Peter J. Carroll set out the order's working philosophy most fully in Liber Null & Psychonaut, first published in the years around the order's founding, which frames magic as a practical discipline of consciousness rather than as membership in any particular cosmology. The central technique the book teaches, gnosis, is a state of heightened, narrowed attention achieved through methods as different as ecstatic dance, sensory deprivation, or intense concentration, in which the practitioner's stated intention is held to bypass ordinary conscious resistance and take effect more directly, whether that effect is understood psychologically, as an intervention in the practitioner's own mind, or magically, as an intervention in the wider world.
Carroll and Sherwin's central methodological claim, and the one from which chaos magic as a wider movement takes its name, is that the specific belief system a practitioner uses to frame a working, whether drawn from ceremonial Golden Dawn style magic, from a particular pantheon, or from an invented system built for the occasion, is a tool chosen for its effectiveness in a given working rather than a permanent commitment the practitioner is obligated to hold. A working system is used because it works, in this framing, not because it is metaphysically true, and a practitioner is expected to be able to shift between systems as different workings call for them.