Politics, Metaphysics, and the Occult

Why the path to authentic liberation requires a new ontology

Over ten years ago, we put together this anthology of essays originally published in our web magazine, Reality Sandwich. It remains a great read!

Perhaps the only good thing I can say about the current situation in the U.S. is that it is clarifying. Our financial and corporate elites have demonstrated their absolute fealty to profit-over-people. They haven’t just “bent the knee;” they’ve crumpled to the ground in abject fealty. Also, for all of those who wondered how authoritarian populism takes over and ruins countries, now we know.

I never meant to be a political commentator or political thinker. My interests were always art, the avant-garde, consciousness, mysticism and the occult. When I was young, growing up in New York City in the 1970s, I had a profound sense that something was deeply wrong with my society, beyond any Marxist, Freudian, or Frankfurt School analysis of the situation. It wasn’t until I explored psychedelic shamanism in my late twenties that I understood what, exactly, was wrong.

While researching Breaking Open the Head, my first book, I learned through direct experience that there are other dimensions of reality, visionary and transcendent domains, that we can access through indigenous shamanic practice as well as modern chemicals. Encounters in these other realms — proximate or orthogonal to our own — can unleash paranormal, psychic, and supernatural phenomena that challenge, and eventually revoke, the prevailing paradigm of scientific materialism. I had many paranormal and psychic experiences and wrote about them in my first books. I began as a hard-headed skeptic and had to be convinced by a combination of repeat experiences with careful study and reflection.

Emerging in the 19th Century, materialism proposes that the universe is built on a physical substrate, with consciousness emerging from matter in some way that is still to be determined. Today I support an alternative paradigm, idealism —- sometimes called “analytic” or “monistic” idealism — which posits that consciousness is the underlying reality. The physical universe is a transitory projection of this “field” of consciousness, which creates separate containers of subjective awareness (such as ourselves) to explore, create, feel, discover, and learn about itself.

A number of contemporary thinkers agree with me that idealism actually meshes better with what we have since learned about the deep structure of reality from quantum physics. Idealism also, in theory, allows for there to be aspects of our being that exist before we are born and continue after we die. The physicist Amit Goswami developed a provisional model for how this works in Physics of the Soul. Through quantum nonlocality, we develop patterns of thinking, feeling, and willing that remain linked and seek to continue their momentum by taking another physical body.

There is a lot of good evidence supporting some form of reincarnation, although our understanding remains rudimentary. Some of that evidence is presented in the work of Ian Stevenson, whose books include Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect. If you research into Tibetan Buddhism and speak with some Lamas, it becomes evident that they possess a highly refined “spiritual science” around reincarnation. Western occult thinkers like Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner proposed that we in the West lost the knowledge of reincarnation with the rise of Judeo-Christian monotheism. Steiner claimed the mission of his life on Earth was to reintroduce an understanding of reincarnation to the modern Western consciousness, exploring how this works in a fascinating series of books, Karmic Relationships. For Steiner, not only human beings incarnate again and again; the Earth itself reincarnates, and we are currently in its fourth incarnation. (I am part of a month-long seminar on Rudolf Steiner starting next week; learn more and sign up here).

In past writing, I explored what seems to me to be an obvious relationship between the idealist paradigm, which understands consciousness as the ontological primary, and a Leftist, utopian social ideology, which recognizes the value in all human beings and all subjective perspectives as aspects of an underlying field of consciousness which is, ultimately, unitary and non-dual. I believe that the Left has sputtered and failed over the last centuries because it lacked this idealist — non-materialist — ontology.

Historically, communism, socialism, and anarchism have been linked with scientific materialism and atheism (here’s looking at you, Karl Marx!). From my perspective, this is very problematic. It is difficult if not impossible to hold a coherent ethical framework from a purely materialist worldview, which is inherently nihilistic. This is partly why, over the last decades, the American and European Left lost its way and got mired in “identity politics.” The Left got stuck on those elements of our human-being-ness that divide us — race, gender, and so on — instead of focusing on our intrinsic unity as subjective expressions of consciousness itself. (Probably this idea should be the subject of an essay in itself: I will come back to it).

There is another extremely valuable aspect of idealism: It allows us to give the various world religions their proper due. It provides a context for understanding them properly without getting sucked into obsolete doctrines. The Biblical or Quranic revelations make sense — and should be read — as authentic expressions of a completely authentic communion with the Divine, a transcendent impulse that is essential to our humanity. At the same time, the various religions must also be understood as historical artifacts and cultural constructs. They gave expression to the knowledge of a particular people, at a certain time.

The drastic mistake made by the various religions is their attempts to freeze knowledge or “truth” in scriptures written long ago. Divine revelation and sacred communion doesn’t end with any musty old book. We should understand our relationship with the Divine as an ongoing, ever-evolving process. We can consciously participate in the ongoing revelation, if we want.

As the poet Rilke put it, “Although we may not like it/God is growing.”

God grows through us — through the evolution of our love, wisdom, and care.

We can ask ourselves why it happened that a few archaic books became so charged with collective meaning that they ended up determining the arc of human history in such a powerful way. I have theories about this.