Is "Magic" a Sensible Response to Ecological Breakdown and Civilizational Collapse?

Part Two in a Series

“Magic Saves the World from Civilizational Collapse and Ecological Breakdown” by MidJourney, in the style of Salvador Dali

Please take this as a thought experiment…

I want to dive deep into the question of whether “magic” as well as the “miraculous” constitute a plausible avenue for responding to the all-encompassing threat of ecological breakdown, civilizational collapse, and the possibility of human extinction. This is a trajectory of thought that I pursue very seriously, yet hold lightly.

As scientists learn about the various feedback loops in the climate system and the other planetary boundaries, the prospect of near-term extinction becomes more legitimate. I don’t think, like uber-doomer Guy McPherson, that our extinction will occur by 2026. However I would be surprised, if, continuing on the current trajectory, we make it to end of this century. We are seeing a rapid acceleration in warming along with many other threats, beyond what most scientists predicted a few years back.

Personally, as I explored psychedelic shamanism while writing my first two books, I experienced a wide range of paranormal and psychic or “magical” effects that I did not believe in until they happened to me. These kinds of effects — ranging from synchronicity to telepathy to the mysterious appearance and disappearance of objects — are quite common for many people who explore this area. As “non-specific psychic amplifiers,” psychedelics often induce paranormal experiences.

The current psychedelic renaissance has constricted the discourse around these substances and their effects to fit them into a materialist scientific worldview that denies the supernatural. They have made taboo all discussion of psychic and paranormal phenomena, cut off from “serious” consideration. For reasons I will explore another time, I consider this a dangerous error.

When I realized the reductive materialist paradigm was broken and wrong, I had to reassemble a new coherent worldview, a process which took a number of years, as documented in my first books.

I had to develop an approach to a wide range of theories and occult philosophies that required finding balance, maintaining both openness and skepticism, while synthesizing parts from many different theoretical systems that slowly came together to form a new whole.

I discovered an alternative “canon” of past and current thinkers in these areas who are basically ignored by the establishment, which continues to indoctrinate the masses into materialist group-think. These thinkers include (in no particular order): Jean Gebser, Patrick Harpur, Dion Fortune, Gurdjieff, Ouspensky, Walter Benjamin, Terence McKenna, Rudolf Steiner, Fritjof Capra, Fritjof Schuon, Rene Girard, Amit Goswami, Bernardo Kastrup, Rupert Sheldrake, Jeffrey Kripal, Namkai Norbu, Sri Nisargaddata, David Abrams, William Irwin Thompson, Jose Arguelles, Carl Jung, and many more. Without the direct experiences of psychic phenomena described in detail in my books, attaining this new integrated worldview would have been impossible.

I was already a monistic or analytic idealist when I finished Quetzalcoatl Returns (2006). In other words, according to my current model of reality, consciousness is fundamental — what Kastrup calls the “ontological primitive.”

We live in a universe formed out of consciousness. Just as we experience dreams that seem as vivid as waking life, this entire physical universe is a kind of dream that the underlying field of consciousness is having.