How To Harness The Power Of “Magic” (Scientifically Proven) w/ Dean Radin PhD

as it turns out and the reason why I wrote the book real magic that what we study within a scientific context something like clairvoyance in the magical tradition would be called divination because divination is all about perceiving through space and time that is exactly what Clairvoyance is all about perceiving through space and time and there are proper validated scientific ways of testing whether that's actually a real thing and the short story is yeah it is a real thing we can test it so we have divination as a magical practice we have something I call force of will which is impressing your will onto the world and making it do things according to your will and the third category is the energy which is communicating with or dealing with Spirits or invisible sometimes non-human entities of one type or another so in each of these three classes divination force of will and clergy there are analogs in the scientific World which have been tested and have been shown to be true Dean Raiden is someone who has dedicated his life to the study of magic he comes from a scientific perspective and shows all of the actual legitimate clinical research that demonstrates that sci phenomenon or magical principles are real and in this podcast we talk about not only the history but also the practice and how to utilize these practices to live a more interesting and magical life so enjoy this podcast with Dean Raiden foreign [Music] it's great to have you on the show brother thank you glad to be here yeah so I've been steeped in a world where magic is real so the ontology the realness of magic for me is something that I've been aware of for many years at least since my first encounter with uh quechua healer Meister Orlando to andama of the Ayahuasca traditions and started learning about and experiencing these Altered States Of Consciousness that had access to Realms where magic is just the normal course of business in those Realms and so this has been many years where my own personal experience with magic has been really present and learning from the great lineage Traditions mostly in the medicine Traditions less so in the western Crowley esoteric tradition you know bovotsky in in that crowd so it was really cool to read this book which is approaching it from not the and it's not excluding but it's approaching it from a lot of the western magic kind of Concepts and seeing how they apply to some of the understandings that I've had and experienced in my own ceremonial context and even outside a ceremony so I wanted to ask you though first because not everybody's going to be like me and have had experience that allows them to know in their body with full noses to grok if you will that magic is real uh so how would you define Magic well first of all I'm looking at it from a scientific perspective and and I do that because first of all I'm a scientist but secondly science is a way of gathering objective data about the the nature of the world and if magic only persisted as a subjective experience then it would not be surprising why a lot of people would say well that's good for Fantasy but it's not real because we equate real with objective measurable events so my understanding then of magic is that first of all requires a different world view than the worldview of science science starts with everything is matter and energy it's reductive materialism it's really really good it's understanding the nature of the external World physical world but it is not very good in fact it's not very good at all when trying to understand subjective experience for things having to do with mind or consciousness so from a scientific perspective a lot of scientists would say magic traditional esoteric type magic cannot exist because from from that perspective you are literally your brain you are your physical brain and that's the end of the story there's nothing else from an esoteric perspective or a philosophical perspective called idealism the entire universe is made up of consciousness not from matter well that's the esoteric position that the world is ultimately made out of consciousness from that perspective now it becomes pretty easy to understand why magical practices would work because everything having to do with the mind is now primary over the physical world so when you start thinking about certain things whether it's involving ritual or some other method that manifests into the world that's taking a very different way of understanding reality so what is Magic then well from a scientific perspective it is exactly the same thing that scientists have been studying for over 140 years that we call psychic phenomena it and the reason why psychic phenomena are not part of the scientific mainstream is exactly the same reason why magic is not part of the mainstream it's because it requires that there's something about the mind and Consciousness that is able to do things in the physical world directly so that's that's rejected by science the difference is that with psychic phenomena we're talking about telepathy Clairvoyance those kinds of phenomena we can use scientific methods to study them to study these kinds of things and as it turns out and the reason why I wrote the book real magic that what we study within a scientific context something like clairvoyance in the magical tradition would be called divination because divination is all about perceiving through space and time that is exactly what Clairvoyance is all about perceiving through space and time and there's proper validated scientific ways of testing whether that's actually a real thing and the short story is yeah it is a real thing we can test it so we have divination as a magical practice we have something I call force of will which is impressing your will onto the world and making it do things according to your will and in third category is the energy which is communicating with or dealing with Spirits or invisible sometimes non-human entities of one type or another so in each of these three classes divination force of will and clergy there are analogs in the scientific World which have been tested and have been shown to be true so that's a little bit of a long-winded answer to your question no it's it's it's perfect and there's so many places that I want to expand the brackets and and talk about the first is the kind of general worldview that you're talking about and I appreciated you referencing and drawing in I'll just talks these perennial philosophy but fundamentally what we're talking about is a different world view in hermetic principles it's you know I think it's the very first principle all is mine the universe is mental it's actually seeing the substrate of all existence as participating in the one in the one mind right is that we're all participating in a greater in a greater substrate of of existence and I think part of the problem with science accepting this which you really elucidate well in this book is that it fundamentally requires like you said this other world view to exist a world view that has you know whether it's mind Consciousness or whether it's you know Shekinah in in the work that I do with Rabbi Gaffney or whether it's uh the Dow in some you know Dallas practice some force that exists that we're all participating in that has influence at the very least if not actually fundamentally inextricable from every single thing that we see feel exists no it's true and so one of the ways of getting around what seems to be an incompatibility so we have reductive materialism on the one hand we have idealism on the other where the esoteric traditions they seem like a completely far apart from each other and how in the world are we going to connect them well first of all the the analogy I'll make here is the difference between classical physics and relativistic physics and quantum physics so just because we developed relativistic physics and or quantum physics it doesn't mean that classical physics is wrong what it does mean is that the Newtonian way of understanding reality is a special case it works at certain speeds at certain sizes and it works really well there we're able to go to the Moon based on Newtonian physics we didn't need quantum mechanics yeah we Propel a rocket all the way up all the way up through space with force and the force is enough to carry the mass of the rocket through the resistance of the atmosphere and then yeah [ __ ] physics hooray and it works so we don't throw that away but what we do do is the more that we begin to understand the nature of the physical world Einstein developed relativity which says okay at very fast speeds at very high degrees of gravity weird things start to happen so suddenly there is no space and time there is space time and time is flexible and and all of the things that we know from relativity and then the further we go into it we find that the very microscopic scale quantum mechanics which is again very very range from from an everyday point of view so what do we do with classical physics well the reason why these new developments are acceptable is because they encapsulate classical physics like you probably if you start from relativity you can figure out classical mechanics if you start from quantum mechanics you're still not quite sure how to develop classical mechanics out of it but nevertheless we see Newtonian physics as a special case and this you see again and again in science somebody comes up with something it works pretty good doesn't quite explain everything and sort of like around the edges of the explanation we have these anomalies that start popping up well scientists are interested in anomalies because it tells us that there's something about our original idea that wasn't quite right well what do we do we expand it so now we still have the original core but we have a more comprehensive understanding so if you think of of that as a general Trend that happens within science reductive materialism works really really well for lots of things it doesn't explain everything there are these weird anomalies at the edges psychic phenomena magical effects and so on to say nothing of Simply the act of conscious awareness itself which is not explained by reductive materialism so okay science as we currently see it today is a special case works for some things doesn't work for everything so we expand it well how are we going to expand it the direction that many scientists are beginning to entertain now is exactly what is talked about in the esoteric traditions so the base is not matter and energy the base is something like Consciousness which is simply part of the fabric of reality the question then is how do you get from from Pure awareness essentially into the physical world where does that come from now look at the esoteric Traditions like the Kabbalah is explicitly about this idea right and most of the esoteric Traditions have a way of describing how do you get from what what amounts to awareness pure awareness and turn that into the physical world as we experience it all of the Traditions have an explanation whether they're correct or not is another issue but that's what even very early on all the way back into shamanism that was a topic of of study of trying to figure out well we can kind of feel that the the world consists of Consciousness it is one mind and somehow that gets turned into stuff well how does that work so we were I think we're in the progress now of having a convergence between a scientific understanding of reality which is beginning to expand and I would claim that it's expanding directly into what we would otherwise call the esoteric traditions I've I don't keep up with all of the latest quantum physics kind of research and and but I saw something that came out recently that's questioning what I believe they were calling local realism which is the idea that things can happen independently of somebody observing them as far as I understand it but you probably can explain it better but it was challenging that long-held belief that things are just constantly happening in in the absence of observation by anybody ends and so it's it appears that it appears that what is emerging from the from the from these fields is a co-participatory universe in which our observation imagination is actually generating is generating a lot of what we see as part of our reality yeah and and if you look in the history of physics you find people like John Wheeler famous physicists from Princeton came up with the idea of black holes and the Big Bang those words uh his notion was that we live in a participatory universe in which case it isn't that's not quite going as far as the esoteric idea that the mind creates reality or creates the physical world but that it is deeply and intimately related to it in some way so in that case mind and matter are are related or correlated in a way that they can't be extracted so the metaphor is it's as though reality is a coin and you have heads and you have a Tails so the heads are his mind and the Tails is matter and they are the faces of ways that you can look at reality they they're the head and the tails are very different from each other but they're obviously part of the same thing and they're correlated so if you flip it the head you know what's going to happen to the heads and tails because they're always going to be related to each other something like that is called dual aspect monism as a philosophy that's gaining traction within certain domains of science today for people who are beginning to think about these topics large chunks of science could care less like if you're involved in biology typically where the neurosciences you don't need to worry about these kinds of ideas because materialism works well enough yes and it doesn't work so well yeah yes and every single clinical trial accounts for the placebo effect and I think this is something that Joe dispenza Dr Joe dispenz has made a made a big big push to help people realize like let's not discard this phenomenon in which the thoughts of the Mind are treating every single known condition from knee surgeries to cancer diagnoses to whatever the whatever you could possibly imagine the beliefs of the Mind are affecting the matter of the body the human biology in a fundamental way but instead of just isolating and trying to create studies that that remove the possibility of the placebo effect what if you actually harness that for your own benefit and fun I mean it's it's really almost crazy that most people out in the general mainstream public and in the narrative still are following this Cartesian split between mind and body and imagining that mind and body are somehow separate when we have thousands and thousands probably 10 tens of thousands I don't know how many clinical studies have actually accounted for the placebo effect and shown beyond the shadow of a doubt that the placebo effect is incredibly real like there's no there's you just can't deny it so what does that mean that means that thoughts affect matter period like end of story yeah no you're right that the the Paradigm the scientific Paradigm infects every area of science and medicine and what's interesting also is that if you're a fledgling scientist you're in college or graduate school learning your your discipline you you're never exposed to the idea that there's a philosophy of science where that the science is not fixed right it's almost taught like a Dogma sometimes you're taught about the history of how do we get from there to here and it's usually a pretty compelling history like there's a lot of stuff about it that's real it's pretty good but it it sidesteps what you just said it sidesteps the idea that there's something about the mind this internal sense of reality that we all have which is deeply related to the external world the internal and the external which by the way the place where I work is the Institute of noetic science is and we were founded by Edgar Mitchell the Apollo 14 astronaut who was exploring outer space that's was it that's his job but on the way back to the Earth he had a mystical experience which has nothing to do with the external world it's all about the internal world so when he returned to the Earth he became just as interested in Inner Space as he was in outer space so from Astronaut to Psychonauts that's exactly right yes yeah yeah that's uh this this feels like you know we're always looking outside for the next great discovery and the next piece of technology that can influence the external world I think we're all sleeping on the advancements in the technology of being able to utilize our inner our inner world the inner Sciences the interior Sciences of what our Consciousness is capable of and it it feels like this is now even though it's not getting potentially the mainstream attention that some of these other external scientific discoveries are it's but it's still building in momentum and what's Curious to me is like what's going to be possible as the general field of belief opens up to these kind of magical practices and principles like what's going to be possible as we start to train and harness and believe in these phenomenon yeah so it's one of the topics I I deal with in in my book because one of the reasons there are many reasons for why the magical Traditions have been suppressed almost from the very beginning I mean up until maybe the beginning of the Enlightenment in the 16th and 17th century everybody believed in Magic a lot of people used magic in various ways but the beginning of science began and also the beginning of organized religion began to squash it and then squashed it real good so that today we see magic showing up on entertainment but people consider it as fantasy except privately they also think well maybe that's actually real and there are plenty of people out there using magical methods whether they know it or not they might call it manifestation or affirmations but that's of course part of the magical tradition one of the the reasons then that this topic is really interesting from a sociological perspective is okay we imagine we move along from society and this is no longer a woo-woo taboo it's now it's become mainstream in some way that would cause a very dramatic shift in the way that Civilization works it would shift it in the sense that first of all within this tradition magical tradition or even just psychic Traditions there are no secrets so how can you maintain government how can you take and maintain the way that the law works the way that business works if there were no secrets the I mean the only reason why people are at each other's throats all the time is because they think somebody else knows something that they don't know and that's this is the reason why the legal system takes forever to figure things out is because they don't actually know what's happening well if there are no secrets and I'm talking about the effective use of telepathy and Clairvoyance among other things that would change everything well then why doesn't everything change well because there's a gigantic status quo out there that is perfectly happy with the way things are and they don't want things to change so without going into the conspiratorial thought you can imagine then why there would be a lot of pressure to keep these kinds of topics Out On The Fringe and and to not start infiltrating and manipulating or changing the way that the world actually works today and and if people are imagining that this suppression is happening now with the U.S government like yes yes but we got to go way back to the early days when actually all many of the churches were trying to monopolize power and monopolize the power of these practices so in you know the the old Hebrew mysticism and lineage Traditions like only the only the only like the inner inner High Rabbi was able to actually evoke the name of the Divine the true name of the Divine in the in the sanctum sanctorum the holy of holies they were able to hold these magical practices inside the temple itself right so and it wasn't democratized nobody else could speak it only there was certain rituals and rights that only the the high Rabbi could could offer and then same in the Catholic Traditions which I think you made a beautiful point there where I mean some estimates that I've seen is that that 10 million witches were burned throughout the history of of the suppression of these Pagan traditions and cultures and magical practices like some astronomical number and I haven't I haven't fact checked that number so I'm not sure if it's accurate but a very at the very least a very large number while at the same time you made the point that there's 400 000 Catholic priests who are practicing magical rituals through the through giving the you Eucharist the blood and the Flesh of the Christ now it's probably been hollowed out of the actual magic that's happening there because they don't even know really what they're doing but nonetheless it's a magical practice so the absolute hypocrisy of saying no no we're going to practice magic but if you do it we're going to kill you it's part of the Catholic catechism I mean it's written there right right in black and white uh you you cannot practice any form of magic it's demonic and but we can well that's the that's that's the that's the ridiculous part but I mean this is the catechism this is the the rules if you're going to be a Catholic yeah anything outside the context of priests doing it in a certain way in a certain time is considered demonic and while some of us would look at that now and saying well clearly that's a matter of social control a lot of people still follow that so the kind of research that I do occasionally somebody will be extremely interested in it and then and their their comment with and by the way this is demonic you know you're you're working with demons and my response is what you know where where does that come well it comes from people who are just artist children who memorize the catechism again and again and eventually get to the point where any form of magical practice is automatically demonic and needs to be shunned that you see also in the US government because there's a large chunk of the US government which is quite religious and it blocks research in this area so I know people for example that are the National Science Foundation and figure well if this stuff is real it would be extremely important to understand from a scientific perspective because maybe our our adversaries are using it against us wouldn't it make sense for us to kind of understand it better there is no federal funding at all zero why is that because Congress allocates money for things and when it comes to this particular topic including at the National Institutes of Health there is zero funding because there are enough people who think it is demonic in which case so I stand back then as a scientist and I'm saying that you're telling me that there are aspects of reality which you believe in which we cannot study because you you have a certain belief about it and the answer is essentially is yes we can't study that we're told not to study that because it's a bad thing well if if Mary Curie had not start studying the the bad thing of radioactivity it would be a very different world today but science is all about uncovering what is unknown and some some of them are can be used for bad and some can be used for good and the same is true for magic magic is a kind of a power or a force and you use that for good or for bad yeah the yes I I think that it for me it makes sense that there's some you know kind of uh religious trappings and old momentum from these religious beliefs that are there but it also seems to me that large parts of the US government have been captured by the capitalistic principles of you know big Pharma basically in in a way and there's a certain sense of human sovereignty and our ability to actually manage our own lives and actually through our own intent and through our own belief to be able to access our inner healing that's available which is very bad for business in PR in the number one contributing Financial Force that's donating the most to you know politicians campaigns is paying the most in advertising for the media so I think it's probably a combination of the old religious beliefs and then the new the new religion which is the religion of money if you actually are thinking like what are people actually wish worshiping now people are worshiping money more than they're worshiping God on that mass you know and so I think both of those forces are are trying to suppress human sovereignty you know for different power and greed reasons yeah well as you said the what I mentioned before about the status quo the status quo is political power economic power any kind of existing power they they're happy with the way things are so why would you want to change anything so that's that's where a lot of the pressure comes from yeah you were mentioning we're mentioning the suppression and the burning of witches which actually uh you know is deeply saddened to read that it's still existing in many different countries in Tanzania there was a massive witch burning that was fairly recent you know and so this these practices are still going on maybe not here in the U.S but in some ways there's cancel culture and people are getting burned in their social identity if not actually physically which is a much better situation let's not even try to conflate the two and compare them obviously like getting attacked on social media is not the same as you know pitchforks and and hot fire like that's a different [ __ ] people to suicide it does it does and it's not to minimize the effects of that but it's also to say like all right like most of us are in a world where we can at least talk about this and not have to worry about an armed mob coming out in front of our house but the one the one thing that was very interesting to me is you know you hear stories about like Giordano Bruno you know getting burned at the stake as a heretic for just basically talking about love I mean like he wasn't even anything having to do with anything that I could see that was very magical other than just being he was just a really good guy you know and I don't know his biography you know super well but there's so many people who were burned at the stake for just challenging some of the oppressive top-down control strategies of the church but then there's this story you write about uh someone who was given his sainthood and I remember it was Saint Joseph I forget his name before he was Saint Joseph but somehow he didn't get burned and somehow he got turned into a saint and he was probably the most magical you know he called him a merlin-class wizard in this book so so tell his story and then try let I'm curious to know like why do you think like like what was how did they how did they decide to make him a saint and not actually to to kind of cast him out like like is the typical strategy yeah it's a very good question there are always been people who have one form of psychic skill or another either as an exceptional healer or as a prophet or something like that if they're really lucky they would have escaped the Inquisition because the inquisition's job was to find these people and basically squash them get rid of them if they were considered a threat well so Joseph of Cupertino was early on became a member of the church which was one reason why they decided maybe it's okay we can turn them into a saint because he's already inside the fold but his special gift was that he he was considered kind of an odd way today we might consider him possibly autistic perhaps he would go into flights of of reverie and um in ecstasy upon praying typically to the um two to one or another Saints and he would start levitating and flying and so the other reason why the Inquisition probably didn't want to wipe them out is because he had done this in in front of hundreds and hundreds of witnesses including at the time clergy and royalty and other prominent people in whatever the governments were at the time where he was and so so many people have witnessed this they of course considered it a miracle and the church was taking advantage of this in a sense I mean not in a crass sense although you could make a sense make a case that it was kind of crass they took advantage of the miracle the show see we're right we our understanding of reality is correct and here's an example all you hundreds of people have seen this person levitate as a result of praying for something of in within our religion and so he was interviewed in quotes interviewed by the Inquisition at least twice and probably came close to being decided that he was demonic because levitation is not all that kind of and just for people just for people to know this is not some David Blaine you know levitating like a couple inches off the ground you know there's there's reports that are documented where he's levitating like 20 feet and 30 feet in the air right like like this is not subtle no not not settle at all if uh flying through the air hovering in the air for lengths of time uh and witnessed by many many people so this was this was way back before there were things like uh Crane That Could lift you through the air with a invisible wire so it wasn't a trick and there were so many reports and so many that were uh systematically accurate in terms of what people were describing many different people describing from different perspectives and so on that it falls into the class today as a kind of a miracle we we don't see people today who are able to do that the people today who claim that they're able to levitate or have seen someone levitate almost always involves hopping so they'll sit in a Lotus position and they'll become very contorted and their body will start hopping and so the claim is that well they're hot they are hopping but they're hopping and staying into the air too long well that's a testable hypothesis and I've always been interested in whether or not we could ever find somebody who could do that and one time I was at the uh the the the the TM headquarters in Fairfield Iowa where I went to see a demonstration of the world's most accomplished yogic Flyers because for years the TM was pushing the idea that if you take the TM cities course one of the things you could learn was yogic flying they used to have competitions for yoga Flyers so I know John hagelin who's the the head of the the TM movement now and I asked him after watching these four young men who were quite athletic who were hopping they were a full Lotus position and hopping up pretty good like one to two feet up if you go into a Lotus position and try to hop up two feet that's pretty good yeah but I asked him have you done the test to see whether they're actually hovering at all the answer was no apparently nobody can hover so we don't know whether Saint Joseph was one in a billion who could do it whether there was something else going on that we we really don't understand today at all because since then I only report three cases of people who had Merlin class kinds of of abilities only one of which is relatively contemporary most are a hundred to hundreds of years ago so if anybody out there can actually hover and levitate let me know and we'll be very happy you're the guy to call you're the guy to call so here's uh here's here's something that I want to open up so I've become very close friends with a gentleman named Matthias DiStefano and Matthias de Stefano remembers his past lives and he remembers one of his past lives in ancient civilization of chem which is post-iluvian After the flood it's an Atlantean kind of um Atlantean spot the one of this one of the cultures that was seated from you know the atlanteans had actually left after the flood and he remembers that he was part of a guild that his they had guilds that were part that were related to the elements and he was part of the he was part of the water Guild and the water Guild was able to actually get into resonance with water and use water to cut these large megalithic stones and some of the other people in the other Elemental guilds were able to so get into resonance with the actual stone itself and then seeing their own energy as in resonance with the stone higher to make the stones lighter so the big mystery of how did they move these Stones they were actually able to alter the weight of the stones through magic through actually forming this sympathetic resonance with the stone itself and then levitate it and while his his P you know his clan his tribe or his uh Temple I guess you would say was able to use water to actually cut the stones so to get those very straight lines that that you can see it was just a line of water and gravity and so he talks about this and I said well could this happen in our in our world now and really what he was saying is it's unlikely at this point because there's a general field of belief that actually puts a cap on the ability for this to happen because it's not only even if even though he believes he believes because he remembers what he did the field of belief around it the collective you know the collective unconscious the morphic resonance field as sheldrake would say is actually preventing this kind of large big you know big displays of magic from actually happening because the the morphic resonance field is is just doesn't quite allow it and now what it seems like is we're seeing like little pokes as we're making like a little progress like pushing the ceiling up but his idea is that you know we can't do that now yet and maybe if actually the the morphic resonance field the collective field of belief shifts then some of these ancient magical practices will will become available again yeah that sounds plausible to me at one point in the TM world the Maharishi was asked well how come nobody can levitate anymore we can only hop and his answer was quite similar to what you just said that the there's a collective sense of what is possible and so if you're doing something which a lot of people would say that's impossible there's a certain degree of fear and anxiety underneath that that could squash it and I think this is one of the reasons why in the this especially in the sorcery Traditions that the sorcerer would never say what they're doing they would never reveal their methods they'd always do it in secret and and so we've paid attention to that and the kind of work that I do when we whenever we do an experiment we've done it in our laboratory and some people know where the laboratory is but generally we don't advertise it in addition we the reason why we try to isolate the kinds of experiments that we do from people's knowledge of exactly when and where it is for the reason you just said if you have a lot of people now saying I don't think I want to believe in that that becomes the equivalent of a dirty test tube in a biology lab right it right we're studying the role of intention well if you have a bunch of intentions coming at you they're saying don't do that it just becomes more difficult to do yeah and and going back to St Joseph it seems like one of the so we're talking about a different field of belief because this is 1600s right if I recall correctly from the book 1600s there's a field of belief especially within the church that Miracles are real that actually water was turned into wine that actually Yeshua walked on the water that actually like the the idea that Miracles were real impossible it we don't live in that we live in the age of scientism not in the age of of even really where most people believe in the possibility of even religious Miracles right so there was a different field of belief for one for two it seems like potentially his what you could call a mental impairment may have just actually knocked offline anything that prevented him from fully 100 believing that he could do that that if he wanted to raise his vibration and actually go meet the Saints where he felt them which was above that he could just do it because there's nothing in his nothing in his entire being nothing in his psyche nothing in his Consciousness whatsoever that had a sh had a just a shred of doubt that that was possible and the field of belief was like wow well we've always we've believed that Miracles are real and this is just another this is an example even still in the in that context the people watching this happen we're still astonished of course because of course it's still rare even at that time with huge amounts of belief and with Saint Joseph's police and all the rest of it it's very very rare so we like those stories because it it uh it appeals to us that there are aspects of reality that we don't understand very well yet and of course we see that reflected in all of our superhero movies and this whole genre of entertainment where the mind is really powerful and able to do amazing things probably because it is right it's it's like a truth that you can't suppress you can suppress it in science and suppress it elsewhere but it has to come out somewhere well where is it allowed to come out comes out in entertainment I mean because if if what was being presented was not resonating with the audience they wouldn't care about it they wouldn't even they wouldn't watch it anymore but it is always been it has permeated the entertainment world forever because it is something that people resonate with yeah now I want to get to the experiments that you mentioned for people who are like what are these guys talking about why are they saying magic is real it hasn't been proven so I definitely want to get there so just know that this is where we're heading if anybody's listening but I want to follow this thread do you watch a lot of the and read a lot of the kind of fantasy and and the different stories and myths that are the modern myths about magic everything from Game of Thrones uh to Patrick rothfuss I thought had a really cool explanation in uh in his in his Works a wise man's fear was the second version and the um what is it the the name of the wind was another was another one like a I thought I thought his was probably the best if you're unfamiliar with it I would say their description of how magic worked was actually in my mind like really one of the coolest and and and actually you almost believe that oh yeah like this is this is maybe how it could be done it was that it was that it was that well like the way that they built up the science of it if you will of like how of how it accessed I thought Patrick rothfuss did a great job also one of the best novelists I've ever read and I read all the Game of Thrones series I've read a lot of these different so definitely recommend that um and I thought the the series The Witcher also did a pretty good job with actually explaining how magic might work and those two I thought were the best like the best explanations um there were certain aspects of Game of Thrones where you know when dragons came into the world which was this thing that was thought impossible then it actually altered the field of belief in everybody's magic got better and stronger so there's little little hints in about about real magic in these things and of course it's taken to the Fantastical taken to place where we can no longer really actually see this although I have to say that I've been witness to you know Elemental Magic if you will happening in an ayahuasca ceremony in many in many occasions where actually you know I mean I could I could tell those stories and I will but I want to first ask the question you know where have you found in in the kind of modern myth making in the stories that are being told something even an avatar the connection to AWA which would be in the theory category right calling on AWA and then AWA influencing the animals and and these different stories where have you found that there's some pretty cool you know descriptions that actually Point towards a real magic uh well you mentioned the Witcher so I've seen that uh and then so the I guess I haven't paid that much attention to how magic is portrayed in fiction uh I watch science fiction and all the movies that have these elements and I'm not thinking of it with my critical hat on so I'm I'm enjoying it yeah and the other thing is that the because virtually all of my career has been studying psychic phenomena I tend to think of these kinds of phenomena from that point of view like what do we know from the laboratory what can we test in the laboratory the things we see in the lab tend to be pretty weak and small but they're real and of course what we see in entertainment we can we can small but then when you when you expand the subject size and we'll get to this when you expand the subject size it becomes almost statistically impossible that it's not real oh yeah no there's a big difference between how how big something is and whether it's real or not right and the electron is really tiny but it's quite real and so we can tell through the methods that we use and the statistics and so on that we're dealing with real phenomena they're of course never going to be the same as their portrayed in fiction because otherwise fiction wouldn't be very interesting so you can project then you can say well I mean the average person will have this much psychic ability or this much magical ability like everyone has some of it some people just naturally will have a pile of it and a few people through natural Talent or whatever means will have an enormous amount a gigantic amount but so what else is new I mean we see that in sports we see that in every domain of human behavior and experience some people are world class and most of us are just an average yeah yeah sorry so I'll tell these two stories that I've that I've been you know firsthand witnessed to the first most magical thing the most magical thing I'd seen to date was the I was sitting in an ayahuasca ceremony with Maestro Alberto Davila and long long mestizo tradition that he's brought from you know he was drinking Ayahuasca from like age seven and you know trained and you know trained in the in the Arts of the ayahuascaro and he had a particular ikaro that was to the bats in the bats in the jungle down in Peru there's lots of bats and when he would sing this ikaro to the bats the bats would start swirling swirling the maloka and the malokas the the ceremonial place and he would sing the ikoro of the bats and you just hear them whipping like whipping around and you'd look out you know it's hard it's obviously low light but you'd see Bats just swirling swirling around and then you know he would just kind of he would just kind of laugh it was just like it kind of a kind of one of the one of the things that he would enjoy doing was just calling in the bats and creating this magic thing but it was unbelievably profound that he could night after night when he sang the ikaro to the bats the bats would come and swirl around and it just it blows your world view when you realize like holy [ __ ] you know this is possible so that was one and then another was with my sister blue in an ayahuasca ceremony I've told this story she steps outside was feeling deeply connected to the wind she started to form again just like I talked about in the story of Matthias the sympathetic resonance With the Wind element and out of nowhere a perfectly still night the wind kicks up in this massive massive Windstorm in the middle of the night and probably you know past midnight where wind doesn't just kick up that midnight in the jungle it's like it's always still and and pregnant with energy but not whipping wind out there like that you just it never happens you know in all the like from a climate perspective it just doesn't happen like that that it just comes out of nowhere and then stops the wind picked up so intensely that it actually knocked down a giant tree so this tree just comes crashing down and she goes whoa like she was in a trance and she's like whoa [ __ ] like I gotta stop this you know because she was dancing and swaying with the swaying with the wind and knocked this tree down now of course you could say this is all this is all just uh coincidence she was out there she was dancing happened to be during a windstorm and it happened to knock down this tree but we could feel that something else was at play here and and really witnessing that and then hearing her firsthand account of it was in that moment she had suspended her own belief about what was possible merged her Consciousness with the wind and was actually able to influence it and this is legitimate in the fantasy novel category of magic and it's not like she could do it at will it's not like she's like blue go out there and make the wind stop or make the wind start you know it's not it's not that kind of game somehow the Ayahuasca opened uh opened a possibility in her own Consciousness opened a possibility that she was able to actually influence so those two things that I've experienced and I've experienced many different magical you know magical occurrences in 24 years of of psychedelic you know ceremonial work but those two really stand and out and it's just shifted my own belief about well this may not be reproducible at will so very difficult to study from a scientific perspective but I was there you know like I I felt that I saw it I know what I felt and I know what I saw and yes it is possible that coincidentally the bat started swirling when Maestro Alberto sang the ikoro and coincidentally blue merged with the wind in her own Consciousness and the wind came but it just becomes implausible at that point once you've experienced it so this is a great segue into why I'm interested in these things from a scientific perspective because it is all about the two things you mentioned first of all you need to be able to demonstrate It On Demand because we're doing those experiments and second we need to know could this be coincidence or not if we see something happen and those are the elements that you then put into a protocol in a scientific experiment to see that something actually occur here where we can exclude coincidence and we could exclude lapses in memory and all kinds of biases and motivations and whatever so that's the point of doing the experiments because again I'm interested in this from the point of view of what is it that we can believe about the anecdotes that people tell because everyone has anecdotes about something psychic or magical I mean they're everywhere so let's say we wanted to study is it possible for intention to actually influence some aspect of the world not just within your body but outside somewhere so I'll give one example of an experiment that we did so this comes most of our experiments start from somebody telling an experience and then we say okay how can we take that what you describe with your sister as an aerokinetic effect changing the air kinetically with your mind so we haven't done that but it's an example of how we would take an experience give it a label and then figure out how do we test this in the lab so I will insert a story from professional chefs who said that if in the kitchen everybody's happy and there's a lot of intention being put into the food as they're making it to be positive and have a good experience for people that they will respond to that and they don't they don't know what's going on in the kitchen but from the chef's experience they find that the people in in the kitchen are angry that day and they're not feeling so good then somehow the response of the customers is not so good either so you can say okay what's the mundane explanation for that well maybe if they're not feeling so good they're just not being very careful in the way that they prepare the food so that could be one explanation well maybe really is something to do with intention so we did an experiment the first one of this type that we did was you said well what if we had people who are expert in tenders and I'm talking about in one case Mongolian Shaman that we knew in another case a Buddhist monk who spent a lot of time in that kind of space we asked them to take little pieces of dark gourmet chocolate little pastilles and then separated into two batches one batch they would imprint with their intention that anybody who ate this would have an improvement in their mood and then we had the identical pieces of pastilles that were not intended then we did a double-blind experiment so the double blind means that we recruited a whole bunch of people we gave some of them the the treated chocolate or the Blessed chocolate and some got the control chocolate by virtue of the way the experiment is designed you tell people that you might be getting treated chocolate and you might get in control we don't know because the person who's giving it to you was blind to which kind of chocolate there was and so were the subjects they were blind too so normal biases are taken care of in that way so you give them the chocolate you tell them over the course of the next week two days of the week and we told them which days at 10 o'clock in the morning and three o'clock in the afternoon you must eat a certain number of these pastilles and at the end of the day you record your mood using a standardized mood reportings questionnaire so this was over the course high high con High Conformity to a study where your main job is to eat chocolate well you know not a lot of people not a lot of people dropping out of that study normally we do a clinical trial it is really hard to get people to sign up for it we have people breaking down the door they're just give me trouble they're like wait wait wait wait I get to either eat blessed chocolate or just eat chocolate yeah that's what you're asking me to do I'm in yeah Gourmet brand dark chocolate for free except that you had to fill out your mood scale every day over the course of a week the three middle days of the week is when you would have to eat the chocolate so both conditions are about as similar as we can possibly make it we even recorded we had them take a personality test to record their degree of neuroticism using the so-called Big Five scale neuroticism is important because mood fluctuates more in people who tend to be more neurotic so we wanted to control for that as well we also did all of this in the San Francisco Bay area so that during that one week the weather would be the same for everybody because weather is also a a a factor that will push mood around so we tried to control so that the controls and the treated people were under the same conditions so we did that experiment and the end result showed that there was a statistically significant difference for the people getting the treated chocolate in the direction that we'd predicted they had better mood under double-blind conditions so a colleague of mine so we published that so a colleague of mine in Taiwan said can we try to replicate that with a much larger group of people and I said sure to the people in Taiwan eats chocolate well some of them do but more often they would drink tea so we said okay let's make a gigantic batch of Oolong tea separate into two bins put them in little tiny bottles and recruit a hundred people in each of the two conditions three Buddhist monks as a temple imprinted the Blessed tea so that to improve their mood and they were the same kind of experimental design and got the same results statistically significant results we have improved mood and the people getting the Blessed tea under double blind conditions now in that case we also ask people afterwards before we told them what kind of tea they got what do you think you got do you think you got the blessed day or do you think you got the other T just to to gauge their expectation and we found something interesting we found that if they got the Blessed tea and they believed that they got the Blessed tea they got a monstrously big positive change in their mood so you can say okay it's a combination of placebo maybe plus something else but then we asked the people who got the Blessed tea but did not believe that they got the Blessed tea they showed no effect at all so as you were mentioning before your belief strongly modulates what amounts to a magical effect and there are many other experiments in in the domain of parapsychology that have looked at how belief on an individual basis modulates whether or not you see these effects you also had mentioned that if you're in a context where you have complete and absolute belief in something which is kind of unusual especially for something exotic the effects can be monstrous but it's very very difficult for us in the modern world to gain that level of belief in something you always have a little doubt saying well I don't know if this is real that doesn't necessarily squash the effect but it does lower it quite a bit right well this so there's something else you talked about in the book which I thought was great which is it's bringing back this concept of saying grace but doing this if you did this from a magical principle where you're actually legitimately blessing the food and in in this you don't have to be a Buddhist monk or a Mongolian Shaman to do this just understanding that in this idea that we all have the capability to offer blessings you know we all have the capability of of practicing certain forms of magic and the act of blessing your food will actually change the change what actually happens internally as you ingest the food and there's been studies on this done I I wrote about one of these studies in my book on the day which was they had two milkshakes and they told you know they told they told a group that well they have one milkshake sorry so they had one milkshake double blind study we have one milkshake they told one group that the milkshake was actually super healthy for them and didn't have you know didn't have a lot of sugar didn't have a lot of this and then they told the other group that this is packed with sugar it's a really like indulgent decadent milkshake well it turns out that it was the same indulgent decadent milkshake that they gave to both people but the people who believed that this was a very healthy a very healthy like metabolically supportive milkshake had a measurable difference in their insulin response in a variety of you know measurable biological conditions based upon their belief about the milkshake they were having and I think we see this phenomenon played out is like as soon as you think that gluten is going to be you know the internal devil that's going to wreak havoc all over your whole body well sure as hell gluten is going to do it where you find somebody in Italy that's like give me the pizza give me the pasta like let's go this is like part of our culture we love it and it doesn't have the same effect and I think people are overlooking it's not that gluten isn't a real thing and gluten can't affect things like inflammation of course it can but the belief about gluten can actually really start to fundamentally shift what you're thinking so this idea of blessing even the pizza or blessing even the bread and then and then instead of thinking of it as poison but thinking of it as this is nourishment from you know from the land and Imagining the sun that's caused the crops to grow in the water that's come through and all of that really does make a difference so it's kind of the the invitation is to bring these practices back in ourself right and so to continue the story then of the two experiments I just mentioned was similar to what you're saying here it's about your internal belief changing the way that you end up feeling even under double blind conditions so the next step though is is there actually a physical change like did the chocolate chemistry change or did the T change and somehow molecularly so we did another experiment where the target was again uh the Buddhist monks blessing water which was used to grow plants and to see whether the plants had changed again double-blind conditions where the technician who was growing the plants had no idea what kind of water they were using monstrously strong results there with better growth with the Blessed water than with the not less water and then we replicated that again using stem cells as the Target and use the water to make the growth medium of the stem cells so it's not only that you can internally change because the Mind Body Connection is so strong but it goes beyond the body into objectively measurable effects outside which now starts to look a little bit more interesting now we're moving slowly towards an aerokinetic effect or Saint Joseph levitating the effects that we see in terms of the magnitude again I want to emphasize this that when you do an experiment on demand under highly controlled conditions you get to statistically very strong effects sometimes and so the effect is real it's a real thing but it's it's small in magnitude you know we're not levitating pieces of chocolate and we're you know it's nothing like that but we're seeing real effects that happen the plants really are different in size but that gives us very high confidence that the kinds of effects that we hear like of the story of your sister yeah that could happen under the right conditions under the the right context the set and setting all the motivation whatever all of that it says in principle that kind of effect can be real and so this kind of it's just an it's just an outlier of you know the in in the same phenomena phenomenological field which has been reified which has been the the phenomenological field has been made real and this is just an outlier of this particular case in this particular day was far beyond what you would ever expect and that not just an outlier because sometimes it is taken at least within statistics as a mistake right it's a fluke it's an error well in this case if not error it's it is not even an outlier in that sense it actually is a real phenomena it's just much much bigger than we we generally will see because to do that kind of a thing on demand is very rare Yeah you mentioned uh to speak to speak to this you did a meta-analysis on Rupert sheldrake's kind of famous experiment about whether someone could detect whether someone was looking at them someone was observing them and you know what would you showed I'll let you talk about the statistical significance of it but you're saying that basically 54 if I remember roughly of the people people could actually detect when someone was looking at them or when someone was not but with the actual size when you did the meta-analysis it was like 34 000 different people who'd been through this if I recall the numbers correctly then all of a sudden that 54 which is a very small you know you would expect 50 50 you know you either would or you wouldn't if it was pure chance but that extra four percent is actually meaningful when you have uh a size that big and actually goes beyond statistical significance in the business we say that the the result of a four percent shift above chance when you have tens of thousands of subjects is it gazillion to one odds against chance I mean it's such a large number that is basically meaningless at that point you say yes we have extremely high confidence that this is a real effect so I think I also talked about in real magic we in our laboratory we took the next step what Rupert had done was generally working with students and generally in the same room or sometimes in through a window somewhere else we did experiments where we'd very strictly isolate people in in two different locations and used a one-way video system for the person being stared at so you're sitting in a room and we wire grew up to look at your physiology and we just say for the next 30 minutes somebody might or might not be looking at you through that camera and otherwise you just sit there you don't there's nothing else to do because there's you don't have any monitors or anything and then the other side of the system is the person assigned to be staring and so a computer will occasionally show your live video on a monitor in front of the person who's assigned staring and when your face pops up they stare at you and oftentimes internally also you try to mentally grab the other person and shake them and then the image goes away and you withdraw your mind from the task so the underlying hypothesis then is that when you look at the person being stared at you look at their physiology like their heart rate or their skin conductance or pupil dilation that that will change when they're being stared at because that would be the physiological equivalent of somebody in the real world saying I feel creepy and then they turn around and see somebody staring at them so there are 36 formal experiments in multiple Labs doing that kind of experiment with something like over a thousand different pairs of people involved when you do a meta-analysis it's very clear that people's physiology does change usually in the direction of sympathetic arousal when they're being stared at as compared to when they're not being stared at so once again very rigorous conditions do this on demand we get real effects they're not as strong as what you'd see in the real world how outside of the laboratory but they're real so again when you say in principle we know that that kind of effect is actually real yeah so one in another one of the the studies that you talked about was using mediums and then flashing different pictures of people and then they tried to decide whether that person was alive or dead based on the photo and this was part of their practice and again what you saw was that some were actually highly effective individually statistically significant in their ability to detect whether someone was alive or dead just based on a photo no but you know nobody that they would know and uh and some were obviously it seems like not as skilled or they had an off day or something like that but overall again in as a as a conglomerate in the aggregate you once again showed statistical significance in that phenomenon as well right and once again that was driven by what mediums tell us about their experience that they some of them can look at a picture and just like in a snap they get it this person's alive or this person's dead they feel the difference so we made this experiment to test that report and that too surprisingly some people are really really good at that and some are not so good the other thing that we do and that be given that it's an experiment is we selected uh photographs of people all of which were taken kind of the same way and in that particular experiment we've done it several times now but as one example we used uh pictures of police who had died in various ways and this was a memorial site online so it was a public site so we took each picture and then we had to adjust the picture so that the faces were we knew direction of the face we knew whether they were looking to the left or the right something about their where their eyes are looking whether they're smiling or not so all of these things were all balanced across the domain of we knew that half of the pictures of people were alive and half of them they were no longer alive and even under those conditions which again we were blinding the medium as to whether this person's alive or dead they're still able to do that task it's so with all of this with all of this evidence and you know there's other evidence with the with the you know kind of mass random number generation we can get into that but so across so many fields there's so much support for these you know again the Hermetic principle all is mine the universe is mental the idealism is as you call it or you know this perennial philosophy all of this is pointing to actually a different fundamental system however people just refuse it seems like refuse to accept even this this evidence right and it's it's it must be a very strange position for you to be in to have be sitting on all of this massive amount of evidence and being denied publication in journals you know you can tell that story as well which you tell in the book but it's it's guy it's a little bit it's got to be a little bit frustrating to have been dedicating your life work to this and say look we got the goods here everybody like here it is and still everybody's like no no no we don't want to hear it yeah the the Curious Thing is that there is a public taboo but there's also a private response so publicly I hate to use the word mainstream but that there is kind of a mainstream way that science has presented that news everything is presented by the big the big guns and and the media business including within science and so the taboo is there very clearly uh the taboo says that this stuff is woo-woo and don't don't need to pay attention to it because it's fantasy but privately there's a very different response and this is true across the board in the academic world among scientists among Engineers among people who are highly trained within the materialistic tradition so as an example we did a survey among scientists and engineers at mainstream Academia like top tier universities around the United States and we asked them not did you what what do you believe about psychic phenomena because that's already a bias in terms of how you ask the question instead we asked a series of 25 questions about experiences that you may have had so have you ever had the experience whether you hear the phone ring and you instantly know who's calling even without ringtones or anything else you just somehow know and even stranger that you were thinking about somebody you haven't thought about in 20 years and the phone rings and there they are so we ask these kinds of questions among academics scientists and engineers and 90 percent plus actually over 90 percent said that they had at least one of those kinds of experiences personally so they were asking about what you believe or saying what did you experience over 90 have these things so then you know and if you ask people who are into new AG stuff well above 99 have had these experiences but even among people you would expect to be fully immersed within materialism we're human we we have the same experiences if you that and asked them to publicly say whether or not they believe in it you get a completely different result you get the result which is reflected by the mainstream this stuff is nonsense it doesn't it's not real or the people said yes they have this experience they would explain it away as a fluke in their own experience and say yeah that happened once but who knows if that's real well they could know that it was real if they read the literature because the literature has tested those things and we know that it's real from a scientific perspective but they're not they're not within the domain where they can spend time looking at that literature because unfortunately the way the internet is now if you start typing in uh something about psychic whatever you'll get a flood of information and it's very difficult for somebody to then discriminate where where do I get credible information well if you know where to look you can find it but if you don't know where to look you can end up with a lot of stuff which is probably not very credible so yeah the public private split is very similar to what you'd find in any kind of taboo it's it's like the uh in some of the original um legal cases having to do with pornography where the judge basically just says well I don't need a definition of it I'll know it when I see it right so that's this is no longer exactly this is not science but everyone knows what it is but if you you come down to a brass tax and you say well is it real or not it takes a certain degree of motivation and looking at the right literature and maybe understanding something about the way science is done to appreciate why it's real so the experience is there underlying number of people who are paying close attention to it is private not public and that's not only in the academic world it's also true in the military in the government and everywhere else in the world that I've gone it's societal so if I go to India and I've been invited to go to India many times to talk about this stuff it is absolutely top tier both government and Science and Academia that's where I give those talks the same is true in Southeast Asia the same is true and even in Australia you go to the United States you never are invited to top tier places to talk about this stuff unless it's in private so in private I've talked to top brass in the Navy top brass in the army people in the intelligence World lots of places but only in private yeah it's almost like UFO sightings which is now becoming more acceptable but like you know lots of different Pilots where you know they don't go on record talking about it because it's if people think oh a crazy crazy person but then in private they'd be like yeah I was flying this F-16 this one day and I like we were chasing this thing and it was moving in a way that you could never possibly imagine and it seems like people are getting more courage coming out talking about these things but there is a massive taboo and you know people have been attacked and slandered and you know for claiming sightings of UFOs but it's it's kind of in the similar in the similar vein that we're talking about is you have to have the courage to be you know kind of attacked for challenging this belief that we're the only sentient life forms in the universe yeah and of course in in my field it's a little bit different because we are doing repeatable experiments and we are increasingly publishing in major stream journals too so we're seeing I would say over the past 40 years or so where I've been doing this kind of work we can see that initially back in the 80s you could get this kind of work published in specialty journals there may be 100 people would look at and this is slowly changing and the change is accelerated vastly within the last 10 years as a result of legalization of psychedelics and and showing that they're actually really useful so it's the first on purpose is and simultaneously the mainstreaming of meditation so just as it was in the 1960s you had more and more people beginning to come to personally recognize that what's going on inside your head makes very significant changes in your body and also outside so that's why the the field now is slowly opening it up and what we're seeing is that you see in every controversial field the people who are older and were more attached to the status quo they don't like this stuff they don't feel comfortable with it but as younger people come along especially younger people learning about quantum mechanics and this strangeness of that they're more and more open so I am pretty confident that this taboo will eventually dissolve it'll take a while they might take another generation or two but it is dissolving as we speak and you know you look at Trends in younger demographics and it seems like you know as like if you you know feel the vibe of what's happening on like The Tick Tock demographic for example it seems like people are a lot more open to these phenomenon than older Generations that have had this kind of entrainment into these other belief systems and it's really interesting and I thought one of the beautiful Parts about the book was not only is it talking about this from a historic perspective and a scientific perspective but there's also practicum in here with you know with ample caveats of like look these are these are intense Realms that you could be getting into especially the Realms of theurgy like calling on calling on spirits and all of these things like proceed with absolute caution and there's good reasons to avoid any of these kind of black magic sorcery bruharia practices so you have some nice caveats but also some like gentle nudges about like all right if you really want to do this like here are the steps to take so if somebody's listening and they're like all right I want to cultivate my own mad magical practices we talked about blessing our food as as one of them but what are some other practical ways that people can access their own internal magical abilities well number one of course is to meditate to you need to get your surface mind out of the way which is sort of what I mean you want to silence your mind if you're not used to meditating it's not that easy to silence your mind I mean about the closest you'll get to it in the spontaneous ways daydreaming where you suddenly realize I wasn't thinking about anything for the last 10 minutes well that's kind of it but you do it in a disciplined way and so for the magical traditions we call that the state of gnosis so you're dropping down deeper and deeper into Realms of the mind that seem like they begin to overlap with the realm of the physical so the mental and physical are no longer quite so separate the farthest down and of course it's metaphorically down that you're you're going into these spaces so that's where magic starts to become very powerful if you're not if you don't want to meditate you're not you don't care about that stuff well then you take a method like like drawing a Sigil so residual is a symbol it's a way of instantiating an intention so you make very very clear what your intention is whatever it could be anything but you have an intention you start you draw a symbol and I describe ways of making the symbol out of out of your intention and then once you have it you've taken what is otherwise only a purely mental abstract thing in your head and you've put it into the physical world it is now a symbol and a piece of paper that you have well there's various ways of them pushing you can charge so-called the sigil you push it through high emotion through Sexual Energy you can burn it you can do rituals around it and you essentially take your intention and not only have it physical but you unleash it into the world and it just with the Assumption it's going to go out there and it's going to do something so that falls within category of spell casting but in the vernacular it would be like affirmations or manifestation and in my own life I have many many examples not so much using sigils but for me mostly just just doing it mentally like a mental sigil of things that have happened which if you look at the a priori probability of such a thing happening especially as fast as the intention unfolded you would say that it's ridiculous they can't happen that way except that it does and it happens again and again so for somebody starting out with this you don't want to have you as your very first thing I want to have a gold-plated Mercedes show up for me that's an actual car I can drive in my driveway that could be that's an intention you have that it could happen pretty low probability so it's not that great to start with something which starts out with an extremely small probability of success so that said where's my gold-plated Mercedes I have it over here somewhere I actually do have one oh I don't see it now so I said this I said the story it's because it's because somebody else manifested it and they have it now that's what happens if you're turning the gold Mercedes they teleported it to themselves because that was their intention no it's my special little toy what do they do with it well that's what I said someone someone someone someone Someone teleported it sorry so that's what happens when you write books about magic and you have a gold plated Mercedes some of them might come and take your [ __ ] so so I told the story once and somebody was asking about affirmations and uh I said it's difficult to manifest really big things because especially in the case where something like a car shows up because a whole bunch of other people have to be involved in order for that to happen so now we're talking about influencing other people which yeah it's a co-participatory reality right it's not just you in your own reality you can manifest that in your own mind but not in the physical especially influencing other people because they could have their own intentions right so right maybe somebody a car dealer says you know what I'm going to just give this to Dean and then they're going to think about and say why in the world would I ever do that I'm not going to do that and they're they can override my intention so I told the story and somebody listening was a witch and so she sent me this little toy it's a gold-plated Mercedes it's this big it's like a little toy and it it is a Mercedes I mean it's Mercedes toy and it's gold and so I got it and and her message to me then was when you do these kinds of intentions you have to be extremely clear about exactly what it is that you want because I didn't specify I was going to get in and write it I just said I would get one well I did get one I can't I don't see it on my desk at the moment but I know it's here somewhere so right that's another message then it comes along with any form of magical practice that especially if it's one involving spell casting where you you're trying to manipulate reality in some way you have to be extremely clear about what it is that you you think you want and recognize that sometimes you don't really want that so be careful what you wish for all right so there's two things two things that I want to talk about one is my own practice using sigil magic so I was taught how to use sigil Magic by my brother Everett and it was a really you know very similar to what you were describing where you either take a word and you remove the vowels or you take a sentence and you remove and you just use the first consonant at each of those and then so you have a string of consonants basically either from one word or either from a sentence and then dropping into like the deeper parasympathetic mind the subconscious mind you start to either you know start to put some of the letters the shapes of the consonants into us into a symbol and then iterate iterate iterate and allow in in my practice at least allow my imagination to so it's not like fitting a puzzle together which is very kind of mechanical it's just free association with how these symbols evolve until you get to a symbol and then there's this feeling where you get the sigil and you have the symbol and you're like this is it this is it and you just kind of I just kind of feel it you know I feel like aha I've arrived at this at this sigil and then that sigil then is a Sim is a symbol for whatever it was that I was trying to it was trying to either remember or or affirm or drop you know drop power from and connect to whatever it might be and then again like you said The more intention and the more like you keep that sigil and you kind of meditate on and you feel what the meaning of that is the more powerful it becomes and then you can you know I have some carved into I got a beautiful magical staff made by a wood carver named Chris Isner with the opal on the top just for my own Gandalf fantasies but I put a series of sigils that I'd created that he carved into the into the staff and it's my magical staff and then I bring it into ceremony with me and I've actually named my staff I bring it into ceremony and then in my ceremonial space when I see myself I can see myself with the staff and the staff has magical properties in the astral realm and so this has like been a part this is exposing my own you know and look whether anything's actually happening or not either way this is incredibly fun for me because I get to go into the Astro World with the magical staff that has magical powers that I believe have magical powers in that world in that substrate and I love it so even if I'm a kook I'm having the [ __ ] best time so all you Skeptics fine are you having fun because I'm having fun like I'm enjoying this practice and it's been you know something that I see too is just another practical guide like if you understand sigils and you understand that the symbol can mean something like all of these people writing so many words on their body with tattoos like I mean maybe just think about it like think about condensing all of those words paragraphs whatever you want condense it into a symbol that'll mean the words that you'll know the words charge that up and you'll have something probably a lot more beautiful on your body than a bunch of letters that you're trying to write and again it's just just a gentle suggestion about a different way to do it you know because it would have been really kind of lame if I had on my staff carved a bunch of words in English that were like written on the whole thing this is like this now has been something that's been really like not only enjoyable but really meaningful especially own practice you will occasionally see somebody with quite Angry Words that they're now with the food on their body or even their neck they're thinking of what in the world are you doing there is just starting a uh an organization called the research Network for the study of esoteric practices and it's starting in the UK and part of the funding for that will be to actually test to see if magical practices work using scientific methods so one of the things I proposed and they haven't decided yet if they want to do it is to make sigils in experiments that have actual physical targets where you're trying to mentally interact with those targets so we'll use real sigils that people make and then we'll use some fake ones you know we'll just use a symbol that doesn't mean anything to anybody and then other conditions maybe where there's no sigil and C does it matter if you take an internal intention and you instantiate it in the physical world in the way that you just described doesn't make a difference I think it will make a difference if for no other reason than that your belief is very strongly pushed in the direction where this is now not just something I'm thinking about but it's out there in the world itself that is a I mean we're such kinesthetic creatures we we interact with the world through touch and through things out there I think it will actually work but we can do an experiment and we'll find out does it does it matter how you do the sigil or what it looks like or any of those kinds of questions those are are questions that are studyable which is what excites me yeah all right so the next the next one is uh the practice of manifestation and this practice of of calling forth through force of will some intent you know with reality and the a lot of people are familiar with the sex magic practices which is basically the idea that you put yourself in an energetic state of ecstasy which is a very high energetic State and from that energetic State you have a greater ability to influence and influence reality from that state and I think that's one of the very popular practices that exist now but again in in conversation with my brother Matthias DiStefano he said there's another way to do it and the other is manifestation from laughter which is actually you bring your state you bring yourself to those super high states of ecstatic Consciousness I mean laughter is just an orgasm with a different spasm in a way and so you bring yourself to that and then whatever your whatever you're trying to manifest you have to actually think of at least three people was his guidance and the guidance that he remembers from the old ways and the old magical practices think of at least three people that this manifestation would benefit and the more people that this would benefit the more likely the universe is going to help respond and collaborate with your efforts and that's always stuck with me is something that just feels like well that makes sense you know I can get down with that and we've practiced that in in different ways and had some pretty I mean pretty cool results where things have happened and again could have been chance you know could have been could have been that there was an influence based upon getting a group together bringing him into a state of laughter and then from that state of laughter dropping into the deep subconscious prayer you know seeing it as it's already been done you know which is again was yeshua's teaching pray as if it has already been done and and then allowing that belief to suffuse our body entirely and and in that state of joy and Rapture and then it's been pretty phenomenal to just experience the results that have happened and it's not foolproof it's not like every time that happens or every bit of guidance or divination that comes in is spot on and always bring you know I can't help but bring a little bit of skepticism with me in it but also a healthy amount of belief and I think there's a a nice tension between both of those we don't get so lost in it that you think that you can just do anything and understand everything about the universe because you know you have some flexibility that all right I'm just incrementally influencing things by this and I fully believe that but I also understand we're in a co-participatory universe and the universe has to in the universe as represented by the many different people in the universe and other many different beings and other the entirety of the of the cosmos has to kind of be in resonance with this with this desire and if so some pretty astounding things can happen yeah and as you mentioned it's also important to not fall down too far down the rabbit hole so because you can start seeing Omens and everything and start seeing coincidences that really are coincidence and that just synchronicity yeah totally so remaining grounded while doing magical practice this is one of the reasons why I liked uh the the approach that uh Crowley had had used which was that think of this like a science experiment it's you know it's not using all the the paraphernalia of science but at least journaling I tried this we did this and then this happened or this didn't happen because you could do that repeatedly you'll eventually build up a repertoire that works for you because the methods will work differently for different people and it probably will make a difference of what the what's the environment outside like what's the weather where's the moon there are lots and lots of things which interact with these kinds of abilities and not just in magical practice but in any kind of human performance I mean we've done studies for example where we correlate the state of the earth geomagnetic field as compared to how accurate psychic perception is and we know that during days of quiet geomagnetic activity it's much better than it is in days of Stormy geomagnetic activity so there's a relationship between the Earth's magnetic field the solar wind all kinds of things that the Ancients probably knew pretty well that's why there's lots of lore about the phase of the moon which also makes a difference the relatively subtle effects but we're talking about subtle effects too subtle effects in the mind that could have a big effect in the in the physical world but if you don't get to that right place in the mind you may end up with nothing yeah yeah I mean I think that's uh that's the right way to look at it is to just be be really curious and to start practicing how to wield wield belief is as part of your life but also not not again get lost in this lost in the sauce so to speak and lose your grounding on reality because in those cases you know if something if something happens that that really doesn't go in accord with what your belief field you know what you've been manifesting it can be really devastating in a way if you don't actually open yourself to that to the possibility that yeah this this may this may not happen you know and it doesn't mean that you failed it doesn't mean that you throw away the whole practice it just means this experiment for whatever reason didn't work out you know and and so try again right yeah to discipline so it's similar to like I meditate and the degree and and depth of the meditation changes day by day and I I don't think I have that much control over it I think I'm doing about the same thing every day but clearly I'm influenced by what I ate the night before and what the weather is today and there's all kinds of things so when you again as you get into these subtle states of mental awareness we are participating in the rest of the universe and even more so the rest of our local Universe including what's going on in the body so yeah so you just look at this you look at Trends over long periods of time and then you can see significant effects happening but it takes a while yeah and the other thing that I would mention is a small percentage of people when they start meditating will have a psychotic break we're talking about one percent two percent something like that and all meditation teachers know that that that some people are not should enter into these kinds of practices very slowly and typically with a good teacher to kind of watch what's happening along the way so it's pretty rare for someone to actually end up going crazy essentially but it can happen in and most of this is unconscious and we don't so we don't can't tell always personally in advance of what's going to happen so that's the one of the reasons why I put him in my book if you're going to go into this domain do it cautiously and especially the case with psychedelic medicines you know I've seen I've seen psychotic breaks happen multiple times in in different ceremonies and it's something to be very mindful of it's why you know I always I'm definitely an advocate for the responsible use of psychedelic medicine but you have to include the caveat that this is not for everybody and proceed with Extreme Caution this is this is meditation on another level well you know I mean when you're meditating you can typically pull yourself out in most cases be like I'm gonna stop that's too much same with breath work you're like I'll I'm slowing my breathing down you know well let's chill for a second but if you're you know taking LSD for example which has led to a disproportionately high number of psychotic breaks I think out of the other ones well you're in there for an eight-hour Journey you know what I mean that's nothing you're blessed to this Inner Space and you you can't get out right right yeah so it's definitely an important caveat in all of these fields and Realms well this has really been really exciting to interact with your work and to know you exist and to make this connection and um you know maybe there's a timeline out there where I bring uh a couple of modern uh Merlin class Merlin class Wizards and and Priestess is over and we'll run some experiments together and uh and see if we can find some interesting uh scientific effects as I explore looking and searching and Gathering the Wizards that I can find uh find in this beautiful world I look forward to it yeah for sure well thank you for your work I mean you've really dedicated your life to to this and uh it's just uh it's an honor to talk to you and I really just uh appreciate your approach and everything you've done and the dedication that you've given to this field and and like you said at the end of the book I think this is one of the important pieces of the puzzle as we build the new story that is going to bring us from these potential dystopian and existential risk realities into another reality that is you know really that as Charles eisenstein says the more beautiful world our hearts know as possible I think this plays a significant role I agree oh it's been my pleasure yeah yeah thank you appreciate you and thanks everybody for tuning in thanks for tuning in to this video make sure you hit subscribe follow me at Aubry Marcus check out the Aubrey Marcus podcast available everywhere and leave a comment let me know if this video resonated or what else you would like to hear from me in the future thank you so much

Channel: Aubrey Marcus

Views: 459,241

Keywords: aubrey, marcus, aubrey marcus, Aubrey Marcus Podcast, dean radin, real magic, dr dean radin, dean radin parapsychology, telepathy explained, dean radin phd, psychic phenomena, dean radin manifestation, dean radin consciousness, dean radin meditation, dean radin magic, clairvoyance, how to manifest, self development

Id: MY0XGtijebQ

Length: 96min 53sec (5813 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 08 2023