Reality as a whole - that is the seen AND the unseen - might be regimented by complex patterns and mechanisms. The whole reality might as well be “materialistic”, it’s just that 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.
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. 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 a reaction to the previously unseen that we recurrently see in humans. Which makes you think about a lot of the traditions about the unseen, the occult 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.
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.
What do you guys think?
P.S.: By the way, I began 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. Pure science is a gem of philosophy and can produce lots of highly reliable and concrete results. Scientific culture however is biased and have tendancies to avoid “weird” subjects, but nonetheless not confirmed impossible subjects of study or at least of serious philosophical inquiry. 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.
