A Probabilistic Universe
When you develop your opinions on the basis of weak evidence, you will
have difficulty interpreting subsequent information that contradicts these opinions, even if this new information is obviously more accurate.
nassim nicholas taleb
Success is a head game. More specifically, it is a head game of chance rather than one of skill or strength. If there is good news in the grim story of the previous chapter, it is that the entire system is a human construct, an overlay on a probabilistic universe. It is flimsy, a hologram inside another hologram. The most insidious way the holographic bars trap you is by convincing you of their eternal, physical reality.
One of the most practicable ways of breaking out of these bars is through a diligent exploration of consciousness and probability. Marching in lockstep with a centralised, extractive late capitalist economic system is the religious faith known as scientific materialism. If only the physical exists, then only the physical has importance. If you are just a bag of chemicals, if your brain is the same thing as your mind, if you are simply a meat robot, then despite the lived personal experience of every human who has ever existed indicating the complete contrary, the worth and value of your life can be precisely measured in physical terms based on the objects you manage to accrue around you.
The hypothesis of materialism is extremely weak. A single example of the non-physical in action, be it telepathy or psi effects, a religious miracle of any flavour, a provable example of divination or precognition, and Richard Dawkins’s house of dreary cards comes crashing down. There are thousands and thousands of examples to choose from and you are well-served collecting those that are most personally meaningful to you over the course of your lifetime. It could be the otherwise-impossible past life recollections of children, it could be the 120 years of university studies into telepathy and other psi results. Find something that simply cannot be but is and get really knowledgeable about it. These data points become talismans to ward off the demon hosts of the materialist tyranny.
The inherent weakness of the materialist hypothesis neatly explains why the scientific establishment remains wilfully, deliberately ignorant of and vigorously opposed to fields such as parapsychology. Inviting it into the canon of approved knowledge, even just as the unloved ginger stepchild of psychology (which it isn’t), breaks the rest of the college. In the words of notorious British metaphysician David Icke “they defend the first domino.” The magician must flick and flick until it tumbles.
At times of economic transition, old maps no longer navigate through unfamiliar streets. Chaos magic helps here. If you believe, as I do, that it is more or less mandatory for magicians to have adventures, then we can extend the metaphor by suggesting that a well-prepared adventurer always travels with more than one map. There may indeed be a resting worldview you prefer for the quieter moments in life or their most important milestones such as births, romance, and the deaths of loved ones and enemies. These maps may not be best suited for navigating the corporate sphere, especially now that it appears to have gone completely feral. (Who is the Egyptian goddess of high frequency trading, for instance? Who is the saint of downsized workers? What is the herbal charm against having your job automated?)
In order to navigate a wealth creation system that is not built for our benefit, the most appropriate maps are offensive rather than defensive. Poking holes in the dominant narrative robs it of much of the unconscious power it holds over you. Visits with the bank manager suddenly generate significantly less anxiety when their absurdity is laid bare. They emerge as a meeting of holograms to discuss things that have no objective reality in a probabilistic universe filled with chaotic high strangeness. Honestly, it’s like a surrealist theatre piece when you stop to think about it.
There is, however, a danger in building out an adventurer’s map that must chart the advantages and shortcomings of science. The magician may find him- or herself accidentally believing that the map is in some sense true. All too often people seek to “prove” this or that mystical worldview by recourse to scientific findings. This is a fool’s errand, as mysticism is fundamentally irrational and that is its great power and solace. “Proving” mysticism with science is like using a slide-rule to measure wind speed.
In either case, in all cases, the best we can ever say is that some maps overlap more than others, which may be useful in navigating a particular metaphoric mountain range or mangrove swamp. Neither map actually is the mountains or the swamp, and neither map is particularly useful on the open ocean. I am not selling and will never sell you a worldview. I merely want to help you find the spot marked X.
Quantum Abuse
The spiritual and occult worlds subject themselves to two different versions of what I refer to as quantum abuse. The first is to slap the word “quantum” in front of some recycled New Thought claptrap and start running classes above a local bookshop. This form of abuse bothers me the least as the inexorability of market forces tends to run such groups out of town fairly quickly.
It is the second form of quantum abuse I find the most troubling. At the moment it is apparently fashionable to declare that quantum mechanics don’t really tell us anything about magic or that its influence has been overstated. This is intellectually lazy (not to mention highly inaccurate), and it emanates most often from the corners of the field that intend to stick doggedly to whatever religious explanation of the universe they prefer. As famous twentieth-century physicist Niels Bohr once remarked, “If a person does not feel shocked when he first encounters quantum theory, he has not understood a word of it.” Because quantum theory does tell us something important about magic, something that may be hugely important. It tells us that, at least in some situations, probability—or the nonphysical—has an objective status. It may be something that is real with a capital R.
A hybrid form of quantum abuse is to rely on theories of quantum mechanics that are approaching almost a century old or to unthinkingly cleave to the least likely interpretation of experimental results. The most egregious example of this is the metaphysical community’s attachment to the many worlds hypothesis. Let us be clear as to what the hypothesis actually is: a mathematical fudge currently being used to cling to scientific materialism in the face of quantum indeterminacy results. As you are probably aware from high school science classes, an electron exists in a state of probability everywhere in its probability field surrounding the nucleus. It is only when we seek to measure it that it collapses down to a single location. These are the experimental results the many worlds hypothesis seeks to explain.
This explanation relies on the completely untestable hypothesis that each time a measurement of the electron happens, our entire universe actually splits into two (or however many universes are required to satisfy the possible locations of the electron). It sounds nice and magical, maybe even a little bit sciency, but it is both bad magic and bad science. What the many worlds hypothesis is saying is that probability definitely does not have an objective existence. Quantum nonlocality does not really exist and that all possible locations for the electron are occurring simultaneously in other dimensions … this means that scientific materialism is still “true” and the only things that exist are physical. It is just that all these other physical things now exist in an infinite number of dimensions that we cannot contact or ever prove exist. My little nephew has an imaginary friend who exhibits many similar properties. The whole thing is highly convenient and, frankly, highly religious. But “religious” is probably the best descriptor for materialism, anyway. As the philosopher Thomas Nagel remarks, “materialism is a premise of science, not a finding.”28
For the purposes of achieving our best lives, we are not really in the market for explanations of how quantum mechanics may really work. We are merely looking for observations of scientific data that lead either to greater ideological freedom or to improved magical results. Chaos magic is as single-minded as a locust swarm in this regard. You are free to fold back whatever results you find into your wider spiritual worldview.
The aggregate observation of the last century of quantum research begins to paint a picture that is both very old and very new. We begin to see the—dare we say it—provability of not only the existence of consciousness but also its primacy. If the implications that consciousness is the fundamental stuff of the universe sounds Vedic, there is probably a good reason for that. Most of the founding fathers of quantum theory were dedicated Vedantists. Heisenberg himself stated that “quantum theory will not look ridiculous to those who have read Vedanta.”29 As for Max Planck:
I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.30
Observer effects suggest a fundamental interrelationship between consciousness and matter which is called in quantum panpsychism chaos magic. From The Octavo by Peter J. Carroll, chaos magic’s founder:
Quantum panpsychism suggests that we turn the whole argument on its head and interpret parapsychological events as evidence for the absence of spirit or mind as phenomena separate to matter.
Miraculous, parapsychological, magical events tend to occur rather capriciously and infrequently on the macroscopic scale. However on the quantum scale they occur frequently and in a much more dependable fashion. The quantum level of reality seethes with weirdness, quanta appear to teleport by disappearing at one place and appearing at another, they appear to communicate instantaneously across space and probably time as well, sometimes they appear to exist in two places simultaneously, or in two contradictory states at the same time, and they may travel backwards in time.31
The influence of consciousness at a subatomic level has been observed for almost a century. It is my personal suspicion that practical enchantment is the scientific evidence the effect of our consciousness scales up from the subatomic to the physical world. What are magical results but a manipulation of real-world probabilities, after all?
The most important contribution quantum physics offers the world of magic is that it overturned centuries of discretism. It ended forever a materialist clockwork universe. And as Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, points out, it achieved this with surprising rapidity and ease … in only three or four experiments. The whole industrial edifice of the Imperial Age was knocked over with a feather. So much for those prison bars, eh?
God Plays Dice with the
Universe but She Uses D20s
We move now from the chaos of your subatomic parts to the impact of probability on your everyday life. French physicist Olivier Costa de Beauregard wrote, “It must be in the nature of probability to serve as the operational link between objective and subjective, between matter and psychism.”32 The question of why the physical universe expresses itself probabilistically is a deeper one than most. Developing a coherent answer to it qualifies you to found your own religion—and you will recall that I promised not to sell you a worldview. However, in between metaphoric bong rips, it is my suspicion that the universe’s inherent optionality allows it to experience itself in the most effective way. “Divided for the chance of union,” and all that.
Perhaps the main reason why Western magic handles probability so poorly is that most of its constituent parts predate probability, sometimes by millennia. Given that the Greeks gave us so much mathematics and geometry, it is surprising they did not develop a theory of probability. A possible explanation as to why is twofold: their philosophical over-
reliance on absolute truth proven via logic and axioms, as well as a more general sense that the future unfolded according to the will of the gods. Thus, to use mathematician Leonard Mlodinow’s example, if an astragalus toss meant that a particular Greek boy would have to marry the stocky, plain Spartan girl he would not view the toss as lucky or unlucky but as the will of the gods.33 (Today’s more sophisticated magicians split the difference and see the will of the gods expressed probabilistically. Spousal selection techniques have also improved, albeit only marginally.)
We have thus inherited spiritual systems that fail to accurately measure risk or probability because they rely on spiritual beings as explanations rather than actors. That accounts for maybe a large minority of our complete mispricing of risk and reward. The majority of it appears to be a wholescale adoption of the “special snowflake” myth from the monoculture. This notion that you are in some sense entitled to a destiny or that you automatically “deserve” to have your dreams fulfilled is not well-supported in magic or Paganism’s classical texts. We have diluted what is probably our most powerful asset, magical thinking, by confusing it with the advertising slogans you heard during the television programmes of your childhood. Nowhere is it written that you are guaranteed miracles on demand.
When it comes to selecting or determining preferred outcomes, there are two essential concepts that are frequently confused: possibilities and probabilities. It is possible that a billionaire with a heart of gold will leap from his limousine, dart through five lanes of traffic and propose marriage to you on your walk to work. But how probable is it? Failure to distinguish between these concepts is at the root of why the lottery may be legitimately called a tax on poor people.
It is almost instinctive to believe the most desirable possibility is also the most probable. The starlet-to-be who gets off the bus in Hollywood cannot but help believe that international fame is mere weeks away. But has she mispriced the risk in her preferred outcome? There is quite a string of low-probability events that need to happen in precisely the right order or overlap to deposit her on the red carpet out the front of Mann’s Chinese Theatre. We will return to how a magician may best take advantage of this mathematic truth, but for now pay attention. The probability that two events will both occur can never be greater than the probability that each event will occur individually.
This is one of the three laws of probability and whilst it sounds counterintuitive, the math is really quite simple. Say you are trying to calculate how many respondents to a survey happen to be fathers. Your equation would look like this, with P as probability:
P(both male and parent) =
P(male) + P(parent) – P(either male or parent)
You see how if you do not subtract the “either” component then you are double-counting the respondents who fall into both categories. Mathematically this means the probability that our budding starlet is both a famous actress and lives in Los Angeles is less likely than either one occurring individually. How she achieves both outcomes in her life is best served by an awareness of this probabilistic reality. Secure, stable, low-cost housing in LA: one event. Secure career optionality in terms of salary, flexibility, and growth potential: a second event. Enchant continuously for an expanded network of theatrical and production people in a social capacity, at the very least. Then start thinking about auditions. Getting off the bus with a “make me famous” good luck charm tucked into her pocket is not the recommended approach.
Very much related to this challenge is what Nassim Taleb calls “the teleological fallacy.”34 This is the dangerous illusion that you know exactly where you are going, and that you knew exactly where you were going in the past, and that others have similarly succeeded in the past by knowing where they are going. Across the magical world the teleological fallacy persists under the guise of one’s “True Will.” Apparently it is the magician’s main challenge to merely find what his or her True Will or destiny or whatever happens to be.
The associated error in the teleological fallacy is the mistaken beliefs that others know what they want, where they are going, or—worst of all—what it is they will want tomorrow. Talking destiny or fatalistic outcomes with magicians is the very definition of the blind leading the blind. (But knowing this in advance makes going to parties thrown by occultists really quite fun.)
Hopefully by now you will have perceived that a more effective map is emerging, one that relies on an understanding of the probability of individual events versus their combinations and the inhibiting belief that you know, right from the outset, where you are going and how to get there. Moving in smaller, less defined steps offers you something that carries a tremendous amount of in-built mathematical energy: optionality. An option is not whether you choose the cake or the ice cream. Viewed from the perspective of pure theory, optionality allows you to benefit from the positive side of any uncertain situation without exposing you to any damage from the negative outcome of the same uncertainty.
The key benefit of wealth people always cite is that it confers freedom, when what they probably mean from a more precise perspective is optionality. A failure to understand this notion can lead to an over-accumulation of mortgage debt that traps you in unsatisfying employment to service an oversized debt burden in a part of the world you do not wish to live because you believed—thanks to the teleological fallacy—that’s how one builds wealth … which confers freedom. However, you have ended up with the complete opposite. Any stored optionality has been systematically destroyed.
The Emerald Hologram of Hermes Trismegistus
Goethe once wrote “he who cannot draw on three thousand years of history is living hand to mouth.” This is a much more sophisticated way of thinking about which aspects of historic spiritual practices can enrich our modern lives than using terms such as “ancient wisdom.” Because it is quite clear that any number of excellent ideas or concepts have tumbled down to us from the past. As we close out the chapter, our adventurer’s map comes into view, and it looks like a universe in which consciousness is fundamental. Out of that first fundament, fizzing into existence first at the subatomic level, is a probabilistically expressed physical universe over which it appears we have some little control, as evidenced by the wealth of tantalising psi experimental results. In a June 2014 podcast interview with Disclose Truth TV, Dr. Russell Targ:
After forty years of research, the reality of ESP is so strong it would be statistically unreasonable to deny it. The evidence for ESP is ten times greater than the evidence that aspirin prevents heart attacks. 35
The demonstrable impact of consciousness across distances both temporal and spatial has a profound impact on how we describe reality. For psi effects to be achieved—and they are regularly achieved—there must be some operational connection between you and the rest of the universe. And I do mean must. There is no question mark after the statement “psi effects are real.” And so any model of physics excluding the existence of consciousness/psi effects is both incomplete and inaccurate. Consider Nagarjuna’s description of reality as Indra’s net; an infinite web of diamonds where each individual stone contains and reflects an image of every other stone. It looks for all the world like a 200 CE version of the increasingly popular holographic universe theory. As most esotericists now know, every tiny piece of a hologram contains a complete version of the whole image. Here, then, is a possible interpretation of how psi effects may work across both time and space: whatever event you are seeking to influence or view is, in some metaphoric/holographic way, contained within you in its entirety.
For those familiar with it, this description bears a striking resemblance to the vision of creation described in the Hermetica: each microcosmic consciousness contains in miniature a version of the macrocosmic mind of God. One can inevitably get caught in an infinite loop looking for science to “prove” a mystical worldview, or have a mystical worldview “validate” scientific findings. In all cases these paradigms are, to paraphrase the Buddhists, fingers pointing at the moon, rather than the moon itself. What is important from the perspective of practical enchantment is that consciousness and the physical world appear to have areas of overlapping results.
Consider Dean Radin’s famous experiments on mind/matter interaction at Burning Man festivals. Random number generators positioned around the festival recorded enormous deviations from the mean during peak events such as the burning of the man or the temple. The odds of this happening by chance are 106,420 to 1. In his book, The Noetic Universe, ponders the implications of psi experiment results.
After a century of slowly accumulating scientific evidence, we now know that some aspects of psychic phenomena are real. The importance of this discovery lies somewhere between an interesting oddity and an earth-shattering revolution. At a minimum, genuine psi suggests that what science presently knows about the nature of the universe is seriously incomplete, that the capabilities and limitations of human potential have been vastly underestimated, that beliefs about the strict separation of objective and subjective are almost certainly incorrect, and that some “miracles” previously attributed to religious or supernatural sources may instead be caused by extraordinary capabilities of human consciousness.36
When it comes to navigating a consciousness-based probabilistic universe for fun and profit, a number of recommendations present themselves. Firstly, lean into optionality rather than charging off after lofty goals from a standing start. Take single steps rather than multiple steps to maximise your starting probability. At each step on the way to your goal, maximising optionality also maximises the probability of a preferred outcome for the next step. Make peace with the cognitive reality that you both probably do not really know what you want and definitely do not know the correct way to achieve it from the outset, so re-examine your options at each step and be open to the hitherto-unanticipated route.
Human consciousness clearly has an impact on the physical realm, but it is more reliable in nudging small, high-probability events than bringing down the walls of Jericho by the power of will. In a 1901 letter to fellow Golden Dawn magician Florence Farr, the poet W. B. Yeats wrote “whatever we build in the imagination will accomplish itself in the circumstances of our lives.”
Which becomes especially true when you build one brick at a time. And while the bricks get smaller and smaller as you build, the next one—the cornerstone, if you will—is an absolute doozy.
28 John Horgan. “Is scientific materialism almost certainly false?” Scientific American. January 30, 2013. blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross
-check/2013/01/30/is-scientific-materialism-almost-certainly-false/.
29 David Storoy. “Did the Vedic Philosophy Influence the Concept of Free Energy and Quantum Mechanics?” Science and Nonduality. Accessed April 12, 2015. www.scienceandnonduality.com/did-the-vedic-philosophy-influenced-the-concept-of-free-energy-and-quantum-mechanics/.
30 Quoted in The Observer (25 January 1931). Cited in Joseph H. Fussell, “Where is Science Going?: Review and Comment,” Theosophical Path Magazine, January to December 1933 (2003), 199.
31 Peter J. Carroll. The Octavo: A Sorcerer-Scientist’s Grimoire. Mandrake of Oxford, 2010.
32 Olivier Costa de Beauregard. The Second Principle of the Science of Time, Entropy, Information, and Irreversibility. Seuil.,1963.
33 Leonard Mlodinow. The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. Penguin, 2009.
34 Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Penguin, 2013.
35 Disclosure Truth TV, “Russell Targ Proof of Phychic [sic] Abilities,” published to YouTube June 6, 2014. www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9cEpxXg3pA.
36 Dean Radin. The Noetic Universe. Corgi, 2009.