REAL MAGIC: Ancient Wisdom Modern Science and a guide to the secret powers of the universe

"… among philosophers, 'magician' then means a wise man who has the power to act." – Giordano Bruno, "On Magic"

Magic! When this word is uttered it brings to mind a wide array of images, from dark vaults and evil spirits to angels and heavenly rainbows. It is definitely the magic of J.S. Bach's music (or Fred Mercury's, your pick) and also the magic of that delicious dessert we had the other day. But what is "Real Magic"? Dean Radin, the chief scientist of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and a noted best selling author, brilliantly defends the thesis that magic is "a natural aspect of reality". That's real magic and with a real tour de force in his book Dr. Dean Radin offers us the connection of real magic with ancient wisdom and modern science as well as a guide to the secrets powers of the universe, exactly as its subtitle affirms.

A Magus, an old Persian/Median word of proto-Indo-European origin adopted in Greek means the one who is: able to, to help; has power, a sorcerer. Magus is the wise, the seer, the interpreter of dreams and in its bad sense the enchanter, the trickster, the impostor, the charlatan. Surprisingly enough the word "machine" derives from the same root as magic (~mech/mach). Originally a machine, a mechanism, signified a device stemming from the mind that empowers us by doing things for us. Yet, today it has inverted its meaning; mechanical means a mindless repetitive operation. And according to mainstream modern scientific meta-paradigm, we live in a mechanistic universe born out of randomness and devoid of purpose. Given the fact that not even a single machine was ever built without a purpose we arrive at an oxymoron! How did this happen? Where the magic has gone?

Dean Radin in his book "Real Magic" succinctly and brightly narrates this course of events that led to the present disenchanted age. The history narrated here can convince even the most die-hard skeptic that what was once considered natural-magic by the ancients is a scientific fact for us, the moderns; or as Arthur C. Clarke famously put it "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Can we say the same for what science cannot understand presently and refuse to study? Are phenomena such as the placebo/nocebo effects, premonition, precognition, telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance, extra-sensory perception, spontaneous healing and near-death experiences just 'magical' that await a future science for explanation? Oh, no. In the eyes of the prevailing scientism within the contemporary mainstream scientific establishment all these are generally considered just fluffy-thinking, ill-posed evidence, quackery or just wishful thinking and downright impossible.

Dr. Dean Radin's take on the above enigmas is amazingly interesting and equally amazingly informed. His readers will benefit greatly from the well organised bibliography and clear exposition of the many interrelated subjects, the evidence and references he provides and also from all the pointers to his own brilliant and seminal work over the years. Dean Radin's presence in conferences, workshops, public debates, seminars and 'webinars' is abundant, well documented and easily accessible to the wider public. The book offers a great incentive to follow up these as well as the creative unfolding of his thought and work.

Knowledge is power. So, evidently power loves to utilise knowledge. The magicians and seers of the past – from the court in Persepolis, Hermes Trismegistus and the Pharaoh, Aristander of Telmessos and Alexander the Great, Merlin and King Arthur, Zhuge Liang and Liu Bei, to John Dee and Elizabeth I of England, as well as the whole academy of them at Rudolf II's imperial court– have become legendary in the esoteric lore and folklore alike. But as Renaissance science gave way to the scientific revolution the influence of magic and the magicians diminished. They either went underground or vanished altogether. The book narrates this story well and vividly. Dr. Dean Radin is renowned, also from his previous best selling books, for his participation to the top secret US government "psychic espionage program" named Stargate. So, when he discuses this aspect of the collusion between knowledge, power and magic he does so from the vantage point of an erudite scholar as well as an honest person with actual work experience on this subject. So, his exposition is both accurate and greatly fascinating.

Obviously, the materialistic, empiricist meta-paradigm of modernity could not accommodate magic as a real, "natural aspect of reality" as Dean Radin asserts. But did the influence of magic also disappear? Not so, says Dean Radin. "Real Magic" offers throughout its chapters a very eloquent presentation of the influence of magical thinking, either consciously or subconsciously in various form of our modern civilisation. It describes the bad and the good, the mundane and the extraordinary magic around. In other words, it makes the reader see the magical dimension of things considered normal and ordinary by offering a different clearer perspective on the workings of magic. Specifically, I found the chapter with the title "Magical Potpourri", just delightful. It starts: "When you are studying the history and practice of magic, the first thing you discover is that everyone throughout history has been fascinated by this topic. And it seems that half of them have written at least one book about it. The scope and magnitude of the literature are mind-boggling". Yet, Dr. Dean Radin masters his enormous sources on the material very well… magically well! He articulates his insightful remarks on the vast literature and covers the societal, both subjective and objective realms, admirably. The range of his analysis is extraordinary, from Harry Potter to psychiatry, from witch-hunt to theurgy and from the mental focus of athletes to the powers of intuition in artists and scientists; a real pleasure to read.

Actually, all the chapters are equally thrilling. But what really fascinated me, and I must confess here that it is due to my own professional bias as a physicist, is the discussion in the chapters titled "Scientific evidence" and "Towards a Science of Magic". For almost four decades Dean Radin has been designing and running experiments to demonstrate the so called 'anomalous' phenomena of mind-matter interaction. Of course anomaly is defined only with respect to what is considered normal and normality within the materialistic meta-paradigm dictates that 'mind is secreted from the brain as bile is secreted from the liver', to borrow Peter Fenwicks's favourite innuendo. Quoting Radin: "How is it possible for a hunk of warm, wet tissue to not only describe itself in exquisite detail but also describe exotic realms that the human body and brain cannot access through its ordinary senses, and that must have been around for billions of years before we developed methods of detecting them. And do all this with mind-boggling accuracy? That puzzling question suggests that maybe the brain didn't dream up these ideas after all. Rather, the ideas dreamed up the brain. If that's the case, then, as magic proposes, we really do shape the world based on our expectations." This point of his really hits the nail on its head!

As he discusses further in the book, information's fundamental role in physics is a resurrecting trend. The critical issue thought is that information theory, as we know it, is deprived of purpose. Its founder Claude Shannon was wise and careful enough to highlight and warn us that his general theory of information is general only to the extend that is concerned with the syntactic level. The pragmatic level was left to the technologists and most importantly the semantic level was consciously excluded as a "hard problem" since semantics (the meaning) fundamentally rests on the subjective side of the information currency.

Shannon was well aware that science, presently, can only deal with the syntactic, objective, and experimentally verifiable aspect of reality. The semantic, subjective, rationally or noumenally (noetically) assertible part had already been delegated to religion, theology and to, an alas ailing, philosophy. The schism was not new, René Descartes formally announced it but it had been imposed, with the most brutal way, on western intellectual life by the burning of the last magus of the renaissance, the neo-Pythagorean philosopher and mystic Giordano Bruno; the 'fearless one'. The subsequent persecution and strict censorship of Galileo Galilei and all their followers followed this decisive bleak moment of western civilisation and real magic disappeared from the established institutions of learning. The scientific revolution had begun. This transition is narrated at large, also so well, in the book at hand.

Nowadays, after four long centuries reigned by the disenchanted and disenchanting scientific and industrial revolutions the humanity on this planet is on the brick of collapse, in spite of our acquired power over nature and unfortunately just because of it. Obviously clinging to what 'just worked' in these past four centuries might finally destroy us. With the advent of the so called meta-modern 'information revolution', which sweeps physics too, the commonly held view of the universe as a giant clockwork seems to morph to that of a giant supercomputer. But if the universe is made up by information who is getting informed? To arrive to a consistent answer to this question the universe does not only need to have meaning or to be made of meaning, the universe has to be the meaning of itself. "...because thinking and being are the same" ("to gar auto noein estin te kai einai") as Parmenides put it when magic was real.

'Real Magic' arrives to that same conclusion above and he is in line with the pioneers of modern physics, Planck, Wigner and Penrose among others. The universe has to be considered now as a noetic, living and thinking being. Four centuries ago, Galileo had posited that "the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics" but the formal mathematics developed ever since has discovered, and very accurately so, just the syntax of the language that the book of nature is written. As Kurt Goedel proved, already in 1931, no formal system can capture in its proofs the whole truth. Meaning (semantics) cannot be fully formalised. So, a new language, a new living dialectic 'mathesis* universalis', is waiting to be unfolded and be learned by us. Dean Radin heralds the quest for such a new language for science and he is asking us to join him in expanding our horizons towards a science beyond a materialistic world view. As one might suspect, Dean Radin's actually acts as a magus of our times and offers us his new luminous sigillum: this very book at hand and its empowering message. That's real magic. … "Let's deal with it.!" as he puts it.

The book argues in its conclusion: "Compared to the lofty goals of enlightenment, magic is more commonly associated with the acquisition of egotistical power. But that's just a stereotype. Magic can also be used for healing, counselling, enhancing survival, and reducing suffering. The range of possibilities spanning the spiritual-material axis is vast." Let me close by continuing copying the quotation that he has chosen for the concluding chapter; it is by Eden Phillpotts: "The universe is full of magical things patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper". Reading "Real Magic" surely helps us to accomplish that sharpening and is a great philosophical delight too!

(* 'mathesis'= deep knowledge, the word 'mathematics' derives from it)