There are pieces of this located all across the site, but based on an interview I participated in this last weekend (more on that later), I want to cohere most of the rant suggestion in a single place.

It always surprises me that magicians, who discover early on that there are extradimensional beings meddling in the physical don’t ever pull on that thread and end up in parapolitics: if they’re meddling in your life, who else’s life are they meddling in? Similarly, I am surprised when parapolitical researchers encounter evidence of extradmensional meddling they don’t work back the other way and go ‘well, let’s have a play with this. Let’s take it into the lab’. In both cases I think this comes down to arrogance, intellectual laziness and self-centredness. Everybody is playing inside baseball while the universe is playing netball. (There may well be a secondary factor in the case of magicians that too few of us have direct lived experience of terrestrial power and how it behaves.)

Over the last century -escalating tremendously in the last thirty years- western culture has accumulated thousands and thousands of replicated psi results from reputable universities and organisations that provide a veritable skyfull of data just crying out to be gridded into new constellations.

In media theory, we have strategies of terrain and strategies of trajectory. A strategy of terrain is one where the steps to the objective are wholly known: running a print advertising campaign, for instance. A strategy of trajectory is one in which the direction is known -the rise of mobile, m-payments and in-app media consumption- but where it all ends up is not known. In magic, a strategy of terrain would be an order-based system of collecting badges, silly aprons and chocolate screwdrivers. A strategy of trajectory would incorporate some of the following:

Daryl Bem’s precognition experiments

Bem had volunteers try to guess which of two randomly selected images were behind a curtain. When one of the images was erotic, predicting the image moved from chance to above chance. This has implications for the notion of ‘creating your future’ as presumably an erotic experience is desirable and thus there is some connection between our desires for the future and creating said future. There are also possible implications for sex magic which -not that you’d know it from looking- is apparently the cornerstone of one of the major western traditions. No one has publicly followed up on this.

Frontloading

The Stargate Project went from a funny little experiment funded in part by former Nazis (von Braun in this case) to a successful SIGINT strategy used for more than two decades by the most powerful military apparatus in human history -apparently continuing clandestinely today- following the discovery of frontloading: the less the viewer and the person conducting the experiment knows about the experiment the better the results. Consider this in the context of Spare’s theory of needing to bypass the conscious mind with your sigil. I said in the interview that a big part of the success of my shoaling method is that it is the best way I could come up with for replicating the ‘blind sitter’: charge enough sigils at once, especially when bulked out with silly goals and it is far easier to completely forget which one is for which.

I appreciate the ‘light touch’ approach to magic is far less dramatic and that many people want it to look and feel more like Hogwarts. The data don’t suggest that is the best method of maximising results until you get to the complete opposite end of the spectrum: memory loss, possession, etc. You will note this also satisfies the hypothesis that frontloading interferes with practical enchantment.

Telepathy and clairvoyance

As Dr Targ regularly points out, statistically the evidence for psi effects are ten times greater than the evidence that aspirin prevents heart attacks. The majority of this evidence comes from telepathy experiments. These data indicate that consciousness has a non-local effect or connection. The subsection of animal telepathy indicates that these field and non-local effects are not restricted to humans. There are dietary and mental preparation exercises that appear to have improved telepathic results which can be back-engineered into divination.

In the case of clairvoyance, regular protocols and attempting to ‘see’ things that you will get confirmation of in the future not only improve short-term accuracy but long-term proficiency.

Meditation

Google basically any illness and meditation and you will find it has an observable, beneficial effect. This says a vast amount about the primacy of consciousness and its impact in your physical experience. When I get asked about how to improve sigilisation technique I say meditation. (And to try intermittent fasting; shoaling them upon waking after a fast day and before eating.)

‘Energy’ healing

Anyone who tells you Elizabeth Targ’s prayer results were ‘debunked’ should get a drink in their face. They haven’t been. Combined with Dr Bengstrom’s research and method, we once again have data indicating that distance in no way impacts the efficacy of ‘energy’ healing. This suggests that it is not ‘energy’ at all, at least by common definition, and seems more likely to be a consciousness effect. Does this have implications for your approach and visualisations? Yes.

NDEs and after-death communication

The research in this area is hugely useful when looking for examples or kinds of manifestations/impacts on your life from the spirits, particularly as it pertains to the Dead and especially as it pertains to your ancestors.

Last Christmas, I had a colleague whose mother had died that year (2013) who went home to Yorkshire to celebrate the festive season with her sister and family. As the two sisters were preparing the meal, a butterfly showed up in the kitchen. They’re not exactly endemic to Yorkshire in high summer, to say nothing of the dead of winter. The sister was adamant this was their mother and my ‘Yorkshire lass’ colleague was all “you think our mother came back as a butterfly?” She was having none of it.

I had to pick my jaw up off the office floor when she told me in January. Butterfly manifestations appear in their hundreds and hundreds in cases of after-death communication. I side with the sister. So should you.

Extradimensional phenomena and their weird behaviour

Sometimes I wonder if the absurd abilities and powers of the grimoire spirits aren’t meant to be taken in aggregate. Nautical engineering, communicating with vegetables, cartography, fencing, igneous rock identification. They read like a recipe for faery or UFO encounters. (And to a lesser extend like a really ambitious college application.) This is why you should be across faery and UFO encounter data… and in particular Dr Vallée’s inimicably French way of putting it all together.

Researching the widest possible range of trickster effects encountered across the whole spectrum of parapsychology is also considerably more useful than listening to a bunch of dead Victorians about what you ‘should’ be doing ‘when’ and ‘what is supposed to happen next’. Improved calibration of personal experience awaits you.

‘Beginners luck’ in magic

‘Beginners luck’ is found in telepathy experiments, remote viewing, etc. When first tried, sitters often experience remarkable accuracy. A similar phenomenon is encountered in magic when first embarked upon. This again points to an underlying consciousness effect rather than ‘super-wizardry’ or ‘being chosen by the first damn spirit you contact’. For the otherwise-inevitable magus-itis, consider this prevention rather than cure.

Conclusion

In aggregate, these data cohere into a permanently-incomplete yet hugely compelling trajectory that strikes me as currently under-appreciated. They are the metaphoric wreckage of a crashed spacecraft. Your first thought upon encountering said wreckage is “my world just got permanently and irrevocably bigger.”

Your second thought is “what can I back-engineer out of this?”