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Knowledge and paranormal research seem to be
involved in a clash that appears to offer no solution.
On both sides the trenches have been dug and an
intellectual no-man’s land lies desolate and ghostly.
Why is this? Many will tell you that it is due to there being no rational theories behind paranormal activity. I disagree, but here I want to turn the tables and look to the nature of knowledge itself to see if an answer can be found here.
Knowledge is more than an answer to a question; more than understanding in a particular field. Whatever the nature of the prevalent knowledge, this filters out of a specialised field to become the way of society.
This is so because within knowledge lies power. And the people who control knowledge at any point in history have usually defined the power base of the society the knowledge reflects. And it is all to do with how we see the universe.
In prehistoric times knowledge seems to have been animistic with a physical and spiritual world in parallel. This created spirituality based fundamentally within nature, and all society did reflected the ‘pact’ man had to make with nature.
With the Agricultural Revolution, society became more complex. Man had made inroads into nature, and this was reflected in the rise of Ego in the God-King. The spiritual expression moved away from nature and became a regulator of society.
The natural outcome of this was Monotheism. The previous God-Kings manipulated the parallel spirit world to their political agenda. In Christ, this spirit world was cut off from the human, with Christ being the only One who communicated directly with God.
From this point on there was only the physical world, the spirit world being something you went to upon death. The Afterlife became separate to human experience, requiring us to live a good life in the physical to gain suitable entry upon death.
We can see in the above a constant shift from a parallel spirituality to becoming locked in a purely physical world. With the rise of science, this physical world was defined, given man’s laws, and became mechanistic.
And with the human showing he could understand this physical universe, such laws transferred to society in terms of laws of human interaction. The Enlightenment was with us, and the resultant flowering of rational philosophy, taking the spiritual from society to the individual.
Finally, with Einstein’s relativity, our view of the universe shifted once more, making life relative, and into this knowledge structure came surrealism, relativist history and ‘do your own thing’; and everything became relative to everything else.
Throughout this history of thought, the interaction of the popular paranormal changed in kind. Moving from the animistic nature spirits, Ego caused the proliferation of man-based superbeings, remembered as the great myths.
Monotheism birthed the Devil and his demons. As science and the individual gained ground, the paranormal became man based in the vampire or ghost. And as relativity grew, the alien and UFO burst into popular consciousness.
Yet there was also a paranormal flip side to the process. Animistic powers survived Ego with the soothsayer or Augur. Witchcraft survived Monotheism. Science caused the rise of the western occult tradition. Yet the relativity phase caused a clinging to mechanistic models as anti-paranormal influence in the rise of the sceptic.
In each of these cases, a counter-culture grew to the obvious way the knowledge/power base should have gone, based on the previous paradigm. And this intellectual counter-culture is presently terrifying science into submission in the same way that earlier expressions cast a shadow in previous knowledge systems.
Until science wakes up and fights the influence of the sceptics, knowledge will not advance. For as this history has also shown, the paranormal has always been with us, and deserves rational study.
© Anthony North, June 2009
