Approaching the Supernatural World
For most of my life, I gave little thought to the “supernatural”: this mysterious layer of existence that lies beyond our observable reality. I’m not sure if I had actually given it enough attention to hold a belief on whether it existed or not — if I did, it was probably an attitude that resembled the standard intellectual dismissal that our materialistic culture favours.
My lack of interest, perhaps like yours, was primarily because I had never experienced anything remotely supernatural, and there is good chance you haven’t either. A small minority of people do, for largely unknown reasons, have regular access to an unseen realm that most of us are denied — I’m not sure if us uni-dimensional plebs should be envious or thankful for this.
My interest in the subject has, over the last few years, increased somewhat; every time I see a podcast, article or blog post about angels and demons, the occult, even magic(k), I now get a jolt of interest that is absent from other more mundane subjects.
Not only that, but I now look for supernatural explanations for every phenomena that our conventional materialist paradigm fails to provide satisfactory answers for: whether it be psychopathy, schizophrenia, or debilitating medical conditions like epilepsy and Meniere’s Disease.
More on these spicy subjects in future posts: here, I would like to present a summary of the research I have done on the supernatural realm, and how we can start to reckon with the fact that there appears far more to our “reality” than what our senses reveal to us.
The original red pill for my interest in the supernatural was a book by Graham Hancock called, conveniently, Supernatural.
I referred previously to the impact his most well known book — Fingerprints of the Gods — had on my understanding of human history. Well, Supernatural was also a game-changer, this time in how I understood the nature of our reality. A demonstration of Gonzo journalism at its finest, the book details Hancock’s experiences with various mind altering psychedelics — mainly Ayahuasca, but also a few hair-raising trips on DMT — and his academic follow up into the supernatural realms that he experienced under the influence.
Hancock points out that belief in supernatural realms and entities therein has been a persistent belief in every recorded human culture. From fairies and aliens, tree spirits and sky gods, and — of course — more mainstream examples like Yahweh and Jesus. It is also, Hancock suggests, a belief that has persisted without any obvious evolutionary advantage: a fact that suggests there might be something to it.
Hancock’s main contribution is to compare the structural similarities between three distinct supernatural phenomena: spirit beings in shamanic hunter-gather cultures; fairies in Medieval and Victorian societies; through to modern experiences of UFO abductions. One of his main conclusions — which initially triggered me but that I now furiously agree with — is that we can understand ‘aliens’ better as supernatural rather than extra-terrestrial beings. Regardless of your own agreement with this premise, an honest reading of Supernatural will leave you convinced that interactions with other-worldly creatures is a common phenomenon across ancient to modern human societies.
In the middle of the book, when summarising evidence of the existence of UFO sightings throughout recorded history, Hancock notes that religious and mythical texts provide the most consistent evidence of these encounters. Not just the winged discs of Sumer and Egypt, the Vimana of the Hindu texts, the flying carpets (?!) of Arabia and the sky rafts of China — but front and centre in the Bible itself. UFO abduction narratives are hinted at if not outright revealed in Elijah’s ascent to heaven, Ezekiel’s prophetic vision of whirlwind and fire, not to mention the truly astonishing descriptions of what appears to be supernatural sexy-time provided in Chapter 6 of Genesis.
And that’s about the time when I realised I needed to start reading the Bible.
When I first started to learn about The Good Book, I wasn’t overly interested in the life of Jesus, or the Psalms, or the moral lessons to be learned from all those God-doubting fools. They were certainly useful, don’t get me wrong; even if only to fill up my biblical repertoire and convince people I knew what I was talking about. I really wanted to understand the weird stuff, this apparent supernatural side of the Bible that many Christians seemingly and inexplicably seem to dance around.
As I also wrote about previously, I found this weird stuff in the writings and translations of Dr. Michael Heiser: summarised best in his book (also conveniently) titled Supernatural. Heiser uncovered (or at least brought to more mainstream attention) the mysterious supernatural world that exists in the Bible, but which has largely been lost in the vagaries of translation, interpretation and conservatism. The Bible is a record that suggests not only that this supernatural world exists, but was common knowledge and a fundamental part of the human experience during the time it was written.
Since then, I have delved a bit further into different sources that deal in some way with the nature of this supernatural world. Not only will one fail to truly understand the Bible without understanding what it says about the supernatural, but a basic appreciation of the supernatural world is fundamental to navigating the wombat hole: crossing over and linking together the burrows of religion, conspiracy, history and spirituality.
With that in mind, here are some of the basics.
In his exploration of the supernatural worldview of the Bible, Heiser paints a quite fantastic picture: that there is a world that exists beyond our earthly confines, a world of spiritual beings our distant ancestors called ‘the gods’ when they decided to grace us with their presence and meddle in our affairs.
We get little in the way of physical descriptions of these entities in the Bible: there is, regrettably, no mention of Greys, Cryptids or Reptilians. We do know that they are very capable of appearing in human form, to the extent of being able to walk among us. In ancient myths, of course, they take on a range of animalistic traits: not least the seemingly ever-present and slightly ominous serpent.
The Bible focuses more on the functional aspects of the supernatural world: the presence of an all-powerful capital G God (Yahweh) who runs the show; the existence of hierarchies below him such as the Divine Council; as well as designated roles like Angel messengers. The presence of this supernatural organisational structure is consistent with findings of many spirit channelings — for example the Ra materials — as well as hypnotic regressions recorded by Delores Cannon.
In this latter, New Agey context, these supernatural beings are not literally consulting directly with a God-like figure who coordinates their collective actions, but more generally operating under the divine will of the Creator. God, dare I say it, operates more as a metaphor.
And it’s not just about us, of course; this is an infinitely large world that we form an infinitesimal part of. What appears in the Bible and other Earth-bound records appear to be the stories of a subgroup of entities that, for various reasons, are solely focused on caring for life on Earth. We basically have our own cosmic taskforce assigned to the planet.
But why, and how, does this taskforce interact with us earthly humans? This is the important part.
The general gist seems to be ‘reluctantly’. These beings care for us, and want the best for us, but ultimately want us to choose to live a good life under our own accord. Their interventions are generally as a last resort, when either an individual (such as through dreams or visions) or a society (such as through a religious revelation) has reached a place where external guidance is unavoidably needed. This is where the archetype of the Angel comes in: beings sent to earth with the specific task of delivering a message.
This is a really important point to establish: good supernatural beings do not just come into and out of our world as they please. This would be a quite severe impingement on our free will, given our inherent tendency to conceive of such entities as Gods and to thus automatically subvert our own will to them. So they are very careful, very measured about how they appear to us.
There are exceptions however. And this is where things start to get a bit uncomfortable.
Let’s not beat around the bush here: there are negative beings in the supernatural world, and they do make contact and directly interfere with our lives. The truly awful and chilling accounts that Hancock summarises in his book are a testament to this. This is not a particularly pleasant reality, and so needs to be worked through carefully.
Once we accept the existence of a supernatural world, it is hard to logically deny that negative beings in this world would exist, and in turn make contact with us. Supernatural beings wouldn’t be part of God’s creation and its permission for absolute free will if they too weren’t permitted to fully explore their dark sides and how they can use it on others.
The foundation of Religion rests on this reality: that the only way to safely access wisdom from the supernatural world is through specific messengers, as any other contact risks dealing with negative entities. If you are so inclined to think that way then, in the more extreme cases, Satan — the devil himself — can whisper in our ears and lead us astray.
Yes, Satan is real. Well, kind of. Not, I would suggest, as a single, arch-evil nemesis of all creation — but various supernatural figures who choose, with their free will, to take on this role do certainly seem to exist; the word ‘satan’ in Hebrew simply means adversary, after all. The term is essentially used in a similar way to the word Angel — that is, as a job description rather than a personal name — and is used to refer to multiple different entities throughout the Bible. We can therefore best understand Satan as an archetype rather than an individual.
The archetype of a supernatural Satan seeking to deceive and control us is a constant presence in the history of humanity, and still is: there is no sugar coating that reality. Yet these entities still operate under the same spiritual laws that we do on Earth, and it doesn’t appear that they can just go after anyone. There seems to be a process of subconscious self-selection that occurs with individuals who are contacted by negative entities: a part of them actually wanted this contact, and was in some sort of alignment with the energy of the entity that allowed for this contact to happen.
Perhaps it is better to look at this less as a hard and fast rule, and more a rule of thumb. I’m sure there are positively aligned people (Jesus/Yeshua for example) who have been contacted by negative entities: perhaps those negative entities who have got a bit ambitious and stepped outside of their lane, so to speak.
But even then, our own spirituality can save us. I’m sure you have heard about the claims of Christians who believe they have fought off the devil by simply invoking the name of Jesus Christ. This actually seems to be a thing: someone who calls on the power of the divine is able to ward off the attacks of negative entities. It is basically the same as the concept of spiritual armour described in Ephesians.
Another interesting theme that comes from Hancock’s summary of supernatural experiences is that contact with ‘good’ entities (good being defined here as entities that bring seemingly positive information about spiritual and physical healing) may require a quite intensely negative experience to begin with. Such traumatic experiences seem to commonly occur with the use of substances like Ayuhausca, and is evidenced through the numerous artworks from ancient shamanic cultures of subjects being pierced with knives and other painful injuries.
A conservative Bible view of these experiences might simply paint them as demonic: that this ‘helpful’ knowledge is simply a trade off for selling one’s soul to the devil, so to speak. However, a more nuanced understanding might describe this process as akin to an ‘ego death’, which is first necessary before the contacting individual is at a sufficient spiritual state to receive the positive messages from the other side. We could potentially see such a traumatic process as a necessary side-effect for anyone who takes the spiritual ‘shortcut’ of accessing this realm through substances rather than more hard-earned means.
Another outcome of taking such shortcuts appears to be trespassing announced into the worlds of these beings, many of which seem to be surprised and then somewhat displeased at the presence of humans. Some of these beings — for example, creepy insect-like things — do not appear particularly positive, and may well be something close to demonic. Hancock himself encountered these insectoids on a DMT trip, and found it a thoroughly unpleasant experience.
A good reminder that this other world is not ours, and is not one to be approached lightly.
Perhaps the most fundamental question I have about the supernatural world is a selfish one: why not me? Why don’t I get to access this realm while others do?
I can’t say I’ve had one even semi-supernatural experience in my life, or at least one that I can remember. I’ve had drug-fuelled benders that have left me pondering in the early hours the deepest mysteries of life, seeing all there is to know about this world laid out in front of me, but never even the slightest indication of a world that lies beyond it.
I bring up this last point, because it is one that Hancock addresses directly. Why have a small fraction of the population (in his estimates, roughly 2%) been granted — perhaps through something as simple as their brain chemistry — the spontaneous ability to converse with supernatural entities, whereas the other 98% of us must instead turn to a range of hallucinatory-inducing practices and/or substances if we hope to do the same?
You can’t rationally argue that open and un-assisted access to the supernatural world is an ethical reward and privilege only earned by our actions in this earthly world. There are many instances of people who have experienced it at the moral low ebb of their lives, bringing to mind the concept of a spiritual intervention from above. Many people have contact from a very young age, when they haven’t really had a chance to demonstrate morality/virtuousness (or lack of).
Aside from anything else, as Hancock points out, one could simply head to an Amazonian jungle (or, increasingly these days, your local bearded hippy) and partake in an Ayahuasca ceremony and be virtually assured of this contact, regardless of how prepared or worthy they are for it.
Rather than having earned the right for supernatural contact, it seems more likely that these select few have been chosen for it. That is, for whatever reason, they have been assigned at birth (or somewhere later along the line) the role of a messenger between the supernatural and earthly worlds.
So getting back to my original question, the answer might be more simple: we don’t need to visit the supernatural world to live a moral life, or conversely that a moral life does not inevitably bring such visits. Maybe we are able to simply rely on experiences brought back from the visits of other people — these 2% or so — using our own discernment to wisely choose the sources that provide this other-worldly information in a credible form.
I don’t know this for sure. There are many people who say that it is within the reach of every person to access spiritual entities for themselves: simply through fairly straightforward meditative and mindful practices that require no drum-beat dancing or ominous plant brews that may result in you shitting yourself in front of a group of strangers (a literal thing for many Ayahuasca users). Some even say it is our destiny (making otherworldly contact that is, not shitting ourselves in front of strangers in an Amazonian jungle).
But my advice, if you are starting to get FOMO from a mind that seems destined to languish longingly in this plane of being — at least while our bodies hold us captive here — would be to look on the bright side. Maybe we are the real lucky ones, because we have the biggest surprise in store for what comes after death.