Emmanuel Kant and Demon Possession

Psychedelics have suddenly become the new cure for mental health issues, mainly because they give us that most novel of all experiences: a spiritual one. The idea is that a spiritual experience will brings us to a place of peace and wellbeing, which in turn will kickstart that mood reset we have all been looking for. But the variety of spiritual experience includes a lot more than gazing at beautiful sunsets or sitting at the bottom of a waterfall; you can also have encounters with extra-terrestrials, demons, hellscapes, angels, and all manner of other spirit beings that were not on your mind when you carefully set your intentions. If your worldview is basically a secular one, having these encounters can seriously rock that world and leave you feeling far less stable than when you started out. Wrestling with demons that can’t exist must be the one worry your poor anxious brain never considered.

 And when the trip is over, that world of yours may remain rocked for some while. Was my spiritual encounter an initiation into a huger and more bizarre universe than I ever imagined, or was it some drug-addled madness I need to forget about as quickly as possible? Oddly enough, I am going to argue that this apparently irreducible question of ‘which real is the real real?’ is simply the wrong one. But to get the right question we need the help of a new philosophy, or at least a wider and more deliberate one, and for that we go to Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804), the Western world’s philosopher in chief.

Kant separated out our belief about what’s real, which is based on our sense impressions, from what he called “the thing in itself,” the something or other out there that we name as the world. The thing in itself, according to Kant, is by definition unknowable. We are like people in the matrix who have not yet been offered the blue pill or the red pill, naively mistaking the information of our sense impressions for direct knowledge of the thing in itself. Even if you then take the red pill and see that you are sitting in a vat being mind-controlled by evil aliens, how can you know that this world is not also a simulation that yet more powerful, commercial strength red pills will sweep aside, and so on ad infinitum? My wrestling match with a spirit being might have been just as I felt it, or it could have been an image conjured up by an exotic Jungian backwater of my brain, or it may have been a psychotic symptom curable by excellent prescribed pharmaceuticals, or something else entirely that I can’t even imagine. Perhaps the last. Kant’s point is that what I receive from my senses,that carefully crafted worldview of mine, are all inventions about a “thing in itself” that cannot in any way be known.

There is much in today’s science that agrees with Kant. Subatomic particles, rather than being reliably something, have properties that only come into being when someone is taking the time to measure them; the thing in itself remains a mystery. Matter, even the densest, hardest rock is mostly empty space with teeny tiny particles zooming around in it, and those particles may in fact be actual stuff or they it may be slightly tweaked light waves. Our eyes, which we take to be pretty reliable reporters of what is going on out there, only perceive three basic colours, while birds for instance also see ultraviolet light, meaning they can see a plethora of non-primary colours that we can’t perceive. So, when William Blake said that a fool sees not the same tree as a wise man, he could have added that even a wise man sees not the same tree as a humble sparrow. And after that there’s also string theory, which maintains that multiverses are perfectly plausible, in fact likely, and that there are eleven dimensions in all, the extra ones somehow tucked in this 3-D world of ours in unexpected little pockets that no-one can quite find.  

Neuroscience also agrees that we don’t know what we think we know. Perception is called “a controlled hallucination”, a hastily constructed sketch that the 86 billion neurons of our brain create while sitting in the darkness of the skull, trying to make sense, not of the world, but of the electric signals that are constantly being fed to it by sense organs. It would be massively wasteful for this brain to fiddle around with concepts like ultimate reality or truth, when its real remit is to create internal representations that are accurate enough to get us to survive through the afternoon. All the rest is self-promoting propaganda, and that right there is the brain’s dirtiest of dirty little secret.

So, when this slightly lazy but massively efficient brain of ours is confronted with a demon possession or with a beatific vision, it has to quickly make sense of something it has not encountered before. Let’s say it starts out on a trip with the rationalist template this culture provides it, but that all gets blown away with our very first chat with an extra-terrestrial centipede spirit-child. After the rationalist constructs have been shredded, the remaining cultural frame that we have is the ancient one of spirit beings, angels, demons, etc. The brain fulfills its job of making order from chaos, and apparently comes to the executive decision that it’s better to create an unpleasant world, even a previously impossible one, than to offer no world at all. We are story-telling creatures who will make sense of our experience, and while it’s happening we believe whatever the brain tells us about it, just as you believe you are flying when you have a flying dream, or that right now you are reading someone’s blog.

So, if no-one, from the pope to Christopher Hitchens, knows what’s really going on, then trying to figure out if this angel or if this demon is real, is pointless. We can no more discover the spiritual “thing in itself” than we can the physical one, and we have been stressing over the wrong question. The right question is: what’s next? Whatever the reality may have been, you have to figure out what the demon-free life is going to be like, and how you are going to keep yourself from inadvertently inviting the little monster back inside you. As Saint Matthew said, if the expelled demon goes back to his “house,” (i.e., you) and finds it “empty, swept and garnished,” he will invite “seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first state.” Turning to a more cheerful note, if you spent hours of unalloyed blissful adoration in a palpably real paradise, how do you infuse that utter bliss into your regular humdrum day-to-day existence?  

Let’s start with the demons. Whether the mythology I adopt is demon-based or psychological, I will probably feel “lightened” by my exorcism or whatever it was, and want to keep it that way. On the personal level you could say that demons get in through our weak spots, through windows left open or doors left ajar. These weak spots are things like negative patterns of thought, fears and aversions, and insufficiencies in our capacity to respond to others and live a full and creative life. Now that we have been purged of the bad guy, it’s our job to fix up those thought patterns, fears and insufficiencies. We do that with the normal tools of therapy, or whatever self-help gig it is that you most admire.

Where do these weak spots come from though? I believe they comes from negative inheritances in our particular family lines, which themselves come from the larger culture, and finally from us as a species. Human culture is the freight train that bad energy sometimes hops onto and will ride to the end of the line if we let it. Its most favorite caboose is those endless negative thought loops, the shame, the closure, the fear and rage that we are all wrestling with. It strikes me how many of us believe somewhere in our souls that there is something about us that makes us uniquely worthless, that I am the excruciatingly obvious odd one out in the room, that I am a child inside while everyone around me is a grown adult. This gets passed on to us through direct trauma and abuse, through parental shortcomings like an inability to speak out or advocate for oneself, and through a general societal silence, such as the unwritten rule that we don’t suddenly stop and stare at the beautiful sky while walking down the street, or uninhibitedly hug a tree or lamppost if we feel like it. This stuff has been going on a long time, and every measure I take to fix it is a blow for humanity and our collective trauma karma.

 And now for the beatific visions. Back in the Middle Ages these were a part of the regular cultural landscape, well understood by everybody. You just needed to check with the local churchman that your vision was not cunningly sent by Satan to deceive you, and after that you were good to go. Then along came the scientific revolution and we all, by and large, became secular. Visions went out of style. All in all that’s a good thing, because we also came to understand the world more accurately, learned how to feed ourselves better, invented the idea of human rights, and no longer think that the lord of the manor is the boss of our lives.

 Today we don’t have to starve in the desert for months or live in a monastery for years, we can pop a pill, have our visionary experience on a Saturday afternoon, go home in an Uber, and make it to for work on Monday. This is a good thing, because now we are on the brink of combining the commonsense fairness of the secular worldview with the richness of the visionary one. But since we left behind the Mediaeval inner mapping, we don’t have yet have a new cultural framework to replace it. Until that framework is built our visions will more easily slip away from us and six months after my union with God I may totally be back in the emotional doldrums, and that ego which so happily conspired its own demise while tripping is now happily up and running again.

 We will build this new cultural framework by giving ourselves a spiritual education. That may (probably should) include meditation or some similar kind of practice, prayer of some sort, and reading the spiritual literature. You don’t get an education without reading. We are very lucky that these days that the spiritual traditions of the entire world are at our fingertips, but oddly perhaps, I personally have grown interested in the mystical traditions of the local culture, the writings of mystics like Julian of Norwich, Meister Eckhart, and from more recent times, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Anyway, there’s plenty to choose from, especially since there’s also the literature of near-death experiences, spiritual emergence, circular economy, and how to save the planet.

 These two things – putting the spiritual house in order so that the goblins don’t get in, and giving yourself a spiritual education – are what’s needed for the next step in human growth, what Teilhard de Chardin described as the development of planetary mind. Right now our planetary mind is still a pretty grumpy one. In the YouTube video The Most Important Moment of a Person’s Lifetime a woman named Reinee Pasarow describes how her near-death encounter led to a new perspective on the importance of simple human kindness:

 I moved into a sea of light. It was as if every atom, every molecule in this room had been electrified with love, with very creative and powerful love…this love I realised was the greatest force of all things, and it is as if every atom were singing and was welcoming me and was full of love. And yet I was more and more attracted to what I perceived to be the centre of this sea of light, it’s as if in the centre of this sea there was a sun, and my heart was irresistibly attracted to that…and in a tremendous and magnificent instant I entered this centre of the sea of light, this sun in the sea, the light,  the heart of the light, and it was as if I were devastated, it was as if I were, you know, just spider silk in the solar wind, completely devasted by bliss, and by rapture and by ecstasy…

 And it seemed as if I was in that non-place, that place of non-being as an individual forever, and then yet again my consciousness at some point was gathered back together as an individual, like sands upon a shore into an individual form, and I was accompanied now by a presence as opposed to simply being devastated by this holy storm of light, and I was called to recount for the deeds of my life…What was more important than just the choices I made were my motivations and my intent and the state of my heart in doing any single action.

 And I realised…how every action one takes is like a stone cast in the water, and if it’s loving, that stone that’s cast on the water goes out and touches the first person it’s intended for, and then it touches another person, and then it touches another person, because that person interacts with other people, and so on and so on, and every action has a reverberating effect on every single one of us on the face of this planet. So if I had committed a loving action, it was like love upon love, upon love, upon light and…if I had committed a truly pure and loving action it had reverberated throughout the stuff of every individual on the planet. And I felt that action reverberating through them and through myself, and I felt it in a way that is beyond what we can even feel ourselves on this plane of existence…so the significance of one’s actions totally changed.

 It looks like Pasarow’s realizations about loving kindness have moved from something that happened in her near-death experience into a “totally changed” understanding of regular life. She now has a deeper take on life than the culturally received one she was born into, and sees that apparently small actions carry huge significance when they come from a “pure and loving” heart. These actions reverberate far beyond what we can perceive, into “the stuff of every individual on the planet,” and this kind of self-transformation happens not as a strategy for improved mental health, but as a contribution we can make to the work of the world.

 Like the question of what’s real in the psychedelic, we don’t have to agonize over whether Pasarow authentically entered dimensions beyond time and space, that’s a “thing in itself” we will never know. Getting your mythology right is not a matter of nailing down what’s true, it is about making productive meaning. We have the freedom to pick from the smorgasbord of metaphors at our disposal, but whatever we light upon, our efforts are all about the further development of love. Love is at the heart of all our many and various worldviews, and how much we can love will be the measure of who we are. So, if we have found ourselves wrestling with demons or oddly at home singing in the heavenly choir, it is not important because it might improve or hinder our mental health outcomes, it’s important because it might soften our hearts.