Month: January 2022

The phrase “sixth sense” entered wide usage in English through the writing of Helena Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy. Blavatsky appropriated concepts from Indian traditions such as yoga and Buddhism and crafted them into an occult movement. Distorted ideas about karma and reincarnation stem from Blavatsky’s popularity, and the “sixth sense” suffered a similar fate.

Scientists who study perception and sensation identify far more then five senses in human anatomy. In addition to those listed above, humans have a sense of balance, a kinesthetic sense, and several others. Theosophy’s “sixth sense” must be understood as a framework for sensation and perception, appropriated from Indian philosophy to enhance Blavatsky’s mystique.

Buddhist philosophers recognized six senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, small, and mind. The last sense refers to the awareness of thoughts, memories, imagination, and other cognitive phenomena. Metaphysical arguments in Buddhist sutras describe experience as requiring a sensory organ, sensory stimulation, and sensory consciousness. Since one experiences thoughts and memories, one must also have a sense that enables the experience. The “sixth sense” here is a straightforward way of talking about mental experiences like dreams or imagination.

In the Buddhist framework, the six senses are part of a naturalistic phenomenology that rejects distinguishing between “internal” and “external” phenomena. The European philosophical tradition often frames mental phenomena against mind-body dualism, a view that “physical” and “mental” phenomena consist of fundamentally different substances. Buddhist phenomenologists instead frame all objects of experience as sharing the same essential substance. A subject experiences sight, sound, and thought through different sense modalities, but the Buddhist framework does not infer differing substances from differing modalities.

Differentiating experiences as “internal” or “external” is not coherent because the subject experiences all sense modalities as a uniform flow of sensory stimulation. As a consequence Buddhist metaphysics rejects mind body dualism. The subject knows themself a continuity of sensory organs, sensory consciousness, and sensory stimuli, a fundamentally non-dual metaphysics. By framing “the sixth sense” as extrasensory perception, Blavatsky reintroduces dualist metaphysics to an account of sensation that should reinforce non-dualism.

A Pagan with a bias toward scholarship tends to encounter difficulties belonging with the wider community. Founding members of the movement built their frameworks with faulty scholarship and fantastic claims. As fictions become beliefs, people hold them too dearly to revise or challenge them. When intuitive and mystical ways of knowing ground belief, academic analysis is rejected as reductive and disenchanting. Nevertheless, the scholar sees their investigation as a form of veneration. Insofar as one confronts one’s truths in the sacred space, one must acquaint oneself with the means to find truth. Studying immerses the scholar in the subject and changes them as well. While untruths of the subject are cut away, the untruths of the scholar are cut likewise. The subject and the scholar emerge more whole from this process.

Where one’s practice includes operant magick, one should have an internally consistent framework. The framework should account for the limits of magic, its necessary conditions, and how to interpret results. Logical consistency does not require a strict commitment to empirical science, but it does require that all claims made by the framework can be true without causing a contradiction. Adopting as principles poorly interpreted claims from natural science weakens a framework, making it reliant on something that can be determined true or false, and often a pseudoscience that has been determined false. Logically consistent principles allow one to draw inferences from the framework to explore the logical space it defines. Otherwise, the magician does not learn about themselves through their framework and therefore never develops.

Mystical insights and personal gnosis should be part of every practice. Through critical reflection on those insights, one engages with the divine and develops their relationship to the sacred. Uncritical acceptance does not allow the insight to take root deeply, leading to a shallow pursuit of experiences whenever the previous bliss is spent. Asserting the truth of one’s personal gnosis as binding on a third party may help a person reinforce a shallow belief, but one can only make epistemic judgments on their own experiences.

Revival of ancient Paganism requires evidence-based investigation such as archeology, history, and linguistics. While experts may offer different interpretations, they also acknowledge the limits of what we can glean from evidence and what we can only speculate based on broader patterns. Scholarship in these fields requires rigorous attention to detail, evidence, and bias. Grounding our beliefs in the on-going academic search for truth gives contemporary Pagans a firmer foundation than amateur speculation and debunked theories.

The practice should work inward, not outward. Beginning magick, ritual, or any working with the intention to create external changes results in delusion and disappointment. Ceremonial magick works change on the magician, encouraging the development of insight and understanding. When witchcraft aims for external results, it works the way nature works. Witchcraft seeks the necessary and sufficient condition, the smallest movement for the greatest change. One must first learn patience, observation, and diligence. On either path the initiate should focus on introspection and personal development and follow those paths into mastery.

While many introductory sources teach protection magick as a safe introduction, focus on wards and protection leads to paranoia. One focuses anxiety or depression on an external cause, a magical or psychic attack, and then employs ineffective external responses. The adversary is the inexperienced mind, clinging to material explanations for mental phenomenon, seeking easy answers over honest introspection. Mindful awareness in meditation serves as a safer introductory practice that teaches investigation of sensation and feelings that encourages steadiness of mind.

When seeking deeply meaningful symbols, one should remember that behind each mythic figure stands an ocean of local cults, personal shrines, and unrecorded re-tellings. A living culture changes as its participants change, as their needs, hopes, and dreams change. By embracing reinterpretation and retelling, one can explore the idiosyncrasies of their personal experience of the divine. Renewed practices should be grounded in the past but should not be confined by it.

In a mass media saturated culture, one encounters the monolithic image first and foremost. In the recorded performance or the perfect copy, one sees the idealized abstract. When encountering a local incarnation such as a cosplayer or fan drawing, the comparison favors the monolith because it is the basis of their experience. The tendency to revere abstraction reinforces the hierarchy of monolith over local expression. However, when reflecting on the prehistoric experience of the divine, a contemporary person must imagine their accustomed hierarchy reversed.

Patterns of worship in the ancient world appear to be very localized. While everyone in a region may venerate the same god, local cults may have different idols, epithets, or rituals. The available evidence suggests that gods had epithets specific to local worship. One might think of gods as local expressions of common concepts. One does not first learn the common aspects and then encounter the local expression. The expressive form serves as the primary introduction to the underlying concept.

“Mythology” is derived from poetry, drama, and other means of artistic expression. The hymn that one village uses to worship Athena might differ from the one used by a nearby village. Each hymn may offer a different introduction to Athena, a different honorific, or different attributes that suit the local cult. One who travels between villages learns about the differences as changes relative to their experience. The abstraction shared between the two villages grows from recognition of attributes shared across both local cults. When that recognition is elevated, stories summarized, and epithets aggregated, the abstract eclipses the specific.

People tend to overestimate the persuasiveness of a message on the part of others but underestimate it on their own part. Sociologists name this dual tendency “the Third Person Effect” and implicate it in various misunderstandings about the influence of mass media. When a person advocates action based on how a message might be received by others, they reveal that they themselves have been implicitly influenced by the message. Social scientists study the Third Person Effect and its impacts on communities, media, and social movements.

The mechanics of the Third Person Effect suggest something morally relevant at work. Beneath the effect lies an implicit assumption of difference between the subject, their interlocutor, and other (third) people. One might believe that that “most people” are less educated, that their perspective is overly informed by a group stereotype, or that some other group-based difference sets the subject apart from the wider audience. Individuals tend to think of themselves as one entity and “everyone else” as an additional entity, failing to recognize that “everyone else” consists of individuals capable of doing the same with regard to themselves. Falling victim to the Third Person Effect reveals an unchecked assumption of inequality and the superiority of the subject.

In Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant argues that the principal moral duty, the Categorical Imperative, requires us to treat one another as ends in themselves and never merely as a means. Every person has the rational capacity to interpret the moral law, so all people have equal status as moral agents. A moral agent must be the author of their decisions about duty, the good life, and morality. One then has a duty to assume that others are close reflections of themselves in terms of their epistemic and moral capabilities. The Third Person Effect shows that this duty is often neglected.

Social scientists and epistemologists can agree that the Third Person Effect represents an epistemic error, but ethicists could note a moral error as well. Pragmatically, one must guard against the Third Person Effort, as one must any potential bias in belief or perception. One should also recognize the opportunity for moral reflection, to inquire about the perceived differences driving the Third Person bias in a particular case. Correcting the biases of the Third Person Effect is not just pragmatic, but a moral duty.