Radical Occultism
What is our contemporary path?
In my last essay, I proposed that our society needs an ontological intervention to restore meaning, purpose, mystery, and transcendence to the world. We lost these things with the rise of materialism or physicalism, which is, ultimately, a nihilistic worldview. Materialism — constricted rationality and empiricism — remains the underlying paradigm of modern technological civilization.
Of course, we still have many religious believers. If anything, traditional religions seems to be on the rise. Several ecological and “sense-making” thinkers I know recently “came out” as newly converted Christians, including Paul Kingsnorth and Jordan Hall. I find this strange but not unsurprising, considering the despair caused by the polycrisis and the lack of traditional community structures. Hall and Kingsnorth probably felt they needed something to hold onto from their Judeo-Christian tradition, no matter how faith-based and antiquated.
Last time, I noted that monistic idealism is a more logical, evidence based, and deeply satisfying worldview than materialism. But idealism requires a perspectival shift that most people cannot bear to make. Nihilism or cynicism is woven into many people’s sense of identity and their psychology at this point.
It took a massive effort for people in the past centuries to give up their Judeo-Christian beliefs in God and the afterlife and accept the existential nothingness of a universe without direction or purpose. Today It would be wrenching for even highly intelligent materialists to admit physicalism is obsolete — that we have reason to hope, once again, for some transcendent realm or condition of being beyond this one. Renewed hope seems more unbearable — or, at least, distasteful — than continuing with nihilism.
As Gerald Heard wrote in Pain, Sex, and Time, it is just as hard for people to regain their hope in transcendence as it was painful to give it up, a few centuries ago. This may even be more difficult!
If the universe is actually woven from consciousness rather than made of matter, we can seriously explore a vast range of transcendent possibilities. For instance, we should consider reincarnation seriously. Professor Ian Stevenson found hundreds of examples of spontaneous past life recall in children around the world and was able to document many of these in his books, including Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect.
We also need a way to understand the vast differences we encounter in occult and esoteric cosmologies from different cultures. Indigenous cultures and traditional societies around the world know of different subtle energy systems (Qi, kundalini, manna and so on), different ideas of gods and spirits, and different models of the afterlife (or underworld). How could this be the case? Doesn’t this mean the esoteric worldview is intrinsically flawed?
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