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

by Dean Radin

sympathetic magic, the idea that objects with certain appearances or properties would sympathize, or resonate, with similar objects.

Hermes Trismegistus (Hermes three-times-great).

Hermetic cosmology contends that reality consists of a single Universal Consciousness, known by many names: the One Mind, the Divine, the Tao, Brahman, Allah, God, Source, and so on. To

In Hermeticism, [C] appears in two complementary aspects, like the two sides of the same coin. One form is a manifested, primordial, “plastic” energy, sometimes referred to within the alchemical tradition as the One Thing.28 The other form is a non-manifested, transcendent element known as the One Mind. The One Thing reacts to and is shaped by the One Mind.

Because the One Thing is viewed as a consciousness-shaping “substance,” its appearance depends on who’s looking and what they’re expecting to see. Moses

Hermeticism may sound like a dualistic concept, with the One Mind and the One Thing being starkly different from each other. But that’s only because [C] is beyond human comprehension, so it’s just described in two forms that are easier to grok.31 That is, the One Mind only has the appearance of being different from the One Thing. Similarly, personal consciousness, [c], is not separate from the physical world. In other words, from the Hermetic perspective reality is not just physical, it’s psychophysical. This interaction is commonly studied in the form of mind-body connections within the mainstream scientific disciplines of psychoneuroimmunology, psychophysiology, and the neurosciences. It’s also the basis of psychosomatic medicine and the placebo effect. But when [c] influences the physical world outside of the body, which it can do because [c] has properties similar to [C], then that’s called magic.

Corpus Hermeticum

Ficino was one of the first to popularize the idea

that there was an ancient secret wisdom at the

core of all the world’s religions. This philosophia perennis would be the fundamental, first-principles truth around ...

One of Ficino’s students, Count Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494), later added portions of the Jewish Kabbalah to Hermeticism. The Kabbalah was an ancient cosmology even in Pico della Mirandola’s time, based on sephiroth or spheres of “cosmic vibration” that connect the transcendent divine with the everyday world.

The Corpus Hermeticum is said by some to expand on principles written (in extremely compact form) on the Emerald Tablet.35

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 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]).

For most people, most of the time, psi experiences are spontaneous and tend to occur mainly during periods of crisis or extreme motivation. By contrast, the siddhis are regarded as reliable and under full conscious control.

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.

within you there’s a spark of the same source that manifests the entire universe.

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.

Adrian Kent

professor of quantum physics at the University of Cambridge.

it might be possible that consciousness affects the behavior of quantum systems, and that someday it might even be possible to detect such effects in laboratory experiments. He then went out on a limb and cautiously predicted that there might be a 15 percent chance that his proposal was correct and ...

This wave-like versus particle-like difference suggests that there’s something peculiar about the role of observation, and that strangeness opens the door to the possibility that consciousness and the physical world might interact in fundamental ways.21

the distance between the participants and the optical systems didn’t matter; the average effects were the same, regardless of distance.

subjective sense of resonance or “feeling at one” with the RNG was the key factor. Another was the paradoxical concept of “effortless striving.” This means you must absolutely want the desired outcome more than anything you’ve ever desired—a passionate, obsessive, overwhelming desire—but at exactly the same time you must also maintain zero anxiety about it.

can be achieved in meditation, visualization exercises, and focused concentration.

absorption in more detail. This refers to a state of mind where the distinction between oneself and the RNG dissolves.

working from a state of consciousness that sees through the illusion of separateness.