Technology and the Paranormal

 

 

 

What could be more at opposite ends of each other than technology and the paranormal? And yet, once we think about it, we notice a curious connection.  Technology, in fact, seems to represent the mechanization of psychic power. Technology, we could say, is the materialization of our psychic potentials.

 

We’re always reaching out.  We listen to people talking, and we can connect with them telepathically, rarely, however. And then one day Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone! Now, after thousands of years of cultural evolution, you can share the thoughts and voice of friend or foe located on the other side of the planet.  Not by ESP, but through your phone.  The phone is mechanical telepathy.  You would also like to see the face of the other you’re listening to. Instead of relying on rare clairvoyance, you have photography or a televised or zoomed interaction.  And you can save it from the ravages of oblivion, creating a kind of eternity from the fleeting moments of time.

 

Our psychic needs and impulses have begun to morph into machines. As noted, telepathy and clairvoyance have evolved into their machine counterparts.  Now consider pre- and retro-cognition.  So far we have not devised a machine that can accurately extend consciousness into the future.  But we can use our enormous information technologies to anticipate likely possibilities.  Technology cannot handle the future of human activity because of that little devil, free will; no machine will ever be invented that has free will.   We can create robots but not robots with free will or the consciousness that is the basis of free will.

 

The story changes when we consider psychokinesis, the capacity of minds to directly influence physical events including our bodies—for instance, levitation.  The saints, buddhas, and yogis were levitating long before the Wright brothers constructed the first flying machine in 1903. On this question, however, technology wildly outdoes the flying of saint Joseph of Copertino, who, as far as I know, did not ever manage to fly to the moon and back.

 

The automobile is the perfect illustration of a PK fantasy morphed into a machine.  An automated factory is a highly evolved image of mechanized magic.  But there’s a problem: the proliferation of machines we’ve invented to make life easy for us has also resulted in the climate crisis that is wreaking havoc on the entire global ecosystem.

 

That brings us to the danger-ridden side of my thesis. Unfortunately, as free agents humans regularly resort to violence to act out their intentions.  So, we evolved from using clubs, spears, and the horse to AR 15’s, tanks, battleships, jet fighters, and atomic bombs to slaughter our enemies.

 

To combat the violent propensities of human beings, we’re only at the beginning  of the creation of a peace-inducing technology. There are two interrelated forms of consciousness that consistently give rise to a peace-loving mode of being—the oneness of the mystical and of the near-death experience.

 

The near-death experience (NDE) reveals the psychological type of peace we need.   In the NDE, consciousness of the external world, mediated through brain and nervous system, is totally displaced, starting to induce the death of the body. But consciousness, not part of the brain or body, is not destroyed.  It withdraws and refocuses on the inner environment.  That is the scene where the near-death experience, its revelations and transformations, unfold. 

 

Technology need not exclusively be machine-based. We can think of a technology of behavior. So, we can ask, what can we do to gain access to the near-death consciousness without literally nearly dying?  Various parts of the answer to this question may be found in the behaviors of shamans, mystics, yogis, and saints.  Instead of having one’s consciousness violently cut off by cardiac arrest or some other near-mortal incident, like being struck by lightning, we can interrupt the normal flow of consciousness by meditation, isolation, chanting, fasting, ingesting psychedelics, and so forth. 

 

There are all sorts of procedures designed to redirect the flow of our consciousness out of the trance of mundane existence toward the light of the internal universe.  But

mainstream science has yet to accept the challenge of learning how to develop a spiritual technology. It has yet to assist us in making contact with the forms of creative consciousness that lurk beneath our everyday mental life.  But the possibilities do exist. We need to get working on it before it’s too late.