Experiments With The Occult

In the past few months, I have been interacting more and more with people who profess to follow certain occult and esoteric practices of various sorts. I for one don’t believe any such practice to have a pragmatic value as I am a materialist through and through. Yet despite this, I’ve found myself in a few debates that are kind of fun and worth sharing.

The first debates I’ve been a part of revolve around people who seem to think that they have some sort of influence over the outcome of things within the world that are outside of them literally doing anything i.e. with their mind alone. This kind of influence on the world is very similar to Oprah Winfrey style ‘The Secret’ ideas.

By this I mean there is a whole cottage industry of people who purport to sell methods on how to exert your influence upon the world with your willpower alone. There is in fact a pragmatic real-world equivalent of this which is simply practicing mindfulness and allowing yourself to do material things to better yourself.

That however is not what people claim, they instead claim that we can just formulate a thought, and concentrating hard enough, make it a reality. This is without taking any material action to make this a reality.

This is probably very boring so far for everyone reading this, but the people I was talking to put a very quasi-gnostic spin on things that got me interested. For them, we are all fragments of God. Each thing that we do in the world is thus a smaller component of some godhead acting within the world.

For them, everything that happens is because we wanted it to happen, the collective ‘godhead’ wanted things to happen in a specific way, and thus we are created components of the whole of different outcomes. Since we are all connected into this whole and are parts of it shed off from others, the collective ‘we’ desire for any given outcome to happen.

This seems to clash with the thought that we can control, as individuals, the outcome of anything in the world. If the collective will of the godhead is what is in control essentially how can we really battle against that?

The way thinkers in this mode solve the issue is by saying that it is a kind of two-way street where we can influence the outcomes of the whole since we are a part of it. By exerting our will in the world we can push the whole in one direction or another a small amount.

It is always fun to hear these theories because while acausal action ‘magic’ is clearly not real, other forms would be extremely valuable if they were true. It is clearly impossible for anyone within the universe to influence matter or make things materialize out of thin air. This much is basically certain.

That isn’t what most occult esotericists claim, instead, they make a much smaller claim that you can change probability distributions that exist materially in your favor using your mind. It is worth taking a few seconds to investigate such claims because this would be immensely valuable.

If I were able to alter some process generally seen as random or stochastic even a fraction of a percent reliably, you could leverage this into compound gains trivially. If it were true it would make you a trillionaire overnight. Most people who claim to have this ability don’t seem to understand this.

So if it were the case, it would be one of the most valuable pieces of knowledge that anyone could know. I would wholeheartedly love for this to be true, it would be an immense power to wield within the world.

My friend claimed to have this ability so I set up a very simple example that he could use to prove to me that he had this ability. It involved a bird sitting on my windowsill. The goal of the experiment is for him to make a bird or birds land on my windowsill.

For this experiment, in the apartment I’ve been living in I asked that he make a pigeon land on my windowsill within some given timeframe. For this, I know the rate at which birds land on my windowsill prior to the start of the experiment. I have not seen any evidence of pigeons landing on my windowsill, no droppings, etc.

There are pigeons that land on various other areas, including above my door and other places around the area. I have seen birds on windowsills other than my bedroom at points in the past. It would be totally feasible for a bird to land on my windowsill.

So we have the historical rate at which birds land on my window, which is to say not much at all. We have the established base rate. The job of the esotericist is to make the birds begin landing on my window at some rate above the base rate in the future. It has now been 4-6 months since this experiment started and there is no evidence of a bird landing there.

What does an ardent esotericist say in response to this? I’ve heard various excuses, involving psychic energy being off. In the view of these people, because everyone has a certain mental will on the world the wills can cancel out much like a stock market price.

By this, they mean that my disbelief influenced the birds to make them not land on my window with nearly equal force to the will of those who want it to land there. To this, I state that nothing could be further from the truth.

I love birds, I used to own two beautiful doves. I would like nothing more than to have a bird start landing on my windowsill for me to look at, it would absolutely make my day. I would also like nothing more than evidence that I could alter stochastic processes to my will arbitrarily. Why would I not want this to happen? I wish more than anything that this was true.

I have heard from people that my disbelief causes something not to happen. I don’t see why people think this is the case, I would love this. In fact, if I saw evidence of it I would need to very rapidly re-evaluate my entire perspective on how the universe worked and how I should go about living my life in it.

If I saw such evidence I would probably drop whatever I was doing and focus all of my time and energy on learning everything I could about how to use this form of magic. It would be great. In that sense, I never understand the people who say that my disbelief impacts magic, I actively want to believe.

In older magical texts and folklore, there is often a notion that magic doesn’t work if you tell someone you are doing it. This is the same logic behind the idea that you should never tell someone what you wish upon a star, wishbone, or birthday cake. If you tell the wish it will assuredly not happen.

The way to keep people from impacting the desire that a person wants to will into the world is to not tell them so they can’t impact it. This forms another trivial experiment for someone to do. We can re-run the bird experiment but don’t tell anyone that you are doing it.

You start the experiment by establishing some long-running baseline for the random process and then attempt to will a change in that baseline. If you do this over repeated experiments, it will showcase to you the ability to influence the world.

The oddness of the challenge is also designed to stop excuses from being made. If I had said ‘Do this experiment with a stock’, they could trivially claim that there are too many ‘wills’ trying to put the stock in various directions for them to have an impact.

By picking something that nobody cares about, like a bird on a windowsill this objection can’t really be raised. There isn’t an army of people attempting to keep birds from my windowsill or trying desperately to get birds onto their own windows. If anything most people are trying to get birds away from their windows, not toward them. More birds for me I suppose.

These experiments have been done thousands of times and failed each time, but still, people try to sell each other on the idea that they can change the world without actually putting in the work to do so. If I want birds to land on my windowsill, I have to put in the work to make it happen myself by putting birdseed there.

Update March 2024

In the spirit of honesty, I would like to say that when my friend who I made the bet above with came to visit me this month an interesting thing happened. To be more specific, a series of interesting things happened.

First, the minute they stepped foot into my house as they were passing by a window I saw a pigeon finally land on the outside of it.

Ironically enough, they did not end up seeing the pigeon themselves because they were not paying attention, but I immediately saw the pigeon sitting there and as they passed by the windowsill it flew away.

There are a couple caveats to this, one is that I have seen pigeons nesting above my door on that side of the house (my neighbors also have a large pigeon coop that houses homing pigeons in it) on that side of my house.

I have in fact seen pigeons on that side of the house and heard them many times before this. I have not ever really seen them outside of any window in my house though until the moment at which the person I was betting with arrived at my house.

The other caveat worth pointing out is that the window which was the one I was actually betting on, was not the one that the bird landed on. A bird has never landed on the window that was part of the bet with or without this person being here.

All along I thought that it would be pretty easy for a bird to land on some window of my house, so I am not particularly impressed by the fact that it landed.

I am however impressed by the coincidental coinciding of it landing with this person setting foot inside of my house for the first time. This kind of coincidence adds a pretty neat datapoint for the things discussed above.

Similarly to all alleged incidents of magical synchronicities occuring, it never occurred in the way that was actually asked, and the task at hand was so mundane as to be plausible in any scenario.

By this I mean, if I had asked for a lizard or beaver to occur outside my window and then there happened to be one, I would be 10000x more impressed. These kinds of extreme things never happen though really.

Another thought that has occured to me that I did not go into above because it is a bit too harsh and causes the conversation to die prematurely if made, is that the above requires me to create a distinction between acausal material actions (i.e.make matter appear out of nowhere are break physical laws about conservation of matter) and some other form of magical action within the world.

I think that in reality, every single action related to a given stochastic process is largely deterministic downstream from the world-state that exists upon making the ‘wish’.

So you kind of have to be able to point to some ‘random’ bit that you can flip somewhere down the line. This bit flipping forms a acausal material action within the world, just at a level that is easier to sweep under the rug.

The reason why it isn’t useful to go into this is that most people who practice magic get confused by it, and also it opens up a kind of debate about if physical determinism exists.

I love this kind of debate and have a very strong stance on it, but I don’t think that most people who are arguing if magic is real or not care to have a nuanced argument about how quantum gravity works.

I will simply state that the two are one and the same, they just feel different when you talk about them. The kind of magic that very obviously breaks fundamental laws of physics (making things materialize from nothing) and other types of magic (alter some stochastic process to generate ‘luck’) both violate fundamental physical properties as they are currently understood. Neither is possible for the same reason in my opinion, but again, pointing this out kills off fun conversations.