You probably know about these peculiar people who believe that it’s possible to predict the future with tea leaves, the lines in your hands or some pendulum. They assign deep meaning to stones, try to cure their diseases with plants and keep talking about spirits, ghosts, angels and cosmic vibrations. As I’m imagining my audience to be more scientifically minded, you’re probably not one of them. In fact, you probably don’t like them very much. You might consider them insane, stupid or even dangerous. But in this post I want to share my thoughts about them, what I think they are and why I think they might not be that insane after all.
Let’s start with something you might know from your own experience. Sometimes you have a bad feeling about doing something like getting in your car, climbing a ladder, leaving the house or even just talking to someone. You tend to ignore it because there’s no rational reason for those feelings but sometimes a bad thing happens and it’s like your bad feelings predicted it. In my eidon, and probably also in yours, there’s nothing magical about that. It’s just that we subconsciously picked up something that our conscious mind missed. Maybe you subconsciously realized that you’re not in the right condition to drive or that the ladder was a bit too unstable or that the weather was about to change or that the other person was in a really bad mood. How crazy would it be if you thought that your own subconscious was some sort of angel sending you messages from the future.
But let’s play a game of “what if” and imagine that was precisely the explanation our eidon had for this phenomenon. Wouldn’t that be more of a reason to listen to that feeling and wouldn’t that have prevented that bad thing from happening? Sure, you might say that you’d never get anything done if you stopped every time you had a bad feeling about something. You might say that our subconscious produces too many false positives to be a reliable warning indicator. You might even say that those feelings are obsolete as evolution decided that the prefrontal cortex should be in charge of these situations. But if you read some of my other posts, you’ll know that I think you shouldn’t underestimate your subconscious mind. It’s by no means necessary to mystify it and make up stories to do so, but if that’s what it takes for you to pay attention to your feelings I don’t judge it. It’s not much different from what religion does anyways, and I consider religion to be very useful to some, if not most, people.
And I want to introduce a hypothesis that drives this even further: why would this have to stop at our own subconscious? Could there be something like a shared subconscious between people? We are all the result of the same evolutionary process which designed our species for collaboration. It’s that collaboration which set us apart from other hominin species and which might have played an important role in our evolutionary success. This design for collaboration precedes verbal language. Instead, there are languages much older that are based entirely on mirror neurons, biochemical markers and stimuli beyond conscious perception. All of this has very little scientific basis, but that’s mainly because it’s really difficult to study. Psychologists study it on a macroscopic level sometimes, but the complex interplay of neurobiology and endocrinology is so poorly understood that any hope for a good model of this would be decades in the future.
But just because scientists don’t study it doesn’t mean nobody does. It’s been with us for hundreds of thousands of years, long before science had even been invented. But all this time ago we were already modelling machines, just like any other species with a central nervous system. We were forming models of these crazy subconscious interactions between people for our whole evolutionary history. And these models were wild, filled with mythical creatures that were right at the edge of what we were capable of imagining, nothing like the models of the world we have today. It was just like the explanations they had for why the sky was blue or why it rained sometimes or why the earth sometimes opened up and spewed fire everywhere. These are all things we have much better explanations for today because of science. But science hasn’t explained everything yet and sometimes we tend to forget that.
So what if the best models for our shared subconscious are actually not based in science at all? What if these highly intricate exchanges of information between beings are so poorly understood by science due to their sheer complexity that our scientific models are just insufficient compared to those that humans have built without the scientific method for hundreds of millennia? Maybe esotericists aren’t crazy at all, maybe they’ve just tapped into a well of knowledge that others won’t dare to touch due to the obscurity of the language it’s expressed in.
Here are a few observations that fit my hypothesis: esotericists seem to value old wisdom. A lot of their lore is derived from shamans, old prophets and indigenous people. A common trait among them is that they are highly emotional or even neurotic, indicating that emotions play a very important role for them. Even their fascination with stones makes perfect sense, since stones played a very important role in human evolution as material for tools. Many of the mechanisms they use to predict the future are basically ways to tap into their own subconscious mind by giving it room to interpret. A certain set of tarot cards can mean basically anything, it’s the user’s interpretation that gives it meaning. And what is reading tea leaves other than a Rohrschach test?
Before I leave you to ponder this idea, I need to address the elephant in the room: what about the booming markets of esoteric products and conspiracy theories? Well, I think those are a sad side effect of modern times. If you think about it, esotericists are an incredibly vulnerable group. People who experience the world mainly through their emotions are incredibly exploitable in times where tools to manipulate emotions are commonplace. It’s incredibly easy for anyone with questionable moral values to steer esotericists to believe almost anything, whether it’s the effectiveness of some nonsensical gadget they want to sell to them or the evilness of a political opponent they want to ally them up against. It’s just as easy as it is for you to tell yourself that you really should drive anyways because you have a very important appointment, or that the ladder has always held, or that the weather report didn’t say anything about rain or that this person wouldn’t dare to get angry at you. Reason always has the power to overrule emotion but that doesn’t mean it should never listen to them.
Which brings me to the conclusion of this blog post: you should become an esotericist. No, just kidding, please don’t. But just because the structure of their eidon is radically different from yours, doesn’t mean they are crazy or stupid or dangerous. They might even be able to teach you a few things about empathy that no scientist could. I really believe humanity could benefit greatly if someone managed to decode the old wisdoms they have encoded in their strange and unwieldy eidons to find other encodings that are more suitable for our science based eidons. Sadly, nobody that I know of is doing that. The rift between science and esotericism is too large for anyone to bridge.
