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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dean Radin
Read between
February 2 - February 13, 2020
The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things by Larry Dossey in 2007,
Mind over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself by Lissa Rankin in 2013.
Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine. —LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
The essence of magic boils down to the application of two ordinary mental skills: attention and intention.
The strength of the magical outcome is modulated by four factors: belief, imagination, emotion, and clarity.
The ceremonial robes, somber settings, black candles, secret handshakes, chanting in ancient languages, sex, and drugs—all are good theater, which may help in withdrawing the mind from the distractions of the mundane world. But ultimately, they’re unnecessary.
The single most important aide to developing magical skills is to learn how to enter the state of consciousness known as gnosis.
The time-honored and safest way to do this is through meditation.
If you manage to read only one book about meditation, I recommend The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works, by Shinzen Young, published in 2016.
The basic practice of meditation is straightforward. Sit in a comfortable position. Relax your body. Close your eyes. Then quiet your mind and stop thinking. That’s all there is to it. Simple.
It may take months or years of practice to achieve extended periods when the mind remains still. While engaged in this practice, you’re essentially reprogramming your nervous system, even if you don’t notice it. You’ll start to feel better physically and mentally. You’ll see the world more clearly.
Some meditation techniques involve mentally repeating sounds, words, or phrases to help keep your mind focused. Others train you to visualize complex patterns. Still others just involve watching your breath. There are scores of variations. One of the more popular methods today is called mindfulness.
This is a secular version of the Buddhist practice called Vipassana, which literally translated means “to see in various ways.” The goal is to see things as they actually are, not as they may appear to be.
As I discussed in my book Supernormal, the goal of meditation across many traditions is to achieve a state of awareness where one gains the realization that the personal self and the Universal Self are one (in my shorthand, [c] = [C]).
Main
these powers have nothing to do with faith, religious doctrine, divine intervention, spirituality, or the supernatural.
Many variations of the superpowers are described in the yogic tradition. They range from vanilla psi to supermagic such as levitation. Levitation may be regarded as a high-level magical skill that involves hanging in the air in much the same way that bricks don’t.
For most people, most of the time, psi experiences are spontaneous and tend to occur mainly during periods of crisis or extreme motivation.
At the Institute of Noetic Sciences, my colleagues conducted a survey of more than a thousand meditators to ask about their experiences. They found that three out of four reported increases in meaningful synchronicities as a result of their practice. Nearly half reported sensing “nonphysical entities,” and a third reported experiences such as clairvoyance or telepathy.
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The bottom line: If you want to perform magic effectively, maintain a disciplined meditation practice. Learn to quiet your mind. See the world as it is, not as it appears to be when viewed through multiple layers of cultural conditioning.
Performing potent magic, like any refined skill, requires talent and disciplined practice.
Fortunately, nearly anyone who’s able to follow instructions and is serious about practicing can perform some degree of magic because—according to the esoteric worldview—whether you know it or not, within you there’s a spark of the same source that manifests the entire universe.
Force-of-will magic involves the application of focused attention, intention, imagination, and belief.
1. Know what you want. The clearer the intended goal, the more likely it will manifest. Believe that the goal will be achieved.
2. Review what you want. Review your goal daily. Between reviews do not dwell on it. You want to strengthen your intention and keep it clear, but you also want to allow the goal to seep into your unconscious, because that’s where magic is catalyzed.
3. Maintain secrecy. Don’t share your goal with others; they may inject doubt, and you need to maintain strong belief.
4. When it works, accept the outcome with gratitude and use it to strengthen your belief.
a sigil is simply a symbol for a desired goal.7 It has an advantage over writing because crafting a sigil requires more focused attention than just writing it, and because use of a symbolic goal reduces the grasp of the analytical mind.
after the sigil is created, the magician traditionally “charges” and then “releases” it. The charging is meant to forcefully concentrate emotion, intention, and belief on the goal; the releasing is intended to push the goal from the conscious mind into the unconscious.
Consider the word spell. As a verb, spell means an action where symbols are combined to form larger symbols, which in turn refer to objects, actions, or concepts. That is, letters a words a sentences. The magical meaning of the noun spell is similar to the meaning of the verb, except it assumes a worldview where everything is inter...
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From the magical perspective, a symbol is more than something that points to a relationship. It’s also an integral part of the structure of reality itself. By drawing a symbol, you pull the meaning of that symbol into existence. If the word-symbol Fido corresponds to a real dog named Fido, then operations on the symbol will also influence the actual Fido.
The idea that signs and symbols reflect, or literally are, the relational structure that holds the universe together
A similar idea, of an alien language evoking special powers, was the leitmotif of the 2016 science fiction movie Arrival. In that story the scientist who figures out how to interpret an alien language based on circular time begins to literally experience time differently.
MIT physicist Max Tegmark generalized Wheeler’s “it from bit” by proposing that physical reality literally is a mathematical structure, an abstract set of relationships. From that viewpoint, if one manipulates those abstract relationships, then one manipulates the physical world.9 That’s the idea of a sigil (and of force-of-will magic in general).
Mathematical universe
Making and Using a Sigil
FTDB. Find a ten dollar bill
Focus on the symbol, projecting either intense calm or intense emotion through the symbol to “charge” it and amplify your desire. Magicians provoke this charge within the state of gnosis through deep meditation, by firing up a fierce concentration, by engaging in strong physical activity, by evoking anger, or by using the moment of sexual orgasm to provide an explosive point of focus.
After the sigil is charged, release your attention by putting the sigil away. Some magicians will go as far as to burn it; others will momentarily glance at the sigil every so often or place the symbol in a location where they’ll see it now and then. The idea is to deflect the intention of the sigil from the conscious mind to the deep unconscious, where it will simmer and draw the desired outcome into being.
As with writing magic, maintaining strong belief is an important factor, as is secrecy. So keep the meaning of the sigil private, and heed the age-old wisdom about using magic for benign purposes only.
In my experience in both life and the lab, yes, it does. Not every time, and not always with great fanfare. But it works often enough to raise an eyebrow.
During the waking periods, he was intensely wishing for a sign that his business was on the right track, and one of those signs would be for me to show up, somehow, so I could join his board of directors. But he had no idea where I was or how to contact me.
That’s why when I opened the door to Jon’s lab that day he was speechless. He couldn’t tell if he was awake or dreaming. From his perspective, my appearance on his doorstep was literally an act of magic based on his clear, repeated affirmations.
perhaps intense intention also warps or distorts aspects of reality. Events that might otherwise be completely separate and never meet are naturally drawn (incorporating both meanings of the verb to draw) together by the resulting warp in space-time. Like magic.
Divination involves perceiving beyond the ordinary boundaries of space and time. In the early nineteenth century this ability was called clairvoyance (French for “clear-seeing”). Later it was called extra-sensory perception, or ESP. Today the euphemism remote viewing is more commonly used.
The reason Swann’s technique focused on fast sketching, at least in the initial stages of remote viewing, is that the single greatest inhibitor of remote viewing ability is the analytic mind, which gets in the way. In the jargon used in this type of training, this problem is called an “analytical overlay.”
Other than using meditation to achieve a state where these flashes of information are not overwhelmed by the buzz of everyday thoughts, learning to not name the target is the primary challenge one faces in remote viewing training.
The talented people that Rhea White studied would sometimes spend an hour or more on a single trial: fifteen minutes to relax, a half hour to create a mental blank screen, then another half hour before perceiving target information and “knowing” that it was correct.
It takes time
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. —ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Random number generators (RNGs), a laboratory protocol used to test if mental intention affects the outputs of random physical systems.
RNGs
Tunneling is a quantum mechanical phenomenon considered in physics to be fundamentally random.
A February 2017 “Big Questions” article in the BBC’s online magazine BBC Earth was on the topic of “the strange link between the human mind and quantum physics.” It reviewed the observer effect in quantum mechanics, whereby observing an elementary quantum object (such as a photon or an electron) affects its behavior.
This “shyness” effect, which is well accepted in physics but still quite mysterious, is thought by some to have something to do with consciousness.
