Welcome to Mind Escape. Are you ready?
Are you ready to escape your mind?
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Tonight we have an amazing episode, something a little
different, a little out of my own wheelhouse, but I love that
and I love learning new things. I am joined by Doctor Richard
Kaczynski, who is a psychologist, author and
historian of Western esotericism.
He's the author of the book Purdue Rabo, which is the
biography of Aleister Crowley. He recently re released The
Sword of Song with Inner Traditions and he just released
Mind over Magic, which is available right now.
So please go click the link down below and get yourself a copy.
This is going to be a fascinating conversation on the
intersection between mind and magic.
Enjoy the show. All right, Richard, how are you?
I'm doing great. How are you this fine evening?
Great, great. So anybody listening, this is
Doctor Richard Kaczynski. He's an author of many books.
One we're going to talk about tonight called Mind Over Magic.
That's Magic with Aki. Thought that this would be a
great conversation and if you haven't checked it out already
please go check out Mind Over Magic and shout out to Inner
Traditions as well and I will have the link down below all the
way at the bottom if you are interested.
So welcome on the show, how are you?
I'm great. Thank you for that lovely
introduction and for plugging mind over magic.
Oh, of course, of course. So just as a little bit of a
background, how did you get into this field as like a historian
of the occult and magic and things like that?
Because like mind over magic kind of you, you get into like
more of the psychological aspects of it.
Do you think that there's anything too magic in terms of
ritual magic, or where do you stand on that all?
Right. Well, starting with the first
part, how I got into this as a, as a historian, I, I guess I
came into this originally as someone who from a very young
age was very interested in all this stuff.
I was, I just grew up in a time where this was just, it was in
the air every place, you know, there were magazines and books
and TV programs and movies, game shows and everything centered
around this idea of, you know, what could probably be recalled
the occult or metaphysics, you know, UFOs, Bigfoot, CSP, magic,
the unexplained everything. And so I've always had that kind
of interest and later came specifically into contact with
like the the Golden Dawn, which was a British like initiatory,
you know, mystical society, which then led to Aleister
Crowley. And one day while I was
traveling, I came across a a new biography of Aleister Crowley
that came out and it was just terrible.
And, you know, at this point I had been studying for about 10
years, you know, his works and, you know, other related things.
And I just thought, man, this is so bad.
I, I could do better a job than this.
And so this little voice in the back of my head said, why don't
you? And then I was off to the races.
Then it was no longer like writing about or reading about
this kind of from an interested, you know, observer or
participant sort of thing. But now it's just like changing
gears into writing about this in a more rigorous historical
academic context. And for me, that was very
important to talk about Aleister Crowley's life in the context of
the times he lived, in the context of the people that he
knew, which for me was also a great learning experience.
Cause a lot of the people that Crowley knew were, you know,
Theodore Dreiser and folks like this were not folks that I
actually had learned about myself like in grade score in
college. So, you know, I had to kind of
rich myself about that context as well.
And it just kind of spilled out from there to kind of
researching kind of the historical background of the
whole esoteric milieu of the, you know, the late 19th century,
early 20th century occultism. And so from there I wrote books
like Forgotten Templars and the Origins of OTO.
And recently about last year, I put out a book about the
foundations of Thelema, which primarily were looking at
Aleister Crowley and his colleagues, Viktor Noiberg and
JFC Fuller, and how their approach to this new religious
movement was informed by agnosticism.
So the OR the, you know, the culture of doubt and how, how
one would approach, you know, esotericism from that
standpoint. So that's kind of my origin
story as a historian of, you know, the occult and occult
ideas and writing about that. But my interests in the occult,
it also led me to pursue psychology as a degree when I
went to university, thinking that A, that this would be a
good career path for me and B, that I was hopeful that I would
find some answers to what is this stuff all about and how
does it work? And I really didn't find those
answers if there wasn't a psychology, psychology of magic
or how all this worked at that time, even though there were
theoretical people like, you know, Carl Jung was very
popular. That was that was more like a
theoretical model or perspective, but it wasn't
really a testable theory in these and kind of in the
empirical, scientific sense. But kind of looking back on my
career as a psychologist or just the field, you know, and my my
encounters with literature over my professional life, I can
realize that while there isn't like a study where people are
doing real time imaging or, or anything like that on people who
are dressed in their robes doing magical rituals.
There are a lot of psychological studies on personality traits
and characteristics and how we interact with the world that do
in fact have bearing on what people do when they engage in a
ritual. And when I talk about people
doing magic, I'm using a very broad term here or broad
definition. I'm not speaking specifically
about say, you know, Golden Dawn cereal ceremonial magicians, but
any practitioner who in her spiritual works engages in some
sort of a, a routine of spiritual practice.
So that can can include people who participate in witchcraft.
It could be certain magicians, it can be Freemasons, it can be,
you know, it can be pretty much any denomination if you're
engaged in some sort of a regular spiritual practice.
And I wanted to explore what psychology could tell us about
that. And as to whether I believe in
magic, I guess that's the last part of your question.
So I'm sorry to be rambling on. I'm trying to remember all all
the things you asked me. No, you're good.
I should have parsed that out, but go ahead.
You know, it kind of depends on your definition of magic and
what you mean by magic. And one thing I'm very careful
about with as a book, because I don't try to address this
question of how magic works in the, in the broader sense.
You know, I think of again, Aleister Crowley's definition of
magic as the art and science of causing change to occur in a
conformity with will. And so since there's, there's
two pieces to it, there's art and there's science, and I'm
talking about the science part of it, there's still like an art
to it as well. So I'm not trying to just chalk
all this up to being mental gymnastics or it's all happening
in your head. But I think there's something to
be said for what is happening in your head because we are human
beings with minds existing, you know, in the world.
And everything we do involves psychology to some extent or
another. And, you know, my approach to
this book is to say, here's the psychological factors that play
a part in what happens when somebody does ritual.
And beyond that, I leave that up to the reader to decide if they,
you know, I, my hope is that a skeptic can pick this up and
read this book and say, OK, I can see why people feel there's
a powerful effect from doing ritual.
But they also kind of leave this, leave that question, leave
this book at the doorstep to that question, you know, the
idea that through these various practices you can facilitate
entering this liminal state of consciousness.
And it's in that liminal state of consciousness that something
called magic can't happen. But I kind of stop at that
threshold to say we can get into this liminal state of
consciousness. But that said, there are lots of
studies that support this idea that the practice of magic can
be an effective tool for personal transformation.
And that is one other definition of magic.
You know, the Golden Dawn, for instance, you know, has this
idea of we're doing high magic, you know, as opposed to low
magic, which is for like personal gain.
You know, the idea of high magic is that you're trying to improve
yourself, become a better human being, become more spiritually
aware and, and again, go through this process of inner alchemy of
self transformation. And in that sense, I think
absolutely what we're talking about with the psychology of
magic. That's these tools that
magicians use absolutely do facilitate putting people in
that sort of a a state where that transformation is possible.
Interesting. Yeah.
And you, you said something in there about people not trying to
create science or quantify the outcomes or something along
those lines. I did read a book I want to say
like 7 years ago I think it was Dean Raiden real magic where he.
Goes. Yeah, Yeah.
So it's like noetic sciences and things like that.
What do you think about that where it's like these very
nominal changes is kind of like the, the idea behind that or
like a Rupert Sheldrick or somebody like that where they're
talking about things like somebody looking at your back,
the back of your head and you, you know, picking up on that.
So you turn around or something along those lines.
What do you think about that kind of stuff?
Yeah, Yeah, I think I have like a two-part answer to that
question. 1 is that in writing this book, I was trying to be
very careful to stick to generally accepted peer reviewed
studies in psychology. And as I mentioned earlier,
again, my hope is that even like a skeptic could read this and
kind of go, OK, I see what you're saying, I can buy that.
And I made a conscious decision to not go too deep into the ESP
or psychical research. I didn't talk about it a little
bit because I think the skeptical position poses some
problems to talking about this, but by and large, I don't dive
too deep into that as a subject. I figure there's people like
Dean Raiden who do a much better job than I could because that's
basically what he's dedicated his life to.
That's sad. I I'm a big fan of Dean Raiden.
I remember reading his book The The Conscious Universe many
years ago and what he does it is he does the statistical
technique called meta analysis, which is something that is very
common in medical research. And the idea being that being
able to make statements about the universe or the world, A
cause and effect relationship, whether you know this causes
cancer or what have you, often relies on a large amount of data
to be able to get a good picture of the world.
The problem is any kind of a study.
And again, this is true whether it's medical research or whether
it's ESP research is limited by funding and so or, or the
availability of people with a particular disease, you know who
to enroll in your study, for example.
And So what statisticians have done, they've come up with this
way of taking multiple studies have been published and then
averaging together the results to make it kind of artificially
this large study. And this is a very accepted
statistical method in in in research in medicine and
psychology, never fields and Dean Raiden basically does this
with, you know, literature, ESP and the results of those of
these meta analysis. And I do talk about this a
little bit in, in mind over Magic as well, concludes that
when you average all these studies together, some with
positive results, some with negative results, you do get a
statistically significant, although pretty small deviation
from chance. It's like like a percentage.
I don't remember the exact amount off the top of my head,
but it's it's like, it's not like this is going to guarantee
you success or anything like that, but it's kind of like
shifting the odds slightly in your favor.
And I often think about a line from Mr. Spock from Star Trek
saying that, you know, chance favors a prepared mind.
You know, so to the extent to which, you know, there may be a
psychic component involved in this magic stuff, it doesn't
necessarily guarantee you a result, but just it's greases
the wheels. And I think, you know, if if
that's true, you're not going to get a result just by kind of
sitting back passively and waiting for the universe to
knock on your doorstep. I think the idea here is that if
the odds are shifted slightly in your favor, you still need to be
going out there and kind of advocating for yourself to the
universe. You know, it's for things to go
your way. Yeah, absolutely.
It's like somebody watching The Secret and then expecting
everything to happen for him. Yeah, so I mentioned off here I
have OCD. I'm very familiar with ritual.
If anybody who has OCD does, whether it's organizing
something, washing your hands a certain amount of times, or you
know, some people count, there's like a whole different array of
ritual associated with having OCD and stuff.
I told you, I've never gotten anything positive other than
like to self soothe or you know, satisfy my own mind temporarily
or something like that. But do you think that obviously
we're talking about mind over magic here, Mind as it relates
to magic, Do you think it's the intention?
Like that's what I kind of take away from when people talk about
that. It's like the intention.
Like if you put the intention behind something, you know, your
energy, whether it's creating art or whatever, there's
something going into that that otherwise wouldn't be there.
But you're putting your focus and your time and your heart and
your energy into it as opposed to, just like you said, sitting
back and like waiting for something good to happen or
something. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
And there certainly rituals that we engage in as human beings
every day. I mean, we brush our teeth, you
know, you know, we, we take showers, we commute to work.
And these are things that we tend to do very automatically.
We don't really have to give too much thought to them.
And that's good, you know, I mean, they, they, you know,
think about this idea of your decision fatigue, you know,
people just kind of wearing themselves out, thinking too
much about what shirt they're going to wear today and every
little decision. And so being able to go on
autopilot for basic human functions is a good thing.
But in terms of having a result, you know, having a change,
having an effect from a ritual, there needs there does need to
be an intention of some sort. There needs to be some
mindfulness about it. And in in mind over magic.
There's a there are we on in the book.
I talk about a big part of magic is establishing kind of a
routine of doing a regular sort of practice of some kind.
And that may be journaling. It may be doing something like
some sort of a cleansing or a banishing every day or, or what
have you, or some sort of grounding and centering.
And or, you know, another example I talk about is that
there, there, there may be some sort of words you might say over
a meal, you know, in, in our Christian traditions, you know,
it's like a blessing of the food and the Thlemic tradition that,
you know, Aleister Crowley created, it's not so much about
blessing the food, but it's about pausing, saying, why am I
eating this? You know what, to what end am I
eating? It's to sustain myself to do
this great work of, you know, discovering my true will and,
you know, transferring myself in accordance with that to become
the best version of myself possible.
And if you do that ritual and you don't really think about the
words and you just say them automatically and then you eat
kind of automatically, you're not getting the effect of that
ritual. I mean, I, I argue that ritual
does involve mindful engagement with what you are doing.
And while it's easy to go on autopilot with a lot of things
in your life, magic is not one of those.
You need to be plugged in and attending to it every time you
do it, or you're just you're not.
You're not going to get the results or the effects.
Interesting. What was your hypothesis going
into writing this book, Mind Over Magic, and did it change at
all after you finished writing it through your research I.
Don't know if I had like a hypothesis in like the
experimental sense, but I think I just had this sense that over
the years I would be reading a paper and I would say, oh, hey,
that kind of relates to this thing, this about psychology.
You know, I love the psychology of magic.
And while it wasn't specifically about magic, it's like, oh, OK,
this this relates in some way. And I just got to this point
where I realized that while there may not be this.
Overarching theory of the psychology of magic out there.
You know, in the experimental literature, there were pieces
that that did explain this. And so I can approach this more
as a puzzle to put together the pieces.
So I kind of went through, you know, the prevailing theories
and the research areas in psychology and, you know,
personality theory and social psychology and started to think
how, how, if at all any of these relate to the the psychology of
magic. Whether you're talking about,
you know, daily ritual habit formation, for instance,
mindfulness, being in the zone, you know, cognitive dissonance,
attitude change, and all of these things and where these
would plug into and inform practices that magicians go
through. And then I just did this huge
WIT review where I pulled, you know, like 1300 articles, you
know, on these different topics and kind of went through them
and put together the narrative that's in this book.
So it's not so much I had a theory, but I had an inkling
that if we put all these pieces together, it would make a
picture. And I didn't necessarily have
the picture in mind when I started.
But as I, again, sort of putting together a puzzle, you know, the
book just kind of took kind of life of its own.
And as I filled in the pieces, you know, I kind of saw the
picture take shape, which was, you know, very exciting and
gratifying for me since, again, I came in into psychology
looking for these answers. Felt like I didn't find them in
Graduate School, but then again, 30 years later, you know, I've
kind of filled in the picture for myself.
So that was a very gratifying feeling.
I'm so I'm not, you know, I've had people on where we've talked
about magic or people that are familiar with Aleister Crowley
or, you know, some of the more esoteric people for throughout,
you know, the different eras and things like that.
When you do magic or like perform rituals or things like
that, what are, what are these people expecting and do they
expect to get something out of it?
Cause for me personally, the only thing I've ever experienced
that was like, I don't want to say supernatural because it's
not supernatural. But the only thing I've ever
experienced in like a waking state that was completely
transformative would be like a psychoactive compound or a
psychedelic or something along those lines.
You know, I've meditated. I used to be a huge meditator
and sometimes I'd meditate for two hours and you can get to
some pretty deep states. But it's still people that claim
it's the same. I I don't agree with those
people. So.
Yeah, what people expect, I think depends on what they're
doing. I think again, the the person
who engages in the meditation practice, you can experience
ecstatic states doing that, you know, these ideas of, you know,
samadhi, you know, the, the union with the Godhead sort of
trance experiences. There's also research which
shows that engaging in these sorts of yogic and meditation
practices actually increases the the brain volume and the neural
connections in your brain. And the theory there is that
this will in some ways protect against the effects of aging
because as you age, you will lose, you lose brain matter.
That's kind of a known phenomenon.
So that if you basically bulk up your brain volume, you know, as
an older age, you know, you will suffer the effects of, you know,
cognitive effects of aging to a lesser degree.
And there is a chapter in mind over magic about that.
But otherwise there's other rituals people might do, like a
part of a daily practice might be something some sort of
grounding, you know, kind of visualizing yourself, you know,
sinking into the earth or you know, growing, being a tree,
growing into the sky and drawing an energy from the sun and from
the earth. Or the Middle Pillar exercise,
which is kind of a similar thing, but just more
kabbalistic. And the intent of that is just
kind of again, grounding, settling in, feeling, you know,
whatever energy or whatever flowing through your body and
kind of feeling kind of, you know, not distracted, but
centered and empowered. But a vanishing or a cleansing
ceremony of your space, you know, might have a different
intention. It might, you know, the
intention. There might be the kind of clear
away distractions to kind of purify your environment that
you're going to do some kind of work again.
You know, one might do some sort of a consecration of a Talisman,
for instance. You know, Talisman would be
something some, I don't know, some object that you were trying
to impress with an intention to bring something into your life.
But that's going to again be have a very different
expectation from someone who is perhaps trying to invoke some,
some deity or some spirit. You know, often times people
will invoke or someone into themselves, like the quality of
some, you know, some God, goddess, spirit, whatever
saying, you know, I could really use some more generosity in my
life. I'm going to invoke the spirit
of Jupiter to to kind of, you know, help me identify with that
sort of feeling. But that's again, going to be
very different from from if you do E vocation, which is to try
to summon something to visible, you know, appearance before you.
So again, the difference between are you trying to bring some
quality into yourself when you're trying to interact with
something out there in the world in front of you?
Or, you know, just going doing some sort of like a astral
vision or a vision quest or some sort, You know, the kind of
similar to meditation, but you're like, you know, you can
be meditating in the tarot card and let your mind take you on a
journey somewhere. Or, you know, you might
literally astral project and leave your body and go on, you
know, some kind of adventure. And then what you are going to
encounter often times is really kind of in the spirit of, you
know, adventure. You know, you don't know what
you're going to expect. It's investigation and often
times people who pursue that will engage in the kind of this
process of reality checking, you know, saying is what I'm is what
I'm getting adding up is what if I've encountered something
that's talking to me, you know, does does what it look like
match what it's telling me? If I asked for its name, does it
does that name match? You know, if I ask what's your
favorite color? Does it match, you know, the
entity that you're claiming to be and so on.
So I guess the the summary of all that is that what you might
expect from doing ritual really kind of depends on the kind of
ritual that you're doing and what your intention is.
Yeah, that's interesting. We've talked a lot about like
ancient cultures and civilizations on the show.
When you look back at like ancient summer and ancient Egypt
and stuff, there was a lot of magic and spells and things like
that. How, how much do you think
belief plays into whether you get a result or not?
Like meaning that like if you fully believe in what you're
doing, will it yield a different result as opposed to somebody
that's maybe more hesitant or, you know, maybe doesn't believe
it as much? I mean, I just think about like
religion too. I remember when I started this
podcast, I was kind of got go, you know, eight years ago, kind
of going through a spiritual awakening.
And I was connecting a lot of dots and things were romantic
and fun and there was good vibes flowing.
And then you start to like read a lot more and you start to
realize, like peel the veil and the layers back a little bit and
you start to realize, oh, there's, you know, maybe there's
not a whole lot to that. So how much does belief play
into magic and does it change the results?
I I, I agree with you, I think belief is a critical piece of
it. And before we talk about like
the science of it, I've got a couple of anecdotal examples I
can provide. I remember one time bumping into
a person who was an avowed ceremonial magician, but his
grimoire or working manual of magic was literally the Dungeon
and Dragon's Dungeon Master's Guide.
And he told me about how we went on to the astral plane and then
fought through all 666 levels of the abyss and blah, blah, blah.
But it was all D&D terminology. And again, I don't doubt that
this person had experiences, but you know, the experiences were
framed by this belief in this system.
Similarly, there's this very popular texts called the
Necronomicon. Now, this was a text that
Lovecraft invented for his, you know, you know, Krulu mythos, it
does not exist. And it was just this, you know,
mystery text that you can call upon to as the the background
for these, you know, ancient, you know, horrible beings that
existed, you know, before time and outside our universe.
But back in the 70s, someone put together a bunch of like
Sumerian, Cacaidian, Kabbalistic Crowley stuff and came up with
his mishmash and released it as a book called The Necronomicon.
And it's, you know, it's a modern invention.
You know, it's not an actual text, even though there's this
mythical story about how, you know, it was given to the editor
and all of that. But people in the intervening
decades have picked up this book, used it and sworn they've
gotten results from it. And so I think the, the idea
here is that, you know, a lot of these practices at some point in
history are made-up, you know, and it's through practicing and
refining and belief that these things do work.
You know, why? If you didn't believe in
something, you know, when you, you know, click your heels three
times and say there's no place like home, but you don't believe
it, why would you expect something to happen?
You know, and it's similar in psychological research, you
know, for instance, there's, there's a study looking at like
Joseph Campbell's hero archetype, you know, that, that
that cycle of myth for and, and they, and there's actually
psychologists who've done studies where they looked at
whether people saw themselves as the main character in their
story of their life or whether they just saw themselves as an
NPC or non player character. And developing exercises to kind
of cast yourself in your own small life, you know, or not so
small life in terms of this, you know, hero's journey and people
who do this have a better sense of self and, you know,
psychological being and so on. The thing I would caution though
about is that I think belief and credulity needs to be balanced
with a good deal of inquiry, doubt, skepticism, you know,
verification. You know, I think that this
whole idea of truth, particularly in this area is
kind of a double edged sword. And again, in in minor Magic, I
talk about this, that skeptics will criticize practitioners or
believers as being gullible, as susceptible as believing in
things uncritically. But there is similarly research
on the flip side, saying that people who are excessively
skeptical are more inclined to misinformation and not see
patterns and, you know, reject information when it is in fact
valid. And so, you know, I would
advocate that, you know, you kind of find that middle ground,
you know, be be open, but, you know, also verify.
And again, a lot of that verify happens through your own
experiences. You know, does does something
work for you? It doesn't.
Not if it doesn't work for you. You know, after a few tries, you
know, try something else. Yeah.
Do you think that there's this like, you know, most of what
we're talking about just to me feels like metaphysics, like
just stuff we just don't really fully understand yet, whether
it's philosophy of mind or, you know, the nature of reality,
consciousness, things like that. But do you think that to your
point, what you just said, that there is this thin sliver of
like it could go kind of either way and if you're open to it, it
might work in your favor. But if you're closed off and
let's say, a dogmatic materialist scientist who's
looking for the most empirical outcome might miss something
that could inform, you know, on a deeper level or something like
that. Yeah, absolutely.
One of the things I, again, I talk about in the mind of a
magic because my dissertation in psychology actually looked at
the psychology of metaphysical beliefs.
One of one of the things I had AI took issue with when I was
reviewing the literature at this time was that a lot of the
studies that were being done were being done on, you know,
Psych 101. Well, Psych 101, you know,
students and you know, I was a Psych 101 student at one point.
And I think other than myself perhaps, or is my only maybe a
handful would actually wrestle with these metaphysical
questions. And so to be asking a classroom
of 300, you know, 18 year olds what they think about karma or
reincarnation or stuff, these are quite, quite likely ideas I
never really thought too much about, let alone actually
engaged with in a meaningful way.
And so I wanted to survey people who were actually practitioners
of some sort. So I went to conferences and
conventions and, you know, camping events that were kind of
geared toward, you know, the Pagan occult community and talk
to those people and the people were actually doing this stuff.
And one of the things I was interested in was this idea of a
transformative religious experience, this idea that you
had this, again, a peak experience.
You know, there's lots of terms for it, but that's that moment
where everything in your life kind of shifts.
You know, this transformative thing where you the way you see
the world is forever changed and you're forever changed as a
person. You know, you, you mentioned the
psychedelics earlier. A lot of people have that sort
of reaction to 1st psychedelic experiences like they, they,
their view of the world is forever changed.
And in that research they did, I found that the best predictor of
having this kind of a transformative religious
experience or spiritual experience was that you were
open to new experiences. So this idea that if you felt
you had all the answers and this this applies not just to
science, you know, saying I'm a skeptic and I, you know, science
tells me everything I need to know, but also, you know, refers
to, you know, your spirituality or religious beliefs too.
If you're a person who says this is, you know, this is my, my
holy book or this is, you know, what my preacher tells me, or
this is what, you know, the religious leader in my community
tells me. And I don't need to think about
it anymore because I've been giving the answers.
And that's it. You're not really going to be as
open to an experience as people are saying.
Oh, you know, I'm kind of curious to find out about the
world or to, to, to learn more about my faith or my beliefs.
And it's that openness that's kind of the key to having these
sorts of transformative experiences.
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.
And to the the point about the psychedelic stuff, I mean, if
you go throughout history, most of the cultural, aside from like
the people partying and just doing it, whatever, most of the
cultural uses you go the loosening mysteries, there's a
lot of ritual associated with that.
You go to South America, the ship people or the Watoto.
These tribes in Amazon have these rituals with ayahuasca,
the Native Americans path of souls.
You can go all over the world and you know, soma homa all over
and there's ritual associated with the, you know, the use of
these psychoactive compounds. So, and I mean, even the average
Joe that I know that's using psychedelics, they have some.
So they might not think about it that way, but they have some
level of ritual associated with the experience set setting.
Everything's going to be a certain way, that kind of a
thing, so. Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, and in the interest of fairness, I should
say that I the the use of psychedelics and ritual is
something that I really don't get into in this book.
So again, that that could be a whole other book in and of
itself and. You should write that one too.
Over again, there's other people, you know, out there who,
for whom that is, you know, their, their passion.
And I think, you know, that like, you know, like I talked
about Dean Rayden earlier, you know, he's the person to write
about ESP researchers, other people like, you know, PD Newman
and you know, and so on, who could do a better job of talking
about this than than I. So, you know, again, the, this
kind of the book I've written kind of sticks pretty close to
kind of standard psychological theory, but it's just a real
easy step into the ESP or some other related area.
You know, Rupert Sheldrake who had mentioned earlier all this
stuff, you know, people can easily integrate this into the
the bigger puzzle if they will so choose.
Yeah, for sure, yeah. Shout out to PD, shout out to
Chris Bennett, a couple people, you know, connected on that
topic that we've had on the show in the past.
Yeah, I consider PDA friend too. Shout out as far as let's talk
about like flow states for a minute or like, you know,
integrating the stuff into kind of like practice and even.
Like stage magic for that, you know, like I obviously we think
of like sleight of hand and things like that When you say
magic, you know, obviously your books with the K and that can,
you know, obviously insinuate ritual, but what about like
stage magic and performative magic flow states, things like
that. I think stage magic or sleight
of hand, that sort of practice is something different from flow
state, but there is definitely stuff that we can learn from the
psychology of stage magic. There's actually a whole field
of psychologists and magicians kind of collaborating to talk
about the psychology, you know, that's that is used in
misdirection or these sort of forced choice tricks and things
like that. There's an, one of the
interesting things I, I get into is this idea of psychological
priming. And there's, there's a study
there where a magician takes somebody, you know, on a walk
through town, they go into a toy store and they ask pick out a
toy and they pick out the toy and the magician pulls out a
card and it says giraffe and the other person had picked out a
toy giraffe. But what they talk about is the
setup to this study is that along that path they walk to the
toy store. There's various things.
There might be a giraffe picture down like a bus stop poster or a
picture of a giraffe, you know, and chalk on or some graffiti or
something. And so they might pass various
things along the way that feature a giraffe and they don't
point it out, but it's they're kind of subliminally.
And so it kind of prompts your mind to think along those lines
and so that when you get to that toy store, the person is more
likely to gravitate toward this giraffe because they've been
kind of psychologically primed to do so.
And this idea of priming is something that also can be used
in magical ritual, You know, with AK, the idea that if you're
going through some sort of a retirement or a period of
preparation for some kind of a ritual work, that you are in the
sense kind of priming yourself for the experience you're about
to have. You're kind of meditating on and
preparing yourself and shaking yourself up.
And in that sense, I think we kind of get into this idea of a
flow state because that's generally defined as this sort
of slippery and hard to get into state of mind where you, the
thing that you're doing, while it may involve some technical
skill, just flows effortlessly. And that can be whether you're
playing sports or whether you're playing a musical instrument or
so ever. But it's just, it just happens
effortlessly. And it's just this like really
calm Zen experience. And getting into that flow state
is not something you just say, OK, here we go.
And they're actually people who train athletes to get into flow
States. And the training regimen for
this looks remarkably like the sorts of preparation people do
in ritual magic. It's like, get a diary,
meditate, you know, do these exercise, do these
visualizations. And, you know, it just backed me
out looking at those, these articles about here's how we,
you know, how these spark psychologists train athletes and
get into the zone. I'm just like, that's, that's
exactly, I mean literally exactly what magicians do.
Like manipulating kind of attention or perception kind of
a thing. Yeah.
I mean, yeah. Or just, you know, kind of
again, priming those expectations and practicing
getting into that flow state, you know, this idea that the
more you do this, the easier it is to kind of enter that flow
States and sort of sort of like priming or setting yourself up
with like psychological cues. You know, like, you know,
there's also to be said for some like the superstitions that
people in sports engage in, Like I've got to wear my magic
underwear or my special socks or the special jersey, you know,
when I when I go out onto the field.
And that's again, that's true in a lot of other field, you know,
areas, you know, actors can go through the same sort of process
of trying to get into the shoes, literally or figuratively, of
the role of her playing. I in the book, I talk about how
Isabella Rossellini when she was doing table readings for Blue
Velvet, even though so again, you're not really acting out the
roles physically, you're just kind of sitting around the table
reading your part. But she talks about how she
needed to have the nail Polish on her fingers so that she could
look at her hands and believe that she was that character.
And she and and so the asserts of cues, you know, that we kind
of train ourselves in whether you're an athlete, actor,
magician, can facilitate getting into the sort of flow states
where things just work more more effortlessly.
How do you personally distinguish between like
psychological efficacy and like of like ritual versus, let's
say, like metaphysical claims? How do you parse that out?
Can you elaborate? Just like the difference between
how it affects somebody versus what they're claiming it's
having an effect on them if. That yeah, I mean, for me, I, I
don't try to explain what the phenomenon is.
I I think that phenomenon is kind of an open question and
the. The book, you know, starts with
this idea that unusual experiences really are not that
unusual, that many people, most people perhaps at some point or
never in their lives, will have some sort of, you know, WTF
moment in their life, you know, something they can't explain or
go, what is that? And yeah, I, I, I'm trained as a
statistician and in statistics, you know, you never have a cut
and dry yes or no, you have probably true or probably false,
but there's always that chance that that could be wrong.
And so I'm kind of constitutionally used to living
with a certain amount of uncertainty.
And, you know, so with a lot of the sorts of phenomenon that
people might experience doing ritual, I mean, if they are
evoking something to visible appearance, for example, is a,
is a spirit or a deity or whatever literally appearing in
the room in front of them? Or is this the idea of the third
man phenomenon or the sensed presence that we talked about in
psychology and nothing more than that.
I, I just don't go there, you know, 'cause I, 'cause I think
the end result is people do practice these practices and
they experience things that transform them as individuals.
And what that is that transforms them to me is not as important
as the fact that they are experiencing transformation.
So again, I, I try not to dip my toe into the metaphysics and I
don't think the metaphysics is really something that psychology
could answer anyway. So, you know, again, I I can't
leave that to a reader to kind of interpret for themselves or
to pursue again, further studies in, you know, Rupert Sheldrake,
you know, Dean Rayden and you know, all these other folks
we're talking about Chris Bennett, PD Doom and never a way
there is. Awesome.
I want to pivot a little bit here.
I did. I listened to you.
I think you're reading when your books is it panic in Detroit
about Aleister Crowley coming to Detroit and causing kind of a, a
whole hoopla. Can you give us a little bit of
a background on that as somebody?
I I'm from the Detroit area and I love history and historical
things that relate to the city. I think that would be a great a
great little piece here. Yeah, absolutely.
And as someone who hails me Detroit myself, this period is
especially fascinating to me. But what happened was during
World War One, Carolee wound up moving from England to the
United States, living here for those five years.
And at one point, toward the end of his stay, he wanted to
publish whatever issue of his periodically Equinox, which is
really like a book length sort of publication.
But he had kind of suspended doing that when he, you know,
left the UK. And right about that time, some
people from Detroit got in contact with them because they
were they were, you know, antiquarian and used book
dealers who were interested in, you know, occult and other
physical topics. And they were also members of,
you know, the Masonic fraternity and they knew that Crawley was a
head of this sort of the English head of this organizational
order template Orientis, which was kind of a offshoot of
Freemasonry. And they were interested in
knowing more. So they brought Crawley to
Detroit to on the on the offer of, you know, hey, you know, not
only do I have this bookstore, but, you know, we can publish
this book, you know, the Equinox that you want to do, but we also
want to know more about this OTO group.
We might be interested in starting a branch here in in the
Motor City. And so Crowley saw an
opportunity. He came out and he met with some
of the local Mason folks and got the book published.
But when it came time to forming the group, there was a lot of a
jockeying for position about, you know, who would be on the
Supreme Grand Council and who would not be, and quarreling
ensued. And then when Crowley's equinox
came out, you know, there with, you know, the him in the pan and
things like this, some people are like, oh, my gosh, this is
not at all what I imagined it would be.
And, and things just kind of blew up, you know, the people
who invested in the bookstore suddenly or got cold feet about
this investment in the the book and they wanted their money
back. And the people who wanted to
start this Supreme grand Council service get cold feet and backed
out. And when this bookstore and the
publishing company had financial troubles and went bankrupt, the,
these the Masonic people who were like involved tried to
blame Crawley for it. And this is, you know, patently
false cause the amount of debts that this company, it was under
far, far, far exceeded the cost of printing the Equinox.
But in the eyes of, you know, the press at that time, this was
a juicy and salacious story. So it became the story of how
Aleister Crowley tries to start this love cult in just in
Detroit and this obscene volume was shipped around the country,
including the Hollywood where it inspired drug fueled orgies and
things like this. And it was all wild.
I mean, I, I can remember when I was first researching this,
sitting at the Burton Historical Collection at the Detroit Public
Library, going through microfilms of the Free Press or
the Renews at that time. And this is like front page
news. And it just blow my mind
thinking that this, like his is like a moral panic, this
hysteria. Yeah.
At this point, by the time this bookstore was like having the
bankruptcy and stuff crowing already moved back to England,
he was long gone. But, you know, people were still
trying to, you know, vilify and blame him for these things
because, you know, there his book was too spooky for them.
Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah.
And I think we mentioned off there that the Detroit Masonic
Temple, I've seen some concerts there.
It's a beautiful building. And I think that was built in
mid, mid to early 1920s, I believe.
Yeah, I think about 1924, so that that that building was
actually built shortly after Crowley left the area.
Gotcha. That his his kind of right man,
right hand man or field manager Charles Stansfeld Jones actually
took his Blue Lodge Masonic initiations at the former Grand
Lodge building in Detroit, which was again raised to make the the
new one, you know in the in the 1920s.
But Jones took his initiations, you know, around 19/18/1919.
Interesting. Yeah.
And I know actually Jack White's mom used to be like, she used to
work at the Masonic Temple, I think cleaning it or something,
being a custodian. And he's actually, he's the one
that saved it because I know that they were considering, you
know, demolishing it or getting rid of it at some point.
But yeah. That was so cool.
Yeah, that's the problem with a lot of these Masonic temples
around is that they were built at a time when belonging to
social clubs like the Masons was a thing that basically everybody
did. And so they had these large
memberships. And part of the membership is
you're paying dues, and the dues help with the upkeep of the of
the building. And in the years, you know, they
had this idea, over decades, the idea of people belonging to
groups has become less and less appealing.
There's a book called Bowling Alone that deals with this
phenomenon that like bowling leagues have kind of disappeared
for the same reason. People don't just don't do this
the way they used to. And so now that these Masonic
buildings are, you know, they, they have, they still need new
roofs, you know, as the Masonic Temple did, and other sorts of
maintenance. And, you know, finding the money
to do that is very hard. I remember a number of years ago
there was a Masonic Temple in Ferndale that was bought and
turned into like a nightclub, you know, because they just
couldn't afford to upkeep the building anymore.
So that's kind of the unfortunate reality that a lot
of Masonic bodies face. You know, some of them may have
like money and trust from the past, but it was really, really
cool and very generous of Jack White to kind of save the
Masonic Temple 'cause it's, it is, it's the largest Masonic
temple in the world. I believe it's kind of like over
1000 rooms and it's really quite a.
Yeah, like I said, I've seen. One-of-a-kind thing.
Yeah, I've seen concerts there. They have the Acacia room right
there too. Yeah.
I mean, I, my cousin who's a photographer, he said he went
all throughout there taking pictures for some event or
something. He said.
It's unbelievable, the architecture and everything so.
Yeah, they do chores. I haven't had the pleasure
myself. I know a lot of people who have
and it's, it's great. And I also have not had the
pleasure of seeing a concert at the Masonic Hall, but my older
sister I know has. I believe she saw The Rolling
Stones there actually. Nice.
Yeah, I'd have to look. I wonder if Jack White in any
capacity, whether it was White Stripes or before, has ever
played a concert there. I wonder if that impacted aside
from his mom being connected to it and stuff.
I wonder if that played a, a roll into it.
I want to ask you too, how does Detroit's like a cult history
fit into the broader, broader American esoteric history?
You know, when we're talking about like the 20th century and
Aleister Crowley and all these kind of movements and stuff like
that, Is it, is it, is it kind of important?
Is it not important when it just happened to be Detroit or?
Well, at the at the time that Crowley came to Detroit, Detroit
was basically the New York City of the Midwest.
I mean, because Chicago kind of replaced that, you know, a
little bit later. But Detroit was, you know,
basically the buzzing metropolis of, you know, in the early 1910s
or, you know, turn of the century there, you know, the
turn of the 20th century, you know, you had the auto industry
and, you know, just this great amount of, you know, wealth and
prosperity happening. And and then you kind of see
that transition happen with sort of the, the Crowley circle
because they, a lot of those people came to Detroit to
support, you know, the publication of this Equinox
volume and also the establishment of a Supreme grand
Council. And when that kind of fell
apart, a lot of these people wound up drifting to Chicago,
which again, was kind of up and coming.
And that's, you know, in Chicago, for instance, you do
see, you know, a lot of I don't, you see this occult work from
Charles Stansville Jones, who had been centered in Detroit and
was giving talks in around town, you know, at the Rosebud Club
and the Theosophical Society and things like that.
Now he was like publishing things out of Chicago and he had
the New Thought movement kind of taking roots.
But Detroit was has always been kind of an interesting place.
You know, during the late 1800s, early 1900s, there was this, you
know, sort of rogue splinter of the Masonic fraternity called
the Egyptian Rite of Memphis and Misery.
And that had a a foothold here in in Michigan.
And one of its leaders, you know, lived here and was, you
know, writing about that. So it's, yeah, there's, there's
a lot of interesting weird history about Detroit.
One of one of my favorite facts factoids is the fact that the,
the Fisher Mansion down on the riverfront was actually donated
by, you know, the Fisher heiress to the Bhaktavidanta Center.
And so it's now like a, you know, a Hari Krishna temple.
And they've tried to like restore it and preserve its
historical nature. But they also have like, you
know, Knights where I do free vegetarian feasts and things
like that. So it's kind of wild to go to
this place where here's the secret boat launch where they
used to illegally run liquor across the border to Canada, you
know, across the Detroit River. Now let's go upstairs and have
our vegetarian feast. Nice.
Yeah. Have you seen how they restored
the old train station? No, I haven't, but my
brother-in-law used to work security there when they were
doing that work, so it sounds amazing you.
Should check it out. I mean it's beautiful, they did
an amazing job. What a great building too, you
know, the architecture and everything.
Everything that Detroit I'm reminded of is my sister when
she was in junior high school, actually interviewed and did a
like a class project on gondola, the green witch who was very
famous in the Detroit area in the 60s and 70s.
So yeah, we've definitely got, we've got, we got our history
there in Detroit and and roundabouts.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I I want to talk about Aleister
Crowley a little bit too. Aside from the Detroit stuff,
you wrote a book called Purdurabo.
Is that pronouncing it correctly?
Is that basically like a biography or what 'cause I
haven't checked it out yet. I do want to check it out.
Yeah, Purdurabo is, you know, subtitled The Life of Aleister
Crowley. So it's a biography.
Purdurabo is the motto that Crowley took when he joined the
Chromatic Order of the Golden Dawn.
The idea is that everyone who initiated chose some sort of a
motto to kind of express again their intentions.
As we're talking about earlier, you know what, what is your goal
as an initiate or as a practicing magician?
And you know, pergorabo came from a biblical verse.
Crowley's father was a preacher, so it was a very well versed in
his Bible. And, you know, pergorabo is a
Latin word that means I shall endure to the end.
And that was sort of Crowley's, you know, aspiration.
And I think he very much descriptive of what his life was
like. And so I think it's a very
apartment title for the book, even though it might be a little
bit of a mouthful to say. But, you know, he was someone
who went out looking for spiritual truth, found his
version of it in this channel text called the Book of the Law.
And like his preacher father before him, he spent his life
trying to spread the word to anyone who would listen and
basically burn through the fortune that he inherited trying
to do so. And, you know, kind of lived,
you know, on a, you know, stipend, you know, a trust fund
from from leftover from his parents, you know, and and from,
you know, support from his, you know, friends and followers in
his later days. But at no point did he ever
waver from his sense of purpose and trying to transmit what he
thought was spiritual truth. And so this idea of I will
pursue, you know, I will endure to the end really very much
fits, you know, the the big, the big life story of Alistair
Crowley. Interesting.
Why do you think people considered him to be like, you
know, a long time ago before I knew anything about any of this
stuff? You hear the name, you hear all
he's dangerous or evil or something along those lines.
You think it was just because it was, you know, counterculture
movement or something that people just didn't understand.
Like, why do you think he got that moniker or the people
having that perception of them? Well, one thing that probably
was really notorious for was pushing against standard, you
know, norms, societal norms, particularly like Victorian, you
know, propriety and prudishness. He was, you know, a sexually
liberated person. He was, you know, a queer person
and and he was also practicing spirituality that didn't fit
into the category of, you know, Christian.
And so, you know, the press just had a field day, you know,
claiming that he was trying to, you know, revive Pagan
religions. And, you know, it was a bad
influence, you know, that people want to call him a devil
worshipper, you know, because of course, anything that's, you
know, not Christian can only be one other thing, you know,
that's, you know, devil worship. You know, there's no there's no
in between or no other category for some people.
And so Crowley became a popular, I don't know, popular figure to
beat up on in in the in the tabloids because it sold papers
and, you know, even his, you know, early biographers, you
know, spared, you know, no, no punches and kind of, you know,
they, you know, befriending him while he was alive and then
while he was dead, doing him dirty, you know, and talking
about what a, you know, terrible person he was.
And spreading, you know, in some cases misinformation and, and in
many ways, this is what inspired me to write Per Durabo in the
1st place, is that a lot of what has been written and said about
Crowley has been very sensational, untrue, misleading,
etcetera. And I just wanted to tell the
factual story. And whether you read, and if you
read that book and you get to the end of it, whether you like
him or loathe him is fine with me.
I just feel like people should be able to make a decision based
on their own judgement of the facts.
Whereas most other biographers by the biographer was telling
you what you should think about Crowley.
And I just, I didn't want to do that.
I want to say here's the facts. You make up your own mind.
Interesting. Yeah, I'll have to check that
out. Like I said, this is kind of
like a little out of my wheelhouse.
It's kind of, you know, all this stuff's kind of fringe, but at
the same time, you know, I've I come from a different view on a
lot of this stuff. But it when you So what was the
connection? I did read what was it called
Strange, Strange Angel about Jack Parsons.
So what was that connection all about?
What was? Is that in Purdue?
Rabo too or? Yeah, I mean, a little bit.
I mean, it's obviously strange. Angel is a biography of Jack
Parsons, who was one of the fathers of rocket science in the
United States. And so I don't go into as much
detail as, you know, this book that's all about Jack Parsons.
But Jack Parsons has turned up and the story there is that
toward the end of Crowley's life, he was, you know, still
head of this organization. OTO or or the Temporary
Orientis, but the only group really acting active under him
at that time was his group of folks in Los Angeles.
And one of the members was Jack Parsons, who kind of, you know,
came into them through there's there's an overlap you can
imagine, you know, the in a lot of communities, there's these,
you know, overlapping pancake stacks.
And in those days, you know, the sci-fi community and the occult
community had a lot of overlapping membership.
That's. How I heard about all that too
was like through the UFO online community, because they're
talking about all they're contacting entities and they're
trying to create, you know, portals and things.
Yeah, so it's so it's, you know, just as true then as it is today
that, you know, these, you know, Renaissance festival people, you
know, sci-fi people, you know, occult people or whatever, you
know. Yeah, They're they, they tend to
fit into multiple categories. And so Jack Parsons got involved
in this group through people in the OTO who are also part of the
science fiction community. And this included a fellow by
the name of Grady Mcmurtry, but also, interestingly enough, the
sci-fi rather by the name of L Ron Hubbard.
So you know which is a whole other.
He's not famous at all. Yeah, but, and probably more
than we can get into here, but yeah, Jack Parsons was a wild
guy. He he had kind of an intuitive
understanding of how explosives work and he worked for like a
company that packed explosives. And then while he didn't have a
lot of formal education, training and engineering, he
kind of just through his own experimentation kind of
developed a sense of these ideas of these combustible materials
and how to channel that into rocketry, which was, you know,
again, science fiction at the time.
But you know, he and his, you know, the suicide clubs, they
were called back at, you know, the university there and
Stanford and Caltech, you know, help develop, you know, the the
first solid rocket fuel Genesis to take off and things like
that. And the other stories are that,
you know, Jack would sometimes, you know, recite, you know,
Crowley's him in the pan before rocket launches, kind of as his
own ritual to ensure things went smoothly.
Interesting. Interesting.
Yeah, I'll have to go. I'll have to check out Purdue
Rabo and maybe go back and revisit Strange Angel as well.
Yeah, the book is really cool. The TV show takes it's well,
it's good entertainment TV show. Oh, yeah.
There were two seasons of Strange.
It called Strange Angel, so it took its name from the book, but
it took a lot of liberties with the facts.
So don't don't watch it like expecting the history of either,
you know, the occults or of. So just don't watch it then.
So none of it's none of the juicy stuff's in there then?
Oh, I mean that's that's other juicy stuff that they make up,
you know, but so, you know, there are various things that
happen out of sequence and there's things that people that
didn't exist, but that's kind of just serve the story moving
along. So it's entertaining television,
but if you really want the true story, read the book rather than
watch the TV show. That would be my intense.
But if you want entertainment, watch ATV show.
All right, all right, before we get to this segment, Mike's mind
melters, is there anything else you wanna, you know, put out
there about Mind Over Magic? It is of if you're listening to
this, it's been available for a week.
We're recording this on the 7th, which is released today.
Congratulations. But if you're listening, it'll
already be out a week. So please again, click the link
at the bottom, pick up a copy. And is there an audio copy by
chance to do you have did you do the audio book?
It's currently available as print and e-book.
We are working on an audio book, but I don't really have a date,
at least not available. OK.
All right. Well, yeah, go check out, pick
up your copy. Got the link down below and
again, congratulations on that. And if you'd be most gracious to
enter Mike's mind melters, let's do this.
OK, I'm ready. Mount my mind.
All right, Richard, I'm going to ask you 5 philosophical
questions. Please just answer them the best
that you can. Number one, what is something
you believe in that you know is probably wrong or logical, but
you are just not being honest with yourself?
Something that is. Gosh, that's tough.
I think maybe what I'll, what I'll, I'll pose as that answer
is the reason it's hard is that I like to think that I being
trained as a scientist and kind of being in my head sort of
person, you know, I've always, you know, admired, you know, Mr.
Spock, I'm more Vulcan than human.
You know, that I've like to think of myself as being
capable, being more detached and analytic and objective about
things. And I suppose being human, I'm
probably not as detached and as objective as I like to think
that I am. And that's potentially a, you
know, blind spot for me. I like it.
Cognitive bias. We all have them all right #2 Do
you think there is an objective purpose for humanity, and if So,
what? That's a tough one I meet.
Me personally, I really kind of like a lot of the Eastern ideas
that the universe is all a bunch of interconnected stuff and you
know, I don't want to get like woo about, you know?
Like an Indra's net? Or like a Alan Watts?
Kind of. A yeah, yeah.
And, you know, and, and, you know, again, not getting really
woo about like, you know, the, the physics of things, but, you
know, even most matter is more space than it is particles, you
know, and but there's particles connect, you know, between
everything in the universe. And so this idea that everything
is kind of connected and one thing and that we perceive
differences because of our incarnation on this planet, but
that sense of separation is an illusion.
And there is a state of mind or a state of progress and
evolution, you know, associated with, you know, burning off your
karma and becoming enlightened and kind of entering the, the
ocean of reality. And then that standpoint, the,
the goal here is for all of us to kind of get to the ocean as
it were, you know, kind of like the baby turtles, you know,
hatched trying to get to the, to the ocean before the birds eat
us or something. 75 seagulls come in and eat them all.
Yeah, exactly. No, I I like that to.
Get there and to, you know, help other people get there as well.
I like that #3 Do you think humans are special or separate
from Nate the rest of nature? If yes, give me your best
example or explanation of why. No, I I think we are part of
nature being how humans certainly perceive themselves as
special. I think kind of the history of
science has been kind of also the history of taking humanity
now down a notch. You know, the idea that, you
know, the Earth is the center of the universe.
Oh, no, we just, we revolve around the sun.
The sun is the center. Oh, it's not the center of the
universe. It's the center of our solar
system, which is just part of a Galaxy, which is one of many
galaxies in the universe and so on.
Oh, you know, humans are unique now.
We're descended from apes, you know, You know, Oh, but humans
are the only ones who build tools is like, no, no, you know,
lots of other animals build tools as well.
Yeah, I mean that argument you could say like recursive tool
making, but even that there's proto tool making, so it's not
like that's a completely original thing.
Yeah, I, I remember I used to have a Chihuahua who would at
the most inopportune times, like when company was over and having
dinner, this Chihuahua would fold his bed and have like a
burrito and have sex with it. But I would say he's, he's
making a tool. He is not using the bed for what
it's intended for. He has turned it into something
else. And that that is tool making.
Good point, good point #4 what do you think happens when we
die? No idea.
I mean, for this, I think I will kind of punt to something that
Crowley writes in a ceremony of his called the Gnostic Mass,
where he has this these sections talking about birth, life,
marriage and so on. And there's a section on death.
And then there's a little reading that has to do with what
he calls the end and talks about may you be granted the
accomplishment of your true will, whether it be incarnation
on this planet or another, you know, and, and various other
options. You know, the, the, the, the
idea basically being that we don't know what happens, but we
hope that whatever you hope for yourself at the end of all this,
we hope you get that, you know, and I find that kind of
intriguing, you know, A, it's just acknowledging we don't
know, but B, it almost kind of implies, you know, this again,
getting kind of out there, but we're kind of mine and we're in
the mind melt, melt area. So let's, let's melt some minds
here, you know, kind of makes you wonder if, you know, again,
reality is a little bit more plastic than we think it is.
And that, you know, just as our beliefs can shape the results
that we get doing magic, do our expectations of what happens
after we die. Is what happens shaped by what
we think is going to happen? I don't know.
I like it. No, I like that.
That's good. Yeah, so some person might
reincarnate, some people might go to another planet, some
people might be absorbed into the infinite, you know?
Yeah I mean, if there's if there's infinite possibilities,
why wouldn't there be infinite possibilities when you also die
too, right I mean yeah all right last one.
I think I'm sticking with this one.
I this the the 5th question since I've.
Started mine is still inside my ears.
That's good. This is, I think this one's
sticking, but so this is my favorite quote. 2 possibilities
exist. Either we are alone in the
universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.
Arthur C Clarke So that being said, do you think there is life
elsewhere in the universe or do you think we are alone?
I think it's almost certainly a statistical certainty that
there's other life in the Galaxy.
I mean, whether it's, you know, human, whether it's evolved or
what have you, you know, we don't know.
But you know, just if you ever you just look at, you know, the,
the odds, you know, there's, there's an equation out there
for calculating the odds. And while people can debate the
values of these various parameters in the equation, you
know, it's almost certain that's in this massive universe of
ours, there is. And particularly now that we
have the capability to not only identify stars, but can
identify. Planets revolving around those
stars and get a measure of the composition of their atmosphere,
how close or far they are from that star and actually identify
Earth like planets is just super exciting, you know, to think
about. And that's also based on the
idea that we're talking about, you know, carbon based life, you
know, that there might not be some some other sort of thing
out there. So yeah, I'm, I'm pretty
confident that there's other things, other other forms of
life out there in this vast and infinite universe of ours.
Yeah, I thought you might subconsciously I was thinking
he's going to take that, his statistical background and apply
it here. The Drake equation.
We actually, I think we need like an updated Drake equation.
Maybe AI can really dial it in. So every time we discover
something new, it's like a evolving equation each time
something comes into the picture.
Kind of like the the Doomsday Clock.
Right. Yeah, yeah, Intelligent place.
That'd be cool. So listen, man, I really
appreciate you answering all those.
I know some of them, you know, like that first one really
throws people off because you're basically saying what's
something that you believe in that's probably wrong.
You know, I don't think most, you know, most people aren't
willing to admit, you know, I maybe if you were.
Like. Yeah, but maybe if you're super
religious or something like that and you really did, you know,
deep down you thought, oh, maybe there's nothing to this,
whatever religion it is or whatever, you know, something
like that I could see. But no, I really appreciate it.
I really appreciate you coming on.
This was totally kind of like I said, like outside my
wheelhouse. I know a lot of stuff like
adjacent to these topics. So I love kind of putting myself
in, you know, these kind of positions where I'm learning
something new. And you, you definitely shed
some light on some stuff that I had no idea about.
And I look forward to checking out Purdue Rabo and all your
future stuff. And Mind Over Magic is available
right now. Check it out.
Links down below. Is there anything else you want
to say or plug before we wrap this up?
I'm just say thank you so much for the opportunity to come on
the show and talk with you. It's always a pleasure for me
too, to have this kind of a chance because having written a
lot of really heady sort of historical for the esoteric
stuff, Mind Over Magic is a little bit more geared to a
wider readership than just this sort of really Crowley centric
sort of stuff. And it's it's good practice to
kind of talk about this stuff in a, you know, more jargon free
and approachable sort of way. So yes, please do pick up Mind
Over Magic. And you know, again, as you
mentioned, if you're interested in, you know, my other work for
Crowley stuff, you know, Perdurabo, the Life of Aleister
Crowley is the biography I mentioned earlier, the book I
wrote about his interaction with agnosticism.
And that's a book called Friendship and Doubt.
And also earlier this year for also for my publisher in your
traditions, there was a, they released a critical edition of
Aleister Crowley's book, The Sword of Song, which is his
first like really magical book that I edited, annotated and
added a lot of explanatory footnotes too.
So those are all places or ways, you know, you can follow my
work. And I'm also, you know, online
through my website, but I'm all, you can also find me on social
media, Facebook, Instagram threads, blue sky.
So come look for me, let me know why you like the book.
Awesome. Sounds good.
And like I said, this episode will be released.
If you're listening to this, it is October 14th.
We're speaking from the past. No, but please check out Mind
Over Magic and all the other wonderful books this gentleman
has written. And I would like to, you know,
if I can get a chance to get the Purdue Rabo in here sometime in
the next few months or something, maybe I can have you
back on the future and we can really just talk about Crowley
and Crowley's stuff. And but yeah, listen, man, I
really appreciate your time. And you, you seem to be really
well researched and read into these topics.
And I love talking with people that, you know, really put a lot
of time in this stuff because it it shows.
So I just want to say I appreciate that.
Thank you so much all. Right, everybody.
Well, we're going to end this episode the same way we end all
episodes, which is we love everybody.
Stay safe out there and we'll catch you next time.
IECE. If you would like to support
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