The Science of Magic, by Dean Radin, forthcoming October 21
from Random House / Harmony
This is Dean Radin's fifth book about parapsychology. They are all compellingly written. If this is the first time you are taking the paranormal seriously, the information can be transformational. Since 2018, he has come out of the closet, openly characterizing as "magic" the results he has seen in the laboratory, in anecdotes, and in real life.
Radin is a consummate story-teller. His books and videos are the best path I know into a field that has been marginalized by the science establishment and the mainstream press, but which has profound implications for every aspect of our lives.
He is also a creative and rigorous researcher who has been personally involved in most of the interesting paranormal research of the last forty years. "Rigorous" is important because every report of paranormal phenomena faces a wall of skepticism from the scientific community. PSI researchers have learned to dot every i and cross every t, to think in advance about all the excuses that will be proffered to dismiss scientific results that theory says should not happen. "Creative" is important because the phenomena being studied don't follow the rules about causality that scientists assume without a second thought. More about this a few paragraphs down...
All of Radin's books begin with summaries of lab results from research into the magical Not to mince words, I'll adopt Radin's bold stance and acknowledge that we're talking about phenomena that we commonly read about in magical fiction, or the witchcraft and sorcery that people believed hundreds of years ago, before the "scientific world-view" taught us that none of that is real.
Scientists speak of magical phenomena (those few who do speak of magical phenomena) under these three headings.
Telepathy is the ability to know what is in other people's minds. For some talented people, including many non-speaking autistic persons, mind-reading is a conscious activity, akin to turning one's head and focusing one's eyes. But for the everyday experience of ordinary people (you, too!) thoughts come into our heads and we don't give a second thought to where they come from. We may assume that our thoughts are generated by neurons in our brains, but it ain't necessarily so. Our thoughts are influenced by the people around us and especially by people whom we've known a long time and for whom we care deeply. People report knowing when a loved one is in trouble far away. Dogs know when their owner is coming home. Answering the telephone, people can guess with better odds than "chance" who it is that is calling. When someone is staring at the back of your head, something inside you tells you you are being watched.
The Ganzfeld protocol is the single most compelling experimental demonstration of magic. One person, in a lab, is in a hypnogogic state facilitated by white noise and diffuse pink light. A second person, far away, is concentrating on his surroundings and "sending" the information to the person in the lab -- whatever that means. The person in the lab mumbles about his impressions and hallucinations into a tape recorder, and when the session is over, he is asked to match what was on the tape recorder to one of four photos. If the four photos are appropriately randomized, the subject should not be able to do better than a 25% probability of choosing the photo that corresponds to his friend's concurrent experience. But in thousands of trials conducted in dozens of laboratories around the world, the subject gets the right photo 32% of the time. Could the 32% be a fluke? Experimenters conventionally report a "p value" corresponding to the probability that the result obtained could have been a chance occurrence. Anything smaller than p
Clairvoyance -- Sometimes people know about things that are happening far away, or that haven't happened yet. People have dreams about what will happen tomorrow. Less frequently, we have a funny feeling about something that might happen, and we change course to avoid what would have been disaster. Commonly, these premonitions affect the body or involuntary reflexes rather than operating directly through the conscious mind. Most people just feel queasy or frightened or delighted and don't ask why, but some people who are attuned to their own responses can recognize a feeling as having a clairvoyant origin.
Another name for clairvoyance is remote viewing, and the Federal CIA used people who have uncanny abilities to spy on the Soviet Union in the 1970s-80s. This was the Stargate Project. (Of course, these "experiments" continue to this day, but they are now unacknowledged black projects.) In the most famous single viewing event (1979), Joe McMoneagle was asked to see inside a military installation in Russia, and he reported that a giant submarine was being built. His CIA handlers were unimpressed, because the site was many miles from the ocean. Why would they build a submarine so far inland, and how would they ever get it out to sea? But indeed, the vision proved correct, and later satellite photos showed the Russian military constructing a canal for the express purpose of transporting this whale of a sub.
Telekinesis -- This is a broad term for making things happen in the 3-D world using the power of the mind alone. It's helpful to think in terms of micro-PK and macro-PK. Micro PK is altering quantum probabilities, and this has been well-documented. Two signature experiments by Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne ran for 25 years and accumulated small changes that add up to overwhelming statistical significance. In one experiment, subjects were asked to influence a random number generator linked to thermal noise that should have been purely random. The other was a pinball setup in which hundreds of balls cascaded down an array of pins into slots at the bottom of the machine. Tiny changes in probability could make the balls more likely to shift left or shift right.
Macro PK is moving objects big enough to see. This is what most people think of in connection with the word "magic". Such events are far less commonplace, but there are too many stories to dismiss them all as hoaxes. Radin tells a story of the evening he spent at a spoon-bending party and was so absorbed in the external drama he didn't realize the spoon was bending in his own hands.
Synchronicity -- This s a fourth category of phenomena, defying categorization or statistical analysis. Sometimes "coincidences" occur with such a poignancy that they leave us certain that the Universe has intentions. Radin is fond of telling the story...
It began in 2000, when I was setting up a new psi research organization with several colleagues. We called it the Boundary Institute. After looking for a suitable office, we eventually settled on a space in a quiet office park in Los Altos, California, a suburb of Silicon Valley. About a month after moving in, I noticed a sign on an office around the corner from our location with the name tag psiquest, inc. We all thought that was a funny coincidence, because obviously our understanding of psi and whatever that company's use of that term was could not be the same thing. We were confident about this because serious psi research is a tiny discipline, with no more than fifty people actively working on it full time, and just a handful of organizations dedicated to psi research worldwide. We personally knew nearly everyone in the field. So we thought.
The second synchronicity was that a few weeks later, I walked toward our office from a direction I hadn't taken before. As I approached the entrance, I passed the office adjacent to ours and saw a little sign. It read psiquest research labs. Now, this was more interesting, because whatever that PsiQuest company was doing, it had a research lab. But again, we thought it was undoubtedly something like "personnel services lab." Why a personnel services company would need a laboratory was beyond us, but we all had a big laugh about it.
Still, with my curiosity now piqued, I knocked on the door of the psiquest research labs to introduce myself. No answer. For the next week I checked every day, sometimes several times a day. Finally, someone was there. A man opened the door, looked at me, blinked a few times, and his jaw dropped. He had such a shocked expression on his face that I didn't know what to think. I cautiously said, "Hello, I wanted to introduce myself. I'm your neighbor next door. My name is . . ." But before I could finish, he managed to croak: "Dean Radin?"
I hesitated. "Yes," I replied cautiously, wondering how he knew who I was. He said nothing and just continued to stare at me. After an uncomfortable pause, I said, "I'm your neighbor next door. I just wanted to introduce myself and see what kind of work you do here."
After a long moment the man replied, "I'm doing what you're doing." Confused, I asked, "What do you think I'm doing?" He replied, "Psi research . . . parapsychology."
Now it was my turn to stare, dumbfounded. Unbeknownst to me or to any of my colleagues, here was an unknown lab engaged in psi research, located next door to our new office.
The third synchronicity was that the president of PsiQuest, Jon K., was not only thoroughly familiar with psi research but was at that very moment engaging in a magical practice to manifest me. Jon was practicing a variation of Yoga Nidra, a Tibetan dream yoga technique that involves alternating three-hour periods of sleeping and waking, repeated over the course of twenty-four hours. During the waking periods, he was intensely wishing for a sign that his business was on the right track. One of those signs was for me to contact him, somehow, so I could join his board of directors. But he had no idea where I was or how to contact me. In fact, hardly anyone at the time knew that I was living in Silicon Valley, even fewer knew that I had co-founded a new institute, and fewer still knew where it was located.
This is why when I opened the door to Jon's lab, he was speechless.
He couldn't tell if he was awake or still dreaming. From his perspective, my appearance on his doorstep was literally an act of manifestation magic. When he was able to tell me what was going on, I too felt seriously disoriented. We both had to sit down, our heads spinning.
The fourth synchronicity is that the month before all this unfolded, I was focused on visualizing what our new offices and laboratory space should look like. I was drawing sketches of my ideal lab configuration on a whiteboard in my office and imagining a certain kind of reclining leather chair, an electromagnetically shielded room, and other types of equipment that would be useful to have in the lab. I knew all this would be expensive, and our budget was limited, so I figured we wouldn't be able to afford much of it in the short term. But that didn't stop me from visualizing what I needed.
Returning to the story, after recovering from the shock of our meeting, Jon invited me to tour the rest of his facility. As we moved from one room to the next, I could hardly believe my eyes. Jon had the reclining leather chair, the shielded chamber, and all of the other pieces of laboratory equipment I had been actively imagining. And all of it was located on the other side of the wall from my desk, no more than six feet from where I had been sketching what our lab should look like. I had literally drawn what I desired into being.
Radin writes about the "experimenter effect" and about time-reversed causality. What follows are my own thoughts in response.
Central to the scientific method of knowing reality are three assumptions:
We have evidence that all three of these assumptions are violated. So the reality of magic calls us not just to new scientific paradigms but new rules for what constitutes scientific investigation.
This latter facts mean that we all must soften our expectations around "reproducibility". Rules for experimentation in the science of the paranormal are only now being written.
Two things. First, Radin focuses on the sociology of science: Why is it that most members of the scientific community -- people whose sworn allegiance is empiricism -- refuse to look at the copious and overwhelming evidence that magic is real? Second is the practical application of magic. The penultimate chapter of the book offers us instructions, recipes, and appropriate warnings about using magic in our lives and in our world.
And what would happen if it were? The conventional answer points to the conservatism of the research community. Scientists have human foibles, including discomfort with change. No one wants to learn that the paradigm under which he has pursued a lifetime of research is wrong. There is a special stigma attached to research concerning magic because of a cultural shift away from "superstitions of the past" that took place in the 19th century. The Age of Enlightenment culminated in a rejection of religions, rituals, and mythologies of the past as superstitions of the weak-minded. Rejection of all things mystical became a badge of one's rationality. Ironically, the witch trials of medieval Christianity were replaced with a professional ostracism of anyone whose world-view is not 100% mechanistic.
Beyond these prejudices, is there a dark hand over the culture of science? All the while that the CIA was obtaining accurate, actionable intelligence about the Soviet military from remote viewers, our government was publicly debunking and ridiculing the paranormal. Could it be that there are rich and powerful people who use magic to enhance their position, and they don't want the rest of us to know about it? Richard Dolan and Jason Jorjani have both speculated about a breakaway civilization, millions of people sharing our planet but living underground or undersea or in Antarctica, using technologies both mechanical and psychic far beyond our public knowledge.
Since I wrote two years ago about Satanic ritual torture of children, I've come to believe that these dark crimes are widespread and accepted among the ruling elite. Whether Satanic rituals actually confer magical powers is a different question.
"If anyone can be psychic at any time you might well ask what stops us from actually being omniscient and omnipotent all the time? Why, we want to know, aren't we gods?"
-- David Luke, quoted by Radin
The answer, once again, is rooted in our materialist Western culture. We do not easily enter the state of mind characterized by effortless, single-pointed concentration and perfect faith in advance of a desired outcome.
Radin is appropriately cautious in his guidance about the use of magic. To be sure, the potential for realizing our individual ambitions and collective dreams is a powerful motivation. But it is not only the demanding practice of mental discipline that dissuades us. There is potential for things to go very badly if we acquire more power than we are wise enough to wield. People get what they asked for instead of what they wanted. People become abusive. Some descend into madness.
There are also stories of the redemptive power of magical omnipotence. The legend (or true history?) of Milarepa is both a cautionary tale and an inspiration.
Pursuant to these cautions, Radin tells us how to do it. His favorite mode uses a sigil:
1. Believe that the process will work. If you cannot avoid some doubt, then suspend your disbelief. We have no problem when Marvel characters like Wolverine or Deadpool demonstrate their superhuman strength and regenerative powers. So suspend your disbelief and unleash the same type of awe and delight you reserve for your favorite superheroes.
2. Clarify your intention. Be crystal clear on exactly what it is that you want, including possible unintended consequences. In principle, anything you desire is possible to receive, but the likelihood of success is related to the probability that your desire could happen by dumb luck. It would be easier to magically win a three-pick lottery than to magically be appointed the president of a major bank if you have no experience in banking, are not particularly interested in banking, have a known gambling problem, and just declared bankruptcy.
3. Create a symbol that stands for your wish. Later in this chapter we'll discuss the various forms this symbol can take, including a sigil, a word, an image, a knot, or a talisman or amulet.
4. Charge the symbol in a state of peak motivation and attention while you are in a state of gnosis. This can be a highly energetic or supremely calm state of awareness, whichever works for you. The former includes drumming, ecstatic or swirling dancing like the Sufi whirling dervishes, extreme physical exertion, or sexual excitation. The latter includes meditation, dreaming, or in general entering a state that a yogi would call samadhi. (Later I'll give some hints on how to achieve this state.) Charging a symbol is a way to force your desire deep into your subconscious, which is closer -- figuratively -- to the magical engine of reality.
I prefer calm charging because I'd rather not have to get up from the couch or change my clothes to do magic. This is not to deny that magic is a serious business, but it doesn't need to be deadly serious. The cosmos has a sense of humor, so there's no contradiction in acknowledging the playful nature of reality by putting a slice of baloney in your shoes so you'll feel funny (nod to comedian Steve Martin), while simultaneously being a responsible magus.
5. Release the intention. Some magicians suggest that once a symbol is suitably charged, you should burn it (if on paper), bury it (if an object), hide it, or otherwise put it out of sight so you don't obsess over the outcome. While the mechanism of magic is not constrained by ordinary space and time, it usually takes some everyday clock time for magic to manifest.
6. Maintain a state of effortless striving. This means pushing your desire with the greatest intensity and motivation you can possibly muster, but without any effort at all. This paradoxical state is a subtlety that takes a while to learn, but it is possible.
7. Record what happens and celebrate your successes. Share the successes with supportive friends and family, but don't tell strangers or anyone who will just shake their head and mumble about tinfoil hats. Maintaining belief is essential even after you achieve the goal because magical time is not linear, and future doubts may retroactively influence the success of past efforts.
That might sound crazy, except that there's good evidence that backward-time influences do exist.
I have been doing yoga and meditation for more than 50 years, including 12 years of intense daily mindfulness meditation. These practices have graced me with enormous benefits, but talent for magic is not among them.
Twice I've consulted mediums for contact with deceased loved ones, and the results were unimpressive.
Two years ago, my girlfriend of 14 years told me to go to hell, and I took that as a sign that perhaps she didn't want to be my partner in love till death do us part. I tried to manifest a loving partner, using Radin's recommended techniques. I wrote a sonnet as a sigil. I tried to help the magic along, using online dating platforms, telling friends of my quest, and reaching out to communities where I had solid roots. Over the ensuing months, I had four first dates that ranged from unpromising to painful. The most plausible thing that might be interpreted as wish-fulfillment was when my flight from Chicago returning home to Philadelphia was canceled, and the flight after it was filled up with transfers from the canceled flight. But there was a convenient flight open to Washington, where my GF lived. I texted her and asked a little sheepishly if I could visit. She said yes, I flew to DC, and we got back together. For awhile.
Since about 2008, I have had an intellectual belief in magic thanks to Elizabeth Mayer's book, but I used to say to myself that I need a personal experience to make it stick, so I would know in my gut what I know in my head. Four years ago, in the summer of 2021, I got my personal miracle -- undeniable in its own terms, transformative, and making a believer out of me. It was not a lesson I would have chosen to learn in this way if I had made a conscious choice, but I have no regrets, having lived through it.
I was in a head-on collision between my bicycle and a speeding SUV. No one survives such a collision. (I don't call it an "accident", but sometimes "my date with destiny".) I not only survived, but my brain and spine and all internal organs were undamaged. A team of doctors stayed up all night, pumping blood into me tying up all the places where I was bleeding uncontrollably. They bolted my pelvis back together. One leg was mended in a cast, the other reconstructed with transplants of bone, skin, and muscle. I was flat on my back for four months and in a wheelchair for four additional months before I was allowed to walk again.
Today, I'm bicycling, swimming, climbing mountains, teaching yoga, grateful for my body in a way that I never was before, and no longer questioning that miracles are real.
Collectively, these experiences have both convinced me that magic is real and disabused me of any desire to use magic to fulfill my own dreams -- but I'm still open to using focused intention in a collective quest for the common good. Think whirled peas.
Radin doesn't mention Arthur C Clarke's early novel, Childhood's End, but I find it relevant. In the last chapter, we learn (spoiler alert) that the reason that a race of extraterrestrial overlords has come to our planet is that our technological development has outpaced our moral maturity, and in particular it was essential for them to suppress research into occult powers of the mind until we were ready to use them responsibly. Clarke envisions an apocalyptic end of humans as individuals, which he neither endorses nor denounces.
It will come as no surprise to readers of this Substack that our world is in the midst of an unfolding polycrisis of Biblical proportions.
* Global ecosystems are in free-fall.
* The US-dominated world order is coming apart at the seams. Our military is lashing out in an increasingly desperate attempt to retain global influence.
* A century of global progress toward democracy has turned around and repressive, totalitarian government is gaining ground.
* Capitalism is concentrating wealth in the hands of a small number of billionaires, while a shrinking middle class is borrowing to sustain what's left of a declining standard of living.
* The global economy is built on a mountain of unpayable debt.
* Trust in sources of information that provided a consensus view of reality is waning. These include the print and broadcast media, Congress, and government agencies such as CDC and BLS. We realize that even scientific journals have been politicized, especially in biomedicine.
* Censorship, propaganda, and shadow-banning have been a government/corporate response to this loss of trust.
* The public in Western democracies has become fractured into groups that have mutual disdain for one another, paralyzing the political systems that might have been called upon to respond to these crises.
* A global outcry for peace that led to the League of Nations after the Great War a century ago has evolved gradually into a stealth, all-encompassing omni-war. A subtext of violence has invaded our psyches and every aspect of our lives.
The rational organizations that have been responsible for 500 years progress and Enlightenment are powerless to respond to current situations. On the contrary, it may be that the materialist, rationalist, Utilitarian philosophy that has been the source of progress during these centuries is revealed to contain internal contradictions that are at the center of these crises. By "internal contradictions", I intend
* Economies that produce material comfort and entertainment, while undermining health and wellbeing
* A scientific world-view that lays claim to objectivity and empiricism, yet takes away our sense of meaning and leaves us with existential angst
* A capitalist economic model that requires unlimited growth on a finite planet
The world-view that has been a core of progress is based on an objective/reductionist science. But the very scientific methodology that produced the objective/reductionist view of 19th century led in the 20th to quantum mechanics, which is paradoxically the opposite of objective and the opposite of reductionistic. Fundamental equations of quantum mechanics are explicitly holistic, and the quantum formalism engages human observers in co-creating reality.
I suspect that the rational/scientific approach to problem solving will not help us resolve the polycrisis.
Quoting from the last chapter of Radin's new book:
[G]aining a better understanding of consciousness, psi, and magic could offer an enormous boon to humanity. As we learn more about the transformative power of seeing reality with naked awareness, whether that happens through a meditation practice, a spontaneous gnosis or noetic experience, a psychedelic trip, an NDE or OBE, a psychic, mystical, or spiritual experience, or any number of other paths, the effect in most cases is the same: a major, positive shift in personality. Having such experiences results in greater compassion, empathy, tolerance, gratefulness, optimism, and, in general, "prosocial" behavior.
There's another reason for gaining a better understanding of consciousness. As an analogy, say you're walking in the woods with some friends, and you come upon a stream. To everyone's horror, you see dozens of crying babies floating down the stream. The natural impulse is to dive in and rescue as many of them as you can. That's what most of your friends will do. But while you're drying off the babies as they're brought ashore, you're thinking, what are all these babies doing in the stream in the first place? They just keep on coming, and we can't keep this up forever. So you decide that in the long run, it's more efficient to go upstream to discover the cause of this unfolding tragedy.
Likewise, to help solve all sorts of global existential crises, we need to go upstream and better understand the causes of these problems, many of which can be traced to our individual and collective understanding about who and what we are. This is a problem of consciousness.
A cynic might say this sounds like toxic positivity; it's unrealistic because the world is "red in tooth and claw," to use Alfred Lord Tennyson's dramatic phrase. But does it have to be that way? Are aggression and survival of the fittest the only way to live? Would an improved understanding of consciousness and its capacities lead toward a more life-affirming existence and guide us away from endless chest-beating, nihilism, and extinction? Why are noetic experiences so positively transformative? Are we mature enough as a species to safely and effectively provide magical experiences to anyone who wants them?
We won't know until we make it a societal priority to find out.
And from Charles Eisenstein:
"A miracle is something that is impossible from one's current understanding of reality, but which becomes possible from a new understanding."