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S2E06 TRANSCRIPT:  

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Yucca: Welcome back to The Wonder: Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host Yucca.

Mark: And I'm Mark.

Yucca: And this week we are talking about manifestation, about creating your own reality and luck.

Mark: right.

So a lot of big topics all rolled into one discussion.

Yes, Yes, because if there is any one thing that it can be said that humans all over the world seek to accomplish through magical or ritual practices, the cultivation of luck is probably number one, whether it's luck in love or luck with money or luck with health, those are the big three. But. Luck in politics, luck in, aspirations to better jobs or just so many things.

Yes to win lotteries all that kind of thing. And so we'll be talking about our understanding of what luck is, and also talking about the whole concept of manifestation and creating and this idea that we can create our own reality. So let's get started.

Yucca: So to start with this idea of the being able to manifest or create our own reality is one that is very popular in the pagan community and adjacent communities, as well as in many other modern religions. It's a very strong idea in many types of Christianity, for instance, where it might manifest more as praying rather than whatever your ritual practice or magic practices. Of course, another topic to get into is that magic? It's just depends on what you call it, but but there's a lot of layers to this in terms of what we have direct influence over and what we don't.

Mark: Right, and we should say at the outset that this desire is a very natural human desire. We live in a world that has all these different factors and there's. It could seem like a lot of chaos going on around us all the time, because the world is constantly evolving with new emergent phenomenon happening all the time, including in our lives, new people come along, new situations come along.

Some of them good for us, some of them not so good for us. So the desire to have some control over that, it's very natural. It. It completely makes sense that humans tend to want that that level of control. And that certainly has driven much of the development of Western occultism among, other systems of magical effort.

And there's so there's no doubt that this has been a great focus for for many of the people going back many centuries who have tried to influence reality through ritual and religious practices.

Yucca: And it's a really tricky area because there are some places where there's very strong evidence that we do have influence. For instance, in medical studies, there's a very strong correlation between the patient's general outlook and belief about the outcome and the actual outcome. This is very well-documented.

Mark: Now it's not. Documented that the belief or practice or prayer or whatever of anyone else has any impact on the health of the patient that's been tested pretty thoroughly. And there really is not good evidence to suggest that.

Yucca: Yeah. Now I'm aware of a study in which the patient had someone praying or practicing over them and that improved the outcome. But I don't know of any in which they did not know whether it was happening, whether it was blind, if they were unaware of the person praying or practicing for them. But once in which it's someone else was doing it over them, there was definitely an improvement

Mark: Sure. And this goes to the power of laying on of hands and practices like acupuncture and Reiki and things like that, which probably mostly in terms of their effectiveness have to do with the giving of attention. To the patient and the and the physical contact, the beneficial nature of physical contact that we as mammals experience we're very social creatures and this is why we like to pet cats and dogs.

Yucca: well, and the belief that it will do it right. The placebo and the playfully named nocebo are really very