Let’s be clear from the outset: the spiritual world is not the physical world. The physical world is everything outside us; the spiritual world is everything within us. The richer and “cleaner” the spiritual world, the better the physical world becomes—or at least the way we perceive it.
For example, there are moments when life is hard because of physical circumstances that are entirely real and objective. We cannot change them if they are overwhelming, but we can change our attitude towards them. When I was practically on the front line, under shellfire, I could have gone into hysterics, declared that everything was lost, burst into tears, vented my anger, or done any number of other psychologically unreasonable things. I could even have got drunk to “calm down”. But all that leads to depressive states. So I changed my attitude towards what was happening and set myself certain goals, even if they were only a game of imagination. What mattered was that I believed in them, and this gave me a more sober view of life. The main thing to understand is that by changing my attitude towards events I could not change, I effectively rose above what was happening. In other words, we do not have to traumatise ourselves simply because we are accustomed to doing so.
When we traumatise ourselves, we fall into depressive states; we experience irritability and aggression. Some people develop addictions, others become workaholics, and there are cases of the most foolish magical thinking, complete with pointless rituals and similar behaviour.
The alternative is to work on ourselves, to start acting as human beings rather than animals and to use the resources of our soul to the fullest.
Our spiritual world is an immense, barely explored treasure trove. It contains all the mechanisms and functions we need, and it is populated by angels and demons, all sorts of gods and archetypes. This world is full of secrets and mysteries.
Our physical world is also far from fully explored, but here we have a clearer model, described by physicists. We can at least rely on some knowledge from school and predict what is going to happen.
These two worlds meet through us, human beings. From the human point of view—and it is only from this point of view that we can know the world—we create gods and the universe without even realising it. After all, gods and demons are, first and foremost, products of our imagination that subsequently take shape. Who came first, the god Enki or the person who invented him? Of course, there was no Enki: a person trying to describe their mystical states personified them as Enki. The same is true of all gods. Then we find that gods are strikingly similar across many religions. A foolish materialist will say that myths simply migrated, but that leaves the question of how they crossed the oceans.
The answer is right on the surface: our experiences are the same whether we are prehistoric people or modern Nobel Prize winners. Attempts to describe these experiences give birth to gods, demons and angels. In Jung’s psychology, these are archetypes—something very ancient and fundamental. They cannot be understood unequivocally, but we can at least attempt to systematise them.
Yet the inner world can manifest itself only through projections, not through physical energies, as is often claimed. It is a mistake, for example, to believe that a healer’s body emits physical bioelectric currents. Things happen rather differently.
How the Inner World Manifests in the Outer
For example, I work very well at a distance, over a video call, using the same healing passes. The mechanism here is somewhat different: I engage my psychic energies and, through our collective unconscious, pass these energies into the unconscious of the person I am working with. And the mechanism of this transmission is not important, whether it is hypnosis, NLP, trance techniques, ritual or telepathy. These are simply mechanisms, techniques. Each technique has its own limitations, advantages and shortcomings. That is why it is foolish, in the modern world, to rely on only certain traditions and exclude others. So-called magicians often shout that psychological techniques are nonsense and something weak. Real magicians know that a psychological technique is only a framework, which can be filled with meaning and developed into something more powerful than those “ancient methods”. The great thing about scientifically grounded techniques is that they are standardised. With proper knowledge of psychology and esotericism, one can work more effectively than by following a tradition without understanding the process.
It is precisely through influence on the unconscious, through the world of images, that we can also change the physical world. For example, we can implant a negative programme into someone’s unconscious, producing psychosomatic reactions that affect the course of certain illnesses, even to the point of death. These are not inventions; it is simply that not everyone can pull a programme out of themselves and pass it on. More often, this is an innate ability, and to achieve it one needs to develop spiritually.
We can also arrange circumstances for ourselves in such a way that we get what we want. But it is impossible to influence the drum of a lottery machine: an extremely complex mechanism governs chance there, and the human factor is excluded. For the same reason, you cannot deflect an icicle falling towards you, but you can make an approaching car swerve aside, because a car is controlled by a person and an icicle is not.
That is why we should not try to influence the external physical world directly, but should work with the psychic world. That is where the secret of levitation and the temperature regulation of monks is hidden.
There was a Frenchman called Mesmer, who was effectively one of the founders of hypnosis. But he went astray because he compared a purely psychic hypnotic phenomenon with the external manifestation of magnetism. He did not understand where he had gone wrong and slipped into unwitting charlatanism. The magical law had been broken: To Will, To Know, To Dare, To Keep Silent. It was knowledge that failed him. Yet the answer was close at hand: the “fluid” was not physical but psychic in nature, so it should have been approached accordingly.
So the spiritual world is not the physical world. The physical world is a set of rigid rules, whereas the spiritual world is boundless and can do anything. And the ability to bring our fantasies from the spiritual world, through the unconscious, into the physical world is precisely the magical act.
But then again, this is not really about magic. It is about how to free ourselves from all of this, how to reach a state in which no magic can touch us and we can find wholeness and harmony.