Introduction
Yesterday (25/7/2025) I began my 500th non-fiction book since early December 2018. I have been reading across many categories because it’s not safe just to stick with a couple. For example, if you want to understand religion you must read politics, history, psychology, philosophy and so on.
This was a wake -up call I got when I was a member of an occult group in the late 1970s, and again in the mid 1980s. Yes, I was so dopey I needed two alarms.
We would talk esoterica until the cows came home but with no idea whether we were talking nonsense or not. Worse, we used our esoteric jargon to describe the world around us in ways that just got sillier and sillier, and again with no idea whether we had an insightful observation.
In 1988 I put myself on an occult and esoterica-free diet which lasted until 1995 when I was forcibly inserted back into the realm of woo.
I broke my occult fast when I impulsively picked up a ‘new age’ magazine and read an article which triggered a sudden flood of memories of an ET abduction incident. I was in Sydney in the early 1970s and was coming down from some very nice acid. I was lying down enjoying flying through a museum full of breathtakingly beautiful artefacts when suddenly the scene snapped, and I found myself in a stark clinical setting on a metal table and surrounded by what I’d now call ETs – the familiar ‘greys’ (I knew nothing of them at the time). I freaked out and sat up. After I regained my composure, I tried to get back to the museum but ended up back on the table. I quit trying and went in search of coffee.
I had forgotten this experience for around 25 years. I make no claims about it being ‘real’. I don’t know what it was, other than something I encountered while coming down from a trip. The point of recounting it here is because it was a theme that was soon to be powerfully reiterated.
A very short time after finding that magazine I was walking past a bookshop on the way to a cafe for my regular Saturday morning indulgence of coffee, breakfast and newspaper crosswords. Before I knew it, I had walked into the bookshop, picked up a book, paid for it and arrived at the cafe with no idea what I had just bought. It was John Mack’s Abduction. I finished it by the next morning.
The following week I saw signs advertising a ‘psychic fair’ on the coming Saturday at a local motel. I’d normally avoid such events but now I found myself eager to go. So, I did. It was disappointing until I encountered a woman talking about ET abductions and how she could do regressions to retrieve memories. This was in Bathurst, and she was in Sydney so when I booked a session with her, I had to factor in a 4 drive.
On that Saturday morning when I set off to Sydney it was around 6:00 that my car refused to start for the first time ever. It was way too early to call to reschedule so I waited 2 hours, trying the car several times with the same result. The car was a Mazda 626 I bought around 1987. It had run flawlessly from the day I got it – until now.
The three things happened next. First, my effort to reschedule went foul of a completely awful telephone call quality – that was weird. Next my car started perfectly normally (and never failed me again). Then, when I formed an intent to get to a new appointment I was flooded with an intense sense of threat. If I tried driving, I would have an ‘accident’. I thought it wiser to quit any such plan. Something didn’t want me to go through with the idea and made no bones about it.
This series of incidents were the beginning of life altering events that took me from Bathurst to Sydney and then to Dover in the UK, to Port Arthur in Tasmania and then to Lismore in northern NSW in 2.5 years. I had left Lismore in 1993 with no intention of going back. This sequence of remarkable events continued there and end in 2002 when I moved into my current home in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.
The point of this odd tale is that I had previously consumed books on religion, spirituality and the occult to the exclusion of anything else for over a decade in the belief that this was where I’d find what I was looking for. It wasn’t. I needed the ‘woo fast’ to kick my consciousness into a far better place.
My ‘Aha!’ moment came when a friend and colleague, aware of my interests in spiritual and occult matters, asked me to tell her about those interests. To my astonishment and embarrassment nothing I said to her made any sense at all. I realised I was talking jargon that I could not translate into plain language. In fact, I didn’t really understand what I was saying. I didn’t know anything outside repeating jargon.
Imagine for a moment that the only subject you had developed any expertise in was psychology and the only way you could talk about any idea in depth was using the language of psychology. How would you describe what an emotion is to a person unfamiliar with any psychological jargon?
Of course, a regular psychologist would be familiar with the culture of an educated person and be articulate about politics, science, popular and high culture, sports and so on – sufficient to talk about emotions in a way that would be comprehensible to an average person. This isn’t to say that that average person would understand the conversation, but they would feel they did because the ideas and language would be familiar to them.
After my embarrassing effort with my friend, I gave myself a good talking in terms I could clearly understand. Was I a wanker or a truth-seeker? Did I want to just accumulate woo brownie points or was I prepared to do the hard work of actually trying to understand what was going on in a serious way?
Artificial categories of knowledge
We routinely speak of science and religion as if these are two distinct bodies of knowledge. They aren’t. Observation of nature has ever been the trigger of deeper reflection. Belief and knowledge aren’t separate categories either. I think belief serves our psychological needs and knowledges arises really only when we achieved decent self-awareness (I am nowhere near that yet.)
The distinctions we make are useful to convey meaning in certain contexts. And hard distinctions arise only when we anchor our beliefs in a certain set of claims. We can be rational and superstitious. That’s true because ‘rational’ people can also be ‘superstitious’ in ways they will not acknowledge because they have settled on a meaning of superstition that excludes them and others like them.
In the ‘human sciences’ we have an array of fields – sociology, anthropology, psychology, cognitive science and neuroscience for example. And each field may have subsets. But the distinctions are essentially for administrative purposes only. They share the common theme of the human in all its complexity.
Materialist scientists are fond of pooh-poohing religion, usually unaware that their field, once called natural philosophy, was actually established and advanced by religious or esoteric thinkers.
We celebrate the great advances that science and technology have wrought but we scarcely contemplate the accompanying moral and philosophical influences because we believe that science is entirely rational.
What is rational is how data is processed but not how it is integrated into the human experience. A belief in the ‘conquest of nature’ or the human right to exploit the natural world is present in Christianity but also transfered to materialistic thought in an unself-reflective way.
Our technology is arguably more shaped by moral influences that are a legacy of a rejection of religion than by rational thought. Our current concern about global warming may have been precipitated by our technologies but those technologies were shaped by moral choices and beliefs about what is virtuous.
The dogmas of religion or materialism are incomprehensible without appreciation of history, psychology, philosophy, sociology and so on. No field of inquiry is sufficient unto itself.
Why animism?
Animism was the first idea that let me make sense of a lifetime of experiences that were not positively comprehensible by science or religion. I was either mad or bad. I am neither.
Animism gives permission to a sense of holism and the universality of intelligence. These aren’t dogmatic positions but just better grounds of possibility from which to permit creative thought and imagination.
Animism better accords with the insight that humans are mostly crap at thinking. For most of us, what we call thinking is a form of emoting – rarified yes but mostly done fleetingly and badly.
It is fascinating that the history of thinking about intelligence includes people who we call ‘savants’ as a kind of syndrome. They express what we imagine to be high intelligence without evident effort. Others express genius via inspiration. Intelligence isn’t the singular attribute of rationality residing in our brains but a synthesis of forms of awareness. The hard graft of rational thought is constantly prone to being ‘derailed’ by emotions. But we should also remember that dogmatic systems like materialism also resist inspiration and succumb to emotions.
For me there’s a certain kind of natural rationalism embodied in mathematics. But it’s a substratum of consciousness rather than the superstructure. The rationalism our culture reflexively favors is not holistic. This matters hugely because it produces non-holistic outcomes. It has an almost psychopathic character to it – free of emotional contamination.
In our excitement over AI, we imagine that ‘intelligence’ is data processing power and not the ability to build holistic insight. We seem not able to understand that data processing is only a portion of what intelligence is. We now have theories of multiple intelligences. We can read from Psychology Today that “There is no agreed definition or model of intelligence”.
Calling AI ‘artificial intelligence’ could be a profound mischaracterisation. At the moment it’s a marketing term – and a misleading one at that. That is, unless we understand that the ‘artificial’ component denotes severe limitations relative to the spectrum of available intelligences. We made this error when defining human intelligence as well. Its only been since the mid 90s that we have come to value ‘emotional intelligence’.
I grew up at the tail end of a period of hyper rationalism that began several centuries before. Science was valorized as pure reason. Emotions were thought to be signs of weakness. But it was all a PR con. While it was true that such was ardently believed by a vociferous minority who created a social norm, many people were not like that – but had to perform as if they were. The culture heroes were the (mostly) men who exhibited dazzling capabilities to imagine and make things. They brought us climate change – because their minds did not include moral intelligence or environmental intelligence.
In fact, when we pause to be sensible about it, the ‘rational self’ should be holistic. This used to be the soul until materialism got rid of the holistic element and rebranded higher human consciousness as the mind dominated by the virtuous intellect that is sometimes bedeviled by debilitating and corrupting emotions. However, I should also observe that the ‘rational soul’ of Christianity was assumed to be a slave to theological dogma – free of pagan holism.
I had been going bush solo near my home in southern Tasmania in my quest for geological specimens from age 12. Later I joined a walking club and went on adventures into Tasmania’s southwest wilderness with deeply rational adults with the souls of poets and artists. We craved the holistic stimulation that the wilderness imparted. By the time I left Tasmania for the mainland an animistic spirit had been kindled in me. But it would be decades before I understood what it was.
My interpretation of animism is that it is a fundamental propensity in the human psyche inherent in us all, and probably in all critters. Rationality is present in all life but it’s just not dominant. It’s not dominant in any life form.
What makes any life form particular in any way is how it expresses itself in its environment. It’s the instincts, sensations and experiences that convey meaning, value and purpose, not just the extent of rationality, that make us intelligent.
Humans have glommed onto rationality as being the secret sauce of life because we have become accustomed to its imbalance expressed in our non-holistic outlook. We are taught to believe that this denotes superiority and singularity.
Western civilization is dominated by the Christian dogma of human exceptionalism. We were a special creation aside from other created creatures. There is no evidence for this, just a claim made by home team cheerleaders.
The conceit of exceptionalism is built into the human psyche. Psychologists have long demonstrated that we have inherently inflated opinions of ourselves. We have a natural potential to believe we are ‘chosen of god’. That’s fine if kept as a private humble conceit. But it becomes toxic if unleashed as a public delusion. It’s rather like the way football fans believe their team is ‘the best’. It’s a great bonding conceit when enjoyed in private but it becomes the trigger for conflict when it goes public and is disputed by other fans who think the same of their own.
Whether gods or football teams, the communal glue of private conceit becomes the ground for toxic conflict when opened up to the zero-sum truth that there can be only one number one.
The mythologist Joseph Campbell observed that western religious thought was influenced by a traumatic relationship with the divine. In the Christian faith there’s the expulsion from paradise, the attempted genocide of the flood, the persecution of Job and the sacrificial crucifixion of Jesus – to name only a small selection. Materialist and secular thought may not retain any literal belief in these tales, but the deep psychological influences of trauma continue to haunt us. Add to this the dominionistic exploitative mindset and what we have is grounds for a sense of traumatic separation from the embrace of holistic consciousness. And at the same time there’s a craving for exceptional acceptance.
It is little wonder, then, that individualism has become a dominant theme of our culture. But rather than creating a sense of particularity, it has been interpreted and exploited as separation.
The evidence from the human sciences is clear that intentional effort at greater self-awareness is critical for our collective wellbeing. Greater self-awareness can be seen as a form of intensification or particularization of the individual. From this we build our capacity for empathy and compassion – and through them, holistic awareness.
This is in compelling contrast to separative notion of individuality which can be used in the exploitative ‘divide and conquer’ rationale.
This is the same message from teachers like the Buddha and the Christ and ET. In fact, it has been a persistent theme in human culture for millennia. But it has been swamped and distorted by dogmas which claim ready-made truths – so no effort required, just believe. That appeal is stronger if it embraces exceptionalism and exclusivity.
Conclusion
Our collective efforts at understanding the nature of the reality we dwell in paint a picture that is not inconsistent with the deepest spiritual insights.
Going back to our roots, efforts at understanding this reality were not broken into science and religion but the functional and the sacred – a kind of yin/yang symbolic duality that still reflects a simple unity – a holism.
Our cultural effort at learning to know our reality is just as sacred. The secular essentially means shared, accessible, knowable and mundanely functional, not other than sacred. Science isn’t other than religion, but other than dogma – belief without thought or responsibility.
The sacred is what is essential to our existential being – the animistic and the holistic. The functional is what sustains our physical being. Functionality informed by holism is what we don’t have. Now our functionality is informed by existential trauma inherited from a faith we mostly do not follow. The sacred has been misrepresented as thoughtless dogma rather than subtle and complex holism. The spirit rejected in opposition to dogma has become the enemy of reason and virtue.
Campbell’s insight about the underpinning trauma of separation that informs our culture must be considered. How we see individuality as separation rather than particularity and intensification reinforces this need to rethink.
Of course, like any attempt at a description, this one isn’t ideal. I don’t think we have the scholarship yet to fashion a deft interpretation of the evidence.
What I am arguing is that a wider education is invaluable in one’s search for understanding. My intent is not to assert a truth but to provoke contemplation through disruption of habituated thought.
Please, disagree with me. But craft an elegant and widely educated argument. 😊