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. That’s basically it. 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.
GNOSIS
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
recently as the 1960s, meditation in the Western world was regarded
as so exotically alien that it was difficult to find a meditation
teacher or training materials. Now any moderate-sized town will have
at least one meditation class offered at a school, library, or
community center. Meditation instruction can certainly benefit from a
wise teacher, but there are hundreds of books, audio programs, and
smartphone apps that provide excellent introductions to meditation.
Some apps now work along with relatively inexpensive neuro-feedback
hardware that is supposed to accelerate the learning process.
The
effectiveness of these programs varies a great deal, so the only way
to tell if a particular method works for you is to try it. 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. It’s also available as an audiobook. It’s an
exceptionally clear exposition written for the Western mindset,
covering what meditation is, how to do it, and how it works.
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.
Well,
not so simple. If you’re a novice, three seconds after beginning
this practice your mind will start to wander and you’ll enjoy one
enticing fantasy after another. After dreaming about tasty
cheeseburgers for ten minutes, you’ll suddenly realize that your
mind was wandering. So you start again. Relax your body. Drop your
jaw a bit and relax the muscles around your eyes. Let it go. Empty
your mind. No thoughts.
This
time, after a whole six seconds of calm silence, your mind will
wander again. Progress! So you do it again, and again. 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. 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.”
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.
It
wasn’t always so easy to find information about meditation. The
cover story of an issue of Time magazine in 1975, “The TM Craze,”
reported on the rising popularity of the Transcendental Meditation
movement. A dozen years later, the cover featured actress Shirley
MacLaine holding a quartz crystal. The photo caption read, “A
strange mix of spirituality and superstition is sweeping across the
country.” In 1996, a cover story asked, “Can prayer, faith and
spirituality really improve your physical health? A growing and
surprising body of scientific evidence says they can.” In 2001, the
“power of yoga” was on the cover. In 2003, we learned about “the
science of meditation.” By 2014, the cover story was on “the
mindful revolution: The science of finding focus in a stressed-out,
multi-tasking culture.”
Over a
mere four decades, the cultural pulse in the United States evolved
from a worried befuddlement at what those crazy hippies were doing to
an appreciation of a widespread beneficial practice with obvious
value that’s covered by medical insurance. Given this shift in
opinion, what else may we expect to become self-evident about
meditation? One likelihood is that science will rediscover what has
been known for millennia but, like magic, was denigrated as a
superstitious belief. This involves the original purpose of
meditation and some of the less well-known but exceptional
consequences of engaging in a disciplined practice. 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]).
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.
It’s
worth mentioning that the Yoga Sutras, the classical book of yoga
written by the Indian sage Patanjali about two thousand years ago,
assures us that these powers have nothing to do with faith, religious
doctrine, divine intervention, spirituality, or the supernatural.
These powers are just another aspect of the natural world. As
Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace put it:
In
Buddhism, these [abilities] are not miracles in the sense of being
supernatural events, any more than the discovery and amazing uses of
lasers are miraculous….What may appear supernatural to a scientist
or a layperson may seem perfectly natural to an advanced
contemplative, much as certain technological advances may appear
miraculous to a contemplative.
Many
variations of the super powers are described in the yogic tradition.
They range from vanilla psi to super magic 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. By contrast, the siddhis are regarded as reliable and
under full conscious control. Some magicians are said to have
developed that level of ability as well, but as with the siddhis,
achieving conscious, robust control of super abilities is rare.
One
way to investigate if meditation really does amplify natural psi and
magical skills is to ask meditators about their experiences. 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.
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.
FORCE
OF WILL
It’s
unrealistic to expect that you’ll become the legendary Merlin after
lighting a candle and practicing meditation for five minutes.
Throwing “battle magic” lightning bolts from your fingertips
looks great in the movies, but for the majority of us magic is
expressed in subtle ways. Performing potent magic, like any refined
skill, requires talent and disciplined practice.
Perhaps
you are the one in a million who’s gifted with strong natural
talent. If so, you’ll be able to achieve dramatic effects fairly
quickly. But the rest of us have to work at it. 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. With that as a brief introduction, here then are two
variations for exercising your force of will: affirmations and
sigils.
Affirmations
Force-of-will
magic involves the application of focused attention, intention,
imagination, and belief. It’s preposterously simple, but many claim
that it works. We’ll use a slightly elaborated example from the
appropriately entitled book It Works! This book provides a prime
example of “writing magic,” one of the earliest forms of magical
practice. The four steps are as follows:
1.
Know what you want. The clearer the intended goal, the more likely it
will manifest. Believe that the goal will be achieved. Imagine that
it has already been achieved in the future and it is inexorably
headed your way. Write the goal on a piece of paper to focus your
attention. Use a pen and paper exclusively reserved for this purpose.
While writing, imagine that the surface of the paper represents
Universal Consciousness and the ink represents your unconscious. As
you write your goal, imagine that you are casting your unconscious
intentions onto the medium that creates and sustains reality itself.
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. You may want to secure the
writing paper with a special ribbon or place it in a box set aside
specifically for this purpose.
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.
This
method, like any form of magical manifestation, is neutral with
respect to morals or ethics. However, virtue is its own reward, and
it’s useful to keep in mind Spider-Man’s motto: “With great
power comes great responsibility.” This means it would be morally
questionable to use this technique to influence someone else, even in
a way that you would consider to be positive, without that person’s
permission.
In
addition, from a pragmatic perspective it is useful to begin with
simple, easily measurable outcomes, like finding a small amount of
money or achieving a modest goal. Avoid jumping straight away into
grandiose schemes like world peace, not because it wouldn’t work
(at least in principle) but because gaining crystal clarity on what
an accomplishment of that type of goal would mean, and how one would
know if it happened, isn’t as simple as it may seem.
Sigils
Before
considering how to create a sigil (pronounced “SIDG-ul”), a bit
of background is in order. First, a sigil is simply a symbol for a
desired goal. 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. In addition, 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.
There’s
another reason a sigil is useful as a magical tool. 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 interconnected beyond
spacetime; this is the meaning of the magical Law of Correspondences.
Now consider the word draw. One meaning of the verb draw is to devise
a picture or a symbol; the other is to pull together.
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. This is the concept underlying homeopathy, the wearing
of good-luck charms, and voodoo. Comb the hair of a doll made in the
likeness of your distant friend, and your friend may thank you later
about the wonderful new hairdo that she spontaneously decided to
adopt. (Note: This example is on the razor’s edge of black magic,
so don’t try this at home.)
The
idea that signs and symbols reflect, or literally are, the relational
structure that holds the universe together was famously explored in
Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. The main character in
that story, Valentine Michael Smith, was raised on Mars. In learning
the Martian language, Smith gained powers that looked like magic. He
taught others Martian words, and they too were able to gain these
exceptional powers. 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.
This
notion jibes with informational interpretations of quantum theory.
Perhaps the most famous of those interpretations was proposed by
Princeton University physicist John Wheeler who 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). As Wheeler put
it: Every it—every particle, every field of force, even the
spacetime continuum itself—derives its function, its meaning, its
very existence entirely—even if in some contexts indirectly—from
the… answers to yes-or-no questions, binary choices, bits.
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. That’s the idea of a sigil (and of
force-of-will magic in general).
Making
and Using a Sigil
Write
your desire. Example: “I find a ten-dollar bill.”
List
the first letters of words in the sentence, ignoring words that
begin with a vowel. You’ll end up with FTDB.
3.
Fit the letters together into an abstract symbol, as in Figure 1.
4.
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.
5.
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.
6.
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.
Does
This Really Work?
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. In life, the desired outcome usually manifests in the
form of a meaningful synchronicity. In a laboratory study, it
manifests as a statistically significant test of a hypothesis. The
key elements in both cases are focused intention, an openness to the
idea that the desired outcome has already been achieved, and very
clear goals.
Of
course, there’s a big difference between magic in everyday life and
magic in the lab. With the latter, we know by design what is a chance
versus a non-chance outcome. But with the former, there’s no way to
know for sure why a desired outcome occurred. Coincidences do occur.
But occasionally a synchronicity seems so unlikely that chance is no
longer a viable explanation. I’ll
give an example of a four-part synchronicity.
Synchronicity
#1
Early
in the year 2000 I was searching for office space for a research
institute that a colleague, Richard Shoup, and I were establishing.
We called it the Boundary Institute because its mission was to
scientifically explore the boundaries between mind and matter using
the disciplines of physics, mathematics, and computer science. This
organization would continue a program of psi research that I had been
in charge of at a Silicon Valley technology company called Interval
Research Corporation, funded by Paul Allen, the co-founder of
Microsoft.
The
dot-com craze was at its peak at the time, with new Internet
start-ups popping up all over Silicon Valley. As a result, office
rental rates, already at astronomical levels, were continuing to
rise. We looked at four potential locations and ended up rejecting
the first three because they were too expensive. That left only one
clear choice, in the town of Los Altos, a suburb of Silicon Valley.
It was a nice space with four offices, a common area, and a
conference room, and it was located in a complex that housed
accountants, therapists, real estate agents, dentists, and so on. The
plan was that I would move in first and get things set up.
After
moving furniture into a room that would become my office, I became
curious about our neighbors. I found a directory sign listing the
office suites. Most were ordinary businesses, but one was named
PsiQuest, Inc. I took this as a delightful coincidence, because our
new institute was also a sort of psi quest, namely, psi research of
the parapsychological kind. There are only a handful of psi research
facilities in the world, and we are all well aware of each other. So
I was certain that the “psi” in PsiQuest must have meant
“Personnel Service Investigations,” or something like that. The
“psi” similarity was surely just an amusing coincidence.
Synchronicity
#2
About
a month later, I took a new route to walk to our office and noticed
that the sign on the suite next door to ours, which I hadn’t
noticed before, was “PsiQuest Research Labs.” Now this was
suddenly more interesting, because what in the world was Personnel
Service Investigations, as I imagined PsiQuest to be, doing with a
research lab? The miniblinds on the PsiQuest Research Labs window
were closed, and what little I could see through the blinds revealed
only a well-appointed reception space. No one was visible.
I
checked every day for the next two weeks. Finally someone was in the
PsiQuest Labs office. I knocked and tried the door. It was unlocked,
so I entered and prepared to say hello to a man behind a desk. He
looked up and his eyes widened as though he saw a ghost. I thought
maybe he was startled, so I extended my hand and said, “Hello, I
wanted to introduce myself. I’m your neighbor next door. My name
is….” But before I could finish he managed to croak: “Dean
Radin?”
I
hesitated. “Yes,” I replied cautiously, wondering how he knew who
I was, and if he was feeling okay. He said nothing. He just continued
to stare at me. After an uncomfortable pause, I said, “I’m your
neighbor next door. I just wanted to introduce myself and see what
kind of work you do here.”
After
a moment the man replied, “I’m doing what you’re doing.”
Confused,
I asked, “What do you think I’m doing?”
He
replied, “Psi research…parapsychology.”
Now it
was my turn to stare, dumbfounded. Unbeknownst to me or to any of my
colleagues around the world, here was another group engaged in the
same kind of research that we were, and they were located next door
to our new offices.
Synchronicity
#3
It
turned out that the president of PsiQuest, Jon K., not only was
thoroughly familiar with psi research but was specifically engaging
in a magical practice to manifest me! Jon was using a Tibetan dream
yoga technique, which involves alternating three-hour periods of
sleeping and waking over the course of twenty four hours. 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. Hardly anyone at the time
knew that I was living in Silicon Valley, and even fewer knew where
our new institute was located.
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. When he was finally able to tell me
what was going on, I too felt seriously disoriented. We both had to
sit down.
Synchronicity
#4
The
month before all this unfolded, I was focused on visualizing what our
new offices and laboratory space would look like. I was drawing
sketches of my ideal lab configuration on the whiteboard in my office
and imagining a certain kind of reclining leather chair, a shielded
room, and other types of equipment that would be useful to have in
the lab. I knew all this would be expensive, and our budget was
limited, so I figured we wouldn’t be able to afford it in the short
term. But that didn’t stop me from visualizing what I wanted.
Returning
to the story, after recovering from the shock of our meeting, Jon
invited me to tour the rest of his facility. As we moved from one
room to the next, I could hardly believe my eyes. Jon had the
reclining leather chair, the shielded chamber, and all the other
pieces of laboratory equipment I had been actively imagining. And all
of it was located on the other side of the wall from my desk, no more
than six feet from where I had been sketching what our lab would look
like. I literally drew what I wanted into being.
A
Half-Baked Speculation
After
discussing that series of synchronicities with the other members of
our institute, we agreed that this couldn’t be a case of dumb luck.
It’s as though sustained intention on the part of Jon and myself
had acted as a sort of force that drew PsiQuest and the Boundary
Institute together, analogous to gravity drawing a moon and a planet
together. 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 spacetime is distorted by the planet’s mass, and the
warped geometry naturally guides the moon and the planet to drift
toward each other. (Later I’ll describe an experiment we did that
more formally explored this idea.) With this analogy in mind, we
thought that 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 spacetime. Like
magic.
DIVINATION
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.
Training
techniques to help develop remote viewing abilities were designed by
artist Ingo Swann as part of a classified program of psi research
funded by the U.S. government from 1972 to 1995. Swann based his
picture-drawing technique on methods used in the 1880s by British
researchers Frederic W. H. Myers and Edmund Gurney, in the 1920s by
the American social activist Upton Sinclair, and in the 1940s by
British psychologist Whately Carington and French researcher René
Warcollier.
The
method involves making fast, abstract sketches of impressions gained
when asked to mentally perceive a distant target image or location.
This is intended to capture not only fleeting visual images but
impressions from the other senses as well. 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.”
To
explain, let’s say our task is to use remote viewing to describe a
hidden or distant target. A taskmaster assigns the target a randomly
assigned label, say “X2395,” which is associated with the real
target. This association can be accomplished by simply placing the
label on an envelope containing a photo of the target. Now let’s
say the target is a person wearing a yellow raincoat. When a remote
viewer directs her attention toward that target she might instantly
perceive a vague flash of something yellow. But then, within a
fraction of a second, the analytical portion of her mind will jump in
and associate that bit of information with typically yellow things.
Before she’s even consciously aware of it, she’ll start thinking
that the target is a banana. And once that thought enters her mind,
it’s extremely difficult to let it go.
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. For reasons that make sense in evolutionary
terms, over millions of years our brains have been hardwired to take
a pinch of information and instantly fill in the blanks with the most
likely description. The reason is simple: If you see a glimmer of
black and orange stripes out of the corner of your eye, your brain
will instantly assume it’s a tiger and your legs will start running
before you realize it. If your assumption is wrong, you’ll get a
momentary scare and it won’t matter much. But if you’re right, it
could save your life. In the wild you survive by acting first and
thinking later.
But
for more subtle types of perception like remote viewing, that same
tendency has to be unlearned. This is what Swann’s method taught.
One of his earliest techniques, designed to baffle the analytical
mind, was called “coordinate remote viewing,” because the only
information provided about the target was map coordinates. Without
thinking about it or looking at a map, what’s your impression of
what’s located at 37.819732° latitude and -122.478762° longitude?
Later techniques by Swann used more abstract targeting methods, like
the randomly constructed label “X2395.” And that worked just as
well.
After
the secret government program was declassified, variations of the
original training methods were developed and taught by former members
of the U.S. Army’s remote viewing unit. As time went by, variations
of the original method were developed by second-and third-generation
students who capitalized on the burgeoning popular interest in remote
viewing training. Each new method seems to carry increasingly bolder
claims about its amazing new and improved, super-duper, double-secret
enhanced learning technique. But the essence of all of these various
methods is the same.
Remote
Viewing Training
Swann’s
original technique was based on a series of stages that I’ve
simplified into eight steps. We’ll assume that you have no idea
what the target is or where it’s located. It might be a photograph
inside a sealed envelope, a person who will travel tomorrow to a
location only she knows, or an object that a friend lost a week ago.
To make the exercise useful as an experiment you’ll eventually need
to know what the right answer is; otherwise you won’t be able to
tell if the remote viewing attempt was accurate.
This
method may be easier if the remote viewing session includes a partner
who can guide you through the various stages. In that way you won’t
need to engage the portion of your mind that’s required to keep
track of the process. Most classroom remote viewing training, as well
as most of the operational remote viewing employed in the U.S.
government program, used a human interviewer for this reason.
Obviously in a valid experiment the interviewer can’t know anything
about the target either. For a novice this process may take a half
hour or more. For an expert it can take five minutes. The steps are
as follows:
1.
Start with a blank piece of paper and a pencil. Holding the target in
mind, quickly draw lines, curves, or squiggles. Don’t think about
it, just sketch the first thing that comes into your mind. Remote
viewing information initially appears as a very brief impression; a
flash, a mere glimmer. It’s not like watching a full-color 3-D Imax
movie. Also, your sketch might reflect how you feel about the target
and have nothing to do with what the target looks like. So don’t
analyze what you’ve drawn. Just quickly sketch while keeping your
goal in mind: describe the target.
2.
List your initial sensory impressions of the target, focusing on
movement, odor, taste, touch, and sound. After listing those, add any
visual impressions that come to mind, including shape and color. The
moment you realize that you’ve named an impression, note it but add
that it’s “AOL,” for “analytical overlay.”
3.
Mentally examine the target from other perspectives: from far away,
close up, low, and high. Capture the impressions you gain from each
new perspective. Avoid naming the impressions.
4.
Note any emotional feelings you may have about the target.
5.
Combine all of the impressions you’ve gained so far and use them to
make a sketch or series of sketches that describe the target. Now,
based on your accumulated perceptions, write down what you think the
target is. This is the first step where analysis should be used.
6.
Mentally reexamine the target and look for anything you may have
missed.
7.
Watch for new insights, novel feelings, surprising elements, or any
other aspect that might feel out of place. Sketch and write down
these impressions.
8.
Compare your sketch of the target with any new information you’ve
gained. Revise if necessary.
9.
Now compare the actual target with your final description.
Factors
involved in enhancing remote viewing performance, or improving
divination skills of any sort, were studied by parapsychologist Rhea
White in the 1960s. She focused on reports by individuals who had
consistently demonstrated high-level psi performance to see if there
were any similarities. She found a number of them:
1.
Relax. Achieve a state of deep physical relaxation.
2.
Stabilize the mind. Meditation may be helpful in encouraging what
some adepts refer to as a “blank mental screen,” or what a
magician might call the initial stages of achieving gnosis. The goal
is to avoid mind-wandering.
3.
Direct the mind. After achieving a period of mental stability, ask
yourself, “What is the target?” The idea is to direct the mind,
which at this point should be in a calm, blank, or idling mode, so it
can focus without distraction on the task at hand.
4.
Wait with expectation. To explain this, Rhea White recounted a
metaphor of the winding of a toy top as a preliminary to its
spinning. That is, don’t just wait passively; create a sense of
tension, belief, and excitement that the information will arrive. Be
patient and don’t force it.
5.
Look for a feeling of conviction. To help discriminate between
mind-generated fantasies and acquisition of genuine information, you
may notice that when the impression is correct it is accompanied by a
strong feeling of conviction, or by a burst of joy, vividness, or
certainty.
In
today’s fast-paced world, we want instant results. Five steps times
thirty seconds is two and a half minutes. Who has that kind of time
to spare? 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. Sometimes no suitable impression would arrive, so there goes
an hour, wasted. You could have been watching the latest cat videos
on YouTube and enjoying a refreshing beverage and a biscotti. Magic
is real, but no one said it’s going to be fast or easy.
THEURGY:
CALLING ALL SPIRITS
Why
is it when we talk to God it’s called praying,
but
if God talks back it’s called schizophrenia?
~JANE
WAGNER
People
have different reactions to the concept that there are disembodied
spirits around us all the time. For those who believe in guardian
angels, or that their departed loved ones are still present in some
form, the idea can be comforting. For those who’ve been frightened
by tales of demons, the same idea is horrific. There are endless
stories about such entities. And a case can be made that all of it,
from legends of the wee people, fairies, and forest sprites to tales
of angels, demons, and even extraterrestrial aliens and UFO
encounters, arises from a common source. But so far scientific
evidence that such experiences involve intelligent, independent,
nonphysical entities, as opposed to a mixture of human-centric psi
and psychological effects, has not been established in such a way
that people who are intimately familiar with the evidence, and even
sympathetic to the idea of entities, will reach the same conclusion.
In my opinion, the scientific jury is still out regarding the
reality of such spirits or entities.
Of
course, my hesitation doesn’t mean that such entities don’t
exist. It just means that we don’t have methods yet that can
strictly discriminate between psi effects in the living and
independent, disembodied intelligences. Some claim that we can
communicate with spirits using electronic devices and computers. And
some of the evidence for what is known as electronic voice phenomena
or instrumental transcommunication (ITC) is intriguing. But there too
the methods do not strictly exclude explanations based on psi. One
source of information about electronic methods used in this line of
research is the ITC Journal, run by Dr. Anabela Cardoso.
As far
as the practice of theurgy goes — the act of evoking spirits — it
should not be taken lightly that ghosts and demons are indispensable
plot points in horror films. Or that skeptics laugh at the notion of
disembodied spirits, even if that laugh is nervous and one eye
twitches uncontrollably.
The
esoteric literature on theurgy suggests that if you don’t know what
you’re doing, don’t do it. There are plenty of books on theurgic
spells and ceremonial rituals that appear to be relatively benign.
But given that scientific guidance for these practices is so thin as
compared to the other two classes of magic, and because of the
potential psychological consequences of shattering your belief system
by encountering something that scares your pants off, I will pass on
providing practical exercises. This is a topic that requires
expertise and wisdom, and because of that, it’s inadvisable to
learn from a book. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
from
Real Magic by Dean Rodin, pp. 73-93
