In ancient times, psychic power was commonplace among Jews and non-Jews

The Jewish sages relate in the Talmud many of the amazing feats they did without using holy names or even a prayer. Some great Rabbis of old, up until about 2000 years ago could make rivers stop, cure the sick, have super strength, talk to spirits, fly, and even teleport.

In many places in Jewish thought, we find the idea of a “descent” of generations. This means that succeeding generations, by virtue of being more distant from the Creation of the world, are less capable both mentally and spiritually.

Consider that the average attention span of humans is less than 8 seconds and this should give us an idea of where we stand! Sure, we have the internet, cars, planes, electricity, and whatnot, but by and large our capacity for using the full powers of the mind is very limited.

I am talking, of course, about psychic powers, which is what this article is all about. What happened that nowadays we seldom see them or, when we do, we are so skeptical about everything being a trick?

A lot of things are upside down in the world. I’m not talking about geopolitics, the medical establishment or the economy. Rather, I’m talking about the whole system of thought as we learned back in school.

Consider how we don’t learn or see any ads about eating healthier, meditating, cultivating good character traits, getting proper sleep, having faith, hope, and a plethora of other good habits and ideas that have been proven (scientifically, no less!) to be highly beneficial.

But it’s not only health ideas that are not taught. Handling money, cultivating patience, opening businesses, self-defense, character building, discipline and other valuable skills are seldom mentioned or given any respect.

Why so?

Scientific advances have brought a lot of benefits to the world at large. We are blessed to never face much of the suffering people had a few hundreds of years ago. Yet, science is still lacking a solid grasp of the human psyche and its many powers.

I’m talking about the innate powers that you, dear reader, possess but have been taught to believe they are all fairy tales.

This problem is coupled with the idea that experiential (often called “subjective”) knowledge is not quantifiable nor observable, and is hardly taken seriously by science. This is a mistake, because while there is a lot we can learn from science with its principles, confining our notion of reality to that which is reproducible and observable limits our perspectives.

Experience (the Sephira of Chokhmah, “wisdom”) teaches us what one million books cannot.

This is the form of perception that transcends words, and which can only be taught to oneself subjectively.

Can someone, for example, know what real love is without truly experiencing it?

What about knowing what colors are without seeing them?

Building psychic power through wisdom

Sure enough, we need to build our own base of knowledge (Binah) before we can engage with “experience”. One doesn’t jump to perform brain surgery without studying copiously for years at med school. Yet, relegating our entire perception of the world to that which can be “proven by everyone” limits us.

So, to start picking your brain a little, here’s one shocking Kabbalistic principle you should keep in mind: everything you can imagine is real, no matter how absurd. Imagination is a power of the soul and, as the Baal Shem Tov used to say “whatever you are thinking about, that’s where you are”.

While it might not be materialized, everything we think exists on the spiritual level and has the potential to be materialized.

Many meditations require one to use the power of imagination, also called “visualization”. This term might sound tricky, but everyone can learn to visualize. It’s just that most people never train this faculty of the mind/soul.

This is another instance in which we see how broken the world is. We are trained to think only in a verbal, analytical mode that is meant to solve everyday problems: How much can I spend every month? How much should I charge for this project? How do I solve this problem?

Seldom do we train ourselves to visualize or think without words, and this is the highest use of our minds, that ultimately opens up channels of energy, and consequently grants people psychic powers (but there’s a lot more than that).

Now, the term psychic power has a dark connotation, because many people associate it with the dark arts.

But as I mentioned before, the Jewish sages had all sorts of psychic powers. In the Talmud and the Zohar we find a plethora of occurrences in which they raised the dead, killed dangerous enemies with their gaze, made gold appear from thin air and healed deadly diseases.

True, these skills can come from the side of evil, as find in Ancient Egypt, which was the center of dark magic.

This might surprise most people, but psychic powers are a natural human skill. It’s just that, again, we have been programmed to believe that they only exist in movies.

How psychic power actually work

Let’s de-mystify the single most important secret of psychic power. As science has started to verify, all of reality we perceive is actually a manifestation of different types of energy.

Over the years, science has slowly been shifting its standpoint from a mechanistic paradigm to an energetic one. What this means is that instead of viewing matter as solid, it is seen now as low vibrational energy.

Everything has a vibration from energy, solids being the lowest frequency and light being the highest. As a consequence, matter is an illusion, and the reason why we don’t go over walls is because of its electromagnetic repulsion, not because there’s actually something there (please don’t try to go over walls, though).

Energy work is a term that contains a myriad of practices aimed at harnessing, directing, and manipulating one’s own life force and energy from within and from without. This discipline stands as a cornerstone in the exploration of alternative healing and spiritual growth simply because we are first and foremost energy beings.

At its core, energy work is predicated on the understanding that everything in Creation is made up of energy from Ein Sof (the “without end”) and that the balance and flow of this energy within the human body are essential for physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. I’d wager that the “light” we hear so often in Scripture is actually a very high form of energy.

Either way, we can trace the roots of energy work across various cultures and traditions, energy work encompasses a broad spectrum of practices, from the ancient art of Reiki and the chakra-based systems of Ayurveda to contemporary modalities like Quantum Touch and bioenergy healing. Each of these practices shares a common goal: to remove blockages, restore balance, and stimulate the body’s innate healing abilities.

That said, the human body also acts as a powerful, but largely under-used battery.

The Holy Arizal (Rabbi Yitzhak Luria) teaches us that the soul is incredibly powerful and that, to vest itself into the body, it first has to create a thinner “Mirror Image”, then put it inside the “vestments” (in Hebrew “Malbush”), and then finally go inside the body to reanimate it.

Besides the soul, the human body also houses what is called the “energy body” and is enveloped by the auras (Makifim). The energy body contains, as we will see, the entire network of bioelectrical energy that can be manipulated at will, to the point of even manipulating external matter.

In other words: Psychic power = energy + will

The prohibition against magic

Now, I know many people who are aware will question the motives of this article. How could one even entertain the notion that a “Jew could manipulate energy like that (i.e. use magic)”? The Torah explicitly prohibits that!

First off, we don’t have a clear definition anywhere of what “magic” (kosmut) is. Some suggest that it’s anything “not provable by science” but that’s a very imprecise term. Many ideas nowadays are taken for granted even though they can’t be conclusively proven by science (ahem, v-a-c-c-i-n-e-s).

Since many of our prophets and sages were clearly well versed in the energy healing sciences and , it’s ludicrous to think that they were transgressing this basic Mitzvah.

The answer lies in having a better perspective of what energy work is. I once wrote about how inquiring of the dead is also forbidden, while going to Kivrei Tzadikim has been an established and very beneficial practice by the Mekubalim. The Arizal and R’ Chaim Vital both agree that one can even speak to the Tzadikim that are residing there in the grave!

The Zohar gives the litmus test to knowing whether one transgresses this prohibition or not: based on the teaching in the Talmud, “the wicked are called dead even while alive, while the Tzadikim are called alive even while dead. R’ Chaim Vital further teaches that the wicked can attach themselves to a person, impurify and even harm him.

So the question is resolved and from here we can understand the quintessential element behind all Mitzvot:

Performing a positive Mitzva or avoiding a negative one brings Tahara (purify) and Kedusha (holiness) while performing a negative Mitzva or avoiding a positive one brings a person to Tumah (impurity).

It follows then that energy manipulation, if it’s done with pure intents or from a pure source is perfectly permitted whereas if it’s done with band intention or coming from an impure source is strictly forbidden.

It should come as no surprise that much of magic of old and new, is done by conjuring demons or spirits in a cemetery or other impure places. Some of it involves sacrifices people offer to these entities. Some of it is done with semen, virgin blood or waste. All of these are sources of Tumah, designed to bring more Tumah to a person, and are clearly forbidden.

However I don’t think we can say the same of making an energy ball in your hands, performing energy healing on another person, meditating on your third eye or any other neutral psychic power with good intentions. If you think about it, even the practice of Yichudim and Kavanot are ways of manipulating energy in the spiritual realms in a pure way. The irony is that many Rabbis even nowadays would also call all these things “magic”.

Yes, the line is very thin, but I believe it needs to be set properly, especially considering we were all victims of a scam about 4 years ago and witnessed some of the greatest distortions of Torah in modern times (or ever).

Concluding remarks

It’s interesting to see a global reawakening of interest in these energy disciplines, which have been used for thousands of years but have slowly been put to the side in favor of the mechanistic paradigm of science. The fact that people start questioning the mainstream media and science is a great sign of development for human consciousness, and consequently, psychic power.

Our Patriarchs, Matriarchs, prophets and sages were all master meditators, capable of handling immense amount of energy with their minds (and bodies) even to the point of being able to use divine names at will. This was all thanks to their holiness and purity, which further gave them the ability to have control even over angels.

And this, I believe, is the way Judaism was always supposed to be.