Richard Smoley: The Truth about Magic

thank you john it's a pleasure to be here here is the book in question the truth about magic and i'd also like to point out to you that this book is also available in an audio and video series with essentially the same content on vimeo so you can track the book on amazon and order the audio and video series on vimeo depending on your preference of course so tonight's topic is the truth about magic and of course i don't know the whole truth about magic nobody does i don't know the whole truth about anything but i am willing to say a little bit uh about the subject without too much superstitious nonsense or without too much snide skepticism or debunking let me further add that when i talk about magic i am not talking about sleight of hand magic of the type where you pull a quarter out of a little boy's ear or you have this enormous stage show in vegas with sounds and lights and all sorts of wonderful effects that is sleight of hand magic stage magic i admire the people who do it enormously i have no idea how to do it myself i am not going to be talking about it i'm going to be talking about what is uh often called occult magic and i will start by going back to 1890 when the scholar jg frazier author of the classic work golden bow first published that work and he essentially divided human religious experience into three categories one was magic that is to say you were using these ritual methods uh chants amulets to manipulate these unseen forces to achieve certain ends it was pretty much a cause and effect relation according to frasier this didn't work so instead of attempting to manipulate or command these forces humans got the idea that they should start asking them nicely if not begging them and that frazier said was the origin of religion religion he said was a confession of human impotence now frasier was a good victorian and like a good every good victorian uh he believed that science had the answer to everything so of course he took the third stage to be science as we know it today or some version of what we know it today it was going to provide all the answers i would like to respectfully submit to you that that is not the case and that it is more obviously not the case on a day-to-day basis but that is a subject for another lecture in any case these things are not as easily separated as frasier might have wanted us to think in fact in the 1920s there was a scholar named lynn thorndike who published a monumental work called the history of magic and experimental science and this work in several volumes occupies about this much of a shelf and as a result we can say that magic and science um at least bore into each other so we can set aside all of these arbitrary uh concepts of magic was one primitive stage religion kind of came next and now of course we have the truth as codified by you know the laws of physics or whatever in fact magic is practiced all around the world it has been practiced all around the world for as anyone knows uh for as long as anyone has been able to keep any record and beyond because primitive artifacts suggest that these objects may have had a magical function of course when you're dealing with people who didn't leave you any writings um you're speculating they didn't write anything so you just draw up a theory and of course you have to convince everybody that uh that's the truth and that's um what academic scholarship is another subject i will um fortunately for you not go into tonight nevertheless magic has been practiced and this leads us to the most obvious question about magic well the most obvious question about magic is what is it well in this context it is attempting to cause effects in the world through shall we say unseen causes or causes that are not normally considered to be part of the physical world switching on a light uh with a switch in the corner is not magic but attempting to do things ranging from well let's say you're not very uh ethical person to get someone to fall in love with you uh maybe you and this was done in rural times maybe you didn't like the people over the hill so you would do something to cause their cows to dry up which may sound kind of funny now but this was not a time when you went to the store and got milk for 269 a gallon um this was your livelihood if not your life so people did this they did magic for both good and for bad did it work well we have one answer in the fact that this has been done continually throughout human history as i've already said well then you might want to say um if magic works so well why doesn't everybody do it now and i will give again a very uh simple and clear answer to that because it is almost impossible to do these kinds of things without unintended and undesired consequences i had a friend years ago who had a boyfriend who was starting a business for this business he needed ten thousand dollars so she did a magical working of some kind to get him this ten thousand dollars well it just so happened that she was finishing medical school at this point and she was moving out of her dorm and she had all of her belongings loaded into her car and somebody broke into the car and stole them and the insurance settlement was guess what ten thousand dollars so did it work yeah uh did a lot of things happen to make it work that maybe she didn't really want yeah and that is always a rather fraught issue in the world of magic so i'm suggesting to you that these things can work and do work under certain circumstances but with very very unpredictable side effects as a result many people have chosen to steer clear of them it's basically like uh teenagers how many teenagers have you known or i know who yeah let's get this magic kind of teen wicca stuff this sounds kind of cool let's do that so they try something and then oh my god it works and the smart ones are just terrifying i'm not touching this stuff again the stupid ones say wow let's see what we can do this the really smart ones say you know i may not want to play with this stuff but this does point to realities that the world around me isn't telling me about and maybe i should look into those so that in a sense is magic and whether it works and we can divide magic into a few categories maybe an almost infinite number of categories but one very common one has to do with working with spirits that is to say creatures who exist in the world around us but we do not normally see or perceive with our senses of course again to the rationalistic mind this sounds ridiculous but let's go back to science for a minute there is an enormous electromagnetic spectrum ranging from sound low sound waves to cosmic waves or whatever our per sight can see like a little bandwidth of this our hearing can perceive another little bandwidth of this so there is a whole continuum of reality uh that our senses are not set up to perceive some scientists these days argue that well it's a matter of evolution we develop these sentence senses as they are uh to focus on survival that may be or may not be but our five familiar senses do not uh encompass the whole world we kind of well yeah there are microscopes and telescopes and we we've pushed the boundaries a little bit but we have no reason to believe we push them totally i would also suggest that these other realities can be perceived by us except not with the familiar senses these are with senses that we don't know a great deal about because for at least the last 200 years the intellectual authorities have been insisting that there were no such thing i'm talking about things like psychokinesis that is moving things from a distance um uh telepathy that is communicating mentally across a distance clairvoyance seeing something from a distance or possibly seeing things like auras in people i do know people who can do that it's an extremely rare skill and most of the people i've known who've had it were simply born with it maybe they got a little training on the way but i would also suggest that we have these senses in ourselves and the reason we haven't developed them is we've been told we don't have them if someone told you from your childhood and everyone in your society believed there was no such thing as pianos much less the ability to play the piano well guess what nobody would know how to play the piano uh and i suggest we're dealing with something similar to that here i did mention clairvoyance and i want to make a little point about that clairvoyance see things that people don't see ordinarily my personal view is that most people have psychic powers but they're not expressed in the ways i've just described they are kinesthetic meaning in this sense they have to do with a felt sense if you go into a creepy old house you may not see ghosts and demons maybe nothing visible but this place gives me the creeps i just don't like it here i love the beginning of every horror movie you know uh this couple's like looking through this old sinister house you know there's like you know dark substances dripping from um uh the ceiling and you know the wife says to the husband honey this place gives me the creeps and he says yeah me too let's make an offer um you know otherwise the movie wouldn't happen but as you know horror movies are basically uh predicated on every character doing the least rational and least sensible thing in any given set of circumstances um let's hope that doesn't strain your uh uh credulity too much but people have these senses on a a regular basis you know people have good feelings and bad feelings about people about places about things and usually they find not that these are infallible but they do find that this is an important source of information that you neglect at your own peril that is to say the place gives you the creeps well gee it's two hundred thousand dollars uh cheaper than every other place on the market you know comparable size well i guess you have to factor all that in but if you don't factor in that kind of kinesthetic felt sense this just doesn't feel good to me you're probably going to make some kind of mistake and of course the reason people love their animals their pet animals so much is that animals have much fewer filters against this you know the dog really doesn't like that person the cat really doesn't like that person and you get a sense that yeah they're not infallible either but you get a sense that they're picking up on something that you may not be picking on up on so that is the kind of the background of the kind of powers that i believe we have uh whether we want to admit them or uh or not or whether we want to cultivate them or not and magic would be to say well let's say there are these entities out there whom we can perceive in some sort of way perhaps we can interact with them and this is the basis of the oldest and most universal of all human religions which is shamanism shamanism is not an established religion um like the roman catholic church uh it has no sacred texts or books nonetheless it has been practiced again universally and as far as we can tell since time immemorial and a great deal of shamanic practice has to do with through various methods psychically entering other realms interacting with beings there for purposes such as healing or maybe for not such good purposes and a relationship with the spirits is an important part of this uh process uh one common form of shamanism which is kind of a distilled uh version from uh which is called michael harner's core shamanism well you can do workshops on this you know you'll go and you'll actually make contact with the shall we say essence of a particular type of animal which then becomes your power animal which gives you certain qualities powers and attributes that you might not otherwise have had that's at one level at another level you contact spirits of a higher sort who are kind of paternal guardian guiding spirits and if you want some help or you want some information about something you consult them so shamanism is very very much about this encounter with the unseen worlds and again it has very very palpable effects shamans will often perform medical cures that medical science wasn't able to do a lot of times people go to these uh sources like shamans only after uh all the conventional medical means failed most of the people i've known who've done this sort of thing didn't do it because they were superstitious and you know didn't trust doctors and hospitals that uh they did this very often as a last resort sometimes it worked sometimes it didn't but that means also that a lot of the most advanced sophisticated medical techniques and medicines don't always work either a thing which i suspect you did not just learn from me right now so this is one of the you interact with the spirits in some kind of ways ritual ways it usually involves some withdrawal from the ordinary world as we know it and again a major feature of the sacred in all traditions um including but not limited to the shamanic is this break this separation between the worlds of the sacred and the profane and in order to make these kinds of contacts you isolate yourself from the profane ordinary world how do you do this uh in many cases you isolate yourself by cutting yourself off from the ordinary physical satisfactions of life which may involve sexual abstinence fasting and any number of other things the idea is you're closing yourself away from ordinary reality often um going off into a secluded a literal secluded space whether in a temple or out in the wild or wherever and thereby uh making these communications and enacting uh what you need to enact so that is one type of magic in the western world uh there's there's been uh ritual or occult magic often again involving all kinds of spirits uh entities uh the western world uh has had i won't say the misfortune but maybe i'm thinking that of um having had some of its mentality shaped by christianity and christianity's mentality about these things goes back to the first epistle of john in the new testament where it says try the spirits to see they are of god if they confess that jesus christ is the son of god they are of god if not they are the antichrist well this has given rise to all sorts of things uh one of which is this radical junk disjuncture between the good spirits and the bad spirits angels and demons is this accurate well i think it's a bit of an oversimplification because if you take the analogy of the natural world there are huge numbers of creatures around us uh insect you know things we can't see things that we'll never see because they're at the bottom of oceans and that kind of thing are they good or bad well from a human point of view the vast majority of them are neither good nor bad they're living their lives uh living what they live on uh we've managed to domesticate some a few species of animals which we use for uh either a nice steak dinner or beasts of burden or are adored pets but those are very very few there are certain species ranging from wild beasts of prey to humanity's eternal enemy of the mosquito who aren't so beneficial but even those are quite rare so we could say that most of the natural world is neutral as far as we're concerned it doesn't hate us it doesn't love us it's minding its own business let me then suggest that the unseen worlds are very much the same way let's say there are all sorts of beings out there all sorts of creatures um some of them may be malevolent uh some of them may be positively beneficent the majority maybe just you know going about their own business trying to live their own lives in whatever realm they live in uh some of them may be beautiful some of them may be ugly that doesn't uh really help us too much because if you go back to the analogy of the natural world there are beautiful flowers that are extremely poisonous and they're hideously ugly creatures in the sea and um on the earth and everywhere else that are completely harmless to us the actual appearance has very very little to do uh with their shall we say goodness or badness in relation to us so we can um assume that the unseen worlds are very similar that much said it would lead you to exercise a certain amount of caution in exploring these worlds just as you would if you were exploring the rain forest or any other unknown terrain because again appearances are deceiving uh you could be disturbing something that really could get pretty mad at you um you know a lot of the western occult um you know uh compendium has to do with all of these like demons uh their their their whole tradition of the demons of king solomon king solomon in the bible was supposed to be a master of demons there's a lot of lore about that and you know you look at these demons well you know you you know this demon is good for finding buried treasure or you know harming enemies or whatever but these these demons are also rather um unreliable and why shouldn't they be i mean if you took the matter face value there's this demon out there minding his own business and you've called him up with these rituals and trying to force him to do something and you know maybe he won't like that whether he's a good demon or a bad demon i mean if somebody broke into your house and started ordering you around um you probably wouldn't be too friendly either so you have to start uh thinking about these things um in in subtle ways the interaction with the inner realms are is always fraught with a certain degree of um a danger but you know so is skydiving if you do want to interact with these forces you had better keep a good grounding in material reality and um ethically your nose would be better be pretty clean because if this sorts of thing um if you have evil motives they will backfire on you the theosophists call this the law of karma and allah karma works in a lot a lot of situations sometimes with a delayed effect sometimes with immediate effects but you better be sure your motives are pretty clean why then would you interact with these things well one of the central legends of western civilization or that is that of faust the original idea was this dr faust dr faustus in uh renaissance germany sold his soul to the devil to gain amazing powers and um you know got to be you know get it on with helen of troy and so on goethe writing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries transformed it faust at that point was not a madman after power but he was a man who desperately so sort sought knowledge and was for the purposes of knowledge that he did this with all that ensued good and bad in fact oswald spengler who wrote a famous book called the decline of the west in the early 20th century even went so far as to characterize european humanity as faustian man that is our desire to go further see things and our civilization is definitely characterized by that in the case of certain legends and even in the case of certain uh maguses that was taken into the unseen realms and the human spirit particularly in the west always wants to go further always wants to push harder and find out what's beyond go to believe that well in curtis tragedy faust is saved make of that what you will so that is one aspect of magic interacting with these unseen beings of whom we may or may not be able to have some uh direct experience again this is a matter of both of natural affinity and training if you have a natural appetite for it well you'll probably want to get training if you have a natural appetite uh for dancing ballet uh it looks like you're kind of good at it when you're young at an early age your parents if they have any sense will send you to ballet school and you may become a great um ballet dancer or not as the case may be it's it's the same with this or indeed with any human endeavor but let's go on to the second aspect of magic and this is shall we say a more contemporary version this idea has been kind of more formulated uh in the last 175 years and the man who really kind of brought it um into focus was a frenchman and eliphaz levy that was his pen name his real name was alfoss louis costa and he almost became a priest but decided to ditch it at the last minute he also had a bit of a run as an anarchist and various other things but eventually he turned to occult magic and in 1854 and 55 or is it 55-56 he published dogma and ritual of high magic and his version of magic was a little different from all of this i mean he didn't deny all of this spirit stuff but he cast it in a very different way he cast it in terms of what he called the astral light if you're french and the astral light well shakespeare may have been thinking of it because shakespeare was familiar with the occult philosophy of his time that is unquestionably clear from any number of passages uh but at one point he said we are such stuff as dreams are made on am astral light is such stuff as dreams are made on we can see that the world of physical world around us as we know it is constructed of something called matter and what this matters is a bit more mysterious than it is normally portrayed all the same we have some concept of it and can work with it the astral light is matter on the level of the psyche thoughts feelings ideas the most common image for it worldwide is that of water or the ocean speaking of which because it is completely fluid and it takes the shape of whatever contained uh nur you put it in now in the this particular case lady would say well the container you put it in is a thought or a magical idea and if you frame this thought shall we say concretely and as vividly as you can it starts to have a certain kind of power that will eventually enable it to materialize in the physical realm because a basic teaching of the alcohol philosophy as in shakespeare and in elephants levy is that everything exists first in this realm of thought but everything exists first in this realm of thought before it manifests on earth i mean you can see this in really quite routine uh instances because uh you're not gonna bake a cake unless you have some idea of the cake oh i'd like to bake a cake uh what kind of cake uh just a cake well you're never going to get anywhere with that you have to concretely visualize it and you know with baking a cake it's a really very straightforward process but the occult theory is saying that everything manifests this way and consequently you can use it in various ways again for good or for evil and so there's the astral light which can be shaped that is one force but let us say there's another force this is what the star wars uh movies are about i mean they call it the force uh in our context it is the life force that is to say vital energy uh you may not think this exists all right then tell me what what the uh difference is otherwise between a living human being and a corpse obviously when when something dies something goes out of it and that is this life force now we all have chi prana there are endless numbers of names for it around the world because people discovered it independently and gave it names in their own language of course now if you take these two things the astral light and the life force and combine them you start to get something very very powerful because you you take this image whatever it is and you focus energy toward it uh the hawaiian uh shamans are known as the kahunas would say you breathe into it apparently well the hawaiians call us halle's white people haoles and i have been told that that means breathless ones and that means because when the christians came they didn't put the power of the breath into their prayers they just sort of you know stood there mumbling how the hawaiians got converted to christianity as a a story that um i can either go into nor exactly no but that's another matter in any case so you take this you you you imbue this with um life energy and uh it has a greater uh chance of materializing let me use a rather mundane example one that requires no occult preconceptions whatsoever right now think of a green lion green lion however you picture well we all know that green lines don't exist all the same you can um have a picture of a green lion however it shapes itself in your mind let's say the idea captures your attention let's say you know how to draw a little bit suddenly you created this cartoon character called a that's a green lion and you kind of do you turn it into a little cartoon you take it some studio and they like it and they do something with it and pretty soon you become a billionaire for something that doesn't really exist in fact i often wonder about cartoon characters uh in this context they they do seem to have almost some independent lives of their own uh walt disney once uh said that he loved mickey mouse more than any woman he'd ever known which tells tells you something about him i suppose um but in any case this can be manifested now well if one person can do this can't a whole group of people do this yes then it becomes a collective thought form and because it's gotten so much more energy thrown into it it has that much more force and this force can be built up the point where it can seem quite real and quite powerful and to have a kind of quasi-independent existence let's say there's this thought form that has had an enormous amount of energy put into it over centuries intense emotional energy directed at it at it uh well the fact that this emotional energy is fear and hatred doesn't really make a lot of difference in the long run because energy is energy remember there's a dark side and a light side of the force that's why that movie is so popular because it actually illustrates something well let's say you have a negative thought farm and you pour centuries of millions of people's hatred fear and aversion into it well it'll start to seem real uh it might seem to have a kind of quasi-independent existence certain people who are vulnerable to it might feel attacked by it so presto what do you have the level does the devil exist as kind of a theological entity uh no i don't believe so but i believe that the devil exists as an aggregor that is to say this collective thought form shaped um fortunately or not uh by the fears and aversions of any number of christians over the centuries and obviously you can see the power of this thought form to this day i mean people live in fear of this idea this thing that um doesn't really exist as a living being but exists as this huge collective image with this enormous repository of energy poured into it and then let me go to the last one at least the last last one that i will treat this evening if you we're talking at some point about the power of intention oh and by the way a great deal of the positive thinking movement of the last hundred years particularly in the united states has a great deal to do with this um in 1910 a man named wallace d wattles published a famous book called the science of getting rich well how do you do you visualize the riches coming to you powerfully and um vividly you're even grateful for them in advance of their coming does this work [Music] i don't know i will say that if it's going to work just some kind of idle wishing is probably not going to do it and also that probably a great deal of practical action is uh likely to be um required in addition but anyway this is the idea behind it um another uh famous practitioner of this school this man named neville goddard said that well you should already envision yourself as already having it otherwise your mind will keep just putting it off into the future and it'll never arrive people swear by these methods uh are there is there something to them i uh let's put it this way i would not say there's nothing to them but let's go to the last aspect that we cannot deal with and if you can put this power into ideas thoughts well why can't you do it to physical objects that are already existing and then we get into this whole realm of talismans amulets sacred statues and everything else some of which often appear to have um quasi-miraculous properties sometimes they may seem to be alive i'll tell you two stories one is by a late friend of mine who was a professor of indian religion he was visiting a temple in india and he actually saw this statue bow that i can tell you about a girlfriend i had years ago i went to visit a collection of tibetan art with her it was in the de young museum in san francisco we got separated and she said you know she was she said then she saw again she saw this buddha or padmasambhava nod and she said that to the couple next did you just see that they said no make of that what you will i was in another gallery so i really am not qualified to comment but sometimes these statues can have appear to have living properties in the russian orthodox tradition there are certain icons which are appear to be or said to be miracle working i think the version of kazan city and russia is said to be and then the russians used to carry the icons into battle before them as kind of talismans all of these point just to a certain kind of sacred force or at any rate some kind of force that's been imbued into the object itself how by will by conscience direction of human attention and force uh and this if you go back to the norse myths um magical swords made this way there are all sorts of legends about magical swords but i'm quite sure that uh whatever effects they had there were plenty of those viking swords that had plenty of spells and whatnot woven into them because people very much believed in that kind of thing and the uh you know the uh you know examples are endless uh the version of guadalupe this uh miraculously painted we're told uh shawl of this mexican indian which kind of just kind of turned up appeared to him and you know basically eight years after the spaniards conquered mexico what is that about i mean it exists it's on display somewhere i mean i've seen any number of images of it as have you but what is this sort of thing about so these things have their own uh power some things are more amenable to this kind of use than others and one of course famous example is crystals uh the crystalline structure has its own unique properties crystals were originally used for healing and are used for healing and they too apparently can be imbued uh with certain intentions in certain certain thoughts um masuro emoto the japanese researcher did a number of strange experiments with water and projected thought forms into various glasses of water and then he analyzed their crystal structures and the ones that had love peace positive energies focus on them had beautiful crystalline structures whereas a typical sample of polluted water taken from god knows where you know had a completely disorganized chaotic structure so again we're talking about the interface between mind mental attention and the physical world and i believe that just about every civilization has understood the importance of this interrelation i think one of the main reasons that we live such uh disjointed lives is that we've just failed to acknowledge this and this is costing staggering amounts in um in human costs as in tens of millions of cases of anxiety depression schizophrenia this kind of denial this kind of utter kind of isolation of oneself conceptually from the world around us visible and invisible i believe it's causing a lot of this do you know where the word idiot comes from comes from the greek idiots and idiots originally meant a private citizen an isolated citizen a man who did not participate in public life and the ancient greeks thought this was utterly reprehensible later it came to mean people who are some way deeply alienated in the 19th century psychiatrists were actually called alienists probably for some reason like this so the sense of this disjuncture between the physical world that we can kind of see and this inner world that we don't really want to see and keep being told doesn't exist is maybe one of the most fundamental diseases of our society today it might even manifest in not directly related effects i have to say the environmental crisis uh which you've all heard uh more about than you wish to hear about although um i suppose we have to hear about it i believe the environmental crisis is in many ways both obvious and subtle uh the result of this isolated mentality of a world that has been kind of deconsecrate the the in which the mystery has lost been lost or pushed so far it's not even lost it's kind of just consciously denied and mocked and that's the way it is do you like that well do you like the effects of what society's like today as a whole is it good do you think things are going great is everybody happy i'm not going to uh i'm not going to draw any conclusions for you in fact let me conclude this discussion by um letting you sit with that and come to your own conclusions what do you think the effects of the loss of magic on this world are thank you it's been a [Music] pleasure you

Channel: Theosophical Society

Views: 16,055

Keywords: theosophical society, magic, esoteric, occult, mind power, psychic, metaphysics, Theosophical Society in America, Richard Smoley

Id: mc7Zeh_NjL8

Length: 48min 17sec (2897 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021