The Science of Magic

Introduction

There may be no such thing as the “glittering central mechanism of the universe” to be seen behind a glass wall at the end of the trail. Not machinery but magic may be the better description of the treasure that is waiting. —­John Archibald Wheeler

In a series of invited lectures to a special study group at the Naval War College, one of the topics I discussed was the scientific evidence for telepathy—­direct mind-­to-­mind communication. During a break, two submarine commanders approached me and described a strange episode they had independently experienced. While under maneuvers and submerged at classified depths, a crew member in each commander’s sub urgently requested that they surface so they could call home. They were certain that something bad was happening in their family. The commanders replied that after their undersea exercises were completed, then they could contact their families.

Each sub surfaced days to weeks later, and in both cases, it turned out that something upsetting had indeed happened in their family at the time that each crew member made their request. Importantly, both commanders noted there were no false positives; that is, these were the only times any crew member had asked to surface early.

A typical operational depth for a submarine is 150 to 300 meters, and based on the commanders’ remarks, these subs were likely at the deeper end of that range. At such depths, the only way to receive a signal from the surface world is through extremely low-­frequency electromagnetic transmissions, which require antennas tens to hundreds of kilometers long. The rate of these transmissions is only about one letter per minute. Even if a human brain could detect and decode such messages (which is exceedingly unlikely), those transmissions are used solely for military purposes. They aren’t used to send personal messages to crew members about their families. Moreover, submariners are carefully selected for their exceptional mental toughness, resilience, and emotional flexibility—­not the type of person you’d expect to report a fanciful telepathic experience while deep underwater.

But they do.

You may have experienced something similar—­a time when you just knew that something unexpected was happening to a loved one at a distance, and later you discovered you were right. Or you found yourself thinking about an old friend and soon received a call or an email from them. In fact, two nights before writing this passage, I had a dream about a friend from summer camp, over fifty years ago. Out of the blue, “Joan” showed up in my dream. I hadn’t thought about her in years.

The next morning I received a blind-­copied email from Joan, which prompted me to write back and ask why I was suddenly included in her mailing list. She explained that her realtor had mentioned Edgar Mitchell—­an Apollo 14 astronaut—­and that Edgar had talked about the noetic sciences. Because I work at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which Mitchell founded in 1973, Joan thought of me. That night I dreamed about her.

Because of commonly reported experiences like this, most people, including scientists, quietly maintain some belief in psychic and magical phenomena. At the same time, mainstream science insists that these phenomena can’t exist because the mind is solely a product of brain activity, so everything having to do with mental activity, including consciousness, is locked inside our skulls. End of story.

But there’s a problem with that story.

Psychic and magical experiences are frequently reported, and they require that consciousness somehow transcends the brain and extends into the physical world. Until about five hundred years ago, most people believed that consciousness was fundamentally interconnected with the physical world, and from that perspective the existence of psychic effects like telepathy and magical effects like divination was taken for granted. Then, as science became the dominant way of understanding reality, magic fell out of favor, and generations of students were trained to see reality solely through the lens of materialism, the philosophical assumption that everything, including consciousness, is made of matter and energy. That worldview has become so entrenched in our way of thinking about reality that science textbooks don’t bother to mention that nearly all the physicists who developed quantum mechanics believed that consciousness played a key role in the physical world. Some, like Max Planck, believed that consciousness was the only primary reality.

But science marches on, and we are now in the midst of a remarkable period of remembering what our forebears knew. Science is rediscovering magic.

About This Book

This book is about the science, theory, and practice of real magic. These practices come in three flavors: enchantment, divination, and theurgy. Enchantment is the ability to mentally modulate aspects of the physical world and shape destiny. Divination involves perceptions that transcend the everyday limits of space and time. Theurgy is about spirits and spiritual development.

Magic, like meditation or mathematics, is a mental skill. Anyone can learn some of the key elements, but true mastery requires practice and natural talent. Magical practices can be found throughout history and in all cultures. Among the thousands of books about magic, only a small percentage discuss this topic from a scientific perspective. And most of those address magic in terms of tricks and illusions, or mistaken beliefs about magic, or the malleable brain-­body relationship. Only a handful of books about real magic have been written by scientists.

Who Is This Book For?

This book’s subtitle, “How the Mind Weaves the Fabric of Reality,” refers to the emerging scientific recognition of the role that consciousness plays in the behavior of the physical world. This perspective transforms psychic, mystical, spiritual, and magical experiences from weird and rare brain-­centric hallucinations into predictable and commonly reported mind-­oriented experiences.

I am confident that we’ll eventually have a rational, scientifically satisfying explanation for magic. The most prominent physicists of the nineteenth century couldn’t have imagined how much the laws of physics would be revised by the turn of the twentieth century. Nor could the most accomplished scientists at the beginning of the twentieth century have anticipated how much the meaning of the term reality would be transformed by the early decades of the twenty-first century. History provides endless examples of leading intellectuals whose prognostications about future discoveries were laughably wrong in hindsight. Each new generation insists that now we’re finally modern and sophisticated, and so now we’re absolutely positive that this or that is impossible.

I believe it is likely that by the dawn of the twenty-­second century, our scientific understanding about mind and its relationship to matter will have evolved to the point where what we currently call “magic” will be accepted as self-­evident. Today’s leading edge in physics already proposes that spacetime is an emergent property of quantum entanglement, which is “outside” space and time.8 In the future we may discover that mind, matter, energy, space, and time—­concepts once thought to be entirely separate features of reality—­actually emerge from a single source that is none of those concepts but somehow all of them and more. At that point a scientific theory of everything will begin to catch up with the esoteric worldview, in which the physical world emerges from a primordial form of consciousness and its two primary qualities: awareness, meaning first-­person subjective experience, and agency, the ability to freely choose and act.