Mike Sententia | Direct Magick, Entity Contact, Energy Healing

00:05 This puppet master's almost surely have a clearly maybe something heavy And until you've thoroughly tested every last horse just to think, you know the less you really do That's true Dr. Seuss! They're with without THC Cause we know they're lying to us Just don't know them without THC The Higher Side Jack show A wooden company

00:44 Alright, Hireside Chatters. We've seen the pattern of powerful people belonging to various groups that utilize the magical arts and we've done several shows on various magical practices in an attempt to even the scales and add these esoteric arts to the repertoire of the common man But contrary to popular beliefs, you don't need to spend years studying Tantra in the Himalayas or working through the ranks of the O.T.O in a dingy basement to learn what they do not want you to know! In fact today's guest Mike Sententia has been working on one of the most straightforward and practical brands of magic I've come across appropriately dubbed Direct Magic which he lays out on his popular website Magickofthought.com So throw off your silly robes and stop brushing up on Latin because we're diving right into the belly of this beast

01:27 It's always a fun ride looking at the hidden potential of our own mind and I'm psyched to get down to it. Magic Mike, my man welcome to The Higher Side! Hey Greg, I'm really excited to be here. And yeah that's exactly what i'm about is let's step outside of all of the robes and the rituals and all of the trappings that traditionally go with magic and let's just explore what's the underlying phenomenon? What are the moving pieces and how can we work with them directly to produce the results that were looking for Heck yeah, I love it. That's basically how i found you! I was looking for a good guest that could talk about the science or the mechanisms behind magic and that really does seem to be at the heart of your approach because sometimes this stuff can be very vague and hard to pin down... And that's a problem for people but to kick this off tell us a bit about direct magic and what separates it from other modalities out there

02:22 So most modalities, what you're doing is you're doing a ritual or visualization or some other symbolic action. And the point of that symbolic action is to engage your unconscious mind communicate your intent through your unconscious and then your unconscious is going out and do something. I know you've talked with folks who do chaos magic thats another example they are using belief to communicate their intent to their unconscious mind which then goes out something. And the focus of direct magic is saying, great we got all these methods it's really important to have at least one way of communicating to your unconscious but

02:59 After you get your intent into your unconscious mind, what does it do? What's that something how does it reach out and cause this change and by understanding that process How can we refine it how can we guide the unconscious mind through a better process That has more effective more reliable results on And so indirect magic we talk about what i call a serial muscles these are the parts of the mind that are normally unconscious drive energy and drive magic and one of the first things that we do when we learn direct magic.

03:37 to make those ethereal muscles conscious. It's a similar idea as using biofeedback to make your heartbeat conscious, and by becoming consciously aware of these normally unconscious parts we can then engage them anytime we want whether were in a place where we could be fully focused into our ritual or whether were on the train Or in the waiting room get ready for a job interview we don't need to do all of the trappings because we know how to engage these parts of the mind that will. And we can also watch them as they go through all the steps and say, great. How is this part of my mind connecting with this force that I'm channeling? Or what part of the human energy field, the biofield am I interacting with when I do this healing technique and what if I change it in this way how does that affect things

04:33 By developing an understanding of the moving parts, the forces and different structures in the biofield we can think about new ways of interacting with them. And develop new techniques. Let me give you one example because I like to make things concrete So a few years ago, a friend came to me. She had chronic hives she'd had hives for nine months. She was on prescription antihistamines she was getting the best Western medical care so she was really getting the best care available but she was still getting worse and Neither of us really knew if I could do anything there. I've been doing a lot of healing around knee pain and things like that, but Hives is really complicated So I did a technique. I first just started with kind of focusing on my intent to heal her I Connected to the skin that was inflamed which was really your whole body

05:29 I connected to the skin, I sent some healing energy and her itching went from an eight out of 10 down to a seven out of 10 which I really consider a failure. Like I want a more pronounced result." I respect that. So I went back and I said all right great when I just focus on my intent what happens is my ethereal muscles connect to her skin and redo this? Well The itching signals are set by all these nerves that go from her skin up her spine into her brain. What if I make a conscious step of connecting to those nerves? And you can think of that conscious step as visualizing, there's actually some concrete techniques involved that we might get into later but take this conscious step of connecting to her nerves guide my mind through doing that

06:16 and then feel the energy signature of those nerves, and act on that. And when we did that her itching dropped from an eight out of 10 to a four out of 10. I consider that a pretty big success. And in doing that, it's about guiding the mind through a new process. That may be not natural and automatic but winds up being more effective It is similar idea to how Olympic athletes will watch videos and consciously think about how they run and how they move If you ever tried to do this You know that your clumsy at first Thinking of how you run makes you much worse

06:57 What the athletes were dedicated to this who put in the time to learn to do it eventually. It becomes a smooth thing of venturing they can train their body to move any new more efficient way, That then through practice becomes natural and unconscious and that's really what we're doing with direct magic is becoming conscious of how the mind responds to our intent to heal or create luck or whatever were doing become conscious of that guided for a new process even if thats gonna be clumsy at first. And then through practice and experience, make that new more effective process natural and automatic. And really rewire how our mind responds to intent so that's what direct magic is about. Well said man I like the approach!

07:48 If there are underlying mechanisms that make this stuff possible, it must be doable without the rituals. Without the candles and without the robes I mean to some degree i know that's about getting into a mindset but i guess if you can get yourself into a mindset without the theatrics i mean thats just as good Basically, not to overuse the term but that's a more direct path to magic. That's where the name comes from in fact. Right on so how did you come to develop this over the years? I mean how did magic go from what probably started as an abstract interest which i think is where a lot of the listeners might be to an actual reliable useful set of skills that you can call on talk just a little bit about your path and developing magic

08:33 So first I want to say that this is absolutely an indirect path, and I'm not going to recommend that your listeners follow it. But I would love to share that. Sure. When I was 11 – this was in 1991 – one of my friends who honestly read a lot of fantasy novels in which he lived in one started talking about magic and energy and things like that And we were at an age where the line between things you actually believe and things you play with, and things you pretend to believe. At 11 those are all kind of the same thing. So we started playing around with this what we didn't realize though was that his books would draw from

09:14 actual occultism like the Golden Dawn and chaos magic would draw from energy healing like Reiki and therapeutic touch. This was in the 90s, so there was already peer-reviewed research in energy healing going around. We had no idea at 11 but now I can tell you this was already being researched by a National Institute of Health. So it was drawing from real stuff as And so some of the things that we were trying out and we're playing with, were drawn from real legitimate ways of approaching this. Some of it was just fantasy novel stuff and over probably a decade throughout my teens

09:52 I would have these experiences and some of them would work really well. I would connect to trees and feel the energy, and at the time I would think about it as talking to the trees. Nowadays I think about it as absorbing the energy and letting that influence your mind in a lot of similar way how a drug might influence one's mind. And then experiencing my own mind high on that energy from the tree in the same way that taking a trip on a drug is experiencing your own mind influenced by that drug. And I would connect with spirits, and some of them were probably real spirits and some of them were probably aspects of my own mind. And I would build energy in my body and see how that influenced physical stamina and healing and just created sensations

10:41 Through all these experiences, I really wanted to know what was happening. What was going on under the hood? My family were scientists and atheists and so I wasn't able to share any of this with them but I was raised with this real love of science. And when I say that a lot of people hear love technology or love standard scientific results and there is some of that but really science is about Understanding the moving parts of a phenomenon when a scientist encounters, you know a rainbow. This is a classic example from Newton and Yates. When a scientist encounters a rainbow he says what caused that?

11:25 He doesn't just want to know the answer is refraction. I can tell you refraction, and if you don't already know what that means—I haven't actually told you anything yet or given you a password—what the scientist wants to say is water droplets are little spheres and they behave like a prism And when sunlight hits the sphere and it reflects, the different wavelengths reflect off the curved surface at slightly different angles. If you're standing in the right spot to see that sunlight reflected off of a water droplet, that creates a rainbow. To me, that is just as beautiful as the actual set of colors in front of my eyes

12:07 And that's what I brought to all of these phenomena and all of these experiences that were happening to me, that I didn't understand and really nobody still nobody fully understands. All of these different ways are approaching this whether it is a ritual or visualization or channeling or lighting a candle whatever They're all one the results they get out are much more complicated than. Whatever the person's putting it right i could do a ritual and speak a hundred words of latin but,

12:44 Those hundred words are not enough to program a computer in how to understand the type of situation I'm looking to create and certainly not enough to explain to a computer how to bring about that type of situation. I'm looking to create there's additional complexity in magic that isn't coming from the ritual it isn't coming from the visual and doesn't coming from my mind because I'm not aware of How this thing is going to manifest i'm not constantly thinking about it i'm thinking about it for five minutes now and then it's often running well. What's off in running where is the same money on and if all of these different systems,

13:25 That have different explanations and different theories are all producing similar results. Well they're probably all acting by the same mechanism whenever out in the world we see a bunch of things that have different explanations and those explanation accurate they produce different results When we see a bunch of phenomena that all do the same thing, they usually have the same mechanism. So what is that mechanism? And I started thinking about what I now call ethereal software—these forces that respond to a person's intent, that provide healing energy or create luck or do whatever else the person is trying to do with magic or healing

14:07 And that was kind of the first breakthrough of really getting one piece of the puzzle. This happened in my late teens, early twenties and then I started looking at what happens in the mind that what am I engaging when I'm engaging by magical facilities? Through a set of techniques called sensory connections. Let me just explain this to you really quick here so Healers and magic workers and all these folks will often talk about sending energy and they'll have to talk about sending energy along your connection So as these connections think of them is like wires or pipes that carry energy well if instead of making

14:44 making a connection and sending energy, we make a connection and just leave it quiet. And let it absorb a tiny amount of the energy of whatever its connected to in the same way that a thermometer absorbs a tiny amount of heat to measure temperature. We can get a reading on the energy signature of whatever it's connected to And if we then make a whole network, just a whole bunch of these sensory connections all throughout a structure We can get a picture of what's going on there. What parts are active? What parts are inactive? What state is all this stuff in and that's what I brought to exploring my own mind And i would make a connection out and i think another connection to that first connection and follow it back into my mind and say what part of my mind is making this connection that's how i found the real muscles.

15:35 I spent much of my twenties looking at those ethereal muscles looking at how their power working where they draw their power from i call it, my core and my power source more religious listeners might call it there soul but actually tracing the pathways using these sensory connections. and figuring out how to open up more power, and open up power to dormant ethereal muscles. And awaken them so that I could start using them for whatever they were best at in the same way that physical muscles... You know? I have an arm muscle that's used for contracting my arm. They have an arm muscle that's used for extending my arm. Then I have other muscles that are used for moving my legs and balancing while I stand on all these different special purposes

16:19 Ethereal muscles have special purposes. Some are used for communicating with spirits and ethereal software, others are used for working with energy in the body and so by awakening more of them it opened up a lot of new facilities that I was able to explore And those were some of the foundational techniques of direct magic Sensory connections, awaking ethereal muscles and then communicating with spirits and ethereal software Right on, man. So for someone who might be wanting to begin flexing these ethereal muscles what are some of the first things they can look at doing just to recognize that they're even there?

16:59 That's a great question. So I wrestled with this for a long time when i first started blogging in 2010, I wrote some posts about energy meditations because that's just like the default way that most people learn or teach how to start engaging these things how to start working with energy and we ran into a problem there was a set of readers that already had some facility with energy and ethereal muscles that this worked great for And there were other readers whose ethereal muscles were completely dormant. They weren't able to engage them at all, and so I could give them all the visualizations that I wanted and it wouldn't do anything because their ethereal muscles weren't listening in the first place."

17:43 A couple of years ago when i started writing this book and the book by the way it's on the draft in progress is available for free on my website its free because i want to get these ideas out there you'll see a banner along the top that says start here just click it you'll get the book. When I started writing that book what i said was hey, i have all of this all these tools ethereal software and i work with all these spirits who make ethereal software Let me talk to them let me have them make me a special purpose ethereal software designed for beginners. Let's put a command in there that is really easy to use that will let the beginner connect to the ethereal software and ask it to help them start awakening their ethereal muscles. And when the novice does this, they look at a sigil, that's like a symbol that I have bound the ethereal software too. I'll have story about that in a minute of they look at the sigil and the software connects to them, connects with my mind starts reading your intent and then give them a command

18:48 To first just test it out and make sure that it's working. And then to ask it to start awakening their ethereal muscles, and it will start sending energy to those parts of their mind and help them start coming online. Then after they've done that I give them an energy meditation so they can start using those newly awakened ethereal muscles and exercising them and strengthening them as they work with energy in their body After that, it's a set of exercises to connect to that ethereal software better and ask it to make lasting connections through your mind so that.

19:26 It can really read your intent a lot more clearly by the way that's an incredibly common phenomenon almost psychics they have this ethereal software that connected to their mind and is always listening on i've worked with a number of cyclics in health one change from one software to another she was getting intuitions about. who would call on the phone and which path to take with driving to avoid traffic, and where to find parking. And useful things but kind of trivial things? She was a nurse and wanted to start getting medical intuitions. Which of my six patients is going to crash, is going to need emergency care to stay alive on my shift? Which of these dozen studies or dozen lab results

20:13 The most useful for figuring out the right care to give this patient and she wasn't getting that those intuitions And she really wanted them. So we actually I talked with the spirits our work with I asked them for What aetherial software would you recommend for this? And we switched her over and it took a few months for that new ethereal software to network fully with her brain but once it did She started getting all of these really useful intuitions and knowing which of her patients was going to crash and Having no idea where it came from in a mundane way she didn't like see that patient looked extra sickly she just knew. Who the ethereal software what was going to happen i want to be really useful and then use similar techniques to activate second intuitions for myself so when i wanna communicate with that is when i talk about hey this is how it works

21:01 A lot of people, I get the feeling when they say this is how it works. They have some intuition. They think that's a great story or just makes sense to them and i love that. I love hearing people's explanations for how our thing works but what I want to communicate is that I then take the next step of trying to use that model to solve a problem and to solve a problem in a way that would never have occurred to me If I didn't have that model, if I didn't have an idea of ethereal software and of different ethereal softwares having different capabilities it never would've occurred to me to switch my friend from one software to another. And so the model gave me a useful what scientists would call a prediction that turned out to be accurate. That's why I have confidence in what I'm doing and where I'm saying about how this all works.

21:53 Yeah, man. I mean you make it sound good so ethereal software obviously that's a new term to a lot of people that would be the mechanism that the spirits use to help us with our requests in a sense That's a great way to put it, yeah. So it's a new term but it's actually an old concept. Chaos magic talks about egregores and servitors. These are these external forces that mages channel and ask for help Reiki practitioners talk about channeling energy from the universe. And if you talk to them, they clearly understand that they're not channeling energy from Jupiter or Alpha Centauri. They're channeling energy from something that's all around us that some force that they don't fully understand and they've chosen to call that force The Universe

22:47 If you talk to psychics, they'll say a similar thing about receiving information from a universal field. And what was happening and what I saw happening is with all of these grand terms—this isn't Egregore it's the sum of all the intents of every human in the world or I'm channeling energy from the universe—if we want then talk about how How does that thing operate? What algorithm does it use how can we reprogram it to work better if I ask how could we reprogram the universe to work better. That's a crazy idea That's just I would reflexively flinch away from even asking that but if we choose to call it ethereal software and We then asked, how can we reprogram this ethereal software to work better? How can we add a new capability to this etherial software too?

23:40 Do healing energy for this new condition well that just sounds like a software upgrade That's a really natural question, and I actually picked the name Consciously. I used to call them systems like computer system And it was really confusing for my readers because there are also these different Systems of magic right like chaos magic is a system of magic and golden dawn as a system of Magic and so when I talk about Channeling systems It's a word that already has a lot of meanings And my readers were finding it confusing. And I actually have a series of posts where I said, hey guys help me come up with a good metaphor and we wound up at Ethereal Software. So this meaning that what would I just explained to you was actually very consciously chosen

24:21 Right nice so right servitors we typically would think of them as conscious temporary entities or something that your term implies you think of these mechanisms closer to scripts of code rather than a conscious slave being type of thing the way i think about it is Consciousness has to run on something, right? My consciousness runs on my neurons. I can imagine a computer that's conscious and its consciousness would run on its transistors Okay and the consciousness and the intent in all of the details of how that servitor behaves it has to run somewhere and

25:07 I want to mention it's easy as a human to kind of imagine a mind that's free floating out in the world and that's because when we humans interact with other. Humans is really important to simulate their minds we have a lot of special purpose circuitry in our mind, for simulating other minds. And you can see this in a lot of the world's religions, that's why it's so easy to imagine a rock or tree having consciousness. When we dig down into what actually happens, what I find is that that consciousness needs something to run on

25:49 When I connect to spirits, when I work with spirits. I will sometimes connect to their mind using these sensory connections that I talked about with the healing example earlier and see what the structures are that are involved and it's a lot of really dense structures that look a lot like my ethereal muscles And when I send out my intent, it's tempting to use that human facility to simulate human minds. To just imagine intent as a free-floating unitary object that can kind of go out into the world and reach out its feelers and you know reach over with its noodly appendage to cause a change but if we really think about the complexity of what's happening

26:32 Grass that thought is my nerves firing in my brain or some similar physical phenomenon. We say wow what actually has to happen under the hood, send out my thoughts where does that program where does that intent have to run and i answer that is a serial software so what i would say is it a servitor sounds like a program that somebody has created an ongoing request That is running in some ethereal software that they have access to. And an egregore is the much larger and more full-bodied, able to accept these requests so an egregore maps to ethereal software

27:17 Right on, that makes a lot of sense. I think that's a pretty practical way of explaining some things that seemed very mysterious and kind of creepy to some degree but you know entities they really are of interest to me and most magical guests i've had have emphasized how important it is to study these particular beings and call on the right ones for the right purposes But I don't see that as much in your writing. I guess you see that as less important because then, you can kind of program your own ethereal software as opposed to going to an entity who specializes in a particular area? You know what, that's really interesting question this is something that I've been wrestling with and how do I teach this

28:01 A lot of my own work actually involves working with spirits or entities. And the reason why I haven't shared them as much is, I don't assign them to a particular pantheon. I don't say let's work with Zeus, or let's work with this fire elemental, or let's work with this named spirit. The way this happened for me is that I was doing my own And I was tracing some connections in my mind, looking at how my mind was powered. And I found some spirits on the other end of those connections and I started talking with them and I started working with them. They would teach me some techniques

28:44 And then as I started learning more techniques, I had some other spirits come and connect to me and want to see what I was doing because they thought that looked really neat. They wanted to learn it too! So I started working with them and would show them what I knew and they would show me what they knew. Through just kind of networking with a lot of different spirits, I wound up with a group that I work with almost daily And whenever I want to learn a new technique, I'll call them up and ask them how to do this thing. Sometimes they know and they just show me and sometimes they don't. We work together to develop it."

29:24 It's hard for me to say hey it's really important to work with the right spirit because i have this group that i work with its similar how if you were to the company, you'd say you know what's really important to collaborate with a great marketing person and a great business development person and a great salesperson. What you want to say and so you should channel the spirit of. This famous marketing person right you'd say you should put out an ad on monster dot com you hire someone, where i'm winding up is the ethereal software that i'm distributing with my book that's tied to that schedule

30:07 That's made by these spirits that I work with and so one of the things that we're programming in is a facility to Ask that software for advice, and if it has the intelligence in itself. It will present essentially a vision of An avatar vision of an angel or a spirit or whatever you can talk with And if it doesn't know enough to answer that question it will connect you to one of The actual spirits that I work with and They'll be able to help you out and the intent there is that as people learn more and start asking more advanced and more intricate questions they slowly transition from essentially reading the help files in the software to Actually talking with the spirits and getting that training so one of things on my mind is definitely how do we get people? The right kind of guidance from spirits because I've benefited that from this so tremendously. So

31:01 But I think it's a different approach than most people take and i'm still working out the details Right on. Yes, spirit contact that seems to be just one of those things the floodgates are either wide open or nobody's home and communicating with entities it's probably the most abstract and provocative idea for a lot of listeners And it's something I've been able to do on psychedelics at time or two But I'd love the validation that it can be done reliably with a sober mind and you know long-forming relationships can happen but how can we strengthen our ability to make contact? How do we go about it So there's actually a whole series of techniques that I've learned and that I'm going to be writing about. The first step is simply learning to quiet one's mind, right? Think of the spirit as kind of whispering into your mind and if you have a lot of thoughts going on it's gonna be hard to hear those whispers. Okay And that's a good first attempt That's actually where I started

32:01 But then after that, we take these sensory connections which is another set of techniques that I teach. And we use that to feel in our mind where is the spirit connecting and spirits will generally connect to the same place over and over? We learn to engage that part of the mind though that set of ethereal muscles when we're talking with the spirit. It's like...I think it as almost Thinking with that part of the mind. I don't know if this is a metaphor that will translate if you, a person hasn't done it but its like engaging a part of the mind and then thinking my idea and by keeping that part engaged its like the thoughts echo in that part

32:47 And the mechanism for what's actually happening under the hood is as a person thinks, as thoughts and words and concepts pass through the brain there's all of this activity in the brain. If we put a person in an fMRI and look at how their brain is firing we find out that there are actually a lot of similarities from one brain to the next it's not like you have one pattern and I have some completely different pattern when we think about a concept like spirits or justice or success, whatever. We actually have very similar patterns and it turns out that we also have very similar energy patterns. The energy signature that our brains enter when we think these concepts seems to be pretty similar

33:32 And so when I communicate with the spirit, what i'm doing is taking all the energy signatures that my brain enters as I think of that message. I gather them up and package them up and send them in a similar way to how you might send healing energy And the spirit then unpackages them and puts it in their, whatever the equivalent of their brain is. And here's my thoughts echoed in their mind as their mind enters the same energy signatures that my mind was in when I thought that message." And then they package up their message in a similar way and send it to me. And I unpackage it, and one concept at a time place that concept into my brain and let my brain enter that energy signature and feel what that concept is. As you might imagine, at first this was really slow and really hard but after doing for few years its

34:30 Kind of like having a conversation it's roughly as fast as talking on one of the really interesting things is occasionally the spirit will use a concept that I'm not familiar with and when that happens. It's like my brain stops my brain like can't get into that state and i have to say hold on hold up Break that down into smaller concepts, break that down into bits that I'm familiar with. And then they do and then I get the concept and once I have that concept in my mind if they use the large concept again, the one that I wasn't able to handle, If they use it again a few minutes later, I can hear it and recognize as that thing they just explained today

35:16 When we're talking with spirits, there's actually a whole set of techniques. This set of techniques is also useful for talking with ethereal software It takes months for ethereal software to connect to a person's brain and if you only want to use one If you just want to turn on psychic intuitions then awesome do that the W well spent few months but I don't want to use just one software i wanna use a dozen or more actually just last week switch from one ethereal software for second intuitions to another that seems to be better for some human events around business. And I was able to do that in about a day because i have all these other techniques with how to do the communication. So it's a combination of making it faster, make it more reliable and also making it more accurate what i found happened as i was first learning these techniques is i was first learning to package up my thoughts and then unpackage the spirit message

36:15 I would have a spirit send me a message the old way, the way where it's just kind of dropping the signatures into my brain. And then the new way, where it was sending me this package. And I would read them and... ...I thought that what was going to happen is the old way was gonna be really accurate and the new way was going to... ...be inaccurate and eventually through practice become as accurate as the old way and just be a little easier for the spirit to work with and let me talk with more spirits who maybe didn't know as much about talking with humans But what actually happened Is i found that the old way where was kind of having the thoughts dropped into my brain and then feeling into them.

36:55 I would get one or two words of each sentence along with an emotional feel of hopeful, sad, whatever. And then my unconscious mind would fill in the gaps in the same way that if I told you new job along with a feeling of hope and we're talking about your career, you could probably fill in the gaps of what my sentence was more or less. That's what my unconscious mind was doing And as I learned to package and unpackage these messages, I started getting more and more words. And more and more accuracy in what I was sending and receiving. That was actually a really great surprising result. I love getting surprising results because I always have this fear in the back of my mind that what if all of this is just placebo? It's just my expectations manifesting in front of me. At least once a month I get some result

37:52 That I completely did not expect. I actually feel the surprise in my body and in my chest and I say wow Okay, I'm getting the opposite of what I expected You know yeah, I want more concrete testing eventually and I'd love to tell you about healing lab where I'm doing that but It's a great, just a personal confirmation that I'm really working with something. So yeah that's how i do communication is I package up the message and send it to the spirit and receive their message and unpackage it And that's a series of exercises that I am going to be digging into in the book as I return later this year

38:32 Right on, man. Yeah that is so interesting I mean so many people probably have a hard time thinking these things are even possible to go a little bit further with this in the more advanced stages can you elaborate on how uh a relationship with a reoccurring entity evolves and develops over months or years even? Sure, so there's one group of spirits that I've been working with for four or five years probably and At first. I would just contact Whatever spirit happened to be available I'd contacts with a real software and say hey I want to know about Sensory connections where I want to know about shielding or I want to know about manifesting connect me to someone who can talk about that as

39:19 I would get whatever random spirit happened to be around and it was great they all really knew what they were talking about and it would be like if you know You went to office hours for a professor, and you got whatever TA happened to be available right? And they're gonna answer your question. It's gonna be super helpful but over time I started working more and more with this one spirit who specializes in communication and In part that was because Most spirits have at least most spirits I work with are kind of androgynous but this one has a really feminine energy and At the time. I was getting involved in erotic energy, and I started doing that with her And it felt really good. And so I would regularly connect to her to explore that hey now

40:08 And if you think about how human relationships form, a lot of times that's what they form around. Right? Yeah it's true! And so I started calling her a lot for that and then i would ask for advice about things...I'd say hey I'm trying to figure out this thing with manifesting what do you think right instead of calling and asking for whatever manifesting expert happened to be available I'd asked her and sometimes she had answer and some have should say oh I know a spirit who Is an expert at that let me connect you guys and sometimes i be talking with that spirit and maybe he wasn't as experienced working with humans. And so he wasn't good communicating with me or maybe i was just getting exhausted because i was doing a half hour to one hour session instead of fifteen minutes session and i would say hey,

40:59 Can you to the spirit that I knew other now call Laura can you handle this communication for me can you have him communicate with you and then you make it really easy for me to read the message by doing more of the work of dropping into my mind. And this became part of a pattern where I would just call her up and say, hey, this is what i want to learn about. Would you be up for helping me figure out how to go about it? And helping manage the communication with the other spirits if we have a team of like five guys who are all collaborating on a project that's really more than I can handle for communication but its no big deal for her because that's what she specializes in

41:44 And she, I've asked her hey what do you get out of this? What do you benefit from and some of the things she tells me are. is having an interesting question. And because I draw from medicine and from computer science, my background is computer science... So whenever we're talking about messaging, I'll say hey why are we preparing a message? Why aren't we streaming messages? That actually led to some really cool research that sped up their communication

42:26 I will ask good questions and very occasionally have good answers, but i think that a lot of what i contribute is asking interesting questions. And she enjoys being part of that conversation and so she's always happy to help me facilitate these training sessions And it winds up being this really comfortable relationship. And she'll tell me about what she's working on, and I'll sometimes have some ideas about how to... What questions to ask as she is learning healing work? How to organize this group that she is working with and how to get them excited and invigorated about the project? How to speak from her goals rather than just the technical question that she is asking

43:09 So I try to bring whatever my skills are to that relationship in the same way that if you had a technical expert, that you worked with a lot. If you collaborated with somebody who did all your marketing, you would help them out with whatever you knew and they'd help you out with whatever they knew. There's no concept of money there but if you think about our community that everyone helps each other, that's really what's going on Hmm i don't know you make it seem so normal and much of the conversation or that.

43:46 communication with entities seems to be about people in the physical world, human beings asking for things or asking for understanding. But through this communication have you gotten any indications of what life is like for them? Or what their reality is like because you mentioned coming from a scientific atheistic background I had an atheistic period as well and there are spiritual implications for thinking about conscious beings that aren't in bodies. It's weird, have you gotten any clues to what their reality is like? Absolutely so that was actually one of the first questions I asked as I started to get to know these spirits as people rather than just as an online oracle that I can ask questions on and they really enjoy exploring how all this stuff works at least the spirits that i work with

44:41 At least as much passion is i do for asking wow when i do this thing what's really happening. What's going on under the hood and what it seems like a lot of status among spirits in this group, who's coming up with really interesting new ideas that are working for everyone getting everyone better results They also enjoy connecting with each other. And when I was doing erotic energy with Laura, she would also do that with other spirits and they seem to enjoy doing that with each other which i think is awesome and kind of humanizing in terms of how do I conceptualize this as from an atheistic scientific perspective

45:30 What i say is just as i could imagine a mind running on transistors and artificial intelligence i can imagine a mind running on. Energetic connections where the thoughts are bits of energy that pass along these connections and activate or deactivate connection. I can imagine essentially building a brain out of energy pathways and energies, and that's how I conceptualize these spirits That's interesting man and i guess one thought I had when preparing for the show is if you wanted to keep this within a materialist scientific paradigm, could you say that these beings that your in contact with are just people on other planets doing exactly what your doing? So the way I think of this first I want to address the word materialist because

46:24 People often hear, when I say materialist what they hear is concrete physical stuff. Only stuff that you can reach out and touch And that's not at all what materialists means Materialists believe in dark matter which only interacts with gravity and doesn't... You can't reach out and touch it Materialists believe in photons, which interact with matter in certain limited ways but pass right through glass and do all sort of not ordinary matter things. What materialism means is that anything that I have can be broken down into smaller parts, so if we have a car we can break it down into the engine and the pistons and down into molecules and atoms and protons and electrons and quarks If we have a mind there's no such thing as just a free-floating inherently mental object

47:25 That a mind sits on top of or is implemented in nerves, which we can then drill down into molecules and atoms and so on. That a mind is implemented in transistors which you can drill down into silicon and so on. And so what materialism means is we can understand how the world works. And I want to mention, science wasn't always materialist when science first started out in the age of Galileo and Newton everyone was very religious and they went looking for a soul and they went looking for angels and they tried to find all these inherently mental things

48:13 And they failed and they tried again, and they failed. One of the wonderful things about science is it learns from failures. Eventually scientists came to say wow when I look for things that are inherently mental that don't break down into smaller pieces i never find anything and everything that I actually do find I can break down into smaller pieces And that's where we got this idea that probably everything in the world, we can break down into smaller pieces. What I'll say as someone who works with a ethereal stuff connections and energy and ethereal software and spirits, everything that i've found

48:55 I could break down into smaller pieces. And by doing that, I can develop useful techniques for doing things that I never would have thought to do or never been able to do if I hadn't tried to break them down into smaller pieces." So that's what materialism means and that's why I would say I am a materialist. Right on! It makes sense. You mentioned the Hive scenario and let's get into healing a little deeper. You have pages of case studies on your site, you seem to be very methodical about documenting these cases and instances of healing. And personally, healing feels like the most hokey to me of most of the things that people talk about with magic but it also seems to be the most cut-and-dry what should be provable effect from magic can you talk to us about your successes in healing? And this Healing Lab that you mentioned

49:48 Absolutely. So Healing Lab, its mission is to develop a scientific understanding of energy healing and the reason is that science advances, scientific revolutions happen by exploring phenomena that can't be explained in today's science And we can find histories in the past. We could find examples in history. 400 years ago, weavers in Venice got their first lenses. They used them to look at their threads so they could make better cloth and then they turned around and looked at water and found discovered bacteria. They called them animalcules. This led to the germ theory of disease and modern medicine. I'm sure that at the time that seemed incredibly hokey

50:37 There's actually examples from the 1800s of a doctor who said, hey I've noticed that when doctors work on cadavers and then turn around and do surgeries people die. We should wash our hands. All right, and he was drummed out of medicine He became a pariah for having the audacity to suggest that doctors hands might be unclean And we should wash them because the germ theory of medicine was not yet cemented as a reality It just seemed bizarre Everybody knew that disease was caused by bad humors and malicious spirits How dare you suggest that these are on the hands of doctors? I

51:18 Another example, quantum physics. It started by looking at photons and discovering all these really weird behaviors that we now recognize as wave-particle duality and the observer effect Quantum physics came from finding aberrations. And most people don't know this, but transistors are based on the quantum behavior of silicon atoms. If we don't have quantum physics, we don't have transistors and we don't have the modern world." Everything that we have today is built on finding aberrations, finding phenomena that can't be explained in the science of the time and hunting it down and figuring it out until we understand it. And when we understand energy healing and magic

52:05 It's going to impact everything from medicine, to biology, to physics and a lot more. And I have no idea where that leads just like those 17th century weavers had no concept of antibiotics but i have a faith that it leads somewhere amazing there are few reasons why i'm focused on healing the first is it provides really concrete results and i really love helping people The second is there's actually a lot of great research going on in energy healing right now. The term to Google is biofield healing, B-I-O F-I-E-L-D that's the term that the National Institute of Health uses to refer to energy healing. There are placebo controlled studies and peer reviewed journals that show statistically significant results. There are cell culture studies and peer reviewed journals that show when you apply

53:00 whatever this healing energy is to cell cultures like MRSA, it does something to them. And it does things that can be detected with traditional chemistry. There are studies that show that when you apply healing energy to plants and animals, that it affects them too. Notice that plants and animals in cell culture don't get affected by placebo so all of these studies really strongly suggest there's something going on here And because there's a culture of doing scientific studies and doing peer-reviewed publications around healing,

53:39 And because it is in the culture more respectable to say, I'm doing research around healing than to say I'm doing research around magic. I think that this is a great way to get started with making this part of a publicly acceptable scientifically studied domain and then we all get to see what amazing things come out the other end of that research Man, it would be a beautiful world indeed. And I've had other guests cite these same studies that are going on but why can't it break into the mainstream? What's keeping this still at bay is just not repeatable enough? So I have two answers for you and I want to say that I spent about six months this year writing and rewriting and thinking about exactly that question because that's what Healing Lab wants to solve in order to solve it we need to understand it. What's going on

54:36 Is really two things the first is that these studies are primarily single blind so blind means that the person doesn't know whether they're getting the real treatment or the placebo and Single-blind means that the subject doesn't know but The practitioner knows So if you've read studies where the practitioner does acupuncture and sometimes they put the needle in the wrong spot Intentionally, and they do fake acupuncture Obviously, the practitioner has to know if they're doing real acupuncture or fake acupuncture. Well what if they're really confident when they meet the person when they're doing a real acupuncturer and less confident when they meet the person and are doing the fake acupuncture? They're not intentionally doing this it's just unconscious thing

55:20 What if what we're detecting is really that people have a strong placebo response to confident acupuncturists and a weak placebo response to not-confident acupuncturists? I don't think that's what's going on, but The reason why all modern medical studies the gold standard is double blind is because of exactly that problem because that problem does come up in Medical research so double-blind means that not only does this subject not know if they're getting real or placebo But the practitioner doesn't know either and that's a problem for anything hands on. So what I've developed is

55:59 Is a set of healing techniques where I meet with the person. I don't know whether i'm going to do a real healing or not, I meet with them I answer all their questions. I touch their head or wherever i'm doing the healing technique and I establish a connection Then I go into the other room and at that point I find out if they're real or placebo And I either do The energy work or I sit there and read the paper and don't do anything I never talk with that person again. An assistant who hasn't talked with me goes, thanks them and shows them out and we then collect data online and then after collecting the data a month later, we let them know whether they were real or placebo and if their placebo, we invite them back for their free healing session

56:44 So the first reason why this isn't taken more seriously is because we haven't met the gold standard for medical research. We haven't done a lot of double blind studies and that's one of things I'm looking to change but there is a bigger reason and that's because pills, pharmaceuticals, surgeries. All of the widely accepted treatments we can explain how they work in terms of medicine and then we can drill down into how they work into biology and chemistry and physics And they're all built on accepted physics We've been studying physics for over 2,000 years and were pretty good at it by now To suggest that there's a part of physics that we haven't found

57:30 I mean, there certainly is and we certainly are finding new aspects of physics all the time. But we need extraordinary evidence before we believe that any one model is really part of the physical universe and to tell you how strong that is in medicine We look for 95%-99% certainty That a treatment is effective And if it's 1% to 5% chance that it was just a coincidence, maybe everybody in the treatment group would have gotten better anyway. And everybody in the placebo group would have stayed sick anyway. Maybe you could flip a coin 20 times and get 10 heads and then 10 tails. It happens. If we have a 1% to 5% chance that that's what happened, that's okay. We will use that treatment.

58:16 In physics, we aim for five sigmas of certainty. That means a one in 3.5 million chance of error that's 200 thousand times as accurate We're not going to get that by running placebo-controlled studies. You can't do a placebo controlled study that's 200,000 times as large So the answer there my answer is hey in addition to double blind placebo controlled studies for healing techniques Let's also develop some techniques that are maybe useless for healing but are great for Demonstrating to a high level of accuracy and this is where my computer science background comes in

58:53 So computer science does a lot with messaging algorithms. How can I send a message from one place to another? And so, I said well hey energy workers talk about feeling energy all the time And they talk about sending energy all the time. So let's get two people, two different rooms that are not talking in any way. The sender flips a coin if it's heads they send energy if its tails they don't do anything they just read the paper for a minute. The receiver says when they feel energy and we look at the correlation so we have a random stream of data that's coming in and we're seeing if that same stream is reproduced by the receiver. I said well hey

59:30 If we want 1 in 3.5 million chance of error, how many trials is this going to take? Is it going to take 3.5 million trials? No! if it was 100% accurate... Now nothing's a hundred percent but let's just make the math easy. If it's 100% accurate We got one and three point five million chance of error in 22 trials You can do that in the afternoon if it's ninety percent accurate maybe we need two hundred or so trials i have to run some statistics once i find out the exact level of accuracy were getting but this is a solid problem. And the next question then how do we get that accuracy up?

1:00:06 All human senses are susceptible to our expectations. There are great experiments with using vision and sound, these senses that we really rely on and showing how if somebody's primed to expect something it will affect their sight or their hearing. And everybody knows about how wine tasters if you take great wine and you put it in a cheap bottle, wine tasters will think it's cheap. And if you take cheap wine and put it into the great bottle, wine tasters will think it's great." Now that doesn't mean that wine is imaginary or taste doesn't exist. It's just a matter of how the human mind works there's always influenced by expectations. So one of my active areas of research is how can we more accurately send and sense energy when we genuinely don't know what to expect? How do we remove the expectations

1:00:57 and still get really accurate results so that we can do that physics level of proof. And I think that the combination of the two of those, demonstrating to physicists that there's something worth studying here so that the physics community starts to try to unravel ethereal structures and the biofield and all of the rest of this. Also demonstrating really useful techniques to the medical community so that more people start wanting energy healing and start seeking it out and start asking for it I think that the combination of those two things can really help this go mainstream and that everything else is going to follow along after we get healing accepted.

1:01:39 Well said, and kind of like we talked about earlier with the theatrics it seems to be about heightening the possibility of expectations that these things would work. And in your experience since you've done this quite a bit what have you found to be the limitations of healing or can you not say until we really raise the wider expectations? Maybe it doesn't have limits So when we talk about limits, I want to distinguish between limits given roughly today's level of technology and fundamental ultimate limits. A hundred years ago the best engineers of the time – the smartest people said that escaping Earth's gravity well and getting into space was impossible not just really difficult but

1:02:27 There's no way we will ever do that and 50 years later they were observably and obviously wrong. So I want to avoid saying actual absolute limits but given the current technology, given what i'm working with it seems to me the way I think about energy healing is that either accelerates or slows cellular processes And when I design new healing techniques, when I say hey what type of energy do I want to apply to what tissue in the body? I think about it in that way. I think about upregulating or downregulating cellular processes and that gives us a good guideline for what things will be amenable to energy healing and what things won't be so if we have a chronic condition like hives where

1:03:18 There are some processes making it better and some processes making it worse. If we can accelerate the ones making it better, and slow the ones making it worse, and let that run for one hour or eight hours or a couple of weeks, then we're gonna see good results! If we have somebody who has a cut, a laceration or a heart attack or a burst appendix. These are not the kind of things that need subtle nudges to cellular processes because they're the kinds of things that needs surgery so I would expect that energy healing will probably never do or never solve the kinds of problems that we solve with surgery

1:03:58 And I'm expecting that energy healing can have some great results for the kind of things that we address with pharmaceuticals. That said, I should make a disclaimer. One none of this is accepted science This is my current hypothesis that will probably change over the next decade and Two-I'm not a physician and I'm definitely not saying to replace your meds with energy healing today I'm saying where will we someday after research with the scientific and medical community eventually get Right, right. Man wow! Well this has been fascinating man before we go please remind the listeners where they can follow up on your website and with your free ebook in progress

1:04:43 Awesome. So if you like what I've been talking about, go to magic of thought dot com that's M A G I C K O F T H o u g h t dot com so magic with the c k um That's where i blog i have every week a new blog post and If you look at the banner At the top it says are you new here start here and that link takes You through the book in progress its free because i want To get as many people exploring this stuff As possible i wanna get The ideas out there If you're interested in the energy healing research that I'm doing, go to HealingLab.org. That's H-E-A-L-I-N-G L-A-B dot O-R-G. That's where I am doing the healing research and publishing the studies. And starting very soon we are going to have case studies in a healing for better sleep

1:05:32 I'm still deciding if i'm going to do only in person or if i'm going to also allow virtual But definitely, if you live in the san francisco bay area check that out. The deal is you get free healings? I get free data Everybody wins right on mike well very much appreciate the time a fresh approach To these ideas no doubt take care out there and best of luck thanks so much for having me you got it Alright, how was that one Hiresight Chatters? I actually expect this to be an episode that a lot of people like. I really enjoy the magic topic and Mike's approach is pretty different and pardon the pun very direct he wants to get in there not be shy about it and see how these things actually work i respect that a lot

1:06:16 And he didn't say this but i find mike to be in such a unique camp almost as if he was wired to be scientifically minded at the same time has some seemingly strong. Natural ability and magic so he's walking between these two worlds that normally mix like oil and water, And over the course of the show, I think you get a good sense of how science should be approaching magic and its testability. Another thing i would say is that it's normally a bit of a pet peeve of mine that so many magic researchers end up using their own glossary of terms if you start looking into a lot of the authors and adventurers in this realm It's something you'll realize pretty quick! And it always makes me think that their ego is so out of control that they need their own brand

1:07:03 of magic. But I do think Mike's case is different, and I don't think he's doing this out of ego but sort of modernizing some the language and putting it in terms that science will probably have an easier time adopting even i think some of his terms help me to conceptualize these things a bit better than I did just a week ago For some people though, probably a lot of those science-minded folks how a particular thing is framed is really important. So for some to not feel goofy getting into this stuff I think terms like ethereal muscles and ethereal software are going to be more useful to some people than terms like spellcasting and servitors It's an interesting thing that if you tweak terms enough You can talk about the very same thing

1:07:49 and sort of circumvent the decades of stigma that's been attached to it. Humans are weird, but I've been trying to practice more energy meditations and i got a pretty serious ancestor altar going here! I went down to the local botanica picked up some specific regional oils and incense got some Caridad del Cobre on Gordon White's recommendation had the nice lady mix me up some road opener and have been giving it a shot I know there will be comment after comment about how people shouldn't get into these things, magic is the devil's toolbox and i'll get called a disinfo plant because i encourage psychedelics and magic but these people that think they know the best and only way to live... They can fuck right off. Puritanical moral judgments are just not for me And im not really encouraging anyone to do anything Im just telling you that IM doing it

1:08:44 I find it interesting, and at least in terms of psychedelics, I've had some profound and life-changing results. Other people have turned themselves into vegetables, so there's a spectrum. But I want to experience things! I wanna try things responsibly and if i don't hurt anyone else then who really cares? Of course I don't need to murder someone to see if I feel guilty or wrong but how are you gonna say that thoughtful meditation and flipping tarot cards is bad?! To me it's as morally neutral as exercise...as going to the gym It very much might be a tool of the elite, but it could also be our tool. But see this is Satan's mouthpiece you're hearing this from so of course I'm gonna say that Maybe i've been spending a little too much time at the crossroads people but I hope You listeners are still as interested As I am to test The waters Of consciousness See if we can't affect Our reality for The better What have you got To lose? I mean ya binge watch Stranger Things and play 4 hours of Overwatch but focusing your conscious attention on some sigils Is a waste of time