I liked what Tess said about people tripping on drugs and believing the trip to have some special meaning. You can find this a lot in trip reports on Erowid. Some guy was talking about how the "shroom" itself is an entity that will teach you secrets. Obviously that's... not riiiight, but he thinks it is, and no one can convince him otherwise.
After I fell out with religion, I still wanted desperately to believe that there was something, anything, and I slowly but surely turned to the occult. I thought maybe I could explore humanity's potential or just see what's Out There. Some of this is embarrrassing to admit, but I don't want to hold on to it forever, or revise the past to leave out the dumb things I did. I have my reasons.
It turns out that, surprise, the Occult is a bunch of crazy people. Well-meaning crazy people, most of the time, but most of what they do boils down to confirmation bias and being bad at math. You can do a ritual 19 times and if it fails all those times, no problems, you have some excuse. Wrong moon sign, not enough energy, you pissed off the spirits with your weakass offerings, or my favorite, someone else is working against you - but the one time something does seem to happen following a thing you did, your faith is totally renewed and that's the stuff you remember.
And see, there were things that were real, that science is like "eh, I'm not losing my career studying THAT." The Occult stuff seemed to be these things that worked that would always be outside the "limits" of what science could understand.
For example, check out these videos of people hypnotizing chickens: (you can see people hynpotize other animals as well. Hail Youtube.)
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=hypnotizing+chickensIt took a long time for, say, lucid dreaming to gain acceptance. It's going to take a lot longer to get the world at large to believe you can astral travel or share dreams with people, probably because those things aren't real, but you can see where, from an occultist sort of mentality, they all link together, because dreams can lead into out of body experience type ... experiences...
It doesn't help that a lot of the practitioners are on a looooot of drugs. People had a lot of subjective experiences that they agreed on, but shockingly, they also didn't always agree. How many ghosts do you feel are out in that parking lot? Only three? Well, maybe I perceive more than you do.
There are times when I kind of miss that life. That drama. Costumes at night, chanting in the dark, doing secret things to try to change the world in ways that nobody would ever know, feeling like I was part of something bigger, feeling like I had this power. Try as I might, it didn't work. The only magick tricks I ever learned were how to waste time, give myself the heebie jeebies over nothing, and feel like a failure. Some of you may realize you could learn all that on your own without supernatural powers.
It took a kind of bravery, though, to actually, truly, believe in demons,
and try to summon them anyway. After some time recognizing the failings of these different systems, I was like those people on infomercials. "There's gotta be a better way!" So I got duped into believing in "manifesting", long before there even was a "The Secret." I tried other stuff. Mystic yoga, psionics, all the really kooky, crackpot bullshit. I mean, you can laugh, but this was all part of a struggle to really find something, anything to believe in. Some kinds of manifesting kind of linked the religion aspect to it, and made me feel like I got some kind of relationship to a "God" back, or in some way, a relationship with my sort of true self, a united being.
Oi. The problem with manifesting is logic. If you have everything you want then you're already doing everything that you need and thus you don't need to do it. If you try make something happen then you're admitting deep down that your life is actually lacking something so you just get more lacking and therefore it doesn't give you what you want. So even if it's real, it's useless. "Lying to yourself and hoping things will just change on their own" is not the basis of a healthy belief system.
My last foray into the supernatural world was part of this weird book called "Initiation Into Hermetics", by Franz Bardon, which had some similar principles to old yoga texts like "The Science of Breathing", written around the turn of the last century. Franz Bardon's style was very much an "East Meets West", or more accurately, "West Steals From The East" approach. The whole book is a lot of weird "theory" but I didn't really care about that, I just wanted to try the stuff out and see if that works. That's where the book tricks you.
You can "learn" the first few chapters - meditating, visualizing, and then do exercises like making your body hotter or cooler, or feel lighter or heavier - those are real things and feel pretty mind blowing. [Cracked has an article about a guy who manipuates his body heat really well, to withstand freezing conditions, along with 5 other X-men types.] Once you've convinced yourself that you can do this stuff you weren't sure of before, you kind of buy the rest of it, as it gets crazier and crazier.
I tried and tried to make the rest of it work, but I couldn't ever get beyond a vivid kind of daydream and weird body sensations, but that's not really proof of anything. I looked up other students, and the fate of the author himself, and it's not good. Like, if his system worked, the guy's death would have totally been preventable. His students who were really into it were also kind of nuts. One guy made up his own belief system that had nothing to do with the books, and instead of being enlightened and moving on, just stayed stuck. For decades.
After running out of all other options, and being thorougly discouraged, I decided "fuck it, let's see what science has to offer." I started watching shows about physics, and how it actually explains how things work. They use math! Funny, looking back, I noticed none of the Occult types used math. Not real math, anyway. Some stupid numerology junk now and then, not math. Not real math. Not equations.
The more watched, the more I learned. People have things pretty well figured out, for the most part. Science is the only really effective tool for cracking mysteries, it turns out, and listening to your "gut" is often wrong. There's no math left over for the supernatural. There is no "Super Nature." Abiogenesis is a great explanation for life, but I don't get how that would work a second time around with as-yet undiscovered invisible forces, to keep us around in a linear time beyond time that lasts forever somehow? What?
All the other stuff sort of fell into place. Hypnosis? Biological hack/possibly useful glitch that's poorly understood because let's face it, it is pretty nuts, but may be useful on realistic goals. You're not likely to find hypnosis useful in DEVELOPING TELEKINESIS any time soon via power of the miiiind, maaaan or cause truly crazy shit to happen, but maybe if you do it enough you can trick youreslf into liking broccoli. Lucid dreaming, well, we got a big brain, we can do some cool stuff with it. Shared dreams are probably just good guesses by two lucid dreaming people talking afterwards and having a lot of confirmation bias on what elements were shared. If you've known somebody for a while you can kind of guess what they're like and maybe your brain can fill in a lot of gaps in a sort of simulation. OBEs are just a different layer of a dream. You're not really going anywhere. Remote Viewing is just garbage scribbling that gets lucky sometimes. There was that cool movie about with Ben Kingsley and Harvey Dent, though, called "Suspect Zero" that was pretty great, but the movie kind of showcases why it wouldn't really be a thing even if it were real.
It's science and math that have always figured things out; real things, things you can use, far beyond just how to make illicit drugs on popular t.v. shows. Much of that knowledge has been hardwon, in some cases had to be smuggled out of dangerous territory. They're part of the human legacy, the human story, and we all rely on math and science more than ever before, but we still don't really collectively appreciate it.
When you really start to grasp just how rare and unlikely life is, and how rare and unlikely you are, through all that life, to get this one chance to be a part of the Universe that can somewhat know itself, then asking for another life, and eternal life, at that, seems greedy. To think, most of us just expect it, like "of course" we're going to live again - how crazy is that? Some are even worse. "Of course
I'M going to eternal paradise, I don't know about the rest of y'all douchebags..."
Yeah, and death, nothing, sure - it's frightening - if evolution has done it's job, it's supposed to be. Those who don't fear death, well, they tend to get weeded out of the system. But here's the thing, there won't be any suffering, there won't be a you that suffers, there won't be a you to be afraid, you just are... not.
You can worry about not living a long and fulfilling life, now, and that makes a lot more sense, but even then, life is just this moment you experience over and over and over again. The journey of a thousand miles doesn't just begin with a single step, it is a single step, in a loop, until the program terminates. Maybe I'm mixing metaphors. But you get what I'm saying.
Life is full of dangers, but you have to keep on putting yourself out there. Driving is a nightmare of possible calamities, but that doesn't stop people from doing it. The anxiety goes away with practice.
Just keep on living until you don't.
http://xkcd.com/167/