- Radin, Dean.
Real Magic.
New York: Harmony Books, 2018.
ISBN 978-1-5247-5882-0.
-
From its beginnings in the 19th century as “psychical
research”, there has always been something dodgy and
disreputable about parapsychology: the scientific study of
phenomena, frequently reported across all human cultures
and history, such as clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy,
communication with the dead or non-material beings, and
psychokinesis (mental influence on physical processes). All
of these disparate phenomena have in common that there is no
known physical theory which can explain how they might
work. In the 19th century, science was much more willing to
proceed from observations and evidence, then try to study them
under controlled conditions, and finally propose and test
theories about how they might work. Today, many scientists
are inclined to put theory first, rejecting any evidence
of phenomena for which no theory exists to explain it.
In such an intellectual environment, those who study such things,
now called parapsychologists, have been, for the most part,
very modest in their claims, careful to distinguish their
laboratory investigations, mostly involving ordinary subjects,
from extravagant reports of shamans and psychics, whether
contemporary or historical, and scrupulous in the design and
statistical analysis of their experiments. One leader in
the field is
Dean Radin,
author of the present book, and four times president of the
Parapsychological Association, a professional society which is
an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science. Dr. Radin is chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic
Sciences in Petaluma, California, where he pursues laboratory
research in parapsychology. In his previous books, including
Entangled Minds (August 2007),
he presents the evidence for various forms of human
perception which seem to defy conventional explanation.
He refrains from suggesting mechanisms or concluding whether
what is measured is causation or correlation. Rather,
he argues that the body of accumulated evidence from his
work and that of others, in recent experiments conducted under
the strictest protocols to eliminate possible fraud, post-selection
of data, and with blinding and statistical rigour which
often exceed those of clinical trials of pharmaceuticals, provides
evidence that “something is going on” which
we don't understand that would be considered discovery of a
new phenomenon if it originated in a “hard science”
field such as particle physics.
Here, Radin argues that the accumulated evidence for the phenomena
parapsychologists have been studying in the laboratory for
decades is so persuasive to all except sceptics who no
amount of evidence would suffice to persuade, that it is
time for parapsychologists and those interested in their
work to admit that what they're really studying is 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.” Instead, real magic, as
understood for millennia, which he divides into three
main categories:
- Force of will: mental influence on the
physical world, traditionally associated with
spell-casting and other forms of “mind
over matter”.
- Divination: perceiving objects or events
distant in time and space, traditionally
involving such practices as reading
the Tarot or projecting consciousness to
other places.
- Theurgy: communicating with non-material
consciousness: mediums channelling spirits or
communicating with the dead, summoning demons.
As Radin describes, it was only after years of work in
parapsychology that he finally figured out why it is that,
while according to a 2005 Gallup pool, 75% of people in
the United States believe in one or more phenomena considered
“paranormal”, only around 0.001% of scientists
are engaged in studying these experiences. What's so
frightening, distasteful, or disreputable about them?
It's because they all involve some kind of direct interaction
between human consciousness and the objective, material
world or, in other words magic. Scientists are
uncomfortable enough with consciousness as it is: they
don't have any idea how it emerges from what, in their
reductionist models, is a computer made of meat, to
the extent that some scientists deny the existence of
consciousness entirely and dismiss it as a delusion.
(Indeed, studying the origin of consciousness is almost
as disreputable in academia as parapsychology.)
But if we must admit the existence of this mysterious
thing called consciousness, along with other messy
concepts such as free will, at least we must keep it
confined within the skull: not roaming around and
directly perceiving things far away or in the future,
affecting physical events, or existing independent of
brains. That would be just too weird.
And yet most religions, from those of traditional societies to
the most widely practiced today, include descriptions of events and
incorporate practices which are explicitly magical according
to Radin's definition. Paragraphs 2115–2117 of the
Catechism
of the Roman Catholic Church begin by stating that
“God can reveal the future to his prophets or to other saints.”
and then go on to prohibit “Consulting horoscopes,
astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the
phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums…”.
But if these things did not exist, or did not work, then why
would there be a need to forbid them? Perhaps it's because,
despite religion's incorporating magic into its belief system
and practices, it also wishes to enforce a monopoly on the
use of magic among its believers—in Radin's words,
“no magic for you!”
In fact, as stated at the beginning of chapter 4, “Magic
is to religion as technology is to science.” Just
as science provides an understanding of the material
world which technology applies in order to accomplish
goals, religion provides a model of the spiritual world which
magic provides the means to employ. From antiquity to the
present day, religion and magic have been closely associated
with one another, and many religions have restricted
knowledge of their magical components and practices to
insiders and banned others knowing or employing them.
Radin surveys this long history and provides a look at
contemporary, non-religious, practice of the three categories
of real magic.
He then turns to what is, in my estimation, the most interesting
and important part of the book: the scientific evidence for
the existence of real magic. A variety of laboratory experiments,
many very recent and with careful design and controls, illustrate the
three categories and explore subtle aspects of their behaviour. For
example, when people precognitively sense events in the future,
do they sense a certain event which is sure to happen,
or the most probable event whose occurrence might be
averted through the action of free will? How on Earth would you
design an experiment to test that? It's extremely
clever, and the results are interesting and have deep
implications.
If ordinary people can demonstrate these seemingly magical powers in
the laboratory (albeit with small, yet statistically highly significant
effect sizes),
are there some people whose powers are much
greater? That is the case for most human talents, whether
athletic, artistic, or intellectual; one suspects it
might be so here. Historical and contemporary evidence
for “Merlin-class magicians” is reviewed, not as
proof for the existence of real magic, but as what might be
expected if it did exist.
What is science to make of all of this? Mainstream science, if
it mentions consciousness at all, usually considers it an
emergent phenomenon at the tip of a pyramid of more fundamental
sciences such as biology, chemistry, and physics. But what if
we've got it wrong, and consciousness is not at the top but the
bottom: ultimately everything emerges from a universal
consciousness of which our individual consciousness is but a
part, and of which all parts are interconnected? These are
precisely the tenets of a multitude of esoteric traditions
developed independently by cultures all around the world and
over millennia, all of whom incorporated some form of magic into
their belief systems. Maybe, as evidence for real magic emerges
from the laboratory, we'll conclude they were on to something.
This is an excellent look at the deep connections between
traditional beliefs in magic and modern experiments which
suggest those beliefs, however much they appear to
contradict dogma, may be grounded in reality. Readers
who are unacquainted with modern parapsychological research
and the evidence it has produced probably shouldn't start
here, but rather with the author's earlier
Entangled Minds, as it
provides detailed information about the experiments,
results, and responses to criticism of them which
are largely assumed as the foundation for the arguments here.
May 2018 