[Help] How Should I Approach Magic in a Scientific World?

[Durward]

Thanks, I'll give it a read.

This is extremely interesting to me. It's people like you with healthy skepticism that stop me from writing off occultism completely as pure fantasy. I just find it so difficult to believe that, in an age of such easy documentation, any phenomena with verifiable evidence could be rejected by the scientific community at large. Especially considering that many of the accomplishments of scientific knowledge put into practice are actually more unbelievable than magic.

Personally I've dabbled in a few systems but never had any results whatsoever. In the past I've read Bardon's IIH, Kraig's Modern Magic, Bruce's Astral Dynamics, and a few others besides. Probably I did not give any of them the time that would be required, but a problem I've had in the past is that it's difficult to devote a lot of time and effort into something that I don't see a concrete probability of success with. It's a bit of a catch 22.

I'd like to know what recommendations you would make as a starting point for developing any of the skills you mentioned above? (except lucid dreaming, it's a bit mundane as far as occult abilities go) What system did you start with, how long did it take for you to have noticeable results, and would you recommend the system or prefer another in its place?

You would have to understand more about me and how I began this journey.
First, I was beaten and starved most of my young life, by crazy cult christian people. I already had extreme lucid dreams and out of body experiences, including seeing banal future events I would tell them about, and then they would come true. So they tried to exorcise me because that is simply just demons to these ignorant abusers.
I saw entities, like a small orb of light that I thought must be the tooth fairy, and a blue electric cloud that harassed me and my siblings for years. The veridical evidence of that blue cloud is that I wasn't the only sibling seeing it, so all of us interacted with it.

So, I STARTED with experiences beyond explanation, and went looking for answers.

Now, whether or not the starvation and beatings, the verbal abuse, or any of the other means of torture created some kind of dissociative personality situation is up for debate, but what I found out is that altered states of consciousness supply actual results that are correct and can be verified by others. So it wouldn't surprise me to find out that these pockets of awareness are supplying correct data.

There are reports that extreme stress or abuse can create alternate neural networks, but because of ethical or moral reasons, we obviously can't just create these for testing purposes.
I ran away from home, of course, at a very young age, and never went back.

The precognition continued, and was never under my control. Those are mainly states of perception that occur during dreaming, or between the state of dreaming and awake, the FULCRUM as science calls it. I made it a point to tell people or write them down, so that then also became veridical evidence of facts. I did try to make them happen, or to see events I wanted to see, but was never successful.

Then I noticed that telepathy, again veridical, was occurring in this state of floating awareness. For example, laying on the couch, my girlfriend was going to ask if I was awake because I was stirring. I heard her voice, but something was different about it. It sounded like she was talking through a metal tube, and the timing of it seemed like it was slower than it should be. I sat up and said, "No, I'm not awake yet." and she ran screaming out of the apartment, and wouldn't speak to me for 2 weeks. We are together, 50 years later. That gives you a point of reference for how long I have been experiencing things. But, the point was, she hadn't spoken yet, and was just thinking about it. We do this daily, to this day, with very banal things like a song stuck in her mind that I will start humming out loud, or what she's thinking about preparing for dinner and asking me about. She tells me to stay out of her head, and I tell her she is the one broadcasting so loudly.

I have been pulled in by other people's emotional states, where I know when someone has died, or is in trouble, or upset about breaking up. Some of those to the point of an interactive dream-like state where we act out the issue. Again, verified by contacting people and asking, which is again veridical.

So, to me there is no doubt about the reality I live in, or the events, or that they are proof of many things people write about. I don't need science to prove that to me, because I live it every day and know it.

However, I still don't just believe what I experience as real unless it can be proven. I have had a ton of things happen that can't be proven and were then just personal. Personal events can be a very slippery slope because the mind is full of shit and stupid. It makes stuff up all the time, and fools people to pull them down rabbit holes of nonsense. I have discovered my own personal filters, locks, and blocks. Look at the purple unicorn, follow it down the path... nope. Some people make a religion out of the purple unicorn, but have no control over anything and can't make anything happen if they needed to for survival.

I recently noticed that they did an experiment where the frontal lobe is temporarily shut down, and suddenly people can do Psi, in this case moving objects with the mind. That makes sense to me, because the frontal lobes are an obvious blocking system or filter, and all the energy of awareness gets funneled into the ego. Less ego, more available energy to focus on other things your capable of.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Instead of following that further, and finding the MANY OTHER locks, filters, and blocks, they just publish that and move on. Instead of seeing the obvious sensory systems like the heart's EM field reaching out, or the energy flows some of us can see and touch, they just move on.

I'm over here screaming that they need to invest in these types of experiments and find out more, and they struggle to get funding.

So, you may find out that plenty of us are 'phenomena first' and finding answers or seeking after.

Anyone going down this road should do as I did, and get your brain checked first. I have a clean bill of health, with a bit of a defiance disorder and a venomous hate of cults and the cult-type.

As far as science is concerned, unless you can perform for them on demand, and produce the results they want, when they want it, they are not going to wait for it to happen. I find it amusing that most of science is jumping on the NDE wagon, with veridical evidence only, and are so willing to accept it, while producing many different hypotheses about what it is and why it happens.

Take the US Government tests as an example. They had plenty of success stories. But, they couldn't control the Psi phenomena, or make it do what they wanted, when they wanted it. So after many years and millions of dollars, they sent it over to DARPA, who is now developing the electronic versions of telepathy and mind controlled interfaces.

A now deceased person I corresponded with got paid to locate terrorists, and paid well for it. President Carter used a remote viewer to locate a downed plane, successfully. Yet in these examples, they have such a stigma in society, and in science, that people will not accept them no matter what kind of evidence you provide.

The Randi million dollar challenge has been proven to be a fraud to milk the gullible public for funds, and was never going to pay out, yet most of the skeptics love the Randi idea and will use this as their own personal "prove it" moment.

This is the world we live in, and they walk with blinders on because it has never hit them personally, or if it has, they have convinced themselves that it was hallucination or something else. They are mostly afraid of what it might mean if the world isn't just what we can perceive while awake with the 5 senses. I never had that luxury, and had to fight to figure out what is just the 5 senses, and what belongs in a category beyond them.

Sorry, long story. Hope that helps you.

Post automatically merged: Today at 5:54 PM

My personal thought is there is no decent model that has been accepted, and can account for these abilities and still be compatible with the incredibly successful science that we have.

Without such a model, we can't begin to fashion testable hypotheses, let alone create a theory of magic.

LOL, yet they are all jumping on the NDE bandwagon, using a soul or survival mode theory.
Long live the ether!

 

[dema354]

Hmm. Not sure what else I can add here. There were several excellent points made by Robert Ramsay, Durward and Swampdweller900 among others. With that said,

I recently noticed that they did an experiment where the frontal lobe is temporarily shut down, and suddenly people can do Psi, in this case moving objects with the mind. That makes sense to me, because the frontal lobes are an obvious blocking system or filter, and all the energy of awareness gets funneled into the ego. Less ego, more available energy to focus on other things your capable of.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

That might generally be the case but it doesn't explain people like Wolfgang Pauli or Helmut Schmidt, highly intelligent and dare I say analytical scientists who still had an anomalous effect or more specifically what we would call Psi. See I am of the view point that it's possible to have both ego and psi however considering the studies and assuming they are taking from the average crowd, it seems that generally the less ego one has the more psi they are capable of, but not always. Occasionally there are exceptions but that's what they are. Exceptions.

Now as for my input on OP's question, that would depend on what sort of paradigm you are operating from. While generally a lot of scientists today operate from a materialistic standpoint we must not forget what the scientific method does and does not require. It requires falsification, sure however we do not need to reduce everything down to a material correspondent. As for me I operate from a probabilistic reality paradigm meaning I look and compare systems to gauge how likely an explanation is to another.

Science was once a method. It has become a priesthood.
What is presented today as “science” is rarely the open-ended process of inquiry it pretends to be. It is a sanctioned narrative, administered by credentialed intermediaries whose authority is protected not by evidence, but by taboo. The lab coat has replaced the robe, the journal has replaced scripture, and consensus has replaced truth. One no longer asks whether something is correct—only whether it has been approved.

As much as I'd like to disagree, that would be burying my head in the sand and not in the manner that ostriches do. Sure, some scientists are in business of open-ended inquiry and provided you're not trying to study and experiment with the paranormal you at least have a shot at funding. But take something like parapsychology, regardless of how rigorous you are deemed as pseudoscientific or to put a clerical equivalent, heretical. The problem isn’t the scientific method itself but its institutional gatekeepers when certain questions and reasonings are treated as heretical regardless of evidence. To be clear, I'm not against science itself. I'm against the dogma as it stiffens inquiry and understanding.

 

[Roger Bacon]

You would have to understand more about me and how I began this journey.
First, I was beaten and starved most of my young life, by crazy cult christian people. I already had extreme lucid dreams and out of body experiences, including seeing banal future events I would tell them about, and then they would come true. So they tried to exorcise me because that is simply just demons to these ignorant abusers.
I saw entities, like a small orb of light that I thought must be the tooth fairy, and a blue electric cloud that harassed me and my siblings for years. The veridical evidence of that blue cloud is that I wasn't the only sibling seeing it, so all of us interacted with it.

So, I STARTED with experiences beyond explanation, and went looking for answers.

Now, whether or not the starvation and beatings, the verbal abuse, or any of the other means of torture created some kind of dissociative personality situation is up for debate, but what I found out is that altered states of consciousness supply actual results that are correct and can be verified by others. So it wouldn't surprise me to find out that these pockets of awareness are supplying correct data.

There are reports that extreme stress or abuse can create alternate neural networks, but because of ethical or moral reasons, we obviously can't just create these for testing purposes.
I ran away from home, of course, at a very young age, and never went back.

The precognition continued, and was never under my control. Those are mainly states of perception that occur during dreaming, or between the state of dreaming and awake, the FULCRUM as science calls it. I made it a point to tell people or write them down, so that then also became veridical evidence of facts. I did try to make them happen, or to see events I wanted to see, but was never successful.

Then I noticed that telepathy, again veridical, was occurring in this state of floating awareness. For example, laying on the couch, my girlfriend was going to ask if I was awake because I was stirring. I heard her voice, but something was different about it. It sounded like she was talking through a metal tube, and the timing of it seemed like it was slower than it should be. I sat up and said, "No, I'm not awake yet." and she ran screaming out of the apartment, and wouldn't speak to me for 2 weeks. We are together, 50 years later. That gives you a point of reference for how long I have been experiencing things. But, the point was, she hadn't spoken yet, and was just thinking about it. We do this daily, to this day, with very banal things like a song stuck in her mind that I will start humming out loud, or what she's thinking about preparing for dinner and asking me about. She tells me to stay out of her head, and I tell her she is the one broadcasting so loudly.

I have been pulled in by other people's emotional states, where I know when someone has died, or is in trouble, or upset about breaking up. Some of those to the point of an interactive dream-like state where we act out the issue. Again, verified by contacting people and asking, which is again veridical.

So, to me there is no doubt about the reality I live in, or the events, or that they are proof of many things people write about. I don't need science to prove that to me, because I live it every day and know it.

However, I still don't just believe what I experience as real unless it can be proven. I have had a ton of things happen that can't be proven and were then just personal. Personal events can be a very slippery slope because the mind is full of shit and stupid. It makes stuff up all the time, and fools people to pull them down rabbit holes of nonsense. I have discovered my own personal filters, locks, and blocks. Look at the purple unicorn, follow it down the path... nope. Some people make a religion out of the purple unicorn, but have no control over anything and can't make anything happen if they needed to for survival.

[snip]

So, you may find out that plenty of us are 'phenomena first' and finding answers or seeking after.

Anyone going down this road should do as I did, and get your brain checked first. I have a clean bill of health, with a bit of a defiance disorder and a venomous hate of cults and the cult-type.

As far as science is concerned, unless you can perform for them on demand, and produce the results they want, when they want it, they are not going to wait for it to happen. I find it amusing that most of science is jumping on the NDE wagon, with veridical evidence only, and are so willing to accept it, while producing many different hypotheses about what it is and why it happens.

Take the US Government tests as an example. They had plenty of success stories. But, they couldn't control the Psi phenomena, or make it do what they wanted, when they wanted it. So after many years and millions of dollars, they sent it over to DARPA, who is now developing the electronic versions of telepathy and mind controlled interfaces.

A now deceased person I corresponded with got paid to locate terrorists, and paid well for it. President Carter used a remote viewer to locate a downed plane, successfully. Yet in these examples, they have such a stigma in society, and in science, that people will not accept them no matter what kind of evidence you provide.

The Randi million dollar challenge has been proven to be a fraud to milk the gullible public for funds, and was never going to pay out, yet most of the skeptics love the Randi idea and will use this as their own personal "prove it" moment.

This is the world we live in, and they walk with blinders on because it has never hit them personally, or if it has, they have convinced themselves that it was hallucination or something else. They are mostly afraid of what it might mean if the world isn't just what we can perceive while awake with the 5 senses. I never had that luxury, and had to fight to figure out what is just the 5 senses, and what belongs in a category beyond them.

Sorry, long story. Hope that helps you.

Not exactly the answer I was hoping for, to be honest, but thank you anyway it was interesting. I find it admirable that despite your experiences you make the efforts that you do to verify them. Not everybody is willing to critically examine themselves with a skeptical outlook.

I recently noticed that they did an experiment where the frontal lobe is temporarily shut down, and suddenly people can do Psi, in this case moving objects with the mind. That makes sense to me, because the frontal lobes are an obvious blocking system or filter, and all the energy of awareness gets funneled into the ego. Less ego, more available energy to focus on other things your capable of.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Instead of following that further, and finding the MANY OTHER locks, filters, and blocks, they just publish that and move on. Instead of seeing the obvious sensory systems like the heart's EM field reaching out, or the energy flows some of us can see and touch, they just move on.

I'm over here screaming that they need to invest in these types of experiments and find out more, and they struggle to get funding.

Honestly, there probably isn't enough benefit to research in these fields to justify the funding. With physics you have consistent results that have applications in marketable technology that achieves wondrous results. With psychology, you attain the means to manipulate the population at large to buy your product or turn against your rivals. But what do you get with PSI? Levitation and remote viewing are already effectively attainable with technology. Precognition and, less so telepathy, might have limited uses if they could be applied reliably, but it's just a sounder strategy to invest in developing technology that doesn't rely on humans developing these abilities. That's without accounting for the societal and theological can of worms that would open at definitive proof of a fraction of what the occult community claims is possible.

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge or longterm benefit to mankind is not a concern for the major powers in the world. That's why the space program has languished for decades since the moon landing.

 

[Durward]

Honestly, there probably isn't enough benefit to research in these fields to justify the funding.

I know your points well. I have pondered so much of this until my brain hurts.
The original research done by the government, and others, was of course to weaponize it, or spy with it.

Currently, if anyone or any country does figure out a way to unlock/unleash the power to stop hearts or peek at secrets, locate terrorists, or see future events, everyone else will want it to the point of destroying each other to get it.

I'm of the opinion that there is a reason that the remote viewing classes are mostly run by ex-military, or the ex-military are involved in watching for success stories, and that anyone who gets to be good at it is likely recruited to work with them, likely with an 'or else' ultimatum. They know it works, and they know what they want from it. Which is always something sinister. Spying is always important.

Locating criminals or terrorists, all by itself, should be a major player in research and investment. Solving crime, sometimes before it even happens, would also be worth their time. Then, what the nature of this ability is, whether there is some kind of ether we can use, or whatever, could reshape how we do communications.

I think you are correct that things like psychokinesis would need to become something major, like being able to levitate an entire bus, before it has much value. At the same time, knowing if they are altering gravity, or if this is another force that can be utilized as a power source would be a major step forward. If we can run generators using these forces, we just solved an energy crisis.

Figuring out the how and why of precognition, or being able to see forwards in time, would likely upset a lot of smart people. Just figuring out how that works or is possible would open a new field of science. I'm a fan of the idea that it has something to do with matching or aligning quantum fields in the present and future, but time is a real bitch to figure out. Again, knowing how we do this could certainly open up some whoop-ass science studies.

Humans are all about using and abusing everything, raping the planet, destroying any balance, and walking away leaving the mess for the locals who live there to clean up.

Post automatically merged: Today at 9:11 PM

By the way, there is an active network of Russian investors that look also look for anyone that has success in remote viewing and precognition. Money has a way of making that part happen.