The Practice of Magic

 

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

1. Write your desire. Example: “I find a ten-dollar bill.”

2. 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