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by
Dean Radin
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February 23 - February 25, 2020
Real magic falls into three categories: mental influence of the physical world, perception of events distant in space or time, and interactions with nonphysical entities.
The new discipline will be the study of the psychophysical nature of reality, that mysterious, interstitial space shimmering between mind and matter. Understanding how this enigmatic space works in a way that’s consistent with the rest of science requires a new worldview—the lens through which we understand reality.
As magician Peter Carroll once put it, “When people are presented with real magical events they somehow manage not to notice. If they are forced to notice something uncontrovertibly magical they may become terrified, nauseated, and ill.”
Within the magical worldview everything is deeply interconnected, so if you intend to harm others, you are likely to end up harming yourself. This is not just because of a guilty conscience but more like Newton’s third law: for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction.
Psi experiences have been labeled telepathy (images or emotions shared between minds separated by distance), clairvoyance (perception of distant events or images), precognition (perception of distant events or images through time), and psychokinesis (influence of distant systems via mental intention). These topics are studied within the discipline known as parapsychology.
The association between psi and tabloid fare is more than annoying; it’s a big problem. The false but perceived connection is petrifying to anyone whose career depends on credibility, and in science credibility is essential.
It’s the kiss of death to put one’s twenty-plus years of education and training in jeopardy by being perceived as too sympathetic about controversial topics.
Cult of scientism
I’ve come to accept that psi is a real phenomenon. I base my assessment on the fact that telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinetic effects have all been independently repeated in laboratories around the world.
For most active psi researchers today, the existential question is no longer interesting, because the data are clear.
If one is taught that psi experiences can only be delusions, because real psi would violate one or more unspecified “laws” of science, then any evidence presented to the contrary can evoke a sense of panic, similar to the body’s immune response to a life-threatening allergen. Some people break out in hives when exposed to pollen; others break out in emotional rashes when exposed to psi.
Both psi and magic refer to the same underlying consciousness-related phenomena; both are marginalized from the scientific mainstream; both are labeled as demonic by orthodox religions; both saturate popular entertainment; and both are perennially popular in scholarly fields, but not if the phenomena are presented as real.
Patrick Dunn’s 2005 book, Postmodern Magic, is more typical of what modern magicians have to say about psi as the scientific study of magic: Looking for a scientific explanation for magic is like trying to find a scientific explanation for poetry. Science simply does not and cannot study magic any more than it can study the phenomenon of “art.”13
Every time you find in our books a tale the reality of which seems impossible, a story which is repugnant both to reason and common sense, then be sure that tale contains a profound allegory veiling a deeply mysterious truth…and the greater the absurdity of the letter the deeper the wisdom of the spirit.
Magic is a multibillion-dollar industry and an essential component of popular culture.
Christopher Partridge, professor of religious studies at Lancaster University, coined the term occulture to refer to the many ways that occult themes are absorbed into and influence popular culture.
Yet magic threatens sovereignty and transcends secrecy. Besides death and taxes, the one other universal truth is that bureaucracies never respond kindly to challenges to their authority. So there’s enormous societal pressure to suppress the reality of magic.
Most anthropological theories about magic were (and still are) based on psychological or sociological reasons why indigenous peoples can so easily sustain their delusions.
Winkelman proposed that the tendency to equate magical beliefs (which are testable) with religious beliefs (which are not) had led anthropologists astray. They regarded magic as a magico-religious faith. If instead they had thought of magic as a magico-scientific practice, then the idea that magic must be due only to trickery or self-deception could have been put to the test, rather than simply assumed.
We know academia currently treats magic as the result of “primitive superstition” or “magical thinking.”…So how did it come to pass that despite throughout all of human history a belief in magic appears in every recorded culture on the planet, in the last 150 years scientists have come to treat it as not real? The simple answer is: magic did not fit our mechanistic view of reality so it needed to be abandoned.
Supernatural magic was eventually adopted by religion, and natural magic split into two branches, the exoteric (outer, physical world) and the esoteric (inner, mental world). The exoteric branch evolved into today’s science. The esoteric branch is where magic has been hiding.
Gnosis is thus a type of deep intuition, a means of knowing that transcends the ordinary senses and rational thought, like knowing “from the heart.”
Note that gnosis being non-rational does not mean it’s irrational, for that would imply faulty knowledge.
Sprenger and Kramer wrote a book entitled Malleus Maleficarum (The Witches’ Hammer), which essentially turned witch-hunting into a religiously sanctioned sport. Hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps as many as a million, were arrested, tortured, and killed at the hands of the Inquisition. These horrific acts forced esoteric interests deep underground, and the cultural memory of the terror associated with being declared “deviant” because of one’s ideas or beliefs continues to affect us today.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 which the whole universe revolved. This idea was so appealing that it never faded away. The search for this particular holy grail can be found in today’s physics in the form of the many proposed Theories of Everything.
Pico della Mirandola’s synthesis was part of a long line of syncretic efforts, meaning a fusion of different religious ideas. Examples of popular syncretic rituals include Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Easter, and Christmas. All of these holidays are hybrids based on a blending of pagan and Christian rituals.
Paracelsus stressed that exercise of the imagination was the beginning of all magical operations. For the youth of the early twenty-first century, Paracelsus is perhaps better known as a character on one of the collectible Chocolate Frog Cards in the Harry Potter novels.
We’d all like to know who’s at the steering wheel, but even if we don’t know the identity of the driver, there’s still some comfort in the belief that at least someone is driving the bus.
A major personality in the history of science was Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727). It is less well known that Newton also played a key role in the history of esotericism, where he is referred to not as the “first of the Age of Reason” but as the “last of the magicians.”
Mesmer’s idea was similar to Paracelsus’s “cosmic fluid” or archaeus, the yogic concept of prana, the Chinese chi or qi, the Lakota tribe’s wakan, Greek philosopher Pythagoras’s pneuma, Austrian psychotherapist Wilhelm Reich’s orgone, and so on. The concept of a living or “vital force” permeates the esoteric traditions.
Carefully controlled scientific experiments are artificial constructs that require psychic effects to occur on demand. Such experiments rarely capture the motivational or emotional context that seems to spark spontaneous psychic effects. Fortunately, they do work often enough, even with solid controls in place, as we’ll see later.
Magic, in Crowley’s view, was basically a branch of science. It was all about consensus interpretation of data and independent replication.
The techniques of magic will be the hypersciences of the future….Science has brought us power and ideas but not the wisdom or responsibility to handle them.
Your thoughts, studied, will let you see where you are going. They point clearly to the nature of physical events. What exists physically exists first in thought and feeling. There is no other rule….
Finally, a key development in practical magic in the twentieth century was the repackaging of esoteric ideas into forms designed to appeal to the American impulse toward pragmatism, prosperity, and personal success.
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 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.
As Shinzen Young puts it, as a result of this practice “clarity and equanimity are slowly but surely trickling down into the subconscious. They rewire us at the most fundamental levels.”
On meditation
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]). Within the [C] state, abilities naturally arise that allow the meditator to manipulate or to transcend the world.
Don Juan on "seeing"
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.
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.
Princeton University physicist John Wheeler. He described it as the physics of “it from bit,” which means that an object in the physical world (an “it”) is derived from pure information (a “bit,” a digital representation of information).
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).
In Einstein’s general relativistic concept of gravity, the planet doesn’t reach out with “gravity beams” to pull on the moon. Rather, the fabric of space-time is distorted by the planet’s mass, and the warped geometry naturally guides the moon and the planet to drift toward each other.
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.
