William S.

Burroughs’ 7 Occult Techniques for Smashing

Reality
ultraculture.org/blog/2017/04/11/william-s-burroughs-occult-technique/

April 11, 2017 by Jason Louv 12 April 11,

Comments 2017

Burroughs Technique #1: Do Easy

Burroughs’ most tried and tested technique was the practice of “Do Easy” or “Doing
Easy”—that is, re-training your brain to do everything in the fewest number of steps. As
Burroughs put it, “[Doing Easy] simply means doing whatever you do in the easiest most
relaxed way you can manage which is also the quickest and most efficient way.” If that
sounds overly simplistic, good.

For the easiest possible way to absorb this important occult concept, check out Gus Van
Sant’s short film explicating the Discipline of Do Easy, above. It could save you years of
your life!

Burroughs Technique #2: Dream Control

Some of this imagery was most certainly drawn from Burroughs’ drug experiments,
particularly with Ayahuasca. But a lot of it was drawn from his dreams, as well—
Burroughs faithfully kept a dream journal (a practice we explore in our online course on
lucid dreaming), and pulled material from it to fuel his writing. (He later published some
of these journals under the title My Education.)

Burroughs Technique #3: The Cut-Up

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Central to William S. Burroughs’ life, magick and world view was the Cut-Up, a technique
created by his friend and collaborator Brion Gysin from the earlier dada experiments of
Tristan Tzara.

Cut-ups are the art of literally cutting up text and images in random fashion and then
reassembling them to form new, unexpected patterns. By doing so, Burroughs felt that
he could destabilize language and get closer to the truth. This chaos magick technique
allowed Burroughs and Gysin to see into the source code of reality, which has been a
quest of magicians and alchemists for centuries. It was later adopted by people like
David Bowie, Iggy Pop and the writer William Gibson—in fact, the cut-up has been used
by countless thousands of artists of all persuasions since to spark massive creativity
when they hit a wall.

Burroughs Technique #4: The Dream Machine

Another Gysin invention that Burroughs adopted and championed was the Dream
Machine, a rotating cylinder of light that can induce incredible visions.

Burroughs often wrote of the Dream Machine in his work, and used its effects to
generate much of the eidetic imagery that filled his novels. Brion Gysin hoped to mass
market his invention, and place it in every home in America instead of a TV set. A noble
idea, but it never flew (you can’t run advertisements in a Dream Machine, after all)—in
the years and decades since, however, the Dream Machine has attained a cult following.
Even Kurt Cobain was a massive fan.

While Dream Machines can be hard to come by, you can build one yourself, for very little
money, that works as well as a professionally made model. In fact, Ultraculture has a
guide to building a Dream Machine right here.

Burroughs Technique #5: Orgone Accumulation

Another William S. Burroughs fascination was Wilhelm Reich’s orgone energy and orgone
accumulators. Reich, a renegade student of Sigmund Freud, believed that he had
discovered how to control and harness sexual energy, or “orgone,” and that there were
actually particles of sexual energy called “bions.”

Reich was persecuted in the 1950s, his lab was destroyed by the US government, and he
was finally thrown in jail (where he died). Burroughs later discovered and championed
Reich’s work, even building his own orgone accumulator box—which Burroughs would
actually spend large amounts of time sitting in and smoking kif, or crystallized THC, while
writing. Burroughs swore by orgone, and used it in his novels as a metaphor for breaking
the anti-sex control forces of society.

Just like the Dream Machine, orgone accumulators can be made very easily, cheaply and
quickly, so that you can test out Reich’s technology for yourself—Ultraculture has a guide
to making an orgone accumulator blanket here!

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Burroughs Technique #6: Total Focus on Destabilizing Control
Burroughs brought all of his experiments together into one central task: destabilizing and
destroying control.

Like the Gnostics, Burroughs saw the world as essentially a control mechanism or a trap.
He saw his goal as utterly breaking and destroying that control system . By control,
Burroughs meant the nature of reality itself, and along with his collaborator Gysin, he
would accept nothing less than its complete destabilization and destruction. In this, he is
one of the clear grandfathers of chaos magick.

The video above is a track from DJ Spooky’s album Rhythm Science, featuring the sublime
Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud. It samples the William S. Burroughs describing his five steps
for smashing control and consolidating revolutionary gains. They are:

1. Proclaim a new era and set up a new calendar.

2. Replace alien language.
3. Destroy or neutralize alien gods.
4. Destroy alien machinery of government control.
5. Take wealth and land from individual aliens.

Technique #7: Chaos Magick

Burroughs was not only one of the intellectual forebears of chaos magick, he also
seriously practiced its disciplines in the 1980s, immersing himself in the works of Peter
Carroll, joining Carroll’s order the Illuminates of Thanateros (Burroughs was buried
wearing his chaos star ring from the order), and making constant and disciplined
experiments with Carroll’s techniques. Burroughs touched on these experiments in his
later novels, particularly his final trilogy, comprised of The Place of Dead Roads, Cities of
the Red Night and The Western Lands.

Burroughs’ fascination with chaos magick had carried on from his previous occult
experiments with Gysin in Tangiers in the 1950s and 60s and his interest in using the
techniques of Buddhist meditation he had learned from the Tibetan teacher Chögyam
Trungpa in the 70s. In the 80s, Burroughs discovered chaos magick, and found in it a
structured discipline that brought his previous experiments together.

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