I don’t know what a “normal” book is these days, or how many men my age even bother to read any more. I have always been an avid reader, and my tastes have been pretty normal for a nerdy guy. I have, however, always had a taste for unusual and esoteric books, a taste that I inherited from my grandfather. On a recent visit to my home state, I was gifted several of his more unusual volumes, and I’ve been slowly plowing through them over recent months.

Like me, my grandfather was a man of science. He was a radar operator in the Air Force and founded a radio company in civilian life, spending his working years building a network of repeater and broadcast towers throughout New England. He was also a man who was keen on exploring ideas some might consider far out. Among his favorite topics were UFOs, which he encountered on radar in the Air Force; remote viewing; and psychic phenomena. His library is chock full of fascinating books.

Today’s book is entitled How to Use Astral Power: Key to a Miraculous New Life, authored by Dr. Reginald DeKoven MacNitt.

Overview

The premise of this book is more or less what it says on the spine: by learning to use Astral Powers, the common person can unlock a whole new world of possibilities. The author, a psychologist trained at the University of Michigan, asserts that one can build a career, make smart investments, improve one’s health, or attract desirable relationships into one’s life by the simple and rigorous application of a few basic principles.

To support this argument, Dr. MacNitt leans heavily on the power of the anecdote. This text is rife with stories of people the author knows in a personal or professional capacity, often abbreviated to initials or first names only. The anecdotes are told with that specifically old-school American flair so common in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. I picture these stories being narrated by a man in wool trousers, suspenders, and a fedora.

While there are plenty of anecdotes, there is no real statistical evidence provided in the text. We’ll just have to trust Dr. MacNitt¹ on this stuff. I think that’s probably okay in this case. This book isn’t intended to be a scientifically rigorous proof of concept. It’s not intended to be an academic study proving a specific idea or point. The book is more humanist than scientist. The idea is to teach people easy methods to release their inner potential, and in that sense I would say it’s a success.

The Easy Methods

One of this book’s most successful points, to me, is that it is incredibly approachable for the common person. Dr. MacNitt doesn’t lean on a lot of jargon. The language is plain and straightforward, and the exercises he recommends to the reader are easy to do and require no special equipment or training. A lot of these exercises mirror practices that are popular today. Dr. MacNitt is essentially advocating for practices like affirmation, visualization, and mindfulness meditation, all popular — and believed to be effective — today.

Meditation for Connection

One of the earliest exercises proposed in the book is titled “An Exercise to Open Up Your Inner Self.” Find a comfortable chair, sit down, and relax. Close your eyes and let in an awareness of the great source of power from which your life stems. Understand that you are part of a larger connected fabric of consciousness, and that you can connect to this larger consciousness. Focus all of your mental energy on this connection, and visualize the power flowing in and out of you like rays of sunlight.

Repeat to yourself: “This is not my imagination. The rays of my consciousness and creativity are reaching out into the farthest corners of the universe. I am truly tapping the all powerful Astral Power that God intended to use for my own success and happiness on earth.”

Mental-Action Images

A complementary technique that MacNitt offers the reader is the use of mental-action images. A mental action-image is a clear mental picture of a specific scenario that one wishes to manifest or experience. The notion of the mental-action image came to MacNitt when he was daydreaming in a ‘rather dull psychological lecture’ and suddenly tuned back in to hear his professor wrapping up a long lecture with the bullet point that “Ideas tend to work their way out into action.” MacNitt explains to the reader that what this actually means is that the focused application of the imagination can lead to tangible results in the material world.

You keep putting mental-action images in your mind of what you want your life to be like and your mind will make it possible for you to materialize these images into physical reality.

This might sound like bullshit to the modern materialist, but I implore you to think twice about this. What MacNitt is describing here is the process of visualization. Athletes, musicians, actors, surgeons, pilots, and countless other professionals who work in the physical world use this exact technique to accomplish real results. Rally car drivers close their eyes and mentally map the course, going so far as to pretend to hold a steering wheel and make the turns as they navigate the course in their mind. Athletes visualize making complex plays. Surgeons visualize the steps for a successful operation. Pilots will visualize stunts, complex approaches, and other maneuvers. There is absolutely something true in what MacNitt is presenting here: focused application of consciousness to the visualization of a specific outcome or course of action makes it much more likely that such a course of action will eventually succeed.

RCC: Relax, Concentrate, Contemplate

Perhaps the most useful method in the book is Dr. MacNitt’s ‘Magic Formula’: the RCC method. This stands for Relax, Concentrate, Contemplate. This method is both simple and effective. It combines meditation, visualization, and prayer to help you achieve whatever goal you’ve set for yourself.

First: relax. Sit down somewhere comfortable where you won’t be disturbed. Close your eyes, slow your breathing, and breathe through your belly. Settle in. Count your breaths, let your thoughts flow over you, and sink deep into relaxation.

Second: concentrate. Visualize your goal. Develop a strong mental-action image. What is it you are seeking? What does it look like? What are some details you can focus on? Focus your mind and your consciousness on your specific goal. Pour your cognitive power into this mental-action image, and let it absorb you.

Finally: contemplate. Use the method described in Meditation for Connection. Focus on connecting to the currents of your consciousness, and follow them back to the source of your consciousness. Connect with the larger consciousness from which we all spring. If you are religious, pray. Be open and receptive. Open your mind and your consciousness to whatever God (or your version of God) might have to say to you. Picture a strand of golden light emanating from your head and ascending into the cosmos, intertwining with the strands of God’s own consciousness. Picture these strands returning to you, passing through you, and then leaving your body, flowing from your fingers and toes out into the world, completing a loop of connection between yourself, God, and the material world.

Wackier Methods

The methods described above are pretty easy to stomach. I imagine that they are relatively palatable for most normies operating in the western world today. But Dr. MacNitt doesn’t stop there: he also advocates for the use of astral projection, psychic space travel, and connection with Astral Helpers, detailing several specific methods to achieve astral travel.

I know this sounds like a lot: materialist me from a decade ago would have immediately shut down and blown off anything that comes after that collection of words as utter nonsense. But there might just be something to this. After all, intelligence agencies in the United States and Russia spent decades working on this exact technology, referring to it as Remote Viewing and operating massive enterprises like Project Star Gate to explore its utility. I’ve never had any success with astral projection or remote viewing, but I’ve never made a concerted effort to be successful at them either.

There’s a lot more to say about these topics, but I think it would take me pretty far outside of the scope of this blog post. I’ll have to try Dr. MacNitt’s psychic space travel methods sometime and report back to you here.

Opinion

On the surface, this book sounds like any book of new-wave spiritual guru nonsense. Many books promise that if you close your eyes and really believe, you can accomplish great things. If you only try super hard to unlock your latent psychic powers and you’ll be able to dominate the world. Put out good energy to attract good energy. These tired old tropes are so routine that they’re almost laughable. You mean to tell me that visualizing it real hard will get me a promotion and a raise and a nice house? Why isn’t everyone super rich then?

I think these criticisms are valid to some extent. I also think there’s a grain of truth in the methods proposed in this book. I think that the power of the human mind is barely tapped, and that there are a lot of forces in the world designed to distract us and siphon that cognitive power away from us. We all carry small devices filled with software that is explicitly designed to steal our cognitive power, our attention and our intention, from us. These devices are aggressively marketed to us by people who do not want to see us succeed, people who profit from our misery and harvest our attention and intention to make money for themselves. That alone suggests to me that there is something incredibly valuable about the human mind, and that perhaps we should consider going back to the old ways instead of leaning ever further into the technological apocalypse of our modern times.

Dr. MacNitt’s methods might seem crazy to a modern mind, but my grandfather — who subscribed to this sort of philosophy — is proof to me that it can work. He was a happy, successful, and wealthy man who built a life and a business from the ground up by focusing his mental energy in the direction he wanted to go. I think we could all learn a few valuable lessons from this book about the very real benefits of focusing our attention and intention in a more structured and developed way.

1. Ever the skeptic, I checked and found Dr. MacNitt’s PhD dissertation online. ↩︎