B (3:49)

I can remember a time when there was basically out and out hostility between the parapsychology community and what you might call the occult community. At the time there were articles in the parapsychological journals warning about involvement in esoteric culture, for example, as well in the magical literature. There were occasional articles about parapsychologists speak to magical groups and they were thought of as simple minded idiots practically.

A (4:28)

Yeah, but it's a sociological issue. It's the same reason why in mainstream academia you don't mention these kinds of things at all unless you do it in a negative way. And so, I mean a large part of my interest in recent years is breaking the taboos that have prevented discussion, open, free discussion of these kinds of experiences everywhere, because every community has their own taboos and parapsychology is no different. And so what you're talking about is quite true. They say, no, don't talk to those people because. Or don't talk to the people that are interested in UFOs because it's too controversial. It's like adding controversies together. Well, I want to break those taboos.

B (5:18)

I totally support that intention. And I suppose it's fair to say that over the years many disciplines associated with magic have become acceptable, like meditation and yoga, hypnosis. But magic itself has always been considered like a bridge too far.

A (5:40)

Yes, and there are good historical reasons for that. I mean it has a certainly looking at fiction, it has a very dark overlay on it. The way that magic typically is presented with very few exceptions. But even take case like Harry Potter, a lot of it devolves into negative, dark, even horrific context. And so that's one of the problems that it's associated with psi. And one of the things, again I want to break that taboo because that psi is just, it is what it is, it's like a force of nature. And so getting rid of the automatic association with negativity is also important in terms of trying to pull this away from fiction and say, yeah, there actually is some interesting science that's going on here.

B (6:35)

Well, let's get into some of that science. And I'd like to start with a study that you did comparing people who had a strong background in magic, who you would consider magicians with meditators on a psi task.

A (6:55)

Right. And so I think this may be the first or certainly one of the first experiments that was specifically looking at magical efficacy in a mind matter interaction type of experiment. So as you know, for years now I've been working with various kinds of optical interferometers to test the von Neumann Wigner idea of consciousness collapsing the quantum wave function. And so the first people to actually test this was Stan Jeffers at York University. And then Mike Ibison at Princeton, and they published their results in 1998. And then nobody did anything with the results, partially because what Stan reported was not significant and what Mike reported at Princeton was significant, but, like right at 0.05. So, like people didn't see it as being a very interesting thing to do. But I picked up that research 10 years later using a Michelson interferometer and then later double slit interferometers. And I became more or less convinced after a while that there was a there there. It wasn't as easy as using something like a random number generator because it required more complex measurements and statistics. And there's a lot of experimentation and is by no means a mature area of investigation. But if we actually believe that there's something like psychic perception which can gain information from the environment, then it should work. And I, as I said, I convinced myself after a while that they look like. Yeah, that there's something like a collapse of the wave function. Although I think in hindsight probably less so that than probably something more like a quantum Zeno effect, because it looked more like intention can push in one way or the other way. So you need measures of variance rather than collapse, which is unidirectional.

B (8:51)

Wonder if you could describe the mechanics of the experiment a little bit for our viewers. I know that to the best of my recollection, a series of experiments involved simply asking your research subjects to pay attention, or not pay attention to the optical device.

A (9:13)

Yeah, except that, let's say an example with the double slit experiment. So you have classic double slit where there's a laser beam that's pointing at two tiny little slits that are microns in size. And then you have a camera on the other side that looks at the pattern of light that makes through the two slits. So a classic double slit pattern would look like alternating bands of light and dark. And that's what you see. So one of the methods of analysis then is that you can do various kinds of analyses of that pattern which say how much double slitiness is going on. So you can do like a Fourier transform of the double slit pattern and that will have a certain peak at a certain point, which is only there because of the wavelength, like nature of light. And so if you give that figure as feedback to somebody in real time and you say, make this number go down, that's your intention, just like you would in a random generator experiment. People don't know how to make the bits change. They're giving a number and say, make this number go up or down. So this is like that saying, make this number go down. If it does go down, it means that you're gaining information from the system and causing the so called wave function to collapse. Because as I said, that particular point on the spectrum only exists because of the wave nature of light. So that's one of the kinds of feedback that we've provided. And as I speak now, there's something like six different laboratories that have actually tried this experiment. And five of the six have reported, let's say, anomalies, significant effects, not always in the direction of collapse, sometimes in the other direction, but something interesting. So the experiment involving the meditators and the magicians came about for two reasons. One is that first of all, I wanted to go away from a double slit system because the analysis is very complex and I wanted to get a simpler version. So a colleague said, well, why don't we use a, or why don't you use a diffraction system? And he actually built one, a diffraction pattern which uses a transparent diffraction grating. If you shine a laser through it, you end up with individual little dots. And so that's important because now you don't need a camera to look at the results, you can just have a photo detector look at the results. And so you just pick a dot, not the one in the center, but what's called the ones, the first order, second order and third order, because those only exist because of the wave nature of light. And so if you gain information out of this system with a diffraction grating and you give feedback based on the amount of illumination at one of those dots on the side and it goes down, well, you have extracted information and collapsed the wave function, so called. So that's the design. So I made these little interferometer boxes that had this kind of a system in it with I was looking at two dots of light. And so one of them became the one that I gave feedback on. The other one was a simultaneous control because nobody ever saw that result. And so I recruited online, we went through 100,000 people who responded to the initial call. And I was looking for meditators, looking for magicians, and they had to jump through multiple hoops because I was going to send them this box and I needed them to actually do the experiment. And we also offered $100, we offered an iPad as part of a raffle for people who did well. So we ended up with 50 people, a few of whom I already knew and had selected in advance, but 47 of them were new people that Went through this whole procedure of selecting them and then I made a whole website and made videos and talked them through it and did many, many emails, answering questions and so on. And 47 people finished, which was great. I mean, it's a high rate of return. We ended up with, I forget how many now, several hundred sessions, about the number that I was asking to get. And the analysis then, for the pre registered analysis, only one of the analyses showed something interesting, the other ones did not. Like the collapse of wave function did not show a significant result. But postdoc I separated the meditators and the magicians, each around 24, 25 people in each group, 23 and 24, something like that. And so the meditators got a tiny significant effect, but the magicians got a whopping effect. And even more so when I did analysis, which I came up with afterwards. So again, another exploratory analysis, looking at not simply what did they get overall when collapsing the data, but looking in time over 30 second periods, because you would concentrate for 30 seconds and then you'd relax for 30 seconds. So I gathered all the data together from the magicians over 30 seconds of paying attention and 30 seconds of relaxing and the same for meditators. And there, there was a very, very strong result that the magicians got, but the meditators did not. So why did I do this in the first place? I originally thought I was just going to take all comers, like anybody who could pass all of these tests, which involved questionnaires and before and attention tests and so on. Then they also had to send me a video explaining why they thought they would want to do this and why they thought they would succeed. So each one was a little hurdle they had to jump through to see if they were both technically adept and also the right kind of person. So the reason why I ended up using magicians and had this particular split is because I originally got a grant from the Be all foundation to do this, of course, which was very nice, I'm very grateful about that. But the apparatus was going to be built by one of our colleagues who at the very last minute couldn't do it, and he was also going to pay for it. So now I'm thinking, oh my God, I'm out $25,000 that was going to go would be necessary in order to make this apparatus. So I'm thinking, well, now what? I don't want to go back to be all and say, sorry, I have to give your money back because I can't do it. So I'm thinking if I need this money. And it wasn't clear how I was going to get it. A week later, while still in this mix of thinking, I get an email out of the blue from a new organization in Europe, rentsep Research Network for the Study of Esoteric Practices. Scholars and practitioners who are interested in classical magic magical practice. And so I get an email from them asking if I'd like to join their advisory board because they're interested in science as well. And so I said, sure. What do you have in mind for the science part? And so they said, well, we have €25,000 to be put towards a science experiment. And I said, well, do I have a proposal for you. So I sent them my proposal that would actually pay for the development of all of these devices. And they said, okay, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. So in typical magical fashion, I needed $25,000 and they had €25,000, which actually ended up being more than $25,000, but it was like the amount I want was 25,000 units. And so magically it showed up from a magical organization. And so I thought, well, okay, now I know how to, first of all, how to contact people in magical networks because they tend to be somewhat secretive. And so I needed a kind of an entree into it and I got it. So that's how I ended up with magicians and meditators. And then I was thinking, oh, you know what, this actually makes more sense than I had originally thought, because the whole meditative practices are generally an inward form of intention and attention. Magical practices are an outward form for people who do enchantment, because that's all about mind, matter, interaction. It's pointing out as opposed to pointing in. I thought, well, I'm giving them a box which is out there somewhere, and they need to work with the box which is not inside, it's outside. That said, so that's the reasoning I had for this, an inward versus outward form of attention. But I've also worked with people who are very experienced in yoga and had probably achieved some of the siddhis. And then so one case which I wrote about, who participated in my first interference experiment, had been meditating for 70 years and was a swami in charge of a yogic society. So I explained to him what to do in the experiment and he did it, and he did extremely well. And so afterwards, after I analyzed the result, they said, what? What did you do? Because it was like unlike what I had seen other people do. And he said, how did you put your mind into our shielded room and into a particular place in this apparatus. And how did you do that? He said, well, I didn't go anywhere. What do you mean? I went inside because the universe is inside. So at advanced levels. What that taught me is that as far as the cities go as well in magic there is no outside world, right? So it'd be like pure idealism. Everything is inside. Now he pointed to his heart, but it's more the idea that their consciousness includes the world at large. So if you're trying to do something over there, the way to get there is inside. So I think I didn't ask the magicians in this case how they were imagining they were doing the test, just wanted to know that they had the practice. And so in a future study I need to spend more time figuring out what exactly did they think that they were doing or what was their practice like. And maybe that's a way of distinguishing them between people who are at elementary stages versus very advanced stages in magic.

B (20:20)

As I recall, the statistical probabilities you got for the magicians in this study, and I gather you just said it was a post hoc analysis, but something like 4, quadrillion to 1 odds against chance, which is astronomical.

A (20:39)

Yeah, yeah, it's astronomical. So it raises an interesting question. We now value pre registration because it prevents people from playing with statistics. But when you, what level of result do you need before people can say, well that's pretty interesting, you know, like that's interesting enough. Nevertheless, in the follow up experiment I'm doing, I will do that same analysis because if it turned out that that was as robust as it appeared to be, it should show up again. And so this time, yeah, I will pre register that. And I perfectly understand why pre registration is a higher hurdle to pass. But exploratory results in our line of work, given that we're still at the earliest stages of understand, I think is absolutely critical. So I will continue to do post hoc analyses and exploratory work forever. Because we're not a mature industry yet, we don't know what we're doing. So we have to explore.

B (21:45)

I gather that you've done a whole range of studies involving the interaction of human consciousness with photons, sometimes increasing the entanglement of photons, sometimes increasing the amount to which they scatter, sometimes having to do with the wave particle differentiation of photons. And in all of these tests it seems that consciousness has some impact, but I gather it's still rather mysterious.

A (22:21)

It's always mysterious. All of it is mysterious. The reason though, that I chose photons as a topic of study. And maybe all we're seeing is something very similar to what we see in random number generators. We're pushing probabilities around. But you see, after 50 years of random generator studies, that hasn't penetrated the mainstream at all. I mean, people who pay attention to the data will look at it and say, well, that's sort of interesting. And then they drop it because they don't know what to do with it. So I figured, well, what would actually be able to penetrate into the mainstream would be apparatus that already are well understood, combined with theories that are already said by prominent people, and people, even contemporaries, think that actually is something going on. Well, what is that? Well, that's the von Neumann Wigner collapse of the wave function. Well, that's all about what's happening with photons. And so that's why I replicated the York University and Princeton University work and have kept going at it. And I found that because of the replications that are very slowly starting to show up, that other people recognize that as being valuable as well. Because it's a way of then using the language in physics to appeal to people who already understand why that would be of interest. And it's not as though physicists haven't already talked about even the possibility of doing such experiments. And there have been some who have done it. It's a way of addressing outstanding issues that are of interest, that are of value for other disciplines. And so that too devolves back into the notion of breaking taboos. So there are reasons for sustaining taboos. And one of them is that you're talking a language that I don't even understand. Like why would anybody push bits around? That sounds stupid. Well, how about if we push photons around? Oh, well, now you're talking. It's ultimately the same thing, except there's like a quasi little experimental theoretical reason why you would expect that it would work. And so all we have to offer with something like why do the random generators work? Well, it's something to do with the born law or something like that. I mean, we can make up hand waving reasons quite different. If you're pointing back to somebody like von Neumann and Wigner and a whole bunch of additional people right up to the present day who are saying, well, it kind of looks like subjectivity is quite different than objectivity. And maybe that's the connection. So that's why I'm working with photons. It's also, it's not, I mean, technically it's not that different. It's not more difficult than working with two random bits.

B (25:06)

One of the techniques which is well known in magical circles is the idea of charging a magical object or a magical implement with one's intention. And I know you've been engaged in a series of studies to look at that.

A (25:22)

Yeah, we first started with chocolate, little bits of chocolate, some of which were blessed or charged by a Mongolian shaman and by a Buddhist monk. And then we tested whether people eating the chocolate under double blind conditions, not knowing if it was blessed or not, would report elevated mood because that was the blessing that we asked the people to charge the chocolate with. And we got a significant result. And so one of the things that I write about in the Science of Magic is a referee's report which I was not aware of at the time. It turns out I knew who the referee was, but I didn't know his feeling about reading the paper at the time. I'm talking about Jim Fallon who is a well known neuroscientist at UC Irvine. And so he wrote in a book about psi research actually that he read the book with some. He read the article because he was asked to be a referee with some trepidation and it was the first psi type article that he read and it disturbed him. He had to actually end up reading it five times because he said that the methods, the double blindedness, the statistics and so on were all appropriate and in accordance with the best kinds of papers that he had seen in mainstream literature. So he didn't believe in the results, but he couldn't find anything wrong with it. So he said, okay, you can accept this. So since then we did studies involving to see again whether Buddhist monks could bless water that was made into tea and would the tea improve people's mood who had the blessed tea? The answer then was yes. So we advanced to plants and then we advanced to stem cells in culture and then most recently to glioblastoma cells in culture, in each case asking for a blessing that was appropriate to the target. And the results of all of those tests have showing something interesting going on. So it's sort of magical in that sense. We're doing something to this object, in this case water, which we're then transferring into something else. These are all double blind. They're all, except for the chocolate experiment. They were all conducted by my colleague Young Yong Shia, who's in Taiwan. Professor Taiwan. So I'm the double blindedness is I'm blind as the statistician for the data. So what I get back is the data from that Experiment, I don't know which is what's A or B. Analyze it and then based on the results, I'll say, well, this is it. So what is it? Which one was it? Because there's always a significant difference. They all turn out to be in the direction of the one getting the blessing had the better results. The second blind is if there are people involved, like in the tea experiment, they didn't know what the result was. When it involved plants and cell cultures. The people who were dealing with the plants and cell cultures did not know. It's just this water and that water and then everything was treated the same. So again, we're doing the best that we can to try to keep expectation out of the role here and we see results.

B (28:58)

Well, you're using a double blind, but it seems paradoxical in a way because if the data that you're coming up with is correct psi data, it would suggest that a double blind is not going to be effective in preventing people from gaining knowledge about the experimental system.

A (29:20)

Yeah, it's a problem, isn't it? This is one of the reasons why it's so difficult and also so interesting. We need to develop a epistemology that fits the actual nature of the phenomena better. And so when it comes to the lack of blindedness, the lack of separation of any type, the lack of the problem of experimenter psi, about the closest that we've gotten at this point is to choose people who have different expectations about the results and have a whole bunch of people try to replicate the same thing at the same time. That would probably go in the right direction. Unfortunately, most of the large scale multicentered trials that have been done for any kind of psi, they don't work, which is yet another clue. It works when there's like a small group or one individual who's involved in something and like deeply committed to it in some way. And something becomes diluted when there's a bunch of people involved. Especially when there are so called skeptics, as though we are not skeptical, but there are people with different expectations who are doing the experiment. It somehow muddies the water. And so I've long had this notion that when I do an experiment that involves intention, that I see it as not wanting to make a dirty test tube. So that means several things. First of all, I don't tell people details about what an experiment is like before it's finished because I don't want their intentions to be part of the mix. I kind of intuitively feel it as muddying the water. It's churning the whole construct that I'm trying to create. So you don't want a dirty test tube. A large scale multicenter trial might work, but only for certain kinds of experiments, especially ones that don't involve explicit intention. But even there, so far, the large scale replications of the BEM precognition, implicit precognition results, those don't work very well either. Except if you look, do some post hoc analysis and you can find what certain subsets work. Well, maybe that's real, maybe it isn't. We don't know at this point. So yeah, this is tell. I think these are providing clues. I mean, there's two ways of thinking of it. One way is you can say it was pre registered multi center, it should work. But that doesn't even work in standard psychology. Right? I mean this is where the whole crisis of replication comes from. And by the way, across the board, including physics. So if our epistemology, which assumes isolation and separation, if that is incorrect, as psi suggests, then it is true that we need a better form of protocols to account for the idea that separation actually is an illusion. And so some of us are working in those directions. But it's a very tricky problem. It does raise serious questions about everything we know in science, which of course is both blasphemous and a panic reaction because then, you know, it raises the panic that we have to throw away all the textbooks and start over again. And so my answer is no. We're always revising textbooks as we learn more, so it just gives people the chance who wrote the textbooks to just write another chapter. And most of the rest of it still works pretty well because we know the technologies work, but it's at the leading edge. We're not as smart as we think we are.

B (33:06)

Well, I know you've drawn quite a bit from the folklore of magic. There's a lot of lore about what conditions are necessary for a magical ritual to be the most effective. And you found that a lot of that folklore is consistent with the experimental lore developed in parapsychology.

A (33:30)

Right. That's what drew me into this in the first place. Because when you look at the magical lore about what matters, the factors that matter. Well, altered states matter. Like in magic, you'd say you need a state of gnosis, starting with the G, which a yogi might say is samadhi, which Charlie Tartt would have said some altered state that is not the ordinary waking state. One of those altered states. Yeah, that matters a lot. So that says that a lot of this is happening not through conscious awareness, but through some unconscious form of awareness that eventually you can achieve through advanced meditation and other techniques and also psychedelics and a few other techniques like that. So that's one thing. The other thing is belief. You see that all throughout the magical literature. You have to believe in what you're doing. Otherwise, in a sense, like, why bother? So one of the things they say in the book, then, is, as a fledgling magician, where you want to start doing things. But we're inside a culture which says, that's fantasy. Well, what do you do? How do you get rid of that? And the answer is, when you go to see a superhero movie, you're not watching it thinking, well, that's stupid. No one can fly like that. No one can turn into the Hulk simply by becoming anxious. Well, you'd suspend your disbelief, right? And so even magicians will say, maybe you don't believe in this stuff, but at least during the ritual, whatever that happens to be, if it's two minutes to half an hour, suspend your disbelief for that amount of time, you have to believe that it's going to work. And even psychologically, it makes a lot of sense because we know that expectations and belief drive what we experience. The blinders are really effective. So if you take an attitude internally thinking, this is stupid, you'll block it. You'll block anything that might happen. Or if you happen to see something happen, you'll immediately dismiss it as, well, that doesn't mean anything. So belief, focus of attention, motivation, all of these different kinds of phenomena that have been looked at in various ways within psy research, they all matter, and they all are mentioned in the magical lore as well. So I don't think that's a coincidence.

B (35:56)

We live in an era, it seems to me, where the study of magic is moving in new directions. I know you, for example, cite a very prominent contemporary writer who talks about chaos magic, which I think is relatively new. In earlier generations, there was sort of ritual, ceremonial magic, but chaos magic was unheard of up until a few decades ago.

A (36:26)

Right. So we're talking about Peter Carroll, who popularized the notion of chaos magic. The term chaos, I mean, from a popular perspective, it suggests naked people dancing around bonfires or something. But the chaos he was talking about was chaos mathematics, which became popular when he was starting to work on this because he also has a physics background, and he was thinking, oh, well, chaos mathematics actually could work as a way of understanding magic because it essentially then dives into extremely complicated systems theory, where things can happen, strange things can happen because of probabilistic pushes. And so part of the. One of the things I mentioned in the book here is like the magical theory that Peter Carroll came up with, and I talked to him about this, and it basically is an equation that says if all of these things are in alignment, these different factors like belief and focus and so on, along with motivation and whatever, then big magic can occur. And so you can calculate, this is why it was interesting. You can calculate, based on the equation that he came up with, the likely effectiveness of a magical practice. And so it all makes perfect sense from a mathematical point of view. And you can see then why he used this notion of chaos magic as a way of pulling it out of the occult world and saying, well, science is progressing slowly into a direction where we could begin to actually create a science. So he deserves a lot of the credit in that sense of taking us out of the Aleister Crowley era with the dark robes and the fires and all of that stuff, and saying, well, can we do essentially what science has done all along and taking these ancient ideas and spiritual ideas and refining it into a secular form where we begin to understand it with different language? And so, yeah, so that's. I was very happy to talk to him about this. And we did a webinar where I played the audio recording of our chat. And then after we finished the audio part, he turned on his video. And so I got one of the rare looks at what he looks like. And of course he's just a guy, but he has a long, very successful business that he created, which he attributes to magic, essentially.

B (39:06)

I'm going to go back. I know we've had an earlier conversation years ago about metal bending and the fact that you successfully accomplished metal bending yourself at a PK party. These days it's almost a forgotten phenomenon. It used to be everybody was talking about metal bending at one time. But you're point of view is that forgotten or not, it's still very valid that the implications of what human intention is capable of. It's not just a micro matter of bending photons or scattering photons. It can involve large scale phenomena as well. Right?

A (39:56)

Yeah. So I talk about, I keep my spoon over here. That's the spoon we're talking about. So that's a heavy soup spoon. And I bent that in half with a little gentle touch like this. I thought this was impossible before I did it. And I specifically, as I say in the book, I specifically went to a PK metal bending party to see somebody do that. I wanted to see anybody do something like that. And I had heard stories, lots of stories, and have seen lots of pieces of bent metal and so on, including occasionally a rebar which was bent, which is close to impossible unless you're incredibly strong. And so I like this because I know a normal person could not do this without serious damage to the fingers. And that's why I wanted to see it, because bending against the shell shape is really difficult. So I ended up doing it myself. I remember what it felt like. I remember the combination of thrill and fear at the same time. I wasn't fearful while I was in the midst of doing it, but afterwards, I think I have no idea how I did this. Yes, it's a macroscopic effect. It is a permanent, almost paranormal object at this point. And I keep it on my desk to remind me that we don't know the limits of what it is that we're dealing with. I'm very comfortable with statistical results and working with photons and that sort of thing, because it's not that scary. It is scary when you think about we don't know what the upper limits are. And it's yet another reason why I'm interested in magic. Because in magic, typically, the kinds of things that people are interested in is not getting a better P value. They want some kind of meaningful thing in their life, whether it's healing or whether it's money or whatever. And so they would not continue being a magical practitioner unless sometimes it worked. And so it might feel. It might look like a synchronicity. And oftentimes it does, because you don't know what the linkages are. But big enough things happen. So the people who are engaged in this sort of thing remain engaged, because otherwise you're just sustaining a delusion. And that's no fun. So I'm thinking what actually happened here, it did not involve force, as far as I can tell, because that would have injured my fingers. So it could be a microscopic change in the grains of the metal. And so one of the reasons why I do a short review of the experimental work that was done in 1970s and beginning of the 80s is because people who knew what they were doing actually did work with metal benders. And unlike some of the modern way of looking at this is that any magician could do this. There were magicians who knew how to do this, how to fake it, and they concluded that whatever is going on here, it's either like, Uri Geller is the best magician ever in the world who's come up with something new, and other people as well, who are not magicians. Something is happening that seems like it is worth investigation. And so we've had people at ions who said, well, why don't, why don't we investigate this then? And the answer is, it is really, really difficult to be able to investigate something in a laboratory under controlled conditions when it always happens spontaneously, because then you could spend a long time investigating something with no results. And I don't want to waste time like that, and I don't want to waste the donor's money either. So what we would end up doing is getting something like a hunk of metal and a very, very sensitive way of testing strain. And there are such things. I mean, they're easy to make such stuff, but then that's not creating a macroscopic effect because now we're looking at very microscopic things happening too. So could you take a hunk of metal and begin to strain it and bend it? I think probably, yes, I had the equipment to make such a thing. It's just that I'm involved in so many things. I never actually put it together. But I would expect that something like that would work. And so that would be an approach that I think would be you could do in a laboratory, because you don't need somebody with super talent, nor do you need somebody who can do it spontaneously. You just give them feedback saying, I want this number to go down or up. And most of the time when we give people those instructions, they can do it if you have enough data and the conditions are right. But I don't know what that would tell us. I've become much more interested in experiments that begin to point at ways of understanding what's actually happening as opposed to simply demonstrating something. So as an example, I already mentioned that we're looking, for example, at changes in glioblastoma migration patterns, which is using this blessed water to change it. So we see, yes, migration is lowered, which for glioblastoma is very important because it's dangerous, because it spreads so quickly throughout the brain. So this slows it down. Well, the next question is, well, what is it? How is it slowing down? Why is it slowing down? So the next series of experiments is looking at the genetic changes and glio that is exposed to the blessed water versus not can we see that there's some kind of genetic underpinnings which change. That's slowly and systematically working towards a direction of saying, well, we still may not know the actual connection between changes in water versus that, but we do know why this happened, why these cells Changed because we can see it in the genetics. And so if there were 10,000 people working with several billion dollars, we would probably end up with much better models about what the connection is between mind and changes in water and changes in physical systems and everything else, and photons and everything else. But we don't have that. So we're all doing the best we can.

B (46:19)

Another area of magic that you've looked at is the whole question of divination or looking into the future. It's also scientific concept of retro causation, causal influences moving from the present into the past or from the future into the present.

A (46:39)

I review the evidence for retrocausation. I spend a little bit of time talking about the very interesting studies that Elmar Gruber did in Austria, because it makes your brain hurt after a while, until you kind of wrap your ideas around what's going on here. And because it's relevant to the way that I think that magic probably works. It's also relevant to Rex Stanford's idea of psi mediated instrumental response, which is a horribly complicated term for what is also said in magic as a way of thinking about magic. So I'll first mention a little more about what Rex's idea was. So Rex had the idea that the way that a psi experiment works is because first of all, we imagine that there's an ESP PE element, a psychic perception element, and a PK element, a mind matter interaction. And they're not really that separate. In fact, they may not be separate at all. So if both of those are always operating somewhere in the unconscious, like we're not evoking these things in experiments, we're hoping to see them express themselves, but they're there always. It means that some aspect of our unconscious, it's spread out everywhere in space and time. And we have the ability to perceive and the ability to push. So consciousness can perceive. It's aware and it has agency, it can do things. If you think of the combination of both of those and you have very high motivation for a certain outcome, then it's as though you're presented with this very complicated maze of past, current and future events where you can travel through this maze. If you're able to both perceive and deflect the direction that you're moving through this maze through esp, mpk, a combination of both. All you need to do is then look into your future at a point where you're much more likely to gain the thing that you want now and you will manage to move through that. And sometimes it means that you need to interact with other people, with other things, but who cares? You're looking at everything everywhere, all at once, just like the movie of that title. So he said, well, maybe, maybe that's what's going on with these experiments, these psi experiments. And that's what magicians have also said, that we have the capacity to almost as though we're in a block universe idea, except it's a very flexible block universe. It's not really a block, it's more like a jello universe. And we can see backwards, we can see now, we can see forward, and we can see like over there. In what I would see as my future, I want that thing. And so I figure out a way to get there and are continually perceiving and pushing so that things happen, and then I'm there. And so it's a nice way of describing how synchronicities work, of how psi experiments work, about how magic works. And so to go back to Elmer Gruber, so Elmer was testing this idea from that coming out of Rex Stanford's theory and said, well, why don't we do this? We will record people as they go into a supermarket by putting a light beam that they would interrupt as they walk through the door. And we'll just record it as a click. Every time the light beam is separated, we'll record a click. But nobody knows, nobody will know that it's working. It's in some other room somewhere. And we'll just record it on tape. And then some months later, we will play back these clicking noises to people and ask them to according to a randomized system using, like, cards, a black and white card. So if it's a black card, you do nothing. If it's a white card, you try to make these clicks come faster. And if it's another test, if it's a white card, you make the clicks go slower. And the black card means you do nothing. So you have different ways, you're trying to push this data, which is clicks, which are created by people going through, into a store. And so we had a bunch of people do that and the results were significant. So now how do we interpret that? Because the clicks were already recorded months before, and the instructions for what to do about the clicks were being done now by people. Well, it suggested that the intentions now were rippling backwards in time and influencing something in the past. So subsequently, many other experiments like that were done with random number bits and other things, including human physiology. And it looks as though the past is not changed. It's not as though thinking about something that happened in the past. We can change what happened, but what we can do is influence things that were occurring at that time, provided that no one already knew the results. So it's as though if we know that something happened, it sort of collapses, similar to the von Neumann idea that when we know something, it collapses into a state that becomes really difficult or impossible maybe to change it. But if we don't know, and literally most of things that are happening around the world, no one's paying any attention to. So a lot of the past world can be in principle influenced now. And so that's what these experiments have done, and that they seem to work just as well as in real time. And again, that's almost exactly what magicians who have deep thought deeply about why magic seems to work. That's how magic works. It's a combination of manipulation through space and time and perception through space and time so as to get the thing that you want. And it's also going to be related to probabilities. So if you want to win the lottery, that's 300 million to one. You can do that because you could look in the future, which is very probabilistic, as best as we can tell, one of those futures, you will win the lottery. But it's 300 million to one. So how do I get to that particular ending? It's not so easy. In fact, we know it's 300 million to 1, so maybe you can get there, maybe you can't. But what you can do is steer yourself in a direction where you're going to make it more likely to happen. There's still going to be probabilistic, and maybe now it's only 30 million to one. So I've improved my chances by 10 times just by thinking about it. Well, that's why when people ask me then, well, how do I win that lottery? I'd like to win the lottery. I say, well, why don't you try starting with a three pick? Your chances are then a thousand to one. So if you can improve that by a factor of ten through a magical act, well, now it's ten to one. That's pretty good. So, yeah, so the magic, I think, even though this happens every so often, you know, this was because of a very strange motivational state that I was in at the time. If you want to win the lottery, first be able to do this pretty reliably. Like, it's like knowing how to get into the state. And I sort of remember what that state is like, but I have A combination of I don't want to go into that state because it was not very pleasant. And I'm also a little afraid of going into it because I think if you can easily get into that state, you would become completely psychotic. And I mean, that's what my intuition says. So I don't want to go there very often. But I think if you were able to go there, you'd be able to navigate in a way such that a 300 million to one event you could land on, but you would be completely insane by that point. So I figured, well, it's not worth it.

B (54:34)

There are lots of warnings against the practice of magic within spiritual traditions. It's often considered a distraction at best and maybe at worst a rabbit hole that you can't escape from.

A (54:51)

And so one of the ways of thinking of it is we know that power corrupts. This is a kind of power that would be extremely difficult to drop. It's like the old parables about people who are given three wishes. Well, if one of those wishes is to have an infinite number of additional wishes, that is like the worst possible thing that you could do because now that will be the ultimate in corruption. We're too weak to be able to deal with something like that level of power. Now. Fortunately, there are some cases we think of like power in terms of dictatorship, dictators, for example. So most of the time in history, a dictator turns out to be like the worst possible thing you could have. But there are a few cases, and I think one that just I was discussing the other day was Singapore. So Singapore is basically under a dictatorship and has become from a very agrarian, not very successful country into one of the prime countries in the world because of a benevolent dictator who is able to resist the power or at least use the power for the benefit of everyone. So it's not impossible. And you know, we have stories of Merlin who wasn't completely bad, as best as we can tell, in Harry Potter and so on, but the fear of it, the reason why I don't go there is because I don't know that I could resist it. So the magic that I do is usually about P values and usually experimental things I can do in a laboratory, but occasionally I can do that, but I don't like to do that.

B (56:31)

Your book, in your final chapters includes a number of magical practices that I'm under the impression you're encouraging your readers to engage in.

A (56:42)

The only reason I put the magical practices at the back of the book is because that was the number one thing that readers would Give me feedback on. So the equivalent is they would read the front part of the book and see why science is moving in this direction. There's evidence for it. And they basically say, okay, we believe it. Now what do we do? Well, there's a thousand books out there that say what you can do. And I basically would say, well, go read another book. Go find a book that talks about this stuff. No, they want me to explain it. So I put very classical, easy magical practices in the back of the book. I also then explained that the methods that are used are all basically the same thing. They're all very elementary because they're designed to appeal to what you will resonate with. So, like, one of the. I have a word magic and sigil magic and candle magic, and then there's not magic. I like knot magic because you make a little. You make a knot. It's like, here's a piece of yarn, you make a knot. And the reason I like this is because it's kinesthetic. Most of the other methods are sort of intellectual. They're subjective. Well, this is objective because you take an intention, the thing that you want, you stick it in the yarn, and as you draw the knot, you are capturing the intention physically outside of yourself. Again, it's like outward focus of attention. Well, now I've done it, I've captured it. And in this piece, this particular piece, I captured an intention many, many times. I made lots of knots and it sort of turned into a little shape. And so once you do that, a part of magical practices, you don't dwell on it because it's like a quantum Zeno effect. You've frozen it until you release it. So in magical traditions, you burn it, you bury it, you hide it, you can do all kinds of things. I leave it here because I talk about it every so often in interviews, and I need it to demonstrate. So my intention on this is to demonstrate a magical practice that everybody can do with a piece of yarn. And so there it is.

B (58:51)

I gather that the state of mind required for a lot of these magical effects is one where you have a definite intention, but you're holding that intention very, very lightly.

A (59:08)

Yes and no. So it is true, as we see even in psi research, that it's all about effortless striving. So you have to strive and want the thing that you want with every ounce of your being, with no effort. So meditators are familiar with this because it's very similar to a meditative state where you need to do the practice and you need to have full awareness of what you're doing, which takes effort, but at the same time with no effort. So it sounds like a paradox. Same thing is true in magic. You achieve extremely high focus, extremely high motivation with no effort. And it takes a while to. It takes practice to get to the point where you realize it's actually not. It's not a paradox. You can get to that state. That's why one of the reasons why samadhi and gnosis and these other altered states are described, because it's like in a deep meditative state where your sense of ego can disappear, but you're also completely well aware that you feel more alive than you ever have before. So ego and aliveness are not exactly the same, but they feel the same up until you realize they're actually not the same. So it's similar like an analogy then, with magical practice, yes, you need very high motivation, attention, focus, all of the rest with no effort. And that's one of the reasons why you go through all of the effort to make this thing and then set it aside so you're not dwelling on it and obsessing over it.

B (60:47)

I know that you've worked with one of your colleagues to develop some exercises that help keep the mind from wandering, because the normal human thing to do is for the mind to bounce all over the place. Most people can't concentrate for more than 30 seconds.

A (61:08)

So mind wandering. So, yes, I took a method that my colleague Arnaud Delorme, who wrote a book on this whole topic about mind wandering, and he suggested a method which is very easy, which is. Is basically a meditative technique, but it's so easy to do that you could do it in any kind of context. So I described that, and it basically is every in breath and out breath, you count a number. And so in the beginning exercise, you would start with 10. And so the out breath, you're thinking 10, and then you have an in breath, and then you think nine with each out breath and go down to zero. And you see if you can get to zero without forgetting what it was that you were doing. So for somebody who has no practice in meditation, they get down to about seven. And then they start dreaming about cheeseburgers or lunch, and then they forget and eventually will come back and say, oh, that's right, I was doing this exercise. It's not that easy to do. And then I describe more and more difficult versions with longer counts and in addition with counts where you only count while during the exhalation, and then you do nothing during the inhalation. Like, you go blank, which is not that difficult to do. But for the moment of the inhalation, you think nothing. That is way more difficult because between the moment that you're thinking 10 and then nothing, you can easily forget what you were doing. It evokes mind wandering. So I forget the number. It was something like, if you can get to 50 with the more difficult version of this thing, you will have achieved gnosis, because that is not easy to do at all.

B (62:56)

And how would you define gnosis?

A (62:59)

Well, it is being in that paradoxical state where you have full awareness. You're able to sustain very high focus and awareness for basically as long as you wish, or at least for the minutes that may be involved in a magical practice. And during that period, while it may feel like nothing is actually happening, that is the state where things do happen. So you're in this state of what amounts to pure awareness that you can sustain. And you have an intention. You're holding the intention. It's very difficult in that state, while you're holding a particular intention that you want something to happen, to also do a combination of dwelling with effort. Because in that state, there is no effort anymore. To be able to get there requires no effort. But again, the paradox, it takes a lot of practice to get to that state. That's why I mentioned the wonderful story of Henry Sugar, I think, is the name of that story that I mentioned here. And there's a very nice short film on Netflix which repeats it. And the idea is that a young person becomes obsessed with the idea of basically not working. So they want to win all their money in the casino. So they hear about a person who says that they can see through cards, they can look through the backs of cards. And of course, he wants to learn how to do that. And to make a long story short, actually to make a short story even shorter, because it's not a long story. He does learn how to do it, and he gains a huge amount of money in the casino until he realized there's no challenge in it anymore. So he withdraws from that life and he starts donating all his money to orphanages around the world. And that's how he achieves his satisfaction. Because now he has changed. The process of learning how to get into that state is echoed in the meditative literature, where the more you can get there, the less you are driven by crass things like ego driven, earning a lot of money. Where you start learning what is valuable are things like compassion and empathy and service. And that's what the wonderful story is of Henry Sugar. And so I put that in the book because there's something peculiar about the experience of gnosis and Samadhi, or we can say noetic experiences, where once you achieve that level, you are transformed from whoever you thought you were before. You could have been a complete jerk, only interested in making money in a casino. You are transformed in the direction of being pro social. Now what you're interested in is compassion and empathy. Actually, the other way around. First empathy and then compassion to do something about it, and then service. So you become the person who helps the world, not just yourself. You go away from the direction of selfishness. So this is one of the reasons why I say that the study of these kinds of phenomena, whether it's psi or magic or things in that space, is so important. Not just from a scientific perspective, but from the perspective of us as a species and the continuation of the planet as a healthy place to be. Because people who move through that system can start out being completely egotistical. But that's not where you went. And so while the stories of magic have all of these horrific elements to it, I think ultimately actually that's not the direction. That's the direction that people end up with. Sort of halfway to the end goal. Which is why in the spiritual traditions it's saying, yes, you can get there, you can get these powers, but that's not where you want to end up. You have to keep going. If you keep pushing through it, you're a completely different person.

B (66:55)

And the story of Henry Sugar, I'm assuming that's a fictional account.

A (67:00)

Yeah.

B (67:01)

Okay. Well, Dean, this has been a great pleasure once again to converse with you about many of my favorite topics. Thank you so much for being with me, for sharing your knowledge and your wisdom with me and with the new Thinking Allowed audience.

A (67:19)

My pleasure. Although I don't think I'm wise yet, I don't know exactly what wisdom is other than it's probably about being pro social. And so I try to do that. But, yeah, I don't know about wisdom.

B (67:35)

Well, you're being modest because I think the interview is full of wisdom, as a matter of fact. In any case, for those of you watching or listening, thank you for being with us because you. You are the reason that we are here. For early access to our videos and livestream events, sign up for our free weekly newsletter@newthinkingalowed.org.

A (68:31)

Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogue series is Charles T. Tart 70 years of exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology, now available on Amazon.

B (68:45)

New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body and spirit, the topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal visit their website at cihs. You can now download all eight copies of the New Thinking Allowed magazine for free or order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org Sam.