@DJDenar said
"I am reading Abrahadabra by Rodney Orpheus and in it he gives a new form of the LBRP called the Nu-Sphere. I am curious as to how practicing magicians felt about it. Is it a good place for me to start or should I stick to the tried and true LBRP?"
Every ritual is nothing more than a bunch of words and actions that somebody, somewhere along the line, just plain made up and attributed meaning to. So, in the big picture, it makes absolutely no difference which rituals you do or even whether you do any formal rituals at all.
However, since you appear to be interested in Western ceremonial magick, it would do you a lot of good to become thoroughly familiar with the LBRP, which lays the framework that many other rituals employ.
Personally, I would do the LBRP every day for at least six months (honestly, you can do it every single day of the rest of your life). This will acquaint you with the ritual and will give you a baseline from which to appreciate the differences that other rituals offer.
After about three months or so, you can throw in a BRH, and after six months, you can slowly branch out into other rituals. I guess you can try the "Nu-Sphere" or whatever the heck that is (lame name), and certainly nothing's stopping you from writing your own rituals, but I would recommend checking out Crowley's Star Ruby and studying how he altered the structure of the LBRP for his purposes: it's impossible to really grasp this unless you have a firm understanding of the LBRP.
"Or in the spirit of science try one for a month then the other and see which one I like more?"
It's certainly not going to hurt you to play around with different rituals, but you're likely to get more out of picking a course of practice and sticking to it -- rather than just idly jumping around between different practices without committing to any of them.
And, obviously, it's going to be a great help to actually study what these rituals symbolize. Just going through the motions isn't going to do a whole lot for you. It's going to help for you to thoroughly understand (to name one example) why you trace the Tree of Life on your body in the Qabalistic Cross and what this represents in terms of attainment.
"Also I know that the Great Work is best done with someone guiding me through it."
Not so sure I agree with this. Certainly, another person can guide you in the "proper" way to perform certain rituals and practices, but nobody else can directly help you do the fundamental task of attainment: observing your Self in the midst of everyday life and discovering who you are.
All true initiation is self-initiation. As Crowley put it (talking in his usual, overblown fancy metaphors):
@Aleister Crowley said
"
It is impossible to lay down precise rules by which a man may attain to the knowledge and conversation of His Holy Guardian Angel; for that is the particular secret of each one of us; a secret not to be told or even divined by any other, whatever his grade. It is the Holy of Holies, whereof each man is his own High Priest, and none knoweth the Name of his brother's God, or the Rite that invokes Him."
Someone can indeed "guide" you in the sense of helping you to understand what the task is, what you have to practically do, and how you know you've succeeded. More trivially, someone can "guide" you by giving you some useful advice or pointing you in the right direction.
But nobody else can actually initiate you, not in the truest sense of "initiation."
"should I hold off and just practice my asana or damn the torpedoes full speed ahead when it comes to the Nu-Sphere/LBRP?"
You definitely should be doing both. You might enjoy performing the LBRP as a precursor to asana.