2025: The Year of Magic

Are we on the brink of a consciousness revolution?

Jan 13, 2025

2025 may be the year that magic returns to the world. Or, to be more precise, the modern Western world.

Or, to be even more precise, the year that magic goes mainstream: the year that tech bros, VCs, and your Boomer dad get redpilled, in the original 1999 The Matrix sense: realizing that the reality they’ve inhabited up till now is something like a computer simulation, or, more traditionally: a dream, a rainbow, a magic show, a heat shimmer on the road to nirvana.

Specifically, I want to address the rise in mainstream consciousness of a few related ideas: 1) that psi effects like telepathy might be real, 2) that consciousness might be as fundamental, or more fundamental than matter, and 3) that all manner of ‘woo’ phenomena, from spiritual awakening to astrology and shamanism, should therefore be taken seriously.

I’m writing this edition of MMM in response to two recent essays I enjoyed: Tom Morgan’s Inside the Telepathy Tapes and Packy McCormick’s The Return of Magic.

Both of these pieces are, in turn, written in response to the meteoric rise of The Telepathy Tapes, which briefly passed The Joe Rogan Experience to become the #1 podcast in America on Thursday.

In case you haven’t heard, The Telepathy Tapes claim that certain nonverbal autistic children can communicately telepathically, with a rate of accuracy (~95%) that far surpasses anything seen in previous ESP research.

Some of the children in the podcast also make statements about the way they experience reality that are in line with the teachings of the world’s great religions and mystical traditions: broadly, that God is real and some kind of universal consciousness; that we’re not separate beings, but somehow part of that universal consciousness; that the material world arises from consciousness, not the other way around; that God/universal consciousness is also somehow Love; and that Love is the most important thing in life as well as the glue that holds the universe together.

The response to The Telepathy Tapes has been wild. In his recent essay, Packy McCormick writes:

“On December 1st, I started listening to The Telepathy Tapes. By December 2nd, about halfway through Episode 9, I believed in God.”

Have you ever watched a friend get really into a genre of music or a hobby that you’ve been into since you were, like, 12? Say they start listening to metal or training in martial arts with all the zeal of the newly converted, while you look on with with a mix of pride, annoyance, and caution borne from years of experience with that thing? Or say your favorite underground band from the 90s suddenly blows up, and now Gen Z-ers are making TikToks about them?

To be fair, I think it’s a good thing that these subjects are getting more mainstream attention. When writers coming from more traditionally left-brained fields like science, technology, and business take ‘woo’ ideas seriously, it lends a certain gravitas that, frankly, I myself cannot provide, as a somewhat neurodivergent psychotherapist and former Religious Studies major who’s believed in magic since I was, like, 12.

What I’m hoping to provide in this essay is additional context and resources for those who are just stepping out into this brave new world, as well as a few caveats.

Defining Magic

The 20th century occultist Aleister Crowley famously defined magick (he spelled it with a ‘k’ at the end to distinguish it from stage magic or prestidigitation) as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.”

For the purposes of this essay, I’m actually not talking about anything that specific—like what would be called “manifestation” or the “Law of Attraction” in the popular spiritual discourse, or even the quantum entanglement that Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” although both of those things are potential implications of a magical worldview.

Instead, when I write about the Return of Magic in this essay I’m talking about something broader: the return of a traditional worldview—or the emergence of a new one—in which in which Mind is at least as fundamental as Matter, or that both are part of what Carl Jung called unus mundus (Latin for “one world”—in other words, non-dual)—and that all kinds of freaky shit is possible as a result.

The Return of Magic is about re-enchanting the world. In contrast to the scientific materialist view of the world, in which God is dead, life is inherently meaningless, and the Earth is a mass of “natural resources” to be measured and converted into capital, a re-enchanted world is one of infinite meaning and infinite possibility, in which everything is alive and connected, and each one of us is part of a greater whole. This shift is what I was pointing to when I renamed this Substack from Mindful Mondays to Mind, Meaning, and Magic this past May.

The Telepathy Tapes in the Context of Psi Research

The core claim of The Telepathy Tapes is that some nonverbal autistic kids can communicate telepathically with their parents, teachers, and caregivers. These kids demonstrate a roughly 95% rate of accuracy in guessing numbers, words, shapes and so on, which positively dwarfs the best results seen in traditional ESP research—which consistently shows results that are just slightly better than chance.

Predictably, the skeptical backlash against the podcast has already started, with critics arguing that the experiments are either flawed or outright fraudulent. Addressing these arguments is outside the scope of the present essay; however, I encourage you to go back and read Tom and Packy’s essays, which link to both the skeptics and some responses to the skeptics that are worth considering.

One key point is that the tests featured in The Telepathy Tapes are not double-blind, randomized, controlled trials performed in a university laboratory setting. Therefore, by definition they don’t meet the criteria to be accepted as proof by the scientific establishment.

However, as case studies, they could provide models for that kind of mainstream research—if they were able to get funding and approval, which, as any psi researcher will tell you, isn’t easy. That’s partly because the mainstream scientific establishment isn’t interested in research that questions the very foundations of its own worldview—that of scientific materialism and physicalism, in which the universe is made exclusively of matter and that consciousness is generated by the brain.

As author Mitch Horowitz has repeatedly argued, it’s why psi research (research into psychic phenomena) is the red-headed stepchild of science: not because of a lack of evidence, but because the evidence doesn’t fit with established models of reality. As Mitch notes, there is over 100 years of solid evidence for the existence of ESP. That evidence meets the standards usually required to be accepted as scientific fact. And yet, because the current, materialist paradigm can’t explain the mechanism of action for psi effects (i.e. how they work), skeptics simply throw the research results out with the bathwater—a process that strikes me as decidedly irrational and unscientific.

It’s in this context that we should see The Telepathy Tapes: not as an anomalous phenomenon, but as part of the long arc of psi research that has consistently shown that humans can detect or communicate information, at a distance, at a rate better than would be expected from chance alone. Hopefully, the podcast can raise enough awareness (and money) to eventually test its claims in a more rigorous setting.

As Tom Morgan puts it in his essay,

On the one hand you have the possibility that this podcast is a product of willful gullibility, deliberate deception or experimental incompetence. On the other hand, you have nothing less than a cultural black swan event for the proof of non-local consciousness.

It’s the latter possibility that I think is really important—not telepathy, per se, but telepathy as evidence for consciousness being (as Wordsworth might have put it) “far more deeply interfused” with the fabric of reality than a simple epiphenomenon of matter and the physical brain.

And The Telepathy Tapes are just one ripple among wider cultural currents that could contribute to a Return of Magic: the sentiment in theoretical physics that “spacetime is doomed,” the renaissance of philosophical idealism (as opposed to materialism), the resurgence of Christianity, scientific research on jhanas and spiritual awakening, the prospect of superintelligent AI, even UFOs could herald the re-enchantment of the modern West.

Was Magic Ever Really Lost?

The other point I want to make in this essay is that while tech bros in the West may just be discovering magic in 2025, the majority of humans on planet Earth have lived inside a magical paradigm since the Paleolithic.

In this statement, I include basically every country and culture outside the modern Western world (primarily Europe and North America) as well as everyone who lived prior to the Enlightenment era that started in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Before that, even white Europeans believed in witchcraft, magic, astrology, angels, demons and, as Shakespeare put it, “more things in Heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Pre-modern and early modern people weren’t idiots. Neither are indigenous and traditional cultures around the world. Many of these cultures had advanced knowledge of math, astronomy, and engineering. They built the pyramids of Giza and Chichen Itza as well as the cathedrals of Chartres and Notre Dame. Magic was not a superstition for them, so much as an integral part of their philosophical and theological worldview, one which saw humans as part of a greater spiritual whole, an interconnected web of life, consciousness, and meaning.

Telepathy may seem like an anomaly in the modern West, but certain tribal peoples in South America routinely use psychedelic drugs for hunting, literally seeing visions of exactly where game animals will appear in the forest. And anthropologists have repeatedly documented instances of all kinds of psychic phenomena in their field work with traditional cultures around the globe, including instances of telepathy, precognition, and spiritual healing (a discourse, which, like psi research, has often been suppressed).

Furthermore, the return of magic to the West began a long time ago. The Romantic poets of the 19th century were reacting to the rationalism of the Enlightenment era as well as the environmental destruction and human degradation caused by the Industrial Revolution. New England Transcendentalists like Ralph Waldo Emerson were influenced by Eastern spiritual texts like the Bhagavad Gita, which spoke of universal consciousness. The New Thought movement in America explored the idea that Mind is universal and thoughts could be causal. Early 20th-century spiritual teachers like Aleister Crowley and G.I. Gurdjieff taught both Eastern and Western methods for realizing higher states of consciousness. Carl Jung explored not only the unconscious, but traditional magical disciplines like alchemy, astrology, and the I Ching. Avant garde figures like Aldous Huxley experimented with psychedelic drugs and wrote about the Perennial Philosophy, paving the way for the popularization of both psychedelics and Eastern philosophy in the 1960s, which has persisted, in one form or another, up to the present day.

And so the consciousness revolution of 2025 will be another wave among many that have broken on the shore of Western consciousness since the Enlightenment; and in a global context, less a revolution than a return to what has been normative consciousness for homo sapiens for the last 200,000 years.

Why Magic Matters: Healing the Meaning Crisis

None of the above is meant to diminish the Return of Magic. On the contrary, I am up on the barricades waving the banner for this revolution.

I’ve written before about cognitive scientist John Vervaeke’s concept of the Meaning Crisis—the loss of meaning in the modern West—and how it contributes to our widespread feelings of anxiety, depression, and loneliness, as well as the larger metacrisis driving existential risks to humanity’s future.

The Return of Magic is necessary for healing the meaning crisis and the larger metacrisis because (as Einstein allegedly said) “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” In order to restore meaning to our lives and prevent or mitigate the existential risks to our world, we need a worldview that sees life as interconnected, not disposable; meaning-rich rather than meaningless; and full of possibilities rather than dead ends.

As Packy McCormick writes,

The Return of Magic isn’t a rejection of reason and science. Reason and science have gotten us here, and we need science to expand. But we must simultaneously rediscover the wonder and intuition that we’ve forgotten, so that we might see the universe as alive, connected, and full of possibilities.

To that purpose, I’m sharing the following resources for re-enchanting your worldview. This is far from being a complete list, but my hope is that it will provide you with an on-ramp to the infinite superhighway of magic.

Mind, Meaning, and Magic

2025: The Year of Magic

Are we on the brink of a consciousness revolution?

Defining Magic

The Telepathy Tapes in the Context of Psi Research

Was Magic Ever Really Lost?

Why Magic Matters: Healing the Meaning Crisis

Recommended Reading and Resources for Re-Enchanting Your World

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