The Science of Applied Metaphysics, Part 2

On the utility of dream bears, cave goblins, and Tarot cards.

Image from planetweird.tv

Let’s say you and I wake up one morning in our thatched-roof village, and go out to gather around the breakfast fire with the rest of the clan, under the brightening sky. This is the custom when the weather permits: after a few minutes of communal yawning and grumbling about our aches and pains, we get to talking about plans for the day ahead.

On this particular morning, I have important news to share. I had a dream the night before. In it, the mountain appeared to me as a bear, and told me that the forest north of the small river was off-limits for hunting. No further explanation given.

This is unwelcome news. Everybody knows the herds have been gathering in the north forest lately. Some of us were looking forward to trying our luck up there today.

Nevertheless—a dream is a dream.

The question, then, is how we evaluate this new information and decide how to proceed.

This is a question of applied metaphysics.

Material-reductionism would treat this as a theoretical question, if it warranted consideration at all. Modern people live in a world in which mountains are only ever mountains; bears don’t talk; dreams are mostly nonsense, and if there’s good hunting over the river, you’d be an idiot to pass it up. Philosophers might take this up as an interesting question to study: what is the internal logic of the beliefs that lead to messages from dream-bears? What is the social utility of this little charade I’m performing? How do these customs and beliefs compare to those of other groups?

But you and I don’t have time for all that egghead bullshit.

We have to decide whether to take our chances crossing the small river, in spite of the taboo, or try our luck hunting elsewhere and risk coming home empty-handed.

We could take the question to the local cleverwoman and perform a divination ritual, to see if there are further clues about the nature of the taboo. Is it a definite thing? Or can exceptions be made? Can we charm some local spirits into loosening the prohibition for us? We could check the astrological conditions in case the dream was pointing to some bad alignment for hunting. Maybe we need to make a special offering to Bear (both the source of all bearness in the world, and also the spiritual guardian of bears) or to the spirit that lives in the mountain. We could sift the memories of the village to find if anyone has received the bear dream before, and what was done about it then.

Regardless of whether we eventually take the north trail or not, we have a whole range of next steps available to us. And all of them begin with taking the dream seriously.

This is what I mean by applied metaphysics: the process of evaluating the ontological status of emergent phenomena—how “real” a non-material subject is—and how humans can (or should) relate to it.

I like thinking in terms of “applied metaphysics” because it’s one level above the artificial separation of “religion,” “magic,” “mysticism,” “spirituality,” “paranormal research,” and all the other nonsense terms we’ve invented to crowbar these modalities into a materialist world.

Note that at no point in the example are we appealing to “belief.” There is no intellectual exercise to determine whether dreams can represent important messages. Outside observers might imagine members of this group as “believing” in the power of dreams—but this presupposes that, at some point, a choice was made between a world in which dreams have power, and a world in which they don’t. Treating this “belief” as a choice reinforces the narrative that it’s a superstructure built on top of the “true” (materialist) reality.

Do modern people believe in gravity? Or do we recognize the force that makes the apple fall to Earth, and then later find a name for it?

Neither does the example rely on a spiritual authority to interpret an established text, handed down from some mythic pre-history when people still regularly received messages from spiritual guides. Rather than enforcing fidelity with an abstract, unverifiable dogma, the example is concerned with evaluating contemporaneous information in order to make an ad hoc decision.

Those forms might eventually develop in our little village. As the population increases, we’ll have to scale up the process: beyond a certain point, it would be impractical to treat every single person in the community as an equally-relevant vector for prophecies and portents. We could set up a group of specialists to interpret their own auguries, tell us where to hunt and whether to go to war. We could elect a single representative to act as the ritual conduit for our spiritual wellbeing—one person to dream for all of us, to meet the mountain and the bear and bring our needs to them. (We could give them a shiny hat and a fancy title to sweeten the deal, since we might have to offer them up as a ritual sacrifice if they screw up the gig.) It helps to have an emissary who can explain things from a human perspective, to the Beings who have never been human—don’t understand the constraints of physical bodies and linear time. With some diligent work, the right spells and rituals performed on the right person, we might be able to keep our representative tethered to us after death, advocating for us directly in the Otherworld where the dreams came from in the first place.

We’d be giving these specialists a great deal of power over us, of course. Abuse and corruption would be a real risk. Future generations might forget that these heroes were ever mortal. In time, they might be imagined as transcendent metahumans who always existed in the spirit realm. Cults could develop around the specific personalities of our mythic heroes, revering their divine qualities instead of the service they performed for the common folks. We’d have to remind ourselves that they were meant to serve us—that we empowered them, to do the work that was always ours, back when we lived in our thatched-roof village and stood talking around the fire in the morning sun.

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If the romantic indulgence in thatched roofs and campfires makes it seem like all this is a relic of the past—here’s a contemporary, real-world example:

Hellier is a 2019 documentary about… a hell of a lot of stuff. On the surface, it’s about a group of paranormal investigators, brought together by a series of strange messages to explore the shadow side of Hellier, Kentucky. They start out looking for cave goblins on the basis of an anonymous email—and that’s probably the most straightforward part of the whole odyssey.

It’s a wild ride.

For pure entertainment value—if you’re ready to surf the wave without grasping after coherent explanations—it’s a hell of a lot of fun to watch a group of smart, funny people drive themselves absolutely insane in a branching maze of synchronicities, psychic messages, channeled entities, and paranormal lore.

By the end of Season 2 (with a promised third season in production) they’re no closer to finding out whether the cave goblins they set out to investigate are real. This ambiguity seems to put off mainstream audiences, who expect to be presented with capital-letter Proof. Even the investigators have trouble giving up that mindset entirely: the documentary is weakest when it assumes a trail of breadcrumbs being laid out by powers unknown, bringing the investigation to an unambiguous conclusion—instead of fully embracing the indeterminate weirdness of non-material reality.

Nevertheless, the whole investigation is also a great illustration of applied metaphysics in action. The Hellier team takes a delightfully omnivorous approach to evidence. Firsthand accounts, local folklore, Tarot divination, high-tech mediumship with radio frequency scanners—all are treated as equally valid. Whereas most paranormal investigators get hung up on evaluating every piece of evidence as scientific proof, the Hellier team is answering a different question at every step: “Where should we go next?”

The documentary ends up presenting a parageography revealed by applied metaphysics. Rather than following a linear path from uncertainty to truth, the team maps another reality onto the mundane world of Hellier (and, later, the wider Midwest). The Hellier team isn’t confined to the post-industrial wasteland of empty mines, broke-ass gas stations, and overgrown trailers, connected by vanishing lines of eroding blacktop. They’re traveling across a liminal landscape, venturing from one metaphysical hot spot to another, led by the voices they hear through the rituals they perform¹.

Hellier is a scientific failure. From the perspective of verifiable proof, it’s a documentary about a bunch of lunatics who are—at the very least—perpetrating either avant-garde performance art or an elaborate hoax, if not wasting huge amounts of time on absolutely insane conjecture.

But it also reveals another world that can only accessed by taking the applied metaphysics seriously. If the Hellier team stopped because they couldn’t demonstrate any material proof for Tarot cards or the Estes method or the firsthand accounts of locals, that entire world would disappear. Only the mundane world would be left. Which might not seem like much of a loss, if we assume that it’s all just imaginative nonsense—that there is nothing “real” in that other world.

This is a paradox: unless we pursue the applied metaphysics as if it’s real, we have no way of verifying if anything in the world they uncover is also real.

And if we ignore the citizen-scientist’s imperative to only engage with things that modernity approves of—from an aesthetic perspective, which world would you rather live in?

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Here’s one more example:

Let’s say you get a pack of Tarot cards to play around with. You’ve learned enough to muddle through, but don’t consider yourself a serious reader. One night, sitting at the kitchen table, you and your wife decide to get the cards out. Just for fun. You ask your first question—“Will we ever have another baby?”—and lay out a simple tirage en ligne spread on the kitchen table: five cards, no fixed meanings, meant for intuitive readings.

Based on your rudimentary knowledge, it looks like the answer is an emphatic yes. Not just the 50/50 answer you’d get from a simple coin flip: the quality of the cards seem to speak directly to the question, cards that are traditionally associated with home and family. Something about the Five of Pentacles seems to stand out—the imagery of people having a hard time in the winter.

Weird.

A week later, your wife gets a positive pregnancy test.

You show a picture of the spread to some more experienced Tarot readers; they suggest that—based on the spread, before any ultrasounds have been done—your new baby will be a boy.

Several months later, your son is born, in the winter of 2020: snow on the ground, in the midst of a global calamity.

It’s the equivalent of building a crystal radio set from a secondhand store and accidentally getting a message from aliens. And even if it doesn’t count as persuasive evidence for anybody else—just a coincidence, just a post hoc interpretation, misremembering, etc.—it takes on the quality of subjective truth. You remember what it felt like to know something in a way that should be impossible.

The implications are far-reaching. Even if 99% of magic and mysticism and parapsychology is pure bullshit peddled by unscrupulous grifters—even if 99% of Tarot readings miss the mark—there will always be the sneaky 1% of cases that you have to wonder about. And if 1% is real, isn’t there a chance it’s much more than 1%? Looking back at all of human history, all the “beliefs” that were discarded as superstition or cynical manipulation—if only 1% of all those claims were real, in some way, what is the true nature of reality?

This isn’t science. It’s not your job to test your results in laboratory-controlled conditions and submit it to a peer-reviewed journal for validation. The more immediate question is the same as it has been for thousands of years, when people realize they’re living in a world that extends beyond what they can see: “Where do we go next?”

Which world do you want to live in?

1. Feedback is a crucial part of applied metaphysics. It’s not just making stuff up and pretending it’s all real: there should be an external response, a returning signal. This can be the passive recognition of something like Jung’s archetypes in the collective unconscious, all the way up to the second-order cybernetics of channeling, divination, and mediumship—the eerie sense of recognition, that something is on the other end of the line. (This might be the topic of a future post.)