I'm reading the Sphere of Art by R. J. Stewart. It's a fascinating book and I can see William Gray's influence in both the writing and in how Stewart explains the magical concepts he's working with. Initial experimentation with the technique, on my part, has built off of Gray's Omnil technique and the Sphere fits the Omnil technique like a well crafted glove fits a hand. There's a point that Stewart makes about magic which I really like because it hits on the difference between an ontological approach to magic and an approach that's focused on doing magic.
Most powerful magic involves not willing things to be but allowing them to be what they already are. This process of allowing is not easily understood, for if it is assessed by the mind alone, it creates a minor paradox. The mind has to be stilled, the will set at peace, within conditions of attuned energy. Not as a meditative process alone, for this merely preliminary training, but as a sacromagical process that uplifts our manifest creation into another octave of being. Only when we allow this do we discover that there is no paradox and that the other octave of being has always resonated and interleaved with our manifest nature.
My own work in Magical Identity involved learning how to let go of doing magic and focus on allowing situations, circumstances, etc., to be what they are, while aligning my ontological state of being to the desired state of being that I wanted to have access to. By taking such an approach and embodying the desired reality I learned how to enter into the right time and space that fit the desired state of being I wanted to access. So instead of trying to will something to change externally, I allowed myself to change to fit what I needed. It's a different approach to magic because its based on an internal approach to magic. This isn't to say that I've stopped creating sigils or entities or doing other forms of magical work, but the need to do that type of work has diminished by applying an ontological perspective to magic and myself.
An ontological approach to magic enables you to enter into a receptive awareness of possibilities that allows you to form a specialized state of being (sacromagical perhaps) with the desired possibility. This state of being initially involves emptying yourself of everything and then inviting into your magical space the specific possibility you want to manifest into your life. You become that possibility, and give yourself over to the expression of it, allowing it to express itself in your life and actions. Instead of trying to force it, you become the possibility, letting it guide your choices, until it is realized. It's not a passive approach to magic, but instead is an approach that involves shifting your entire state of being into the preferred space/time you want to embody. It recognizes that magic is an integral part of your being as opposed to an activity you do.