Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe

by Dean Radin

The term “Western” refers to a Eurocentric development that began around the Age of Reason in the seventeenth century. It consists of three key assumptions:

Realism. The physical world consists of objects with real properties that are completely independent of observation.

It also means that those properties exist even when you’re not paying attention to your drink. In the everyday world, this assumption is just a matter of common sense.

Locality. Objects are completely separate. “Action at a distance” is impossible. For object A to affect object B, you have to shove A and make it collide into B. In the realm of deep physics, this collision might involve infinitesimally tiny particles or force fields, but the general idea still holds.

Causality. The arrow of time is a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, so it’s against the law to try to...

Mechanism says that everything can be understood like the gears of a clock. Events unfold forward in time in a strictly orderly, tit-for-tat, cause-and-effect fashion.

Reductionism says that everything is made up of a hierarchy of ever-smaller objects, with subatomic particles at the bottom. Causation flows strictly upward, from the microscopic to the macroscopic.

After they were adopted, it took humanity only a few hundred years to advance from staring slack-jawed at the moon as the most exciting form of evening entertainment to asking the voice recognition feature of your smart home controller to dim the lamp, turn up the thermostat, make a cup of coffee, and play an on-demand movie on your tablet computer while you video-chat with a friend on the other side of the planet.

Damn

So it isn’t sensible to throw away what demonstrably works. If we had based our worldview solely upon religious texts or esoteric lore, we wouldn’t be enjoying the wonders of streaming movies and emoji texting.

From quantum mechanics we know that elementary objects, such as electrons and photons, do not have fully determined properties before they are observed.

From Einstein’s general relativity, we know that a fixed arrow of time is an illusion.

Consciousness is fundamental, meaning it is primary over the physical world.

Interesting

Everything is interconnected.

A 2017 book that examines this substance from a scientific viewpoint is You Are the Universe: Discovering Your Cosmic Self and Why It Matters, by Deepak Chopra and physicist Menas Kafatos. The “cosmic self” they refer to is this ever-present essence of all existence.

That’s because the experience we’re seeking is inside the brain-body machinery in a way that cannot be observed from the outside. Science is exceptionally adept at studying features of the external world, but so far it has just barely scratched the surface at developing ways to study the “inner world.”

Inside out

As cosmologist Jude Currivan says, “Its fallacy is the assumed duality between the apparent immateriality of mind and the seeming materialism of the physical world.”

Related ideas include panpsychism—the idea that matter at all levels, including fundamental particles, has an inherent property of sentience, or mind. And neutral monism—the idea that mind and matter are actually complementary aspects of the same “stuff,” like two sides of the same coin.

Mind first

Computer scientist Bernardo Kastrup provides a clear explanation of idealism in his 2014 book, Why Materialism Is Baloney.

Three that I recommend for those who’d like to study this topic in detail are Irreducible Mind, a comprehensive review of the many challenges to prevailing mechanistic ideas about consciousness;18 One Mind, which lays out in exquisite detail why the notion of a single, collective mind has been taken very seriously by many scientists and scholars;19 and Beyond Physicalism, which makes a persuasive case that today’s neuroscience assumption that consciousness is a meaningless side effect of “meat machines” (that is, us), is evidently wrong.

What [c] can express about [C] is severely limited because [C] is inconceivably “larger” than everyday reality. As such, [C] is also beyond ordinary concepts and language. That’s why mystics are always frustrated when asked to describe their experience. The moment we step beyond the ordinary, language fails.

Force of will works because the physical world emerges from and is modulated by [C]. Our personal will, expressed by [c], can also create and modulate physical reality, but not to a great extent;

Theurgy works because the human physical form is just one of a potentially infinite number of ways that consciousness can be embodied. There is no reason for the “body” that hosts [c] to necessarily be physical, at least not in the way that we currently understand physicality.

To describe physical reality below the level of everyday awareness, physics requires the use of mathematics that are more abstract than simple integers.

We know that a mental domain exists below conscious awareness from research in psychotherapy, psychology, the neurosciences, and meditation. Our conscious life emerges from the unconscious, and likewise, the classical physical world emerges from the quantum domain.

As eminent neuroscientist Christof Koch has said, “Consciousness is really physics from the inside. Seen from the inside, it’s experience. Seen from the outside, it’s what we know as physics, chemistry, and biology.”

foundations of reality are physical: matter and energy. From that domain elementary particles and energies combine in complex ways and emerge into the realm we call chemistry. From there biology emerges, and then psychology.

In each of these hierarchical stages, higher levels emerge from lower levels. The higher levels often contain new properties that the lower levels do not share, and that could not be predicted from the lower levels. The elements hydrogen and oxygen can be combined to form H2O, the water molecule. But neither hydrogen nor oxygen is wet.

Interesting

Somehow at the top of this hierarchy a new property emerges. We call it consciousness. But this property is radically different from all of the other properties emerging from lower levels, because consciousness no longer has ordinary physical properties.

Wow

We call emergence of a new property into a higher level an instance of “upward causation,” because the arrow of causation seems to point upward in this knowledge hierarchy. But higher levels can also influence levels below. Nobel laureate Roger Sperry called this property “downwards causation.”

Information does everything we claim energy or spirits do: it is nonphysical yet interacts with matter; it is manipulated with the human mind and stored in symbols; it can be copied, transported, and transformed instantly; and science even studies it.

After all, the brain deals with information in quantities far greater than the miniscule electrical impulses passing between its neurons. If my mind can cause change on a symbolic level, perhaps it really can cause change. Perhaps the information passing through my mind also passes through the world at large—everything being connected to the same matrix.

Penrose suggested that the amazing accuracy of these mathematical predictions “was not the result of a new theory being introduced only to make sense of vast amounts of new data. The extra precision was seen only after each theory had been produced.”

For those who insist that mind and consciousness are nothing more than bioelectrical circuits in the brain, then mathematics too must be nothing more than the brain’s representation of a preexisting, independent, external physical world.

That seems reasonable enough until we realize that the symbols generated by three pounds of neural tissue somehow describe not only vast swatches of the physical universe to an unbelievably precise degree, but they also predict phenomena that strongly contradict common sense, such as quantum entanglement and black holes.

Interesting

How is it possible for a hunk of warm, wet tissue to not only describe itself in exquisite detail but also describe exotic realms that the human body and brain cannot access through its ordinary senses, and that must have been around for billions of years before we developed methods of detecting them. And do all this with mind-boggling accuracy? That puzzling question suggests that maybe the brain didn’t dream up these ideas after all. Rather, the ideas dreamed up the brain.

Mathematician Kurt Gödel proved—that’s a word not to be taken lightly—that no system of mathematics can be considered complete. Any non-trivial mathematical or logic system will be either incomplete or inconsistent.

wow

the universe cannot be completely modeled with mathematics. Said another way, a symbolic language by itself can describe physical reality amazingly well, but something will always be left out. Is that something “outside” the physical world, meaning nonphysical? Could the missing element be consciousness?

Information (and not matter or energy or love) is the building block on which everything is constructed. Information is far more fundamental than matter or energy….Information can also be used to explain the origin and behaviour of microscopic interactions such as energy and matter….Information, in contrast to matter and energy, is the only concept that we currently have that can explain its own origin.

Medical researchers too are sensing a shift from solely materialistic models of health and healing.

To solve the enigma, I will propose that we are conscious and so are quantum variables such as electrons and protons exchanging photons measuring one another, where measurement is mediated, I claim, by consciously observing one another.

This all leads to a vast panpsychism, in which all quantum measurement is mediated by Mind, conscious and free-willed, as part of the furniture of the entire universe!

“Panpsychism is crazy, but it’s also most probably true.”

Philosophers Robert Koons, of the University of Texas at Austin, and George Bealer, of Yale University, write in their 2010 book, The Waning of Materialism,

Throughout science and scholarship a basic principle of the Perennial Philosophy—that consciousness is fundamental—is slowly becoming acceptable to talk about. Within science this notion tends to be cast into the more conventional language of information and mathematics, but the connection with consciousness is undeniable.

For most fledgling magicians, most of the time, magic will be fragile and subtle. That’s because three factors are working against you: reality inertia, lack of talent, and the unconscious.

reality appears to be highly reactive to intention, but it’s also elastic and fully interconnected. So when your intention warps the universe a bit here, then somewhere else a distortion is going to appear, and someone (or something) may not like it. So they (or it) will push back to repair the warp and maintain the status quo. Such rebound effects have been repeatedly observed in psi experiments studying the force of will.

The unconscious is, by definition, hidden, below your awareness. The only way to unveil what’s going on in the depths of your unconscious mind is through practices such as meditation, where you slowly peel away deeper and deeper layers of the mind, or by working with a psychotherapist who can more objectively sense what’s going on, or by taking the right psychedelic drug in a supportive context.

The human brain and body are a superb host for Universal Consciousness [C]. This living form offers many paths for personal consciousness [c] to realize it’s the same as [C]. But there could be countless other ways that [C] might be expressed, especially in systems that are sufficiently complex for [c] to become self-reflective.

we’ve been shaped by evolution to be highly effective at personal and social survival, which means we’re exceptionally adept at avoiding predators, outwitting prey, and cooperating with others in our tribe. But we gained those skills at a price.

Our brains are very good at making snap judgments, quickly forming stereotypes, and responding to our needs here and now. We rarely need to know what’s happening elsewhere.