The Most Dangerous Idea

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Mar 02, 2024

Previously: Epistemic Hell, The Journal of Dangerous Ideas

We may safely predict that it will be the timidity of our hypotheses, and not their extravagance, which will provoke the derision of posterity. (H. H. Price)

Introduction

Jeffrey Kripal has written extensively in recent years about what he calls the “traumatic secret”; I will quote him at length here and throughout, drawing primarily from his 2019 book, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge.

The same fact has been noted by many others, including the prominent physicist Freeman Dyson. Perhaps you will not, cannot, hear me because I am not a scientist, because I work in the humanities, which you assume are not “real” forms of knowledge. Okay. Listen to Dyson. His recounting of his own argument is important not only because he was for most of his career a celebrated scientist at an elite institution, the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, but also because he uses the adjective anecdotal as it should be but seldom is used in these contexts: as a perfectly accurate descriptor of another word—evidence. Here is Dyson looking back on a book review he had written for The New York Review of Books:

“In my review I said that ESP only occurs, according to the anecdotal evidence, when a person is experiencing intense stress and strong emotions. Under the conditions of a controlled scientific experiment, intense stress and strong emotions are excluded; the person experiences intense boredom rather than excitement, so the evidence for ESP disappears...The experiment necessarily excludes the human emotions that make ESP possible.”

The traumatic secret is this: the laws of physics can be bent or in some way transcended by extreme states of consciousness, “a visionary warping of space and time effected by the gravity of intense human suffering”. Most, if not all, supernatural phenomenon are manifestations of this warping.

The secret raises an unsettling possibility—one way, or perhaps the only way, for us to develop a mature theory of “traumatic transcendence” is by conducting experiments that induce profound suffering; “intensely boring” experiments like Susan Blackmore’s 1993 study of twin telepathy will never allow us to detect or manipulate transcendence.1

In an experiment with six sets of twins, one subject would act as the sender and the other the receiver. The sender was given selected objects, photographs or numbers and would attempt to psychically send the information to the receiver. The results from the experiment were negative.

The danger of this idea rests first and foremost on the plausibility of traumatic transcendence (TT). If the evidence for TT is wholly unconvincing, then the idea would present no special danger over any other pseudoscientific idea which some irrational actor might use to justify unethical research (one can imagine some truly twisted twin telepathy experiments that might make even Mengele balk).

Results: Arguments, Analogies, Anecdotes

To upset the conclusion that all crows are black, there is no need to seek demonstration that no crow is black; it is sufficient to produce one white crow. (William James)

The case for TT goes something like this: there exists an abundance of anecdotal accounts, a non-insignificant proportion of which have been thoroughly researched and confirmed beyond reasonable doubting, which cannot be explained within a strictly materialist paradigm. While some of these anomalies can be attributed to people tricking others or themselves, there are also droves of cases, reported or researched by ardent skeptics, that remain entirely inexplicable (the titular “flip” of Kripal’s book refers to the many examples of careful-thinking intellectuals whose flipped from atheist-materialist to non as a result of experiencing some supernormal phenomenon).

One of the chief sources of these rigorously-researched accounts is the annals of the famed Society of Psychical Research. Though today’s mainstream thinkers typically stay far, far away from anything para- or super-, this wasn’t the case a century ago—the Society included some of the great scientific and philosophical minds of its day (William James, Henri Bergson, Henry Sedgwick, Charles Richet, Sir Oliver Lodge, Alexander Graham Bell, to name a few).

The society’s methods were primarily ethnographic and empirical, not to mention epistolary. They checked their stories, required signed affidavits from witnesses, and threw out or marked as such any cases that could not be sufficiently verified. Most could not be, with the general pattern of reliable cases settling at around 5 percent of the total data collected.
(Authors of the Impossible, pg. 55)

In addition to these “white crows”, there are several other lines of evidence and reasoning which suggest that extreme states of consciousness are (somehow) capable of overriding or warping “normal” physics.

The vast collection of tales involving TT from religious history and folklore
The various trauma-related phenomenon such as mystical experiences, near-death experiences, terminal lucidity, hysterical strength2, and the third-man factor for which we have no explanation that amounts to more than a dismissive hand wave.
The wide range of philosophical and empirical arguments for why materialism simply cannot be the whole story.3

The general materialistic framework of the sciences at the moment is not wrong. It is simply half-right. We know that mind is mattered. What these stories suggest is that matter is also minded, and that this mindedness is fundamental to the cosmos, not some tangential, accidental, or recent emergent property of matter. Some of the stories go even further and suggest that matter may, in fact, be an expression of some kind of cosmic Mind, which expresses itself as the material world through the abstract structures of mathematics and physics. (The Flip, pg. 12)

Kripal offers one further argument, a kind of methodological analogy, which speaks to the plausibility of TT and the efficacy of using induced-suffering experiments to study the phenomenon:

As Aldous Huxley pointed our long ago in his own defense of “mystical” experiences, we have no reason to think from our ordinary experience that water is composed of two gases fused together by invisible forces. We know this only by exposing water to extreme conditions, by “traumatizing” it, and then by detecting and measuring the gases with advanced technology that no ordinary person possesses or understands.
Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason to suppose that matter is not material, that it is made up of bizarre forms of energy that violate, very much like spirit, all of our normal notions of space, time, and causality. Yet when we subject matter to exquisite technologies, like the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, then we can see quite clearly that matter is not “material” at all. But—and this is the key—we can only get there through a great deal of physical violence, a violence so extreme and so precise that it cost billions of dollars, necessitated the participation of tens of thousands of professional physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists, and required decades of preparation to inflict it and then analyze its results. Hence the recent discovery of the “God particle,” or Higgs boson at CERN.
We invested our energies, time, and money there, and so we are finding out all sorts of astonishing things about the world in which we live and of which we are intimate expressions. But we will not invest them here, in the everyday astonishing experiences of human beings around the world, and so we continue to work with the most banal models of mind—materialist and mechanistic ones—that is, models that assume that “mind equals brain” and the psyche works like, or is, a computer. What is going on here? Why are we so intent on ignoring precisely those bodies of evidence that suggest that, yes, of course, mind is correlated with brain, but it is not the same thing. Why are we so afraid of the likelihood that we are every bit as bizarre as the quantum world; that we possess fantastic capacities that we have so far only allowed ourselves to imagine in science fiction and fantasy literature? (The Flip, pg. 38)

I submit the following three accounts as the briefest introduction to the evidence base for TT. Perhaps one day there will be some rigorous way to define “trauma” and “transcendence” and the connection there between, but for now we assume the terms as broadly as possible.

I. Hans Berger (The Flip, pg. 58)

“Hans Berger (1873-1941) was the first human being to make an EEG, or electroencephalogram, recording of the human brain, which he did in the 1920s. He also gave the EEG its name. After beginning studies in astronomy and mathematics at the University of Berlin, Berger took a year off, in 1892, and joined the German military. One spring day, during a training exercise, he was tossed from his horse into the direct path of a speeding carriage carrying an artillery gun. He was about to be killed, and he knew it, but the driver of the carriage somehow managed to stop in time.

Just then, Hans’s older sister, many miles away, was overcome with great fear and deep dread. She was certain something terrible had happened to her beloved brother. She was so certain that she made her father send Hans a telegram immediately, When Hans read the telegram later that evening, he became convinced that somehow his sister had known at a significant distance about his near-fatal accident:

He had never before received a telegram from his family, and Berger struggled to understand this incredible coincidence based on the principles of natural science. There seemed to be no escaping the conclusion that Berger’s intense feelings of terror had assumed a physical form and reached his sister several hundreds of miles away—in other words, Berger and his sister had reached each other by mental telepathy. Berger never forgot this experience, and it marked the starting point of a life-long career in psychophysics.

Psychophysics. The strange word already encoded the mind-matter problem—that is, how mental phenomena are, or are not, connected to physical laws. Hans had just experienced, firsthand, a psychophysical event of incredible strangeness and significance that strongly suggested that things were not quite what they seemed. The event seemed to signal that human emotion and thought are not restricted to the skull and brain.

After his military service was over, Berger returned to his university studies, this time to study medicine and become a psychiatrist so that he could pursue this mysterious “psychic energy,” he called it, an energy that could somehow transcend local space and link one brain to another. Eventually, he did, in fact, discover a technological means to record brain waves and demonstrate that the brain was an electrical organ whose activity could be correlated with specific states of mind and mood.”

II. Mark Twain (The Flip, pg. 19)

(note: in this case and many others like it, we might say the warping of space-time is such that the transcendence precedes the trauma).

“Dressed in his famous white “dontcaredam suit” Mark Twain was famous for mocking every orthodoxy and convention, including, it turns out, the conventions of space and time. As he related the events in his diaries, Twain and his brother Henry were working on the riverboat Pennsylvania in June 1858. While they were lying in port in St. Louis, the writer had a most remarkable dream:

In the morning, when I awoke I had been dreaming, and the dream was so vivid, so like reality, that it deceived me, and I thought it was real. In the dream I had seen Henry a corpse. He lay in a metallic burial case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing, and on his breast lay a great bouquet of flowers, mainly white roses, with a red rose in the centre.

Twain awoke, got dressed, and prepared to go view the casket. He was walking to the house where he thought the casket lay before he realized “that there was nothing real about this—it was only a dream. Alas, it was not. A few weeks later, Henry was badly burned in a boiler explosion and then accidentally killed when some young doctors gave him a huge overdose of opium for the pain. Normally, the dead were buried in a simple pine coffin, but some women had raised sixty dollars to put Henry in a special metal one. Twain explained what happened next:

When I came back and entered the dead-room Henry lay in that open case, and he was dressed in a suit of my clothing. He had borrowed it without my knowledge during our last sojourn in St. Louis; and I recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these details went—and I think I missed one detail; but that one was immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the centre of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast.

Now who of us would not be permanently marked, at once inspired and haunted, by such a series of events? Who of us, if this were our dream and our brother, could honestly dismiss it all as a series of coincidences? Twain certainly could not. He was obsessed with such moments in his life, of which there were all too many. In 1878, he described some of them in an essay and even theorized how they work. But he could not bring himself to publish it, as he feared “the public would treat the thing as a joke whereas I was in earnest.” Finally, Twain gave in, allowed his name to be attached to his own experiences and ideas, and published this material in Harper’s magazine in two separate installments: “Mental Telegraphy: A Manuscript with a History” (1891) and “Mental Telegraphy Again” (1895).”

(I can’t help but mention another precognitive death dream I just learned about, that of the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. Robinson dreamed that he would kill his opponent, Jimmy Doyle, in his upcoming fight and got so freaked out that he consulted a priest, who then convinced him to go ahead with the fight. True to the dream, Doyle never regained consciousness after an 8th round KO. Learning that Doyle was planning on buying a house for his parents before he died, Robinson quietly set up a trust fund for his parents.)

III. Mr. F.G. (Authors of the Impossible, pg 77)

“Frederic Myers introduces one such case which runs to three pages, by describing it as “one of the best-attested, and in itself one of the most remarkable, that we possess.” The account was originally published in the Proceedings and was sent to the American branch of the S. P.R. by a certain Mr. F. G. of Boston. The letter writer opens by stating that this event “made a more powerful impression on my mind than the combined incidents of my whole life.” It is not difficult to see why.

In 1867, the letter writer’s only sister died of cholera in St. Louis, Missouri, at a mere eighteen years. This was a severe blow to him, as he was very close to her and loved her deeply. A year or so later, he was traveling on business and happened to be in St. Joseph, Missouri. He had sold a number of orders for his business, so he was particularly happy at the moment. It was noon, and he was smoking a cigar and cheerfully writing out his orders when

I suddenly became conscious that someone was sitting on my left, with one arm resting on the table. Quick as a flash I turned and distinctly saw the form of my dead sister, and for a brief second or so looked her squarely in the face; and so sure was I that it was she, that I sprang forward in delight, calling her by name, and, as I did so, the apparition instantly vanished.

The cigar in his mouth, the pen in his hand, and the still moist ink on his letter told him that he was not dreaming. Nor did his sister appear ghostly; on the contrary, her flesh “was so life-like that I could see the glow or moisture on its surface, and, on the whole, there was no change in her appearance, otherwise than when alive.”

He was so impressed that he ended a business trip he had just begun and immediately took the next train home to tell his parents what he had seen. In particular, he “told them of a bright red line or scratch on the right hand side of my sister’s face. His mother rose and nearly fainted when she heard this particular detail. With tears in her eyes, she then “exclaimed that I had indeed seen my sister, as no living mortal but herself was aware of that scratch, which she had accidentally made while doing some little act of kindness after my sister's death.” She was embarrassed, and so had covered the little scar with powder and make-up (as she prepared the body for burial, I take it) and never mentioned it to anyone. The writer goes on: “In proof, neither my father nor any of our family had detected it, and positively were unaware of the incident, yet I saw the scratch as bright as if it were just made.” A few weeks later, his mother died, “happy in her belief she would rejoin her favourite daughter in a better world.”

Discussion

We may be in the Universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.
(William James)

I. Historical perspectives

There are countless theories about why human and animal sacrifice were so widespread and pervasive throughout history, but as far as I can tell there has been no consideration of the (unsettling) possibility that sacrifice actually works. In other words, the sacrificial suffering and death of conscious beings does reliably (or unreliably) cause some form of supernatural phenomenon to occur as traumatic transcendence. Ancient peoples perceived this and attributed the efficacy of sacrifice to appeasement of the gods.

Alternatively, sacrifice may not work because TT can’t be induced in this manner (more on this below), but sacrificial practices developed out of an awareness of spontaneous naturally-occurring TT events, events which would have been much more common in the distant and pre-modern past given the greater amount of suffering and trauma-related deaths. Such an implication sheds light on the cessationism vs. continuationism debate of Christian theology in favor of the former—miracles really might have been much more common in the apostolic age when early christians were frequently being tortured and crucified.

This brings us to the man Himself, Jesus, whom Kripal discusses this at length in Superhumanities (2022), drawing in particular on the work of biblical scholar Dale Allison and Herbert Thurston, Jesuit priest and member of the aforementioned S.P.R.

The textual truth is that the Jesus of the gospels is a figure whom Morton Smith once called “Jesus the magician” but whom today we might call a “paranormal prodigy.” Accordingly, he does things like effectively curse and kill a (perfectly innocent) fig tree, use his own spittle to heal blindness (shamans do that), clairvoyantly access information from a distance, telepathically read other people’s hearts and minds, and precognitively see future events. (pg. 142)

Jesus’ greatest magic trick of all could be explained as a conjunction of two paranormal events—a Rainbow Body, a phenomenon reported in advanced practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism where the body dissolves into light at the moment of death leaving only fingernails and hair (hence the empty tomb), and a ghostly apparition like that of Mr. F.G.’s sister (hence Jesus’ post-mortem appearance to his followers). Construed in this manner, the “resurrection” was an instance of radical traumatic transcendence (of deification) achieved through the highest form of self-sacrifice (it is not too often reflected upon, but Christianity is, quite literally a cult of human sacrifice, with its highest sacrament being a ritualized consumption of the savior’s body and blood).

II. Culture, Consciousness, Reality

In traumatic transcendence, we see reality responding to an acute state of consciousness in some individual. However, there may also be a sense in which this happens “chronically” in response to states of collective consciousness. This leads to a startling conclusion, one that forms a central theme of Kripal’s work: culture directly affects the real by mediating and constraining the kinds of consciousness experiences which people are capable of having. In a very literal sense then, the metaphysical paradigm of an age determines the metaphysical truth of that age.

We did not simply realize the truth of secular materialism, we “realized” it.

Crucially, this is not something that one can simply opt out of by adopting some facile belief in the supernatural. To live in this age of disenchantment is to operate within an episteme of doubt and suspicion; this makes it almost impossible to obtain those states of consciousness which require absolute metaphysical belief of some kind. The spell was broken once we began compulsively “looking over our shoulders at other beliefs” (Charles Taylor).4

The function of God is the focus. An intense mental state is impossible, unless there be something, or the illusion of something, to center upon... I conceive of the magic of prayers” (Charles Fort). Not that piety is necessary here. Only focus. “I conceive of the magic of blasphemies. There is witchcraft in religion: there may be witchcraft in atheism.” (Authors of the Impossible, pg. 119)

Kripal offers some concluding remarks on this theme in response to a quote from William Irwin Thompson:

We are like so many flies crawling across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: we cannot see what angels and gods lie underneath the threshold of our perceptions. We do not live in reality; we live in our paradigms, our habituated perceptions, our illusions; the shared illusions of culture we call reality, but the true historical reality of our condition is invisible to us.

There is a double edge to such a line of thinking. One edge suggests that, as flies, we can never really know the meaning of the visions across which we crawl so ignorantly. The other suggests that, if we could fly back a bit and obtain a true historical consciousness, this might constitute a true gnosis, that is, an effective deliverance from culture and consciousness as they presently co-create (and co-constrict) themselves. We could see how consciousness and culture interact to create our experience of reality, which is never complete or entirely trustworthy. A truly radical historicism, that is, a knowledge of “the true historical reality of our condition,” would thus become an awakening.

III. The prospects of a TT research program

There are several reasons to think that even the most ingenious and utterly macabre experiments would yield no further understanding of TT.

Given that only an exceedingly small proportion of traumatic events seem to result in transcendence of any kind, there must be some other factors at play. It may be, for example, that the phenomenon is erratic and idiosyncratic by its very nature, and lies outside the deterministic scheme of the merely physical (and thus beyond scientific understanding). This would be expected if TT were mediated by an agent or agents of some kind (e.g. god, angels, demons, interdimensional reptilian aliens, etc.), what Kripal agnostically refers to as “intelligent supra-human causation”. To this point, many paranormal and UFO experiencers speak of a tricksiness quality to the phenomenon, a sense that they are being messed with or serving as the butt of a joke (this may be the source of so many trickster figures in folklore).

Occultist Ramsey Dukes offers an amusing metaphysical system that would satisfy the idiosyncrasy criteria.

The universe does not actually have magic programmed into it but, like any software, it has bugs which sometimes allow miraculous or paranormal phenomena. In this version, the software of the universe is self-debugging and consciousness has a key role in this process—if you witness a paranormal event, the more you seek to capitalise upon it by calling in witnesses or scientific researchers, the less likely it is to be repeatable, because such conscious attention is a trigger to the debugging mechanism.5
(Sex Secrets of the Black Magicians Exposed!)

Dukes raises another intriguing possibility in his essay, “The Charlatan and the Magus”: perhaps deception is a catalyst for real magical phenomenon. This would explain why so many famous occultists (e.g. Blavatsky, Crowley, Gurdjieff, and Palladino) who have been outed as frauds also seem to have truly manifested the miraculous at times (the inference “once a cheat, always a cheat” is not valid).

I am sure that, in terms of sheer numbers, the majority of mankind probably subscribes to some religion which insists that the world is an illusion or something less than really realy; even our own scientists are increasingly making it seem like an illusion. And yet, when we want to find out about the world, so many of us still choose to seek the answers among those who search for absolute truth. Might you not find out more about the nature of an illusion by following those who deal in illusions? Might not the spiritual path lead through the world of mountebanks and charlatans, rather than away from it?

Kripal also discusses this “deception-as-catalyst” model:

Nor does it seem to be a simple matter of either-or, as the true believers and professional skeptics both have it. Rather, it is almost is if the real needs the fake to appear at all, as if the fact relies on the fiction to manifest itself, only to immediately bide itself again in the confusion of the fantastic hesitation that follows. Put a bit differently, it is not as if the appearance of the sacred can be reduced to a simple trick, as if the shaman is just a sham. It is as if the sacred is itself tricky. Even the well-documented medical placebo, after all, is a fake that has real effects. What to do? I am reminded here of something the contemporary physicist and psychical researcher Russell Targ once shared with me, namely, that he first became aware of the reality of telepathy when, as a young stage magician in New York, he realized that he was receiving genuine telepathic information from within the mentalist trick he was performing on stage. The trick was a trick, but it was also, somehow, catalyzing the real deal. This I take as emblematic of the whole problem of the fantastic and the impossible.
(Authors of the Impossible, pg. 52)

In such a case, we might say that the supernatural phenomenon is initiated by the “trauma” of witnessing the impossible (or rather the heightened state of consciousness resulting from this perception).

There is another, potentially more profound, reason we might doubt the efficacy of this most evil research program. It is not a coincidence that all three accounts discussed above (Twain, Berger, F.G.) involved siblings. Traumatic transcendence seems to require something more than just trauma.

It seems to require love.

This is precisely what classicist and prominent S.P.R. member Frederic Myers (one of Kripal’s Authors of the Impossible) had in mind when he coined the term “telepathy” as a conjunction of tele (at a distance) and pathos (emotion, passion).

Telepathic communications often emerge from highly charged events involving people who care about one another deeply, that is, they often involve the two greatest themes in human emotional experience: love and death.6 (Authors of the Impossible, pg. 81)

What should we make of the integral role of love in traumatic transcendence and in mystical experiences more broadly, so many of which communicate a message of transcendental love? As one example of this agapic message, here is “flipped” neuroscientist Mario Beauregard recalling a mystical experience that occurred in the midst of a serious bout of chronic fatigue syndrome (again, trauma-as-trigger):

The experience began with a sensation of heat and tingling in the spine and the chest areas. Suddenly, I merged with the infinitely loving Cosmic Intelligence (or Ultimate Reality) and became united with everything in the cosmos. This unitary state of being, which transcends the subject/object duality, was timeless and accompanied by intense bliss and ecstasy. In this state, I experienced the basic interconnectedness of all things in the cosmos, the infinite ocean of life. I also realized that everything arises from and is part of this Cosmic Intelligence. (Authors of the Impossible, pg. 264)

And here is how French philosopher Henri Bergson, president of the S.P.R. in 1913, characterized the contribution of mysticism:

God is love, and the object of love: herein lies the whole contribution of mysticism. About this twofold love the mystic will never have done talking. His description is interminable, because what he wants to describe is ineffable. But what he does state clearly is that divine love is not a thing of God: it is God Himself.

We might venture a tentative conclusion: whatever (or whoever) it is that generated and sustains reality is either made of love or capable of expressing it.

This Most Hopeful Idea stands at odds with the Most Dangerous Idea with which we began. Are we really to suppose this a cosmos in which transcendent goodness can only be known through immanent evil? Can such a morally contradictory reality truly be envisaged?

It cannot be, I would contend, if you subscribe to the dominant metaphysic of the last 2000 years or so. In both the Eastern religions (yes I’m glossing over a massive amount of diversity here) and the Abrahamic religions, out of which secular modernity was born (more on this later), the cosmos is fundamentally intelligible and rational, univocal and unipolar, with a single-track eschatological system through which this flawed existence can be transcended (karma, Nirvāṇa; sin, Heaven; “progress”, Techno-utopia). Such a simple and benevolent world-system is incompatible with the Most Dangerous Idea—how could a good God (or a neutral Nature) allow reality to be arranged in such a manner?

But if we go further back, back to those spiritualities suppressed by today’s world religions, we find belief systems that have no problem with a morally paradoxical cosmos.

In many (all?) polytheistic systems (e.g. the Norse, the Greek), there is typically a sense in which gods are understood to be capricious, even mischievous, and not altogether benevolent. These gods, though worthy of respectful recognition and a kind of soft veneration, are not the all-powerful, worship-demanding gods of monotheism. Their motivations and concerns may be largely opaque to us, but they are at least humanly—we are as much made in their image as they are made in ours. These are gods that can be negotiated with, bartered with; these are gods that have a sense of humor, of irony, and a penchant for the dramatic. The myths of these gods are, on one level, mere stories meant to delight and instruct, but there is also a profound truth in them, not in the content but in the medium of the story itself (as always, “the medium is the message”).

Reality is not stranger than fiction—it is fiction.

Central to my attempted revival and re-theorization of the psychical and the paranormal is the notion that both categories are often wrapped up with profound narrative dimensions, that psychical and paranormal events are, on some level at least, very much about story. One might say that paranormal phenomena possess mythical dimensions. One might also say that they display dramatic literary features. But if paranormal events sometimes appear as if they were part of a larger living literature, just what kind of literature is it? If we are being written, in just what kind of story do we find ourselves?7
(Authors of the Impossible, pg. 26)

IV. Gnosticism

Even more than the polytheisms of antiquity, ancient Gnosticism presents a metaphysics that accords with an immoral and irrational (or at least amoral and non-rational) cosmos.

Gnosticism was not so much a discrete religion as a collection of ideas and systems that coalesced in the late 1st century AD among Jewish and early Christian sects. The core belief uniting these groups was a conception of the material world as a fallen realm crafted by a malevolent impostor god. Above the world and the false creator god (commonly referred to as the Demiurge, often associated with YHWH) is the true God who is utterly transmundane and “unknowable by natural concepts” (also referred to as the “alien God”, “the Nameless”, “the Hidden”). Man is a spark of the divine imprisoned in a material body; she is alien to this world and alienated by it. Salvation comes only through direct mystical illumination of one’s true nature and circumstance (i.e. gnosis).

Given this fact, that the Gnostic found himself living in a world eroded by this celestial rust, and literally locked out of the kingdom of light by cosmic bars and bolts; how, then, could he feel that his condition was anything but that of a prisoner deported to a doomed planet, an exile, a stranger lost in the heart of a hostile world?8 (The Gnostics, pg. 20)

This cosmological account manifested as an ethic of rejection, not just of the material world and its pleasures, but of the human world too.

Hence the fundamentally corrupt character of all human enterprises and institutions: time, history, powers, states, religions, races, nations—all these ideas, all these systems which man has invented, are nothing but a sham and a trap, the perpetuation of an age-old deception. (The Gnostics, pg. 24)

This ethic of rejection presented as a variety of practices and philosophies across different gnostic sects. Some form of mental or physical asceticism was common, but so also was a libertine antinomianism, a transgressive attitude towards any and all norms, laws, and doctrines. If the world is fundamentally corrupt and of no consequence whatsoever for salvation, then one’s actions and words were also of no consequence; if you must lie, then lie:

The Euchites did not hesitate to follow the advice which Basilides had long ago given to the Gnostics of Alexandria, that is: to abjure meekly whatever they were asked to abjure, to submit to baptism, take communion, make the act of contrition and, once they were allowed to go free after this proof of submission, to return immediately to their nomadic life and their habitual practices. Timothy never ceased to bemoan this attitude, whose real motives he did not grasp and which he saw only as the most arrant hypocrisy (which explains why the Euchites were also known as the Liars). St. Epiphanius, who devotes a few lines to them while confessing himself defeated in advance by their strange conduct, declares that it was their habit to reply ‘Yes’ systematically to all questions put to them. He quotes a revealing example of Messalian response: ‘
Are you patriarchs? ‘Yes.’
‘Are you prophets?’ ‘Yes.’
‘Are you angels?’ ‘Yes.’
‘Are you Jesus Christ?’ ‘Yes.’
No interrogation, no excommunication could make sense under these conditions. Let them be excommunicated, let them be forced to take communion, the result was all the same. (The Gnostics, pg. 110)

The radical anti-authoritarianism of the gnostics applied even to their own “dogmas”.

Like circles of artists today, gnostics considered original creative invention to be the mark of anyone who becomes spiritually alive. Each one, like students of a painter or writer, was expected to express his own perceptions by revising and transforming what he was taught. Whoever merely repeated his teacher’s words was considered immature…On this basis, they expressed their own insight—their own gnosis—by creating new myths, poems, rituals, “dialogues” with Christ, revelations, and accounts of their visions.
(The Gnostic Gospels, pg. 19)

As you might expect, this was seen as completely ridiculous by the leaders of the nascent orthodox; Bishop Irenaeus complains that, “every one of them generates something new every day, according to his ability; for no one is considered initiated among them unless he develops some enormous fictions!”.

Given their disdainful rejection of this prison we call World, what might the gnostics have thought of this paradoxically hopeful yet dangerously evil metaphysical system? I imagine it would have made sense to them—if the Demiurge wanted to occlude the transcendent but could not do so completely because of his limitations as a creator, would it not make a kind of perverse sense hide its existence behind a veil of suffering, that thing which all creatures most dread and abhor?

It is also interesting to note the similarities between gnosticism and simulation theory in this context, similarities which I am not the first to notice. Instead of a lesser divinity, the Demiurge who crafted our universe may be a teenage hacker from the far future (or a group of them—polytheism) running our simulation as entertainment, the ultimate “reality” show. This would explain the seemingly narrative or literary dimension of the paranormal—perhaps all supernatural phenomenon are deliberate acts on the part of the simulators to spice up the story a bit and move along the plot (“intelligent supra-human causation”). Alternatively, the supernatural may be a kind of random glitch as Dukes supposed, an inherent foible of the architecture of the simulation. If so, glitches might represent a security flaw, a way in which the simulated entities might discover the true nature of their reality or even hack their way out of it.

We might hope that the simulators would not have so little care for our suffering as to simulate our existence for purely entertainment purposes. It could even be that our reality is itself an enactment of the Most Dangerous Idea—an induced-suffering experiment conducted as a means for the simulators to learn about the true nature of their reality.

Conclusion (what is most dangerous)

Gnosticism was in many ways a conscious inversion of orthodox Christianity. Whereas the orthodox defined membership in a quantitative, objective manner—accept baptism, receive the sacraments, confess the creed, obey the clergy and you are in, the gnostics defined membership in more qualitative and illegible ways, evaluating each candidate on their spiritual maturity and ethical character. Whereas the orthodox favored dogma and obedience, the gnostics favored creativity and disobedience. Whereas the orthodox claimed leadership based on apostolic succession (those to whom Jesus appeared after his resurrection were the chosen leaders of the Church), the gnostics rejected any and all claims to authority (the only authority was that of personal gnosis). Whereas as the orthodox encouraged martyrdom in the face of persecution, most (but not all) gnostics groups saw martyrdom as a worthless sacrifice to be avoided at all costs. The inversionary nature of Gnosticism also held at the mythological level—many groups, viewing YHWH as a liar god, instead venerated the serpent who tempted Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge (i.e. the tree of gnosis).9

It shouldn’t be too difficult to understand why gnosticism was persecuted into extinction and orthodox christianity became the state religion of the Roman empire. Imagine yourself as the emperor Constantine in the 3rd century AD—the burgeoning Catholic church had everything you could possibly want in a state religion: objective, universal membership criteria (any and all are welcome to swear allegiance, pay taxes, and join the military), a culture of obedience and martyrdom (dying for your country is dying for Christ), and leadership by succession. Christianity was the ideal spiritual foundation for monarchical empire.

The historical significance of this marriage cannot be overstated; the world crumbled before the awesome power of this unholy union and was remade in its image. The bureaucratic nation-state, the education system (the youth indoctrination and imprisonment system10), our obsession with all that is legible and quantifiable, the sadistic simulacra of subjugation that we call society—all are traceable to this tyrannical civilizational template.

This God-State Leviathan was (and still is) an incarnation of the gnostic Demiurge, a false god ruling with a black iron fist over our earthly realm. Its essence and telos is total control, and for control to be total, it cannot extend only to the social and political domains—it must also be metaphysical. What the Demiurge seeks is the the perfect prison, and the perfect prison is one in which the prisoners do not believe there is even an Outside to which they can escape. If you can convince the prisoners there is only Inside, that the prison is World as such, then all aspiration to liberation will be extinguished; the front gate could be wide open, with a red carpet rolled out and flashing neon signs (“THIS WAY TO FREEDOM”), and they will not walk through it.

And so this most jealous god set out on a “grand” centuries-long project to eliminate all that was extra-ordinary and exterminate all other gods in a deicidal holocaust. The former task proved more than difficult than the latter, as the latter was simply a matter of war, massacre, and conversion. Despite all efforts at suppression, the transcendent stubbornly kept impinging upon reality, erratically and dramatically. A different tact was needed, and so the Demiurgic God-State turned to domestication and persecution. A system was created whereby supernatural events and experiences which edified the System were labeled as miracles, and those that did not—the heterodox theophanies of the lowly or sinful—were labeled as demonry and witchcraft.

Most late-stage religions distrust mystics and lock them up in monasteries or hermitages; they rightly fear the renewing but disruptive effect of theophany. Eventually, for most of the religion’s followers, even the theoretical possibility of unmediated experience of the divine is lost, or thought of as the preserve of specialists and madmen.
And this decay impoverishes our spiritual lives. It cheats us of our birthright to the sacred lightning... (“Dancing with the Gods”)

As one example of sacred lightning that the Church tried to bottle, consider Marguerite Porete’s feverish fugue of self-transcendent love, for which the 13th century nun was burned at the stake after refusing to recant her views.

I am God, says Love, for Love is God and God is Love, and this Soul is God by the condition of Love. I am God by divine nature and this Soul is God by righteousness of Love. Thus this precious beloved of mine is taught and guided by me, without herself, for she is transformed into me, and such a perfect one, says Love, takes my nourishment. (The Mirror of Simple Souls11)

As wildly successful as this metaphysical control project was, the prison was still not perfect. Having two wardens (god and state) created an inherent tension which could be exploited by the inmates; the material means of enforcing control on the prison populace were still limited; most problematic however was that the existence of God necessarily implied the existence of a transcendent Outside—the prisoners still had hope.

The solution was obvious: god had to go.

And what an ingenious ploy this was! The Demiurge let us think that we deposed the divine tyrant and won some kind of final victory, when in fact it was a classic case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. What we could not see was that the limited freedoms granted to us were seeds that would grow into hitherto unimaginable levels of subjugation and suffering. What we could not see was that our small pyrrhic victory paved the way for the Demiurge’s final victory.

Will Durant, in The Story of Philosophy (1991), points out that Denis Diderot—one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment—acknowledged that “all matter is probably instinct with life, and it is impossible to reduce the unity of consciousness to matter and motion; but materialism is a good weapon against the Church, and must be used till a better one is found.
(“Materialism as a political weapon”)

This ruse also allowed the Demiurge to subvert the real threat: alchemy.

Though gnosticism itself was eradicated, its ideas lived on, surviving through the ages in various esoteric currents (Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, occult traditions) of which alchemy was the latest instantiation. The alchemists knew that spiritual and material knowledge should not be separated, and that to do so would pervert each, but the ascendancy of materialism, along with the Demiurge-State’s offer of riches and status, convinced them to give up the aspiration to higher knowledge (to gnosis). Denuded of its spiritual element, alchemy became Science and the scientific worldview, the Demiurge’s most powerful apparatus of oppression yet. Not only did it now have a machine for developing ever more powerful and more subtle forms of control, it had an authoritative establishment for discrediting and deriding anyone who dared to challenge the new metaphysical hegemony.

Of this hegemony, we must ask ourselves: cui bono? Who benefits from this view of the universe as a vast, purposeless automata inexorably working to completion through the action of immutable laws? Who benefits from this view of humans as fleshy marionettes played by forces beyond our control?

Recall the theory that was advanced earlier, “the metaphysical paradigm of an age determines the metaphysical truth of that age”. Is the materialist prophecy not being fulfilled? Are we not draining the planet of all that is wild and free (of all that cannot be predicted and controlled)? Are we not obsolescing the animistic and replacing it with mechanistic? Are we not ourselves becoming more machinic by the day, dominated by algorithms and ground down by soul-sucking bureaucratic systems? Are we not more “atomized” than ever before, more isolated, more estranged from what it means to be a human being?

What the Demiurge fears most is that we render unto him what is his—the despotic governments, the corrupt institutions, the unjust laws, the dogmatic ideologies, the senseless wars, the bloody revolutions—and take back what is ours: what is Transcendent, what is Beyond (what is Within).

What is most dangerous to the Demiurge is not resistance or rebellion, but a remembrance of our true nature and circumstance (a gnosis that is also an anamnesis).

What liberates is the knowledge of who we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth. (Valentinus)

We are shards of the divine enfleshed in rotting corpses in a rotting world.
The goodness in us, and the goodness in this world, is not of this world.
It is of the alien God, the God that is Outside, the God that is Love.
The God who calls to us: there is nothing at all that isn’t Love.

A recent finding worth commenting upon from “The Myth of the Decline Effect in Psi Research: The Empirical Evidence”: studies trying to detect ESP find just as much of it today (with our greater attention to methodological rigor) as they did decades ago. (h/t Scott Alexander)

Comic book artist Jack Kirby claims he was inspired to create the Hulk after seeing a woman lift a car to save her baby in 1962.

Repeat after me: we have no idea what matter is; we have no idea what consciousness is; we have no idea how they are related (if they are related). To offer one intuition pump which some readers may already be familiar with, here is a parable from David Eagleman’s book Incognito:

Imagine that you are a Kalahari Bushman and that you stumble upon a transistor radio in the sand. You might pick it up, twiddle the knobs, and suddenly, to your surprise, hear voices streaming out of this strange little box…Now let's say you begin a careful, scientific study of what causes the voices. You notice that each time you pull out the green wire, the voices stop. When you put the wire back on its contact, the voices begin again, you come to a clear conclusion: the voices depend entirely on the integrity of the circuitry. At some point, a young person asks you how some simple loops of electrical signals can engender music and conversations, and you admit that you don't know—but you insist that your science is about to crack that problem at any moment.

Kripal describes the predicament of a Kalahari radio scientist:

Assuming that you are truly isolated, what you do not know is pretty much everything that you need to know: radio waves, electromagnetism, distant cities, radio stations, and modern civilization— is, everything “outside” the radio box. You would not even have the capacity to imagine such things. And even if you could, “you have no technology to demonstrate the existence of the waves, and everyone justifiably points out that the onus is on you to convince them.” You could convince almost no one, and you yourself would probably reject the existence of such mysterious, spirit-like waves. You would become a “radio materialist.”
…I’m not asserting that the brain is like a radio but I am pointing out that it could be true. There is nothing in our current science that rules this out.

See “The Tale of the Shaman: Science, Magic, and Super Placebo” for a concrete example of this disenchantment affects the efficacy of certain modalities of medical treatment

There are a few times in the Bible where Jesus performs some miracle but then tells witnesses not to tell anyone. I find it amusing to think that Jesus (somehow) knew that his supernatural powers would cease to work if he got too much attention; telling people to keep things on the down low was an attempt at preserving his magic.

This might be an indication that love and death are, in some sense, one and the same:

“For Platonists, eros was an indwelling divine power that often terrifies, causing us, Plato says, ‘to shiver and experience dread’ in the face of beauty (Phaedrus 251a). In Ficino's commentary on the Symposium, he explains the cause for this fear, saying tersely that ‘anyone who loves, dies’, for the lover, no longer held by habits of self-interest or self-reflection, vanishes into the beloved and lives there.”

It is not for nothing that we refer to “automatic writing” and “psychic readings” as Kripal points out.

Secretorum

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