The Big Black Book: Christopher Hyatt’s War on the False Self

There are books that comfort. Books that stroke your hair and whisper affirmations to the wound-child curled inside your psyche. And then there are books like The Big Black Book: Become Who You Are—a razorblade across the soft flesh of your delusions. A psychological IED detonated beneath the false personality you wear like a mask soaked in perfume and rot. Christopher Hyatt didn’t write to inspire. He wrote to dismantle. He wrote to shove you into the abyss with nothing but a mocking grin and the words: “Now build yourself.”

This book isn’t literature. It’s a trigger. A weapon. A dark mirror. And if you're honest enough to look into it without flinching, it will shatter you in the best possible way.

Who Was Christopher Hyatt? And Why Should You Care?

Dr. Christopher S. Hyatt—born Alan Miller—was a clinical psychologist turned modern magus. He earned credentials in experimental psychology, Reichian therapy, hypnosis, and bioenergetics before diving headlong into chaos magick and the left-hand path. He wasn’t interested in sterile academics. He wasn’t selling New Age snake oil. His obsession was freedom—real freedom, the kind that burns.

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Hyatt combined the brutal honesty of psychology with the explosive volatility of occult transformation. His writings, especially under New Falcon Publications, were anti-spiritual in the best sense: not about floating above life but diving deep into it—raging, devouring, resurrecting.

The Core Premise: You Are Not Who You Think You Are

Hyatt begins with a premise most people can’t stomach: your life is a lie. Your personality? A patchwork of fears, cultural programming, and compensations for childhood trauma. You’re not “you.” You’re an echo. A puppet. A program installed by your parents, schools, religions, social media, and the thousand silent manipulations of a sick society.

But The Big Black Book doesn’t stop at critique. It forces a confrontation. Through a vicious gauntlet of psycho-magical exercises and self-inquiry techniques, Hyatt goads the reader into un-becoming—into killing the lie of themselves so that something real might crawl from the ashes.

The Work: Brutal, Personal, Unforgiving

You won’t find gentle journaling prompts here. Hyatt’s method is Reichian and chaotic. He invites you to scream. To breathe. To convulse. To break the body armor that deadens your soul. He strips you of polite self-reflection and drops you into the raw interior of your being. It’s somewhere between a magickal grimoire, a psychological boot camp, and an occult rite of passage.

There are pages of journaling that demand you to lie, then tell the truth, then question both. Exercises that leave you disoriented, naked. And that’s the point. Who are you without your stories? Without your traumas? Without your identity? If you dare answer, you're already on the path Hyatt laid bare.

Some sections instruct you to scream until you cough up blood. Others guide you through memory minefields you’ve avoided for decades. It’s ugly. It’s sacred. It’s alchemical warfare on everything that keeps you numb.

Become Who You Are: The Nietzschean Underbelly

The title itself is a provocation: Become Who You Are. A nod to Nietzsche, of course—but stripped of the romanticism that even modern Nietzscheans indulge. This isn’t about affirming your “true self” as if it were hiding like a glowing jewel under your trauma. Hyatt doesn't believe in a stable “true self.” What you are is what you become. What you create. What you destroy. What you choose in the moment when all choices are pain.

To “become who you are” is to stop lying. To drop the act. To admit your darkness, your lust, your envy, your fury. To use them. To turn your shadow into a sword and your repression into fuel. Hyatt doesn’t want you to be good. He wants you to be free—and freedom, for him, includes the liberty to be monstrous.

A Book Against the Herd

At its core, The Big Black Book is a declaration of war against herd consciousness. Hyatt’s contempt for “normal people” oozes off the page. Not out of elitism, but because he knows most people are sleepwalkers. Bioelectric zombies. They don’t live, they function. They recite ideologies they never examined. They follow paths they never chose. They vomit inherited morality without ever asking, “Whose voice is this in my head?”

This book is the cure. A violent, purgative cure for the disease of conformity. You won’t like it. But that’s the point. Hyatt doesn’t want your agreement. He wants your annihilation—followed by rebirth.

Why It Still Matters

Most spiritual books sedate you. Most self-help books infantilize you. The Big Black Book does the opposite—it electrifies your nervous system and dares you to act. In a time of algorithmic coddling and manufactured outrage, Hyatt’s work remains a brutal, necessary relic of resistance.

He doesn’t want followers. He wants individuals. Actualized, dangerous, unrepeatable individuals who have faced themselves and refused to kneel. That’s what this book is: a rebellion manual for the soul.

Not for the Faint, but for the Willing

Reading The Big Black Book is like swallowing broken glass and discovering that your throat was made of steel. It hurts. It burns. But in that burn is truth. It’s not a book for readers—it’s a book for seekers. For those who know that the persona must die if the Self is to emerge.

If you’re still addicted to being liked, don’t read it. If you still need approval, stay away. But if something in you is done—done pretending, done pleasing, done apologizing for your existence—then open the damn thing.

And let it burn.