Posts Tagged ‘Science’

2 Instruments to Measure the Biofield

Sunday, April 17th, 2016

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

Science requires standardized measurement. Often, scientific fields are created once it becomes possible to measure something. What might a measuring device look like for the biofield?

A friend asked me that today. I see two possibilities right now:

Option 1: Crystals

Crystals seem to interact with biofield energy. For years, I thought this was bunk, that crystals were just placebo. But readers asked me about it, and the first (only?) rule of science is to ignore your expectations and run the experiment. So I did, and it turns out, crystals seem to absorb biofield energy, then emit that energy in a different signature.

Aside: When a healer feels energy, they’re feeling how much that energy shifts their own biofield. Having a lot of energy can shift their biofield more, but so can having energy in a very different signature. Think of it like mixing paint, if you have white and mix in grey it won’t change much, but if you mix in red it’ll change obviously. The crystal absorbs energy of any “color” and emits “red” energy, making the energy obvious, amplifying the sensation.

It may turn out that there are observable changes to the crystal as it does this, perhaps a change in the frequency or electrical potential. If that’s the case, we could put a crystal on a circuit board, carefully measure that physical property, and learn something about the biofield energy passing through the crystal.

Option 2: Cell Cultures

Energy healing is fundamentally about using the biofield to influence cells. And it seems that different cells respond to different biofield energies.

We can use this to create a biofield measuring instrument. Set up a grid of cell cultures. Point a camera at each (or a microscope, or measure whatever are the relevant physical changes as the cells respond to the biofield). Send that data to a computer, run an algorithm to calculate the state of the biofield that’s interacting with the cell cultures. Research is required to determine the specific cell cultures and the algorithm.

Finding Solutions

One thing strikes me as I write this:

A few years ago, I thought creating a biofield instrument would happen after energy healing went mainstream, with a scientific community behind it. A problem for larger groups and future generations.

But now, this problem seems… Not easy, but not particularly difficult. And it reminds me that other impossible-seeming problems may, in fact, be not particularly difficult, too.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

The Importance of Useless Techniques

Saturday, April 2nd, 2016

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

A reader asked me about telekinesis. I haven’t seen any demonstrations that didn’t involve jostling the table that the object is on, but that’s not what today’s post is about.

He said he used to be able to move water, but that he “retired of it because it was not useful in real life (no matter how cool it was).” That’s what I want to talk about: What does it mean to be useful?

There are two types of useful: Directly useful, and scientifically useful. And by focusing only on directly useful techniques, we will wind up holding ourselves back.

A few examples: Transmuting lead into gold is obviously useful. Same with reading minds, flying, etc. They’re abilities we’d all love to have. (For this post, I’m ignoring what’s possible and what’s not, and just plucking examples from fantasy.)

But let me ask you this: Is it useful to know that the same force that holds me to the earth, also governs the motions of the planets? Is it useful to know that DNA is in the nucleus of a cell? Or that passing a magnet over a wire will cause the electrons to move?

None of that is useful in isolation. Transport a person 1,000 years into the past, and they can’t do anything with that knowledge. Without gears to make clocks, knowing the precise location of planets and stars doesn’t help you navigate. Without the rest of biology, knowing about DNA doesn’t solve any problem. Without steam engines to power an electric generator, it doesn’t matter if you know how to create an electrical current.

And yet, the last hundred years have been shaped by those three pieces of information. Space travel, modern medicine, and electricity. That useless information is the foundation of the modern world.

Which brings us to telekinesis. A force, generated from thin air, without an obvious opposing force. This is impossible in current physics. If it existed (and that’s a big if, but if it did), it would be a massive addition to physics.

What would that finding ultimately let us do? No one knows. Just like no one knew that learning about gravity would lead to space travel, or that learning about quantum physics would lead to transistors and computers. That’s the point: We often have no idea where new science leads. But we follow it anyway, despite being initially useless, and it’s given us the modern world.

What would I do with a clear demonstration of energy healing or magick? The Randi challenge pays $1,000,000 for it. San Francisco venture capitalists would likely give even more — not to create a water-moving device, but to put together a team, figure out what’s going on, and then create the next spaceship, internet, or whatever this science leads to.

This post isn’t about telekinesis. It’s about all the phenomena we explore. Because the real question isn’t, “Can I use this?” The real question is, “What could I do with this, plus a team of scientists and the backing of venture capitalists?”

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

Choosing the Hard Path

Monday, March 14th, 2016

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

I’m learning energy healing the hard way, and it’s forcing me to become a better healer.

I want to demonstrate my healing techniques (among other goals). And it’s so tempting to do a healing session, see that the person sleeps better or hurts less or whatever other result, and call it a success. So, so tempting.

But that path invites placebo and luck. That isn’t the demonstration I’m looking for.

And facing my goals, really truly facing them, is forcing me to realize the space between where I am now and where I want to be. The space between “skilled” and “skilled enough to know I’ll create obvious results, if energy healing and magick are the only tools I’m allowed.” And facing that gap is the only way to close it.

It’s hard. At times I hate it, at times I resist learning. But I’m figuring things out and practicing techniques now that I never would have otherwise. I’m only doing them because the scientific method is forcing me to do it the hard way.

It makes me wonder: What other ways have I convinced myself I’m skilled? And if I got serious about testing, how much better would I become?

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

Why Energy Healing Needs Physics

Sunday, March 6th, 2016

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

Biofield healing (aka energy healing) has shown tremendous results in case studies, placebo-controlled studies, cell culture studies, and other peer-reviewed research over the past few decades. It’s recognized by the NIH and approved for use in hospitals.

And yet, biofield healing is only used by 1% of the population, and research funding is almost non-existent. Why?

It’s not failings in current research. Yes, most studies are single-blind not double-blind, and like all research you can find flaws in some studies. But you know what? If a drug were producing these results, there would be a pile of money to fund top-quality double-blind trials.

So what’s the difference between drugs and biofield healing?

The short answer is: Physics.

See, the sciences aren’t isolated. Medicine is based on biology, and we can explain how drugs function in terms of cells and hormones and neurotransmitters. And biology is based on chemistry, which describes the details of those interactions. And ultimately, all of that is based on physics. Science isn’t just a collection of facts. It’s a tower, with physics at the bottom, and chemistry, biology, and medicine built on one another, going up.

To research a new drug, we only need a new top floor. All of the foundation already exists — the physics, chemistry, and biology.

But when we research biofield healing, we’re starting from zero. There’s no biology that corresponds to the biofield, and no chemistry, and no physics. We need the whole building, not just the top floor.

That’s why current research isn’t convincing: It’s starting with the medicine, and skipping the physics.

But scientists add to physics all the time. Two hundred years ago, relativity, quantum, string, and many other findings didn’t exist. So why can’t we just run some good medical studies and let the physicists update physics, while we get on with healing people?

The short answer is: Medicine and physics have different rules. Except that isn’t satisfying at all. Why do they have different rules, and why does that matter?

In any research, there’s a chance that the results are coincidence. Some portion of your volunteers will get better all on their own, and if we get more of those destined-to-be-healthy people in the treatment group than the control group, the treatment group will have better results with or without the drug. Think of it like flipping a coin — heads means healthy, tails means sick, and if you flip 10 times, sometimes you’ll wind up with 7 or 8 heads just from random chance.

If instead of 10 flips, we do 100 or 1000, it’s must less likely we’ll wind up far from 50% heads. So that’s what we do: We test the drug on many people, and ensure there’s only a 5% chance the results were just luck. Maybe 1% chance if we’re really serious. Those are good papers in medicine.

But in physics? Between 0.01% and 0.0001% chance the results are luck. That’s 10,000x as careful as top-notch medical research. And physics can do that, because atoms are much easier to work with than humans, and there are no ethics committees.

The point is: Accepting the biofield requires new physics. So we need a way to produce physics-level results, that only have a one-in-a-million chance of being luck.

How do we do that? Short answer is to develop new biofield techniques producing obvious, unmistakable results. The long answer is its own post, or more likely its own book.

But the first step toward a solution is understanding why the problem exists. So that’s why: Because we don’t just need new medicine. We need new physics.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

What is the Biofield?

Sunday, February 28th, 2016

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

A friend asked me, “What is the biofield?”

That’s like asking, “What is gravity?” Or “What is magnetism?” There’s no simple answer, and perhaps no known answer. The best we can do is give you examples, and describe how those phenomena behave.

Examples include Reiki, Therapeutic Touch, Chi Gung, and many more. “Biofield” is the term used by the NIH and medical researchers to describe the energy used by all of those healing modalities.

How does the biofield behave? It seems that living cells emit some sort of field. The state of those cells — inflamed, injured, healthy, etc — determines the state of that field. Normally, the field flows out of cells. But it seems that the flow goes both ways, and that influencing the field can also influence those cells. (This has been demonstrated with cell culture studies, for example.)

That’s my answer. But there’s also a story here. The question came up at a writer’s potluck — bring food, bring something you’re writing, share both. I read the start of my vision for Healing Lab, got asked that question and flubbed it in front of a dozen writers. Just went off on a tangent, focusing on how no one knows instead of giving examples. Not a good answer, and I got gentle, kind feedback to that effect.

Today, this feels ok. That’s what practice is for: To make errors, reflect on them, plan a better answer next time. Better now with friends than later with investors.

But in the past, that writer’s potluck would have terrified me. I wouldn’t have read my work, wouldn’t have taken the question, would have frozen up instead of reflecting on how to answer it better.

I think bloggers too often share only our successes. Only the good answer we’ll give next time, not the failed answer we said in the moment. So I’m sharing that failure, too. If you’re afraid of flubbing an answer, know that us experienced folks mess up, too. I hope it helps you share when you get the chance.

The world doesn’t need your silence. The world needs your art.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

The Missing Half of Healing Research

Monday, February 22nd, 2016

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

If we understood energy healing as well as we understand pharmaceuticals, how would that change our lives? And what would energy healing research look like?

Currently, most energy healing research starts with an established system of energy healing and tests its efficacy for patients with various conditions.

The equivalent in drug research would be testing a folk remedy, like chewing leaves or making tea from bark. Don’t get me wrong — that’s valuable research too, drugs like aspirin came from that research. But it’s only one step.

After finding out that willow bark is effective at reducing inflammation, chemists analyzed it, identified unusual compounds, and tested each compound to identify the active ingredients. That’s why we have aspirin in pill form, fast to take and with standard doses, instead of needing to brew tea from willow bark each time we have a headache.

And of course, folk remedies can only find cures that already exist in nature. Most pharmaceutical research doesn’t start from a folk remedy. It starts with the condition we want to treat, plus an understanding of the human body and the chemistry involved. Researchers test possible solutions in test tubes, then in mice, and slowly work up to randomized controlled trials in humans. This lets us discover compounds that no folk medicine could know, because many useful medicines don’t occur in nature.

That’s what’s missing in healing research: A chemistry-like understanding of the biofield, to let us analyze existing techniques, find the active ingredients, and make them more concentrated and effective. And a science for developing new energies and techniques, beyond the ones that healers naturally produce.

Once we have that, we’ll be able to develop even better healing techniques and help even more people.

Developing that chemistry-like understanding is up to healers, at least for now. Doctors can help us test the healing techniques, and help us understand the physiology of the conditions we’re dealing with. But to develop that fundamental science of the biofield? Only healers can do that, at least while we’re still working understand the biofield well enough to explain it to non-healers.

That’s the real reason behind Healing Lab.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

Superman, Time Travel, and Why Science Matters

Monday, February 8th, 2016

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

To do energy healing, or manifesting, or other magick, we need a visualization that engages the unconscious.

Keep that in mind: Engaging the unconscious. Because that’s a different goal than understanding how magick operates. Not a bad goal, just a different one. And confusing those two goals (engaging the unconscious vs understanding the mechanism) derails so many people, smart insightful people who could otherwise be helping us build a deeper understanding of energy healing and magick, and helping us create the better techniques that flow from that understanding.

A simple example: Chaos Magick is famous for rituals to Superman. The idea is to engage concepts of strength and justice in the mage’s unconscious, and to tap into those same virtues in a collective unconscious. When one does that ritual, it might be useful to pretend to believe that Superman is real.

“Superman will fly down and help me stand up to this bully” is a great visualization, but a terrible model for how manifesting actually works.

We’re about to discuss a not-so-obvious example. But first, I want to explain how we could figure out that Superman isn’t a good model, if we didn’t already know that.

Imagine a friend believes that magick actually works by Superman hearing your ritual and helping you out. You say, “That sounds amazing. Let’s do a ritual, I want to talk to him.” Your friend replies that Superman doesn’t stay around long enough to talk, and moves so fast you can’t even see him. “I have a high-speed camera.” Sorry, he’s too fast for even that. “I know, we’ll hang ribbons from the ceiling, and we won’t see Superman, but we’ll still see the ribbons swaying after he leaves.” Your friend thinks for a minute, then says that Superman will pause to stop each ribbon from swaying as he leaves.

For each experiment, your friend predicted the same result we’d see if Superman wasn’t real. If your friend really truly believed Superman was real, he would say, “Awesome, let’s run the experiment, I want to see those ribbons swaying too.” But deep down, he knows how the world really is, and he knows what experimental outcomes he’ll see even before doing the experiment.

(This is from Carl Sagan’s dragon in the garage.)

Now it’s time for the not-obvious example. Synchronicity asks:

What about retrocausality? Do you think it’s physically impossible or it’s possible but some ethereal softwares don’t know how to affect the past?

There’s a Chaos Magick book that talks about reverse-time manifesting, where you send out your intent and it travels to the past to arrange things for you in the near future. I think it was Phil Hine. (Anyone know the book? Leave a comment. Thanks!)

I think reverse time is like a ritual to Superman. Great visualization to engage your unconscious. Probably not how magick actually works.

(And keep in mind, Chaos Magick’s motto is, “Belief is the tool.” The goal was to temporarily believe things to get your mind to engage and do magick, not to accurately explain the underlying mechanisms of magick.)

But why? It’s easy to pretend to believe in Superman, then drop the belief after the ritual. But reverse-time isn’t obviously wrong. It’s a fun belief — who hasn’t wanted to go back in time and undo a mistake? And doesn’t quantum physics predict equally weird stuff?

I see this as an opportunity. Separating good mechanisms of magick from useful ways to engage the unconscious is an important skill. So let’s practice it.

Imagine you fully believe your magick can go into the past and change time. When I do that, I notice a mental flinch away from predictions that are obviously silly. Fight that flinch. Imagine we just made this discovery, it was a new technology, never used before. What could we do with it?

Here’s what I flinched away from. (That’s usually a sign that an idea is worth exploring):

Ananael has talked about manifesting to influence lottery results. If reverse-time manifesting worked — if we could somehow change the past — then he should be able to change last week’s lottery results.

And immediately, I start making excuses. “Ananael already knows the lottery numbers. Maybe this only works if he hasn’t seen them yet.”

OK, so I’ll look at the lottery numbers but not show them to him, then let him do the ritual…

I could come up with some excuse, but I’ve spent years training my mind not to create those excuses, and I actually don’t want to develop that excuse-making skill.

But try it. Ask, “What would the world look like, if the world actually worked that way?” And see how much you immediately have to explain away.

That’s how we know reverse-time is a good visualization, but not a good mechanism for magick.

Why bother with this? Why not just believe in whatever speaks to me, as wholeheartedly as I can?

Because when we take a good mechanism and ask, “What could I do if the world actually worked that way,” we don’t have to create excuses. Every idea it gives us is a useful, working technique for energy healing, or manifesting, or something else we care about. (And instead of excusing failures, we use them to refine our model, so next time it gives us even better techniques.)

Gather enough good mechanisms and we call it a scientific model. And that’s why science matters: Not because having the right answer is cool, but because a good model suggests good techniques that give better results.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

Why Does Manifesting Fail? And 2 More Reader Questions

Sunday, January 31st, 2016

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

Sharon, a new reader, experienced psychic, and curious scientist, asks some excellent questions. I’ll put her text in italics, mine in normal.

Hello Mike :-)

I came to your blog to help me link my magik with science. I am a natural psychic (still developing) who is looking to find the reason why I just “know” things. I am also uncomfortable with the pagan community telling us to do things (e.g. use a white candle or x oil when looking to purify x) and not saying what difference these correspondences make.

Welcome! A phrase I like is, “I simply refuse to believe there’s a special case in the laws of physics for a human mouth forming specific words.” Same with candles, runes, etc: There has to be some deeper mechanism at work.

A common answer is that those things are symbols, and communicate intent to the unconscious mind. My next question is, “What happens next? How does the unconscious act on that intent?” Part of why I write is to get more people asking those questions.

My questions that I have answered:
(Please feel free to question/debunk/comment on these)
1. How does magik I do at home affect events that will happen outside of my house?

Like most areas of science, there are many levels of answers. Richard Feynman has a wonderful talk on this, explaining why a person slipped. You might say, “Because there was ice on the ground,” or you might go deeper and explain why ice is slippery, or even how friction and gravity work. All those answers are true, and different levels are better for different problems. The job of science is generally to find deeper and deeper answers, while the job of engineering is to select the right level to solve a specific problem. Anyway, go watch or read Feynman’s explanation, it’s excellent.

I’d say this question is similar. Magick affects events outside your house because you got your intent into your unconscious. Also, because your unconscious contacted external forces that know how to create luck. Also, because those external forces somehow influenced your decisions (or occasionally the decisions of others), and somehow knew which way to nudge those decisions to create that outcome.

Most of my work focuses on going deeper down that causal chain: How do those external forces nudge decisions? How do they know which direction to nudge? How can we improve them?

But as I write this, it occurs to me that there are also engineering problems: How can we become more aware of those nudges, and listen to them more? How should we phrase an intent to produce the desired outcome? These don’t necessarily need the deeper exploration of how that external force functions. And for beginners, learning to use these forces probably matters more than a deeper exploration of why they work.

Well, that wasn’t really your question, but I hope you found it interesting.

2. Why do some spells not work? (Your intent vs about 12 other people looking for a parking spot for example, your intent is outnumbered.)

I think this is a plausible scenario, but since so few people use magick, this is probably a rare cause of failures.

In my own work, as I’ve gotten better at communicating with ethereal software (and in particular at receiving messages back), I now get error messages. So if I ask for an event (“find a parking space on this block”) but there’s no path to that event (all the spaces are already taken), the software tells me it’s not possible. In general, I take this as a guide to broaden my request (“cause me to drive such that I find a parking spot,” which focuses on influencing my decisions rather than on forcing the world to be a certain way).

3. Why do I just “know” things? (The ethereal software tells me)
4. How do herbs, crystals, and tools help me to get my desired effects? (They emit different frequencies e.g. when you hold a magnet to a crystal it makes a different sound. Every herb, crystal, and colour has different atomic structures and properties that enable them to work for certain spells e.g rose quartz for a beauty spell).

When I see answers like this, I reflexively ask, “But how?” Not to put the person on the spot (I try to avoid saying it out loud except with friends). But whenever I get an answer, I try to imagine all the moving parts in my head, see how they fit together, and I notice that I don’t actually have enough information to make things fit.

Herbs and crystals emit different frequencies — are we talking about sound waves? Light? Magickal energy? (Note: I use the term energy signature rather than frequency, but they’re synonyms.)

Each herb and crystal has a different atomic structure — true, but also true of everything. It sounds sciency, but hasn’t told us anything. Why is ice slippery? Because of its atomic structure. Great, but what about the structure?

I’m not saying these to put you on the spot. I’m saying them because that’s where my mind immediately goes, and since you love science too, part of your mind probably wants to go there too. So consider this a friendly nudge.

My answers:

Herbs contain medically-active chemicals. Aspirin is found in willow bark, for example. This seems like a good explanation for everything I’ve seen done with herbs.

If you asked me about crystals a few years ago, I would have said they were just symbolic, like using a white candle. But a few years ago, readers asked about it, and I tested it.

Crystals seem to absorb energy, then emit that energy in a particular signature. So there’s one signature for quartz, and whatever energy you send into the quartz, it absorbs then re-emits that energy in the “quartz signature.” Interesting side-note: This is also how color works, with objects absorbing light then emitting photons only in specific frequencies. Maybe “frequency” would be a better term than “signature”…

What’s the significance of changing your energy to “quartz signature” energy? Well, the sensation of energy has more to do with the signature than the amount. Your body has a signature, and energy that’s similar to your body’s signature only produces a small sensation, while energy that’s dissimilar produces a large sensation. So, you send energy into the quartz, it comes out in a signature matching the quartz (and not matching your body), and that energy feels much stronger because of the more dissimilar signature.

This, by the way, is one of my favorite things about Direct Magick: I routinely test something, and find that it doesn’t work the way I expected. If that didn’t happen, well what’s the point of exploring? (Other systems do this too, by the way.)

That, by the way, is also the essence of science: Run the experiment, let nature tell you about the world. It means you can connect every finding, every belief, to something you can experience for yourself in the world. That’s what I love about science: The exploration and connection to the world. And everything in the modern world, from medicine to sky scrapers to cell phones, rests on the power of asking nature how the world works, then listening to the answer.

That’s about half of Sharon’s email. I’ll do the second half coming up.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

So Good They Can’t Dismiss You

Saturday, December 5th, 2015

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

What will it take to build biofield healing into a trusted, reliable science?

After a decade or so of published research, it appears that current healing methods can reduce pain for 24-48 hours. Not all studies agree, and this hasn’t been subjected to double-blind testing, but let’s ignore that for now. My question today is: Is that enough?

Is it enough to reduce pain for a day? Clearly, that’s a great result. It’s what Tylenol does, and we’re all better off for it. If that were a pill, we’d already be using it. But is that enough to get the medical community and the public on board for biofield healing?

I don’t think it is. And I’m reminded of something a dance teacher once said about competitions:

When I got serious, I stopped aiming to be the best competitor out there. I aimed to be so good, the judges would look bad if they put anyone else in first place.

That’s what it’ll take. Healing techniques so effective, people will look bad if they dismiss them.

That might be a verifiable-under-controlled-conditions healing technique for people with cancer, multiple sclerosis, or drug-resistant infections. If someone you love had that condition, you wouldn’t care that biofield healing sounds woo, you’d want it.

Or a technique to create obvious, fast numbness or sensations. Not just a reduction in pain, but novocain-level numbness in minutes. Could anyone deny the effectiveness after experiencing that? (They could, but they would look bad doing it, which is the point.)

But… We can’t do any of that yet. So where does this get us?

It can guide our work. Doing those things isn’t a matter of being slightly better, it’s a matter of being 10x or 100x better. It’s not a matter of practicing more hours or channeling more energy, it’s a matter of understanding how the biofield works and engineering new techniques. And that can guide our work, focusing us on exploration rather than repetition, on developing new techniques rather than performing already-known healing techniques.

This is what’s on my mind as I write and plan studies for Healing Lab.

(Hat tip to Skeptics vs Skepticism on Augoeides. This is my response to that, too.)

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.

Killing Skepticism in Magick: A Plan

Sunday, October 25th, 2015

You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.

Skepticism dies via mature technologies.

Take Hertzian Waves. Invisible messages floating through the air, passing through solid objects. Sounds pretty woo, right?

Today, they’re better known as radio waves, and everything from remote controls to wifi to cell phones depend on them. Mature radio-based technologies are ubiquitous, and only a crazy person would remain skeptical.

Mature technologies produce obvious results, experienced by everyone. That’s what kills skepticism.

Here’s the rub: Energy healing and magick haven’t produced a mature technology yet.

Can an expert use sigils or beliefs or ethereal software to create luck? It certainly seems so. Can we do it with the precision and reliability to create an obvious, media-friendly demonstration? Do we have something a layman can experience themselves? No and no. So it remains limited to stories at magick conferences, only convincing the already-convinced, and laymen never get the visceral, proving impact of a successful manifesting.

What about energy healing? A decade or more of scientific research suggests that an expert in Reiki or Therapeutic Touch can reduce pain for 24-48 hours. This is a great first version of a technology, and I hope it continues helping more and more people. But a mature version? That would produce fast, obvious numbing, or invert the technique to produce clear sensations. Mature energy healing would affect the long-term outcome of a disease, convincing people by saving their lives. And the healing techniques we have today, which right now is applied by an expert at $60-100 per session? It would be tied to a sigil that anyone could meditate on and experience the energy healing themselves, for free or a low monthly subscription.

Skepticism in magick is rational, and it has many causes: A history of mages and healers making false claims, which continues today. The language we use, and our misuse of science, particularly quantum physics. How even our solid, well-researched claims would require new physics. And more. We’ll have to address all of that eventually.

But when I look for solutions, I look for something that’s both necessary and sufficient. And getting all healers to stop making false claims? That isn’t necessary, it isn’t sufficient, and it probably isn’t possible. Same with getting everyone to use less-woo-sounding terms, or to understand that the “observer” of quantum physics is a photon, not a conscious mind. And developing new physics that explain our results? That happens after we’re taken seriously, not before.

But a mature technology? That’s necessary, sufficient (or nearly so), and can be accomplished by a small group of experienced mages and healers.

If we want to kill skepticism, we need a mature technology.

Moving forward, I’ll be performing studies on this blog, based on healing energies tied to sigils. They’ll be double-blind, placebo-controlled, solid research. I hope you’ll help. (If you live near San Francisco, I’ll also be doing in-person research, publishing the results here.)

And if you want to copy my design and do your own studies, tell me and I’ll help you publicize. Because we all benefit from building a community of researchers.

If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.