I was looking at a list of NLP …

I was looking at a list of NLP presuppositions on the screen when one of those old correspondences lit up again.

NLP asks us to work with ideas such as the map is not the territory, there is no failure, only feedback, and people have the resources they need. These aren’t final descriptions of reality. They’re working assumptions: beliefs adopted provisionally because of what they might enable us to notice or do.

Chaos magick makes a similar move when it treats belief as a tool. Rather than asking which belief-system deserves permanent allegiance, it asks what happens if I believe this—for a while. Enter the reality tunnel. Let it organise attention and action. Observe the results. Then decide whether to keep it, modify it, or walk back out.

I like the freedom in that. A belief doesn’t have to become a flag planted in the ground or a little boss behind my eyes. I can hold it as an instrument, use it to reach somewhere my existing assumptions can’t take me, and put it down when the work is done.

This isn’t permission to pretend facts don’t matter. The territory still gets a vote. Bodies, consequences, other people, money, gravity, grief: none of them disappear because I’ve selected a more interesting map. The discipline is to inhabit a belief fully enough for it to change what I can see, while remaining responsible for what happens when I act from inside it.

Perhaps that’s the shared practice beneath NLP’s presuppositions and chaos magick’s reality tunnels: belief without bondage. Hold the belief firmly enough to use it, lightly enough to revise it.

And then comes the more uncomfortable question. If beliefs are tools, which of mine have been left running so long that I’ve forgotten I’m the one holding them?