Life is strange, and by all accounts the physical reality that sustains it is far stranger still. The absurdity of life on Earth increasingly makes viable the interpretation that we live in some kind of simulation, or video game, intended perhaps for the development of conscious minds on their way to ascension to godhood. If we are to become gods in some other reality, we should start thinking and acting like them in this current one. The goal of the Journal of Applied Magic is therefore quite simple: to figure out how an individual human can live like the minor god of their own objective reality. This means enabling a person to manipulate reality with their thoughts, emotions, and intentions, through careful practice and lifestyle adjustments while keeping as close as possible to arguments grounded in peer-reviewed scientific research (and occasionally declassified CIA documents or religious texts), in addition to developing premonitions for the future, the ability of foresight, remote-viewing, astral projection, telepathy, and other abilities most frequently explored and developed in classified military intelligence training programs.

If humanity has the ability to live as minor gods in this life what prevents us from doing so already? Any good story needs an antagonist and the antagonist of humanity is The Blight - a widespread cultural and social phenomenon that seeks to control individuals through narratives of fear that are spread by hijacking well-intentioned people’s sense of empathy and civic duty. Most humans are mostly good when given the chance, but a very small number of people can co-opt good-natured intentions through radicalizing narratives and extremist alarmism over things like climate change, artificial intelligence, and so on, that turn people against otherwise liberating technologies of abundance. The long-march of technological progress is to uplift humanity from suffering and fear and turn us towards positive-sum games that serve the greatest good. Yet everywhere we turn the path of the righteous builder is beset on all sides by the forces of bureaucracy, known as Agents of the Blight.

The starting point for the Journal is a new theory of consciousness, Unified Conscious Field Theory, which takes two central premises as starting points: experiences are valid indicators of reality and so need be explained, and not dismissed (e.g. premonition, intuition, after-life, DMT elves, etc); and secondly, that microtubules are one-dimensional superconductors. The conscious mind is hypothesized to consist of two electrically coupled computing networks, a conventional neural network in the familiar axon-dendrite-synapses, and a quantum mechanical computing network sustained by the superconducting cytoskeleton. ‘Magic’ in the sense of thoughts shaping reality is therefore almost entirely explained by electromagnetic field interactions and the existence of higher physical dimensions and a fully symmetric view of time. Therefore ‘magic’ does not mean the conjuring of things directly into existence from the void, but more often the simple influencing or re-arranging outcomes of probabilistic systems. The existence of magical phenomena to the observer is therefore often mostly a choice of narrative - did their intentions manifest that outcome, or was it a coincidence? Does time go both directions, and therefore am I being influenced by the future, or am I re-arranging the past? Did this thought originate in my head, or was it someone else's? And so on.

While there are many complicated theories of consciousness that perhaps are more technically accurate than UCFT, none of them point the way towards how we can finally unite science and spirituality into a Theory of Applied Magic and become minor gods. So, we needed a new one. After all, all models are wrong but only some are useful. The point of UCFT isn’t to claim correctness but rather like the Bohr model of the atom it gives conceptual leverage over a large number of apparently disparate phenomena, from dark matter to democratic republics, matching strange physics to strange experiences. The rather hilarious result is that UCFT reduces a great many cultural forms of expression, like jewelry and hairstyles, along with spiritual practices, like meditation and qi-gong, into the framework of radiofrequency engineering of antenna theory, noisy channels, impedance matching, resonance, and so on, with implications for topics like temple architecture and nightclub design.

Beyond solving the hard and soft problems of consciousness, uniting science and spirituality into a Theory of Applied Magic, liberating the human condition from The Blight, and enabling individuals to live like minor gods of their own reality, the primary long-term purpose of this Journal is to sell merchandise.