I’ve noticed since I made the change that there’s a great deal of overlap between the vegetarian/vegan communities and the New Age community. Visit any vegan restaurant (if you can find one) and there’s a good chance you’ll find brochures and flyers pinned by the door for psychic readings, energy therapy and other healing modalities, pet communication, Wiccan meetups, etc.

Given their worldview, the desire for a meatless diet makes perfect sense. I certainly couldn’t fault them for it.

Scientifically there’s little dispute that animals like cows, chickens, and pigs have the capacity to suffer. The cognitive machinery that facilitates pain appears long before primates on the evolutionary timeline. Our suffering may have a certain richness or sharpness to it that they don’t experience — they’re spared things like existential angst and the anticipation of future pain — but they suffer nonetheless.

Belief in the supernatural will often skew a person’s perspective on animal suffering. It’s historically been the Judeo-Christian stance that an animal cannot suffer because suffering happens in the soul and animals don’t have them. Descartes famously argued that animals are mere automata. An animal exhibits the same behaviors that we exhibit when we suffer, but since there’s “nobody home” to do the suffering it’s all purely mechanical — mindless clockwork. I don’t think this belief is as common as it used to be, but you can still see echoes of it in the way we treat animals today.

Conversely, I find that occultists and nature worshippers almost invariably give animals far more credit than the rest of us do. For them, every animal has a spirit and a rich inner life. Animals can speak to you through mediums (with varying degrees of lucidity), sense and interact with beings from other realms, and they have special powers of their own such as the ability to heal people or predict events in the near future. It’s even claimed by some that dolphins and whales are the most spiritually evolved beings on the planet and they’re waiting for humanity to catch up. That animals can suffer greatly is entirely uncontroversial in these circles, in my experience. Nature is afforded so much intelligence that you’re more likely to hear debate over whether a tree is sentient than a cow.

So of course New Agers are frequently vegetarians. What I find baffling, actually, is that so many are not.

I’ve known many psychics who made a concerted effort every day to shield themselves from negative energy. They said that if they didn’t continually purge it from their lives it would lead to dulled sensitivity, emotional disturbances, and even physical illness. I can’t count how many times I’ve watched a psychic get suddenly overcome with the feeling that something was off, and then sense that the cause was negativity from a particular person or event attaching itself to him. Once he went through the steps to remove it all was well again. This was evidently something that you could become aware of out of the blue, like hearing someone calling you or smelling a familiar scent.

What I find interesting now is that most of these people ate meat three meals a day.

The average grocery store stocks its freezers with factory farm meat, and frankly I’m having trouble coming up with a more perfect negative energy delivery system than factory farm meat. What goes on in factory farms is outside of the scope of this blog and I’ll leave you to your own research, but here are a few highlights. Animals usually either spend their entire lives in cages slightly larger than their bodies or packed into a communal area with standing room only. They live on top of a layer of their own waste, breathing in ammonia fumes that factory workers can only tolerate for minutes a day without a respirator. They’re fed foods (corn, mostly, being dirt cheap) that their bodies aren’t built for. In the case of cows, a diet of corn is so destructive to their ruminant digestive systems that many of them are already slowly dying of liver damage by slaughtering time. Dairy cows are kept perpetually pregnant so the milk continues to flow until their bodies are used up. And don’t ask about veal… just, don’t. Cocktails of antibiotics are given routinely to animals on these farms because there will be significant losses otherwise — that they need antibiotics just to survive to adulthood should clue you in on whether suffering is occurring. And, if you can believe it, the factory farms of today are a huge improvement over the farms of the ’70s.

A lifetime of this sort of treatment is not the end of the negative energy the meat is bathed in. The killing floor of a slaughterhouse is a dangerous place. A person can only stay in a job like this for so long so new workers are continually streaming in, given minimal amounts of training. The injury rate is the highest of any industry. Shifts are long and intense, requiring constant focus just to avoid getting cut or mangled. Workers (frequently illegal immigrants with no other options) are treated horribly because so few will last anyway. Many leave with something resembling PTSD. By the time the meat is on its way to the grocery store, it presumably carries the residue of the suffering of both the animal and the poor souls who’ve prepared it.

Picking up negativity from your surroundings is one thing; ingesting it and building your very body out of something saturated with it is another. If it’s true that negativity can attach itself to physical objects then I would think that the meat aisle of the supermarket would be a red-hot flashing beacon of it, impossible to ignore by anyone with the least bit of sensitivity.

And yet the negativity-phobic psychics I knew were completely content to have this food on their plates. The reality of what transpired for it to get there went completely unnoticed.

I see a few ways that one might account for this:

1. We are mistaken that animals suffer (Descartes was right).

If they don’t suffer, then there are no negative emotions to spawn these problematic energies. I think this explanation is easily dismissed. These psychics were certain that animals have feelings and they picked up on energies from their pets all the time. Many gave readings specifically to make clients aware of how their own pets were feeling.

2. The act of lovingly preparing a meal for your family cleanses the ingredients and transmutes negative energies.

Perhaps, but your food won’t get that sort of treatment from the people behind the counter at Burger King. Meals prepared by uncaring strangers that the average psychic has eaten in his lifetime will easily number in the thousands.

3. To become aware of negative energies, you need to tune into them, and unfamiliar energies can do you harm for years before you ever notice.

I did hear explanations like this one now and again. One of your tasks in this realm is to learn how to gradually peel away the onion of negativity that surrounds you. We’re faced with so much of it that any particular source of it can get lost in the roar. But in this case this excuse just seems a bit too desperate to me. Few activities are as intimate as eating. And few objects we encounter in our daily lives should be so imbued with pain. A shoe produced in the worst of sweatshops is still just a shoe; meat is the very thing that suffered. I can’t imagine how a flash of anger from a nearby stranger could have such an effect on a psychic, whereas not one of thousands of meals ever called attention to itself.

Which leads me to the explanation I find most plausible:

4. The power of suggestion is responsible for the effects of ambient negativity, and nothing more.

The average American, psychic or not, has no idea where his food comes from. He has little reason to suspect that the cow he’s eating didn’t live a long, happy life on the pastoral farm depicted on the packaging. Or he’s just forgotten that what’s on his plate ever had eyes in the first place, as so many of us have. It’s an easy thing to do; the food industry has made sure of that.

As interesting as this psychic blind spot is, I can’t think of any obvious ways to develop a test around it. Many psychics are vegetarians or vegans for exactly the reasons I’ve outlined — meat tastes like violent death to them. But which came first, the knowledge or the taste? Even if they know nothing about factory farming, it doesn’t take ESP to figure out that an early death is probably an unpleasant one.

The only psychics we can attempt to test are the ones who relish eating meat. What happens when you show these people the graphic videos that animal rights groups like to circulate? What happens after they read a book or two on how their food is actually produced? And does the resulting change in their perception of their dinner really require ad hoc supernatural explanations?

I don’t think it does. If a psychic is bothered by energy at all, he shouldn’t have to be told where his food comes from in order to notice that it’s drenched with suffering, just as I don’t have to be told that a salt shaker was spilled into my meal in order to gag when it hits my tongue. That he must learn of the suffering before becoming attuned to it suggests to me that this is merely mundane psychology at work.

Halfway into the movie Max has been exiled from Bartertown and lies in the surrounding desert on the verge of death, but he’s rescued by a group of children who live in a nearby canyon oasis. They’re the offspring of the survivors of a plane crash. According to the history they retain through ritualized storytelling, a pilot named Captain Walker flew a group of people out of a bombed city to escape the ensuing nuclear winter. It went down in the desert and what was left of the group was forced to make a life in the oasis. After about a decade of building shelters and raising families, the group decided that they needed to find out if there was any human civilization left around them. They put the eldest children in charge and departed with a promise from Captain Walker that someone would return for them. At this point it’s safe to say that no one ever will.  

Left on their own, the children have clung to Walker’s promise with (literally) religious fervor. The community is reminiscent of a cargo cult. The junk from the jet wreckage has been converted into sacred adornments and talismans (the tribe even appears to have a medicine man) and Captain Walker has become a messianic figure to whom they attribute supernatural powers. They wait for him to come lift the downed airplane back into the wind and return them all to “Tomorrow-morrow Land”, a utopia they’ve dreamt up based on the stories they’ve been told about the old world and the photos and artifacts they’ve scrounged. Max bears an uncanny resemblance to Captain Walker so the children are convinced that he’s finally returned and ignore Max’s protests to the contrary.

This scene always strikes a chord with me. There’s some dramatic license being exercised here, but fictional scenarios like this one hold a very valuable insight. It’s easy to see primitive tribal cultures that are steeped in magic and superstition as quaint, naive, misguided, or delusional. Even for Max the tribe comes off a bit crazy at first, and for someone accustomed to the apocalypse that’s saying a lot. We take completely for granted the fact that we each hold thousands of lifetimes of accumulated knowledge in our heads. We live in an age where we’re assaulted with more information in a day than a member of an ancient isolated community could encounter in an entire year. We just can’t see ourselves reflected in this strange ancestral condition; we find all this stuff anachronistic and irrelevant to life in the present.

But what’s so crucial to remember is that this condition is the default state of a human being. This is you, me, or anyone else had we not been born into intellectual privilege. These children have modern genes and modern blood, but having grown up isolated from the global environment and lacking schooling beyond the stories their parents raised them on, humanity’s fundamental nature has been laid bare. Magical thinking, imbuing coincidence with meaning, creating sacred myths and rituals, perceiving supernatural connections — this is not merely anomalous behavior. This is the cognitive path of least resistance for any Homo sapiens.

We were all on this path until we were graciously shown a higher one. It’s only through education and intellectual self-discipline that we rise above it and become our modern selves. 

Many, however, don’t aspire to rise very far. Others are born into circumstances where intellectual resources are sparse. Today’s society is replete with examples of people still living at this primeval level. Because we’ve created an environment in which knowledge is unavoidable, few can entirely succumb to this condition, but vestiges of it are continually surfacing in people’s daily lives.

A ballplayer refuses to wash his lucky pair of socks. A grieving husband makes monthly visits to his wife’s grave to tell her about his life since. A hotel skips the 13th when numbering its floors. A churchgoer draws the sign of the cross on her chest in the face of tragedy. A truck driver sees the same digits repeated on three separate license plates and decides to play the lotto with them. A fisherman sets sail on Saturday instead of Friday to help ensure his safe return.

This is all just the practice of magic in a modern form. The behaviors and rituals are different but the psychological inclination is the same. And what makes the old magic inferior to ours? What distinguishes the ballplayer’s socks from a fetish or charm? Or the sign of the cross from an incantation? Or the reading of license plates from divination?

Is our modern mysticism really that much different from the belief that a man can send a crippled jet back into the sky?

This is why I can’t be too hard on the average occultist or religionist. I can’t get as angry about their frequently negative influence on society as many skeptics do, because you can only get so upset with something for obeying its own nature. Even the staunchest of rationalists can lapse back to his ancient roots when met with enough terror or hardship. We’re all walking on a wire that threatens to toss us into barbarity without warning.

Being rational animals we’re torn between two modalities. The path of rationality is difficult; the animal path is easy. And until the end of time the vast majority of human beings will take the easy road. This will never, ever change. One who hopes for a world of perfect sanity is setting himself up for disappointment.

So since mysticism isn’t going anywhere, my advice is to gain enough distance from it all to be able to respond to it with academic fascination rather than arrogant indignation. To observe the traces of our ancestry influencing every aspect of modern society — emerging from simple roots into very complex and unpredictable patterns — is a truly amazing thing. Stepping back far enough to see your own magic in the same light as the alien magic of ancient cultures gives you a better glimpse of the grand cognitive tapestry you’re a part of, and the inborn impetus to deceive yourself loses a little more of its hold over you.

Before I close I do want to be clear on this: I’m not arguing that the customs of cultures that our society deems primitive are juvenile or useless. Every culture has within it a unique intellectual DNA and the preservation of this ethnodiversity is paramount. Each peers at the cosmos and the human condition through its own lens, and one of the worst things we can do to ourselves as a species is to reduce the number of those lenses down to one. Monoculture is death, and we’re headed toward it full tilt.

But as I’ll explore in future posts, when plumbing the depths of your own consciousness (which is what magic is truly about) you can choose to come to conclusions about the internal world or you can choose to come to conclusions about the external world based on what you uncover. The former I find to be a valuable, noble endeavor; the latter, a very problematic one. And it’s with the latter that this blog is chiefly concerned.

In any case, we as meager human beings don’t have ultimate power over our existence. But we have some, believers in the weak Law of Attraction argue. The question is, how much? Where do the boundaries lie?

To address this question, we must first ask two others.

Does the Law of Attraction necessitate a breach in the laws of physics as we currently understand them?

Take the classic example of the billiard table. You hit the cue ball with X amount of power at an angle of Y and it comes to rest in position Z. The laws of motion dictate that if you could hit the ball from the exact same place in the exact same way under the exact same conditions (yes, possible only on paper) it would come to rest exactly where it did before, and it would happen every time.

Now add intention to the equation. According to the Law of Attraction it’s possible for someone with unwavering confidence to sink a ball while someone with a self-defeating attitude just bounces it off the corner, even if the two shots they take are physically identical. After all, if a person’s mental state has influenced the way he physically hit the ball then there’s no need to appeal to mysticism in the first place; it’s just simple psychology at work. But believers argue that there’s more going on — that the intention itself has power. And if through intention alone we can cause a ball to come to rest where it wouldn’t have otherwise, could we say that the laws of motion have been violated?

It appears the answer to the question is yes. Even if the difference is measured in nanometers, one can’t break the laws of physics a little bit any more than a woman can be a little bit pregnant. They either hold up or they don’t. That’s what makes them laws.

There’s no substantial difference between making a better pool shot and attracting a new car. Outside of the “laboratory conditions” of our billiard table we’d have a million new steps and variables to keep track of, creating an environment thick with ambiguity in which a shaky belief is able to survive and flourish. But in each scenario, reality was moving in one direction and through mere intention (versus intention leading to action) it was steered into another.

The average believer in the Law of Attraction would respond to all this with: “What’s the big deal? Our current understanding of the universe is laughable. The laws of physics are incomplete and will undoubtedly be amended many, many times in the future. That our laws don’t encompass the Law of Attraction just illustrates society’s current level of ignorance.” Which is absolutely correct (well, except for that last bit) and it leads us to the next question.

If the Law of Attraction violates known physical laws, is it a big deal?

The thing about our current understanding of the laws of physics is that our vast technological infrastructure depends on that understanding reflecting reality. It couldn’t function otherwise.

For example, computer CPUs are now hitting the market with transistors that are only 45 nanometers thick. Every reduction in transistor size is a milestone, because at this scale you start running into strange quantum effects like electrons jumping from one transistor to another. There’s concern that CPU design will have to be drastically rethought once we hit the lower limit. The precision that this sort of engineering requires is mind-blowing. Overclockers (people who force their CPUs to run at speeds higher than what they’re rated for) know that any slight change in the conditions in which a CPU operates can trigger it to fail. At best, the computer will reboot itself at random; at worst, the CPU will burn out and fill the room with a lovely ozone smell.

We’re surrounded by other devices that are just as delicate. Your car relies on fuel and air behaving exactly as expected when subjected to a certain amount of pressure, and this success must be repeated thousands of times per minute. A tiny quartz resonator in your watch vibrates 32,768 times per second, allowing it to stay accurate for a year or more without adjustment depending on its quality. The average computer monitor repeatedly redraws a screen consisting of about a million tiny squares of color 60 to 90 times per second.

If the “intentional noise” that we all produce (according to the weak law) can cause little breaches here and there in the known laws of physics, shouldn’t we see things failing left and right? All of the precision machinery in the world has been designed taking the fixed nature of the laws of physics completely for granted. There are no protections or fail-safes whatsoever in place; today’s machines are utterly vulnerable to any sort of intentional interference, were it to exist. And with precision machinery even the slightest effect is enough to cause a visible disruption. In just the examples I’ve given you see millions of opportunities for failure every single day.

In a universe that includes the Law of Attraction we would have discovered long ago that any advanced technology would be useless without some sort of intentional shielding, just as so many devices require electrical or temperature shielding today. And how do you design such shielding when it’s just as vulnerable to a breach in the laws that govern it as is the object you’re trying to protect? This problem would only get worse with exponential population growth. Imagine how much intentional pollution almost seven billion human beings must generate.

NASA spends millions of dollars a pop to send probes millions of kilometers through space to arrive at exactly the right destination at exactly the right time. These journeys take years, and every single second is a chance for the trajectory to be thrown off by how someone feels about the project. Cause the probe to drift just slightly in another direction early in the trip and you may have ruined the whole mission. Probes that can steer themselves don’t have much fuel onboard for corrections; probes that can’t are screwed. In a world where we have so much physical influence (even just accidental), how could such a fragile endeavor ever be a success? How could we possibly defend it from ourselves?

As you keep asking yourself questions like these, eventually every known law gets crossed off the list of potential co-conspirators in attraction. It becomes clear that the Law of Attraction isn’t “a law just like gravity” — at least not at the Newtonian level. There’s just no room for its effects. For every physical law we know of there’s a machine out there that relies on its unwavering permanence. And these machines continue to work like clockwork, regardless of how we feel about or around them.

As usual I probably seem like I’m overthinking this, but I’m trying to make clear what a person demands of the universe when he supports even the weak law. To claim that “the Law of Attraction just works somehow” isn’t enough. It’s a big picture conclusion that ignores the dire small picture consequences.

Adherents typically solve these problems for themselves by appealing to quantum mysticism. They argue that the scope of our influence is at the quantum level rather than the Newtonian level. Somehow our intentions influence quantum probabilities, somehow causing the wave function to collapse in a configuration complementary to our intentions, somehow leading to a better likelihood of that new car appearing in our lives. Ambiguity galore.

New Age authors (the guiltiest perhaps being Deepak Chopra) have jumped onto this bandwagon in droves, and in thinking they have any business teaching quantum physics have done the public a great disservice. As scientists have repeatedly tried to explain, the bizarre quantum realm that they’re slowly coming to understand isn’t the reality that New Agers say is being uncovered. It just isn’t. The whole New Age conception of the quantum realm was borne from misunderstandings, misrepresentations, and massaging of findings to make them appear to conform to already held beliefs. And now that this mistaken view of quantum physics is rooted in people’s brains it’s going to be very hard to unroot because the true reality is so difficult to process. You can’t simply correct a person on what physicists have really discovered because it would take years of higher learning in the subject to start to grasp it.

But now I’m repeating criticisms that have been made about the Law of Attraction for years, so I think I’ll wrap things up.

There is a much, much simpler explanation for why the Law of Attraction is so incredibly convincing — one that when you finally digest it makes you wonder how you could have ever been so oblivious to it before. I hope to get to it in the near future.

In my experience the Law of Attraction comes in two flavors which I’ve started mentally referring to as the strong Law of Attraction and the weak Law of Attraction.

Adherents of the strong law claim that we’re gods who don’t know that we’re gods. We have unlimited power fettered by very limited understanding. Nothing stands in the way of having everything we could ever want, instantly and effortlessly, except our own minds. The universe never fails to give us exactly what we wish for at every moment, so our wishes must be the failing point.

Someone wanting to fly would only have to believe wholeheartedly that he could. Most people are convinced that human flight is impossible (or at least have deep-seated, unconquered doubts about it) and that belief produces our inability to fly. The double-edge of unlimited power is that you have unlimited ability to limit yourself — a god who believes he’s a man can only be a man until he believes something else. Every doubt and anxiety and fear is as much of a reality-shaper as every desire. It’s not a problem of not getting what you wish for; it’s a problem of an undisciplined mind consciously or unconsciously polluting and sabotaging every wish you make.

A few exemplary individuals in history (religious icons, many of them) have fully realized their divinity and taken the reins. They’ve ceased their self-defeat and mastered their personal power, rendering all things possible.

This is the strong law in a nutshell, and though you might think it’s just an extreme interpretation I’ve found it to be surprisingly common. As I recall this picture isn’t painted explicitly in The Secret, but they sure do seem to be trying to plant the seed.

The strong law borders on solipsism and shares its many flaws. What makes it especially unconvincing for me is that it seems to render human discovery impossible.

There was a point in history (more distant than most people think) when the world was assumed by all to be flat. The notion of the world as a free-floating orb never entered the minds of our earliest ancestors. Why would it? What reason would they have had to question something so transparent to the senses? Doubting the world’s flatness would be like doubting a heavy thing’s heaviness or a red thing’s redness — a philosophical exercise that cavemen didn’t have the leisure for.

So in a world filled with god-men who were in harmonious agreement that the world was flat, why didn’t the world resolve to actual flatness? They weren’t aware that the world could be anything but flat. There was no doubt, no fear, no confusion. For the Law of Attraction, there’s no better condition than single-mindedness of this magnitude. And yet roundness (something no one was desiring, at least until someone started to wonder what held everything up) is what we eventually found, in spite of all this.

What went wrong? To individuals with ultimate power, the difference between manifesting a flat Earth and a new car is trivial. How could a universally-held belief ever be proven false in a framework where belief governs reality?

And how in this framework could we make discoveries for which we have no expectations whatsoever? Since the Earth became round we’ve stumbled upon germs, quasars, tectonic plates, radios waves, quantum entanglement, dinosaurs, etc. Usually scientists see things coming, but certainly at least one world-changing thing has been discovered in the past for which there was no precedent and came as a complete surprise. What, if not human intention, conjured these things into existence?

Clearly this power of ours must be limited. In order for the Law of Attraction to be compatible with an objective, independent, pre-human reality (which our ability to discover things entirely new to us is an indicator of) there must be physical laws which remain untouched by it. Our creative influence must have boundaries.

Where the boundaries are drawn is the problem of the weak Law of Attraction, which is the subject of the next post.

However the idiom has a slightly different meaning for me. During the years I spent involved in New Age culture I picked up on an attitude that disturbed me a little more every year. The people I observed seemed to believe that as long as there were good intentions behind every action they took, they could do no harm.

This is ludicrous of course. I can attest to the emotional and financial harm I suffered at their hands, and I’m certainly not alone. Every day people are making life decisions spurred by the advice of self-deluded psychics, passing up needed medical attention for long-debunked alternative remedies, and tossing huge amounts of money down the drain chasing promises of ultimate power over one’s own deficient universe.

What makes these things especially frightening to me is that they so often lack any malice behind them.

The New Agers I’ve known have been some of the most caring and compassionate people I’ve ever met. Their hearts genuinely ached for the suffering endured by humankind. They exerted more energy in a day toward creating a more peaceful world than most people do in a month.

And yet most of them would fleece a person without hesitation. They had no qualms about charging one, two, three hundred dollars an hour to perform questionable spiritual services that they had no evidence for the efficacy for — over and above what the power of suggestion will yield. Seminars on the various “healing” techniques that one can become certified in (whatever that means) can easily cost you a thousand or more, and often these techniques are grounded not in empirical data but in the originator’s feelings and intuitions, pulled out of thin air.

I witnessed little or no concern from these folks that they were deceiving people or ripping them off. Somehow they just thought themselves immune to the possibility.

This contradiction of intention and action is something I’ve always had a dark fascination with. As the famous Steven Weinburg quote concludes, “…for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” This is just as true of alternative belief systems.

It’s interesting how people rationalize this sort of behavior, if at all.

Some of them see your money as God-given. They provide a godly service, and as a reward (or in “creative partnership”) God arranges for money to flow to them through you. The money becomes a divine endorsement for their legitimacy, so there’s no question of whether or not they deserve it; the more money they get out of you the better. If God grants them wealth it must mean they’ve done a lot of good for the world. Maybe if you were in a close partnership with God, you’d be wealthy too?

Some consider themselves humble messengers. They admittedly can’t prove that the knowledge they have to offer comes from ESP or cosmic intelligences, but they feel that they’ve been tasked to share it so they distribute it on a seemingly innocent “take it or leave it” basis. If you get something out of it, great, but if not that’s fine too. This approach doesn’t bother me if they don’t also present themselves as psychics and charge for their services. They want to be recognized as legitimate and compensated accordingly, but want to be exempt from the burden of validating their authenticity to earn that recognition. It’s a common cop out — when they’re right, they’re psychic; when they’re wrong, they’re just normal folk who make mistakes like you and me. To be fair, no one can perform perfectly in any job, but I have yet to find a psychic who’s correct to even a statistically interesting degree — though I found many who would happily accept my money.

And many are just naive. They’re taught something by someone who’s developed an air of authority and take it immediately as truth. They’re the blind that the blind are leading. They pay the hundreds of dollars an hour to learn a new skill and are assured that they too can make that kind of income teaching others. They eagerly set up their own little businesses, totally oblivious to the fact that they’re just new links in a chain of fraud.

It’s not a difficult line to cross. There was a point where I was on the verge of becoming an unwitting swindler myself. Thankfully I never quite had enough confidence in anything I learned to feel comfortable charging for it.

No one really thinks of himself as the villain; he is merely trying to better his universe with every choice he makes. Human history is brimming with atrocities that were conducted explicitly (and misguidedly) for the greater good. The agents of those atrocities were, in their own minds, well-meaning, and damage was inflicted on the world regardless.

Clearly it takes more than referencing one’s own intentions to determine whether or not an action will be harmful. “The road to Hell,” from my perspective, is the path of carnage one often leaves behind when he lets his intentions be his only compass. There’s no place in Heaven, allegorically speaking, for a good person with a legacy of destructive deeds.

We need not only to act, but to ensure that the results of our actions compliment our intentions. Kindliness and goodwill must be accompanied by this deep concern for ultimate outcomes. Otherwise it’s all for nothing.

If you’re a teacher of supernatural/spiritual beliefs and practices it’s extremely important that you keep asking yourself whether you truly offer something of substance. If you don’t, you’ll have to live with people like me floating in your wake who are justified in feeling deceived, manipulated, and stolen from. And your benevolence, though admirable, won’t make those wounds heal any faster.

It’s been disturbing to me how few people I’ve encountered who found these questions pertinent.

The truth is, I am a big picture person. But you have to test the big picture with the small.

I never read the book nor cared much to, but the movie Sphere had a moment that perfectly illustrates the power of the small picture. If you’re bothered by having a movie from 1998 spoiled for you, now’s the time to stop reading.

The military discovers what appears to be a spaceship abandoned at the bottom of the ocean. It’s covered by centuries of coral growth, so it’s assumed that the ship is of alien origin because no human invention of the 17th century could possibly have been so advanced.

The people involved in this endeavor have been operating single-mindedly for weeks under this assumption until a team finally manages to explore its insides, and someone makes a discovery. Within one of the corridors is a container labeled on top with the words: “TRASH/BASURA”

A trash can — an object so commonplace and insignificant — has instantly transformed everything around it. The big picture is demolished by a minor, easily-neglected detail, forcing everyone to start almost from scratch. Now we’re dealing with a time machine.

I’m not saying that they were wrong in having a working assumption, but you can see that they would have been radically misled if they hadn’t investigated the mystery further. To form an accurate picture, an understanding spanning multiple levels was needed.

There’s a reason they say that the devil is in the details. The lurking minutiae that can potentially collapse a supernatural claim are very easily concealed behind abstraction and handwaving (often intentionally). The New Age section of your local bookstore is filled with shaky, sloppily constructed ideas that in their avoidance of the small picture have seduced millions, including me in years past. But when you start to inspect these ideas more closely, the cracks and holes in their foundations jump into view. As Bertrand Russel said, “Everything is vague to a degree you do not realize till you have tried to make it precise.”

No false claim can be entirely internally consistent; it’s just too much for a human brain to maintain. Only a claim backed by reality can hope to eventually have an answer to every niggling question. Thus, a rigorous attention to detail gives you an immediate advantage in evaluating a supernatural claim about the world, because a genuine claim is innately better able to hold up to scrutiny than a false claim. You just have to do the scrutinizing.

The big picture is unquestionably important, but a big picture that’s on the verge of falling apart — no matter how pretty a picture it is — is of little use in the end. Only after delving deeply into the particulars do you find out whether the claim as a whole is really worth your time. This is where claims that are fraudulent, delusional, or just poorly researched are made or broken.

The small picture without the big picture lacks context and meaning. The big picture without the small is tenuous and superficial.

It’s best to devote time to both before letting a new idea influence your view of the cosmos.

This isn’t at all the case. I would love nothing more than to come upon a claim whose truth could be demonstrated clearly to me without needing to draw its persuasive power from my own biases and wishful thinking.

I just… haven’t. And it took a while to admit that to myself.

There’s an atheist website out there called “Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?” which points out that people make numerous, daily claims of God miraculously curing them of diseases like cancer (which sometimes goes into remission on its own), whereas there are never claims for miraculous recoveries of lost limbs (which never regenerate on their own).

The argument being made is that if all the illnesses being spontaneously cured in the world have in common the ability to heal without outside assistance, maybe there’s no reason to assume a deity is involved in the first place. God should find one miracle no more challenging than the other, and it’s doubtful that he just has less love for amputees.

I’ve gone through a similar dilemma. I’ve never seen or experienced a phenomenon that forced me to resort to the supernatural to find an explanation for it. Nor was it all that difficult to stumble upon some mundane explanations that worked just fine once I gave the phenomenon some serious thought and research. And the psychics and mediums I’ve met — being hypothetically genuine — shouldn’t have had any trouble providing something much more convincing. Having the abilities they claimed to have, a mind-blowing demonstration shouldn’t have been any more challenging for them than a mundane one. And if they had the intention of convincing me, why would they pick the mundane one?

The problem isn’t that I’m not open. The problem is that every claim I’ve come across requires me to turn a blind eye (or two) to become a believer. And I just can’t do that, nor should I have to. The great thing about truth is that it remains true when both eyes are open.

In any case, I’d like to offer an invitation to anyone out there with a psychic ability or access to some phenomenon to share it with me here. I sincerely do want to know what you’re capable of or what you’ve discovered. If there’s something out there for which blindness isn’t necessary, I’d love to know about it.

The ultimate purpose of this blog is to shed more light on the supernatural. Whatever that light reveals — positive or negative — is valuable and relevant. I’m not closed to the possibility that the positive is out there, but if I’ve only come across the negative and the neutral so far, then that’s what I must report.

If you have something that you’re sure will send me in a new direction, you’re more than welcome to contribute.

I just can’t promise belief in it. Without good reason, anyway.

It’s often said that a human being has dual channels that his understanding of the world comes through: the head and the heart. Some areas of life fall cleanly in the domain of one or the other, while other areas are warred over — sometimes causing unbearable inner turmoil. We’re told that we need to gradually learn which side of us should make which decisions and eventually a steady truce will form.

I think everyone would agree that this model is just an easy way of talking about something extremely complex, and the simplification comes at the cost of lost information, so we can’t take it too seriously.

There are eastern and esoteric belief systems which take the model a few steps further. They posit separate bodies that together compose a human being, such as the mental, emotional, and causal bodies beyond the physical. Good health in one of these bodies and bad health in another can cause a person to become unbalanced and skew his perceptions. For example an experience might be stripped of its true emotional or spiritual value because the mental body is too dominant and it muscles the experience into its own domain. This is something I’ve been accused of more than once.

I haven’t personally found the body model to be convincing at all. To me the model reeks of ancient people trying admirably to explain the oddities of human consciousness, but falling far short without the understanding of neurology that we’ve achieved in the last century. If you do some reading in ancient western philosophy you find similar theories that have become obsolete. The mind and the soul were for a time the exact same thing because the mind was too intangible to be anything but supernatural. Now the physical roots of the mind that neuroscience shows us are so hard to deny that most people would say the mind must be distinct from the soul, if they believe the soul exists at all.

In any case, I’ve found that logic is applied very easily in domains that people have tried to convince me logic has no place in, and I’ve found that you can often point out that people are indeed using logic on occasions when they’re convinced that they aren’t. I just wasn’t hitting this insurmountable boundary they spoke of.

I think part of the confusion comes from the fact that some forms of basic logic (pattern-recognition, association, categorization, etc.) are done preemptively — and often sloppily — by the brain without our conscious awareness. Those hidden processes inject an element of mystery that definitely arouses magical suspicions. I’ve spent years succumbing to them.

Further confusion, sadly, comes from many people defining logic as “stuff that sounds think-y.”

I didn’t want to dismiss the idea that there are other faculties, however, because I’d had many experiences in meditation where I felt detached from logic completely. I’m very aware of the problems that arise with using logic to justify the reliability of logic (or to justify the unreliability of logic), so if there were times where an alternative was more appropriate I sincerely wanted to know about it.

So I asked myself exactly where the boundaries of logic were drawn. I figured if I kept asking, “Can I use logic to assess this?” and ventured further and further with every affirmative, I’d finally push logic to its limit and discover what was on the other side.

Philosophers have already done this extensively and written volumes on it. But I was curious if I could find a boundary simple enough that anyone could understand it as easily as the head/heart model, unrigorous as it might be.

A few months ago it popped into my head. It was simple algebra.

We’ll represent any given experience as:

X

X is difficult to talk about because it’s pre-verbal. X is the experience in its direct, isolated, self-contained form. It’s the quale of it. When you stand facing a blank white wall, X is the whiteness you experience. When you hear the wind blow, X is the perception of the sound. When you touch a hot stove, X is the raw sensation.

Abstraction is, in my opinion, where logic enters the picture:

X = Y

Once we apply equivalence to any given experience, logic is at work. The experience of the white wall itself (X) is absolutely free of logic. It’s that place I visited during meditation. It’s a state of pure unabstracted being. But once I conclude from that experience that I’m currently facing a surface, and that surface is reflecting every wavelength of visible light, and I have eyes and a brain to receive and interpret that light, I’ve made a judgment about the experience (X = Y). When I conclude that the sound is made by moving air, along with making conclusions about what air is and what movement is and what I am in relation to it all, I’m using logic. Even when I label the burn from the hot stove as a bad feeling, I could argue that a degree of logic is at work. This is one of those cases where the brain is doing most of the work for me unconsciously; it’s piggybacking the unpleasant flavor of the experience onto the sensation before it reaches consciousness, because reasoning about it consciously would be way too slow to prevent damage to my hand.

So, in a simplistic way I think we’ve uncovered the boundary. It’s the appearance of the equal sign — the cognitive addition of information not actually embedded within a sensation itself. But the place beyond the boundary is a place we spend only an instant in for each experience we have.

This is clearly a very different picture than the one painted for me earlier where long, involved stretches of our lives are lived in logic-proof places — like being in love and communing with the divine. Of course I’d never advocate reducing these experiences down to nothing but cold logic, but to believe that logic isn’t even present in them is something you do at your own peril.

For hundreds of millennia, humans walked the earth knowing nothing about the outer frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum. Radio noise from the sun and the stars flitted all around us — passing through our very bodies — and we were not only unaware, we were unaware we were unaware. No obvious mysteries were produced by their existence. They were answers to questions that hadn’t yet been born. It wasn’t until the 19th century (seconds ago in human time) that radio waves were discovered and explained, and today they’re used ubiquitously. We can hardly imagine a world without them.

This is just one example of many. It’s safe to assume that there exist other life-changing, society-changing aspects of the physical world that are operating right here, right now, without leaving a single recognizable trace and without being found in a single theoretical framework. Until human understanding rises to a sufficient level, we’ll remain absolutely oblivious to them.

And there are the things that humans could never come to understand.

An ant colony functions as a single, purposeful entity, yet no individual ant has any awareness whatsoever of what it’s a part of, nor could it hope to. The ant simply doesn’t have the perceptual faculties for it. It’s a machine that adheres to a simple program, and when a thousand other ants are present these combined behaviors result in a whole that’s much smarter than the sum of its parts.

A human being is both an individual and a collection of individuals. Our cells are organisms that have become so specialized that most of them cannot live outside their special niches within the body. They’ve given up their obsolete autonomy, but are they really that different from bacteria and protozoa and diatoms? We are — quite literally — hives. Again, each type of cell has a set of rules to follow, and out of this incredible synergy, I emerge. This entry was written by none other than my billions of neurons, but any one of those neurons would need to have a few billion neurons of its own to begin to fathom the meaning.

From this you can’t help but wonder if there’s a whole that we ourselves comprise. I am a we, but are we also an I? Are we the equivalent of ants or neurons blindly orchestrating some cosmic endeavor that lies far, far outside our perceivable, conceivable realm? It’s a beautiful idea, but it’s unfortunately of little use. It isn’t necessarily true, and if it is true we’ll never find out.

It’s these questions — of the things we don’t know and of the things we can’t fully know — that led me to occultism. I thought reports of psychic and paranormal phenomena were the smoke from the fire of this mysterious side of existence that I hoped to understand. I bought into the idea that there were mystics and gurus who could help me to finally lift the veil. I was convinced that the secret knowledge was out there waiting to be claimed if I just did enough digging in the right places.

I’m not saying that mystics and gurus have nothing valuable to offer, but there is a problem with my early reverence of them that I originally failed to see.

Consider someone living in the days long before radio; we’ll call him Ogg. Ogg tells the rest of his tribe that he thinks there are invisible energies all around us. They aren’t magical, they can be understood, and one day people will use them to send messages to each other through the air. You won’t be able to see or hear the messages or even be aware of them at all without the help of special devices. People hundreds of miles away from each other will be able to have a conversation as if they were in the same room.

This is a very alien notion in Ogg’s time, and though he’s absolutely right, the rest of the tribe doesn’t believe a word of it.

The question is, should they?

It’s important to ascertain just how Ogg came to this conclusion. He has no technology sensitive to radio waves that could accidentally reveal their existence. He has no theoretical understanding of light which could lead him to believe there might be wavelengths of it outside the visible spectrum. He’s stretching well outside his empirical range, so to speak. Without a trace of evidence and without being fed this information by someone much more knowledgeable Ogg can only ultimately arrive at this conclusion by, well, guessing. This time, Ogg got lucky.

An arrival at a truth doesn’t necessarily validate the methodology through which that truth was attained. Even though Ogg was right, would it have been prudent for his tribe members to believe him? Suppose his neighbor comes up with a prediction that we know will be blatantly false. Without the glimpse into the future that we enjoy, what separates Ogg’s prediction from his neighbor’s? Why should the tribe listen to one and not the other? The often confusing answer is: it shouldn’t. The two predictions are actually on equal footing.

Likewise, imagine one neuron explaining to another neuron what a human being is. Should this “expert” neuron be taken seriously? Or could its description only be hopelessly and comically naive?

When evaluating teachers of the occult, or of any religion or philosophy, it’s very important to keep this all in mind. No matter how intelligent and knowledgeable they sound we know two things about them from the start: 1) they have only so many tools at their disposal to acquire this knowledge empirically, and 2) they are as seriously handicapped by their human form as we are. They may indeed be wise, but be very careful not to attribute superhuman awareness to them, especially right off the bat.

The next time someone shares a seductive new model of reality with you, remember that without solid evidence and without a solid rational basis, you may very well be listening to Ogg’s neighbor, rather than Ogg. And the next time someone tries to tell you how the cosmos really works, picture your neurons having a conversation about you. In my early New Age days I was too eager and hopeful to take these important evaluative steps. I was blinded by the burning desire to finally find the truth, so I believed my teachers had it because I wanted them to have it, not because they demonstrated it unequivocally. To my credit I can at least say that this happened less and less as years went by.

I hinted earlier that it was possible Ogg was relaying a truth rather than discovering it. After all, for anything in the universe that’s understandable there could exist a consciousness that understands it. There are many tribal people in the world today that have a basic understanding of how a radio works, but they didn’t come to that knowledge through their own efforts; they were taught by visiting anthropologists. Could Ogg have been told about radio waves by an entity more technologically advanced than the people populating the planet at the time, thus making his prediction viable? This is a common response in New Age circles to this sort of argument, and we’ll explore it in future entries.

For years I researched the supernatural and the paranormal. I tried my hand at tarot, automatic writing, reiki, astral projection, channeling, telekinesis, clairvoyance, animal communication, creative manifestation, and more. I sought information and instruction from more psychics than I can count. I spent thousands of dollars on books, classes, expos, seminars, and was even enrolled in an esoterically-oriented “Ph.D.” program before I realized the people running the school wouldn’t recognize a scholarly work if it bit them.

Some of these missteps are things I’m not especially proud of, but in a very roundabout way they helped to finally put me on a path of reason, and gave me the experiences one needs to truly see the necessity of a rigorous philosophical approach. Nothing reveals the power of faulty thinking more clearly than being a longtime casualty of it.

I do wish that I had found this path earlier, but looking back on my life I see that I had very few introductions to it. I had no critical thinking education whatsoever before college. My bachelor’s was in art, and, though many of the world’s most brilliant minds have been artists, the subject doesn’t require the reasoning abilities that disciplines like science and math do. Until I officially became a philosophy student, my only real exposure to critical thinking, sadly, came by my own independent study.

The rampant disinterest in such a fundamentally important skill throughout our society is very troubling to me. I felt compelled to contribute something, however small, in making its value known to the world. Intelligence alone won’t protect a person from seductive but ultimately baseless ideas as well as one might think. Sometimes it even makes him more vulnerable.

I fear that I’ll be primarily preaching to the choir with this blog, but I’m sure there must be people out there like me that just can’t shake their buried suspicions about what they’re being shown and taught. People who are tired of the obfuscation and the disappointment that one constantly endures when immersed in that world. My goal is to develop this blog into, simply, the resource that I wish I’d had all along. If you’re on the same path I was headed down, I hope that my collection of findings can save you some future grief.