The Occult
OH NO !!!!!!!!!!!!!
My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all
Stephen Hawking
The Church is wary of ‘The Occult’, partly because it sees it as a threat to its own power and partly because it thinks it should remain ‘occult’, while Materialist Science dismisses it on principle, as it apparently requires non-Material elements to have real independent existence… and anyway, the whole idea is silly.
But is it? The word ‘occult’ is related to ‘occluded’, meaning ‘concealed’ or ‘hidden’. ‘The Occult’ simply refers to a supposed hidden body of knowledge.
For something to be ‘hidden’ several things are implied:
- That something must actually exist for it to be hidden.
- That some person/group knows what this something is.
- That some person/group judges that it should be hidden.
- That some person/group has good reason for hiding it.
- That some person/group has the ability to hide it.
- That what is hidden might somehow become revealed.
I detected a link in principle here with the ancient Mysteries and their pledge of secrecy. The public/private (Exoteric/Esoteric) split in the doctrines of the great religions came to mind as well, and the need they felt to keep certain information hidden.. ‘occluded’ from hoi polloi.
Also, I came across writings which alternately called these various pearls ‘esoteric’ or ‘occult’. The terms are practically interchangeable. Thus the creepiness of The Occult, generated by sensationalist fiction and desperate pop groups, could be dispersed by simply thinking of it as ‘The Esoteric’, about which there is nothing creepy at all. And Yogic philosophy, my first introduction to the Esoteric world, was the most positively benign and helpful thinking I had ever come across.
The Idealist doctrine is held by all strands of ‘The Occult’, but with varying emphases. Thus, The Occult is not the mad jumble of superstitious rubbish that it is assumed to be by people who have never looked into it, but a more or less coherent system for the understanding of certain rules of power. The problem with The Occult is that as with any other system concerned with power, it has attracted all sorts of snakes and weasels. Great care is needed in sifting the fragments of gold from all the sewage.
***
Remember Isaac Newton requiring an ‘aether’ to carry light waves around?
§ ‘That one body may act upon another at a distance through a vacuum without the mediation of anything else, by and through which their action and force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an absurdity that, I believe, no man who has in philosophic matters a competent faculty of thinking could ever fall into it.’ Isaac Newton.
The Yogic/Esoteric/Occult world says that something very similar to this does indeed exist. They call it ‘the ether’ or ‘akasha’ (see Chapter 13),
§ When I mention the occult or esoteric world I’m being selective. There are so many strands to this world that life is too short to investigate them all thoroughly. Thus I’ve limited my summary below to a few major movements like magic, paganism, and shamanism, as well as the more well-known threads that turn up in eg Buddhism, Yoga, Sufi, and Theosophy. I’ve ignored other threads like astrology (which Isaac Newton spent years investigating), alchemy (much studied by Jung and Newton), and numerology, of which I know nothing (0)). The material which follows is a simplified composite, which reflects the consistency in the esoteric/occult threads, but which will almost certainly offend every esotericist/occultist who knows far more than I do. My apologies to all.
and claim that every physical item has an etheric ‘double’ which occupies the same space as the physical body. In fact it is slightly bigger. You can see your own etheric body, they say, by holding your hand against a dark surface and looking at the rim of your fingers. It’s not obvious, but you can see a faint transparent ‘shadow’. Well, I can, anyway. Or is it an optical illusion? The effect is not strong enough for me to be certain.
§ ‘Kirlian photography’ can apparently make visible the etheric field/body, even to the point of ‘restoring’ a cut-away section of a leaf. If this is true, maybe it would help to explain the mystery of the ‘phantom limb’ reported by amputees. I am reminded of Plato’s ‘forms’, whereby the abstract ‘form’ precedes the physical matter which infills the ‘form’. Logic then suggests that a missing physical entity, like a limb, would leave behind it the non-physical, etheric, ‘form’ as a phantom, detectable by some. See www.kirlian.org/kirlian2.htm and www.fullspectrum.org.uk/default.asp
Phantoms can be very real. One lady who was born without arms, nevertheless felt the presence of two phantom limbs which would gesticulate while she was speaking (mentioned in The Master and His Emissary by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist). Another case: a man reported feeling ‘gnawing’ in his phantom arm. It was discovered that the arm had been buried and was being devoured by maggots. Once the arm was burned, the gnawing feeling went (see Phantoms of the Brain by VS Ramachandran, neuroscientist).
As a point of interest, Lord Nelson suffered badly from the phantom effect in his missing arm but he saw something positive in it. If an arm could survive materiality why not the whole body? He saw it a proof of immortality. Did he have a point?
Clairvoyants can see this ‘etheric body’. It is part of what they call ‘the aura’, and they say it carries information about a person’s physical condition.
The ether pervades everything, including space itself, which might have pleased Newton. The purpose of the etheric body is to transmit life force (Yogic ‘prana’) into the physical body.
§ ‘Prana’ in India; ‘chi/qi’ in China; ‘ki’ in Japan; ‘ik’ in Maya; ‘tona’ in Aztec; ‘zoe’ in ancient Greece; ‘ase’ in Yoruba; ‘kau’ in Egypt (all definitions approximate). Kirlian photographs seem to show both an etheric field and radiant ‘electrical’ lines of what might be seen as prana.
In other words, the etheric body is the bridge between the clearly Physical and the apparently non-Physical worlds. When the physical body dies, the life force is withdrawn, and the physical and etheric bodies both decay and return to the appropriate general pool, as in ‘dust to dust,’ etc.
As if that wasn’t odd enough, they claim that we all, along with every atom, flower, walrus, etc have a third ‘body’, often called the ‘astral’. This is the body of the emotions. Some clairvoyants can see this ‘aura’ too, and can read your emotional condition from it, from, say, the rose pink of unconditional love to the black daggers of malice.
They claim we also have a ‘mental body’, in whose aura the quality of our thoughts is readable (only the quality: not individual thoughts: …’logical’ for example, or ‘fuddled’… although telepathy does suggest itself here). It seems that a mind consistently concerned with thoughts of an altruistic and highly intelligent nature has an aura strong in golden yellow, encircling the head. Hence ‘the halo’ of religious art, perhaps.
Each of these three extra bodies exists in its own world, so to speak. Thus we all simultaneously exist in four worlds.
§ In fact there’s much more to it than this, but this is enough for the moment, I suggest.
So why can’t we all see these alleged bodies? We all can, say the occultists, if we take the trouble to learn the skills needed. Of course, they add, the reason so many people don’t bother is because they simply don’t believe that these ‘bodies’ can possibly exist. Given that we’ve all been drenched in Materialism for some 200 years, this is a valid point, even if it all strikes a newcomer as rather bizarre.
‘Bizarre’ or not, the question must be ‘Is there any evidence for all this?’ Well, it depends on what you call evidence. People have reported seeing or feeling or hearing ‘other-worldly’ visitations of various sorts in all cultures I’ve ever heard of, and for thousands of years. Under the terms of SPIT I would call those millions of reports ‘evidence’ until it is proved otherwise. Surveys also repeatedly show that a large proportion of the population (20-30%) are sure they have had some sort of contact with what they think of as a being from ‘another realm’, but they don’t tell other people until asked, for fear of the ridicule that would be poured upon them by people like my biology teacher.
I found the idea of having four bodies laughable at first, then intriguing, and finally ‘tentatively persuasive’. I couldn’t see them, but then I can’t see X-rays or electricity or radio waves, which doesn’t stop them being real. A blind man can’t see light at all, but I doubt if he claims it doesn’t exist. And these extra ‘bodies’ would definitely allow for a few of the oddities people have repeatedly reported: luminous ‘wraiths’ in churchyards (the ‘etheric’ decaying); telepathy (two mental bodies making contact); the mob mentality (emotional bodies overlapping); hypnosis (one mental body linking with or dominating another); and of course these bodies suggest locations for dreams to happen in. Presumably dreams take place in the ‘astral/emotional world’, as dreams tend to be concerned with emotional issues rather than questions of philosophy. However, as Mozart and Einstein would testify, not all dreams are emotional; so perhaps the ‘mental body’ deals with intellectual rather than emotional information.
The ‘mental world’ would also be a locus for Intuition to operate in, along with the Laws of Karma; and the ‘astral world’ would be the Other World to which they say we shuffle back and forth between death and rebirth. An invisible lowly ‘astral body’, emanating powerful negative emotion, could explain why dogs and cats refuse to enter rooms. ‘Positive astral emanations’ might also ‘explain’ the medieval concern with saintly relics and why people pick up ‘vibes’ from artefacts and places.
§ St Teresa of Avila was so revered for her visionary experiences and goodness that her body was disinterred several times, and was always found to be intact (and possibly ‘fragrant’). Eventually, she was cut into pieces; her jaw being sent to Rome.
It is said that General Franco, the murderous fascist dictator of Spain in the 1930’s, slept with St Teresa’s hand next to his bed. I wonder if she was tempted to strangle the brute? Being a saint, probably not.
But, above all, it would allow for the existence of ghosts. It would not explain ghosts, but it offered them a natural home, which Materialist Science could not.
I could find no paradoxes in what I read, and ‘no paradox’ means ‘might be true’. There were many mysteries raised, of course. But ‘mystery’ does not mean the same as ‘irrationality’.
Something that helped me was that all the cultures and traditions that thought in terms of these ‘multiple bodies’ also thought in terms of the Other World being a ‘superconscious’ world, as opposed to ‘subconscious’. To Westerners, Freud’s ‘subconscious’ has a rather creepy connotation: it’s beyond our control and is somehow out to ambush us with irrational and savage iddish impulses. This savage iddishness is held to be our ‘true self’, by many Materialists. Sad…..
§ Some Materialists seem to take a depressing delight in this sort of nihilism, as did my biology teacher. The humour of hidden despair, perhaps?
To Yogic/Esoteric/Occultist cultures the Other World is quite the opposite of creepy. It does have its lower levels, where karmic debtors hang out and annoy each other, but overall it is a superior locus, full of wonders and possibilities, often of a sort we would call magical, or ‘paranormal’.
§ You will have noticed that I’m avoiding the word ‘supernatural’. That’s because it is meaningless. If something happens, it’s natural. If it doesn’t happen then it doesn’t exist. ‘Paranormal’ is a much better word for weirdo events.
I will sometimes abbreviate ‘Yogic/Esoteric/Occultist’ to ‘Yogic/Esoteric’ (or YEO) from now on, in the interests of calm positivity!
§ I think it might aid clarity to reserve the ‘subconscious’ for automatic behaviours like walking, and for behaviours we normally call ‘instincts’: things like a new Mum eating her placenta, and a new calf butting for milk… actions which refer backwards, to tradition, for example.
The ‘superconscious’ would then be the world of what we might call Intuition: forward-looking; new developments; new ideas, creativity, connections …
Our word ‘education’ comes from the Latin ‘e + ducere’ meaning ‘to lead out’: ie, the job of the teacher is to bring forth that which already lies within: ie, to stimulate the Intuition (‘inner’ + ‘tuition’) into action. Every teacher knows that you never teach anybody anything: you can only stimulate the will to learn.
Yogis claim that human creativity derives from a high level of the ‘Mental world’ via what we call Intuition, or ‘hunch’, as in a scientist’s eureka moment when he makes the vital connection, or a poet’s sublimely sunlit metaphor, or a comedian’s fun with a pun. These are all ‘new connections’, deriving from an intuition: a message from the Mental world.
This makes more sense to me than lifeless chemicals spontaneously creating poetry and laughter from out of their abiotic selves for no purpose at all. And, they say, if you can access this superconscious world on a regular basis, you make more and more connections, and people call you a genius.
Yogis say: these various worlds are not separate, but on a sort of sliding scale of vibration.
§ Vibration again. Physics tells us that every particle in creation vibrates or undulates somehow, so some room for agreement there. A question: a vibration must take place within a matrix of some sort. I wonder what this matrix might be? The a/ether?
Yogis etc say that the physical is the lowest rate of vibration, then the etheric, then the astral-emotional, then the mental, and they relate to each other in the same way as radio stations on a dial. If you tune to one level, you will perceive that level (or hear that particular programme). Tune to another level and you will be aware of a different ‘reality’ instead.
So why not a sliding scale of entire worlds? The neat point being that they are not actually separate worlds: just a continuum to which you and I can attune ourselves at any point, if we know how, and can operate at the appropriate vibratory rate. They are all actually in one place, just as your own body space is simultaneously occupied at this very moment by thousands of radio and television wavelengths, hundreds of sound vibrations, heaven knows how many magnetic and electrical fields from your phone, the telly and the toaster, and, it seems, the trillions of ultra-tiny solar neutrinos that pass through you every second.
This idea of tuning in would start to make sense of clairvoyants and psychometrists, and would be a good candidate for explaining why certain people in a group will report seeing a ghost while others won’t. And when we go to sleep we simply raise our vibe and live our life in the astral for an hour or two. Food for thought, for me at least.
§ The ‘rose pink of unconditional love’ mentioned above would be a vibration at the highest, most refined, end of the astral world-vibe. The ‘black daggers of malice’ would be at the lower, coarser end.
The purpose of life, the Yogis say, is to (re)find one’s Higher Self by choosing to act selflessly. The four worlds we live in are actually one, perceived as varying scales or octaves of vibration. The Yogic name for this multi-world is ‘samsara’. We are born and re-born on the planes and sub-planes of the samsaric continuum until we shake off (or ‘rise above’) all the lower vibes of our animal nature and become compatible with the much higher vibratory rate of a totally different Life in the Higher World, in which our Higher Self permanently resides.
§ I guess some people will be thinking of the word ‘soul’ at this point. A Buddhist won’t, because he regards every existential condition we can imagine as being temporary, and thus not worth getting too excited about. I won’t either, as it is a word so loaded with prejudice that it’s much better left to theologists. Buddhists don’t get too excited by the notion of ‘God’ either, as for them the Ultimate Creative Force is so remote from our own little world that it’s not worth the effort of trying to make sense of it. Hence why Buddhists tend not to worry about much, and seem to be always smiling, while the Believers of the Desert Religion/s are more prone to shame, shouting, and shooting.
This World, the Lower World, is seen as a sort of extended education, during which we meet challenges. If we make selfless decisions we begin to purify ourselves from our animal/selfish Lower Self, and in the process, raise the rate of our personal vibration. This is the Law of Karma in action. If we fail our challenges, they return until we get it right. Eventually, we do get it right and are finally free to slip off the vibe-continuum of this coil and to move on to something grander, knowing we are now tried and tested and strong, and able to meet any challenge in the future.
The Occult… a little more
Life is nor a fairground but a school
Franz Bardon
The esoteric/occult philosophy claims that our animal body is a temporary home to our incoming Lower Self, which reincarnates (‘becomes flesh again’) after a spell in the higher vibe of the astral or mental. The body is a mechanical device to be carefully used by the incoming being, for the purposes of learning to become selfless and finding his/her own personal power by coping with problems and conquering adversity.
Is this material interesting enough to tell your friends about? If so… please do tell them! Thankyou.