Lucca

You probably think that’s a typo in the post heading.

It isn’t.

The word debunk strikes me as unscientific and actually quite violent.

It hands the semantic advantage to our oppressors even in cases where the evidence simply isn’t on their side.

Just stop for a moment and consider the implied power relationship in the word de-”bunk”. It says any nontraditional assertion is somehow filled with “bunk” beforehand, simply because it does not have a pre-approved orthodox stamp.

This is a classic framing technique… like using ‘tax relief’ to describe the poor paying for the rich or insisting that state governors use words and images like “little green men” when describing UFO events witnessed by thousands of people for 106 continuous minutes, to the ever-unhelpful pejorative; ‘conspiracy theorist.’

Take the Baltic Anomaly. People think that because it didn’t turn out to be the Millennium Falcon that we somehow know what it is. Either it’s a glacial deposit or possibly Nazi tech. End of.

But it’s actually still properly, properly weird. (And I don’t see anyone viewing it in the context of other possibly vastly ancient sites in the area. Both have burnt rocks which seems interesting to me.) It’s clearly not a UFO -whatever that is- but that does not mean it has been “debunked”.

Yes, it’s very likely an unusual glacial deposit. But it still disables equipment near it and has circles of burnt rock on the top. It would be inelegant to call time on this phenomenon so early.

Notre-Dame de la Garde in Marseille

We have evolved a tendency to recognise patterns, to prefer concrete answers. Our minds will literally push out and forget uncomfortable data. It’s a distinct disadvantage when it comes to wizardry. Because wizardry requires wading through a lot of wrong to get to the right.

So let’s instead say something is ‘disputed’, let’s instead say something is ‘refuted’. Let’s resist the violent binary implications of that other word imposed on us by the passport fraudsters of this world.

Here’s another example of ontological hijack that we just let happen: Elizabeth Targ’s famous prayer studies.

A church exterior in Firenze

Daughter of Russell Targ; who was also given military money to remote view -among other things- the far side of the moon and subsequently refused to make public what he saw there. (Sidebar: It’s anecdotal but I think this happened. It’s a good RV target because it’s initially unknown and ultimately verifiable. What he found there he wouldn’t/couldn’t comment on. Unfortunately, I have heard other researchers profess their belief that Targ may have been told to deliberately discredit himself, muddying the waters of speculation any further.)

Leaving aside the replication challenges that plague even the hardest of sciences (which nobody seems to want to talk about), attempts to replicate the effects of healing prayer with randomised healers and double-blind recipients yield results that haven’t been as spectacular as Elizabeth Targ’s initial findings.

However, as her father pointed out in a recent interview on YouTube that I have spent days unsuccessfully trying to find again godsdammit, knowing the person you are praying for dramatically improves the results in the same way as knowing the people involved in a telepathy experiment dramatically improves the results. (My speculation is this is due to a similar consciousness-based action.) An afternoon spent watching Russell Targ videos on YouTube will not be wasted.

(Sidebar: You get a 45% hit rate with people you know, versus just about -but still significantly above- what you’d expect from chance at 25% with strangers. I’ve half a mind to find out what kind of results wizards who know each other would get using this exact test.)

A church door in Firenze

And so we come to the eternal challenge of verifying magic: The accepted scientific method which serves us well in so many other corners of life breaks the thing it is trying to study in this instance. (Factor in the ‘top drawer effect’ and we’re pretty much fucked.)

However, it does provide some potentially useful implications for practical enchantment:

• Tell the person you are performing healing for that you are doing so.
• Have a ‘prayer chain’ connection to the target. (Check out a hot nerd describing the diminishing returns of the impact your social graph has on a coffee shop in NYC for an example of why this is necessary. Note: This is also why your small business Facebook activity doesn’t work. It’s just your mother and the same twelve people seeing it. Try and ‘daisy chain’ into other social graphs.) Improving the quality of your network may improve the efficacy of any enchantment done on your behalf.
• It’s possible that the quality of your connection to the target is the most important factor… or at least, certainly more than choice of deity or the beliefs of the people involved. As such, get your long-suffering mother to pray for you even if she doesn’t believe in anything.)
• Just like the telepathy study listed above, physical distance does not appear to have a measurable impact on your results.

Windows in Winchester cathedral. Which I had to MYSELF for like twenty minutes. Brilliant.

The final one: Pray for yourself. Here’s Dr Sheldrake again, because I want to clear through a backlog of Kindle quotes:

The effects of prayer or meditation on health and survival have been investigated through prospective studies in which people who prayed or meditated and otherwise similar people who did not pray or meditate were identified at the start of the study and watched over a period of years to see if their health or mortality turned out differently. It did.

On average, those who prayed or meditated remained healthier and survived longer than those who did not. For example, in a study in North Carolina, Harold Koenig and his colleagues tracked 1,793 subjects who were over sixty-five years old with no physical impairments at the beginning of the study. Six years later, those who prayed had survived 66 per cent more than those who did not pray, after correcting for age differences between the two groups. (Without this correction the difference was 73 per cent.)

They then examined the effects of ‘confounding variables’, a scientific term for other factors that might have influenced survival, like stressful life events, depression, social connections and healthy lifestyles. Even after controlling for these variables, those who prayed survived 55 per cent more. ‘Thus, healthy subjects who prayed were nearly two-thirds more likely to survive, and only a small percentage of this effect could be explained on the basis of mental, social, or behavioral factors.’ If a new drug or surgical procedure had such dramatic effects on health and survival as spiritual practices, it would be hailed as a medical breakthrough.

Hermes in the Tuscan garden of a German wizard/beer baron.

The man has a point. Maybe we should slip the hospital shoe onto the other foot and call ‘debunked’ on Big Pharma?

See how they frikking like it.