Books

My Book List

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Below are links to books that I’ve found particularly interesting. The Amazon link includes reader reviews. Instead of writing my own, I’ve created tag clouds that show the most common words in the book. They are presented in no particular order. As I find stuff I like I will append to the page.

Magic, Power, Language, Symbol: A Magician’s Exploration of Linguistics – Patrick Dunn

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As someone with an analytical personality and an engineering mindset, I was truly surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. Here’s why:

Science is focused on observation and the gathering of evidence to prove theories wrong. Ultimately it’s about what tests can be devised to prove a theory as false.

On the flip side, magic is more concerned with the search for what is true, and to the magical practitioner, a lot of it is about discovering relationships and finding meaning.

Magic Power Language Symbol. A Magician’s Exploration of Linguistics –Patrick Dunn

Symbols play an important role in all this because, by very definition, they represent relationships to objects or ideas.

In this book, Patrick Dunn makes the case that symbols have power and that power is due to how we interpret them as they relate to the real world. The argument is made that “reality is, at some very deep level, a set of interrelated and self-referencing symbols”.

Moreover, that “we interpret these symbols, and therefore explore reality, according to a set of codes, not all of them conscious”.

If you’re looking for a deep dive into linguistics, semiotics, and the application in various religious and magical practices, then this is the book for you.

In my case, I’ve studied and written about more than a few “enigmatic” devices where if there’s any working effect, a case can be made it’s from the symbols and relationships alone and their effect on the operator.

Perhaps this book provides a possible explanation of why that might be the case.

You can find the book on Amazon.

Amazing and Wonderful Mind Machines You Can Build – G. Harry Stine

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Originally published in 1992, this esoteric classic is not available electronically and can be difficult to find.

The author details several simple anomalous devices and then challenges the technical community and amateurs to build them and then try to figure out why they work.

Among the devices covered are dowsing rods, energy pyramids, pendulums, and symbolic machines. There’s plenty here to fall deep into the rabbit-hole of pseudoscience, but what makes this book exceptional is the author’s open mind and the rational discourse on esoteric topics.

Mr. Stine claims that he’s made many of these machines work himself and his hope is that his readers may be able to “design, carry out and validate a repeatable experiment that will lead toward the development of a viable hypothesis”.

Amazing and Wonderful Mind Machines You Can Build

ISBN-13: 978-1560870753 ISBN-10: 1560870753

Given what this website is all about, I couldn’t agree more.

Breakthrough : An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication with the Dead – Konstantin Raudive (1971-03-02)

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Here’s the excerpt: “This book is the documented result of 6 years’ arduous research into an astounding scientific phenomenon, accidentally discovered in Sweden. In some ways, and for reasons not yet fully understood, voices of dead persons linked by affection or interest with the experimenter appear during playbacks of tape recordings on which no such voices were audible at the time of the original recording.”

This one is a great read but hard to find, if you’re lucky you might be able to grab a used hard cover edition from Thriftbooks or Amazon. The original version came with a vinyl that contained some of the actual recorded transcripts.

Konstantin Raudive is one of the fathers of “electronic voice phenomena” or EVP. He popularized the phrase ITC or “Instrumental Trans-Communication” to describe his method of “communications” with the spirit world. I built one of the diode detector devices that he details in his book. Check out this post for the results of my experiments.

Here’s the wordcloud of the book text:

Yes, that is Hitler in there. Raudive would like us to believe that Hitler spoke to him in Latvian. Also there are accounts of voice sessions that involve other political leaders. Personally, I’m less interested in the voice transcripts than the ideas behind his recording devices.

If you check out the book, leave a comment and let me know what you think.