I was recently watching a docuseries in which they talked about the Oracle of Delphi and all the subsequent oracles who were apparently successful until an earthquake brought the temple down where they would perform their prophecies.
According to the docuseries, scholars concluded that it was probably some natural form of gas (I forget the name of it) that emanated from underground that put the oracles into some kind of trance, and the chemical no longer existed for them after the temple was brought down. They didn’t say as much, but one can only assume this was their justification for why nothing paranormal had actually been happening.
Even though this sort of dialogue is extremely typical in academia, two things suddenly occurred to me while watching this. One, if we’re so sure that there can be no paranormal explanation for something/anything, why do we go through so much trouble desperately searching for a mechanistic explanation for anything? Why wouldn’t we just assume there’s some such explanation whether we’re aware of it or not, and leave it at that?
And two, so what if the Oracles of Delphi really were psychic prophets? Why do that and other such considerations bother us so much that we must always “solve the case” and come up with any explanation whatsoever that we can think of other than the paranormal?
These two things point to one thing: we’re playing a game with ourselves. To a mind that sees beyond the spirit of the times of their culture, there are many such societal or psychosocial games we collectively play with ourselves without even realizing it. They always have to do with the tension between what we’re conscious of about ourselves and what we’re not, and with what we are versus what we’re becoming, or perhaps sometimes versus where we’ve come from.
This particular game is rooted in our collective denial of a whole side of reality—indeed, the side that contains all the most beautiful, fascinating, meaningful, and uplifting aspects of life—following the Enlightenment, which is ingrained into us from such an early age and from so many directions that we don’t even realize we have this scientistic/physicalist/mechanicalist bent/bias.
We’re constantly trying to convince ourselves in order to keep up the charade, and we’ve hidden from the light by remaining physicalist for so long that the light of the spiritual has become dangerous and painful to us, and is therefore treated as the modern-day boogeyman.
Related posts: https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2022/01/23/psychism/; https://myriachromat.wordpress.com/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/
