Richard Smoley - The Truth About Magic

THE
TRUTH
ABOUT
MAGIC

BOOKS BY RICHARD SMOLEY

Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity

The Deal: A Guide to Radical and Complete Forgiveness

The Dice Game of Shiva:
How Consciousness Creates the Universe

The Essential Nostradamus

First Flowering: The Best of the Harvard Advocate,
18661976 (editor)

Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism

Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions
(with Jay Kinney)

How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying about God and the Bible

Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition

Supernatural: Writings on an Unknown History

A Theology of Love: Reimagining Christianity through A Course in Miracles

THE
TRUTH
ABOUT
MAGIC

Richard Smoley

Published 2021 by Gildan Media LLC

aka G&D Media

www.GandDmedia.com

Copyright 2021 by Richard Smoley

No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner whatsoever, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. No liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained within. Although every precaution has been taken, the author and publisher assume no liability for errors or omissions. Neither is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

First Edition: 2021

Front cover design by David Rheinhardt of Pyrographx

Interior design by Meghan Day Healey of Story Horse, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request

eISBN: 978-1-7225-2420-3

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Knowledge

W elcome to this book. Its about magic, not stage magic, but the magic that has to do with the unseen worlds. This could open up the most exciting adventure of your life, and possibly the most important.

You may have picked up this book because you have a sense of something much larger than yourself, much larger even than the world we see. In his play Our Town, Thornton Wilder has one of his characters say, Now there are some things we all know, but we dont takem out and look atm very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it aint houses and it aint names, and it aint earth, and it aint even the stars everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. Theres something way down deep thats eternal about every human being.

Its possible, even likely, that you are reading this book because you have this intuition.

Have you ever seen a pond that was completely covered with green scum? It practically looks like a lawn. If you did not know anything more about that pond, you would think that the scum on the surface was everything instead of merely the thin surface of a much larger body of water.

Id like to suggest to you that this is what the universe is like. Everything we see, everything we hear, from the tiniest submicroscopic particles to galaxies millions of light years away, is simply the surface.

We know that this physical world is merely the surface. We know there is much, much more. That is what all of the great religions, all of the great philosophies, throughout time from prehistory to now, have known and tried to tell us.

Many people today are suspicious of religion and religious forms. Its partly because religion can catch you in the trap of thinking that the formsthe doctrines, rituals, scripturesare the ultimate truth. They arent. Theyre merely paths to the truth.

In this book, I want to give you some idea of what lies under all of these externals. It can be approached through any of the religious pathsas long as the path does not pretend its the only pathor without any of them.

A verse in the New Testament says, Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye shut up the gate of the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in (Matthew 23:13). That can happen with religion. If you focus too much on the scriptures, the doctrines, the literal facts, you are staying on the surface. If you are a religious leader, you run the risk of keeping others from going deeper as well.

In this respect, we live in a very fortunate time, because many of these religious forms have lost their power, and people are opening up to the possibility of truth beyond these forms. Many people describe themselves these days as spiritual but not religious. They often mean that they have some intuition of this greater depth but are not satisfied with the religious concepts theyre presented with.

Some claim that we can approach the whole truth about the universe through science. Science often acts as if its telling us the whole truth, but it doesnt. Its actually a very limited form of inquiry. To pretend that everything we know can be summed up scientifically is a great error. It has caused as much suffering as religious persecutions and wars.

There is a deeper reality, and I would like to help you explore it. I have some experience in these areas. Ive reflected on them for decades. Ive written eleven books and spoken to many people, so I have some insights. Im willing to share them with you, but I cant pretend to be telling you the whole truth, because I dont know the whole truth. Nobody does. The whole truth is vaster and more sublime than our minds can approach, but we can approach it a little more closely than we may have.

Im going to tell you the truth about a lot of mysterious subjects as I understand them. Its important to steer a middle course between skepticismits all bunk. Its all been debunkedand total credulity: Yes, its all true. Wow. I believe everything I see or hear about mystical subjects.

Neither of those is a sensible approach. In some ways, when you start looking into the unseen worlds, you have to be more critical than in ordinary life, because theres always the capacity for self-illusion and self-deception. That possibility has always got to be in the background, if not the forefront, of your mind. On the other hand, if you compulsively doubt, saying, Its all nonsense, that too is a trap.

At this point, I need to say something else that I think is extremely important. Its quite possible that many or most or all of the people you know and love are not interested in this kind of knowledge and in one way or another oppose it. You may have hyperreligious people in your life who insist that their way is the only way, and if you dont follow it, youre going to fall into the clutches of the Devil. (I will talk about the Devil and what the Devil might mean later.)

You may well find that people around you are unsympathetic. Most people are simply not interested in these things. Its true of most of my friends. Im talking about people who are educated and intelligent, often far wealthier and far more successful than I am in worldly terms. Yet they have no more interest in these subjects than my dog. This is not a problem in our friendship, because we can simply talk about something else. But the fact that your friends or family do not necessarily share your interests does not mean that these interests are not valid or true. It means that you have to know when to talk about them and when not to talk about them, and whom to talk about them with and whom