How They Hack Your Website: Overview of Common Techniques

We hear the same terms bandied about whenever a popular site gets hacked. You know… SQL Injection, cross site scripting, that kind of thing. But what do these things mean? Is hacking really as inaccessible as many of us imagine — a nefarious, impossibly technical twilight world forever beyond our ken?

Not really.

When you consider that you can go to Google right now and enter a search string which will return you thousands of usernames and passwords to websites, you realize that this dark science is really no mystery at all. You'll react similarly when you see just how simple a concept SQL Injection is, and how it can be automated with simple tools. Read on, to learn the basics of how sites and web content management systems are most often hacked, and what you can do to reduce the risk of it happening to you.

SQL Injection
SQL Injection involves entering SQL code into web forms, eg. login fields, or into the browser address field, to access and manipulate the database behind the site, system or application.

When you enter text in the Username and Password fields of a login screen, the data you input is typically inserted into an SQL command. This command checks the data you've entered against the relevant table in the database. If your input matches table/row data, you're granted access (in the case of a login screen). If not, you're knocked back out.

The Simple SQL Injection Hack
In its simplest form, this is how the SQL Injection works. It's impossible to explain this without reverting to code for just a moment. Don't worry, it will all be over soon.

Suppose we enter the following string in a Username field:

' OR 1=1

The authorization SQL query that is run by the server, the command which must be satisfied to allow access, will be something along the lines of:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ?USRTEXT '
AND password = ?PASSTEXT?

…where USRTEXT and PASSTEXT are what the user enters in the login fields of the web form.

So entering `OR 1=1 — as your username, could result in the following actually being run:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ?' OR 1=1 — 'AND password = '?

Two things you need to know about this:
['] closes the [username] text field.

'' is the SQL convention for Commenting code, and everything after Comment is ignored. So the actual routine now becomes:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = '' OR 1=1

1 is always equal to 1, last time I checked. So the authorization routine is now validated, and we are ushered in the front door to wreck havoc.

Let's hope you got the gist of that, and move briskly on.

Brilliant! I'm gonna go hack me a Bank!
Slow down, cowboy. This half-cooked method won't beat the systems they have in place up at Citibank, evidently.

Mind Tricks for Attracting Beautiful Women

Want to Get Someplace New, Fast? Start by Looking at a Map.

Why be one of the millions of men who’ve spent their lives thinking things like, “That girl liked me—how did I mess things up? What did I do wrong?”

If you really want to feel your seductive muscles beginning to bulge, if you really want to start feeling powerful—if you really want to see your seduction skills get bone-slicing sharp, so that you start seeing genuine sexual results, fast— then, for the next few minutes, you’ve got to put aside the gritty, sticky, haunting little details, and look up at the Big Picture.

The Big Picture, when it comes to seducing women, is the realization that women are profoundly different from men. Not just on the outside, but on the inside as well. Not just behaviorally, but cognitively. Not just because of social conditioning, but because of neurology. The brains of men and women are physically different in specific, measurable ways.

Putting aside the details for now, just remember that women seem different because they are different. And understanding exactly how they are different, understanding how they think, will give you a profound and permanent and ever-growing advantage over the men around you. So: A woman perceives and thinks differently than you.

She inhabits a completely different subjective universe than you.

Actions that make perfect sense to you can seem irrelevant or off-putting to her.

Actions that seem ridiculous to you can be intoxicating and erotic to her.

Suppose you want to drive someplace new, someplace you’ve never been. Let’s call it, for convenience’s sake, the Land of Sexual Delight. Do you just hop in the car and hit the gas? Well, that might work—of course, you might be celebrating your 83rd birthday by the time you get there. If you want to get there while you’re young-- soon— as fast as possible—starting right now, I suggest you start with a map, so you can plot out exactly how to get where you going. The map of seduction you’re going to imagine now is actually a comparison of three perspectives: Telescopic, Face to Face, Microscopic. Or Macro, Iso, Micro. Or the Societal, the Dyadic, and the Personal. Each of these levels gives you a set of tools and distinctions for making women very horny very fast. Operating with any one of these levels in mind gives you a big advantage over the guy next to you in a club or bar. Using them all gives you a huge advantage.

The Tribal Level: “It Takes a Village”

Women are social creatures. Really social creatures. Even the shy ones. Women, in relation to men, are physically weak and physically vulnerable. They rely on social bonds for safety, and create social bonds through emotionality and cunning.

Because women depend on social bonds, they are highly attuned to the opinions of those around them. Highly attuned, and highly susceptible. When you and a woman are part of a larger social grouping—if you and she are in a bar, for example—her opinion of you will be strongly influenced by the opinion of those around her. Trusting to collective wisdom, she will place a premium on others’ perceptions.
Her initial opinion of you will usually be outweighed by the combined opinion of the three friends she came to the bar with... or the four random people standing next to her.

Therefore, to get a hot girl to want you, get her not-so-hot friends to want you.

Get her to see how many people approve of you.

Show her how many people, male and female, you get along with.

Demonstrate the width and breadth of your social web. From her perspective, the wider your social web, the wider her social web will become, if she succeeds in winning you.

By winning you, every member of your social web will be transformed from a possible source of physical harm to a source of physical safety. The more people who seem to like you, the better and more valuable you must be. The more people who seem to like you, the safer—if she wins you—she will be.

You might think, “Well, sure—but what if I don’t know anyone there? What if I don’t have a social web?”

Easy.

You create one.

And that, too, is easy.

Just memorize the six ancient and magical words of Instant Apparent Club Friendship: “How ya doin’?” and “Yeah, that’s cool.”

You just go around the room, making lots of superficial contacts, having lots of brief, empty, upbeat conversations. With an air of friendly, cheerful indifference, ask various people you don’t know, especially couples, “How ya’ doin?” Shake hands, if it seems appropriate. Then nod, smile, say “Yeah, that’s cool.” And immediately leave to talk with someone else.

The idea is to make sure as many women as possible see you having apparently friendly conversations with as many people as possible. Each such apparently friendly interaction gives you social credit, in the eyes of female observers.

For women, social connection equates to social power.

By having lots of short, friendly conversations, you are demonstrating social power.

Which makes you attractive and desirable.

To get the girl you want—to make the girl want to get you— let her see you talking to people you don’t want.

By going through the room, casually talking to lots of people, you are marking territory. You become the master of ceremonies. The star. The main attraction. The place becomes your place; the revelers, your guests.

Don’t worry about “rejection”. Instead, treat every interaction as a successful interaction. Smile, nod—“That’s cool, dude.” Be blithe, serene, deliberately shallow, perfectly indifferent.

Act like a game show host—slick, smooth, seamless, nice-yet-detached. Be friendly, in a way that suggests you have no personal interest whatsoever. Hey, being nice to the customers is just part of your job—besides, you’re obviously in on The Real Party that will take place later in the Hidden VIP Lounge, so what do you care about what happens out on the floor, among the peasants and little people?

“How ya doin’?” Next.

Be friendly, precisely because you couldn’t care less.

Become attractive, by caring so little, that you aren’t even afraid of rejection.

Care so little, that you become everyone’s friendly acquaintance.

And by being everyone’s friendly, frictionless, non-adhesive, uncatchable acquaintance, become the emblem of that universal social acceptance which women so crave.

After you demonstrate that you’re a Man of the People, friend to all, presumably backed by the full force and credit of the community at large, pick a prominent spot, a spot with few or no other people, a spot from which you can be easily seen by the woman, or women, you want.

Stand out.
And relax.
Kick back.
Completely.
Challenge yourself to relax as much as you possibly can.
Stretch out.Get cat-in-the-sun, ball-scratchingly relaxed.
Sprawl your arms and legs, so they stick out from your body at wildly different angles.
Move the furniture, if it makes you more comfortable.
Roll your neck, if it makes you feel more comfortable.
Push your hands through your hair, if it makes you feel good.
Forget about the world around you.
Let yourself focus entirely on feeling really, really good.
Let your whole body send this signal: “I feel really, really good, and all I care about is my own pleasure, and I feel much more pleasure than you.”

Maybe you’ll be approached, maybe not. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you will be noticed. You will be remarked on. And what matters much more is that you actually gave yourself time to feel good and relax. Whatever else happens, doesn’t matter. You feel good, and that’s what matters.

The more pleasure and comfort you seem to feel—and the more pleasure and comfort you do feel—the more pleasure and comfort a woman will believe that you can make her feel.

More on this later.

At this point, you’ve worked the room, and you’ve cut a profile. The next step is to choose a target. If she’s in a group, approach and engage the other members of the group first. Make your target feel confused, neglected, and envious by disregarding her and chatting up her friends, male and female.

If you like, increase the pressure by leaving that group, and chatting with another.
Be seen with some other pretty girls.

Get in the habit of leading girls into silly, strange, childlike behavior in public. Do this by acting like a coach or yoga teacher… or a parody of a coach or yoga teacher. Just tell a girl what to do, in an insistent, stern, demanding (and subtly self-parodying) way. Make sure what you’re telling her to do is something public, rather than private. Persuading two or three girls to do something outlandish is often much easier than persuading one girl alone. Group activity reinforces their friendship with each other.

Give a girl an opportunity to be the center of attention. Allow her to deny responsibility for acting out this need for attention—do this, by playing ringmaster.
You see that wall over there? You, Cindy, stand behind Tatiana and take her hand. Tatiana, extend your other hand—palm up, dammit!—now place it in mine. You still see that wall? Good. Now we’re going to walk across the dance floor directly toward that wall. No stops, no looking in either direction. Now!

Go back to your target.

Now that she’s seen your ability to command attention— now that you’ve got the rock star halo— she’ll feel herself being subtly nudged toward you by millions of years of evolutionary heritage. Her body will be tingling, as all the billion cells of her body elbow each other and whisper to her: Hey, this guy can really kill woolly mammoths!

Thus, the Tribal, Societal model..

Remember, as you start exerting more and more group leadership, that it’s easy to become an authority figure, because humans are programmed to expect hierarchies to develop. The crowd waits for a chieftain to emerge. And one always does. (He needn’t be spectacular or exceptional—he just needs to speak loudly or stride forward boldly—this pretty much qualifies him for the job.) And when one does emerge, the crowd, as a whole, breathes a sigh of relief: At last, someone’s taking charge.

The Parental Level: “Cat and Mouse”

When you and she are alone, your job changes. Now you don’t need to show you can command the room, you need to show that you can control her. And you control her, paradoxically, by not needing to control her.

You control her by making her want to catch you.

You control her by not needing her.

You make her want to catch you by presupposing that she wants to catch you.

You make her want to catch you by explicitly, verbally stating—playfully, but as a fact— that she is the one chasing you.

She wants agreement, acceptance, approval.

Play “keep away” with these things, in the same way that a boy might hold his little sister’s doll out of her reach. Age regress her; infantilize her; make her feel like a child.

Give her some praise or approval; then, in the next breath, take it back. Criticize some other quality she has, or, even better, something she’s doing or failing to do.
Be the teasing, demanding, impossible-to-satisfy father figure—even if you and she are the same age.

As with the group leadership thing, the father-figure thing is a role. It’s an archetype etched in her ideational world. It’s a position waiting to be filled.

Don’t worry about your personal qualifications.

Just remember that she wants someone to play this role with her—to call her bluff, to knock her down to earth, to show that he sees where she’s messing up and has no qualms about letting her know.

And you have no qualms about letting her know, because you don’t care if she rejects you. Hey, she’s the one who’s chasing you, remember? And the world is filled with gorgeous women. Women prettier than she is. And they all want someone like you.

So you’re willing to tell her, “No.”

And the more you demonstrate that you’re not one of the spineless, drooling clowns mesmerized by her big glossy eyes and bone structure and facial symmetry and waist-to-chest ratio—the more you show you’re not a sucker—the more often that you can comfortably and enjoyably tell her, “No,” the sooner she’s going to be willing to ultimately say, “Yes.”

Frustrate her immediate, superficial desire for male subservience—her desire for guys to do what she wants them to--and by doing so, fulfill her deeper, more hidden desire for male supremacy—her desire for one, special man, one better than all the others, who is so strong and so sure of himself and so aware of his own value that she cannot control him and must instead admire and desire him. Your strategy at this level of interaction consists of ambiguity, rejection, unpredictability.

At this level of interaction, your magic words are “Maybe” and “No” and “I’ve changed my mind.”

Remember, this is a social role—she wants you, she wants someone, to do this.

You are not hurting her—you are tantalizing her.

She is not like a dog, eager for a straightforward game of fetch.

She is like a cat, eager for a game of “cat and mouse,” a game in which you offer her something she wants, wave it, make her want it, and then pull it away from her, so that she has to chase it down. And once she chases it down, you take it away from her again—because if you just let her have it, she’ll get bored with it. Take it away from her, so that she again has to chase, and the game becomes fun for her again.

In this case, the thing she wants, the valuable thing you show and then take away, is your attention, approval and affection—or, more simply, the valuable thing is you.

From her perspective, that you can say “No” to her means that you can say “No” to others. You are demonstrating your ability to protect her.

The “stronger” you are, the safer she feels.

Thus the parental, dyadic, one-to-one, I’m OK You’re Not OK, pimps up/hoes down model.

You might still be wondering, though: “Well, if I know a girl really likes me, then it’s easy to be a jerk… but if I’m just a jerk, and she doesn’t like me, what’s to keep her from just telling me off and walking away?”

There are two factors here: First, being cocky and self-assured makes you more interesting and attractive.

Second, you can use words to get her brain excited and sexually aroused.

That’s what we’re going to talk about next.

The Invisible Level: “Eternity in a Grain of Sand”

We’ve talked about using group pressure and social dynamics to make her feel that wanting you is the right thing to do.

We’ve talked about playing “cat and mouse” to make her feel that you are cagey enough to control a situation, and powerful enough to protect her.Now we’re going to drill down to the next, most hidden level: Thoroughly understanding the rules that run her brain, that determine how she sees the world, that lead her to start feeling itchy and tingly and hot and eager.

These rules give you the tricks you need to start punching the hidden buttons in her brain, so can immediately get her increasingly fascinated and restless and sexually aroused.

When you understand how a woman’s brain works, the other pieces start snapping into place. A clear, simple, logical pattern emerges. You start to recognize, more and more easily, that women--their behaviors, their whims, their responses, their sexual hungers, their erotic pressure points--are completely logical and predictable.

Superficially, these things seem illogical—but that’s because you’re a man, and men and women have different mental and physical machinery.

The brains and nerves and organs of men and women operate differently. Compare PCs and Macs. Outwardly, they look pretty similar. But their internal physical components are different. And they run different programs.

When you understand the different programs, in a detailed way, you can do astonishing things with them.

A woman has a different set of mental programs than you do.

I’d say that she has a different set of metaphysics—a different of beliefs about the world—but that would make what we’re talking about sound hard, and it’s actually laughably easy. (Remember, a one year-old kid has a different set of metaphysics than you do; the kid believes everything comes from, and happens in relation to, mommy and daddy. You see things differently, and you know, among other things, that to get the results you want, you need to get the right information, and then take action.)

So you can gain an extraordinary advantage by operating on the invisible, metaphysical level— knowing and shaping how she sees the world and what warm, pleasurable feelings she’s beginning to sense tingling in her body.

Understand this: A woman has different beliefs than you about what is true and real and important, different psychological reactions to common concepts, different biological responses to external stimuli.

And, interestingly, she’s incredibly erotically sensitive to things you aren’t.

By doing certain simple things you ordinarily wouldn’t, you’ll see her face light up and glow; you’ll feel her becoming emotionally warm and open; you’ll hear the low, raw arousal in her voice and know you’ve crossed a threshold.

And she’s hungry. She hides it, but she’s hungry.

You know that ticking clock, the clock of time and opportunity passing you by? It ticks a lot louder for her than for you.

You can make yourself more and more attractive, either by learning how to turn women on or by acquiring wealth (or both!).

Her attractiveness, on the other hand, hits a peak early in life, and then swiftly and steadily declines.

The older she gets, the more her sexual value fades.

The older you get, the more (if you continue to invest in developing your skills) your sexual value can grow.

And it’s quick and easy to make your sexual value grow, when you understand that there’s a quirk to the female mind, and how it gets aroused. You don’t have to be good-looking or rich to meet and enjoy more and more beautiful women; you just have to understand how the female mind works.

When you finally understand how a woman’s mind works, you can easily and naturally and comfortably guide it where you want to go.

A woman’s mind moves like a sailboat.

A man’s mind moves like a car.

If you try to guide a woman as you would a man, you’ll end up bumping the sailboat pointlessly against the pier (how would that feel?)… or going in the wrong direction (seem familiar?)… or being left, not moving, going no place, dead in the water (know what I mean?).

A woman is erotically sensitive to language.

You can use words and ideas to turn her on. Not just any words or ideas—only the ones that slide into her brain’s natural (but hidden!) grooves. The grooves that, most of the time, are left untouched. Empty. Hungry. Unfulfilled.

Know how her brain works, and you’ll find your words filling her mental grooves. You’ll see her face flushing with appreciation.

Remember, her brain, like the rest of her body, is different from yours. It operates in different ways. It releases different chemicals. It processes data differently. It remembers events differently. It gets highly aroused by certain words and ideas.

So when you know what to say and how her brain works, you can take any concept at all and make it brush against the nerve-endings other men can’t see—the nerve-endings other men will likely die, never having really learned about, never having really benefited from. (If you have kids or are planning to have kids, this is the kind of information you really want to pass on, before they hit age 13.)

To start getting a handle on these differences—the differences from which all else springs, the differences that make everything else suddenly clear and simple and logical and easy—you can start watching lots of soap operas. Start watching talk shows aimed at women. Start reading women’s romance novels. Listen to women talk, when they feel really comfortable and relaxed, and when they think there are no men listening. Do this for a couple of weeks, until you truly know, for yourself, that women don’t just seem different—they actually are different. See for yourself that women live in a completely different subjective universe than yours. (Or, if you don’t want to waste all that time and energy, just take the shortcut.)

Remember that when you understand the rules of a woman’s mental universe, you can shape her universe. You can talk about anything, and make it fascinating,
intoxicating, erotic. Her brain becomes a machine you can use, just like a computer; her thoughts become things you can guide, just like a word processing program or a web browser.Remember that by understanding the internal, invisible, metaphysical level, you naturally come to understand the other levels.

And if you want to see the radically different but extremely simple rules of her universe specifically diagrammed and mapped out— if you want to easily and consistently be one step ahead of her, amazing her and dominating and thrilling her again and again with your penetrating insight into the needs she tries to hide and the needs she didn’t realize she had-- if you want to easily discover the exact words and concepts that slide right into the pleasure slots of her skull, so you can choose to turn a potentially boring conversation into something that she experiences as a titanically intense sexual event that makes her eager for more and more and more—if you want to hurry up and get to the Land of Sexual Delight, right now, just go here.

The Art and Science of Sexual Magic

Sex… a word with multiple meanings, manifestations and images that expresses the most fundamental instinct of the animal kingdom. For us mortals sexuality is the expression of how we experience ourselves as sexual beings biologically, physically, emotionally and so on.

The implication of this word, so popular it is the most searched for on the internet, can cover nearly all aspects of the human condition, embracing cultural, political, philosophical and spiritual issues. Regarding human sexuality, Leonardo Boccadoro and Sabina Carulli state:

Human sexuality is not simply imposed by instinct or stereotypical conducts, as it happens in animals, but it is influenced both by superior mental activity and by social, cultural, educational and normative characteristics of those places where the subjects grow up and their personality develops. Consequently, the analysis of sexual sphere must be based on the convergence of several lines of development such as affectivity, emotions and relations.

However, apart from being the source of life, it can also mutate into a harbinger of demise for some. An endless tale of pleasure and obsession, evoking sublime beauty that can so easily become one's worst nightmare. Some of the greatest achievements of humankind have been inspired by this primordial urge and sensation. It has dictated the course of history, both materially and immaterially. A wonder of human existence that has yet to be fully unravelled.

For many it is the vehicle of procreation, whereas for others merely a source of pleasure. Some have been inspired by it to pursue and develop spiritual paths and exercises endeavouring to transcend themselves and to partake in the 'other'. Its power has also been used as the most dreadful weapon to destroy, humiliate and enslave. Despite these differences and many more, our relation to it is the one uniting feature of humanity that we all accept and recognise. Even the absence of it is a reaffirmation of its existence.

What is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploring it as the secret.

Although it is evident from recovered art and artefacts, human achievements and monuments, that sex has always been a central feature of our existence in all its dimensions, never has it occupied such a powerful, ambiguous and obsessive presence as it does in our day and age. Wherever one turns, one is confronted by it, seduced, aroused and terrorised by it. Never has it been so available but also distant, like a spectre flirting with us elusively.

It is no wonder that sexuality has become intertwined with another fascinating, exciting and terrifying feature of human existence that has yet to be understood and fully accepted – magic. Two labyrinths of darklight becoming one…

A Short History of Sex Magic

Sexuality and the occult arts have long been in a state of unholy and tempting matrimony in Western imagination. Since at least the days of the alleged Gnostic heretical acts of worship, the continuing persecution of the Templars and the Cathars and the witch frenzy of the Middle Ages, it is evident that illicit sexual behaviour has easily, but not always objectively, been linked to acts of magic, or what the accusers believed to be acts of magic.

Beyond the realm of ecclesiastical condemnations and mislead evocations of an ungodly pagan past, sexuality has flourished within schools of Western esotericism. From the Jewish mystical Kabala to the Renaissance magic of Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno, and the sexual mysticism of Emanuel Swedenborg during the era of the Enlightenment. All of these embraced in their own individual way the concept of the physical union of male and female sexuality as being an earthly reflection of the conjoining of the active and passive aspects of the Divine. But it was not until the middle of the 19th century that the relationship between esoteric beliefs and sexuality actually manifested into a series of practices, detailed attitudes, and a specific magical category of its own.

Hugh B. Urban, in his exceptional book Magia Sexualis – Sex, Magic and Liberation in Western Esotericism, clearly identifies the superficiality and ignorant approach contemporary Westerners have towards sexual magic:

Judging by the titles in most popular bookstores or the rapidly proliferating Web sites dotting the cyber space, sexual magic is understood fairly in simple terms by most American readers: it is most commonly defined as the 'art of extended orgasm', or 'peak experience in sexual loving'. According to Margo Anand, a widely read New Age author, "sexual energy can be refined and expanded, transporting you to realms of orgasmic delight that offer an endless variety of exquisite experiences. This is a type of magic."

The question remains: why did sex magic flourish in the middle to the late 19th century and continues up until this day?

Despite many attempts on behalf of 'authorities' who endeavour to present sex magic as being the purest expression of an ancient heritage of Western esotericism and a well-kept occult secret that has reached us from the dawn of ages, this magical practice – like many of those who advocate it – is not a rejection of secular modernity but rather an affirmation of many of the ideals of modernity. These ideals are reflections of ideas such as progress, the affirmation of the individual as being an ultimate force in the universe, the recognition of the multidimensional and powerful reality of sex, a scientific endeavour to unravel the secrets of the universe and the overwhelming potential of free will as a form of liberation from suppressive institutions. This also coincides with the endeavour to re-enchant a demystified and secularised modern industrial world through the occult.

I am not implying that sex magic is a product of fantastical renderings superficially relating to a glorified past of arcane knowledge and constant sacred communion with the Divine. Indeed, contemporary occultism has been effectively inspired by esoteric traditions of the past, reaffirmed, rediscovered and reinterpreted in this day and age, and has to be admired for its courage to seek out means to adapt esotericism to a disenchanted world of secular thought and scientific cynicism.

Neither am I proclaiming that sex magic is merely a mask for movements of social change, implying that all ideas and practices revolving around sexual magical applications are romantic decorations of new radical movements that aspire only to cultural liberation and social transformation.

It is my belief that for sex magicians, their sacred art and science is one fully preoccupied with a search for esoteric truths through their personal relationship with the Absolute and the magical universe they inhabit. It might be a combination of effects, both socio-cultural and supranatural, which manifested sex magic into what it is in contemporary occultism.

The second question that remains is why so much attention has been drawn towards sex magic. According to occultists, sex magic transcends the principles of hedonism and in its unveiled essence is a powerful manifestation of magic aligned with cosmic forces and correspondences. The rationale behind this is that if non-spiritual sex can create new life, the intentional ritualised form of sexual intercourse can give birth to the greatest supernatural effects and results. As Aleister Crowley stated, "the root idea is that any form of procreation other than normal is likely to produce results of a magical character."

The Magical Eroticism of Paschal Beverly Randolph

The most important figure in the rise of modern sexual magic was arguably the fascinating yet generally neglected figure of Paschal Beverly Randolph. Born in 1825 to a wealthy Virginian father and a slave from Madagascar, Randolph was a poor, self-educated free black raised in the poorer parts of New York. He was orphaned at a young age and ran away from his foster parents to explore a vast range of new spiritual traditions and to travel the world.

Through his journeys in Egypt and the Middle East, he claims to have been initiated by various seers and holy men, including Egyptian mages and Indian Brahmins. Upon his return to the United States he became involved with various Spiritualist movements and was involved in political movements championing the cause and future of African Americans. These ideas of liberation would become a major theme in his spiritual writings and understanding of sex magic, especially in regards to gender equality.

He also founded a new religious order, which he labelled the Brotherhood of Eulis. Although he had been influenced by European Rosicrucian orders, he claimed his order would surpass them and that the core of their spiritual teachings had a sexual magical element. Unfortunately, Randolph's life ended after a series of tragic events. An accident left him invalid, and this led him to excessive amounts of intoxication. Suspicious that his wife had betrayed him, he committed suicide in 1875.

Randolph's work on sexual magic took place during the era of Victorian America, where the tremendous power of sexuality was slowly being recognised scientifically and socially, where it was praised within the confines of marriage and condemned outside of it. It was also an era of radical social movements and the foundation of various new religious movements, especially the Spiritualist movement, all of which were concerned with the spiritual side of sexuality but not all in the same fashion.

Randolph's main contribution to Western occultism concerns sex. Apart from being an expert in the cure of sexual diseases and dysfunctions, he developed a system and practice of sexual magic that, as he claimed, could achieve all manners of marvels, both worldly and otherworldly. He saw his system of sexual magic as a path to a millennial new world.

Randolph's teachings would later on inspire and influence a host of new magical orders, such as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and the Ordo Templis Orientis, and even various forms of sex magic now available in nearly every mainstream bookstore.

Randolph's system of sexual magic has been described by Hugh B. Urban as "a system of magical eroticism, or affectional alchemy." As Randolph continuously stresses:

LOVE LIETH AT THE FOUNDATION… and Love is convertibly passion, enthusiasm affection heat, fire, SOUL, God… The nuptive moment, the instant wherein the germs of a possible new being are lodged… is the most solemn, serious, powerful and energetic moment he can ever know on earth.

Randolph believed that the sexual drive is the most potent and fundamental force in the universe, due to its natural attraction between the active/positive and the passive/negative. Following Franz Anton Mesmer's pattern of thought, Randolph understood the male and female as opposite yet complimentary electromagnetic forces, with the male genitals being the positive and the female the negative. Because sexual attraction is the most potent and fundamental force in nature, the experience of orgasm is a very primordial, powerful and critical moment in human consciousness. It is the key to magical power. At the moment of climax the soul is exposed to the energies of the universe and new life pours from the spiritual into the material realm. At this point anything that is truly willed can happen.

The moment when a man discharges his seed – his essential self – into a womb is the most solemn, energetic and powerful moment he can ever know on earth; if under the influence of mere lust it be done, the discharge is suicidal… At the moment his seminal glands open, his nostrils expand, and while the seed is going from his soul to her womb he breathes one of two atmospheres, either fetid damnation from the border spaces or Divine Energy from heavens. Whatsoever he shall truly will and internally pray for when Love… is in the ascendant, that moment the prayer's response comes down.

A unique feature of his sexual techniques, apart from the employment and magical use of the orgasm as a means of acquiring otherworldly sympathies, was his emphasis on the mutuality and equality of male and female in their loving union. All forms of sexual abuse within the Victorian framework, whether through masturbation or excessive intercourse, drained the body of the vital energy required for the undertaking of a sexual magical operation.

Although he was accused by many as promoting promiscuity and sexual license under the guise of his sexual magical teachings, Randolph was indeed a very conservative character. His practice of sexual magic is anything but mere hedonistic license. Sex, for Randolph, is strictly for married couples in a state of pure love.

Free-love, disguise it as you may, means sensual license, no more, no less; and wherever its doctrine prevail there will you find either a worn-out debauchee, a freedom-shrieking woman of faded charms,… or brainly men, actually heartless unemotive, spasmodically lecherous.

Although for many in 19th century Victorian America Randolph might appear to be a radical spiritual antinomian threatening the moral and spiritual foundation of society, his teachings on spiritualised love and sexual magic reflect and embody many of the basic sexual values of his day, both physically and spiritually. His system is unlike the sexual techniques developed by many magicians who were inspired by him. His teachings could be no further than the sex 'magick' of the notorious Aleister Crowley.



Sex Magick and the Great Beast

When one conjures up images and sensations of sexual magic, one generally stumbles upon Aleister Crowley before anyone else. Known in the press of his day as "the wickedest man in the world" and self-proclaimed "Great Beast 666," Crowley was the object of much scandal and moral outrage. Rejecting the prudence of Victorian society, Crowley saw sex magic as a supreme source of magical power. Unlike Randolph, Crowley did not advocate sexual magic as being confined to a state of holy matrimony, and instead made use of 'outraging' sexual acts, such as masturbation and homosexual intercourse, which shocked and horrified British society.

However, despite being the sexual hedonistic deviant and the spawn of Satan as presented by the popular press of the early 20th century, Crowley's importance and influence on Western occultism should not be overlooked. His rejection of Victorian morality and his identification of sex as being the supreme magical source introduced new dimensions to the study and practice of the occult. His study of Buddhism and Hinduism transmitted new ideas and techniques that affected the Western Esoteric Tradition in a tremendous way. These and many more have made him one of the most influential figures in the revival of magical traditions.

Born Edward Alexander Crowley in 1875, he was the son of a highly zealous and prudent father who was very well-established in the excessively puritanical Plymouth Brethren. He was raised in a strict Christian home in late Victorian England. Crowley, apart from turning to the occult and sexual excess, was also a prolific poet and an avid mountain climber.

Despite all excesses and taking delight in the accusations hurled at him, he was according to one of his biographers, Lawrence Sutin, an enigmatic, gifted and misunderstood character, and "one of the rare human beings… to dare to prophesy a distinctive new creed and to devote himself… to the promulgation of that creed." He studied at the University of Cambridge and inherited a lot of money, which he spent travelling the world, publishing his works and wasting on excess.

He was first initiated into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, but his relationship with the Order and one of its founding members, MacGregor Mathers, ended in turmoil and controversy. From 1899 onwards, he began travelling to places such as India and Ceylon where he studied Hinduism, Buddhism and Yoga, and was exposed to Tantra. Although he only approached it from the naive and highly ethnocentric angle of the Orientalists of his day and age, it fuelled an interest in combining his version of magic, which he labelled magick, with sexual techniques.

In 1904 Crowley received a revelation from an entity called Aiwass, which Crowley claimed was his guardian angel. Aiwass appeared and dictated to him the Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of the Law), which claimed that Crowley was to be the herald of the third aeon of humankind – the Aeon of Horus. The infamy of him being a black magician and "the wickedest man in the world" was spawned in the period of the 1920s when he founded the Abbey of Thelema at a farmhouse in Cefalu, Sicily. The rule of this community was 'do what thou wilt' and in Urban's words,

Crowley took Rabelais' ideal a good deal further, however, by creating a utopian community in which every desire could be gratified and every impulse expressed, through free experimentation in drugs, sex and physical excess.

By the 1940s Crowley had exhausted all his money, which he had largely spent by 1915, and his will to power. Although he continued to believe The Book of the Law might have a decisive role to play in the era to come, he spent his last years in a small guest house in London increasingly addicted to heroin until his death in 1947.

In his autobiographical account, Confessions, he wrote:

The battle will rage most fiercely around the question of sex… Mankind must learn that the sexual instinct is… ennobling. The shocking evils which we all deplore are principally due to the perversions produced by suppressions. The feeling that it is shameful and the sense of sin cause concealment, which is ignoble, and internal conflict which creates distortion, neurosis, and ends in explosion. We deliberately produce an abscess and wonder why it is full of pus… why it bursts in stench and corruption. The Book of the Law solves the sexual problem completely. Each individual has an absolute right to satisfy his sexual instinct as is physiologically proper for him.

Crowley continued the tradition of sex magic as set out by Randolph, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor and the Ordo Templis Orientis, although he adapted to his own magical system. In 1910 Crowley became involved with the OTO and soon was declared the Sovereign Grand Master General of Ireland, Ioana and all the Britains.

Although the OTO were practicing sex magic before Crowley's reception into the order, he had already revealed the secret of sexual magic in his Book of Lies. According to Crowley, the secret of sex magic is so tremendously powerful that "if this secret which is a scientific secret were perfectly understood… there would be nothing which the human imagination can conceive that not be realised in practice… If it were desired to have an element of atomic weight six times that of uranium that element could be produced."9

Crowley's own diary, Rex de Arte Regia, listed a series of 309 sexual magical acts for purposes both worldly and otherworldly. Also, Crowley wrote a series of rites for the OTO, with the highly dramatic ceremony of the Gnostic Mass being the most popular and central to his mystical system of Thelema within the OTO. He also revised the OTO's initiatory degrees with the eighth degree consisting of an autoerotic sex rite, the ninth a heterosexual one and the eleventh, which he introduced, a homosexual sex rite. Peter Koenig summarises this:

Crowley's VIIIth degree unveiled… that masturbating on a sigil of a demon or meditating upon the image of a phallus would bring power or communication with the divine being… The IXth degree was labelled heterosexual intercourse where the sexual secretions were sucked out of the vagina and when not consumed… put on a sigil to attract this or that demon to fulfil the pertinent wish… In the XIth degree, the mostly homosexual degree, one identifies oneself with an ejaculating penis. The blood (or excrements) from anal intercourse attract the spirits/demons while the sperm keeps them alive.

It is now recognised that Crowley did have some very good knowledge of Indian Yoga and was aware of some of the key features and practices of Indian Tantra. Unlike most Orientalist scholars, he did not denounce Tantra, but instead described it as a valid form of religion and the most advanced form of Hinduism. In his works he frequently used the terms lingam and yoni, the male and female sexual organs, and he compared the IXth degree rite of the OTO with the Tantric view of semen and the rite of maithuna. However, as N. N. Bhattacharyya has argued, most Western authors and magicians, Crowley included, misinterpret and misrepresent Tantra as they only approach it in terms of its sexual elements. The difference lies in the fact that Western magical systems have placed emphasis on the act of sex from the beginning whereas in traditional Hindu Tantra sexual union is a minor part of the spiritual practices, and when it does take place it is merely only one method of awakening Shakti. Even one of Crowley's most devoted students, Kenneth Grant, admitted that Crowley's actual knowledge of Tantra was limited.

Crowley conceived the rational mind as an act of departing and an irregularity of the true human self. He believed he discovered with his system of sex magick a way of destroying the rational mind at the point of orgasm inducing a sense of natural trance and spiritual clarity not confined by the burden of the mundane and the rational. At this climaxing point the divine is allowed to enter into the magical consciousness of the magician. This can be compared, according to Crowley, to the transubstantiation of the elements of the Mass:

The sexual act… is the agent which dissipates the fog of self for one ecstatic moment. It is the instinctive feeling that the physical spasm is symbolic of that miracle of the Mass, by which the material wafer… is transmuted into the substance of the body.

In The Book of Lies Crowley states:

As man loses his personality in physical love, so does the magician annihilate his divine personality in that which is beyond. In love the individuality is slain… Love death therefore, and long eagerly for it. Love destroyeth self… Love breedeth All and None in One.

Beyond the use of sex magic to acquire worldly things, Crowley believed that the purpose of sex magic was destined for achieving supreme spiritual power and the power to conceive a divine child and godlike being. Within this magical operation though, unlike Randolph, the woman, who Crowley regarded as being inferior and limited, was merely a passive vehicle for the male magician to use in his sexual magical rites.

The Bedchamber of Sex Magic

Modern sex magic has been associated with some very enigmatic, remarkable and sometimes radical personalities. Randolph and Crowley have been the ones most associated with the current of sexual magic and have influenced generations of magicians with their pioneering visions. What Randolph and Crowley came to represent in the popular imagination is an outcry for liberation from the suffocating pressures of the Victorians. This is evident from Randolph's system of sex magic as being a path to the dawn of a new era where the inequalities of Victorian America will not exist and the innermost secrets of human life will surface. Although at first glance Crowley's vision appears to not share some of these desires and hopes, upon further scrutiny it is apparent that Crowley too was a remarkable reflection of his era, and he was indeed struggling against what he conceived as being hypocritical and fallacious. According to John Symonds:

Crowley was a contemporary of Freud; he grew out of the matrix of Victorianism… He was one of many who helped to tear down the false, hypocritical, self-righteous attitudes of the time. What is peculiar in Crowley's case is not that he chose evil but that in his revolt against his parents and God he set himself up in God's place.

These two sex magicians have come to stand as explorers of the ambivalence of the tension between romantic and sexual love, the place of non-reproductive sexual acts, the experimentation and importation of exotic sexual techniques from the 'Orient' and so on. They have come to reflect many of the themes and paradoxes of modernity, such as striving for individualism, a utopian future, the exploration of the meaning of sexuality and the essence of ourselves.

I have already stated in my introduction why Aleister Crowley conceived the art and science of sex magic to be one of the most powerful occult systems. Many esotericists have expressed the view that the human mind is the gateway of magic through which the magician gains access to the astral plane and through which the magical universe works. The basic structure of the psyche for some magicians consists of the conscious mind, also known as the waking consciousness, and the subconscious, also known as the unconscious, the realm of our being experienced in dreams and altered states of consciousness. There is also a kind of 'censor' that separates these two parts of the psyche and acts as a filter ensuring the selective gathering of empirical perception, and also the protection of the conscious mind from an uncontrolled flooding from the subconscious. Magic makes use of both the 'rational' and the 'irrational' parts of the psyche.

The key element in every magical operation is introducing this understanding of the psyche to the magical formula of combining will and imagination, which in turn affects the psyche. The aim of every magical rite is to temporarily 'shut down' this censor so the unconscious mind might gain immediate access to the conscious, sending forth its raw power and in turn this raw power being directed and assigned to various magical tasks. The key result is what can be referred to as a 'magical trance', the very peak of a ritual ecstasy where the cosmic forces are invoked and manifested. For sex magicians the best way to achieve this altered state of consciousness, this magical trance, this death-like feeling of emptiness where the magician becomes the vessel for magical forces, is the orgasm.

Beyond the social analysis, the psychological enquiry and the historical investigation, the true inspiration for these two magicians and others to come was the search for an ultimate magical system based on occult correspondences and a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of the Self. A way of communing with the magical universe and the pure whirling forces that inhabit it. Their efforts were more than just an outcry for liberation. More than just a struggle against oppressive taboos. For them it was a magical attempt to enchant a disenchanted world. A path that could lead them into a state of union with the divine. A method for them to acquire supreme spiritual powers that could affect both the natural and the supranatural. It was an expression of their Will and Imagination.

7 Steps to Opening the Third Eye

The third eye, also called the inner eye or the mind's eye, allows you to observe the world in a manner similar to as you do in your dreams, even with closed eyes. The opening of the third eye heightens your sensitivity, and the working of the mind attains a great balance.

There is a certain procedure that needs to be followed step-by-step in order to open this third eye of yours. And in order to unlock the door of intuitive powers, you are required to master your mind.

Anything in this world is possible if you have a strong belief. You can open the third eye if only you have a strong belief that it exists. The eye can easily be opened even while being conscious.

Once you become aware of its presence, the next plan of action should be to know the details of purusa (attentional principle). This principle helps you to understand the importance of separating your dreams with your logic and assumptions. This is important for the sole functioning of the third eye.

Once this level is reached, you are ready to meditate and focus all your energies towards the opening of the third eye. At this stage, the temperament of your concentration transforms into self-understanding. Now, the attentional principle plays an important role in raising your vibrations.

Once you understand the concept of the opening of the third eye, just sit upright on the floor, or a chair or a sofa in a cross-legged position. Then try to relax your body starting from the shoulders.

You can practice half-head circles to release any kind of stiffness you may be experiencing. Close both your physical eyes slowly and try to focus your entire attention towards a point present in the middle of the eyebrows. This attention can be shifted to the lower areas after an interval of 3 to 6 min.

While following this simple procedure, there are a few things you must keep in mind:

1. Sensing is an important feature of this procedure. It is indeed necessary for you to be aware of the commotion that arises from the environment.

2. Your body has to be perfect enough to detect all the sensations arising in it.

3. Now is the time to feel, and experience the immense flow of sensations through your body.

4. Feeling helps you to recognize and separate each sensation individually.

5. Now is the time to reflect on memories, feelings, and sensations.

6. You have to notice every feeling that keeps coming up now and then from the store of the subconscious. You have to identify the present co-relation of these memories in order to understand their significance.

7. Then, ultimately is the act of refocusing concentration to stir each chakra related to your subconscious mind.

After completing the above mentioned steps, you are geared up to focus your entire power of concentration at the rear of the point in the middle of your eyebrows. If you are successful, you will come upon a presence that will allow you to observe. You will then see light spawning from this presence, and the opening of the third eye will take place.

How to Be Outstanding in any Situation

Today I would like to give you a powerful technique that you can use anytime you need a little boost of confidence and energy. You will be amazed at how many times what I'm about to share will come in handy, if you use it.

This technique is called anchoring. Today, anchoring is generally considered part of the body of knowledge known as NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) which has its roots in Pavlovian behavior modification. You remember Pavlov. He was the Russian scientist who, in about the year 1900, made dogs salivate by ringing a bell.

Here's how he did it: He would start by ringing a bell while letting dogs smell meat powder. They would salivate from smelling the meat powder. Eventually, he only needed to ring a bell and this alone caused the dogs to salivate. The dogs had associated the bell with hunger. The bell was an anchor for salivation. Pretty simple, huh?

Unfortunately, you are exposed to this form of conditioning every day.

Did you know that TV commercial makers use anchoring to manipulate you? TV commercials will show you a sexy person smoking to cause you to associate (anchor) sexiness with smoking. Beer commercials are notorious for showing women in bikinis so that you will associate beer with sex. Fast food commercials show happy families clogging their arteries to cause you to associate eating garbage with being happy.

This technique has been used AGAINST you countless times.

Now, I'm going to hand you the keys to the car and let you take control of your anchoring. It is possible to apply this same basic technique to almost any problem. Smoking, overeating, nail biting, fear of public speaking, all of these conditions are treatable with NLP. On many of my hypnosis recordings, I use NLP to reinforce the positive change.

Let's take a look at how Pavlov's discovery can HELP you right now. I teach this technique to established actors who need a little boost between multi-million dollar movies. Yes, even established actors feel a little self-conscious sometimes. And they love quick powerful techniques which they can use before going on camera.

So here is how positive anchoring works:

Step 1. Think of three times in your life when you felt very powerful and in control and write them down (one sentence describing each).

Step 2. Stand alone in a room and think of the first situation. Recall it in full color with sound and anything else that could make it real to you.

Step 3. At the moment when you feel fully back in that moment, slap your left shoulder with your right hand and say, "Power!"

Step 4. Repeat steps 1-3 for each of the three memories.

N.B. Remember, you want to anchor each feeling by slapping your shoulder when you feel the memory at its MOST INTENSE moment. In NLP, this process of reinforcing the anchor is called stacking anchors.

Now that you have the anchor installed, you can "fire it off" as needed. The next time you are in a situation requiring confidence, slap your left shoulder with your right hand and say, "Power!" Just as sure as Pavlov's dogs salivated when they heard that bell, and just as sure as countless people associate smoking with sexiness, you will feel confidence surging through you because now your mind associates confidence with that slapping motion and the word "power"!

Occasionally feeling a lack of confidence is a normal part of being human. Having an effective strategy for immediately turning this into confidence is a normal part of being outstanding.

The Science of Creating Your Own Reality

In 1633, an aging Italian astronomer named Galileo Galilei was taken before the Roman Inquisition, tried, convicted of heresy, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Galileo's crime? He endorsed the idea, proposed a century earlier by the great Catholic astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, that the earth is not the center of the solar system. In fact, said Galileo, it is the other way around: The sun sits at the center, and the earth is simply one of a handful of planets that revolve around it.

This idea was judged as being diametrically opposed to the position taken by Holy Scripture. Galileo was forced to publicly recant his views, and his book containing the offending idea, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was banned. The old man's sentence was later commuted to house arrest, and he lived out the rest of his days confined to his villa outside Florence, where he eventually went blind.

Still, Galileo's views persisted, and the meticulous experiments and mathematical models he used in his search to understand nature set the stage for all the developments of modern science that followed. Three centuries later, a German physicist named Albert Einstein called him "the father of modern science."

From Galileo's time onward, scientists' precise observations contributed to a picture of the world that looked very much like a massive piece of mechanical clockwork; they had little practical use for such ideas as soul, spirit, or consciousness.

The French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, a contemporary of Galileo's who is today regarded as "the father of modern philosophy," declared that the best way to understand how the world works would be to divide existence into two parts: the objective or material world, governed by the principles of science, and the subjective world of the mind and the soul, which would be the province of the church.

Descartes is especially famous for the statement I think, therefore I am. But the truth is, the think part of that declaration puzzled Descartes, much as it has puzzled scientists for centuries since. Just how is it that we think? Where do our thoughts come from? How do the bits of physical matter that constitute our brains generate consciousness? The answers to those questions open up a tremendous new world of possibility for what we can achieve in our lives, and they form a central part of The Answer.

A World Inside the Atom

In the generations following Galileo and Descartes, Sir Isaac Newton took the idea of nature-as-machine much further, detailing the precise laws that govern how that machine operates. All of classical physics, and in fact, all of modern science, has been built upon the foundation created by Newton. His laws of motion made possible the advance of modern technology, from simple steam engines to the space probes that have analyzed soil samples on Mars.

But scientists eventually reached the limits of the Newtonian worldview. As their tools grew more sophisticated, their explorations of the physical world took them deep into the heart of the atom, where the nature of reality proved to be something quite different from anything Descartes or Newton ever imagined.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, scientists began looking into the world within the atomic nucleus, and they were shocked to discover that on the subatomic level, the physical world did not behave at all the way Newton said it should. In fact, the "atom" itself turned out to be a sort of illusion: The closer scientists looked, the less it really appeared to be there.

And when our vision of the atom fractured, the foundation of classical physics fractured along with it. Our view of how the world works was in for a radical transformation.

Everything Is Energy

When we say the name Albert Einstein, what comes to mind? Perhaps you think of his wild mane of white hair, or that famous picture of the distinguished physicist sticking out his tongue. Or maybe you think simply, "Genius." But whatever picture you have, you will also probably come up with "E=MC2."

Why on earth would a mathematical equation for a sophisticated theory be so famous that even nonscientists recognize it immediately? Because with that simple equation, "Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared," Einstein shattered centuries of thinking and radically altered our view of how the world works.

One reason Einstein's idea was so transformative was that for the first time ever, it described how energy and matter are not only related, but can be transformed back and forth into each other. Now the elegant, clear-cut world of classical, Newtonian physics would be forced to move over and make room for the fuzzy, strange, nearly unimaginable world of quantum physics.

Quantum physics is the study of how the world works on the smallest scale, at a level far smaller than the atom. And as scientists studied the nature of reality on a smaller and smaller scale, something strange began to happen: The deeper we went into reality, the more it seemed to dissolve from view. The search for the smallest known particle of matter had instead turned up distinct yet elusive little packets of energy, which physicists called quanta.

The Einstein breakthrough comes down to this: Everything is energy. A rock, a planet, a glass of water, your hand, everything you can touch, taste, or smell - it's all made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of protons and electrons and neutrons, which are made of nothing but vibrating packets of energy.

This is where quantum physics intersects with what I found inside that cardboard box. What physicists found has everything to do with how you are going to create the life of your dreams by building your dream business. For once we know that everything is energy - that there is no absolute distinction between matter and energy - then the boundaries between the physical world and the world of our thoughts start to disappear as well.

Reading the Mind of God

In the decades that followed Einstein's theory of relativity, the new quantum physics began to reveal some very strange things. The tiny packets of energy known as quanta exhibited some very peculiar behaviors, including an unexplainable ability to influence one another, a property called entanglement.

In his book Science and the Akashic Field, physicist Ervin Laszlo describes a series of experiments conducted by lie detector expert Cleve Backster. Backster took some white blood cells from the mouths of his subjects and cultured them in a test tube. He then moved the cultures to distant locations, more than seven miles away. He attached lie detectors to the cultures and then performed a series of experiments on his subjects.

In one of his tests, he showed his subject a television program depicting the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. This man was a former navy gunner who had actually been present at Pearl Harbor during the attack. When the face of a navy gunner appeared on the screen, the man's face betrayed an emotional reaction—and at that precise moment, the lie detector's needle seven and a half miles away jumped, exactly as it would have had it been attached to the man himself, and not just to a test tube of his cultured white blood cells miles away.

How is such a thing possible? In the language of quantum physics, the particles of the gunner's body are still connected or "entangled" with one another, and no matter how far apart they are separated in space, they will continue to influence one another. In fact, this effect appears to occur at speeds faster than the speed of light, which violates one of Einstein's basic rules.

Scientists dubbed this mind-boggling capacity for instantaneous interconnection nonlocality. Einstein had a somewhat less technical term for it. He called it spooky actionat a distance.

A Bizarre Discovery: Thought Influences Matter

Within twenty years of Einstein's radical work, another revolution in worldview occurred, just as cataclysmic as Einstein's. It started with two of the early pioneers of the quantum world, the Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his protégé Werner Heisenberg.

Bohr and Heisenberg studied the puzzling behaviors of these tiny subatomic particles and recognized that once you look deep within the heart of atoms, these "indivisible particles" are something like tiny packets of possibility.

Each subatomic particle appeared to exist not as a solid, stable "thing," but as the potential of any one of its various possible selves. Heisenberg's uncertainty principle stated that it was not possible to measure all of a subatomic particle's properties at the same time. For example, if you record information about the location of a proton, you cannot pin down its speed or trajectory; if you figure out its speed, now its precise location eludes you.

Bohr and Heisenberg's work suggested that at its most basic level, physical matter isn't exactly anything yet. At the subatomic scale, according to this new understanding, reality was made not of solid substance but of fields of potentiality - more like a set of possible sketches or ideas of a thing than the thing itself. A particle would take on the specific character of a material "thing" only when it was measured or observed.

In fact, even more bizarre, it was soon found that the mere intention of measuring particles, even without carrying out the actual act itself, would still affect the particles in question!

Suddenly subjectivity - the action of consciousness upon a piece of "matter" - had become an essential component in the very nature of reality.

The Zero-Point Field

As scientists continued pursuing their explorations on staggeringly small scales, they eventually found themselves staring at something truly confounding. They termed it the zero-point field (ZPF), because at this most infinitesimal of levels, some sort of force appears to be present even at a temperature of absolute zero, when all known forms of energy vanish.

Here, beneath the level of energy itself, exists a still more basic level. The field at this level is not exactly "energy" anymore, nor is it a field of empty space. It is best described, physicists realized, as a field of information.

To put it another way, the undifferentiated ocean out of which energy arises appears to be a sea of pure consciousness, from which matter emerges in clustered localities here and there. Consciousness is what the universe is made of; matter and energy are just two of the forms that consciousness takes. Ervin Laszlo calls this field that underlies and connects all things the A-field, in deference to the ancient Vedic concept of the Akashic record, a nonphysical repository of all knowledge in the universe, including all human experience.

The psychologist Carl Jung called it the collective unconscious. It has been intuited and described for thousands of years and in a multitude of terms and images throughout human history. Only in the last few decades has science caught up to what we always sensed but could never fully explain.

Says Laszlo: "The ancients knew that space is not empty; it is the origin and memory of all things that exist and have ever existed. . . .[This insight] is now being rediscovered at the cutting edge of the sciences [and is emerging] as a main pillar of the scientific world's picture of the twenty-first century. This will profoundly change our concept of ourselves and of the world."

In fact, it has already profoundly changed our picture of ourselves and our world—and it will radically change how you approach your life and your business.

Thought Creates Everything

So what are we saying here, that everything that is, is made of thought? That thought creates the physical world? Yes, that is exactly what we're saying.

Your thoughts not only matter, they create matter. Thought is where everything comes from. And your thoughts are where your business comes from.

In the chapters that follow, we're going to walk through the process, step by step, of building your dream business by first harnessing the most powerful force in the universe: your beliefs.

The Most Powerful Force In The Universe

If the idea that the universe is made of thought seems amazing, here is the truly amazing thing about it: The scale of power we're talking about here is staggering beyond comprehension.

The universe appears to be structured as a series of layers or levels, much like an onion or Russian nesting dolls: Inside of organisms, we find cells; inside cells, molecules, then "indivisible" atoms, then electrons and protons, then quarks, bosons, mesons, photons, leptons . . . and the smaller the world, the greater the amount of force we find wrapped inside it.

The deeper in nature you go, the more dynamic nature becomes. In other words, the more fundamental the level to which you penetrate, the greater the power you'll find.

For example, chemical power, the force of chemical interactions, operates at the level of molecules and atoms. Nuclear power operates at the level of the atomic nucleus, about a million times smaller - and it is a million times more powerful. Yet even the nuclear level pales in comparison to the deeper levels today's quantum physics is exploring. According to Laszlo, the zero-point field has an energy density of 1094 ergs per cubic centimeter - that's ten thousand billion, billion, billion, billion times more energy in a single cubic centimeter of "empty space" than you have in all the matter in the known universe.

And that's just one cc of empty space. Imagine what you'd have in a quart.

How Quantum Science Helps You Build Your Dream Business

In 1902, two years after the physicist Max Planck first coined the term quantum to describe the core reality of light, a young British writer named James Allen penned a little book entitled As a Man Thinketh, which drew its title and its message from the biblical verse "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."

At the time, few would have associated the two men and their work, but with the hindsight of a century's discoveries, we can now see the connection. While scientists spent the rest of the century pursuing the horizon set by pioneers such as Planck, Einstein, Bohr, and Heisenberg, which would ultimately lead to the quantum vacuum, philosophers like Napoleon Hill, Earl Nightingale, and Bob Proctor worked to articulate its application to the practical world of human accomplishment.

This idea, that our thoughts have a direct, causal impact on our reality, has been observed, but it always seemed like something that rational people couldn't buy into, an idea that created more questions than answers. Now science has given us that set of answers.

Remember the mind-boggling amount of power in that cubic centimeter of "empty space," or consciousness? When Victor Hugo said, "There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come," we now know that this was more than a metaphor. He may not have fully realized it at the time, but he was giving us a literal description of how reality works.

Thought is the most powerful force in the universe. Our thoughts are the controlling factor in what we manifest and create in our lives.

The idea precedes the thing.

That is at the heart of how my dream house showed up, as well as every business I've built, and the same thing happens to every businessperson who has a vision and applies these strategies and tactics. It started as a picture, an idea in my mind, and before I knew what had happened, I was living in it.

Science tells us that underlying what we know as the world is a field of pure consciousness, billions upon billions of times more powerful than any measurable energy, and that this field of absolute consciousness knows everything that happens, anywhere and everywhere in the universe, instantaneously and with absolute accuracy.

This is not so different from the kind of descriptions people have given for millennia in their efforts to grasp the ultimate nature of our universal source, what some of us call God. Whatever you call it, the picture that emerges is of a world bounded by an infinitely large, omnipotent, omniscient intelligence, which lies behind everything in the phenomenal world as its source, author, and ultimate destination.

This is the dream world we live in, you and I, and it is the clay from which you will shape and give life to your dream business.

Confidence In Just 5 Mins A Day!

Confidence is one thing that everyone wants more of. The funny
thing about confidence is that we all have it in certain
situations. But for most people, the area they feel lacking in
confidence involves other people, so these exercises are designed
for this purpose. Each exercise takes only 5 minutes a day if you
do it all at once, or longer if you spread it out. There are 3
steps to this exercise, each one designed to build a little more
confidence each time.

Step One - Eye Contact

Do step one for 10 days. Each day, go out in public whether it's
shopping, on a lunch break at work or just for a walk around your
neighborhood.

Your job is to make pleasant eye contact with another person. You
don't need to stare, but you also can't just steal a quick glance
and then look away either. Short, but definite eye contact is what
we're after here with a pleasant, casual feel.

On Day 1, you will make eye contact with one person. On Day 2, bump
it up to 2 people. Day 3, three people and so on until by Day 10
you are making eye contact with 10 people. Don't stick to one
gender (only females) or one kind of person (the elderly or
children).

It's important that you don't take other people's reactions
personally when you're doing this. Many people will look down or
away but that's just how we're all programmed to react. Don't worry
about it. Besides, if the eye contact is short and non-threatening
people won't react much anyway.

Step Two - Say Hello

Step Two is a bit harder but is huge for your confidence. Start
back at Day One and make eye contact with one person, but with one
addition. You are going to greet them in a friendly clear voice.

You can say 'Good Morning', or 'Hello' or whatever feels natural to
you. Don't take too much time picking the 'right person', just do
it with someone you're passing on the street that is looking up.

Follow the same pattern as Step One: increase the amount of people
you say 'Hi' to every day until you're greeting 10 people on Day
10. Again, forget about any reactions this exercise may cause in
other people and remember to stay pleasant no matter what.

Step Three - Random Conversations

Step Three is again a big step away from the first two steps, but
is also easier in some ways because you're only interacting with
one stranger a day.

Here's the plan:

You are going to engage in a short conversation with a random
stranger. Again, don't pick a certain type of person and don't
worry about what their reaction will be. You're simply going to ask
them 2 questions, thank them and move on.

Some suggestions:

At a bus stop, ask someone if the so-and-so bus already came.
Then ask them what time it is. Then say 'Thanks'.

At the grocery store, ask someone (not a store employee) if a
product they're looking at would be good in the soup (or whatever)
you're making. Then ask them another question related to the
product. Then say 'Thanks'.

(FOR ADVANCED STUDENTS) At work, ask that attractive co-worker
that you're scared to talk to how their weekend was. Then ask them
if they had fun. Bonus points if you can do it with friendly eye
contact and a smile. Then say 'Good to talk to you'.

After a few days of random conversations with people, it gets a lot
easier to talk to anyone in a confident way. After a month or two
of doing these exercises, you'll feel much more confident in any
social situation

You Can Be Successful Using Your Mind

Many people think you have to do something special to be successful. When in fact there is nothing really special you have to do to be successful.

If there is anything special to do, it would be believing and having a plan. Yes, I know this sounds very simple, but you know what?— That’s really the basic formula of being successful…everything else are just add ons.

There are many people out there that deserve to be successful, but because of a lack of plan and belief, they are not.

Can this be changed?
Yes it can!
How?

By setting your mind to believe and following through with a plan. I can not tell you what this plan is. This is something you have to put together by you.

I can help you with setting your mind. There are many ways of doing this…you can use mind power tools, which can be found here on this web site. Or you can do it yourself with out the aid of mind power tools. You will have to determine which is best for you.

I use affirmations, self suggestions, meditations, binaural beats, and other tools to help me become more successful. Self suggestions are the best in my opinion, because I can use self suggestions with practically any mind power tools of my choosing.

Example:
I am successful right now!
I am prosperous right now!
I am great at planning right now!
I am at the right place at the right time right now!

These are just a few of many affirmations I used daily to become successful. You can make up your own, ones that fit your particular needs.
So you see, you can be successful using your mind. Apply what I have written here and you will on your way to success in a matter of time!

Reading Strategies

Reading Efficiently by Reading Intelligently

Whether they're project documents, trade journals, blogs, business books or ebooks, most of us read regularly as part of our jobs, and to develop our skills and knowledge.

But do you ever read what should be a useful document, yet fail to gain any helpful information from it? Or, do you have to re-read something several times to get a full understanding of the content?

In this article, we're looking at strategies that will help you read more effectively. These approaches will help you get the maximum benefit from your reading, with the minimum effort.

Think About What You Want to Know

Before you start reading anything, ask yourself why you're reading it. Are you reading with a purpose, or just for pleasure? What do you want to know after you've read it?

Once you know your purpose, you can examine the resource to see whether it's going to help you.

For example, with a book, an easy way of doing this is to look at the introduction and the chapter headings. The introduction should let you know who the book is intended for, and what it covers. Chapter headings will give you an overall view of the structure of the subject.

Ask yourself whether the resource meets your needs, and try to work out if it will give you the right amount of knowledge. If you think that the resource isn't ideal, don't waste time reading it.

Remember that this also applies to content that you subscribe to, such as journals or magazines, and web-based RSS and social media news feeds - don't be afraid to prune these resources if you are not getting value from some publishers.

Know How Deeply to Study the Material

Where you only need the shallowest knowledge of a subject, you can skim material. Here you read only chapter headings, introductions, and summaries.

If you need a moderate level of information on a subject, then you can scan the text. This is when you read the chapter introductions and summaries in detail. You can then speed read the contents of the chapters, picking out and understanding key words and concepts. (When looking at material in this way, it's often worth paying attention to diagrams and graphs.)

Only when you need full knowledge of a subject is it worth studying the text in detail. Here it's best to skim the material first to get an overview of the subject. This gives you an understanding of its structure, into which you can then fit the detail gained from a full reading of the material. (SQ3R is a good technique for getting a deep understanding of a text.)

Read Actively

When you're reading a document or book in detail, it helps if you practice "active reading" by highlighting and underlining key information, and taking notes (member-only article) as you progress. (Mind Maps are great for this.) This emphasizes information in your mind, and helps you to review important points later.

Doing this also helps you keep your mind focused on the material, and stops you thinking about other things.

Tip:
If you're worried about damaging a book by marking it up, ask yourself how much your investment of time is worth. If the book is inexpensive, or if the benefit that you get from the book substantially exceeds its value, then don't worry too much about marking it. (Of course, only do this if it belongs to you!)

Know How to Study Different Types of Material

Different types of documents hold information in different places and in different ways, and they have different depths and breadths of coverage.

By understanding the layout of the material you're reading, you can extract the information you want efficiently.

Magazines and Newspapers

These tend to give a fragmented coverage of an area. They will typically only concentrate on the most interesting and glamorous parts of a topic - this helps them boost circulation! As such, they will often ignore less interesting information that may be essential to a full understanding of a subject, and they may include low value content to "pad out" advertising.

The most effective way of getting information from magazines is to scan the contents tables or indexes and turn directly to interesting articles. If you find an article useful, then cut it out and file it in a folder specifically covering that sort of information. In this way you will build up sets of related articles that may begin to explain the subject.

Newspapers tend to be arranged in sections. If you read a paper often, you can quickly learn which sections are useful, and which ones you can skip altogether.

Tip:
You can apply the same strategies to reading online versions of newspapers and magazines. However, you need to make sure that you don't get distracted by links to other, non-relevant material.

Reading Individual Articles

There are three main types of article in magazines and newspapers:
News Articles - these are designed to explain the key points first, and then flesh these out with detail. So, the most important information is presented first, with information being less and less useful as the article progresses.

Opinion Articles - these present a point of view. Here the most important information is contained in the introduction and the summary, with the middle of the article containing supporting arguments.

Feature Articles - these are written to provide entertainment or background on a subject. Typically the most important information is in the body of the text.
If you know what you want from an article, and recognize its type, you can get information from it quickly and efficiently.

Tip 1:
Nowadays, you probably read many articles online. You can easily save links to these in a bookmark folder to reference later. Make sure that you title folders so that you can easily find the link again. For instance, you could have separate folders for project research, marketing, client prospects, trade information, and professional growth. Or, it might be helpful to title folders using the website or publication name.

Tip 2:
Remember that there are many online articles and electronic documents that weren't originally designed to be read on a screen. (This will also include documents that are emailed to you.) If you find it hard to read these on screen, print them out. This is especially important for long or detailed documents.

Make Your Own Table of Contents

When you're reading a document or book, it's easy to accept the writer's structure of thought. This means that you may not notice when important information has been left out, or that an irrelevant detail has been included.

An effective way to combat this is to make up your own table of contents before you start reading. Ask yourself what sections or topics you are expecting to see in this document, and what questions you want to have answered by the end of the text.

Although doing this before you start reading the document may sound like a strange strategy, it's useful, because it helps you spot holes in the author's argument. Writing out your own table of contents also helps you address your own questions, and think about what you're expecting to learn from the text.

Use Glossaries with Technical Documents

If you're reading large amounts of difficult technical material, it may be useful to use or compile a glossary. Keep this beside you as you read.

It's also useful to note down the key concepts in your own words, and refer to these when necessary.

Further Reading Tips
The time when you read a document plays a role in how easy the reading will be, and how much information you'll retain.

If you need to read a text that is tedious, or requires a great deal of concentration, it's best to tackle it when you have the most energy in the day. Our article, Is This a Morning Task? (member-only article), helps you work out when this is, so that you can schedule your reading time accordingly.

Where you read is also important. Reading at night, in bed, doesn't work for many people because it makes them sleepy (which means that you may not remember the information). Everyone is different, however, so read in a place that's comfortable, free of distractions, and that has good light - this is important even if you're reading from a screen.

It can be helpful to review the information when you've finished reading. When you're done, write a paragraph that explains, in your own words, what you just learned. Often, putting pen to paper can help strengthen your recall of new information, so that you retain it more effectively.

Key Points:
If you want to read more effectively, identify what you want to learn from each resource you read, and know how deeply you want to study the material. And, consider "active reading" by making notes and marking-up the material as you go along. It's also useful to know how to study different types of material.

Making your own table of contents before you read material, and using glossaries for technical resources, are other useful reading strategies.

Remember that it takes practice to develop your reading skills - the more you use these strategies, the more effective you'll become.

Reading Strategies

Reading Efficiently by Reading Intelligently

Whether they're project documents, trade journals, blogs, business books or ebooks, most of us read regularly as part of our jobs, and to develop our skills and knowledge.

But do you ever read what should be a useful document, yet fail to gain any helpful information from it? Or, do you have to re-read something several times to get a full understanding of the content?

In this article, we're looking at strategies that will help you read more effectively. These approaches will help you get the maximum benefit from your reading, with the minimum effort.

Think About What You Want to Know

Before you start reading anything, ask yourself why you're reading it. Are you reading with a purpose, or just for pleasure? What do you want to know after you've read it?

Once you know your purpose, you can examine the resource to see whether it's going to help you.

For example, with a book, an easy way of doing this is to look at the introduction and the chapter headings. The introduction should let you know who the book is intended for, and what it covers. Chapter headings will give you an overall view of the structure of the subject.

Ask yourself whether the resource meets your needs, and try to work out if it will give you the right amount of knowledge. If you think that the resource isn't ideal, don't waste time reading it.

Remember that this also applies to content that you subscribe to, such as journals or magazines, and web-based RSS and social media news feeds - don't be afraid to prune these resources if you are not getting value from some publishers.

Know How Deeply to Study the Material

Where you only need the shallowest knowledge of a subject, you can skim material. Here you read only chapter headings, introductions, and summaries.

If you need a moderate level of information on a subject, then you can scan the text. This is when you read the chapter introductions and summaries in detail. You can then speed read the contents of the chapters, picking out and understanding key words and concepts. (When looking at material in this way, it's often worth paying attention to diagrams and graphs.)

Only when you need full knowledge of a subject is it worth studying the text in detail. Here it's best to skim the material first to get an overview of the subject. This gives you an understanding of its structure, into which you can then fit the detail gained from a full reading of the material. (SQ3R is a good technique for getting a deep understanding of a text.)

Read Actively

When you're reading a document or book in detail, it helps if you practice "active reading" by highlighting and underlining key information, and taking notes (member-only article) as you progress. (Mind Maps are great for this.) This emphasizes information in your mind, and helps you to review important points later.

Doing this also helps you keep your mind focused on the material, and stops you thinking about other things.

Tip:
If you're worried about damaging a book by marking it up, ask yourself how much your investment of time is worth. If the book is inexpensive, or if the benefit that you get from the book substantially exceeds its value, then don't worry too much about marking it. (Of course, only do this if it belongs to you!)

Know How to Study Different Types of Material

Different types of documents hold information in different places and in different ways, and they have different depths and breadths of coverage.

By understanding the layout of the material you're reading, you can extract the information you want efficiently.

Magazines and Newspapers

These tend to give a fragmented coverage of an area. They will typically only concentrate on the most interesting and glamorous parts of a topic - this helps them boost circulation! As such, they will often ignore less interesting information that may be essential to a full understanding of a subject, and they may include low value content to "pad out" advertising.

The most effective way of getting information from magazines is to scan the contents tables or indexes and turn directly to interesting articles. If you find an article useful, then cut it out and file it in a folder specifically covering that sort of information. In this way you will build up sets of related articles that may begin to explain the subject.

Newspapers tend to be arranged in sections. If you read a paper often, you can quickly learn which sections are useful, and which ones you can skip altogether.

Tip:
You can apply the same strategies to reading online versions of newspapers and magazines. However, you need to make sure that you don't get distracted by links to other, non-relevant material.

Reading Individual Articles

There are three main types of article in magazines and newspapers:
News Articles - these are designed to explain the key points first, and then flesh these out with detail. So, the most important information is presented first, with information being less and less useful as the article progresses.

Opinion Articles - these present a point of view. Here the most important information is contained in the introduction and the summary, with the middle of the article containing supporting arguments.

Feature Articles - these are written to provide entertainment or background on a subject. Typically the most important information is in the body of the text.
If you know what you want from an article, and recognize its type, you can get information from it quickly and efficiently.

Tip 1:
Nowadays, you probably read many articles online. You can easily save links to these in a bookmark folder to reference later. Make sure that you title folders so that you can easily find the link again. For instance, you could have separate folders for project research, marketing, client prospects, trade information, and professional growth. Or, it might be helpful to title folders using the website or publication name.

Tip 2:
Remember that there are many online articles and electronic documents that weren't originally designed to be read on a screen. (This will also include documents that are emailed to you.) If you find it hard to read these on screen, print them out. This is especially important for long or detailed documents.

Make Your Own Table of Contents

When you're reading a document or book, it's easy to accept the writer's structure of thought. This means that you may not notice when important information has been left out, or that an irrelevant detail has been included.

An effective way to combat this is to make up your own table of contents before you start reading. Ask yourself what sections or topics you are expecting to see in this document, and what questions you want to have answered by the end of the text.

Although doing this before you start reading the document may sound like a strange strategy, it's useful, because it helps you spot holes in the author's argument. Writing out your own table of contents also helps you address your own questions, and think about what you're expecting to learn from the text.

Use Glossaries with Technical Documents

If you're reading large amounts of difficult technical material, it may be useful to use or compile a glossary. Keep this beside you as you read.

It's also useful to note down the key concepts in your own words, and refer to these when necessary.

Further Reading Tips
The time when you read a document plays a role in how easy the reading will be, and how much information you'll retain.

If you need to read a text that is tedious, or requires a great deal of concentration, it's best to tackle it when you have the most energy in the day. Our article, Is This a Morning Task? (member-only article), helps you work out when this is, so that you can schedule your reading time accordingly.

Where you read is also important. Reading at night, in bed, doesn't work for many people because it makes them sleepy (which means that you may not remember the information). Everyone is different, however, so read in a place that's comfortable, free of distractions, and that has good light - this is important even if you're reading from a screen.

It can be helpful to review the information when you've finished reading. When you're done, write a paragraph that explains, in your own words, what you just learned. Often, putting pen to paper can help strengthen your recall of new information, so that you retain it more effectively.
Key Points:

If you want to read more effectively, identify what you want to learn from each resource you read, and know how deeply you want to study the material. And, consider "active reading" by making notes and marking-up the material as you go along. It's also useful to know how to study different types of material.

Making your own table of contents before you read material, and using glossaries for technical resources, are other useful reading strategies.

Remember that it takes practice to develop your reading skills - the more you use these strategies, the more effective you'll become.