A Little Practice-Room Grimoire

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Atacor! Atacor! Proceed diligently, we are well on the way! Atacor! Atacor! The way is well, and those on it are those who are well! Atacor! Atacor!! Atacor!! There is no way but the way that is happening, and it’s really happening—it’s happening!
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On the Friday of April 3rd in the year 2026 of the common era, I had a significant cognitive realization which was only possible by looking closely at what’s currently happening. As such, I understood with finality the base nature of things.
This iteration of the work began on the Monday of March 30th in the same year, and its true beginning cannot be pinned down but perhaps really began on the Saturday of March 1st in the year 2025. I am completing it on the Easter Sunday of April 5th in the year 2026, two days after my realization, three days after the ordeal which initiated it, six days after beginning this iteration, and a year and a month after really beginning—and so on.
Initially I undertook to complete this work so as to present something of use to the communities I come from—the realms of classical music and performance-art-adjacent Alexander Technique—as well as to perhaps be initiated into the magical community whose fringes I’ve long sat at. Now I realize there was no other point to what I had been doing other than that of having the significant cognitive realization which has not only freed me from bondage within Samsara, but provided the basic condition with which to loose karmic bonds in the first place. Moreover, I finally ‘got it’, but there’s nothing at all to get, which is why they say Buddha nature is in everything and why Chao-chou said ‘Mu!’ in that koan with the dog. Thus, I can really say that I’m ‘not done’, and yet ‘I’m done’, and ‘I can do anything, whatever I want’, taking full responsibility for my endeavors.
As such, I am completing this work entirely for myself, to put what I know onto paper alongside what I knew slightly prior (in the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Elucidation by Example’ sections), for entirely my own reasons in going forth burning karma. At the same time, I am delivering this work to the public (to my communities) as the larger part of the work I’m involved in—I am training to teach the Alexander Technique, so it’s likely that I’ll be explaining all this for students eventually anyways. I truly hope it will provide itself as a key to magical AT, magical music, and magic proper for those who would be ready to use it. Moreover, it will not be the last time I set out to explain this understanding, so as I learn to communicate in a more supportive way I will likely eventually return to recommunicate exactly what has been said in this work.
Why should I want to present magic as a valid pathway for musicians and AT practitioners/bodymindworkers? For one, in my journey exploring these things, I’ve found that I can say there’s ‘nothing but magic’. For another, the field of classical music which I come from faces unique obstacles in its purpose, its message, its sources of support, and its reasons for continuing (which could all be said to be the same thing). I believe that magic can revivify this field of music, and that its means for doing so lie in its empowering of the musicians and audiences who create that field in the first place. Empowerment means having the choice of what, why, and how to perform music, and not only the choice but the choice to make the choice, and the choice to make the choice to make the choice. As for the Alexander Technique, I’m only presenting the lens which has cohered in order for my own understanding of the work to be an understanding. I believe this magical, mystical lens could ‘round out’ the potential means of arriving at that understanding for others—which is what scientific, artistic, and social lenses have done already. In that sense, this work is largely a preface rather than a necessarily detailed exploration, which will likely follow.
Finally, I should want to present this work to the magical community for a few reasons: as self-introduction; as a ‘beginner’s book of beginner’s books’; and as a work of ‘advanced’ theory. In these senses, it still isn’t a ‘fully rounded’ explication, nor one grounded in the accessible languages of existing correspondence systems, nor is it really a ‘beginner’s book’. However, I arrived at completing the work only after revisiting my own beginner’s books and then exploring, at breadth and depth, beginner books in general. In all of them I found all ‘models’, meta-models, lore-explanations, and earnestly shared wisdom wanting, never really satisfactorily answering the persistent ‘but why?’ question. Now that I have answered it for myself, I only wonder if this could be the key for beginners in beginning with beginner books and their practices. In other words: I write it to say ‘here’s what magic really is‘.
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It could be said that ‘life is improvising’, and this is so because every moment is new in a very real sense; nothing that’s happening has ever happened before (nothing has ever happened—’something’ happening presumes that some ‘thing’ can happen again after having happened—every happening is every ‘something’).

If it’s improvising, we’re performing, and if we’re actively performing this current historical moment, my want is to say that we, collectively, as a species, are doing a terrible job.
Is it possible for one person, or for a small group of people, to totally ruin in an ongoing fashion an improvised performance made up of so many more people? I’m inclined to say no, for a couple reasons.
The first I’ll relate to intonation, and the same principle I believe underlies improvisation. If I’m playing with one other person and my intonation is ‘true’ while theirs isn’t, if I recognize that and have the capability of adjusting, but don’t, then I am responsible for the ‘poor performance’ which is created by our clashing tonalities. It’s a test of a player’s skill to, by ‘being better’, salvage the performance while the less-skilled player can’t. If both can’t adjust, nothing can be done, but the discomfort can be endured until it’s over.
The second relates to the manner of adjustment and the nature of adjustment itself.
The more skilled player might adjust to the less-skilled player, but does this matter if their out-of-tune playing is inconsistent? On the one hand, mismatches are bound to occur even if adjustment is possible. On the other, at least a consistent distortion in ratios (ratios being the basis of intonation) is something the listener’s ear can adjust to—an inconsistent distortion is harder to overlook.
And, as for the nature of adjustment—how does an out of tune player learn to play in tune except by adjusting, via the feedback of listening, to an uncompromising partner?
As such, an active balancing of responses is necessary. At the same time, it can’t be said that this current moment isn’t our fault but is rather the fault of a given group, class, or figurehead: right now, in your daily actions, you may be adjusting and you may not be, but it’s observable right now that the proportions and timings of these adjustments and non-adjustments are enough to transform the unskilled improvisers.

Moreover, what does it mean to be a skilled improviser? Well, how does it feel to live life? And if it feels great, if life itself feels lifegiving (as opposed to subtly empty, always dissatisfactory in a slight or overt way), how skilled are you at sharing that feeling with others?

In that sense, effective political organizing is merely effective because it’s the natural result of life feeling lifegiving; in that state, it is possible to not only see the conditions clearly, but to know well what is possible in order to change them for the better. All manner of effective actions ending homelessness, hunger, poverty, environmental extraction, and so on are possible as a result of being in this basic condition of support. This basic condition of support is achieved by not dissociating from the present, from presence being unclouded by illusions (which reveals the infinite forms that present discretely, which themselves incite the illusion of time), and in this condition it is possible to see ‘who’s improvising well’ and ‘who’s improvising poorly’, to see the nature of improvisation as requiring support, and to then discern not only what’s supportive, but what is particularly supportive for others.

Thus, it can’t really be said that after my significant cognitive realization that I’m ‘done’, since so much that is specific remains to be seen; however, I am ‘done’ in the sense that only one thing really remains, which is to find out what supports me. Or, in other words, to discover what’s in alignment. Doing thus, I no longer have to worry necessarily about how to balance the approach to adjustment, since support itself is balancing—support balances, and it is balancing.

It’s possible that the use of a given fixed form can ‘be improvised’, and this is the magic of classical music: that a pattern with defined limits can be found to have no limits, that the pattern can be ‘enlivened’ as a vivifying ‘current’ passes through, that the ‘same thing’ is, really and truly, new all the time. As such, it can’t be said that any given theoretical or actual political system is superior to this one or that one—what really matters is whether or not the vivifying current which is supportive of life, which is the lifegiving quality of life, is present. In fact, it is present. It also cannot be felt or embodied by adhering to fixed forms. However, by adhering to fixed forms it is still possible to embody and transmit the current of support—and this is the magic of classical music performance.

Unfortunately, the one that seems to be doing improvising on our behalf is money and the economy—both of which self-adjust and refuse self-adjusting in such a great manner that its generators, us, are allowed to be the most absolute dog-shit improvisers we could possibly be.

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As is standard for the genre, here I shall defend and justify the existence and practice for the sake of the initiate. The standard questions are assumed: What is magic? How? And Why?
Listen, have you ever had cause to reflect on your own luck in life? Those who tend to do this also tend to discover or seek out magic, and this is because magic essentially deals with two things.
The first is the sets of situations that an individual finds themselves in which, in the end, are seen to arise out of the black box of chance. The individual’s relation to that black box is called their luck.
Magic deals directly with a person’s luck—its methods for this come down to two: the first is to directly effect certain situations into appearing, and the second is to become more adaptable in the ones that appear. In other words, magic can change one’s luck, and it can help one deal with their unluckiness.
The second thing magic deals with is the set of actions, things done or not done, that an individual finds to be available to them. Magic can make certain actions easier and more effective; it can increase the availability of certain choices, converting things ‘not done’ to ‘done’. The same process can also make not doing certain things easier and more effective.
So, to reiterate, magic works to change an individual and their situations—someone can use it to weather a bad time in life, to move into a better time in their life, to do the things that will maintain that good time, and to not do things that will worsen it. Since the appearance of situations is ultimately up to the black box and not the individual, and magic works on the individual’s relationship with it as well as the actions they carry out within that relationship, magic is always effective.
In order for someone’s magic to be effective in the way they want, they have to learn their magic. That means it can’t ultimately be said ‘how’ magic works, because its specific mechanics exist due to a dynamic relationship that exists between an individual and their world.
However, general tendencies can be observed as common among relationships, so it can be said that ‘how’ magic works is due to traits such as: the constant ability to listen, to imagine, to become immersed, to adapt (all the prior put together result in ‘accepting feedback’), to relate, to participate, to choose, to imagine, to say yes and no, to sympathize, to consume, to learn (all the prior put together result in ‘dialectically creating’).
The manifestation of these traits within the relationship that magic works on can appear to be far removed from their most basic meanings—such as by ‘dialectically creating’ a new situation in one’s life by interacting with spirits during a ritual sourced from a 2000 year old grimoire—which just means that everyone is unique in how they approach relationship.
So, to reiterate, magic can look like many things, such as energy manipulation, relationships with spirits, astral travel, prayer and ritual and meditation, and so on. What it looks like and what it does are up to each individual, because the purpose and motivations in doing magic come from the specifics within one’s relationship to life.
With all that said, magic is both incredibly mundane and observable in just about every human activity under the sun, and incredibly weird, esoteric, mind-bending, reality-warping, non-sensical, comes from and goes to strange places—it’s life, in other words.
Finally: Because the aforementioned is so, it is likely that the initiate for whom I write this has always done and is already doing magic. It only remains to make magic more magical.
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This work ‘is the only true work’ simply because all forces, benefic and malefic, have conspired together to produce the significant cognitive realization that was necessary to complete it. But, it ‘is the only true work’ simply for the one who writes it, and it needn’t be ‘your own only true work’—because there is no ‘only true’ work, book, teaching, system, etc., since all teachings are only the same thing, which is what’s happening right now, and you can already look very closely at that on your own.
What has been constant through the ages are people suffering, people trying to mitigate suffering, and people looking very closely at what’s happening right now. In that sense, this work is ancient, and the works have which informed it (the Alexander Technique, music, and magical practice) are that ancient work. As such, it can be said that the ‘magical current’ which vivified any now-stagnating older lineages can also be said to have ‘moved into’ new practices and their fomenting lineage-branches. I posit that the Alexander Technique is one of these practices—and it may also be that classical music had been one, what with its early-modern performance-conspiracies and cutting-edge institutions and adventurous lifestyle-possibilities, which is now stagnating in the face of general socio-cultural-economic shifts. It could also be said that this ‘current’ is unbounded, and only flows in and out of suitable ‘vessels’, and that vessels abound and dissolve in fractal manner.

Really, what I’m putting down here is a short section on where I came from.

Magical practice has always been around. Any given specific practices or systems have been variously effective in different times due to the aforementioned dynamics, but magical practice has always been around because magic works. The specifics of a given practice arise from the conditions of the era, which means its context—the myriad forms which have passed into formlessness—and ‘the system of the era’ can be said to be its most salient forms having been conjured out of the mists of past into explication as sets of images.
When I began exploring magical practice, I was 18 and it was for a simple reason: I wanted to get really good at playing my instrument and with little effort involved (I succeeded, but that doesn’t really matter). Moreover, this desire was concurrent with a sudden thought, as well as another—’I could summon a demon to make a contract with to help me do this’, and, ‘wait a second, there are for sure actual people in the world who actually would try something like summoning demons, aren’t there? Who are they?’
It did not occur to me at that moment that I was already one of those people.
I didn’t end up ‘summoning a demon’, at least not by intentional procedures (of which kind typically involves many hours of preparatory prayers and rituals, perhaps years of gathering materials, and which I, in the cluttered four-person conservatory dorm room that I lived in, which hardly supported a comfortable bedtime routine, put away consideration of nearly immediately)—however, I did download PDFs of a choice few grimoires per recommendations by Redditors.
Of those, six come to mind: an alchemist’s handbook; a daemonolater’s handbook; a Gallery of Magick book of demons; Peter Carroll’s Liber Null & Psychonaut; Bluefluke’s Psychonaut Field Manual; and The Lesser Key of Solomon.

Now, there were a few reasons as to why I wanted to use magic to boost my musical practice. For one, I considered music performance my only viable career path at the time, and also as the only career I would want. However, I had just gone through two summers which had destroyed my confidence in that career materializing, the first of which dispelled many illusions I had about the craft necessary for good playing, the second reinforcing the feeling of my own lack of facility.
Up to those points, music was a slight pipe-dream which was sustained by the fact that music was lifegiving and was, at the time, the sole reason why I didn’t prematurely end my life. I devoted significant hours every day to listening, some of that time stolen from the public school system, and most of my waking time at home was spent just practicing my instrument. Trying to play the music I listened to made me feel alive, made me feel real because I felt heard.
The performance career pipe-dream, which I recall forming distinctly on the morning bus to school in the middle of Sol Gabetta’s Elgar Concerto, was my thought of ‘giving back’. Specifically, I wanted to be a recording artist whose CDs could be found by so many suffering like I was—and because there was a feeling of power that went with the idea of being a skilled, solo artist.

A few things are observable in my college-freshman thought of utilizing magic to quickly and easily ‘level up’. There was that music itself was truly lifegiving, a fact which remained even after the prior summers had crushed my spirit; there was that my motivation for making music still remained in ‘giving back’ that lifegiving quality through a performance career; moreover, the manner in which my spirit was crushed dispelled the illusions I had about me or my music being ‘powerful’, so gone was that feeling of power that I was soaking in with the idea of performing; however, that feeling of, or for, power was now migrating—toward magical practice.

And magical practice had so much to consider, so much history and so many characters to absorb. It seemed that it could have two bases, meditation (or other forms of cultivation) or ritual, and it seemed that, depending on the chosen system or paradigm, study was either unnecessary or highly necessary. Some systems work with spirits, others with energy, others calling both thought-forms or perceptible aspects of one’s neurology.
For example, chaos magic ended up being the most feasibly considerable due to the barebones nature of its meta-model: belief is what generates magic, and gnosis (moments or experiences of cognition-dissolution through excitatory or inhibitive means) is what powers it; the practitioner only need choose what to believe, and the belief determines the results possible, and the means of powering the belief is available in so many techniques that all do the same thing.
Chaos magic itself was a social, historical reaction to the paradigms of the eras prior, which were exemplified by lodges and orders that managed the progression and curriculum of initiates through progressive levels of magical knowledge, ability, and experience. The magic of lodges and orders was, itself, a historical development from a long period during which the discourse of magical practice was spread across time and place by the construction and redistribution of grimoires.
The grimoire magic of the medieval and pre-modern periods developed in that way due to the illegality of heresy in the eyes of the Catholic church, which informs the actual content of the grimoires: it was typical to employ a version of ‘working with spirits’ that entailed supplication to the Lord who was the source and deliverer of all magical results, who bound the demons or ordered the angels which were being contacted through ritual as mediators between the practitioner and the material world which God was somewhat hands-off about. Moreover, much of the magical development in this period was carried out by Islamic practitioners who had a robust Muslim tradition of advanced scientific and philosophical inquiry, as well as the benefit of possessing Ancient Greek and Latin texts which were untranslated in Europe for some time. At the same time, much of the actual magical practice and theory of the magical practitioners of Ancient Greece survived through transition to Eastern Orthodox Christianity—and was preserved through the whole history of the Byzantine Empire and the Orthodox church. The magic of Ancient Greece itself is exemplified by the PGM, the Greek Magical Papyri, which actually combines materials from a number of authors all working in Greco-Roman Egypt, thus demonstrating a magical era and paradigm which was already a combination of Greek, Roman, and Egyptian sensibilities. Finally, the grimoire magic of medieval Europe, typically performed by the clergy, employed its own synthesis of unique sources, including: sometimes authentic but oft bastardized Judaic magic and lore, pre-Christian pagan spirits and methods with the serials filed off, and the Christianity of the region applied as the lens through which Judaism (itself applied like a filter over a pagan root-current) was viewed.

While the colorful history of magical practice, lore and spirit transmissions, grimoire constructions, and so on, deserves greater explication, here I only illustrated it to demonstrate a point. ‘Purer’ currents exist within the mystical elements of the aforementioned regions and religions, but in general it’s common for magical development to be synthetic and syncretic. The only ‘technique’ of mysticism is anything that dissolves duality so that the mystic can experience interconnectedness and unity. This is also the ‘only’ technique of magical practice, which is what chaos magic ended up positing. So why did those millennia of all convoluted transmissions of lore, systems, images, spirits, correspondences, materials, and so on, happen?
Encountering chaos magic as a young, would-be practitioner, I had ‘the technique’ which was necessary to succeed, but I also lacked so much in grounding. It seemed that with chaos magic I could, according to Carroll and Bluefluke, contact spirits who could help me do certain things. However, it was also recommended that certain procedures accompany spirit contact (such as cleansing and banishing)—well, why couldn’t I just ‘believe’ that shouldn’t be the case? What is a spirit, and what can they do such that I would need protection to interact with them, and what can I do such that a ‘banishing’ would work? And how do I know which spirit to summon, or that I’ve summoned a spirit that can or will help? If I can make a spirit up, summon it, and have an experience and result that accords with the thing that I made up, then what’s going on here?
I could therefore go in two directions with these inquiries. I could essentially delve deep into grimoire magic (and end up writing a grimoire), or I could really just try to figure out what’s going on here. Thus, here in this work, I seek to do the latter by providing the ‘meta-meta-model’, since the meta-model which chaos magic had provided (or, the way in which it was provided regardless of its correctness) was an obstacle. This meta-meta-model is, as I see it, sufficient to clear that obstacle and not only form my own grimoire, but also to discern which existent forms, spirits, lores, grimoires, and images and so on are capable of supporting magical practice.
Now, sometime after my interest in magical practice had developed and waned, in my sophomore year of conservatory, I developed an interest in Buddhism. This interest was subtler—somewhat like asking ‘what’s the difference between Buddhism and Hinduism? What are they saying that’s different?’ and then attempting to find out by going down Wikipedia rabbit-holes. Eventually I read Osamu Tezuka’s Buddha manga (or, the first five volumes in particular), which spurred further Wikipedia research, which was later followed by time spent with the teachings of the Venerable Robina Courtin. I would also be remiss not to mention my time spent with anti-civilizational anarchist theory, which casts so many spiritual movements in a different light, and which simultaneously propelled my interest in the same spiritual movements: Taoism, Buddhism, early Christianity, etc. This different light was necessary to see past the commodification and imperialization of these movements, at the same time as that what I learned from them was necessary to see the nature of commodification and imperialism in order to accept the current historical moment, its trunk the past 10,000 years, its roots in the mists of the past 10,000 years, its branches extending as right where we are; to accept that moment and to go past an intensely critical, anti-civ cynicism toward a constructive ‘nihilism’. My encounters with Buddhism, as well as with Max Stirner’s writing, I can attribute as incredibly supportive for my significant cognitive realization—these things were ‘real to me’—as well as my experiences with the Alexander Technique, my practice with music, my considering the philosophical implications of modern science and occult science, and all the people who have embodied and pointed to the thing that is. All these things have helped me to understand ‘what’s going on here’.
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Still, though I’ve apologized for magic I’ve still not yet explained precisely what it is. In essence, magic is communication and relationship with invisible objects, forces, and entities that underlie the observable field of experience.
The particular descriptors of the participants in this relationship can vary according to tradition, aesthetic values, needs, and so on—so sometimes the invisible interlocutor means spirits, or the unconscious, or energy and one’s own power or receptivity, or God, and so on. Moreover, there is a case to be made that ‘invisible’ can be replaced with ‘subtle’, which contains within it both visible and invisible phenomena.

In my apologetic, I referenced a certain black box of chance. Here, the symbolic image of the black box comes from cybernetic theory, which describes how systems of machines communicate through the feedback of interaction. A cybernetic feedback loop is a pathway of interaction among machines, and these machines can be characterized according to their relation to an operant: if a machine’s inner workings are obscured from the observer, such that its outputs are functionally chance-based, then it’s a black box machine. The black box sends its outputs to the sensor, which is a machine that adjusts the controller, the machine that sends its outputs to the black box and whose workings are accessible to the operator.
Another way to consider this model is through the image of a steerswoman piloting a ship at sea. The sea and its waves, the winds and rain, and myriad other potential phenomena are capable of appearing in extremely sudden, unpredicted moments—despite that, also, the sea and the sky will demonstrate signs which make their behavior somewhat predictable. The steerswoman is the sensor who carefully listens and watches for these signs and sudden changes, making adjustments to the ship, the controller, as they go. The continuing journey is a dialogue (even if one side has immense potential to obliterate the other) between the ship, the sea and sky, and the journey’s end as arrival to the intended destination or not. This dialogue constitutes the loop playing out between controller and black box.

Earlier, I described magic as an affectation within the relationship between black box and operator, in order that the situations produced by the black box are generally more ‘valuable’. While this is still the case in its way, there is that magic can also produce arrival upon a destination as a result of the whole interaction between sea, ship, and steerswoman—therefore being a magic which is a result that is the sum of each participant’s actions, or the total relationship amongst them all, and whose result is not reducible to a single one’s outputs.

Rather than remaining in the theoretical derivation of principles, let’s see how this can be applied. As an example, I’ll use the Alexander Technique, which can be found as reliant on communication and relationship with invisible phenomena (therefore, reliant on magic), as well as subtle but visible phenomena.
Is this really the case? Those familiar with the technique will know about what we call ‘primary control’, which F.M. Alexander called “the controls related to the use of the head and the neck in relation to the trunk [which] modified and changed the use of the limbs” during his Bedford Physical Training College lecture in 1934, August 3rd.
Seems simple, does it not? When last September I asked my teacher ‘but what exactly is primary control?’ she replied with something to this effect:
There’s this relationship between the head and the neck and spine which is primary, because it affects every other relationship in the body as well as how we move through the world. So, primary control is everything that’s connected to that primary relationship.
And later, in my notebook, I wrote:
The work begins by balancing the head and neck atop the spine, and proceeds by noticing the ways every other relationship connects to this primary relationship.
And what I wrote may have been less extrapolation than paraphrase, but I’m unsure in retrospect. Here’s the important point: in any case, all three of us here describing primary control aren’t pointing to anything in particular.
We are each using this primary relationship of the head balancing on the neck and spine to point to everything that exists beyond it. This is most apparent in my teacher’s telling of it—if that primary relationship affects every other relationship in the body (and between the body and the world), it follows that every relationship in the body (and in the world) in turn affects the primary relationship. The latter principle is familiar to those using the technique, since it’s only the realization that many phenomena will activate the startle reflex, which is a particular relational configuration of the whole body whose activator is the neck and shoulders (in other words, the head atop the spine); this realization of the startle phenomena is what can begin the work of letting go of that particular configuration.

It matters that primary control does not indicate any specifically observable thing, because this itself is the indication that it is an invisible object. It can’t be said to be just the head atop the spine, because it’s also the ‘controls related to’ the ‘use of’ the spine and head, which modifies and changes the use of the limbs.
Put another way, primary control is the ‘target’ of the work precisely because of that last point, regarding the use of the limbs. Here we can talk more about practical magic. The magical effect of the technique is the fluid, easy, and powerful use of the limbs (of the whole body, or the whole self, really) in a given activity. As such, it’s popular among performing artists.
Rather than attempting to make use of the limbs (the body, the self) easy through direct manipulation or affectation, they’re targeted indirectly because the target is the primary control.
The use of the spine and head modifies and changes the use of the limbs.
However, neither is the target specifically the head atop the spine, even if the work begins by bringing balancing to that relationship: the target is the ‘controls related to’ that relationship. What are the controls? The work continues by noticing the ways every other relationship connects to that primary relationship. Every observable phenomena, every single one, has potential to activate the primary relationship, for whatever reason and in whatever way.
In particular, the target is primary control (the connections as they come back to the primary relationship), but the intention toward the target is what we call ‘inhibition’, which is essentially a ‘letting go’ that has the effect of returning flow to the spine and bringing the head into a state of balancing on the neck. The ‘letting go’ of inhibition is unspecified because though certain conditions of the head atop the neck can directly effect it, so too can a particular connection ‘distant’ from the head and spine effect it in being released. Really, they are concurrent processes—the circularity of this technique’s processes are why they are effective, because this circularity is demonstration of the loop occurring between black box (primary control), sensor (the practitioner expanding awareness by noticing) and controller (use). The magical effect, the result of the sum relationship among the participants of the loop, is the release and thus easeful, flowing, effective happening of any given movement or activity.

What does this look like? It’s very plain from the outside. The practitioner, either with a teacher or not, is directing attention to supportive features of the environment, perhaps before or during a movement. This (movement of attention and accepting of support) is a means of communication between relationships, such that the connections can reorganize. What ‘reorganization’ means here is that a tension in a relationship exists because of an over-relaxing somewhere else, among the myriad connections that come back to primary relationship. Awareness or attention, either one, remains on primary relationship as the other expands or moves throughout the connections forming environment, body/mind, and sensations.
Primary control organizes all of these connections by virtue of it being their center (the chosen center for this work)—the myriad connections can communicate with each other, through many means, through this invisible, nonspecific center, and the specific expression of this center as the primary relationship, head atop spine, is the existent connection we ourselves use to communicate with the myriad connections. As such, while communication occurs largely at the threshold between conscious awareness and the unconscious, the practitioner is just noticing and, by not intervening, will notice either a release somewhere or the ‘lengthening’ of the primary relationship.
The result of both is easier movement by indirect, largely unconscious means, which the practitioner tests out in activity to observe whether or not the work was ‘successful’ (more could be said about whether observed success is necessary for success to exist).

So, again, what does it look like? Say I’m going to stand up from sitting. Before I go to do so, I just notice, which means I sit there, maybe looking around, maybe looking ‘inwards’, maybe dissolving the boundary between inner and outer noticing as my awareness expands. The quality of my presence likely changes—as I ‘restore my head’, which has been ‘cut off from’ the torso by the startle reflex, to my body—and as my whole being is acting in coordination with itself rather than enmity. Either with the aiding impulse of a teacher or by my own ‘thinking in activity’, I might stand from sitting in such a way that it seems to ‘just happen’.
The overall effect of this work can be incredible as it extends beyond the lesson into daily living—being lighter and more easeful generally, not only in physical activity but in mood and in response to situations, and not only in ‘being’ but also in ‘gaining ends’, for which my whole approach may change from direct, effortful action to a non-doing that yet produces fantastic results.

Indeed, the Alexander Technique is magic, and it’s magic that occurs in relationship and communication with invisible phenomena (the primary control and the unconscious connections it unites, which constitutes the whole of my experience), and it’s magic that is the result of a constant relating among the invisible (the black box), the noticing (the sensor and steerswoman), and the visible (the controller, primary relationship, and use).
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Now, the trouble with explaining magic lies in two fronts: the first is that practical examples of magic being done range the gamut from unbelievable (that’s too amazing to be true, e.g. stories of levitation), to plausibly deniable, to unbelievable (that’s too stupid to be true, e.g. spells calling for cliche ingredients employing distasteful aesthetics). The second is that theoretical explanation ends up being tedious, nonsensical, or too-sensical as to be obscuring.

Here’s what I believe needs to be known in order to do and experience magic—the theory I can offer. Since the following won’t ‘make sense’, because it doesn’t posit concrete statements so much as use the statements which are required to capture the many sides of the thing, I advise reading slowly and again and again.

Form is, and formlessness (emptiness, void, unity,) is, and the two create each other and are inherent in each other.
Form is intense, and this intensity is often painful in such a way as to beget a dissociation from presence.
Form changes and is shaping, and the intensity of form causing dissociation leads one to overlook this.
Every change of form is new form, and form is and form changes. Form does not ‘disappear’ (the illusion that it does creates time), however, the forms which were, and which persist because form is, are changing, and every change is new form. Therefore, there is no difference in essential quality between form that is memory, or thought, or imagination, or physically sensed object.
Form is story, story is form, and how many stories can a life be? As many as forms there are, and there are infinite forms, and these forms appear discretely as form changes and then remain in formlessness from whence they can arise again.
Because form changes, and changes are new form, there is no persistence of ‘a thing’, and no ‘this thing’ which can be conjured out from formlessness—such that even thoughts are both always embodied by new forms as form changes and aren’t necessarily the forms that they can appear to be, since forms which were have changed—except through the application of ‘formless image’, images which can convey ‘thingness’ because of their appearance within the formlessness of many forms, and which thus create the total interconnectedness of all things.
It is possible to ‘be in’ just form, to ‘be in’ just formlessness, and to ‘be in’ both at once.
The intensity of form and the dissociation it leads to are the cause of suffering, or, say, discomforts, annoyances, cringing, fearing, anxiety, and so on. Tendency to dissociate is tendency towards formlessness, within which the interconnection between things can be seen as the appearance of forms within the emptiness of form.
Presence toward form is possible because form is supportive, and moreover formlessness is supportive of form and form supportive of formlessness.
Dissociation is the result of form’s intensity being unsupportive, but form is supportive, so the question is ‘what forms are supportive?’
Support is the intensity of form being a buoy, making living feel like living, making activity feel easy and effective, creating lightness in being and flow in all movement, and feeling like one with the flow of the movement of form’s flowing change.
The basis of morality is the supportive quality of forms which can appear in formlessness.
The basis of meaning is the appearance of forms within the formlessness of forms.
When wondering what to do or how to do it, the only relevant question is ‘what supports me?’, and the discovery of the answer is allowing movement to occur, because support creates flows of movement.
When supported, the total flowing of things and the infinity of forms creating ‘time’ can be observed.
When the infinity of forms can be observed, it becomes obvious that we make choices and also have no choice in relating to certain forms out of the infinity, due to the nature of support. The only choice is the question of ‘what forms are supportive?’ and form is supportive.

Magic is the use of both forms and formlessness to discover and relate with the supportive qualities of both form and formlessness.

Thus magic can’t be said not to work, because the support of form is, and because forms appear in formlessness, and because formlessness is inherent in form.
The interconnectedness of things, seen in ‘formless images’, is the basis of correspondences wherein aggregates of qualities are related to each other. Simple applications of such images are called keys, and one such key is the directional/elemental key, or the tetrapolar key.
There are many systems, and many systems employ the ‘same’ images differently, and it has no bearing on which is the ‘true system’ using the ‘same things’ ‘truly’—because the forms which appear are not necessarily the forms they can appear to be (because form is changing) and because the formlessness which creates forms is the formlessness everywhere in all forms.
Thus, the directional key can be North = Earth, South = Fire, East = Air, West = Water, and this is the one I use; and for another it can be South = Earth, East = Fire, West = Air, North = Water... and so on.
Moreover, the elemental key can employ the qualities of elements to create correspondences to qualities of things, such that Earth can be the materiality of things, the land, the coherence, the aggregate; Water can be emotions, memory, psychic abilities, the many as one; Air can be thoughts, discernment, record, and the one as many; Fire can be passions, the present moment, action, and the inner, subtle fire of things; and so on, and the qualities can be rearranged according to the needs of any given system for certain forms to support certain forms, or to create certain spaciousness within which forms can arise.

The application of correspondences is used in ritual as the collection and arrangement of material objects. This creates a body made of the many forms which can arise out of the formlessness of the given objects. This is also to say that the forms of the collected objects creates a formlessness, negatively shaped in such a way by the shaping of form, within which certain forms are likely to arise.
This, including specific other preparatory methods such as prayers, consecrations of materials, exorcisms, and so on, make the basis of classic grimoire magic. However, the basis of magic itself is, said in a certain way, interaction between forms creating form creating formlessness creating forms. This basic principle can be observed in magic done through meditative or ‘inner’ procedures, wherein the meditative process itself arranges forms in the self in such a way as to contact formlessness, within which forms can be encountered.
In fact, that process itself is why ‘meditation works’ at all, since the forms which typically arise in daily life as thoughts, feelings, reactions, and so on—which aren’t supportive or as supportive as the other forms which would be moreso—aren’t necessarily the forms they appear as, since forms that were are changing, and the changes are new forms. Thus, contact with formlessness in meditation allows one to ‘peel back’ the thought, feeling, etc., to see what more fundamental form underlying it is animating its constant appearance, and as this process continues (which is just an interaction consisting of non-reactive observation and listening, as well as a general ‘direction for/toward support’) movement can occur, and movement itself ‘clears’ the ‘obstacles’ that are manifested as stiffness of mind, brittleness of heart, inflexibility in spirit, and so on. As a result, such things as forgiveness, kindness, understanding, and openness can blossom.
The very same principle of meditation magic is why ‘classic ritual magic works’ at all, since the forms that typically arise in daily life as situations, events, tendency toward certain places, and so on, aren’t necessarily the forms they appear as. This is because the forms that were are changing, and the changes are new forms, and forms arise out of formlessness, and physical events, the basis of ‘objects’, are not distinct from thoughts and memories and feelings in that regard. Thus, contact with formlessness through ritual allows one to ‘peel back’ the situation, event, etc., to see what more fundamental form underlying it is animating its constant non/appearance, and as this process continues (which is just an interaction consisting of non-reactive observation and listening, as well as a general ‘direction for/toward support’) movement can occur, and movement itself ‘clears’ the ‘obstacles’ that are manifested as stagnation of events, brittleness of changes (their refusal to ‘stick’), inflexibility in tolerances, and so on. As a result, such things as forgiveness, kindness, understanding, and openness can blossom as the result of the result of ‘external’ situations changing due to the movements of forms.

Ultimately, even with an ‘understanding’ of magic gained through scholarly work, there remains the question of ‘why do magic?’ and this is only the same question as ‘what’s supporting me? What forms are supportive?’ and that this question is the only real question can only be encountered by encountering the intensity of form and seeing through the formless images which obscure its infinite changes, and, moreover, discovering that the same intensity is life-giving and, moreover, that you were of the walking dead before and only through form’s intensity can you discover the true means of living and sustaining life.
Thus, magic is really just the means to discover the means with which to discover the true means of living.
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Now first it must be said that there seems to be hardly any need for magic to be introduced to music, since music is magic. Moreover, music is a ‘formless image’, a ‘subtle, smokeless fire’, a ‘Platonic form’, a ‘core idea’, a ‘Unique’, an ‘invisible object’. Music proper is the Philosopher’s Stone.
Since this formless image that music is is a formlessness which can present for itself as many forms as it would like, this true thing, formless image, can present whichever forms are supportive to the particular listener who is directed toward support. Therefore, some of the work of a musical magical practitioner is to uncover that supportive formlessness at the heart of all ‘particular music’ they make and play. Playing that employs certain forms which functionally obscure this ‘musical heart of all music’ is employing forms that yet still support, and the question then is only ‘what forms are supported?’, or, ‘what about this allures, how is this supportive?’ And in any case, the magic of music lies in the same principle underlying magic itself, which is that form creates formlessness and formlessness creates form, and by interacting with both form and formlessness it is possible to discover forms and ‘formless images’ which are supportive, that is, lifegiving. Magic is the lifegiving quality of any given situation, and situations are all there is.

So, what does an intentionally magical music ‘look like’? Or, what could it look like?

Here I’m spitballing, because I have some curiosity in myself about what that could be. For one, it can be observed that ritual is inherent in concert-giving practices. The programme is nearly a grimoire, especially the ones which ‘prime’ the audience with imagistic descriptions and contexts. A grimoire is only a book which provides the ‘alphabet’ and ‘vocabulary’, and with those and its rituals it is possible to contact a spirit (a formless image, and invisible object,) that can teach the ‘grammar’, and the book is called the grimoire, sometimes a ‘grammarie’, because it points to this grammar. The grammar is nearly only the ‘means with which to discover the true means of living’, meaning the grimoire is ‘the means to discover the means with which to discover (etc.)’. The means the grimoire provides, its alphabet and vocabulary, are imagistic descriptions and contexts. By context, I specifically mean rituals and preparations, the contexts within which the imagistic descriptions (spirit lore, etc.) function. The working grimoirist prepares the rituals, imagination primed by spirit lore and description, consecrating the self and the involved objects, and then (employing magical timing—a timing of all procedures according to correspondences between hours, planets, numbers, qualities, and so on) carries out the procedures. Contact with form creating formlessness creating form—or, formlessness creating form creating formlessness creating form.
The concert itself is ritual; the musicians consecrate the self and the involved objects in their preparation, consecration meaning alignment of the forms which create ‘self’ toward the carrying out of the ritual. The professional, aligned musician has a body which is internally, psycho-physically, harmonized such that the music ‘just happens’ with the smallest energetic impetus setting it off—since the ‘grooves’ in time, set into the musculature, into the mind, have been patterned in accordance with the patterns forming the music.
What sort of magical results could arise from performing concert-ritual magic? For one, this is to ask the question ‘what is supportive?’ whose answer differs across the infinite forms creating ‘time’. In the situation of the performance, asking the question is like asking ‘what is inspired right now?’ and such a question occurs in less than an instant, precedes its cognitive appearance as form, because what is inspired is already at hand and can only be seen within the stillness from which the infinite forms can be observed as happening discretely. That is, formlessness is used to contact form is used to contact formlessness which creates form.
What is supportive after the concert? What is supportive? In some ways, the music itself and its meaning to the musician contains the answer. Music proper is supportive; the forms which music can create are supportive. Support, what is really lifegiving for a person, may mean the benefits of performing for lavish crowds in high places, traveling the world, accessing experiences through the vehicle of Music. This is, put another way, to say that Music itself is capable of providing what is really needed to live life, music itself creates the forms which are lifegiving, that is, supporting. As external forms dissipate and lavish crowds disappear, it is a question of what internal forms are supportive that music is capable of giving. In that sense, one can move toward ‘living for music’ from ‘living with music’.
The only forms available within the ritual of concert are not the musician’s body and instruments—plenty of imagistic descriptions and contexts are capable of providing a lore and set of connections within which specific forms can be gathered to create a negatively shaped formlessness within which specific forms are likely to arise. Moreover, there are further questions—for whom is this music magical? Are the conjured forms supportive for the audience, or, is the music ‘formless enough’ to conjure forms that are supportive for the audience?
And as I say this, it must be said that the ‘spirit of music’, its ‘heart’, the ‘subtle fire’ at the core of arrangements of particulars, is what you also have within yourself; you are your own conjuration of forms; are they supportive for the audience—are you ‘formless enough’ to conjure forms that are supportive for the audience? Do you want to support the audience so that they might experience the shift, the release, the change they need to experience? And do you bring music—do you bring support—with you outside of the practice room and hall? Do you do music, or are you music?
To illustrate these questions, here is a tableau-proposal for the kind of intentionally magical project that music-giving could entail:

This project is unique and has potential for impact in the community for the fact that it’s drawing the boundaries of classical music performance in toward the space and embodied process of creation itself. This is to emphasize the latent power that performance has as a communal ritual. Imperative to this is the inclusion of marginalized voices, who by definition exist at those boundaries being drawn in—the latent power exists at the edge where the potentiality of uncertainty comes into realization through creation. This is a communal endeavor because that potentiality, embodied in artists at the edge of uncertain futures, is channeled by creation into the community that receives and enacts the work: it says, ‘who we are is all here, and the furthest of who we are has this to say about what is and could be—listen and feel it, and know who you are’.
‘The moment of performance structures [...] contact by necessitating preparative and decompressing processes, before and after. During preparation, the artists, at work in the community, work with shape, together, to create a structure that potential will flow cleanly and easily through; during decompression (performance), the shape of the whole community has come into contact with that potential, and shares the glow of mutually apprehended experience that allows for change and relationship to occur.’
What I am saying is that classical music performance, without drawing in these boundaries, is the repetition of deadened sound. It can be enlivened, and the act of enlivening it necessarily changes artists and audience. Without this enlivening, the ritual element of performance becomes a vampiric act siphoning time and energy from all involved; this project seeks to enliven the work consciously—and direct the music and writing involved toward the enlivening of both audience and artist.

Which is all to say: form creates formlessness creates form creates formlessness, and we choose our relation to form at the same time as we have no choice in our relation to form because it is only ever the choice of direction for/toward support and the question of what supports us.
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