Pulling Back the Veil: The Paranormal and the Spiritual

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A century ago Max Weber stated that modern science had “disenchanted the world” by explaining away all non-material domains—that is, all realms that were concealed from the senses. Throughout previous history, people had assumed that the senses reveal only a portion of reality, the rest of which—and perhaps its most important aspect—is concealed behind a veil that occasionally parts to disclose a wide range of sometimes-incomprehensible phenomena, from the Divine to the ridiculous.

Well-known contemporaries of Weber, including William James, continued to take seriously first-person accounts of encounters that suggest that the world in fact remains enchanted.  In Varieties of Religious Experience, James offers dozens of extraordinary examples of paranormal experiences, a number of which were evidently drawn from his own experience, despite the fact that he had been tutored in the best materialistic science of the late 19th century. These reports are all the more striking, given that they described encounters that occurred long before widespread use of psychotropic drugs.

In addition to James, a host other fin-de-siècle luminaries had a strong interest in “psychic” phenomena. In Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (University of Chicago Press, 2010), Rice University professor Jeffrey J. Kripal analyzes—among other things—the remarkable findings of Frederic Myers, a central figure in the London Society for Psychical Research during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Kripal notes that academically respectable interest in the connection between psychic/paranormal experiences, on the one hand, and spirituality/religion, on the other, faded by the middle of the 20th century. I agree with Kripal’s contention that serious students of religion must come to terms with psychic/paranormal phenomena—including UFOs and “alien abductions, which also figure in Kripal’s book—that are usually not welcome in “better” academic neighborhoods. For that matter, they are not all that welcome in some Integral circles, even though Integral theorists often take seriously different levels of consciousness, various modes of corporeality, shamanism, and other such dimensions of experience and reality.

Although I long had an interest in paranormal phenomena, I held these conceptually at an arm’s length, not knowing how to include them in my worldview, influenced as it was by secular 20th century European philosophers who had no (admitted) interest in such things. Then, in 1988, I read Whitley Strieber’s bestseller, Communion, about his frequent and bizarre encounters with alien Others who would take him away against his will. Strieber’s effort to make sense of these “abduction” experiences in terms of mind-brain disorders, such as temporal lobe epilepsy, made the book all the more compelling. He concluded, however, that he was in fact encountering an Otherness that could not be explained away in terms of materialist categories.  The veil had been drawn back for Strieber. 

After this, I began haunting the “New Age” section of bookstores, the same section in which Ken Wilber’s books so often appear.  In 1992 I encountered John Mack’s book, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. Reading it gave me a sinking feeling, because—given Mack’s status as a Harvard psychiatry professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author—I now had to take more seriously what Strieber and others had been writing about. Where would I now “draw the line” about what counts as “real”? Would I have to include aliens who abduct people?

Mack and I already knew of each other, because we had been involved in and had published papers about the nuclear arms race. In reply to my inquiry, he invited me to meet him in Cambridge in the fall of 1992. Later on, I became research director for PEER, the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research that Mack had founded in Cambridge. For years, I read widely about and met with people we called “experiencers,” rather than “abductees,” because what “really” happened when someone was “abducted” was uncertain. Were flesh and blood aliens involved, or did these others come from a dimension other than the material plane? The latter possibility would be far more threatening to the prevailing materialism, which is why Mack spoke of the “ontological shock” reported by the experiencers with whom he worked. So threatened were certain people at Harvard that Mack was subjected to a very rare academic review that could have ended—but did not—in revoking his tenured position at Harvard.

In the mid-1990s, I read an exceptionally important—but insufficiently well-known—book by Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality, which investigates a host of paranormal apparitions ranging from crop circles to the Virgin Mary to aliens. According to Harpur, such apparitions amount to a “return of the repressed” in an age when non-material plans of reality are so completely dismissed. The entities that show up inhabit “worlds” that run parallel with and sometimes intersect with our own. If Harpur is right, people who encounter fairies, UFOs (that can’t otherwise be explained away), and other such phenomena are neither deluded nor mad: rather, they are witnesses to what Carl Sagan rather dismissively referred to as the “demon-haunted world” that science was intended in part to render incredible.

There is good evidence that millions of people have experienced something very much like “alien abduction.” Strieber reported that he had received more than 200,000 letters from people about their experience. Mack received enough such letters to fill two large filing cabinets.  I read one drawer full of such letters, while being careful to protect the identity of their authors.  They were astonishing: people from all walks of life and backgrounds reporting very disturbing and perplexing experiences about encounters with strange Others. Establishment leaders studiously ignored the fact so many people were undergoing such strange and deeply disturbing experiences.

In A Brief History of Everything [1996], Ken Wilber briefly addressed the issue.  He maintained that people experiencing alien abduction filter them through “a very narcissistic world view,” according to which they have been chosen to parent a new planet-saving race. He wrote:

"[I]t’s always possible that some genuinely transpersonal or spiritual dimensions are temporarily ‘peek-experienced’ and then translated downward into terms that will satisfy the fulcrum-2 fixation and fit into the ‘world-saving’ paradigm fabricated by the client, often in collusion with the therapist.  All of which presents itself as vividly real and undeniable….

The therapists investigating these phenomena had a real opportunity to make pioneering observations on new forms of hysterical syndromes emerging as a sign of our troubled times, but by and large they lost that opportunity by allowing the vividness of the impressions to persuade them that they were dealing with ontological realities. They converted phenomenology into ontology." [All quotations are from the final two pages of chapter 10, “On the Way to the Global: Part 1”]

Mack did not believe that such comments fairly referred to his work. He carefully bracketed the issue of the ontological status of the Others. Moreover, as someone with decades of clinical experience, he was certainly in a better position than most of his critics to draw the conclusion that his clients were not “hysterical,” but instead were undergoing a profoundly disturbing experience for which there was no adequate psychological explanation. An encounter with some sort of Otherness was taking place. Mack may well have made mistakes in his struggle to make sense of something that remains unexplained, but he was discouraged by Wilber’s comments, because he and Wilber were “working on the same side of the transpersonal fence.” At my encouragement, Mack wrote to Wilber, but later told me that no reply had been forthcoming. At least Wilber conceded that UFO abduction is a powerful example “of what happens to spiritual realities in a culture that denies spiritual realities….” In effect, the abductions represent a return of the repressed, a lifting of the veil.

Every age interprets these Others in terms that somehow accord with the cultural trappings and developmental levels consistent with that age.  For instance, there is a very long and widespread history of people who report that they have been kidnapped by fairies. Reports of such experiences bear a remarkable similarity to reports made by people abducted by alien Others, right down to the “breeding” program, although without the metallic spacecraft. It is no accident that today’s aliens are so often assumed to be traveling on flying saucers from another corner of the galaxy, rather than being fairies living in places unreachable by ordinary folk.  Far more plausible is that aliens (like fairies) are manifestations of other planes of reality.

Gatekeepers of orthodox materialism use every means available, especially ridicule, to defend their perspective.  Their concern is understandable. German National Socialism, despite its sometimes-crude biological materialism, had many members with a serious interest in psychic phenomena. Defenders of Enlightenment modernity regarded National Socialism as in part an outbreak of irrationalism consistent with its socio-political regression to premodern social formations. One reason that rampant drug use in the 1960s was considered so threatening is that psychedelics opened “the doors of perception,” in ways that allowed people to encounter things that simply weren’t supposed to be there. Serious explorations of shamanism revealed a structured psychic reality, the very mention of which was a thorn in the side of every eliminative materialist. 

Similar concerns motivate those who seek to stamp out all talk of “intelligent design,” as if the idea of an ultimate metaphysical ground or source for the universe had not been a staple of Western metaphysics for many centuries. A crucial contribution of Integral Theory has been its resolute effort to defend the hard-won truths of spiritual inquiry against those who claim that only the hard-won truths of scientific method should have any serious credibility.

One time John Mack told me that one of the problems of materialist ontology was that it refused to respect the sincere reports of witnesses to phenomena that cannot be fitted into the modern worldview.  Witnesses are taken seriously in court, even though they are often mistaken in what they see, perhaps because they inevitably interpret and thus filter what they encountered.  Witnesses of strange phenomena try to make sense of them in terms of available categories. Hence, people who see unidentified flying objects (95% of which can usually be explained away in terms of known factors) or are “abducted” by aliens often conclude that these critters and their crafts come from “outer space.” There is still not much permission, even in the post-psychedelic era, to interpret these phenomena as coming from “inner space.” Inner space, of course, refers to the enormously complex interiority that corresponds to the similarly vast array of exterior phenomena, much of which is still unexplored by natural science. Let us respect witnesses for whom the veil has been pulled back. They have something to tell us, even though what they report is inevitably inflected by cultural categories. There is authentic paydirt in non-dual experience, even though attempts to report or describe them (even to oneself) are colored by culturally specific beliefs and traditions.  Likewise, there is paydirt to be found in reports of a wide variety of psychic/paranormal phenomena, even though considerable work must be done to catch a glimpse of the phenomenon that has been witnessed and reported.