About Max
Max Gray
Author of The Kybalion in Practice. Reader of old books. Lives in Lincoln with three children who are growing up faster than he would like.
2015
In 2015 a brain operation went wrong and left Max Gray with a stroke. The years that followed were, by his own account, spent in the wilderness.
What eventually moved him was reading. Self-help first, then the older literature on natural law — not because any of it performed miracles, but because it got him out of the why-me stage and gave him something to do with the day.
He walks and talks now. He counts that as a good outcome, and he is not casual about how he got there.
Why this book
The Kybalion in Practice came out of that reading. The 1908 Hermetic classic hands you seven principles of enormous scope and then, in the manner of initiatory literature, declines to explain what to do with them. Its own authors say as much: they give you the working principles and leave you to apply them. A century of readers have closed it convinced something important was there, and unsure what to do on Monday.
This is the missing half — each principle taken in turn, with the original axiom, what the text actually says, and practices specific enough to do. The complete original is reprinted at the back, cross-referenced throughout, so readers can always check the source for themselves. A companion volume, The Kybalion Working Journal, takes one real problem through the seven stages a page at a time.
Honest about limits
Having recovered alongside doctors rather than instead of them, Max has no patience with the manifestation industry that has grown up around this material — and nor did the original, which is scathing about those who grasp that the universe is mental and conclude they may therefore defy its laws. Transmutation, not denial.
Lincoln
He lives in the English city of Lincoln with his three children, who are growing up faster than he would like.