Real Magic

(Three categories of real magic: force of will, divination, theurgy)

Her evidence that the speed of light and other physical constants were mental constructs, not inviolable absolutes, provided a clear path to global harmony.

Real magic falls into three categories: mental influence of the physical world, perception of events distant in space or time, and interactions with nonphysical entities. The first type I’ll call force of will; it’s associated with spell-casting and other techniques meant to intentionally influence events or actions. The second is divination; it’s associated with practices such as reading Tarot cards and mirror-gazing. The third is theurgy, from the Greek meaning “god-work”; it involves methods for evoking and communicating with spirits.

Magical power intended to manipulate or exploit others is called black magic.

found myself intently wishing that the tornado would go somewhere else. Even in the midst of extreme magical thinking, I knew that my wishes were just a way of coping in the face of peril.

I base my assessment on the fact that telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinetic effects have all been independently repeated in laboratories around the world.

After all, a Gallup poll in 2005 showed that nearly 75 percent of Americans believe in at least one “paranormal” phenomenon, like psi, but a mere 0.001 percent of academic scientists are actively engaged in studying the ontological reality of these experiences. What’s wrong with this picture?

Nor would most individuals embrace magic as real the moment they realize that through the application of magic it would be possible, at least in principle, for others to know their private thoughts, manipulate their health, or influence their finances. The mere idea that such feats may be possible can evoke severe paranoia.

Like any struggle for political power, gaining the allegiance of the masses is much easier by inciting fear of the “other” than by encouraging love and compassion.

(Conditions that enhance psi and the psychological risks of magic)

In addition, those magical practices seemed to be consistent with conditions found to enhance psi effects in laboratory studies, including a reliance on altered states of consciousness, concentrated visualization, goal-oriented imagery, positive expectations, strong belief, and intense emotions.

If you take that path, it’s especially important to maintain strong social connections so you can talk about your experiences and remain psychologically well grounded.

But using magic in an attempt to manipulate reality or conjure spirits can be psychologically destabilizing. Even the innocent use of the ever-popular Ouija board game can, for a small percentage of people, lead to major psychological problems. Dropping down the rabbit hole into the unknown is exciting, but it’s not without risk.

Shamans didn’t enter these states because all the cool kids were doing it; rather, they did it because their tribe’s survival depended on it. They were healers, oracles, and warriors wrapped into one, and they were charged with sustaining their tribe and defending it against rival groups through whatever means necessary, including magical techniques.

In practice, this consisted of experiencing a ritual death of the physical body and subsequent resurrection into a new body, with new capabilities of intuiting secret wisdom, often regarding the functioning of the body itself.

by following someone else’s dogma, because each of us could achieve enlightenment on our own. As you may imagine, such insolence was unacceptable, so the Church applied its well-honed strategy for maintaining control, and like Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, Hermeticism was forced to go

In other words, toss aside restraints of tradition and laws and do whatever you want, including brazen hedonism. This was the Victorian version of an unabashed call for sex, drugs, and rock and roll (the last hadn’t been invented yet, but if it had been, Crowley would surely have promoted that too). Crowley’s approach to magic was an idiosyncratic mix of ceremonial magic, yoga, astrology, Kabbalah, a Western form of Tantrism, and his own inventions.

Through disciplined effort, transformation could be achieved by nearly anyone. In his book Meetings with Remarkable Men, Gurdjieff “meant to bring to the West…not only a new statement of what has been called ‘the primordial tradition,’ but the knowledge of how modern man might conduct his own search with the conditions of twentieth-century life.”63

(A lineage of practical magic — from Hermeticism to New Thought)

Your thoughts, studied, will let you see where you are going. They point clearly to the nature of physical events. What exists physically exists first in thought and feeling. There is no other rule….71 Matter is formed by those inner qualities that give it vitality, that structure follows expectation, that matter at any time can be completely changed by the activation of the creative faculties inherent in all consciousness.

Finally, a key development in practical magic in the twentieth century was the repackaging of esoteric ideas into forms designed to appeal to the American impulse toward pragmatism, prosperity, and personal success.

The aphorism, “As a man thinketh in his heart so is he,” not only embraces the whole of a man’s being, but is so comprehensive as to reach out to every condition and circumstance of his life. A man is literally what he thinks, his character being the complete sum of all his thoughts….Let a man radically alter his thoughts, and he will be astonished at the rapid transformation it will effect in the material conditions of his life.

All of these books, and dozens more, assert the same basic idea: if you have very clear goals, concentrate on them, and unquestionably believe that the goals will manifest, then they will. This concept, simplified into the New Age shibboleth “You create your own reality,” comes directly out of the esoteric traditions and is at the very core of magical practice.

2007, The Secrets to Quick and Lasting Life Change with Neuro-Linguistic Programming, published in 2008 by Richard Bandler, and a rash of other popular books

(Attention and intention — the essence of magic, and gnosis as the key)

The essence of magic boils down to the application of two ordinary mental skills: attention and intention. The strength of the magical outcome is modulated by four factors: belief, imagination, emotion, and clarity. That’s basically it. The ceremonial robes, somber settings, black candles, secret handshakes, chanting in ancient languages, sex, and drugs—all are good theater, which may help in withdrawing the mind from the distractions of the mundane world. But ultimately, they’re unnecessary.

GNOSIS The single most important aide to developing magical skills is to learn how to enter the state of consciousness known as gnosis. The time-honored and safest way to do this is through meditation.

You’ll start to feel better physically and mentally. You’ll see the world more clearly. As Shinzen Young puts it, as a result of this practice “clarity and equanimity are slowly but surely trickling down into the subconscious. They rewire us at the most fundamental levels.”2

I discussed in my book Supernormal, the goal of meditation across many traditions is to achieve a state of awareness where one gains the realization that the personal self and the Universal Self are one (in my shorthand, [c] = [C]).

Within the [C] state, abilities naturally arise that allow the meditator to manipulate or to transcend the world. Within the path of yoga, the goal of meditation is transcendence, or personal liberation. In that tradition the siddhis, or powers, that are gained are strongly deemphasized. In the magical tradition, gaining those powers is the goal.

The bottom line: If you want to perform magic effectively, maintain a disciplined meditation practice. Learn to quiet your mind. See the world as it is, not as it appears to be when viewed through multiple layers of cultural conditioning.

Affirmations Force-of-will magic involves the application of focused attention, intention, imagination, and belief.

(Practical protocols: writing magic, sigils, and remote viewing)

1. Know what you want. The clearer the intended goal, the more likely it will manifest. Believe that the goal will be achieved. Imagine that it has already been achieved in the future and it is inexorably headed your way. Write the goal on a piece of paper to focus your attention. Use a pen and paper exclusively reserved for this purpose. While writing, imagine that the surface of the paper represents Universal Consciousness and the ink represents your unconscious. As you write your goal, imagine that you are casting your unconscious intentions onto the medium that creates and sustains reality itself.

2. Review what you want. Review your goal daily. Between reviews do not dwell on it. You want to strengthen your intention and keep it clear, but you also want to allow the goal to seep into your unconscious, because that’s where magic is catalyzed. You may want to secure the writing paper with a special ribbon or place it in a box set aside specifically for this purpose. 3. Maintain secrecy. Don’t share your goal with others; they may inject doubt, and you need to maintain strong belief. 4. When it works, accept the outcome with gratitude and use it to strengthen your belief.

This method, like any form of magical manifestation, is neutral with respect to morals or ethics. However, virtue is its own reward, and it’s useful to keep in mind Spider-Man’s motto: “With great power comes great responsibility.”

First, a sigil is simply a symbol for a desired goal. It has an advantage over writing because crafting a sigil requires more focused attention than just writing it, and because use of a symbolic goal reduces the grasp of the analytical mind. In addition, after the sigil is created, the magician traditionally “charges” and then “releases” it. The charging is meant to forcefully concentrate emotion, intention, and belief on the goal; the releasing is intended to push the goal from the conscious mind into the unconscious.

By drawing a symbol, you pull the meaning of that symbol into existence.

MIT physicist Max Tegmark generalized Wheeler’s “it from bit” by proposing that physical reality literally is a mathematical structure, an abstract set of relationships. From that viewpoint, if one manipulates those abstract relationships, then one manipulates the physical world.

Making and Using a Sigil 1. Write your desire. Example: “I find a ten-dollar bill.” 2. List the first letters of words in the sentence, ignoring words that begin with a vowel. You’ll end up with FTDB. 3. Fit the letters together into an abstract symbol, as in Figure 1. Figure 1. Letters arranged into a sigil. 4. Focus on the symbol, projecting either intense calm or intense emotion through the symbol to “charge” it and amplify your desire. Magicians provoke this charge within the state of gnosis through deep meditation, by firing up a fierce concentration, by engaging in strong physical activity, by evoking anger, or by using the moment of sexual orgasm to provide an explosive point of focus. 5. After the sigil is charged, release your attention by putting the sigil away. Some magicians will go as far as to burn it; others will momentarily glance at the sigil every so often or place the symbol in a location where they’ll see it now and then. The idea is to deflect the intention of the sigil from the conscious mind to the deep unconscious, where it will simmer and draw the desired outcome into being. 6. As with writing magic, maintaining strong belief is an important factor, as is secrecy. So keep the meaning of the sigil private, and heed the age-old wisdom about using magic for benign purposes only.

In my experience in both life and the lab, yes, it does. Not every time, and not always with great fanfare. But it works often enough to raise an eyebrow. In life, the desired outcome usually manifests in the form of a meaningful synchronicity.

The key elements in both cases are focused intention, an openness to the idea that the desired outcome has already been achieved, and very clear goals.

During the waking periods, he was intensely wishing for a sign that his business was on the right track, and one of those signs would be for me to show up, somehow, so I could join his board of directors.

The method involves making fast, abstract sketches of impressions gained when asked to mentally perceive a distant target image or location. This is intended to capture not only fleeting visual images but impressions from the other senses as well. The reason Swann’s technique focused on fast sketching, at least in the initial stages of remote viewing, is that the single greatest inhibitor of remote viewing ability is the analytic mind, which gets in the way. In the jargon used in this type of training, this problem is called an “analytical overlay.”

When a remote viewer directs her attention toward that target she might instantly perceive a vague flash of something yellow. But then, within a fraction of a second, the analytical portion of her mind will jump in and associate that bit of information with typically yellow things. Before she’s even consciously aware of it, she’ll start thinking that the target is a banana. And once that thought enters her mind, it’s extremely difficult to let it go.

This method may be easier if the remote viewing session includes a partner who can guide you through the various stages. In that way you won’t need to engage the portion of your mind that’s required to keep track of the process.

1. Start with a blank piece of paper and a pencil. Holding the target in mind, quickly draw lines, curves, or squiggles. Don’t think about it, just sketch the first thing that comes into your mind. Remote viewing information initially appears as a very brief impression; a flash, a mere glimmer. It’s not like watching a full-color 3-D Imax movie. Also, your sketch might reflect how you feel about the target and have nothing to do with what the target looks like. So don’t analyze what you’ve drawn. Just quickly sketch while keeping your goal in mind: describe the target. 2. List your initial sensory impressions of the target, focusing on movement, odor, taste, touch, and sound. After listing those, add any visual impressions that come to mind, including shape and color. The moment you realize that you’ve named an impression, note it but add that it’s “AOL,” for “analytical overlay.” 3. Mentally examine the target from other perspectives: from far away, close up, low, and high. Capture the impressions you gain from each new perspective. Avoid naming the impressions. 4. Note any emotional feelings you may have about the target. 5. Combine all of the impressions you’ve gained so far and use them to make a sketch or series of sketches that describe the target. Now, based on your accumulated perceptions, write down what you think the target is. This is the first step where analysis should be used. 6. Mentally reexamine the target and look for anything you may have missed. Watch for new insights, novel feelings, surprising elements, or any other aspect that might feel out of place. Sketch and write down these impressions. 7. Compare your sketch of the target with any new information you’ve gained. Revise if necessary. 8. Now compare the actual target with your final description.

She found a number of them: 1. Relax. Achieve a state of deep physical relaxation. 2. Stabilize the mind. Meditation may be helpful in encouraging what some adepts refer to as a “blank mental screen,” or what a magician might call the initial stages of achieving gnosis. The goal is to avoid mind-wandering. 3. Direct the mind. After achieving a period of mental stability, ask yourself, “What is the target?” The idea is to direct the mind, which at this point should be in a calm, blank, or idling mode, so it can focus without distraction on the task at hand. 4. Wait with expectation. To explain this, Rhea White recounted a metaphor of the winding of a toy top as a preliminary to its spinning. That is, don’t just wait passively; create a sense of tension, belief, and excitement that the information will arrive. Be patient and don’t force it. 5. Look for a feeling of conviction. To help…

The talented people that Rhea White studied would sometimes spend an hour or more on a single trial: fifteen minutes to relax, a half hour to create a mental blank screen, then another half hour before perceiving…

Theurgy: Calling All…

There are endless stories about such entities. And a case can be made that all of it, from legends of the wee people, fairies, and forest sprites to tales of angels, demons, and even extraterrestrial aliens and UFO encounters, arises from a common source.

In my opinion, the scientific jury is still out regarding the reality of such spirits or entities.

Of course, my hesitation doesn’t mean that such entities don’t exist. It just means that we don’t have methods yet that can strictly discriminate between psi effects in the living and independent, disembodied intelligences.

The esoteric literature on theurgy suggests that if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t do it.

Mood is known to be influenced by the personality factor of neuroticism, a hardwired tendency toward anxiety or depression.

Still, many scientists might find it difficult to believe that eating intentionally blessed chocolate would do anything other than make you gain weight. But when we shift our perspective to a magical worldview, where consciousness affects the physical world, this study outcome isn’t surprising at all. A magician might only wonder why the effect we obtained wasn’t even stronger.

(Blessed tea experiments, field consciousness, and manifesting goals)

SETTING FUTURE GOALS According to magical lore, one way to manifest a goal through force of will is to affirm that the goal has already been accomplished. This means placing the goal in the future with your imagination, and then letting present-time events catch up to the future goal.

The point of the metaphor is to play with the idea that maybe intention warps something about space-time, because if that were indeed the case, then intention could make all sorts of surprising things happen.

Does that mean the universe has a destiny—and the laws of physics pull us inexorably toward our prewritten fate?”43 Perhaps. And experiments like the present one,

The placebo-controlled test (left-hand panel in Figure 7) showed that even though everyone in the two groups believed that they were drinking the blessed tea, people who actually drank the blessed tea reported better moods than those who drank the control tea. The mood difference between the two groups was associated with modest odds against chance of about 50 to 1.

Everyone in these two conditions in fact drank the same blessed tea, but some believed that they did and others believed that they didn’t. The odds against chance for this comparison were a healthy 50,000 to 1.

In 2000, I launched a suite of psi tests on the Internet that are still accessible at the website www.GotPsi.org. From

Study After the Test If divination is a real phenomenon, then when you’re taking a multiple-choice test today you ought to be able to peek at your future self, tomorrow, when you’ll be looking at the answer sheet. You can then use that future knowledge to improve your performance today. That would be nice. It’s also a testable idea and known as an experiment involving “implicit precognition.”

We usually behave as though we have free will, but maybe we really have unalterable destinies and free will is just an illusion. This raises the question: does precognition perceive the actual future, the one that must occur, or does it perceive a probable future, a future that might occur? And how can we tell which is a better explanation?

Theories of crowd behavior note that because we are social animals, we are exquisitely sensitive to the herd instinct and are hardwired to imitate.

disturbance in

In the context of magic, what this and other field consciousness studies suggest is that rituals designed to draw and focus the attention of a group may accomplish more than simply produce a psychological sense of group coherence. They may also, as the magical traditions suggest, literally distort the fabric of reality.

Based on the assumption of an interconnected reality, this law proposes that inner and outer experience, or mind and matter, intermingle and interact. It’s the principle behind the practice of sigils and writing magic. What you sustain in your mind is reflected in the world at large.

The Feeling of Being Stared At

When viewed with high-end medical devices, the human brain will treat us to a largely unpredictable fireworks show of electrochemical reactions. But so will dead salmon when you put them in an MRI. To say these electrical signals are creating experience is to say that Rihanna lives in your radio. She doesn’t.

This would seem to rule out hallucinations and dreams, because if the brain is completely inactive, then the mind must also be inactive. So NDEs could not be reported, but ipso facto they are.

At face value, this line of reasoning seems to be persuasive, but it’s been challenged by recent discoveries that brains continue to show activity well below what was once considered to be flatline conditions, such as in deep coma or the dying brain.

At a neural level, NDE memories resemble ordinary memories of everyday events; they don’t look like memories of imagined events.

addition, there is abundant anecdotal and experimental evidence that non-ordinary states of consciousness (e.g., dreaming, meditating, being under the influence of entheogenic compounds) are conducive to enhanced psi phenomena.

We need to sense the tiger stalking us right now, not a tiger a thousand miles away or two weeks from next Tuesday. That evolutionary pressure made ordinary conscious awareness exceptionally adept at detecting danger, but at a cost of excluding naked reality—awareness of events distant in space or time. So when normal brain functions are incapacitated through brain injury, brain surgery, or an NDE, it’s possible that the neurological and psychological filters that ordinarily prevent us from perceiving naked reality might also begin to subside. In that case, some people might report significant increases in feelings of self-transcendence, unexpected enhancements in consciousness, and improved cognitive skills.

For a journalist’s review of the evidence for disembodied forms of consciousness, I recommend Leslie Kean’s 2017 book, Surviving Death.104 And for a discussion of NDEs from a medical perspective, I recommend John Hagan’s 2017 book, The Science of Near-Death Experiences.105

Double and triple-blinded studies show that some mediums can gain accurate information about the deceased under conditions that strictly exclude all conventional explanations.106 Mediums’ experience is that the information they’ve obtained comes from the deceased. But where it actually comes from is not yet certain.

As a practice, science aspires to be rigorous, open, and humble in the face of the great unknown.

As author and social activist Upton Sinclair once quipped, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

(Consciousness as primary — the scientific case for a magical worldview)

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness. —NOBEL LAUREATE PHYSICIST MAX PLANCK, father of quantum theory Based on thousands of psi experiments

4. Psi effects are stronger during non-ordinary states of consciousness, such as during meditation, while dreaming, or while under the influence of psychedelic

5. We have the capacity to mentally influence the physical world, probably not through application of the four known physical forces, but perhaps through as yet unidentified principles that either affect the probabilities of events or “warp” the fabric of space-time.

6. We can gain information from sources purported to be nonphysical entities.

7. Consciousness is fundamental, meaning it is primary over the physical world. 2. Everything is interconnected. 3. There is only one Consciousness.

Three that I recommend for those who’d like to study this topic in detail are Irreducible Mind, a comprehensive review of the many challenges to prevailing mechanistic ideas about consciousness;18 One Mind, which lays out in exquisite detail why the notion of a single, collective mind has been taken very seriously by many scientists and scholars;19 and Beyond Physicalism, which makes a persuasive case that today’s neuroscience assumption that consciousness is a meaningless side effect of “meat machines” (that is, us), is evidently wrong. These books don’t mention magic per se, but they do discuss the type of worldview that is completely compatible with the reality of magic.

Most people, most of the time, don’t identify with [C], but when that happens—in the magical state of gnosis, or the yogic state of samadhi—then divination is perfectly normal. What [c] can express about [C] is severely limited because [C] is inconceivably “larger” than everyday reality. As such, [C] is also beyond ordinary concepts and language. That’s why mystics are always frustrated when asked to describe their experience. The moment we step beyond the ordinary, language fails.

Force-of-will effects observed in the laboratory and in everyday life are generally small because you’re like the tail trying to push the elephant.

The relationship between personal intention and [c] may be thought of in this way: [c] is like a battery and intention is like an electrical circuit. The circuit is a design that’s poised to act, but without the power of [c] the circuit won’t accomplish anything.

We know that a mental domain exists below conscious awareness from research in psychotherapy, psychology, the neurosciences, and meditation. Our conscious life emerges from the unconscious, and likewise, the classical physical world emerges from the quantum domain.

The separations experienced in the everyday world are similarly an illusion based on our limited perspectives. The esoteric traditions can be understood as attempting to describe this mountain from the bottom up.

As eminent neuroscientist Christof Koch has said, “Consciousness is really physics from the inside. Seen from the inside, it’s experience. Seen from the outside, it’s what we know as physics, chemistry, and biology.”21

Philosophers call subjective experience qualia because experience is an internal quality, rather than a measurable external quantity.

Some suggest that reality literally is information, like a cosmic conscious hologram. Others talk about reality as a mathematical or a supercomputer-based simulation.

my mind can cause change on a symbolic level, perhaps it really can cause change. Perhaps the information passing through my mind also passes through the world at large—everything being connected to the same matrix.

For those who insist that mind and consciousness are nothing more than bioelectrical circuits in the brain, then mathematics too must be nothing more than the brain’s representation of a preexisting, independent, external physical world. That seems reasonable enough until we realize that the symbols generated by three pounds of neural tissue somehow describe not only vast swatches of the physical universe to an unbelievably precise degree, but they also predict phenomena that strongly contradict common sense, such as quantum entanglement and black holes.

If that’s the case, then, as magic proposes, we really do shape the world based on our expectations. Think of the thousands of physicists and engineers at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, all working feverishly for years to detect the Higgs boson.

Said another way, a symbolic language by itself can describe physical reality amazingly well, but something will always be left out. Is that something “outside” the physical world, meaning nonphysical? Could the missing element be consciousness?

magic is real, then why can’t I use it to solve big, intractable problems, such as poverty, disease, and war? Why can’t I use it to make my personal dreams come true, every time? You can, sort of. For most fledgling magicians, most of the time, magic will be fragile and subtle. That’s because three factors are working against you: reality inertia, lack of talent, and the unconscious.

The second factor is that it isn’t easy to achieve the state of gnosis, which is where magic happens. Yogis who diligently practice their craft for decades are not guaranteed to achieve the siddhis, the Eastern version of Western magic. Most dedicated practitioners are likely to spontaneously experience various powers occasionally, but for magic to work reliably under conscious control requires both steadfast practice and natural talent.

The third factor is that consciously you might strongly desire something, but unconsciously you may not. This conflict leads to self-defeating behaviors that can neutralize or even reverse a magical effort.

If science ever did begin to make serious enquiry into magic, the result would be disaster. Humanity has proved itself totally incapable of handling even a moderately dangerous substance like plutonium with responsibility. Imagine what it would do with machine-enhanced sorcery or even simple, reliable telepathy. It is in the interests of the survival of the species that occultists continue to ridicule and discredit their own arts in the eyes of orthodox science.

Humans are hardwired to quickly reject people and ideas that are different from us; “others” are dastardly and dangerous. These common tendencies must be identified and forcefully countered.

If we can already see tiny space-time warps in our little laboratory psi experiments, then they’d be able to manipulate huge chunks of space-time like slabs of soft butter. They would be able to spy on us, perhaps even embody us, from the dark side of distant galaxies, far better than we’re able to spy on friends and enemies with today’s aerial drones.

If extraterrestrials are watching, they may well have decided that as a species, we’re still basically infants, spending most of our time sleeping, pooping, or crying. We haven’t reached out to say hello via humanity’s global telepathic mind because we’re still enthralled with the cowboy myth of rugged individualism.

Thus, to maintain comfort, we’ve collectively agreed to relocate real magic into entertainment and fiction, where it happily earns billions of dollars.

This is the principal truth described by mystics throughout history, and individuals who glimpse that truth often describe it as the most profound transformational event in their lifetime.

So how could my intentions affect anything outside of me? How can I know what someone else is thinking? How can I tell what will happen tomorrow? As we’ve seen, based on the current scientific worldview, you can’t. But within the esoteric worldview there is no outside world, no separation, no time. Everything is already within consciousness, which is beyond ordinary space-time.

Said another way, when the Indian sage Ramana Maharshi was asked, “How are we to treat others?” his reply was simple: “There are no others.”

These powers can be intoxicating and seductive, which is why in most meditation traditions the student is advised to just regard these phenomena as yardsticks along the path to enlightenment. Don’t dwell on them. By contrast, within the magical traditions these powers are exactly what you’re attempting to achieve.

Compared to the lofty goals of enlightenment, magic is more commonly associated with the acquisition of egotistical power. But that’s just a stereotype. Magic can also be used for healing, counseling, enhancing survival, and reducing suffering. The range of possibilities spanning the spiritual-material axis is vast.

THE BOTTOM LINE Many scientific and scholarly disciplines are slowly coming around to the idea that consciousness is far more important than previously imagined. This shift of opinion, combined with the idea that reality is a form of information,