Grace

This is a term that has a lot of connotations, good and bad: snooty debutantes, saying a prayer at the table, Jackie Onassis, etc. What does it mean? That is, what is grace actually and does it have any actual magickal implications (since it can be used as a prayer)? Also, is it really that important because, frankly, not many people use the term anymore, grace or graceful, for much of anything intentional and non-idiomatically. Coming from gratia in Latin, it originally meant favor, kindness, and esteem and had roots in gratus, or pleasing.

What does it mean to act gracefully? Simply, to act with kindness and esteem for others. However, what does it mean to be kind and hold esteem towards others? An integral part of showing kindness and having esteem for others is to approach yourself as the Other, to whittle down the alien parts of yourself and investigate within the mind what makes you tick and what causes stumbling blocks towards unfolding that highly-efficient and happy psyche trapped in layers of harmful behavior. Act gracefully towards yourself by both understanding yourself to act out of accordance with your Will and show esteem towards that which brings you success and is the “best” in you. To value oneself highly is paramount to any successfully cultivation of the Will and the greatest stumbling block to realizing the greatness within you is allowing Ego (the rigid, non-flowing, defined, Reasoned aspect of your core beliefs) to supersede your understanding.

When you are approaching Others (and yourself as Other) you must be flexible in understanding and be agnostic towards your virtual capabilities; an Ego is a set of habitual mastery of one’s capabilities that does not experiment and refine the Will towards new goals, so understanding naturally precludes a reinforced Ego. To have a frozen Ego but still consider oneself graceful is a contradiction of terms and constantly tearing down the Ego’s barriers to your unbridled Selfhood is key to understanding, to engaging in the alchemical process of changing your body-mind to create and investigate new landscapes. Act gracefully in all endeavors by accepting your successes as well as your failures, dancing amongst your actions as experiments and forgiving others the same.

The space of the Other is where magick happens, where uncertainty unfolds, and where the potential for new and exciting adventures can come to fruition. While ego-death is a terrible place, it is essential to cross that barrier to see unheard-of topologies and critical surfaces where personal transformation takes place. Just remember to be graceful and mind not only your Self but your Other as well. To paraphrase Aleister Crowley, magick is the science of causing change in accordance with the Will and this must be done in accordance with Love; however, I would say gracefulness, the ability to accept and treasure both triumph and tragedy, is the penultimate mandate for any magus to finding the Permissible Will, the ultimate goal of any psychonaut. Conduct not only the science of change, but the art of making new things happen. Above all, be ready to look at every fragment of the holograph of your Other with a care and precision that can only be afforded by the well-trained mind. Afford yourself this understanding which leads to magickal transformation and you can soon extend that to other people through right conduct.

And now for the black metal version of The Beatles’ Help, complete with wizards popping out of moonforests and corpsepainted hell warriors – get ready to be terrified by the hell-bastards of the blackened northern heathen wastelands that peek out from behind trees:

There is no natural singularity to experience, only filtered and fleeting multiplicities from the plenitude of reality’s infinite variations of itself. Task for the day: stare in a mirror at yourself for at least one hour. You’ll be amazed by how different you look to yourself for that long and how alien the landscape of your face is to you.

{Matt's note: wow that video is horrible...}