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Gordon White, Will Magic Kill Parapsychology? |366|
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Chaos magician and author Gordon White on the blurring of parapsychology and magic.
photo by: Skeptiko
Nobody does magic quite like Disney. The sciency wizard, the wand, the spells, it’s all burned into our collective consciousness, along with the idea that it’s all silly nonsense, but hey, what about this…
(Dr. Dean Radin on RuneSoup) Sorry, I should back up a second here and say I’m talking in a way that a year ago I would never have talked, I would never have used the word ‘magic’ and I wouldn’t have talked about spirits or anything of that sort.
That’s Dr. Dean Radin, the Dr. Dean Radin, pre-eminent parapsychology researcher, pioneering researcher and he’s talking with today’s guest, author and chaos magician, Gordon White.
So, this is all relatively new for me. I know a little bit more than I did a year ago, because I’ve just written a book on this, but the thing that sparked my interest in looking into the esoteric traditions is, that I’ve been working in psi research for something like three decades, almost four decades now, and I had to think really hard for anybody whoever talked about… a couple of anthropologists will talk about the psychic and Sharman connections as real, as opposed to as theater.
In the most recent large book, which is a state of the art book on psi research called A Handbook of Parapsychology for the 21st Century, the word ‘magic’ doesn’t even show up in the index. I found this kind of puzzling because, of course, everybody’s well aware of what the Sharman’s claim to be able to do and we’re well aware of notions of what magic is, at least what is portrayed in entertainment, and I became curious as to why it doesn’t show up. I mean, I’m involved in the profession of studying magic, if we think of magic in the proper terms.
So I went through this whole business of seeing if I could synthesize, what are the basic magical practices and seeing if I could map it onto psi research and of course, it completely maps.
(Gordon White) It 100% maps, absolutely.
It a 100% match. So then I was shocked at, “Well, how come I didn’t know this?” It’s virtually because no one ever talks about it, and then, well why is that? Well, we’re being scientists, that’s why.
So, fully take that in for a minute. The leading light of psi research, Dean Radin, is telling us that psi, the stuff that’s blown the lid off of grandpa’s dopey old materialistic science, well he seems to be saying that, that isn’t really science at all, it’s maybe better termed ‘magic’.
(Gordon White on Redesigning Society) Yeah, I have this definition down to a sentence now I subsequently explain, which is, ‘magic is a culture specific way of using or interacting with the natural consciousness capacities of a particular human.’
Here’s Gordon again, this time he’s chatting it up with Phillip Watt, on his magic themed podcast, Redesigning Society, but tell me, as you’re listening, does this sound like a podcast about magic or a science podcast, because I’m not sure which is which anymore?
So, that might sound a bit circular, but actually if you look across the world at systems or cultures that have never repudiated magic in the same way that the northwest European Enlightenment did, and I’m being very specific about that in Europe because you’re actually finding in southern Europe that it’s carried on merrily in the kind of folk traditions of Italian grandmothers and so on, but it’s a very specific Cartesian post-Enlightenment world out of all of human history that repudiated it.
But if you look around the world there are, sort of, what you might call ‘magical powers’, for want of a lesser dramatic term, a number of techniques that are reasonably conserved. So you have some method of seeing the future, or clairvoyance, you have some method of communicating across distance, so you have telepathy or whatever you want to call it, these are just modern words for capacities right? Then you have interacting or communicating with the spirit world and then you have some method, as a result of that typically, of what I would call probability enhancement or probability manipulation, which is, to make the things that you want happen more often than the things that you don’t want to happen.
What’s interesting to me about that is, if you look at the history of say, the development of psi and the Society of Psychical Research and all these kinds of groups that emerged about 150 years ago, we now have 150 years of evidence, mostly laboratory evidence that basically falls neatly into these four categories.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’m pining for a simple-minded world of biological robots in a meaningless universe, a paradigm that we’ve thoroughly trashed on this show over the years, but at the same time I’m not entirely sure Dean Radin knows what he’s signing up for.
Here’s occult philosophy expert and more importantly, practicing ceremonial magician, Dr. Stephen Skinner, on Greg Carlwood’s, The Higherside Chats show.
(Dr. Stephen Skinner, on The Higherside Chats) One of the basic grimoire things is that the parchment that you do the key seals on things, must be made from an animal because parchment is animal skin and that you should make it yourself and I have done that and it’s quite an interesting procedure and it’s hard work and I can tell you that parchment, rather than paper or plastic or something, is much more effective. So, perhaps in some reason, the spirit can, I won’t say see it but understand the sigils on it because it’s written on something that was once living, whereas if you just sketch it out with a compass on a piece of paper it’s much, much, much less effective.
Wow.
People will not push themselves to do those things. Now, one day somebody may discover how you can do sigils on plastic and still get the same effect but it sure as hell is not going to be me.
Yeah, I mean, once we can do it on Facebook we’re all going to be set.
Yeah, it will not happen. There are only certain images and things that the spirits recognize and these are not what comes up on Facebook.
(Greg Carlwood) Damn. Well, as for people’s fears on this kind of stuff, I’ve heard you discuss the classic notion of the Faustian pact, this idea of making a deal with a trickster and losing your soul and then it was more of a Christian invention to scare people off and I think that’s really interesting. How can we separate real concerns and dangers in dealing with this kind of thing, from that lingering propaganda residue?
Okay, you’re absolutely right. It was largely a Christian gloss on the Faust books that he lost his soul. The pact is real but the pact is what the spirit makes with you and it’s his obligations to you that are written into the pact. The whole idea that you lose your soul or whatever at the end, I think, is a priest’s view rather than a magician’s view.
There are dangers in magic, one of them is obsession. There are a number of people who get obsessed or possessed anyway, but if you’re actually actively calling a particular spirit, and you have no defense and you don’t know what you’re doing, then it occasionally happens that the spirit will take up residence and then you’ve got a serious problem and you need an exorcist who knows what they’re doing.
So, there are dangers in doing magic. It’s like electricity, with the right insulation, at the right circle, the right conditions, you don’t get zapped, but if you do these things and handle a wire without the right precautions, then you may get zapped.
So magic, like physics or doing household electrics, is not without danger.
Brave be the scientist who wants to bring that into the lab, but that may in fact be the future of parapsychology… and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to Gordon today on Skeptiko.
Alex Tsakiris: How do you really bring magic into the lab? If you come to that worldview shift and you say, “Okay, I really don’t understand what I’m measuring,” he wants his scientific cake and he wants to eat it too, I mean, isn’t there an inherent problem with that?
Gordon White: Yeah, absolutely but I think you sort of nailed it when you said, you mentioned 20 years in terms of people looking at Dr. Radin’s research and, sort of, figuring out what he was doing or is doing. I think, in a lot of fields, we’re at that point now where, to sort of quote Pete Carroll magic works in practice but not in theory, so I’m sort of sanguine about it.
Dean’s going to be wrong, as we all are, and I think between now and how we get to, even the word science is maybe not correct for it, but how we get to a method of inquiry that is a least worst match for these phenomena, is going to require a lot of things. It’s going to require interdisciplinary research, so it’s going to require anthropology, it’s going to require history, biology, it’s going to need all these things that we don’t have the words for, because our conception of the world has sort of outrun the way we structure learning about things, even adding ‘ology’ to a word, and putting it in little, sorts of, pillars and categories.
All that and much, much more on this episode of Skeptiko.
Share
Tweet
SHARES0
Chaos magician and author Gordon White on the blurring of parapsychology and magic.
photo by: Skeptiko
Nobody does magic quite like Disney. The sciency wizard, the wand, the spells, it’s all burned into our collective consciousness, along with the idea that it’s all silly nonsense, but hey, what about this…
(Dr. Dean Radin on RuneSoup) Sorry, I should back up a second here and say I’m talking in a way that a year ago I would never have talked, I would never have used the word ‘magic’ and I wouldn’t have talked about spirits or anything of that sort.
That’s Dr. Dean Radin, the Dr. Dean Radin, pre-eminent parapsychology researcher, pioneering researcher and he’s talking with today’s guest, author and chaos magician, Gordon White.
So, this is all relatively new for me. I know a little bit more than I did a year ago, because I’ve just written a book on this, but the thing that sparked my interest in looking into the esoteric traditions is, that I’ve been working in psi research for something like three decades, almost four decades now, and I had to think really hard for anybody whoever talked about… a couple of anthropologists will talk about the psychic and Sharman connections as real, as opposed to as theater.
In the most recent large book, which is a state of the art book on psi research called A Handbook of Parapsychology for the 21st Century, the word ‘magic’ doesn’t even show up in the index. I found this kind of puzzling because, of course, everybody’s well aware of what the Sharman’s claim to be able to do and we’re well aware of notions of what magic is, at least what is portrayed in entertainment, and I became curious as to why it doesn’t show up. I mean, I’m involved in the profession of studying magic, if we think of magic in the proper terms.
So I went through this whole business of seeing if I could synthesize, what are the basic magical practices and seeing if I could map it onto psi research and of course, it completely maps.
(Gordon White) It 100% maps, absolutely.
It a 100% match. So then I was shocked at, “Well, how come I didn’t know this?” It’s virtually because no one ever talks about it, and then, well why is that? Well, we’re being scientists, that’s why.
So, fully take that in for a minute. The leading light of psi research, Dean Radin, is telling us that psi, the stuff that’s blown the lid off of grandpa’s dopey old materialistic science, well he seems to be saying that, that isn’t really science at all, it’s maybe better termed ‘magic’.
(Gordon White on Redesigning Society) Yeah, I have this definition down to a sentence now I subsequently explain, which is, ‘magic is a culture specific way of using or interacting with the natural consciousness capacities of a particular human.’
Here’s Gordon again, this time he’s chatting it up with Phillip Watt, on his magic themed podcast, Redesigning Society, but tell me, as you’re listening, does this sound like a podcast about magic or a science podcast, because I’m not sure which is which anymore?
So, that might sound a bit circular, but actually if you look across the world at systems or cultures that have never repudiated magic in the same way that the northwest European Enlightenment did, and I’m being very specific about that in Europe because you’re actually finding in southern Europe that it’s carried on merrily in the kind of folk traditions of Italian grandmothers and so on, but it’s a very specific Cartesian post-Enlightenment world out of all of human history that repudiated it.
But if you look around the world there are, sort of, what you might call ‘magical powers’, for want of a lesser dramatic term, a number of techniques that are reasonably conserved. So you have some method of seeing the future, or clairvoyance, you have some method of communicating across distance, so you have telepathy or whatever you want to call it, these are just modern words for capacities right? Then you have interacting or communicating with the spirit world and then you have some method, as a result of that typically, of what I would call probability enhancement or probability manipulation, which is, to make the things that you want happen more often than the things that you don’t want to happen.
What’s interesting to me about that is, if you look at the history of say, the development of psi and the Society of Psychical Research and all these kinds of groups that emerged about 150 years ago, we now have 150 years of evidence, mostly laboratory evidence that basically falls neatly into these four categories.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not like I’m pining for a simple-minded world of biological robots in a meaningless universe, a paradigm that we’ve thoroughly trashed on this show over the years, but at the same time I’m not entirely sure Dean Radin knows what he’s signing up for.
Here’s occult philosophy expert and more importantly, practicing ceremonial magician, Dr. Stephen Skinner, on Greg Carlwood’s, The Higherside Chats show.
(Dr. Stephen Skinner, on The Higherside Chats) One of the basic grimoire things is that the parchment that you do the key seals on things, must be made from an animal because parchment is animal skin and that you should make it yourself and I have done that and it’s quite an interesting procedure and it’s hard work and I can tell you that parchment, rather than paper or plastic or something, is much more effective. So, perhaps in some reason, the spirit can, I won’t say see it but understand the sigils on it because it’s written on something that was once living, whereas if you just sketch it out with a compass on a piece of paper it’s much, much, much less effective.
Wow.
People will not push themselves to do those things. Now, one day somebody may discover how you can do sigils on plastic and still get the same effect but it sure as hell is not going to be me.
Yeah, I mean, once we can do it on Facebook we’re all going to be set.
Yeah, it will not happen. There are only certain images and things that the spirits recognize and these are not what comes up on Facebook.
(Greg Carlwood) Damn. Well, as for people’s fears on this kind of stuff, I’ve heard you discuss the classic notion of the Faustian pact, this idea of making a deal with a trickster and losing your soul and then it was more of a Christian invention to scare people off and I think that’s really interesting. How can we separate real concerns and dangers in dealing with this kind of thing, from that lingering propaganda residue?
Okay, you’re absolutely right. It was largely a Christian gloss on the Faust books that he lost his soul. The pact is real but the pact is what the spirit makes with you and it’s his obligations to you that are written into the pact. The whole idea that you lose your soul or whatever at the end, I think, is a priest’s view rather than a magician’s view.
There are dangers in magic, one of them is obsession. There are a number of people who get obsessed or possessed anyway, but if you’re actually actively calling a particular spirit, and you have no defense and you don’t know what you’re doing, then it occasionally happens that the spirit will take up residence and then you’ve got a serious problem and you need an exorcist who knows what they’re doing.
So, there are dangers in doing magic. It’s like electricity, with the right insulation, at the right circle, the right conditions, you don’t get zapped, but if you do these things and handle a wire without the right precautions, then you may get zapped.
So magic, like physics or doing household electrics, is not without danger.
Brave be the scientist who wants to bring that into the lab, but that may in fact be the future of parapsychology… and it’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to Gordon today on Skeptiko.
Alex Tsakiris: How do you really bring magic into the lab? If you come to that worldview shift and you say, “Okay, I really don’t understand what I’m measuring,” he wants his scientific cake and he wants to eat it too, I mean, isn’t there an inherent problem with that?
Gordon White: Yeah, absolutely but I think you sort of nailed it when you said, you mentioned 20 years in terms of people looking at Dr. Radin’s research and, sort of, figuring out what he was doing or is doing. I think, in a lot of fields, we’re at that point now where, to sort of quote Pete Carroll magic works in practice but not in theory, so I’m sort of sanguine about it.
Dean’s going to be wrong, as we all are, and I think between now and how we get to, even the word science is maybe not correct for it, but how we get to a method of inquiry that is a least worst match for these phenomena, is going to require a lot of things. It’s going to require interdisciplinary research, so it’s going to require anthropology, it’s going to require history, biology, it’s going to need all these things that we don’t have the words for, because our conception of the world has sort of outrun the way we structure learning about things, even adding ‘ology’ to a word, and putting it in little, sorts of, pillars and categories.
All that and much, much more on this episode of Skeptiko.