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

by Dean Radin

“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.”9

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. Effects

And here’s the rub: psi is magic. That is, when you boil magic down into its essential forms, it’s precisely what psi experiments investigate. Both psi and magic refer to the same underlying consciousness-related phenomena;

The marginalization of magic has been so thorough that until the late twentieth century scholars of religion scrupulously avoided talking about esoteric topics, as though they didn’t even exist.

In 1917, German sociologist and philosopher Max Weber (1864–1920) defined a key feature of modern Western society—its “disenchantment.”18 Weber was referring to a growing conviction among scientists and scholars of the early twentieth century that supernatural concepts were outdated.

Magic is to religion as technology is to science.

That is, one difference between religion and magic is that the former is essentially a faith-based theory about the nature of reality, while the latter involves testable applications of that theory. Theories provide meaningful structures proposed to account for an otherwise chaotic and bewildering existence, while applications provide the means of controlling some of the chaos.

Among modern magicians we find the trend toward the scientific normalization of magic proceeding apace. As Patrick Dunn proposes, “If reality at an even more fundamental level than the quantum level is symbolic in nature, then manipulating symbol systems manipulates the semiotic web, and therefore manipulates reality.”76

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.

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. Within the path of yoga, the goal of meditation is transcendence, or personal liberation. In that tradition the siddhis, or powers, that are gained are strongly deemphasized. In the magical tradition, gaining those powers is the goal.

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. This suggests that meditation works as the yogic and other traditions claim it does, at least when it comes to subjective reports.

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.

This study showed that force of will produced objectively measurable changes in plant growth.

According to magical lore, one way to manifest a goal through force of will is to affirm that the goal has already been accomplished. This means placing the goal in the future with your imagination, and then letting present-time events catch up to the future goal. This sounds crazy, but it’s a testable idea that provides an example of how science can help advance our understanding of the mechanisms of magic.

Now, what if—as magical lore suggests—intention bypasses the ordinary flow of time, manifesting the goal in the future and thereby causing events unfolding in the present to be “pulled” toward that goal?

The conclusion was that intention influences RNG outputs not by “pushing” the RNG by force but rather through a goal-oriented or teleological effect.

Poorer remote viewing performance was associated with lower levels of belief, and better performance with higher levels of belief. The bottom line: sheep get magic, goats do not.

This suggests that precognition accuracy is influenced by the present probability of the future target.

The outcome of this experiment cannot be attributed to the participant’s conscious choices, because nothing reveals that there’s a hidden factor. So this probabilistic influence is a completely unconscious tendency. This

The question posed by such a story is whether the esoteric concept of an anima mundi or “world soul” is a measurably real phenomenon. Within psi research this idea was first encountered by noticing that during participation in engaging rituals, whether sports, meditation, or music, people sometimes reported a strange, expansive feeling as though they had merged with the group’s collective mind. Such moments are described as an “energetic shift,” a feeling of “electricity in the air” or “being in the zone.”

This phenomenon may be similar to the concept of resonance in physical systems. Resonance can be demonstrated by placing a group of metronomes running at similar—but not exactly the same—frequencies on a flexible surface. That

This spike was within minutes of when news outlets around the world were calling the election for the Republican candidate.70 The odds against chance of observing a peak value of that magnitude within an hour of the final results of the election, as compared to all of the data recorded over six days, was calculated to be 226 million to 1. What this implies is consistent with the idea that when millions of minds intently focus on the same event it causes a ripple in the fabric of space-time.

The Law of Correspondences is a principle underlying many magical practices. Based on the assumption of an interconnected reality, this law proposes that inner and outer experience, or mind and matter, intermingle and interact. It’s the principle behind the practice of sigils and writing magic. What you sustain in your mind is reflected in the world at large.

Among the studies that we conducted using this setup, we found that being stared at affected one’s “gut feelings,” as measured by changes in electrical activity in the belly.

We also found in long-term emotionally bonded couples, one of whom was being treated for cancer, that when the healthy partner gazed at the image of the patient, it affected the patient’s physiology.

The results, shown in Figure 13, indicate that Mulder’s intention periods successfully influenced Scully’s physiology. Her fingertip blood volume increased significantly and her heart rate decreased significantly.

the bottom line was that controlled use of a magical technique caused two measures of physiology to significantly change in ways that were unexpected from a conventional perspective, but in alignment with the Law of Correspondences.

NDE memories are also significantly different from imagined events. At a neural level, NDE memories resemble ordinary memories of everyday events; they don’t look like memories of imagined events.97

when normal brain functions are incapacitated through brain injury, brain surgery, or an NDE, it’s possible that the neurological and psychological filters that ordinarily prevent us from perceiving naked reality might also begin to subside. In that case, some people might report significant increases in feelings of self-transcendence, unexpected enhancements in consciousness, and improved cognitive skills. And that is exactly what happens.

The bottom line is that NDEs suggest that one or more of today’s assumptions about the mind-brain relationship is probably wrong.

Besides demonstrating that the mediums could statistically discern who was alive or dead based on a fast glance at a photograph, their performance showed an unexpected outcome.

We used photos of people from three time periods: many decades ago, a few decades ago, and recently. The mediums’ performance was much more accurate with the “newly deceased” (56.8 percent correct) than with the “older deceased” (51.7 percent) or the “long deceased” (50.2 percent). This result, which surprised us, suggests a possible way to experimentally explore the idea of reincarnation, because mediums sometimes report that a person who passed away long ago no longer “feels” dead, presumably because that person (or some aspect of that person’s spirit) has gone on to another incarnation.

before the mediums could consciously decide how they were going to respond, their brains showed different patterns of activity when they correctly decided if the person was alive or dead, as compared to when their decision was incorrect.

When a scientist or journal editor declares that something is impossible and must be stopped, even in the face of supporting experimental evidence, then we’re no longer dealing with science. This is a sign of scientism, the dogmatic belief that a narrow interpretation of today’s scientific worldview is infallibly correct. Enforcing dogma was the purpose of the Inquisition, whose motto was, essentially, “Eliminate heretical ideas. Resistance is futile.”108

a 2017 editorial in New Scientist said, “To advance science we need to think about the impossible. Science sets out what we think is true—but when it gets stuck, it’s time to explore what we think isn’t.”

The results showed that their brain activity while they were performing a mediumship reading was significantly different than during the other three states: recollection, perception, or fabrication.

We concluded that “the experience of communicating with the deceased may be a distinct mental state that is not consistent with brain activity during ordinary thinking or imagination.”114

three simple ideas keep popping up: 1. Consciousness is fundamental, meaning it is primary over the physical world. 2. Everything is interconnected. 3. There is only one Consciousness. That’s it. Those three ideas are the basis of real magic.6

Divination works because [C] is more fundamental than the physical concepts of time and space, so [c] too can perceive what is ordinarily experienced as past, present, and future.

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; this may be due to what might be called “reality inertia.”

reality emerging from consciousness. But now we see an increasing number of mainstream scientists and scholars openly proposing this idea. Some suggest that reality literally is information, like a cosmic conscious hologram.28 Others talk about reality as a mathematical or a supercomputer-based simulation.

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.

What the trend in information physics suggests is illustrated in Figure 16 (see this page). The hierarchical structure of science remains exactly the same as before, except that now the “bottom” of the hierarchy is Universal Consciousness [C]. The physical world emerges from [C], and the top of the pyramid is the mind, meaning the brain’s machinery involved in information processing, cognition, and perception. From this perspective we enjoy conscious awareness not because the brain generates it, but because [C] permeates every layer of the physical world, just like electrons permeate every layer “above” the discipline of physics.

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! It is the enigma all the way down. Mind is part of the actual becoming of the universe.48

that 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.

It’s actually fortunate that magic is fairly weak. It prevents us from accidentally blowing up the universe with our momentary whims.

Enlightenment occurs when personal consciousness realizes that it is identical with Universal Consciousness. This is not just an appreciation of the abstract idea that I’ve summarized as [c] = [C], but a direct, tangible, certain realization of this identity.