Book Review: Real Magic by Dean Radin

“This book is about 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.

This is about real magic….

Real magic falls into three categories: mental influences of the physical world, perception of events distant in space or time, and interactions with nonphysical entities. The first type I’ll call force of will; it’s associated with spell-casting and other techniques meant to intentionally influence events or actions. The second is divination; it’s associated with practices such as reading Tarot cards and mirror-gazing. The third is theurgy; from the Greek meaning “god-work”; it involves methods for evoking and communicating with spirits.”

There has been a lot of talk about magic lately, and a HUGE increase in interest in spirituality, magic, witchcraft, and the occult, especially since the recent pandemic further eroded trust in mainstream narratives, traditions, and institutions.

This has had both positive and negative effects.

On one hand, a lot of those old narratives, traditions, and institutions needed to be challenged. Unfortunately, we’re lacking powerful and effective replacements in a lot of cases which has left room for the current meaning crisis and the rise of New Age charlatans. To be fair, charlatans are NOT just a product of the New Age movement. Any perfunctory review of human history will reveal that there has never been a shortage of snake oil salesman, false psychics and mediums, and other such charlatans.

That is why it is so refreshing to come across someone like Dean Radin, PhD, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and professor of integral and transpersonal psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies. He asks questions and explores possibilities most people too readily ignore and in doing so reveals both profound truths about reality, and profound limitations of our current systems of scientific discovery. Namely the artificial limits we place on ourselves by limiting which questions we ask in the first place. I’m referring to the limits of scientism, not the scientific method itself. Scientism is the dogmatic belief that certain things are possible and others are not. And scientism limits us because it results in people not asking certain questions because they think they already know the answer; which makes scientism itself anti-scientific.

What’s so great about Dean is that he specifically asks those questions which other scientists refuse to ask. Like, is ESP possible? If so, to what extent, and how can we replicate that in controlled conditions? And what might a scientifically informed vision of magic look like?

“While science as a practice has primarily concentrated on the objective world, scientific methods are extremely powerful, so if we wish we can redirect our lens to look inward and explore what consciousness is capable of. When we do that, we are startled to find whole new realms of knowledge. One of the consequences of taking this inner perspective is that the idea of magic transforms from an impossible fantasy into an aspect of Nature that we can begin to study. From this stance, terms such as paranormal and supernatural are seen as quaint and antediluvian, similar to how modern medicine no longer needs the concept of “bad humors” when discussing the origins of disease.”

In Real Magic, he explores the history of magic and shows how what was called “magic” in each age was simply the set of processes which we didn’t mechanistically understand yet. Much of what was called magic a thousand or two thousand years ago is simply medicine or physics today. He also talks about the many ways that magic still pervades our lives today.

“…magic didn’t miraculously disappear with the rise of the scientific worldview. Magic is still intensely present. Prayer is a form of intentional magic, a mental act intended to affect the world in some way. Wearing a sacred symbol is a form of sympathetic magic, a symbolic correspondence said to transcend time and space. Many religious rituals are forms of ancient ceremonial magic. The abundance of popular books on the power of affirmations and positive thinking are all based on age-old magical principles.”

He then reviews the scientific literature, including both his own experiments and those of others, for the evidence for magic. This part was especially fascinating to me because I regularly read scientific literature and he talks about the difficulties of designing proper experiments in the realm of what we call parapsychology and reveals some paradigm shifting data that forever changed what I believe is possible, like energy healing at a distance. That one particularly blew my mind. I was adamant that, if energy healing was at all real, it certainly couldn’t be done at a distance. Turns out, I was wrong.

But the book doesn’t stop there! He also goes on to reveal which magical techniques and practices have been shown to be real, effective, and replicable and introduces the reader to a few individuals who he calls “Merlin-class magicians”. Or people who have/had abilities beyond what most of us think is possible. Which leads us to question, what are we really capable of when we stop limiting ourselves by our beliefs?

To say that I was skeptical when I purchased this book is an understatement. I flat out believed that most of this stuff was impossible and nonsensical but I wanted to challenge that bias because I have a practice of challenging myself whenever I find that I’m being prejudicial. And Real Magic is one of those rare books that really did change my mind. To be fair, the results of most scientific tests of magical principles, while statistically significant, are still generally small in magnitude. So don’t expect any huge jaw-dropping revelations there. But that’s not the point.

Dean is a scientist, not a journalist, so don’t expect flashy headlines and bold, sweeping statements. Instead, you can find a careful, systematic review of the past, present, and future of magic, or in other words human potential.

(Link to purchase: Real Magic)