just it condensed, then the inner worlds aren’t off somewhere else at all, they’re this same field at a different density. It’s all one thing. It’s why I said at the start that his ideas all stem from this, because the Etheric is literally everything.

To explain this outlook a bit better I would like to give you an analogy. Quite recently I got a 3D printer. It uses resin as the printing medium. This resin is a liquid that sits in a vat on top of a screen, and UV light shines up through that screen and hardens the liquid into a solid shape. Layer by layer it builds up whatever is being printed.

So, the Etheric is this liquid that has the potential to be anything. And then the light comes in and solidifies it. We live in a part of the Etheric that is denser than the greater Etheric substrate, but everything is contained within the greater Etheric. There is nowhere else, just different levels of density, with some things being more solid than others. But ultimately the whole thing is extremely malleable.

The lower our personal Etheric energy vibrates or oscillates, the more dense and hardened and stuck we are. The higher the frequency, the more loose, free, malleable, creative, and expressive we are. This feels right on an intuitive level to me. We all know people who have become totally hardened around a particular idea or viewpoint, and just how rigid and set in their ways they have become. And we all seem to harden into our personalities and outlooks the older we get, too.

So, the ultimate goal would be to get our Etheric up to a high energetic level and keep it as free and as soft as possible. And how do we do that? Well, to start with we have to be able to see the Etheric in operation for ourselves, so here are some of Wilde’s Etheric exercises to get us going.

WILDE’S ETHERIC EXERCISES

These are some of Wilde’s beginner Etheric exercises, and none of them need trance or belief or gear or any prior training. But Wilde does warn that “Merely desiring to see the etheric doesn’t work. To see it, you have to become an etheric being.” And these exercises are designed for us to become more aware of our Etheric bodies and the greater Etheric field we inhabit.

Waking up our peripheral vision.

Wilde reckons that in order to start seeing the Etheric we have to use the sides of our eyes. By this he means using the rods, which sit at the edges of the eye, rather than the cones at the front. The Etheric is too faint and too fast for the cones in the middle of our eyes. The rods out at the edges are pretty much colour-blind, but far more sensitive.

Try this:

• Hold your hands out either side of your face, about 18 inches away.
• Draw them slowly back past your ears while watching both at once, without moving your eyes.
• Note the point where they disappear.
• Then through the day, ask yourself: what’s to my far left, what’s to my far right? Move your attention only, never your eyes.

Nothing dramatic is going to happen, but over weeks of practising this we get a widening of what we’re aware of without looking at it. “By concentrating on your peripheral vision over a period of time you activate it. You have to remind the brain that you want that information.” Do it at dusk or in soft light, because bright sun and neon swamp the whole business, and do it when you’re tired, because tired eyes and a slowing brain both push peripheral awareness up.

The Tree at Dusk.

This is the classic Wilde exercise and the one most people get something from first.

• Go to a wooded spot at dusk and pick a big robust tree with plenty of foliage on it.
• Relax, and put your concentration on the top of the tree, the twelve o’clock position.
• Move your eyes to the sky just beside the tree, around one o’clock, and hold them there.
• Without moving your eyes off that spot, move your attention back to the top of the tree.

The whole trick here is that we have our eyes in one place but our attention in another. What we’re after is “the enormous flamelike spirals of energy firing out from the tree in all directions.” If we get nothing, he says it’s one of three things: our peripheral vision isn’t developed yet, or we’re not relaxed enough, or the light is wrong.

The Turn-Around Game.

The first one that gives us something we can count.

• Sit somewhere people pass at a moderate distance, a park path or a promenade.
• Click into peripheral vision, pick up a passer-by’s Etheric, and hold your attention on it for even a split second.
• In theory, they’ll turn around and look at you.

People deep in thought, or in the middle of an emotional wave, don’t register it. This sort of stuff, particularly at the beginning, is largely a numbers game, so try it twenty times rather than having one go and deciding the whole thing is nonsense.

That said, I was never all that successful with this version of the Turn-Around Game. Wilde has another one that I got really good at:

• Look at someone.
• Visualise yourself standing right behind them.
• Then lean in a bit more and lick the back of their neck.

I was able to get people to look around, and even show off to other people a bit with it. There definitely seems to be a practice element to it, because I am much, much less effective at it if I haven’t done it in a long time, or haven’t been doing it regularly.

Reaching into People.

This is the properly Etheric one, and the one that’ll convince us if anything is going to.

• Sit on a bench where people pass and work on them as they walk away from you, so you’re not being swayed by faces or clothes.
• Visualise yourself with an elongated arm.
• Reach into the person through the centre of their back and take a molecule of their feeling from around the heart.
• Keep your mind blank, hold no expectation, and ask one question. How do they feel?

The trick here is to take the first answer that arrives, even if it feels way off or a bit silly. Start with the simple states, anger, fear, confusion, boredom, happiness, joy, and let the complicated mixtures come later. We’re after impressions rather than visions with this. Of course, we will have no idea whether we’re right or wrong with these random impressions, but the aim here is to start engaging with the Etheric rather than to be super accurate.

“Don’t feel limited by a lack of perception. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong. In the act of reaching out, you heighten your perception by demand. It’s a numbers game. Try it on 500 people, and then on 10,000. Eventually you won’t have to stretch to touch people — you’ll know just by looking at them.”
— Silent Power, ch. 8

We’ll leave it there for now, but this really is just the beginning of Wilde’s ideas and techniques. Even if this stuff didn’t grab you, it’s worth experimenting with, because what’s coming next only really works once we have the basics down. And the next stuff is the good stuff: Etheric Manoeuvres for loosening and moving the field, travelling up the Near Death Tubes, putting thoughts directly into people’s minds, and a manifestation ritual that would work excellently as a sigil launching method.

In the meantime, try to get strangers to turn around and look at you, but don’t actually lick them.

_____

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.

If you would like to support this series and the rest of the stuff I do, then please consider a paid Patreon Membership, buying me a coffee, or sending a PayPal donation! All amounts, even very small ones, all really, really help to keep the engine running here.

So, until next time,
MAY YOUR BEST DAYS BE AHEAD!

Tommie