Sight Beyond Sight

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Despite what the title suggest, I’m not actually going to focus on vision this week, mostly because I want to talk about it with Eck. This is Kripal, mostly because remote seeing (sight beyond sight) ties in nicely and has a nice, captivating title.

“An opening is a beginning, but it is also a hole.” This entire intro is sick as hell, just from a purely literary standpoint. The opening with the (coincidental? fated?) extremely uncomfortable chain of events sets the tone really nicely.

As someone who’s dabbled on and off with the occult (I believe that, despite my inactivity, I still technically rank among the Cthulhi, the second lowest tier of membership in the Cult of Cthulhu, with the possibility of going up a tier and becoming an Ascendant, assuming the Nyth council liked my responses to the online exam, and more importantly, if I felt like it. I don’t), learning the history of the terms ‘psychic,’ ‘psi,’ ‘paranormal,’ ‘psychical,’ and all, was absolutely fascinating for me.

My favorite thing about the entire subject of the religion, science, the paranormal, whatever the hell this book is even about, is just how equally impossible it is to prove or disprove. One of my favorite book series growing up, The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, by Michael Scott, explains all of the magical, wonderful, terrifying, ‘unnaturalness’ like immortality, monsters, and anything else that made the series fictional, by saying something like ‘every legend has a grain of truth.’ Who’s to say that the things we call impossible, or, as Kripal suggests, the potentially possible, aren’t just misremembered distortions of the real that we, as a species, have forgotten were true?

Love the fact that Freud, one of the most (in)famous psychologists of all time, himself admitted that this stuff might actually be true, but that admitting it would be a very bad idea. Looking at this chapter, and regrettably going back to the example of the Cult, Lovecraft wasn’t kidding in The Call of Cthulhu when he said that the world we live in is barely held together by sheer human unwillingness to acknowledge or even think about everything that goes on behind the scenes.

This entire chapter, of trying to summarize something that cannot easily be described to modern thought (like the Flatlanders and their fork) reminds me of the Exploring Egregores blog, a fascinating time sink which preoccupied itself with describing Lovecraft’s outer gods in terms of egregores (living thoughts that outlive and evolve beyond the bounds of the thinker), and the absurdity of reality. Azathoth, the Nuclear Chaos, is sleeping, and all of reality is their dream, and should they awake, Everything will end. Because of that, everything you know is a lie and reality is total bullshit. To demonstrate, I’ll post a link to Jon Bois’s explanation of what constitutes a catch in NFL. It’s a bit long, but worth it.

Nothing is real. It’s all just bullshit. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

And isn’t that what makes it so fun?  

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