This article follows on from part 1 (click here) where I discussed demonic possession. It’s important to have read that, in order to put what follows in context. There will also be some references, and comparisons made, to the material there.

    I’ll turn now to the work of another therapist, Wilson Van Dusen. The material here is different from the previous three, in that we are not dealing with people who have been completely possessed, rather with those who seem to be under attack by invading spirits, but who are tormented by this, and doing everything they can to resist, but on the whole unsuccessfully. They are diagnosed as mentally ill, or schizophrenic.

    Van Dusen is a follower of the Swedish scientist and mystic theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, so I’ll briefly describe the latter’s life. The purpose of this is to demonstrate that we are dealing with one of the greatest intellects of all time, so that when we come to the material relevant to this article, nobody will be able to dismiss him as an eccentric or crank, rather someone who should be taken extremely seriously.

    I have put together the following account from Van Dusen’s The Presence of Other Worlds¹, and also Colin Wilson’s Afterlife², in which he discusses the former’s book, specifically the chapter ‘The Presence of Spirits in Madness’, which is the reason for my title. (Everything in quotation marks comes from one of these two sources.)

    Swedenborg (1688–1772) received a classical university education with a heavy emphasis on Latin, Greek, and literature to the level of a master’s degree. His earliest published works were Latin poetry, and he was fluent in nine languages. He had a prestigious scientific career, publishing 150 early works, even though his followers considered his later writings more important.

    “He had exhausted all the known sciences after founding several of them”. Listed are: chemistry, engineering, physics, mathematics, mineralogy, geology, paleontology, anatomy, physiology, astronomy, optics, metallurgy, cosmogony, cosmology, and psychology. “He can be said to have founded several sciences, such as crystallography”. He made discoveries about the human brain, being the first to discover the function of the cerebellum. He was also the originator of the nebular hypothesis in relation to the formation of the solar system.

    Surprising though this may seem, he somehow managed to find time for a few hobbies: bookbinding, watchmaking, cabinetmaking, engraving, lens grinding and more.

    Crucially, in the middle period of his life he developed an interest in psychology and the inner world. He had begun to have powerful dreams. He went through an extensive period of self-exploration, and there was an “opening of the spiritual worlds to him”. He spent “thirteen years of journeying in the worlds beyond this one”. “He claimed to have actually visited heaven and hell, and to have held long theological discussions with angels and deceased religious teachers”. He then wrote extensively about his experiences, and his theological conclusions. Sometimes he may have sounded like a crank, “except that he was able to offer some impressive evidence that he really had been in touch with the dead”, revealing things to living people he could not possibly have known about their deceased relatives.

                                                                                        Wilson van Dusen

    This is where Van Dusen comes in. He was already familiar with Swedenborg’s writings, following a series of religious visions: “it seemed to me that Swedenborg was talking about what I had experienced”. He then started studying him in depth.

    He later worked for sixteen years as a clinical psychologist in a mental hospital, where he examined thousands of mentally ill persons, who were hearing, and being tormented by, inner voices. Rather than take the conventional route of dismissing these as ‘hallucinations’, he tried to gain a greater understanding of what was actually going on. This would not necessarily be easy because, as might be expected, “most patients who are hallucinating prefer to keep their experiences to themselves, since they know it will be taken as a proof that they are mad”.

    He began by asking an unusually cooperative patient whether he could talk directly with her inner voices. He then sought other patients, and held dialogues with their voices and, to his surprise, “there was great consistency in what was reported independently by different patients”, “even though they had no contact with each other”. “The hallucinations were all so similar. This in itself seems baffling. After all, one would expect to find as many different types of hallucinations as there are people. This either implies some basic similarity in the parts of our minds that create hallucinations, or something far stranger”.

    Now we come to the heart of the matter: “One consistent finding was that patients felt they had contact with another world or order of beings. Most thought these other persons were living”. All objected to the term ‘hallucination’ and coined their own terms. For anyone who has followed this series from the beginning, this is the precise point of dispute between Ted Wade, following on from Julian Jaynes, and myself. They claim that the supernatural, and therefore the belief that inner voices are real, are illusions or even delusions — hangovers from the distant past — which need to be explained by science. Swedenborg, van Dusen and his ‘schizophrenic’ patients, Adam Crabtree, Scott Peck, Stanislav Grof, and more humbly myself, would disagree.

    For the purposes of this article, what is significant is that “Swedenborg had described at some length what it was like to be ‘possessed’ by spirits, and Van Dusen noticed striking similarities, “an almost perfect fit”, between his patients’ descriptions of the inner voices and Swedenborg’s description of the relationships of humans to spirits”.

    According to Swedenborg, a human’s life involves an interaction or relationship with a hierarchy of spirits. This is normally not conscious for the humans, because there is a kind of barrier between these entities and human consciousness, and also for the spirits, who do not normally know “they are with man”. However, if spirits get through this barrier, or are allowed through, they have the ability to get into the victims’ thoughts, feelings, or even bodily acts. Colin Wilson says, “they are likely to become a nuisance”. In the light of what Van Dusen says, that would appear to be something of an understatement:

• “All of Swedenborg’s observations on the effect of evil spirits entering man’s consciousness conform to my findings”, for example they attempt to destroy, they can cause anxiety or pain, they speak in man’s native tongue, they seek to destroy conscience, and seem to be against every higher value.
• “Evil spirits are such that they regard man with deadly hatred, and desire nothing more than to destroy him, both body and soul”.

    This is a pretty good description, he says, of what we now call schizophrenia. However, many victims keep quiet and “suffer insults, threats, and attacks for years from voices with no one around them aware of it”.

    As a brief aside, the patients sometimes describe the spirits trying to seize for their own some part of the body, for example: “Several worked on one patient’s ear and he seemed to grow deafer. One voice worked two years to capture a patient’s eye, which went visibly out of alignment”. This seems to corroborate information given in the case of Karen Kingston from the previous article. She went through a total of 13 exorcism sessions, expelling one demon each time, and this brought about remarkable changes in Karen’s condition. “As in the case of the first possessing demon, others were responsible for certain of Karen’s physical maladies; when a particular demon had been cast out, the infirmity was gone”.

    Regarding this other world of beings, Van Dusen’s patients seemed to experience two distinct kinds of ‘voices’. He calls one the ‘lower order’ who:

• “are similar to drunken bums at a bar who like to tease and torment just for the fun of it. They suggest lewd acts and then scold the patient for considering them”.
• “call the patient every conceivable name, suggest every lewd act, steal memories or ideas right out of consciousness, threaten death, and work on the patient’s credibility in every way”.
• “threaten pain and can cause felt pain as a way of enforcing their power”.

    He further says: “Many patients have heard loud and clear voices plotting their death for weeks on end… The most devastating experience of all is to be shouted at constantly by dozens of voices”.

    Van Dusen was particularly struck by the lower order’s hatred of religion (remember, as mentioned in the previous article, that the Catholic Church says that a sign of demonic possession is a violent reaction to seeing any holy object):

• “If voices are merely the patient’s unconscious coming forth, I would have no reason to expect them to be particularly for or against religion. Yet the lower order can be counted on to give its most scurrilous comments to any suggestion of religion”.
• “All of the lower order are irreligious or antireligious. Some actively interfered with the patients’ religious practices”.
• “To one patient they appeared as conventional devils and referred to themselves as demons. In a few instances they referred to themselves as from hell”.

    There are also ‘higher order’ beings who are much more likely to be ‘religious’. (This will become more relevant later in this series when I discuss angels.) Whereas “just the mention of religion provoked anger or derision from the lower order, in contrast, the higher order appeared strangely gifted, sensitive, wise, and religious”. For example, the female vision of one patient “showed a knowledge of religion and myth far beyond the patient’s comprehension”. The higher order “seem concerned with helping the patient”, and one of their purposes “seems to be to protect people against the lower order”. They are supportive, genuinely instructive, and “can communicate directly with the inner feelings of the patient”.

    As an aside, I’ll now refer back to the second Grof case in the previous article, where I said that the woman who had chanted unconsciously in Sepphardic was perhaps temporarily ‘possessed’ by some benevolent entity seeking to help her. When I wrote that, I was unaware of the following quote from Van Dusen, coming across it for the first time while researching this current article. He says that “the only instances I could find where hallucinations seemed to know a language other than the patient’s were in the higher order”. This appears to offer some evidence in support of what I hypothesised then.

    The question that we now have to ask is whether it is really possible to attribute everything described in this article to brain functioning. It is barely credible that it could even be described as brain malfunctioning. I would pick out in particular the experience of being shouted at constantly by dozens of voices. How is the brain achieving that?

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Footnotes:

1. Wildwood House, 1975

2. Grafton, 1987

    This article is the next in a series with the overall title of The Supernatural Origin of the Natural, a response to an article by Ted Wade on Medium.com, which claimed that the ‘supernatural’ is a figment of humans’ imagination. I am arguing the contrary. In the first part of the series I offered some evidence for belief in the supernatural in general. Now, following on from an introduction on the subject of discarnate entities in general, I’m going to explore the topic in more detail, beginning with the phenomenon of demonic possession. (For a guide to the whole series, see under Religion and Spirituality on the Blog Index Page.)

    My sources for what follows are the work of four therapists: Adam Crabtree, M. Scott Peck, Stanislav Grof, and Wilson Van Dusen.

    Adam Crabtree is the author of Multiple Man: Explorations in Possession and Multiple Personality¹. The book discusses these topics in much greater detail than space allows here, so I’ll focus strictly on the most relevant material, and recommend the book to anyone who wants to explore this disturbing subject more thoroughly. It contains lengthy descriptions of three historical examples of demonic possession:

• the Illfurt Boys of Alsace, taken from The History of Witchcraft and Demonology, by Montague Summers
• Anna Ecklund, taken from Begone Satan in German by the Reverend Carl Vogel, translated by Reverend Celestine Kapsner OSB
• Karen Kingston, taken from The Devil and Karen Kingston, by Robert Pelton.

    According to Crabtree, the Catholic Church considers the classical signs of diabolical possession to be: paranormal knowledge, fluency in unfamiliar languages, and a violent reaction to seeing any holy object. As is clear from these case-histories, other possible features are:

• the ability to levitate
• feats of extraordinary strength
• demonic voices appearing from the body of the victim without any movement of the mouth
• extreme physical deformities
• the production of substances and smells beyond what you could possibly expect from a human.

    Here is a combination of levitation and strength. Karen Kingston twice levitated “for considerable periods of time”. She was “a frail, sixty-three pound child, pinned to the floor by the combined weight of two huge men”. She “suddenly began levitating while carrying this bulk — a total of five hundred and thirty-five pounds. And the diminutive child passively floated there for seven full minutes, while (the two men), their eyes like saucers, grabbed and hung on for dear life”.

    Anna Ecklund also levitated: “With lightning speed the possessed dislodged herself from her bed and the hands of the protectors, her body, carried through the air, landed high above the door of the room and clung to the wall with catlike grips… Real force had to be applied to her feet to bring her down from the high position of the wall. The mystery was that she could have clung to the wall at all!”

    Here is an example of the voices. Anna Ecklund produced a variety of voices in a mystifying manner. According to Reverend Vogel: “Satan in his speeches and answers did not use the tongue of the poor possessed girl. The helpless creature had been unconscious… her mouth was closed tight… It was possible for these evil spirits to speak in an audible manner from somewhere within the girl, possibly they used some inner organ of the body”.

    Here is an example of the physical deformities and disgusting substances. Anna Ecklund’s face “became so twisted and distorted that no one would recognize its features… her whole body became so horribly disfigured that the appearance of her human shape vanished. Her pale deathlike and emaciated head often extended to the size of an inverted water pitcher, became fiery red and again like glowing embers. Her eyes would protrude, her lips would swell up actually to the size of hands, and her thin emaciated body would bloat up to such enormous size that at the first occurrence the pastor and some of the sisters drew back out of fright, thinking that she would be torn to pieces and burst open. At times her abdominal regions and extremities became hard like iron and stone and were pressed into the bedstead so that the iron beams bent to the floor”. She also vomited “large quantities of foul matter” even though she “could take in only a small amount of liquid as nourishment each day”. Following the exorcism, there was a “terrible odour that filled the room. All the windows had to be opened, the stench was something unearthly, simply unbearable. It was the last souvenir of the infernal devils for those they had to abandon upon the Earth”.

    Another extraordinary feature is that, following a successful exorcism, the victim may have no memory of what has happened, even though it has been of an extremely dramatic and traumatic nature; this seems to be a clear indication that the victims have been truly possessed, and are unaware of what is happening to them. For example, the elder Illfurt brother had no memory of the two days of his exorcism procedure, even though three strong men had been needed to hold him, his face had been beet-red, his lips had been swollen, he had drooled a continuous stream of thick yellow froth, and had emitted a horrible scream of agony when the priest had called upon the Blessed Virgin.

                                                                                          Adam Crabtree   

    I’ll turn my attention now to M. Scott Peck. He is the author of the famous book The Road Less Travelled, and later wrote People of the Lie², which is an exploration of the psychology of evil. It contains one significant chapter on possession and exorcism relevant here.

    He discusses two successful exorcisms at which he was present, which he believes were both cases of Satanic possession. He is obviously in a far better position than me to judge but, from what he says in his accounts, I am not convinced that this is the case. There are definitely certain moments in the exchanges between the demonic figure and the exorcism team which might lead us to think that. However, since Peck calls Satan “the Father of Lies”, it all depends on whether one can trust such a figure, and his servants, to tell the truth. For the purposes of this article, it does not matter. The two cases he describes seem to be clear-cut examples of demonic possession, whether or not they are Satanic.

    My purpose here, in referring to Peck’s accounts, is merely to confirm the type of material found in Crabtree’s examples, to give an example of a modern person who has actually witnessed the phenomenon, and is convinced of its reality. He says: “When the demonic finally spoke clearly in one case, an expression appeared on the patient’s face that could be described only as Satanic. It was an incredibly contemptuous grin of utter malevolence… I have seen that expression only one other time in my life — for a few fleeting seconds on the face of the other patient, late in the evaluation period… The patient suddenly resembled a writhing snake of great strength, viciously attempting to bite the team members… The eyes were hooded with lazy reptilian torpor — except when the reptile darted out in attack, at which moment the eyes would openwide with blazing hatred… Almost all the team members at both exorcisms were convinced they were at these times in the presence of something absolutely alien and inhuman”.

    He also says: “The spirit I witnessed at each exorcism was clearly, utterly, and totally dedicated to opposing human life and growth”. It told both patients to kill themselves, found love distasteful, saying “I want people to work in business so that there will be war”, and said that it wanted to kill the exorcist. “There was absolutely nothing creative or constructive about it; it was purely destructive”. There was also absolutely nothing to suggest that this was the normal personality of these victims, and demonic possession, it seems to me, is the only reasonable conclusion.

    Peck offers an interesting insight into how the problem might begin: “Possession is no accident… Possession appears to be a gradual process in which the possessed person repeatedly sells out for one reason or another”.

                                                                                            M. Scott Peck

    I’ll turn my attention now to Stanislav Grof. For those unaware of him, here is a little background information. He began as a psychiatrist in Marxist (therefore atheistic) Czechoslovakia, where he became involved in an experimental programme, using LSD for therapeutic purposes. Because this often induced spiritual experiences, he felt compelled not to reveal his results to the authorities there, and worked secretly. He later moved to the USA, where he continued this research, until LSD was made illegal. He then devised a system of intensive breathing to obtain the same results without using the drug. His patients explore their own personal unconscious, often go on to relive their birth, experience ego-death and rebirth, have past-life memories, encounter archetypal beings (gods and goddesses), and much more besides.

    Here are two cases relevant to this article. My purpose is again that they reinforce and corroborate what Crabtree said, and indeed what Peck also said.

    Grof describes the following anecdote³ as the most extreme case in all his many sessions of altered-state therapy. A woman was referred to him as a candidate for LSD therapy, because 11 months of conventional treatments had achieved nothing. The woman was suicidal, had a criminal record — guns had already been involved. Her first three sessions brought forth violence, sexual abuse, and a difficult birth, but there were no major breakthroughs. In the third session, however, about 20 minutes in, the woman’s face took on a “mask of evil”, becoming constricted. Then a deep male voice started to speak through her, introducing himself as the Devil. He told Grof that the woman was his, and started to threaten and blackmail him, telling all the things that would happen to him and his programme if he tried to take the woman from him. The entity referred to things the patient couldn’t have known (therefore, we assume, it was not some bizarre aspect of her own personality). Grof says that he had never seen anything this extreme. The woman’s hand had become “spastic, like a claw”. Grof was in a state of “metaphysical fear”. He decided to meditate on light and focused on this for a long time. After about two hours the woman’s face and hand suddenly relaxed. Her regular voice returned and she was in wonderful shape.

    In the feedback session which followed Grof decided against telling her what had happened. (This again suggests that she was completely unaware of what was going on in her own consciousness, therefore temporarily possessed.) When she returned the following morning, she was radiant, and showed no sign of depression. (As in the Crabtree examples, the successful exorcism had instantaneous results. The effect was not quite so dramatic in Peck’s two cases.) Two weeks later she was released back into the community.

    It is reasonable to conclude, therefore, that Grof singlehandedly achieved an exorcism through LSD therapy. This would seem to be a remarkable achievement, given the large teams assembled in Crabtree’s and Peck’s examples, and the extraordinary difficulty they experienced in achieving the desired result.

                                                                                           Stanislav Grof

    I mention the following case only because it includes some confirming evidence of one of the things Crabtree mentioned, that fluency in unfamiliar languages is considered typical in such circumstances. What is interesting here is that there is no mention in the account of demonic or any other type of possession. And in this case the knowledge of an obscure language was positive, and had a healing effect, contrary to the Catholic Church’s understanding that it is indicative of demonic possession. It nevertheless seems to require some kind of supernatural explanation⁴.

    The patient was a woman with chronic depression; she couldn’t bring herself to do anything. She had two powerful sessions, including re-experiencing her birth. The next day she came back to the group for a further session, highly charged. She again went back to her birth, and began shaking. She was told to go with this. At some point the sounds she made had a different quality, as if words. She was told to let these words come through. To the onlookers it seemed to be clearly a language, an incantation of some kind, although no one could understand what she was saying. She was sitting up, making broad movements with her arms, as if in adoration of something. It was some kind of chant, a repetitive sequence. Then she lay back in ecstasy.

    In the room there was a Jewish psychoanalyst from Argentina. He approached the facilitators, and said that this was incredible, that the woman was singing in perfect Sepphardic, an esoteric medieval language mixing Jewish and Spanish. He was a Jewish intellectual who had studied it. The woman had been singing: “I am suffering and I will always suffer. I am crying and I will always cry. I am praying and I will always pray”.

    In the feedback session which followed, it emerged that she didn’t know modern Spanish, and didn’t even know what Sepphardic was. However, these sessions completely resolved her depression.

    What are we to make of this? I suggest that, assuming the account is correct, this is evidence that the brain does not produce consciousness, (and we therefore do not have to seek explanations for how primitive humans mistook brain functions for the supernatural). In the woman’s ordinary life, she had no knowledge of Spanish or Sepphardic, so how did her altered-state consciousness have access to it? I suggest that there is no natural explanation for the woman’s hidden knowledge; only a supernatural explanation of some kind seems plausible. One possibility is that she had unconscious access to a past life, although this is not alluded to in the account. Or perhaps she was temporarily ‘possessed’ by some benevolent entity seeking to help her? (This possibility will be explored in the next article.)

    A further extraordinary coincidence/synchronicity, which reveals the great mystery of how the world works, is the fact that in the room was an expert in this esoteric language who was able to explain what had happened. What were the odds against that?

    The work of another therapist, Wilson Van Dusen, is highly relevant and could be included here.  However, I’ll save that for the next article, to be published soon.

Footnotes:

1. Grafton Books, 1988

2. Touchstone 1985, (1988)

3. Grof tells this story on tape 3 of a series of audiocassettes The Transpersonal Vision, Sounds True (Publishers). Colin Wilson retells the story, having met Grof and heard the story from him, in Alien Dawn, Virgin Publishing, 1998, p3–4. He gives more details, and the woman is given the name Flora.

4. see footnote 3, also on tape 3

    This is the latest in a series called The Supernatural Origin of the Natural, which is a response to an article by Ted Wade on Medium.com, which claimed that the supernatural is a figment of humans’ imagination. I am arguing the contrary. In the earlier articles, I have offered some evidence for belief in the supernatural in general. Now I’m going to turn to the crux of the matter, which was the main point of Wade’s article, the existence or otherwise of various discarnate entities.

    In the very first article I mentioned some examples which, if real, would seem to exist at various levels of reality outside space-time or, at the very least, are invisible to humans in their everyday consciousness:

• spirits of various kinds, whether formerly human and now in the afterlife, or otherwise
• demons
• elemental beings, otherwise known as nature spirits, e.g. fairies, elves
• gods, goddesses, angels, and any other such high-level beings.

    Wade believes that these are “avatars of our primitive past”, and in our correspondence since his article has talked about “the human tendency to seek meanings by creating imaginary entities capable of agency, of willful interference in our lives”. He is therefore a firm non-believer. He wants me to say more about discarnate entities before commenting further, and wants the answers to some questions:

• By any reckoning, there are a lot of them. Why would there be so many types?
• Would they be aware of each other?
• Would they exist as factions in some higher civilization?
• Do they toy with us and, if so, why would they care about us at all?

    The simple answer to all these questions is, obviously, we just don’t know. How could we, given that we are mostly incapable of even perceiving these beings, let alone have access to their way of life and thoughts? The articles to follow will nevertheless attempt to address these questions insofar as that is possible, but here are some provisional suggestions to get us started.

    Why wouldn’t there be many types? Our planet is inhabited by thousands of species of creatures, amazingly varied, some extraordinarily weird, as you will know if you watch nature documentaries. Why should other levels of reality be any different?

    It seems that beings on higher levels, living in a higher dimension, can be aware of everything below them. It is difficult for a lower-level being to be aware of entities existing in a higher dimension. So it would be logical, but not necessarily true, to assume that high-level beings would be aware of nature spirits and demons, but not necessarily vice versa.

    It’s not clear whether they are factions, or whether they live in civilizations; it would depend what you mean by those terms. But, if they exist, they do live at other higher levels of reality.

    I’ll provide evidence that they do certainly toy with us, and much worse. Why do they do this? You’d have to ask them, but in the case of demons, on the whole, it’s because they’re evil.

    Wade is keen on Julian Jaynes, whom he considers to be a “controversial genius”. Jaynes is the author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, published back in the 1970s. There he suggests a theory, based on right and left brain psychology, as to why early humans mistakenly believed voices in their heads were gods and goddesses. Their powers of self-awareness and knowledge of psychology were not sophisticated enough to understand what was really going on, he believes.

    He might be right, but it should be obvious that everything that Jaynes says must be speculation. How can we possibly know for certain what was going on inside the minds of humans several thousand years ago? He starts from the preconceived belief that spirits and deities do not exist, and therefore has to hypothesise an explanation. The exact opposite to this may be true. I have written about this elsewhere (in this article), so I’ll begin by quoting myself: “We assume perhaps that people have always experienced the world in the same way that we do (saw through similar eyes, heard through similar ears), but formerly misinterpreted it, naïvely believing that hidden agencies were at work behind the weather, and so on. This is not necessarily true. It is reasonable to assume that through the centuries, consciousness, and the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious psyche, have themselves evolved. My assumption is that ego-consciousness has gradually become stronger, and that in the past the boundary between psyche and the material world was less pronounced. We might perhaps say that daily life once had more of a dreamlike quality. This would mean that, if nature spirits, or for that matter any spirits, do actually exist, then people in earlier times might have had a direct experience of them, and that is why they believed in them”.

    I then went on to quote Jonathan Black, who has been an important source in other recent articles of mine (for an explanation see footnote 1). He says: “In the ancient world experience of spirits was so strong that to deny the existence of the spirit world would not have occurred to them. In fact it would have been almost as difficult for people in the ancient world to deny the existence of spirit as it would for us to decide not to believe in the table, the book, in front of us”².

    So, the ancients were not necessarily imagining these things; they were possibly literally aware of the reality of all kinds of spirits. I admit, of course, that this is also pure speculation, along the lines of Jaynes, but it is an equally possible and credible scenario — we just don’t know. So, rather than try to speculate about the psychology of the distant past, about which we can know nothing for certain, now that we have superior knowledge of the brain and psychology, wouldn’t it be better to study evidence from recent times and the present day?

    There is a problem for the point of view of Jaynes and Wade, which is that, despite the ‘Enlightenment’ and the ‘progress’ of science, modern people are still having direct and powerful experiences of the same ‘illusions’, if that is what they are. If nothing else, this means that they cannot be simply dismissed as the misguided fantasies of our ancestors, and have to be explained within the framework of modern neuroscience and psychology.

    In the articles which follow I’ll explore modern experiences of at least some of the categories mentioned above. On both sides of the argument, we have people who think the other side don’t want to face the facts. Atheists and materialist scientists say that religious people and believers in the supernatural seek false comfort in the hope of an afterlife, because they cannot face the unbearable fact of death being the end. They pride themselves on being superior beings for having faced the uncomfortable fact of the meaningless, pitifully indifferent universe. Believers in the supernatural, on the other hand, think that materialist scientists seek false comfort in their beliefs, because they have an irrational fear of the paranormal and the supernatural. They have somehow allowed themselves to be brainwashed by the false worldview of Enlightenment science.

    So let the debate begin. In the examples in the following articles, since the phenomena are all apparently real, and many of them have been attested by several witnesses, I suggest that the onus will be on the doubters, if they don’t believe in the supernatural, to explain how the brain manages to create such illusions.

Footnotes:

1. Jonathan Black is the author of The Secret History of the World (Quercus, 2010), which is a compendium of knowledge which “has been taught down the ages in certain secret societies” (p17), “common to Mystery schools and secret societies from all over the world” (p25). His book “is the result of nearly twenty years’ research” into esoteric texts. More significantly, however, he was “helped to understand these sources by a member of more than one of the secret societies, someone who, in the case of one secret society at least, has been initiated to the highest level”. Black “had been working for years as an editor for one of London’s larger publishers”. One day this man walked into his office; he “was clearly of a different order of being” (p 23–24). They became friends, and this man became Black’s mentor, educated him in these secret teachings. That background information is my attempt to suggest that Black should perhaps be taken seriously.

2. The quote is on page 58 of his book.

    This is the latest in a series. If you’re starting here, I’ll begin with a brief summary of what has preceded. (For a guide to the whole series, see under Religion and Spirituality on the Blog Index page.)

    My inspiration was a response I received from Isak Dinesen on Medium.com which mentioned a book by André Comte-Sponville called The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality¹. The title was intriguing because it contained what I considered to be a contradiction in terms, so I decided to buy it to see what the author’s point of view might be. In the first four Thoughts I have been debating the nature of God with Ms. Dinesen, who considers herself to be a spiritual atheist, and who I assume is a fan of Comte-Sponville’s book. So far we haven’t got round to discussing it specifically. That begins here and will continue in future articles. Here is a brief synopsis.

    He is a philosopher by profession and, as is obvious from the title, he is formulating what he considers to be a spiritual belief-system from an atheistic perspective. The jacket-notes say: “According to Comte-Sponville, we have allowed the concept of spirituality to become intertwined with religion and thus have lost touch with the nature of a true spiritual experience”. He has experienced a “loss of faith in God but not in spirituality”, and he “offers a convincing treatise on a new form of spiritual life”.

    That sounds exciting. Even though I am someone who seeks to reunite religion with its original spiritual foundations, I am always pleased to hear people claiming to be “spiritual but not religious”, if this means that they have seen through the limitations of organised religions, and are seeking something deeper. The question then arises, how deep does such a person want to go? I was therefore concerned to read in the same notes: “In order to change this, however, we need not reject the ancient traditions and values that are part of our heritage; rather we must rethink our relationship to these values and ask ourselves whether their significance comes from the existence of a higher power or simply from the human need to connect to one another and the universe”. What the writer seems to be saying here is that, for Comte-Sponville, religion has served an important cultural purpose historically, but the reasons for that may have been illusory, namely a false belief in a higher power. Belief in some form of supernatural power is what I would usually expect from someone claiming to be spiritual but not religious. I therefore wonder whether he will be advocating something truly spiritual, or something closer to Humanism. I’ll have to wait and see.

    His chapter headings are:

• Can We Do Without Religion?
• Does God Exist?
• Can There Be an Atheist Spirituality?
• Conclusion: Love and Truth

    As I said, future articles will discuss specific points in his text, and those will be the topics. Before that, it would be useful to discuss the terms and try to establish definitions, which is what I’ll do here. What precisely do we mean by religion in general, a religion, spirituality, and atheism?

    Comte-Sponville spends some time trying to define religion, accepting that this is a difficult task. He quotes approvingly a definition from Emile Durkheim, but finds it limited because it is sociological or ethnological. He therefore seeks something more theological or metaphysical, and comes up with this: “any organized set of beliefs and rituals involving the sacred, the supernatural or the transcendent (this in the broad sense of the term) and specifically involving one or several gods (this is the restricted sense), which beliefs and rituals unite those who recognize and practice them into a moral and spiritual community” (p4).

    It seems to me that, while saying that he is defining religion, here he is actually defining what constitutes a religion. His chosen formulation enables him to conclude that various Eastern traditions are not religions, specifically Buddhism, Taoism, Jainism, and Confucianism. He thinks that these are “a mixture of spirituality, ethics and philosophy rather than a religion in the generally accepted Western sense of the word. They are less about God than they are about human beings or nature. They have to do less with faith than with meditation… not so much in churches as in schools of life or wisdom. This is especially true of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism… They are sometimes referred to as atheistic or agnostic religions… no deity, no revelation, no personal or transcendent Creator of any sort”.

    My first response is that, even if Buddhism, Taoism, and Jainism are sometimes described as atheistic religions, they are nevertheless still called religions. How can that be? Whoever says that obviously does not think that atheism and religion are contradictory terms. (I’ll discuss that point later.) 

    Comte-Sponville has made it clear what ingredients he considers necessary in a religion. Because he is keen to promote the idea that humans can live without religion, he conveniently chooses a definition which seeks to reduce religion to either Judaism, Christianity, or Islam. But why should we go along with “the generally accepted Western sense of the word”? Why is the Western definition of a religion considered superior to others? Perhaps the West has misunderstood the meaning of religion, as I’ll discuss below.

    Buddhism, Taoism and Jainism fulfill the first part of his definition of religion, in that they involve the sacred, the supernatural or the transcendent. They merely reject the concept of a personal Creator God whom one might worship, or to whom one might pray. Just because one personal, masculine God did not singlehandedly create the material universe, however, does not mean that it is not the result of supernatural intelligence(s).

    If these other systems do not accept a personal Creator God, they have to explain the existence of the material universe somehow. In order to do this, they usually fall back upon the concept of an impersonal Creative Principle. If we take Taoism as an example, Comte-Sponville says that it has no “transcendent Creator of any sort”. This is clearly not true. One only has to read the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching, the foundational text of Taoism, to find that:

    “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name”. The eternal Tao is clearly beyond all words and attribution, which seems transcendent to me.

    “The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth. The named is the mother of ten thousand things”. Here we have two creative principles of some sort. The nameless, eternal Tao is the source of heaven and earth. And why is the Great Mother Goddess not considered a Creator deity of some sort by Comte-Sponville? (The ten thousand things clearly refers to the vast diversity of manifestations in the universe.)

    Comte-Sponville does not mention Hinduism in his list of atheistic religions, so we can assume that he considers it theistic. Nevertheless, Hinduism has the equivalent of the eternal, nameless Tao (Brahman), and also a named God, apparently the Creator (Brahma). (Whether Brahma is understood in the same way as Christians understand their Creator God is a different question, which I won’t go into here, as Buddhism is the topic under consideration.) All we need note is that Hinduism, considered theistic, has close parallels with Taoism, considered atheistic.

    Is Buddhism atheistic and Hinduism theistic? Are they significantly different? You may not have heard of the late Ananda Coomaraswamy, but he is one of the great authorities on Traditionalism, which is another word for the Perennial Philosophy. In his book Hinduism and Buddhism², he begins the introduction to the Buddhism section: “The more superficially one studies Buddhism, the more it seems to differ from the Brahmanism in which it originated; the more profound our study, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish Buddhism from Brahmanism, or to say in what respects, if any, Buddhism is really unorthodox. The outstanding distinction lies in the fact that Buddhist doctrine is propounded by an apparently historical founder, understood to have lived and taught in the sixth century B.C. Beyond this there are only broad distinctions of emphasis”.

    Comte-Sponville says that Buddhism is not a religion, or is an atheistic religion, because there is no specified Creator God. Why might that be? Perhaps not because the Buddha did not believe in one, rather because he considered the question a distraction for his followers from the real issue. At the time there were fourteen so-called difficult questions of a metaphysical and theological nature, one of which was the origin of the world. The Buddha, however, rejected speculation on such matters, and “refused to answer these questions because they were vain and had no significance for salvation”³. By ‘salvation’ he means union with the transcendent, that is to say the true purpose of religion, as discussed below.

    Comte-Sponville also calls Jainism atheistic, and therefore not a religion according to his definition. Yet it is not hard to find a different viewpoint where Jainism is described as “a non-theistic religion founded in India in the 6th century BC… The Jain religion teaches salvation by perfection through successive lives…”⁴. The second point suggests that it is very similar to Hinduism, which not even Comte-Sponville considers atheistic.

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    How should we define religion itself? Etymologically speaking, there are two possible origins of the word and, as Comte-Sponville points out, “modern linguistics has never managed to decide between them”. The first is the Latin verb religare which means to bind or link back, and the second relegare, which literally means to reread or, he says, contemplate. He doesn’t claim any specialist etymological knowledge, but thinks the second “more probable”, without explaining his reasoning. Religion for him is therefore “what is contemplated or reread… namely myths, founding texts, teachings… in a word, a revelation or tradition that is at once ancient and still relevant, accepted, respected, interiorized, both individually and communally”.

    It seems to me that he prefers this second one simply because it fits more neatly with his definition of a religion (as above), and makes it easier to reject religion — you only have to disagree with the myths, founding texts and teachings. I am also not an etymologist, although I can see that the spelling of religare is closer to religion than relegare, which may or may not be relevant. I can say with some confidence, however, that religare, to bind back, is much closer to what religion and spirituality actually mean.

    Comte-Sponville states that religare means bind back, but then says that this leads to a specific conception of religion; it is that which “binds people together”. This again fits with his definition of a religion, but the binding back is being ignored. (By coincidence, another writer on Medium seems to have failed to notice the implication of the word religare: “The word religion comes from the Latin word religare, which means ‘to bind’. A religion, therefore, is not merely a set of beliefs, but a set of beliefs that bind the believer”⁵. He has somehow failed to notice the ‘re’ in religare. And in his profile he describes himself as a Roman Catholic Deacon!)

    According to the religions and spiritual traditions of the Perennial Philosophy, humans have a divine essence/nature which they lose touch with by becoming (incarnating as) human. The purpose of these traditions is therefore to show a way, by means of spiritual practices, to reunite with (link back, bind back to) the divine essence. This binding or linking back is the whole meaning and purpose of religion. Supporting evidence for this view is provided by the word yoga, which also means to link back, yoke, union. As one online source says: yoga is “a school of Hindu philosophy advocating and prescribing a course of physical and mental disciplines for attaining liberation from the material world and union of the self with the Supreme Being or ultimate principle”⁶.

    That is what the spiritual search, and all true religion is about. I believe that this was what Jesus was intending when, according to Luke’s Gospel, he said: “The kingdom of heaven is within you” (17.21 – I accept that other translations may not say this quite so clearly). Another relevant teaching can be found in the Sermon on the Mount: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5.48). You have to become of the same nature as the Divine Source.

    It would therefore be surprising if religare were not the correct etymological origin for our word religion.

    As I said above, I believe that Comte-Sponville has chosen a definition of religion which helps him to promote his agenda of living without it. In the light of the discussions above, I would like to suggest some simpler definitions:

    Religion consists of two beliefs:

• in the supernatural or the transcendent, specifically that the universe we inhabit has a supernatural source.
• that humans’ ultimate nature is the same as this Divine (supernatural) source, and that it is possible to reconnect with it.

    A religion is a system which seeks to guide the individual to a reunion with this source.

    According to these definitions, not only would Buddhism and Jainism be religions, they would be examples of true religions. It is the Western (Abrahamic) religions which fall short, at least in the forms presented for general public consumption. (They have deeper, more mystical traditions to accompany the exoteric versions: Kabbalah and other forms of Jewish mysticism, esoteric Christianity, and Sufism.)

    With these definitions religion becomes identical to spirituality, which is what it once was and still is, I believe.

    What’s the definition of atheism? There was an interesting word in the internet quote above used to describe Jainism, ‘non-theistic’. So far we have only been using the term a-theism. It seems that we could make a very useful distinction between the two. In an earlier article in this series I suggested that we should separate atheists into two groups. One would be called hard, meaning those who completely deny anything supernatural or transcendent — this would be equivalent to the philosophy of scientific materialism. The other would be called soft, those who believe in the supernatural, the transcendent, just about everything that a religious person (theist) believes in, apart from an anthropomorphic, personal God who can be worshipped and prayed to. It seems that ‘non-theist’ would be a very appropriate term for this soft atheism.

    In this scenario Buddhism and Taoism would not be considered atheistic, rather non-theistic, and would definitely be called religions. From our correspondence, it seems to me that Ms. Dinesen would also be more appropriately described as a non-theist, and I’m looking forward to hearing from her whether she agrees. It remains to be seen which term will be more appropriate for Monsieur Comte-Sponville, but I already see some danger signs in his first chapter.

                                                                              André Comte-Sponville

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Footnotes:

1. Viking, 2007

2. New York: Philosophical Library, 1943

3. My source for this paragraph including the quote is: Buddhist Cosmology, by W. Randolph Kloetzli, Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1983, p1–2

4. I found this quote doing a simple internet search on Jainism. There was no reference given.

5. by Rev. Mr. Matthew Newsome, https://testeverythingblog.com/what-is-religion-356908f99b7a

6. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/yoga

    This article is the fourth in a series in response to an article by Ted Wade on Medium.com, which claimed that the ‘supernatural’ is a figment of humans’ imagination. I am arguing the contrary. In part 2 I discussed the relevance of quantum physics to this question, and in part 3 Jung’s concept of synchronicity. Here I’ll turn my attention to the ancient Taoist book of wisdom, the I Ching. It is also used as a tool for divination, which is what I’ll focus on here. (For anyone unfamiliar with the practice, the Western method is to toss three coins into the air six times, and the combination of heads and tails enables one to find the relevant passages in the book. This can be in response to a question. I have also found it helpful on occasions when I felt intuitively that it wanted me to consult it, at which times I merely threw the coins without asking a question.)

    In his preface to the Richard Wilhelm translation¹, Jung says that meaningful coincidences are the rule and, from my personal experience and what I’ve heard from others, I would have to agree. He believes that such meaningful consultations are examples of synchronicity, a coincidence in time of an external event with a subjective state of mind, in line with his definition given in part 3.

    How can that be? Scientists widely believe that everything in the universe obeys the laws of physics, the interplay of the four fundamental forces, which include laws of motion. Is that true here? When consulting the I Ching, we would assume that, if one took into account the precise starting positions of the coins in the hand, and knew the exact force used when throwing them into the air, then one should in theory be able to predict how they will land. Logic suggests that this must be true, even if it might be hard to achieve in practice. That the way they land leads to meaningful readings from an oracle book suggests that some kind of mysterious intelligence is at work, that mind (of some kind) is another type of ‘force’ to be taken into account. In this context, Jung notes, while offering his own alternative explanation based on synchronicity, that the traditional Chinese view is that “spiritual agencies” are at work, “acting in a mysterious way” (Pxxv). He also notes that the book “purports to be animated” (Pxxvi). Whether true or not, that is certainly how it seems.

    What are the possible explanations for this phenomenon? The options are more or less the same as for the mysterious coincidences described in part 3. The first is that the individual throwing the coins is responsible for the way they land, albeit unconsciously. Jonathan Black is an important source for this series of articles, as explained earlier. He is not referring to the I Ching specifically here, but what he says is relevant: the laws of probability (e.g. a coin flipped many times landing half heads and half tails) “will remain invariable only in laboratory conditions. In other words, the laws of probability only apply when all human subjectivity has been deliberately excluded. In the normal run of things when human happiness and hopes for self-fulfilment depend on the outcome of the roll of the dice, then the laws of probability are bent. Then deeper laws come into play” (p35, his italics). (On the same theme, the two quotes from Black in part 3 are also relevant here.)

    Applying this to an I Ching consultation, since the whole purpose is to seek guidance about one’s life situation, to find answers to difficult questions, this obviously qualifies as “human happiness and hopes for self-fulfilment”, in which case these deeper laws, whatever they are, may come into play. If this is the true explanation, it still suggests a supernatural level of mind, something like one’s Higher Self operating in ways inconceivable by conventional, materialist science.

    The second option, which is the one I consider more likely, would be something beyond the individual. There is a growing trend among physicists and philosophers to consider consciousness/mind as more fundamental than matter. Panpsychism or animism would be terms that describe this viewpoint. Relevant recent books are: Mind and Cosmos by Thomas Nagel², and Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, by Philip Goff³. Goff especially, having rejected materialism and dualism, argues that panpsychism is philosophically the most plausible explanation for how the universe works.

    According to this viewpoint, which is also the esoteric understanding according to Jonathan Black, everything down to the smallest subatomic particle is conscious and alive to some extent, part of the living organism of the universe. If we pursue that idea logically, the coins being thrown are conscious and alive, and have the potential to land how they wish. Even though in general I subscribe to the panpsychist/animist worldview, I still find this suggestion somewhat far-fetched, and think it more likely that some kind of supernatural, collective mind is influencing the coins. The two quotes at the end of part 3 by Wilhelm von Scholz and Liz Greene would again be relevant. Rather than repeat them, in conclusion I’ll offer two others, which are from the preface and the introduction to an edition of the Bhagavad Gita:

    “The Lord reveals His cosmic form: universes upon universes, inconceivably vast, created and sustained by the infinite omnipotence of Spirit which is simultaneously aware of the tiniest particle of subatomic matter and the cosmic movement of the galactic immensities — of every thought, feeling, and action of every being on the material and heavenly planes of existence”.

    “The Universal Christ (Krishna) Consciousness… (is the) sole undistorted reflection of God permeating every atom and point of space in the manifested cosmos”⁴.

    If this is in any way close to being true, such a Consciousness would be very capable of organising all synchronistic coincidences, including the mysterious phenomenon of the I Ching.

    I have written about divination in general in an earlier article, click here. It focuses on the Tarot, but also discusses the I Ching; some of that material is repeated in this current article. 

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Footnotes:

1. Routledge & Kegan Paul edition, 1968, 1978 reprint

2. Oxford University Press, 2012

3. Rider, 2019

4. Paramahansa Yogananda Self-Realization Fellowship, 1999, Pxii, Pxxvii

    This article is the third in a series in response to an article by Ted Wade on Medium, which claimed that the ‘supernatural’ is a figment of humans’ imagination. I am arguing the contrary. By the end of part 2, I had provided convincing evidence, to my mind at least, in the light of statements by quantum physicists over a period of 80 years, that the material world does not exist independently in its own right, but emerges from a hidden background, which is unmeasurable and not accessible to scientific experiment. I am choosing to call this the ‘supernatural’, although I accept that Wade would say that this is merely the natural waiting to be discovered by science. (He has said this in our correspondence.)

    The next task would be to try to ascertain what might be going on in this hidden realm, also whether it might be inhabited (that will be the subject of later articles). If it could be shown that intelligences(s) operating from within this hidden background, were influencing the material world, this would be further evidence of something supernatural. This is what appears to be the case in the phenomenon of synchronicity, as understood by Carl Jung, who coined the term.

    Synchronistic events are extraordinary, sometimes life-changing, coincidences, mysterious comings together of an external element with a subjective state of mind. Rationalists will obviously say that such coincidences are nothing more than that; they are bound to happen occasionally, and reading a hidden meaning into them is a fanciful illusion. All I can say in response is that many highly intelligent people have not dismissed such incidents in this way, and have taken them seriously, believing that something mysterious (supernatural?) is going on behind the scenes. (For a list see footnote 1.)

    If they are real, and not mere coincidence, we have to ask what hidden intelligence is organising these synchronicities, with apparent foreknowledge of all the circumstances, including what is going on in the mind of the participant.

    Here are three bizarre incidents, as related by Jung in his book² (although he is not claiming that they are all examples of synchronicity). Firstly:

    “The writer Wilhelm von Scholz has collected a number of stories showing the strange ways in which lost or stolen objects come back to their owners. (There is a) story of a mother who took a photograph of her small son in the Black Forest. She left the film to be developed in Strasbourg. But, owing to the outbreak of war, she was unable to fetch it and gave it up for lost. In 1916 she bought a film in Frankfurt in order to take a photograph of her daughter, who had been born in the meantime. When the film was developed it was found to be doubly exposed: the picture underneath was the photograph she had taken of her son in 1914! The old film had not been developed and had somehow got into circulation again among the new films.

    “The author comes to the understandable conclusion that everything points to the ‘mutual attraction of related objects’, or an ‘elective affinity’. He suspects that these happenings are arranged as if they were the dream of a ‘greater and more comprehensive consciousness, which is unknowable’ ” (p21–22).

    This is the second incident, which Jung describes as typical of a certain category of events. “The wife of one of my patients… once told me in conversation that, at the deaths of her mother and her grandmother, a number of birds gathered outside the windows of the death-chamber. I had heard similar stories from other people. When her husband’s treatment was nearing its end, his neurosis having been removed, he developed some apparently quite innocuous symptoms which seemed to me, however, to be those of heart-disease. I sent him along to a specialist, who after examining him told me in writing that he could find no cause for anxiety. On the way back from this consultation… my patient collapsed in the street. As he was brought home dying, his wife was already in a great state of anxiety because, soon after her husband had gone to the doctor, a whole flock of birds alighted on their house. She naturally remembered the similar incidents that had happened at the death of her own relatives, and feared the worst” (p31–32).

    The third incident is the most famous example in the literature on synchronicity. “A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer, which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment” (p31).

    Jung comments that the woman had been a very difficult case, essentially because her mind was full of ‘Cartesian philosophy’ (i.e. scientific materialism). “Evidently something quite irrational was needed which was beyond my powers to produce”. So, when the scarab came in through the window, this was enough to blow her mind, and “the process of transformation could at last begin to move” (p33). (It should be further noted that the scarab is a symbol of rebirth.)

    This last example fits Jung’s definition of synchronicity perfectly: “the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state — and, in certain cases, vice versa” (p36). At the moment that the woman is telling Jung about her dream of a scarab-beetle, such a beetle appears at his window.

    Jung accepts, and explains at some length, that the flock of birds example is not, strictly speaking, an example of synchronicity according to this definition. It is nevertheless an extraordinary, and mysterious coincidence: “Such phenomena cannot be explained causally unless one permits oneself the most fantastic ad hoc hypotheses” (p37).

    The example of the photograph returning to the woman is even less of a synchronistic event, because there was no simultaneous psychic state; she had presumably given up all hope of finding it, and was not thinking about it at the moment she recovered it by chance.

    Synchronicity or not, Jung describes such coincidences as acausal. If, however, they are not merely the result of random chance, there must be a cause of some kind, some intelligent agency both willing and organising them. I therefore take him to mean that there is no cause and effect relationship according to the laws of conventional physics, which assume a present situation following on and caused by the past, whereas the elements in a synchronistic coincidence come together simultaneously, without any comprehensible causal connection between them. The question then arises, where is this organising will located? My suggestion is that, if something cannot be explained by the laws of physics, then a paranormal or ‘supernatural’ explanation must be considered.

    Let’s have a look at the examples one by one, beginning with the return of the lost photograph. Surprisingly, such occurrences are not especially rare. I have discussed extraordinary coincidences in a previous article , where one category was ‘the unexpected finding of a lost possession’. Two other examples I mentioned there were:

• a man finds his engraved fountain pen on a street in New York over two years after losing it in South Carolina³.
• a teenage boy catches a large cod and gives it to his grandmother to prepare. Inside it she finds a valuable diamond ring she had lost while fishing ten years earlier⁴.

    In trying to find an explanation for such occurrences, I quoted Geoffrey Cornelius: “And which student of Magia and the imagination, ancient and modern, could there be who did not know of the capacity of the Soul to draw the object of its desire towards it across time and space?”⁵.

    Jonathan Black, who is an important source for this series of articles, as explained in part 1, says something similar in more detail:

• “In the universe this book describes, our emotional states directly affect matter outside our bodies too. In this psychosomatic universe the behaviour of physical objects in space is directly affected by mental states without our having to do anything about it”⁶.
• “The ways in which the physical content of the universe responds to the human psyche are described by deeper and more powerful laws than the laws of material science”⁷.

    According to this analysis, the photograph, the pen, and the ring found in the fish are attracted back to the owners because of the latters’ unconscious longing to be reunited. If this is true, these coincidences would not be examples of synchronicity, rather a paranormal ability of consciousness. We don’t know exactly how Cornelius defines the word ‘Soul’ but, whatever the definition, its ability to achieve what is claimed here would lie way outside the worldview of materialist science and its understanding of the brain. According to the alternative understanding of the universe that I am advocating in this series, even our everyday consciousness is a supernatural phenomenon (since it is not generated by the brain). (This was also the view of Sir Arthur Eddington, pioneer in quantum physics, as quoted in part 2.)

    In the third example of the scarab-beetle, some comparison could be made to this explanation. Since the woman was in therapy (Jung was her third analyst), she presumably at some level knew that something was wrong and wanted to be healed, even though her conscious ego was furiously resisting this. It is therefore possible that her soul or Higher Self organised this synchronicity in order to enable her to move on. I nevertheless think that such an explanation is less likely than that some other organising intelligent agency was responsible. We assume that the scarab-beetle was not aware of its role and meaning in this sychronistic event, yet it was driven to appear at Jung’s window “contrary to its usual habits”. So who or what was doing the driving? I suggest that this would require something beyond the woman’s unconscious psychic abilities. Since it is hard to conceive where this organising agency could be within the space-time universe, I therefore conclude that it is, in some sense, supernatural.

    The second example of the birds on roofs has clear similarities to a synchronicity, in that there is an external event — birds alighting on roofs — meaningfully related to a separate event — the man’s death — which is in itself related to a psychic state — the wife’s anxiety. It is different in that there are three elements, rather than the customary two. It is also significantly different, in that nothing positive emerges from the coincidence, the delight in being reunited with a lost object, or making a breakthrough in therapy. On the contrary, the birds seemed to be a sinister omen of the man’s impending death. He was presumably not unconsciously willing a signal to be broadcast to his wife, and it is reasonable to assume that the birds, like the scarab-beetle, were not aware of their role in this drama. Unless all this is just a coincidence, and anyone who thinks otherwise is mad, as rationalists would say, I would have to conclude, as in the previous example, that the birds were being driven by an unconscious impulse, controlled by some supernatural intelligence. The wife intuitively, and correctly, recognised the signs.

    What can we say about this supernatural, intelligent agency? Is it an independent entity, or is it some kind of collective consciousness? I favour the latter idea. Quantum physics teaches us that the whole universe, both matter and psyche, is interconnected. We would not need to include the whole universe when considering this question, however; something like the psyche of our Planet Gaia would be enough.

    Above I asked the question, “what hidden intelligence is organising these coincidences, from behind the scenes, with apparent foreknowledge of all the circumstances, including what is going on in the mind of the participant?”

    One answer could be provided by the quote above from Wilhelm von Scholz; he called it the dream of a “greater and more comprehensive consciousness, which is unknowable”. The Jungian analyst and astrologer Liz Greene says something similar, but with more detail. She talks about “the overriding sense of some kind of a priori knowledge in the unconscious… This ‘it’ is generally experienced as God. The sense of the omniscience of the unconscious, without any conceivable causal basis, gives rise to a peculiar feeling of fatedness when we encounter synchronous events… ‘It’ seems to have fingers, if that is the appropriate word, in both the inner and outer worlds, in the realms of both spirit and matter, as though there were really no distinction between these opposites”⁸.

    That sounds supernatural to me.

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    In the next article, I’ll discuss one category of what Jung called synchronicity, consultations of the I Ching.

Footnotes:

1. Some of the most noteworthy, not directly followers of Jung, are:

• Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind by F. David Peat (physicist and associate of David Bohm),
• The Roots of Coincidence by Arthur Koestler
• The Challenge of Chance by Arthur Koestler, Alister Hardy, and Robert Harvie
• Coincidences, a Matter of Chance? by Brian Inglis.

Some less well known figures are:

• The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self by Jean Shinoda Bolen
• Synchronicity and You by Frank Joseph
• Synchronicity, Science and Soul-Making by Victor Mansfield
• Coincidences, Chance or Fate? by Ken Anderson
• Coincidences, Towards a Greater Understanding by Tony Crisp
• There Are No Accidents: Synchronicity and the Stories of Our Lives by Robert Hopcke
• Beyond Coincidence by Martin Plimmer and Brian King
• Incredible Coincidences by Alan Vaughan
• Synchronicity, Science, Myth and the Trickster by Allan Combs and Mark Holland.

Those with a more direct connection to Jung are:

• On Divination and Synchronicity by Marie-Louise von Frantz
• Jung, Synchronicity, and Human Destiny by Ira Progoff
• Revelations of Chance, Synchronicity as Spiritual Experience by Roderick Main
• C.G. Jung’s Psychology of Religion and Synchronicity by Robert Aziz
• Synchronicity: C.G. Jung, Psychoanalysis and Religion by M. D. Faber

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2. Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972

3. source, Alan Vaughan, Incredible Coincidence, Corgi, 1981, p33. Repeated in Coincidences, Tony Crisp, London House, 2000, p61.

4. source, Ken Anderson, Coincidences: Chance or Fate?, Blandford, 1995, p79

5. The Moment of Astrology, Arkana, 1994, p88

6. The Secret History of the World, Quercus, 2010, p35, his italics

7. ibid., p36, my italics

8. The Astrology of Fate, Mandala, 1985, p278

    This article is the latest in a series, a conversation between Isak Dinesen and myself on Medium.com on the themes of religion, spirituality, the nature of God, and atheism. She has replied to my thought number 2 , beginning by quoting me: “If any being with such personality traits exists, then he could only be a god, a deity, a lesser figure, not the ultimate GOD”.

    She then asks: “Further on and further into our discussion of the nature of God, am I correct in understanding that your ‘Unknowable, Unnamable Ultimate’ is mutually exclusive to an anthropomorphic God; a forgiving/ condemnatory Judge, Son of the most High, He who crumbles walls, parts the sea, commands locusts, returns sight, stays bleeding and raises the dead? One may appear to the limited mind uninvolved at an individual level, but might still engage cosmically in some inexplicable, imperceptible way. The other is a source of help and a powerful vector of change and grace for the better, or perhaps the worse for your enemies”.

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MY REPLY

    Here you are raising very complex questions. I prefer the term ‘personal’ to ‘anthropomorphic’, if by that we mean ‘with personality’. ‘Anthropomorphic’ suggests that humans have created the gods and goddesses in their own image, which I don’t believe. (That’s a rather Freudian idea. I think Genesis is closer to the truth when it says that we are created in theirs.)

    My simple answer to your first question is that the Unnamable Ultimate and an anthropomorphic/ personal god are not mutually exclusive; they can both ‘exist’, but at different levels of reality, and they are not the same being. In my understanding the Ultimate Oneness is the source of absolutely everything that exists. I believe that individual entities of various kinds exist in the spiritual realms, ‘below’ the Ultimate Oneness. Examples of these would be the gods and goddesses of Greek, Egyptian, Norse, and other mythologies, the angels of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and the Devas of Hinduism. These are not equivalent, however, and do not seem to have the same role. For example the angels are often seen as messengers, whereas the Devas are said to be the creators and sustainers of the lower realms. I believe that it is more accurate to say that entities of these types are emanations from the Ultimate Oneness, and therefore exist at a lower level, although others might say that it creates them.

    The rest of your question is concerned with the ‘Gods’ of the Old and New Testaments, and conflates many different aspects of them. (That is not intended as a criticism, for that is the understanding that Christianity is forced to adopt, if it remains Bible-based.) This is a problem of monotheism, which tends to attribute anything ‘supernatural’ to the Ultimate God, if it denies the existence of all the intermediaries, e.g. gods, spirit guides, guardian angels, Higher Self etc.

    On your specific points:

• “A forgiving/condemnatory Judge”. Various religions and traditions believe that we are souls on a spiritual journey, learning, performing various tasks. At the end of each life, there is some kind of assessment in the afterlife, to put it in simple terms, a review of how well we have done (prior to reincarnation). (It’s interesting to note on that point that many people who have had a Near Death Experience report that at some point their whole life flashes before them. That would seem to be in anticipation of such a review. Fortunately for them, and us, some of them recover and return to tell the tale.) Again this is a problem with monotheism. I believe this ‘review’ to be true, but not that it is conducted by the Most High, or Jesus, or any other being from such a level. It would be hubris to believe that at our level of development we are worthy of such a judge; we have spirit guides assigned to our existences.
• “ Son of the most High”. This is a metaphysical concept, and obviously refers to a very high level of Being, having very little to do with the earthly activities you mention. Whether Jesus is that Son is, of course, a very controversial question, much debated in the early days of the Church, but not so much by Christians nowadays.
• “ Returns sight”. This would be the achievement of a spiritual healer. The Jesus of the gospels is an outstanding example of such a person. There are modern authenticated examples (as well as the charlatans); no need for divinity to get involved.
• “Raises the dead”. We could be talking about Jesus or Lazarus here. I’ll start with Lazarus. Some modern commentators have suggested that this incident should be interpreted allegorically, and seen as an initiation into a spiritual tradition. In that context, to bring someone back from the dead means to awaken them spiritually. (In a recent article I discussed Jung’s book The Seven Sermons to the Dead, and pointed out that the ‘dead’ referred to in the title is ambiguous, and could be interpreted as those people we normally think of as living, but who have become ‘dead’ through not having experienced spiritual awakening. As R. D. Laing is reputed to have said: “Is there life before death?”)

    For an in-depth investigation of Jesus’s ‘death and resurrection’, please see this earlier article of mine.

    Your other points refer to the Exodus story. There appears to be no mention of this in the Egyptian records, and archaeologists have found no evidence of it. This might obviously lead us to conclude that no ‘God’ parted the Red Sea, sent plagues of locusts etc. But, as in the example of Lazarus, are we meant to take the story literally? According to the Jewish Kabbalist Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, whom I have been quoting in recent articles (Thoughts 2 and 3): “The history of the Exodus (is) an analogue of an individual’s escape from the physical bondage of the body, represented by Egypt, and his soul’s struggle with psychological slavery in the desert as he strives to reach the Promised Land of the Spirit. (In the accounts)… are revealed the inner stages of initiation, trial and rebellion that led up to the realization that the secret of Existence is that it is a mirror in which man reflects the Image of the Divine so that God may behold God”¹.

    So a Jew, albeit one from an esoteric tradition, clearly recognises that the Exodus is not a story that is intended to be taken literally, for those who have ears to hear, but is actually the story of humanity’s spiritual search to reunite with the Divine. (In this interpretation, we do not need even to begin to contemplate a God who intervenes in human affairs.) This is the same story that is told in all branches of the Perennial Philosophy: Hinduism, Buddhism, Sufism, Gnosticism, esoteric Christianity, and so on. (I understand that the expression ‘in slavery in Egypt’ was actually used by the Egyptians themselves to describe the human situation of being a soul trapped in matter.)

    If we interpret the story symbolically or allegorically, therefore treat it as a myth, we no longer have to be concerned whether ‘God’ literally parted the Red Sea. In the language of myth, even in Genesis 1, the ‘waters’ represent the psychological realms between the ‘heavens’ (the spiritual realms), and the ‘dry land’ (the material world). In line with Halevi’s interpretation, I would suggest that the parting of the Red Sea represents allegorically a dramatic moment when the searching soul has broken through the psychological realm, and has emerged into the spiritual realm beyond. (Does anyone remember that great song by the Doors, highly relevant here, Break on Through to the Other Side?)

    Modern rational, sceptical minds, will obviously find the Exodus story ridiculous, if interpreted literally, and may therefore conclude that we should reject all notions of the type of God found there.        (I assume that was the point of Ms. Dinesen’s question above, and that this is what she thinks. I agree with her.) If we interpret it allegorically, however, this story reinforces what is believed to be the spiritual truth of all ages, the Ancient Wisdom of the Perennial Philosophy.

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 Footnote:

1. Kabbalah and Exodus, Gateway Books, 1988, Preface

    In the previous article, I quoted the Kabbalist Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi writing about the nature of God: “God the Transcendent is called in Kabbalah, AYIN. AYIN means No-Thing. AYIN is beyond Existence, separate from any-thing. AYIN is absolute Nothing… Out of the zero of AYIN’s no-thingness comes the one of EN SOF… EN SOF is the Absolute All to AYIN’s Absolute Nothing. God the Transcendent is AYIN and God the Immanent is EN SOF. Both Nothing and All are the same. Beyond the titles of AYIN and EN SOF no attributes are given to the Absolute. God is God and there is nothing to compare with God¹.

    I suggested that this is a deeper understanding of Divinity than the personal, theistic God of Christianity.

    As I was writing out that quote, I was struck by how similar it is to a passage in the writings of Carl Jung. This is in a book that I have also written about recently in this article, which discusses Jung’s relationship to Christianity and Gnosticism. He started to write the book in very strange circumstances — he was compelled to write by a group of spirits haunting his house. (If that seems too hard to believe, or if you are unfamiliar with the story, please check out that article, about half way through.) He says that the book was ‘written’ by Basilides, who was an ancient Gnostic teacher from Alexandria; this sounds like what is called channelling. Or Jung is being fanciful, and he is imagining what Basilides might have said; it doesn’t really matter.

    At the end of that article I concluded that Christianity might have a lot to learn from Gnosticism. So, let’s compare the opening of Jung’s Gnostic outpouring with the Kabbalistic quote above:

    “I begin with nothingness. Nothingness is the same as fullness. In infinity full is no better than empty. Nothingness is both empty and full… A thing that is infinite and eternal hath no qualities, since it hath all qualities.

    “This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the eternal and infinite possess no qualities. In it no being is, for he then would be distinct from the pleroma, and would possess qualities which would distinguish him as something distinct from the pleroma.

    “In the pleroma there is nothing and everything. It is quite fruitless to think about the pleroma, for this would mean self-dissolution”² (all italics mine).

    Not only are there striking similarities here with Halevi’s Kabbalistic statement, which suggests that Gnosticism has much in common with the deeper, esoteric version of Judaism, there is also a strong relationship with Buddhist and Hindu ideas, which suggests that Gnosticism is a branch of the Perennial Philosophy. When is Christianity going to wake up?

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Footnotes:

1. A Kabbalistic Universe, Rider & Company, 1977, p7

2. VII Sermones ad Mortuos (7 Sermons to the Dead), Watkins, 1967, p7