Why the Occult? THE OCCULT is a study in contrasts. Astronaut Edgar Mitchell, aboard the multimillion-dollar Apollo 14 — a symbol of the ultimate in scientific rationalism — attempts to mentally transmit ESP cards to a group back on earth. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — the epitome of 20th-century science and technology — Professor Huston Smith describes a seminar with some of his best students: I cannot recall the exact progression of the topics, but it went something like this: Beginning with Asian philosophy, it moved on to meditation, then yoga, then Zen, then Tibet, then successively to the Bardo Thodol, tantra, the kundalini, the chakras, the I Ching, karage and aidido, the yang-yin, macrobiotic (brown rice) diet, Gurdjieff, Meher Baba, astrology, astral bodies, auras, UFOs, tarot cards, parapsychology, witchcraft, and magic ... Nor were the students dallying with these subjects ... they were eating brown rice; they were meditating hours on end; they were making their decisions by I Ching divination, which one student designated the most important discovery of his life; they were constructing complicated electronic experiments to prove that their thoughts, via psychokinesis, could affect matter directly. And they werent plebians. Intellectually they were aristocrats, with the highest average math scores in the land, Ivy League verbal scores, and two to three years of saturation in MIT sciences. Whats happening? Occult Revival in a Secular World A wave of fascination with mysticism and the occult is noticeable throughout the country today. And, as strange as it seems, its all taking place in the most scientific and rationally materialistic society in history. Occult literature-books, magazines, articles-is a booming field. One of two general approaches to the subject is used. Those taking a documentary approach are basically scrapbooks of strange facts and wonders — recipe collections whose pages are filled with a miscellaneous hodgepodge of superstition, science, and primitive horrors. Others take a religious approach. These tell the reader how to gain various powers on the way to enlightenment. On the surface, it appears that more people are reading about, are interested in, and are better informed about serious occult ideas than ever before. And more people than ever before in recent years are willing to agree that some claims of occultists may be valid. In most of the elite universities in the country, horoscopes and the predictions of the future by the use of tarot cards are widespread. Only a minority of students are involved, but the majority react the same way they reacted to different political groups in the past: We under stand why they want to do it, even if we are not yet ready to do it ourselves. It is paradoxical to witness the appearance of such material and nonscientific elements as the occult on college campuses, because it is the universities, the great bastions of reason, where you would have expected the process of rationalism and scientific secularization to have been the most complete. Sigmund Freud, the founder of modern psychiatry, would be greatly surprised. He wrote in 1927 that religious concerns (including the occult) no longer had the same influence on people as before. He said that the increase in the scientific spirit brings about widespread falling-away from religious belief. If Freud could be resurrected today, the revival of the occult at the very time when science and technology have reached their peak would surely astonish him.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 08:08:55 +0000
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