THC 113: Philip Farber | Understanding Invocation & Evocation Magick

00:04 In the 1930s, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed a nation through a series of radio broadcast known as the Fireside Chats. His aim was to reassure the common man that our society would recover from its troubled times but we're far from 1930 and I deal with a different kind of fire For a new era of worldly frustration We offer a fresh conversation! I'm Greg Carlwood These are The Hireside Chat Hallelujah, Hireside Chatters! How the hell are you? Drinking a little drink. Smoking a little smoke just trying to get into that magical state of mind Today's an amazing show Phil is a great guest and even walks us through evoking an entity so pay attention there we can evoke tens of thousands of entities across the world if you concentrate do the exercise along with Phil

00:52 I also wanted to let you people know that i will be at the secret space program conference in San Mateo California on June 28th and 29th if you want To get weird and hear about breakaway civilizations and secret black ops technologies It's going to be a trip that. I would recommend making also this round of the money bomb is higher than ever ever thanks to a ton of added input and people signing up for the monthly donations which is great, and one very generous donation of $1,000 we are at the point where the winner gets at least $700 so consider that. And if you're not sure how it works here's the quick rundown and were gonna be talking magic entities evocation invocation NLP in the goddamn kitchen sink with Philip Farber on the other side

01:34 Hey people, I gotta take a second to tell you about something we do around here called the THC Money Bomb. What i do is every 5 episodes, I total up the donations that I've gotten in that period of time and half keeps me and the show going, I take the other half and gift it back to random listeners. So far were hitting 500 each round and couldn't be happier about it. So consider throwing in 5 or 10 bucks, it's cheaper than a hand at the blackjack table with better odds and scratch off ticket. Plus you know half supports the show you like and at least half will go to a like minded person who could probably use a nice surprise in these troubled times When you make a donation, I can see your email address and that's how i pick the winner. But to keep things kosher you can also get in the pool by sending your info on a postcard to me, Greg Carlwood PO Box 635223 San Diego California 92163 Dollars, bitcoins it's all good to me And that's what we call The THC Money Bomb Boom

02:37 Alright folks, as we try to get a proper grip on this reality in which we find ourselves it's always fun to hear from the people who seem to have a deeper understanding of this thing called life. Well the particular flavor of Universal Insight that I find to be tastiest lately is that of The Magician With an arsenal of practices like evocation, sigil making and banishing rituals a curious mind can't help but wonder how these things work and just how powerful a magician's toolbox can be. Well today's guest Philip Farber is just the guy to give us that look under the hood! Phil is not only a well-respected and longtime magic practitioner he has also extended his skill set to include being a certified hypnotist, hypnotist instructor, expert trainer in the field of Neuro Linguistic Programming or better known as NLP

03:20 He's written three highly acclaimed books in the field of magic entitled Future Ritual, Magic for the 21st Century Metamagic The Book of Atem Achieving New States of Consciousness Through NLP Neuroscience and Ritual And the nugget a magical wisdom I was lucky enough to read myself Brainmagick Exercises in metamagic and invocation It's gonna be a wild ride. An eye for one cannot wait Philip my man welcome to THC Thanks, happy to be here. Yeah man I mean...I'm psyched to have you here it's a real honor! I learned about your work from a listener request and i have a ton of respect for anyone who has taken the time to master the mind at level that you have when I can't even seem to get through five minutes meditation before I wonder what's going happen on the next game of thrones? You know what I mean? Well that is actually part of the process of meditation. Most people think

04:08 You know when you sit down to meditate, you know magically your mind is going to be clear and then your focus than whatever but really the process and in Yogic terms the term is Dharana which is a fluctuation between concentration and distraction And it's actually something that we some important lessons that we learn about our mind from doing that in terms of what? We tend to distract ourselves with how to quiet that part of the brain down and so on. It takes a while. Right, well that's a little comforting because I consider myself to be a mess frankly but um...I do find it interesting that you blend magic with NLP and i think that as good place is any to start this thing because almost everyone I've spoken with about magic seems have unique style to it So tell us a little bit about your approach to magic and how you found it complimentary to something like NLP

05:04 Well, I started out with very traditional approaches to magic with Golden Dawn type magic and Aleister Crowley's Palaemic Magic which is all pretty traditional kind of ritual you know very formal ritual kind of work. And i was lucky enough very early on in my career as a magician uh to come into contact with some folks who were part of an unbroken lineage from Crowley and other older magicians and were doing it right, let's just say. They were doing some ritual that was very powerful and I got that experience right away. Around the same time that I was coming in contact with these folks, I was also getting involved in NLP. Well, I've been involved in hypnosis since I was a kid but that's another story entirely

05:51 I was getting involved in NLP. Part of NLP, really the core of NLP is the process of modeling and being able to observe some kind of behavior and understand how it works and break it down into small chunks of behavior that make it possible to understand it and learn a little bit more easily. Normally, in the field of NLP people use that break down the processes of, you know great business thinkers and decision makers and people who've overcome their habits and public speakers and things like that. In my case I was coming in contact with some of these great magicians And the first thing that popped into my head at that point because i had all this NLP going on in my head was wow! I can use this to model the magicians

06:39 you know, what is it that makes this ritual work? What is it that's giving me these the goosebumps running up and down my spine when they do this ritual?" And uh you know so I... It took some years to do it and I actually got quite a bit of resistance from the actual magic people at that time because NLP was kind of unknown. kind of a rarity. And I mean, NLP was pretty new this is we're talking the early 80s but over the years i was able to do enough of this and there's certainly a vast amount of magic technique and practice and so on that that I've yet to study in uh...and so on but at least the little corner that I've been involved in I've been able to model it enough that I learned some interesting things doing

07:25 Yeah, man. Witnessing a powerful ritual that is exactly what I've been waiting for before my mind is really willing to do all the work because it seems like taking someone who's never heard of science and then putting them in front of neurology you know space exploration every chemistry everything it seems like daunting field of study that I don't know, I dabble in it from an outsider's perspective but I'm dying to witness a really powerful ritual that validates the experience for me and that seems to be kind of the catch-22 is that it usually doesn't happen that way for a lot of people so you're kind of lucky in that sense.

08:01 Yeah, I think early on in my contact there were enough weird and unusual things that happened in the context of ritual that I became very intrigued. You know, odd synchronicities and so on... And it became pretty convincing to me right away! And of course most people have this idea of magical ritual that is exclusively this idea paranormal or supernatural or something like that. It certainly includes But as far as I'm concerned, there's really no demarcation between what we consider normal behavior. I mean natural behavior and what most people lump into paranormal.

08:41 a continuum and by learning how to do some of the more mundane things with our brains, some of this other stuff starts to happen as well. So usually when I start people off with magic there are more things that we would think of more psychological or therapeutic or something like that getting your life together and habit change, developing confidence and beliefs. Ultimately a lot of the so-called paranormal stuff comes down to that. Think of magic as a way to manage and create a hierarchy for your beliefs

09:25 by opening yourself up to beliefs that include possibility and miracles and unusual things, we start to notice these things happening around us a little bit more. That makes sense! One thing that gets confusing to me, and I think it is an issue that a lot of curious minds have. There are so many different unique brands of magic. Wiccan, Hermetic, Chaos Magic... All the practices and rituals can be just as diverse. And there's definitely a long tradition of these styles but they also seem to be pretty flexible and that's the part that hurts my brain. My brain that wants black-and-white answers, you know? If I want to cut a board in half I use a saw but yet i can't just conjure up...I can't just make up in my mind what I determine a saw to be it is this thing! But magic seems to be way more malleable. Does that makes sense?

10:17 Yeah, your saw metaphor is a good one because think about it this way. There's a lot of different kinds of saws right? You could be using that old handsaw you could be using a jigsaw you could be using a power saw I mean yeah think of those as the different branches of magic there's all there's that basic kind of function that's going on in the magic there's really a few basic operations that everybody does banishing and invocation and evocation, and not really a whole lot more. Most of the other things that the divisions that we make are how we go about doing those different functions so if you think of invocation which is drawing qualities into you and bringing the essence of deities and entities and so on into you uh you find that over a whole range of different

11:08 So think of that as the saw and the different kinds of magic are the different brands and different types of saws that you can use. And for some things, certainly a jigsaw is more appropriate if you have to make those fine little curly cues in details in your wood or somethings like chainsaw's probably more appropriate if your invocation involves chopping down a big tree of qualities or whatever. Maybe I'm stretching the metaphor here a little bit. No, no! I think that's great and makes it does clarify things a little bit to me You know, I might be walking down this path a little bit already But are there any common misconceptions or big pet peeves you have about the layman's understanding of what you do? That...you know It's good to clarify early

11:54 Oh absolutely. Most people in our culture have this idea of magic that's essentially drawn from the movies and just like movie cops are not much like the cop in your neighborhood, You know, movie secret agents are not really much like real secret agents and so on. Movie magicians are really not a whole lot like real magicians and the things that we see in movies you know toothy slathering demons appear and chew your leg off or something like that I mean

12:32 it's fantasy, right? It's not really what magic is all about. Magic is really a self-discipline. It's a way of recreating who you are in your psyche and in doing so, recreating your world. Yes there are certain mystical elements to that and certainly very unusual things that happen—we'll talk about that a little bit—but for the most part doesn't really have to do with the things that you see in horror movies or you know, fantasy tales. Yeah and one of the sexiest aspects of magic to me is the idea of communicating with entities or summoning and after reading Brain Magic it seems a lot less weird really I actually thought that concept of memetic entities was really eye opening can give people a little bit of information on what memetic entities are?

13:21 Sure, well, memetics of course is the study of how information spreads. A mean is to information what a gene is to biological life it's that smallest unit of information that carries something from one entity one being to another And just as we are composed of, in a sense the sum total of our genetics. Not really but to large extent were informed by our genetic makeup or DNA and so on. Mimetic entities are composed largely of the sum total of the memes that go into them. Now I don't want people to confuse this with the idea of internet memes which are those silly

14:06 Images that we pass around on Facebook, you know where the cat wants a cheeseburger and blah blah. Those are memes in the sense that they are a little piece of information that gets spread around, right? Like a virus. Call these things viral and uh... That's the commonality but for the most part memes can be a lot more important They can relate to things like schools of knowledge schools of philosophy or different kinds of beliefs or religions or Things like that now when we put these Anthony's together. The guy who created the concept of memetics is Richard Dawkins, who is probably most famous right now as our leading new atheist and it just seems odd to me that somebody who

14:54 is studying the way that information interacts with minds would be such a heavy denier of entities. Yeah, there's a little bit of universal humor there! Yeah, there is and his idea you know they talk about some the more scientific or straightforward mimeticists talk about mimetic complexes, or memeplexes which are closer to what I would consider a mimetic entity. Now the idea of entity is actually something that for most of us is kind of wired into our brains all right we tend to look at different kinds of things in our environment and we categorize them as entity or non-entity

15:43 And an entity, of course you're going to try to communicate with. There's a Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy reference in the movie where I'm trying to remember the character's name, Ford Prefect, the first time he meets Arthur Dent, he's trying to shake hands with a car and almost gets run over uh because he he thinks it's an entity right, he thinks that's dominant life form. Our brains do this all the time and we look at things like cartoon characters right if you look at um an episode of South Park now these are very crudely drawn characters, they're made to look like cut out paper and so on. Yet they maintain enough entityhood that we identify with the characters enough that we can laugh at them right? You have to be able to understand Eric Cartman as an entity right or as a sentient being of some sort even in your imagination otherwise it's not funny right it doesn't he's not a funny character unless he's a character

16:43 So we tend to do that with a lot of different things around us and some of it's appropriate, some of it is not. I'm sure quite a few people listening right now have done things like name their automobile or cursive their computer or things like that. There's always this This great scene in the movies where the hero is being pursued by the enemy and they're trying to start their car, and they stick the key in. And then the car doesn't start. They go come on! Come on already! Not now! Don't do this to me now! Who the hell are they talking to? Right? They're talking to the car as an entity

17:23 And we tend to do that a lot. We tend to relate to things in our environment as entities, uh little bit more than were often aware of consciously when we do this with say forces of nature or you know elements of our consciousness and so on and we start to give them characteristics about well this is how back in the day we originated the concepts of deities you know, some of the earliest gods and goddesses were stand-ins for forces of nature and so on. Now are they really entities? Do they have sentience that's separate from us? Who knows! Our minds don't really function on a large enough level maybe to really understand them but we can communicate with them in that way and learn things from it let's say

18:18 We accept Hermes as an entity, right? Hermes being the god of science and language. Does that mean that you know this guy with a winged helmet is going to suddenly appear in your room and say, how you doing? Probably not. However in the course of a ritual invoking or evoking Hermes you may actually gain some information concerning language or science or whatever and communicate in that way Some people's imaginations are more thorough than others and maybe they will see entities as in their mind's eye, as humanoid figures and so on. And that's very cool when they do. For many of us though the answers come more in terms of synchronicities or thoughts that arise in our minds and so on

19:15 Yeah, I thought the whole thing was pretty fascinating because you know in terms of fictitious characters as archetypes that actually Influence our regular reality. I mean that does happen as odd as it sounds You know you might think the example i've heard used in the past is Sherlock Holmes like obviously not a real person just a fictional character but the way that he was written as a detective has influenced the way detectives do their work. And I do think that's pretty fascinating, and that almost makes it real you know? Is it real or not? Well it has real world influence so what difference does it make?" Right! It's real on a certain level. Its' real on the level of a memetic entity but Sherlock Holmes isn't necessarily real in terms like your neighbor is real."

20:07 Right. We do see some of these, I mean some of these entities things like Jehovah right or Allah who have you know, they're imaginary so-called imaginary entities yet they've changed the world. You know millions of people have died in the service some of these entities. Civilizations have been built and civilizations have fallen based on belief in and uh interaction with some of these entities. They're major forces in human history Yeah, that's absolutely a great point. And tell us a little bit about ATEM from your book Metamagic it sounds like a great experiment in memetic entities from what I understand Sure yeah absolutely it's an experiment in willfully breaking down the elements of what constitutes a memetic entity and being able to learning how to be able

21:05 Create one intentionally. Now people have done this over the years, certainly with fictional characters and so on yet there seems to be a kind of hit or miss quality in that, right? What is it that made Sherlock Holmes a popular character that we've passed down from several generations now whereas other characters we've long forgotten. So I was sort of kind of studying the elements of that and attempting to codify it a little bit and then doing so I needed an entity to practice with. And so Autem was that entity and I call Atem a self-created entity because the whole process was really developing the entity enough that i could contact the entity and get information from the entity about how it would manifest, and so on. And develop it that way and ultimately the book came out of that process uh and the book itself is a kind of thorough exploration experiential exploration of this particular entity

22:07 that can be passed along from person to person in a memetic way. Books are inherently memetic, in that we can have the information of that book and hand it to another person and let them get that information and understand it verbally or physically pass it along somebody else And it's interesting, some of the responses I've got from it. I mean, I get letters from people who read the book about the appearances of Atem in their life and so on, some which are pretty wild Yeah, it's so interesting to me and it actually seems like a great way for me to understand memetic entities. And it seems just kind of weird I mean obviously you'd have to be very skillful and you've been practicing this stuff for a long time but is it kinda like mentally creating an archetype with the personality in the same way that like a screenwriter would create a character or an author would create a character? Yeah absolutely! In fact

23:09 I write these non-fiction books and they sell better than my fiction. But ultimately, I consider myself a fiction writer if i had my druthers about what I was sitting here in my office doing from day to day it would be writing fiction and yes it is absolutely very comparable process to creating characters and so on. And I mean, in fiction like the Sherlock Holmes character some of our most beloved characters in our culture are fictional ones. They're ones that

23:46 you know, came out of comic books and novels. Things that represent American culture in ways that nothing else does like characters out of Mark Twain's books or things that represent, if you think about characters that represent Victorian cultures something to think of Dickens and so on. So very often we do some of these characters do actually embody a spirit of the time or an archetype, something like that in ways that we probably couldn't do otherwise. I think it is kind of innate way that our mind has adapted to information rich and evolving environment

24:31 Yeah man, in a big way this kind of clarifies an issue that's come up for me before. I was just having a conversation with a friend of mine talking about secret societies performing a specific ritual to summon Cthulhu which didn't make sense to me because Cthulhu from my understanding was just a work of fiction written by Lovecraft but i guess with this new understanding it is possible to conjure some type of fictional entity if there's enough of a cohesive understanding of what that archetype is? Sure, and absolutely. There's plenty of people working with the Lovecraft mythos. On one of my websites I actually have a really cool piece by Don Webb called The Fictive

25:18 fictive mythology, which is essentially about the Lovecraftian mythos and how magicians are using it. And that's been going on for quite a while. Lovecraft actually when I was in college...I wrote a paper on how Lovecraft had incorporated some of the magical writings of the day into his work. And he was writing horror fiction, so he would always show you that scary side of all these entities but they all have their counterparts in classical mythology and I don't, this was so long ago. I don't have this in front of me but some of these like Shubh-Nigarath the goat with a thousand young is certainly uh a version of the god Pan you know but he's showing you that the scary side that the side where people would freak out about it because he was writing horror fiction and so on whether he was really afraid of these things or not as another story who knows yeah he seems to have from his personal writings he seems to have had a sense of humor about it

26:22 But in a sense think about what Lovecraft actually did. In writing about these characters and giving these kinds of descriptions, he created some memetic entities that we've been passing along and that have changed our culture in some interesting if slightly creepy ways. Yeah that's true! So okay now this is kind of a stupid question... And you've got to be prepared for stupid questions when you're talking to me but um with- How far does this go? Because with enough focus and skill, could one evoke or summon or manifest a character like Neo from the Matrix or Ron Burgundy from Anchorman or any memetic entity. Like how far does this go? Well sure you could and certainly the writers and creators of those movies did that right but

27:14 You know, you could certainly invoke the qualities of Ron Burgundy if you wanted to be like that character. Right? In terms of evoking them, you could certainly place them in external positions and carry on an internal or imaginary conversation with them that would enlighten you into some aspects of your life or their life something like that, whether you would suddenly make an entity that looked like Ron Burgundy suddenly appear in your room in a physical form. Color me skeptical but you could certainly work with them as characters and in a magical context and as archetypes that would certainly influence your life that you could learn from and so on. That makes sense. So I guess

28:05 you know, people talk about communicating with their higher self or with the universe which I think are kind of terms for the same thing. It almost seems like if you were to have that internal dialogue with the archetype of Ron Burgundy it's kind of just a facade for doing that—for communicating with the higher self is that kind of accurate? Like it's kind of just the vessel in which the universe will speak to you...if that's the one you put up there To some extent. I think how we slice and dice our understanding of the universe is probably the crucial point here, it's what makes one of these entities is actually how we delineate it right? Hermes' is the god of science and language and so on because we've decided that he is right because we say- We put a circle around all these things that are science and language and say well this is Hermes and everything outside the circle is not

29:02 right? So, when we're talking about the idea of like the higher self and so on you have some interesting cultural ways to understand that in Hinduism for instance you have there's different levels of that right. There's the human one then there's Atman or Atma which is sort of, which is your higher self but it's your personal level of it. It's the things in the higher level of the universe that relate specifically to you right? And then there's Brahma or Brahman which is the greater creator God and the greater sense of everything all together maybe well beyond the personal

29:46 So we do have those, and in magic tradition we have things like the Holy Guardian Angel which is probably more of your personal connection to that infinite thing. And then you have various aspects of the universe or God as a sum total if you'd like you know, and also other intermediate things Gaia the sum total of life on planet Earth or the psychosphere that are the noosphere which is the sum total of human consciousness and interaction. So it's certainly different levels of that that you can relate to when when you're doing your ritual you sort of decide you delineate what that is but then it is that you're going to be specifically relating to but yes all these things are ultimately fronts for

30:37 your unconscious mind and the universe as a whole, that unconscious part of the universe that we don't necessarily... That our brains tend to filter out because it's often just too much information to deal with on a moment-to-moment basis. That makes sense. So all right man when I've asked magic practitioners in the past, sometimes they don't really like to talk about personal experiences but can you give us any examples of evocation experiences you've had with entities that have been the most confirming or most impactful? I'm one of these magicians that often avoids talking about my personal experiences and then the main reason is that i don't really want to prejudice people about what their experiences are going to be. Everybody's

31:27 when you do one of these evocation rituals or an invocation ritual, everybody has just very uniquely different experiences. People read Alistair Crowley's descriptions of it or Israel Regardi's descriptions of it and they expect theirs to be like that. They go well mine didn't... the figure didn't form in the smoke like it did for Crowley and blah blah blah and well you're not Crowley and you have different ways that is going to manifest for you Let's see, I'll give you an example though. One that I actually described this in Brain Magic and it just sort of shows how the dichotomy between your conscious understanding and the more universal understanding

32:11 Some years ago, my wife and I bought a piece of property here in upstate New York. It has lots of many acres of woods and deep forest. It's an oak pine forest here. And it had some old buildings on it that we were going to renovate now A number of odd things happened. The first one, before we had even just bought the property and the builders were just starting to go to work renovating one in the business I went to an event that i was speaking at. I speak a lot of pagan magical conferences And there was a workshop there on psychometry. Psychometry is the art of you take an object and hold it in your hand then you get psychic impressions from it. And I'm not really practitioner about but I wanted to witness it in action

33:02 And so I went and took the keys from the new property, from one of these buildings that was on the property. The first person I handed it to said, I hear this sound that goes, fuck shit! Fuck shit! Oh hell, that's the builder. That's the guy who is working right now. That's what he does I was like, that was pretty prescient. And the next person who took the keys said, the trees want you to thin the forest

33:39 It's like, first of all how he knew that there were trees. That this is a forest and so on was pretty cool right? And but second of all you know my thought was like uh that sounds like a little more work than I want to do! I don't have any reason to... You know i don't want to kill trees and out of you know from the far so some years passed um about two years past we got the building finished here We moved in and we did an evocation ritual you know, consecrate the building and get things rolling here. And we were looking for an entity that would help us with prosperity in making this a viable business place and everything. So I got this entity that appeared as big tree! The words of advice it said to me was, Prosperity grows like a tree." It's like well that sounds very lovely and very nice how useful that is? I don't know

34:39 A couple of years later, money was getting a little thin. We were dealing with some medical issues and things like that. Money was getting thin The car broke down. I took the car to the mechanic who's a friend of mine and the mechanic said, you know well where are you living now? And I told him about the property we had bought he said oh I checked into the Into the timber history of your property and you've got about $40,000 worth of worth of timber ready to be cut on that property And so of course my mind flashed back on well the forest wants you to trim the trees and Prosperity grows like a tree and and so I'm like, oh alright. I'm a little slow You know, I may consider myself a magician but I don't you know, I always try to suspend judgment Maybe I'm doing it a little bit too long

35:30 So the short version of the end of that story is that we did do a little, called The Timber Guy and he came. And we didn't do $40,000 worth cutting but we did enough to cover some of our immediate needs and pay our taxes and so on for that year. Yeah! Just sort of example how your conscious mind may have a little dichotomy from what's going on unconsciously and universally and so on Yeah, that's an excellent example and I definitely understand the reluctance to talk about those personal experiences. So I appreciate that it's for me It's because I want to know you know what it can do again to go back to the saw or the hammer? I know what a saw or hammer can do! I want to know what an evocation ritual Can do you know I want to know what its like so I appreciate that That's pretty awesome But rather than

36:26 Talk about personal experiences. Let's talk about a more objective lesson, because I know Brain Magic is full of exercises and lessons in magic ritual and I highly recommend digging into it for anyone interested but i was hoping you could walk people through just one of these rituals to give them an idea of how it works. Particularly the one that I found pretty interesting is the simple evocation of basic positive resource entities, I don't know if you remember specifically that lesson but could you walk people through a little bit of that exercise? Sure, absolutely. Okay a simple evocation is basically a method of taking a particular feeling that you have and relating to it as an entity and it is one of these things that we do quite naturally all the time or most of us do some people are wired a little differently than others but for most people this is a really kind of simple and easy thing to do so people who are listening now unless you're driving a car

37:26 or otherwise operating heavy machinery. You can just relax where you're sitting and close your eyes, take a nice deep breath and just begin to notice how your body feels as you breathe and relax a little bit. Notice how when you breathe deeply certain muscles start to relax and as you do that think about some time either recently or in the past

38:05 when you just felt really, really good. You had a wonderful feeling and since this is audio only you don't have to share this with anybody it could be anything so just identify what that wonderful feeling is for most of us when I ask the question like that say identify a wonderful feeling it takes a moment to actually sort of run through a little range of things in your mind, which one is the most wonderful and so on. So probably if you're listening and following along, we've probably had a moment of that experience. And hopefully at this point you've settled on a particularly wonderful experience that would like to work with it. Think about where in your body you have the feelings that let's you know its wonderful right? There are certain things that you feel

39:04 viscerally and physically that allow you to make that evaluation. It says this is a good feeling, right? For most people these feelings happen along the center line of your body but it could happen one side or the other everybody's a little bit different and so recall this experience remember what you saw at that time and remember what you heard at that time and remember what you felt at that time and that starts with the physical position of your body

39:46 anything that was touching you or you were touching and then of course those internal feelings that let me know that it's a good feeling. Okay, notice where in your body you have those feelings and ask yourself if this feeling had a color or colors what would it be? So everywhere on your body that you have that good feeling apply that color or colors keep breathing relaxing as you do this and notice now

40:33 kind of 3D color map in your body. And when you're ready, just take a nice deep breath and take that colored map out of your body using your imagination or use your hands if it helps and place it in front of you and flip it around to face me. Then breathe deeply and each time you exhale give that breath energy attention into that colored shape notice what happens

41:15 as you continue to give it breath and attention. And then in your mind, you can open the lines of communication and the first thing to do is ask this entity what it would like to be called? What identifies it? Maybe its a name maybe it's a word maybe it's sound or feeling or symbol but something so that if you wanted to call this entity back at some point. Whatever their response was

42:05 You can ask this entity what it has to teach you. What's it there for? Maybe, it is there to teach you how to feel wonderful more often and maybe there are some other lessons. And you can also ask this entity if there is something that it would like to accomplish now away from your body. Maybe there is something that it could go off in the world and do for you without your conscious knowledge If the answer to that is yes then get a time from it

42:54 that it'll do this and come back to you, five minutes an hour a week or month whatever it is. And if said no then thank it and flip it back around and bring into your body If it said yes and you have agreement of time then make note at that time and send it off to go do what it wants to do When ready either way the entity has come back into you or if its going off in world somewhere

43:32 Just take a nice deep breath, bring your attention back into your body and open your eyes and bring your awareness back to your present situation. Wow man thanks for doing that! That's pretty cool boom yeah it's a pretty simple thing I've done this with like pretty large groups of people at times and most people i think we have kind of a 95 percent rate of people actually contacting entities and so on. Of course, they're not... These are small personal entities. They may or may not be memetic or whatever but usually everybody gets at least some experience of wow that's an entity and maybe some interesting information

44:25 Yeah, I think that's super cool and thousands of beings just came into existence right there. You know one thing that i'm curious about is increasing accuracy like let's say...I guess what if the things you set in place right there or during one of these rituals don't tend to manifest? Like that to me makes the whole practice seem invalid. That's happened to me before in the past and of course I'm sure it's just a matter of fine-tuning but how can we increase our accuracy if we run into one of those types of roadblocks? Well, yeah. Again it's very often a fine-tuning kind of thing. Very often it's about the way people have framed what the intent is I often get this kind of stuff as a hypnosis practitioner where they come in with negative intents and as a hypnosis practitioner I get that even more so than as a magic practitioner where people come in and say well

45:28 I want to stop smoking or I don't want to be fat. Right? And so, you know well and good but what is it that you want to be right? It leaves a void And generally when intents are phrased that way, they often don't become manifest because there isn't a coherent goal to go towards really. There's something you're going away from but not something that you've defined well enough to go towards. So I'll get people to at least reframe some of those while I want to be healthy or I want I want to be able to breathe clearly or I wanna, you know, be fit enough to have the stamina to win a bicycle race. Or whatever it is that they wanna do ultimately. So that's often one of the things people need to tweak kind of simple thing

46:18 But there's other ones as well. There is if people are distracted while they're doing the ritual, maybe they need to increase their focus a little bit and so on. So there's a lot of stuff this is these are good reasons for actually doing some of this in the company of an experienced practitioner or teacher something who can kind of watch what you do and give you some feedback like any other field that you're going to learn right on Alright man, now I tend to think conspiratorially. You know? I tend to think a powerful elite who have a better understanding of how the world works put a lot of energy into keeping the masses away from anything that empowers the individual and modern society seems so tailored to looking externally for happiness or fulfillment...I mean even you mentioned the language we use isn't super conducive for communication with the universe even down to that! I wonder if

47:13 These things aren't you know if the way that the world is today isn't put that way for a reason to keep us from. understanding our true potential or I mean, what do you think? Do you just chalk it up to coincidence or do you think it's more design. I think it is some of both. There are a lot of forces that really don't want you to access your internal information and they don't want you to find solutions for your own life because they have personal and greedy outcomes for themselves

47:49 And, you know in our culture we have this like a consumer culture and so on where we're told these basic truths about our reality that are really absolutely useless. The whole when I was growing up the whole American dream thing were you a house and two cars and whatever it was and basically these were memes that were given to us by the house and the car companies, right? Yeah. These corporate entities that you know... And this is an interesting term right we think of corporate entities right yeah that want to see us in servitude to them in it to a certain extent they want us to be in debt to them they want absolutely

48:38 are money to go to them and so on. So there's certainly a conspiracy that way, that dovetails pretty well with the government conspiracy as far as I'm concerned that a lot of our government uh, particularly right now in our country is in service to the big money of these major corporations. I don't necessarily think that there's these conspiracies of you know, I don't know the Illuminati or things like that they were maybe active at one time and what their agenda was? I don't know if-if at some point they did exist in ways that carried on they were probably

49:19 there because they were co-opted by a government or corporation or something like that. And if any of them do exist today, they're probably... There's money involved! Let's just say it. I think that's a great analysis because when i think of corporate entities, well you know...I had a conversation with Lone Milo Duquette and I mentioned you know a lot of times I'll see a guy on the beach reading tarot cards and I'm like what does that guy have to offer me? His life looks like one step away from being homeless. And so it's easy to project that onto people who are in the magic realm because a lot of times you'll see that! You know you see palm readers that don't seem to be all that successful if they had some

50:00 access to information that you don't have, you think they'd be something to aspire too. But yeah in terms of the corporate entities it just seems like magic is being used in some of those cases and it's used in secret, and a lot of areas where It's suggested to be use. Those people are making a lot of money having a lot of success So it's easy to look at the guy on the boardwalk and say oh magics all bullshit But maybe you look at some of the other things where it's not so overt that a lot of those tools seem To be working right well one thing you have to remember about magic instead. It's not a

50:40 how should I say, it's not a regulated and structured field like physics or medicine or something like that is in our society. And we don't really have there's no protocol who gets called the magician and so you do have right? You have a lot of phonies and frauds and people who are doing bizarre and unsafe things, and people who are doing pretty ineffective and ego-based things. Along with that I often get the thing like well if you're so good at magic how come you're not a millionaire?

51:27 Right and And well, I say well at times. I actually have been a millionaire. I've had money. I've had I've been poor now somewhere in between But my goals usually aren't necessarily about money there's usually enough money involved for me to My goals are usually about doing what? I want to do right freedom which entails money sometimes oh Yes, right. Which certainly entails money I certainly have to be able to pay my electric bill and my phone bill and my internet bill things like that if you know I want to do some of the things i want to do

52:05 However, having a huge bank account isn't always the way to do that and it's often a distraction. I learned that in the past when I was doing more business-oriented things and I worked in the corporate world as a writer for a number of years writing copy for pharmaceutical companies and financial institutions and things like that. Ultimately You know it struck me that yeah i'm making a nice living I'm doing okay doing this but. I'm actually spending the time of my life that uh doing things that aren't necessarily what I want to be doing at that time. And then, I thought back on some of the best times in my life when I was absolutely flat broke piss poor whatever and yet I was having a really great time doing things like writing books and stuff like that so hopefully I find my life is about finding that happy medium where I have enough money to do the things I wanna do but I'm not obsessed with spending all my time getting money

53:05 Mm-hmm, which in our culture that's what we're often told is the important thing to do right? Yes. That's how you spend your money I had to spend your time on sorry time is money right? Yeah You spend your time getting money And if you're not doing that while you're somehow a failure or something like that yeah You know maybe this guy sitting out on the boardwalk with his tarot cards is um, you know Maybe he's maybe he's really happy right true I met people years ago who were doing things like that. Now, I remember this one guy who was a small-time fungus salesman in the college town where I was going to school years ago

53:47 and seemed like this total burned out hippie guy. But once we started talking to him, turned out he was this fantastically successful stockbroker who had just had this epiphany which related to his mushroom fungus. It'll do that to you. Yeah, he had this epiphany with that the stockbroking was ultimately an evil thing and he moved out into the woods and started doing what he was doing and he's one of the happiest people I ever met! And it was really kind of a surprise at all. He was a big-time corporate stock broker for one of these top companies

54:28 And we're like, whoa really? You. So you never know and everybody has different goals and works by different standards and it's interesting at one point I remember posted something on my Facebook page about how come all these magicians are poor or like well... I know plenty of them that are actually quite wealthy they don't necessarily identify themselves publicly as magicians They're businessmen or rock stars, or whatever. And there's actually some very well-known people who practice magic that they at least

55:08 credit somewhat who are just incredibly famous people like David Bowie or Robert, I mean sorry Jimmy Page or things like that. People who were very involved in magic at one time but certainly while they were involved in magic Moved very quickly to the top of whatever their field was and you know, I also know. I know a biochemist He's one of the top biochemists around I Know guy who's a bank executive? No and so on So they're all there And but we don't necessarily see them because they don't they don't necessarily hang out a sign that says You know, you know, I am a practicing dilemic magician or I'm a chaos magician because

55:52 It confuses people, particularly in some of these fields. And that totally makes sense I mean there's a lot of judgment out there I think The thing that Lone Milo DeKette said that rang true was you know A wealthy man can choose his appearance but a poor man can't hide his poverty which is exactly what you're talking about You know? But man this has been a blast Phil This is probably hands down my favorite conversation about magic that I've had thus far. It's a, it's a really slippery thing for me to talk about sometimes. A lot of times it's also so subjective to what a person wants or a person's view. So it's very hard to talk about sometimes but this has just been great before we go.

56:37 grab this Redditor's comment. We have a little subreddit where occasionally people suggest guests and when they do suggest a guest who gets back to me I usually post like, hey you know they're gonna be on the show and that was the case here And I asked the person who suggested you to come on the show if they had anything specific That they'd like me to ask and we kind of touched on some of this but he wrote Phil would be an awesome guest. That just made my day I'd really like to hear him talk freely on his ideas of bridging the unconscious and the conscious mind using evocation and invocation one or two of his techniques has really helped me with real-world psych issues, And i think the listeners would love it We did a little bit of that but um how would if you would expand on your ideas for bridging the unconscious in the conscious before we go that Would Be Awesome

57:28 Okay, to start with I use the terms unconscious and conscious quite a bit. However there as our understanding of the brain proceeds they're getting to be kind of archaic terms ultimately i think what we're talking about when we talk about conscious and unconscious is the difference in our brain between what's known as executive function which is our conscious ability to direct what our brain does and to make choices and to focus our attention And the brain's what's called the default mode network, which is essentially our imagination and daydreaming. And the brain's ability to process things on a level that is beyond that usual consciously directed executive function

58:17 And the brain's default network, this is actually a very recent development in neuroscience that they've discovered this. It's a series of areas in the brain up until very recently when they studied brain stuff, it was brain localization of function where we look into the well the amygdala that's about emotion over there and the hippocampus that's about short-term memory and the prefrontal cortex. That's about the higher functions and so on however what they're finding now is that the brain tends to hook itself up in these different areas

59:01 tend to hook themselves up into different patterns and it's kind of like modular. So when these different areas in the brain hook up in different configurations, you have different networks running in the brain And possibly the most important discovery in recent years was the default mode network, which is what happens when you stop consciously directing your brain. When you just let it relax and it goes off and starts thinking things and day dreaming and dreaming and making images and feelings and so on Magic is essentially the conscious use, Carl Jung gave us the definition. Magic is the conscious use of active imagination

59:44 So in a sense, magic is the conscious use of this default mode network. It's being able to flip it on in ways that give us access to this wider range of information that's usually outside our conscious mind. The default mode network does some very interesting things. One of the more interesting things that it does is called trans-derivational search All right, so a good example of translational search like when I said in the exercise earlier think of a very pleasant experience you had. the brain has to do. The trans-derivational search is when the brain pops up 15 of these different experiences and you have to sort through and pick the one that's the most, okay? The brain does this constantly with a lot of different kinds of information if I say the word chair or apple or something like that

1:00:40 immediately your mind, sometimes too fast to consciously apprehend but it has to come up with a range of chairs and then you pick the one that's appropriate for the context. Or arrange of apples and then you pick the one that is appropriate for the context So your brain is constantly going through this in a sense it is delineating your reality so when I say it's most comfortable to sit in a chair, right? Your brain is going to go through and it's not going to pick necessarily the uncomfortable chair. It's gonna pick one that kind of makes that statement a little bit more true. It's gonna pick up a comfortable one. So in a sense you're at that moment at any rate, you're defining chairs in a particular context and that's the way at that time in your life with that particular moment

1:01:34 the reality of chairs is for you, if that makes sense. So the default network is constantly helping us to define and delineate what our present reality may be And there's also, interestingly enough with this... Well first of all because it does that every bit of perception that comes through the default network comes with this big range of associations and possibilities and outcomes. It processes like its playing a game of chess. It processes everything 10-15-100 moves in advance

1:02:21 But it only lets through that conscious to the conscious part of your brain, that little bit that the conscious part of your brain can understand at any given moment. So every time this default mode network switches on which is again if you're listening to me speaking if you're meditating right when those distractions start popping up and things like that in effect you are at that moment using your unconscious mind to define reality The more you access that and the more you are able to guide it in particular ways, and that's where magic comes in. Where we set up these ritual frames that help to guide the way your default network makes judgments and picks out the particular delineations of different things

1:03:13 by using this ritual context. I know this is a fairly complex idea, but ultimately at almost every moment you're engaging in sort of a magical act of defining what your reality is and by accessing that process consider that your unconscious mind You get to choose a little bit more what it is. So in a sense, by learning this process and meditation is a great help because it helps you to understand how your hypnosis as well that how your default network and your executive function switch back and forth there are some instances where they can normally their mutual exclusive right if the your executive functions switches on the default network automatically switches off

1:04:11 And there are problems with that. Schizophrenia seems to be a problem where the default network switches off prematurely and whatever was in the fantasy suddenly gets delineated as reality. Oh, that makes sense. Okay? However we do get to My default network just switched on and I sort of lost my thread there. When you start talking about trance activity, things that are very trancey it sort of does induce it and I hope people are following along without transiting out too much but you do get to make some decisions about how that works and how your reality is delineated and ultimately if you change that personal level of reality

1:05:07 And you can get information from the default network, from your unconscious mind in that way. And so on does it all connect with some greater reality? Does it all connect with the world at large? I think so! I think we have obvious if not quantum or unconscious connections with everything. Everything seems to affect everything else drop a pebble into upon the ripple spread out keep going indefinitely even when they get too small for you to see with your eye. Every action you make does that every thought that you think changes you in some way and changes the world around you in some minute or greater way yeah so

1:05:52 by being able to consciously access this ability of your brain to imagine, to process information on this more intense level or deeper level and so on. You are coming to terms with your unconscious mind and maybe exerting a greater influence on your reality at that point I hope i answered the question. It's kind of a complex one. It is and I'm glad that I read that off but yeah, heavy place to end but I'm still glad we got there so Phil very cool! I love talking to you do want to give the people your website anything else you got going on before we really call it in?

1:06:39 Sure, people can find me at www.metamagic.com and also at hawkridgeproductions.com there's all kinds of, there's a lot of, at hawkridgeproductions.com there's a lot of free articles and things that people can read and this also links to my various books and so on I got another book coming out this summer, another novel called Legendary Blue Smoke People should watch for it, it should be out I'm guessing end of July And we didn't mention my novels at all, but the one that I think Magic fans will enjoy is called The Great Purple Hoo-Ha. Which actually incorporates some of the ideas in brain magic and meta magic in a

1:07:27 a fictional and more entertaining setting that's a little more fun to read. Though I hope the nonfiction books are kind of fun to read too. Right on, well...I love Brain Magic! Thank you! Yeah so there they can go onto Amazon or Barnes & Noble and just put my name in it and you'll see all my books. Awesome man. Well thanks again, y'know it's Friday the 13th this is my first day with this new black cat that I adopted So I'm well on my way, I'm trying to catch up to you man but uh.. I do appreciate it Take care of yourself out there. Okay, take care I enjoyed it.

1:08:25 You can choose if it's junk band music or rhythm and blues Just go and listen, it'll start with a smile It won't wipe off your face no matter how Your beat starts happening you can see the fire Now you got me so just blow your mind If you're feeling bad come along and read We'll dance until morning there's just you and me And maybe

1:09:06 If the music is right, play it at night. Then your magic's in the music and the music's in me. Yeah! Believe in the magic of a young girl's soul. In the magic of a rock. Believe in the magic that can set you free. Do you believe?