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

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

DEAN RADIN, Ph.D., is Chief Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) and Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies. For nearly four decades he has been engaged in consciousness research. Before joining the research staff at IONS in 2001, he held appointments at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Princeton University, and several Silicon Valley think tanks, including SRI International, where he worked on a classified program investigating psychic phenomena for the U.S. government.

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Chapter 1

Beginning

This book is about magic.

Not the fictional magic of Harry Potter, the feigned magic of Harry Houdini, or the fraudulent magic of con artists. Not blue lightning bolts springing from the fingertips, aerial combat on broomsticks, sleight-of-hand tricks, or any of the other elaborations of artistic license and special effects.

This is about real magic.

Occultists sometimes use the Old English spelling magick to distinguish fictional and stage magic from the real deal. We’ll use the more common term, magic, to avoid unnecessary associations with the occult.

Real magic falls into three categories: mental influence of the physical world, perception of events distant in space or time, and interactions with nonphysical entities. The first type I’ll call force of will; it’s associated with spell-casting and other techniques meant to intentionally influence events or actions. The second is divination; it’s associated with practices such as reading Tarot cards and mirror-gazing. The third is theurgy, from the Greek meaning “god-work”; it involves methods for evoking and communicating with spirits.

Unlike books that discuss beliefs about magic from psychological or historical perspectives, or that list recipes for spell-casting, the goal here is to explore real magic from an evidence-based scientific perspective. Why a scientific approach? You wouldn’t know it by reading most college textbooks, but there’s a vast scientific literature that informs our understanding of real magic. When I was in college, none of my coursework mentioned anything about that literature. But now, after four decades of experimentally studying magic, motivated by scientific curiosity and without a religious background that might have biased me to be overly sympathetic about metaphysical concepts, I’ve come to two conclusions.

First, there’s no doubt that science is the most accurate lens on reality that humanity has developed so far. What we’ve collectively discovered about the nature of Nature over the last three or four centuries, from the quantum to the cosmological, is an awe-inspiring testament to our creativity and imagination. Technologies based on that knowledge provide proof that our discoveries are valid. So, when considering real magic, it would be foolish to just throw away what we’ve already learned.

But second, reality viewed through the lens of science is an exceedingly thin slice of the whole shebang. Science is tightly focused on the objective, measurable, physical world. That focus excludes the one and only thing you can ever know for sure--your consciousness, that inner spark of sentience that you call “me.”

While science as a practice has primarily concentrated on the objective world, scientific methods are extremely powerful, so if we wish we can redirect our lens to look inward and explore what consciousness is capable of. When we do that, we are startled to find whole new realms of knowledge. One of the consequences of taking this inner perspective is that the idea of magic transforms from an impossible fantasy into an aspect of Nature that we can begin to study. From this stance, terms such as paranormal and supernatural are seen as quaint and antediluvian, similar to how modern medicine no longer needs the concept of “bad humors” when discussing the origins of disease.

We’ll explore this new realm of knowledge through two major themes. First, based on a substantial body of experimental evidence, we can state with a high degree of confidence that real magic exists. Second, there are rising trends in science suggesting that what was once called magic is poised to evolve into a new scientific discipline, just as medieval astrology and alchemy evolved into today’s astronomy and chemistry. The new discipline will be the study of the psychophysical nature of reality, that mysterious, interstitial space shimmering between mind and matter. Understanding how this enigmatic space works in a way that’s consistent with the rest of science requires a new worldview--the lens through which we understand reality.

Another theme we’ll discuss is that magic didn’t miraculously disappear with the rise of the scientific worldview. Magic is still intensely present. Prayer is a form of intentional magic, a mental act intended to affect the world in some way. Wearing a sacred symbol is a form of sympathetic magic, a symbolic correspondence said to transcend time and space. Many religious rituals are forms of ancient ceremonial magic. The abundance of popular books on the power of affirmations and positive thinking are all based on age-old magical principles.

From a conventional scientific perspective, these widespread practices are considered examples of infantile magical thinking, fairy tales. Some scientists even use the word magic as a synonym for nonsense, because it implies the scientifically appalling idea that some things “just happen” for no discernible or plausible cause. But magic doesn’t mean “no cause.” It just means that we haven’t yet developed scientifically acceptable theories to explain these effects. As we’ll see, there are already important hints that may lead to such theories, so it’s best to think of real magic not as something impossibly mysterious, but as a forerunner of the future of science.

Magic Is Everywhere

The possibility that magic is real can be terribly unsettling to those who’d prefer that it not exist. Consider A. J. Ayer (Sir Alfred Jules Ayer, 1910-1989), a prominent British philosopher who specialized in logical positivism. This is a critical philosophical position that utterly rejects any sort of metaphysical, religious, or magical concepts. As might be expected, Ayer was a hardcore atheist. At age seventy-seven, he died. Fortunately, he was resuscitated, and to everyone’s surprise he reported a near-death experience (NDE). He described it as consisting of repeated attempts to cross a river and “a red light, exceedingly bright, and also very painful . . . responsible for the government of the universe.” Ayer retained his atheism, but declared that the experience had “slightly weakened” his conviction that death “will be the end of me.”1

That Ayer reported this experience is more astounding than it may seem. Lifelong logical positivists are tough. They don’t “slightly weaken” their intellectual positions on anything. The link between magic and Ayer’s NDE is theurgy, the third category of magic. NDEs suggest that there may be forms of disembodied awareness, or spirits. For many who’ve experienced an NDE it’s a virtual certainty that such spirits exist.2 But so far there’s no strictly objective way to tell if that’s the only viable interpretation. We’ll revisit this issue in more detail later.

Another example of magic intruding into the mundane world involves William Friedkin, the director of the movie The Exorcist. Before he made his famous film, Friedkin hadn’t witnessed an exorcism; afterward he decided to do so. He spent time with Father Gabriel Amorth, a Vatican exorcist. His experience with Father Amorth did not overcome his prior agnosticism. But after showing a video of a terrifying exorcism to three prominent neuroscientists and three psychiatrists and not getting the blithe dismissal that he expected from those experts, it “scare[d] the Hades out of him.”3

A third example is provided by historian Michael Shermer, a prominent skeptic of all things paranormal. In Shermer’s September 2016 column in Scientific American, he asked, “Is it possible to measure supernatural or...