Transcend the Chaos: Proven Integral Techniques for Emotional Control, Confidence, and Creativity

by Angel Millar, Michael Moynihan (Read by)

Overview

A holistic approach to personal and professional growth

• Demonstrates daily practices for stress management, more effective persuasion, and creative problem solving

• Explores the use of trance and dreams among famous artists, philosophers, and inventors for making important breakthroughs in highly-competitive fields

• Explores the Six Cs—Connection, Creativity, Craft, Culture, Character, and Consciousness—to model integrating a spiritual consciousness into one’s life

For thoughtful, spiritual people to thrive in a fast-changing, unpredictable, and high-pressure world, they must continue to develop themselves spiritually while cultivating the qualities and tools necessary for personal and professional growth.

In Transcend the Chaos, Angel Millar provides a unique working model for navigating our world today using Six Cs—Connection, Creativity, Craft, Culture, Character, and Consciousness. He explores the use of trance and dreams in the lives of famous artists, philosophers, and inventors and urges us to look inside to cultivate the imagination and creative thinking needed for modern careers. He also teaches persuasion techniques that work in advertising and politics and how to apply them to self-talk to replace self-defeating, sabotaging inner dialogue with powerful positive messages.

Millar shares exercises to optimize posture, breathing, and relaxation as well as pathways for emotional control, confidence, and creativity—techniques that can be used not only in times of high pressure but also at home during more quiet moments. He offers the tools, practices, and theory to not only endure the chaos but transcend it.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668145647
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster/ Inner Traditions
Publication date:	10/14/2025
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 1.50(h) x 5.00(d)

About the Author

A practitioner of esotericism for more than three decades, Angel Millar is the author of The Path of The Warrior-Mystic: Being a Man in an Age of Chaos and The Three Stages of Initiatic Spirituality: Craftsman, Warrior, Magician, among other books. A qualified hypnotist, martial artist, and fine artist, he is well-known in the U.S.A. as a lecturer on self-development and spirituality.

Read an Excerpt

1

Chaos

Philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) described our own time as “liquid modernity.” Fluids cannot be stopped. They “pass around some obstacles,” he said. They spill, drip, flow, and flood. “Fluids do not keep to any shape for long and are constantly ready (and prone) to change it,” Bauman also noted.1 Today, we “go with the flow,” are concerned with “market liquidity,” and make sure that we have “liquid assets.” Even gender is “fluid.” Money, identity; everything seems to be in a state of flux. Everything is changing.

Bauman was not the first philosopher to take an interest in liquid. Indeed, we find a similar observation at the very beginning of philosophy. For Thales of Miletus (born ca. 624–620 BCE, died ca. 548–545 BCE), everything was made of water. This seems like a strange idea but Thales might have seen water as the primal substance of life since it can exist in the form of a gas (steam), liquid (water), and solid (ice) depending on temperature.2 This, in turn, Thales might well have related to the transformation of metal through the metallurgical process of heating, melting, shaping, and cooling, and to the eruption of volcanoes in which molten rock appears as a fiery liquid.3

Thales lived roughly a century and a half before Socrates (469–399 BCE), who is often regarded as the father of Western philosophy. Though Socrates wrote nothing himself, through the writings of Plato and Xenophon—who were his disciples in his final years—he has given us the Socratic method of probing a subject through dialogue, or questions and answers, in order to arrive at the truth, or at least as close to the truth as we can get with limited information. This method became a part of classical education and lies at the foundations of such fields as psychoanalysis, therapy, and life coaching.

We must, of course, be able to reason. But rational thinking has definite limits. And believing that the world conforms to rational thought is absurd. Life is chaos. Or as Thales or Bauman might have said, life is liquid. It is always in a state of change: flowing, evaporating, freezing, breaking apart, then flowing again. There are times of calm, but there are also storms. And there are waves, whirlpools, and strong and weak currents.

There is something in Thales’s concept of water and Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity that is reminiscent of medieval and Renaissance alchemy. Notably, although alchemists attempted to turn base metals into gold through processes of heating, liquefying, and evaporating, alchemy has also sometimes involved the creation of medicines from plants through processes of boiling, simmering, and evaporation. Alchemy has also served as a metaphor for spiritual and psychological awakening. During the twentieth century, early psychoanalyst Carl Jung explored the process of alchemy as a reflection of the psychological process of individuation.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, alchemy is often regarded as the forerunner of modern science. Yet conceptually they opposed each other until very recently. In Europe, the alchemist began with Chaos—or the “watery chaos,” as alchemist Simon Forman (1552–1611) described it.4 Sir Isaac Newton, who practiced alchemy himself, said that “just as all things were created from one Chaos by the design of one God, so in our art [of alchemy] all things . . . are born from this one thing, which is our Chaos.”5 Chaos, if Newton is to be believed, is part of the divine plan. Or to put it another way, it is an inescapable aspect of reality, and as such, acts of discovery, of creativity, and of transformation necessarily involve chaos in some way. In contrast, from its beginning, science rejected the very idea of chaos, or the nonlinear, and assumed instead that natural processes were essentially orderly, or linear.

It was not until the 1960s that the modern study of chaos began. And it began in physics, with the creeping realization that relatively simple mathematical equations, with tiny differences in input, could model systems that appeared disorganized. Described as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions” in relation to weather, this phenomenon became known as the butterfly effect. Accordingly, a minor stirring of the air in one part of the world (e.g., by a butterfly) might lead to changes that ultimately create a storm in another part of the world some time later on.6

Over the following decade, a small number of scientists working in different fields (physics, mathematics, biology, and chemistry) began to take chaos seriously.7 Then in 1976, Nature published a “messianic” paper by the theoretical-physicist-turned-biologist Robert M. May in which he observed that the mathematics of “linear systems” (which had been successfully applied to linear problems) had come to dominate the mathematics and physics at the university level.8 Yet, he observed outside the sciences, nonlinear systems were “surely the rule, not the exception.”9 Chaos needed to be taught if scientists were going to truly be able to understand our “overwhelmingly nonlinear world.”10

Not only has chaos made a return to the sciences, but the name of Thales has begun to echo in our own time, being used in the names of a number of prominent corporations in the financial, defense, and technology sectors. Perhaps this is not surprising. Aristotle tells us that Thales was once scolded for being poor and told that his philosophy was of no practical use. Thales’s philosophy required observing the night sky and the motions of the planets. Through this practice, he had come to believe that the next olive crop would be unusually abundant; it was still winter at the time. Thales paid deposits on all of the olive presses in Miletus, where he lived, and in Chios, which was some distance away. Since they were not in demand and no one else bid on them, he was able to hire them cheaply. When it came time to harvest the olives, there was, as Thales had predicted, an abundant crop. The olive presses were now in high demand and he was able to hire them out, making a substantial profit. He did this not because he wanted the money but to show that, through their knowledge, philosophers can become wealthy.11

Yet, Thales’s ability to predict harvests is not the only point of connection to the financial world today. In Trading Thalesians: What the Ancient World Can Teach Us about Trading Today, Saeed Amen tells us that “Thales’ notion of water . . . can actually be closely related to the concept of risk [in today’s financial markets].”12 While Western societies tend to conceive of the wealthiest 1 percent (and therefore the other 99 percent) as essentially fixed, even here there is constant flux: a staggering 70 percent of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation and 90 percent lose it by the third generation.13 As some people move out of this demographic, others of course move in, though their families will be no more immune to the cycle of familial financial boom-and-bust than those they replaced.

Of course, you might feel that those born into wealth are still at an advantage, but 70 percent of the children of wealthy parents are not. Two-thirds of the remaining families will lose their wealth with their grandchildren. If the grandparents could make themselves wealthy, it is plausible that most of their offspring could at least have increased their wealth if they had been born into equally humble circumstances, rather than lose it during their lifetime. The children of wealthy parents do, of course, sometimes make more wealth. But adverse circumstances often instill outsiders with the drive and ambition to succeed despite the odds.

Although a small percentage of families will keep their money generationally or lose it far more slowly over many more generations, for most, in a world of chaos and constant change and new challenges, being born into wealth is a disadvantage. The children of the self-made wealthy learn to spend rather than to create. And what comes easily, goes easily. Still, you might envy their easy ride through life and their ability to buy whatever they want. You might think of them as free of the worries you have experienced. They will not know what it means to struggle to pay the rent. But spoiled and entitled, such people often feel—and perhaps are—inadequate and unloved.

We have friends to the degree that we have character and gravitas. These qualities are carved out in facing challenges, in aspiring, pushing through discomfort, cultivating endurance and fortitude, and in overcoming our struggles and accomplishing goals in our lives. Of course, we all have acquaintances as well. These are people that we like but that do not know our struggles and accomplishments and we do not know theirs. The grown-up children of the self-made wealthy usually attract only acquaintances—mere hangers-on who want to help them spend their inheritance. Of course, the children of the wealthy will often use their money to get what they want, including sexual or romantic partners. But deep down, they know that their attractiveness and power is entirely derived from the character, gravitas, and work of others. They, themselves, are empty.

Table of Contents

Introduction

1
Chaos

2
Character and Culture
Group Loyalty / Individualism • Innovation / Tradition
Self-Assertion / Receptivity • Religious Faith / Secularism
Epicureanism / Asceticism • Sex / Abstinence
Work / Leisure • Migration / Settlement
Recognition / Denial of Impermanence

3
The Eight Laws of Self-Empowerment
Health (or Physical Presence) • Self-Confidence
Determination • Will Power
Fearlessness • Concentration of Thought
Self-Possession • Perception

4
Eight Daily Power Practices
Diet • Physical Training • Sleep
Deep Conversation • Deep Reading • Ritual
Contemplation • Self-Hypnosis

5
The Language of Enchantment

6
Self-Talk

7
Five Roots of Personal Presence
The Face • The Heart • Breath
Calm Exterior • Posture

8
Chaos Revisited: Strangeness and Authority
Authority and Strangeness in Society

9
The Six Cs: A Survival Guide for a Time of AI
Connection • Creativity • Craft • Culture
Character • Consciousness

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Editorial Reviews

Angel Millar provides us with the tools to transcend the chaos of modernity by taking the axiom ‘bring order to chaos’ to new and exciting heights. A must-have for every person of ambition, consider this an invitation to show up for a new level of self-understanding and self-empowerment.

author of Pop Magick: A Simple Guide to Bendin Alex Kazemi

Drawing on philosophy, aesthetics, and esotericism, Millar deciphers the rising paradoxes of our era: authority in an age of strangeness, identity in a time of impermanence, and the place of character and consciousness in the unfolding AI epoch. Transcend the Chaos is an indispensable and captivating guide for the last Stoics: those who dare to face society’s chaos and expectations without losing hope and without losing themselves.

Lua Valentia

Let’s face it—uncertainty is only going to increase in the future. In this book, Angel tells us how to go beyond the chaos and lead rather than be resigned to change. He shows us how to use a holistic approach that includes personal growth, persuasion, presence, and leadership. I found it fascinating!

Ram Nidumolu