I begin this series on the exploration of occult reality because I was weary of the unserious and unrigourous claims about it that are rempent both from spiritual people and from the scientific community. I think we can give ourselves more serious tools as a ground to think about the occult, the spiritual, the unseen, and so on - such as being epistemologically carefull in choosing what to trust, but also using epistemology as a way to be strategically opened to possibilities in our philosophical investigations.
Also, well, pure science is a gem of philosophy and can produce lots of highly reliable and concrete results on the question of what is susceptible to be true. Scientific culture however is biased and have tendancies to avoid “weird” subjects, even if those are not confirmed to be impossible to study, even from scientific standards. Present empirical deadends or lack of imagination in methodology might not be the same in the future. At the very least lot of those subjects are not impossible on the plane of serious philosophical inquiry.
Because of the elusive nature of the unseen, whether what we find there is close to what we expect or goes way beyond, humans will be inevitably clumsy in their pursuit of this knowledge by the nature of their mental processes, as they are largely already when it comes to the seen world. Interesting to me is to find serious ways to go around that as far as our mental capabilities can do so.
This is quoted from Confucius’ Analects:
"Zilu asked how to serve the ghosts and spirits.
The Master said: “You are not yet able to serve people—how could you be able to serve ghosts and spirits?”
Zilu said: “May I venture to ask about death?"
The Master said: *“You do not yet understand life—how could you possibly understand death?””
While I agree with Confucius’ perspective, I choose here to go beyond it. I will use an explorative approach based on actual scientific knowledge to make more serious hypothesis and theories about the occult reality, although a lot of them will remain of hypothetical status for obvious reasons. For the word occult, I choose the definition of “what is hidden” or “what is beyond reach”.
Additionnally, I think there can be advantages - at least speaking for this life - to do some carefull leaps of faith about the unknown, which I will talk about in future opuses.
We do not know for sure what lies beyond and whether or not it has real implications for us - and this remains true whether we are secular or religious. This series is an attempt to see with you guys what serious possibilities lies in this beyond.
And now the first exploration.
On the possibility of a mechanistic occult realm
The seen reality veryseemingly is regimented by mechanisms, but I found interesting that a lot of people (and I include myself) have a tendency to represent themselves the possible spiritual/unseen/occult world as something chaotic, vague and simplistic while there is no reason for it not to be complex and somewhat “material” and mechanistic in a way more or less analoguous to what we already “know” from the seen, said physical world. When we put ourselves in the position of defending some occult possibilites we often make the mistake of confounding the materiality that is perceivable, assessable (with our human senses, methodologies and instruments) with an absence of the materiality in the unseen. Both seen and unseen world are sometimes interpreted as something as discontinouous, rather than continouous.
Take for example chemists doing experiments. When mixing different compounds, a flame, an explosion or an unexpected reaction might emerge in a way that is not going along with our intuition of the matter and the material world. Yet unexpected reactions are regimented by clear mechanisms when we observe and deduce beyond our normal sensory limitations. This appears however magical to our eyes and led to many conceptions on the beyond in the alchemical traditions. Arthur C. Clarke said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Similarly, some, in reality, quite complex phenomena could be indeed of occult/spiritual nature, but today simplified into vague and more or less porous theories as the unexplained phenomena of the past were.
Another exemple, is when Nicholas Tesla was doing his public demonstrations with alternative current, being capable to make appear lightnings seemingly out of the blue with is coil and other instruments, lots of people thought he was a sorcerer, and this is, again, a reaction to the previously unseen that we recurrently see in humans. Which makes you think about a lot of the traditions about the occult, the divine and the spiritual. That some valuable discoveries and experiences of unseen forces at play might have been interpreted in a loose, unmaterial and magical way. That some realities, some real mechanisms might have been simplified or have taken a form more understandable to the people experiencing or observing them while not being totally, directly or precisely understood at the time. Chakras for example, are theorized to be aligned with major secretory glands and organs in the human body, meaning that an intervention there or there on the body – either physical or psychological through placebo and suggestion – could have indeed have a measurable, or let’s rather say witnessable impact. Which demonstrate that the spiritual practice might have help maintain a knowledge that had functional repercussions.
Also, lot of rituals are quite rigorous, complex and have lot of regularity in their elements and practice - sometimes in a way that seems to approach a scientific experiment or operation and all the control of variables that needs to take place in this kind of settings - and although the reasons of why we would see an impact seemingly emerging from the ritual — whether it is because of a placebo or some spiritual mechanism — it is interesting because it suggests in both cases that an underlying mechanism is happening nonetheless. That’s why i tend to think that it is reasonable to believe that the unseen might be mechanistic, although sometimes elusive for our senses and instruments.
It is particularly interesting how we can bend and significantly change the phenomenological experience by altering brain regions, as studies on controlled, localised brain damage shows us. We can induce on command out-of-body experiences with transcranial magnetic stimulation. We can also induce in someone the fear of being chased or persecuted by entities - subjects often mention demons, secret agents, spirits, etc. - by stimulating in the same way some specific brain regions. Although those in themselves doesn’t cancel the possible “spiritual” reality of certain experiences which are commonly reported by people (astral projection and so on), it shows first of all that we can be easily be at the mercy of the influences of physiological processes and that we ought to be careful when interpreting seemingly spiritual experiences. Additionnally, it can suggest a mechanistic tendancy from which the occult and “spiritual” world could simply be a more or less smooth continuation of. Djinns in the muslim folklore for exemple are represented as some sort of hyperdimensional beings with the intellectual level and impulsivity approaching those of animals, who live for really long and who can sometimes interact with us in the seen, physical world and even influence our behaviors or thoughts. Hypothetically speaking it is interesting as a thought experiment to think how hyperdimensional beings of some kind could be influencing brain processes through real, concrete, but not yet known mechanisms - if those mechanisms are knowable at all. All of this remains highly hypothetical of course.
What do you guys think?
