Extrasensory Perception, Modernity, and the Higher Realms

Can we directly perceive thoughts?

Ever since modernity kicked in, we got used to looking at perception in a dualistic way: impressions from the outside world make it to our sense organs, and then get processed by our minds (or brains, in the materialist view).

This picture remains more or less in place whether you believe that the mind plays the primary role (like the rationalists), or the outside world (like the empiricists), or whether you try to find some middle ground, like Kant did with his categories that the mind imposes on the physical world as a precondition for knowledge, thereby creating the reality we find ourselves in.

These days, we like to talk of “sense data” and “processing,” in analogy to digital signal processing of sensor data, as happens when you hook up a webcam to a computer.

However, this way of looking at it has made it difficult to account for extrasensory perception—that is, perception not based on our usual sense organs such as our eyes, ears, or skin. For if how we know and perceive the world depends on sensors and processing, there can’t be any perception without both: no sense organ, no perception. Consequently, while some philosophers—like William James and A. N. Whitehead—have acknowledged that there is such a thing as extrasensory perception, most modern thinkers and scientists vehemently deny it.

Whatever you think about it, the very term “extrasensory perception” seems to presuppose the modernist view: the sharp distinction between “processing sense data” (supposedly normal and uncontroversial) and paranormal perception such as telepathy or premonition (supposedly abnormal and controversial).

But this is not how people have always looked at it, even in the modern age.

Rudolf Steiner, for example, makes the important point that not only do we perceive the outside world, we also perceive our feelings and even our thoughts. This alone suggests that perception cannot be limited to processing data from our sense organs.¹

A. N. Whitehead even generalized this idea and thought that, among other things, we perceive past experiences directly in this way, which he called “prehension.”

From this perspective, the modern dividing lines between thought and perception, between emotions and perception, and between physical objects and concepts or ideas disappear.

From this perspective, the modern dividing lines between thought and perception, between emotions and perception, and between physical objects and concepts disappear.

There are various consequences. For example, if we can perceive our own thoughts without any “sensors” involved, perhaps we can perceive thoughts that are “out there” as well. Normally, these are mitigated by the physical world, like when we communicate with someone verbally or non-verbally and immediately recognize the underlying thought. Even when we look at the natural world, at plant life for example, it might be more accurate to say that we directly perceive thoughts expressed via these plants than to speak of photons and sense data: we perceive concepts about beauty, about symmetry, about growth, or even about evil, destruction, and dark archetypes, like when we look at parasites.

In other words, the direct perception of thoughts and feelings that we know is possible when we observe our own mind might, in some sense, be applicable to our perception of the outside world as well. (It is hard for the modernist mind to change its ways of thinking about such matters, but I believe it is very much worth it, if only as an exercise.)

Following this view, our connection to the higher realms (if you will) might also become clearer: it is not so much about literally talking to angels or to God, or about “channeling,” but about perceiving thoughts that are not exclusively produced internally by our own minds, but have their origin without, or above—or even in a different time.

We could perhaps say that just as our regular sensory perception is sort of based on a collaboration between our minds and external reality (thoughts mediated by physical reality), our perception of those “communications” or external thoughts are a collaboration between our own minds and mind-at-large, or higher mind.

Just as we perceive thoughts and feelings without, we perceive thoughts and feelings within, but the source of those thoughts and feelings is not entirely clear. It might not be “us” in a sense; and even if it is us, the question is: what is “us”? If, during self-observation, our conscious “I” can perceive thoughts and feelings that another “I” seems to create, and this other “I” apparently has some information that the conscious “I” doesn’t have, where exactly does this information come from? We seem to connect to, to communicate with, something. We might as well call it higher.

This seems obvious enough when we think of inspiration. Countless artists and writers have described the process of manifesting inspiration during moments of profound, blissful creative activity “in the zone” as a sort of collaboration: whole creative chunks seem to come down the pipeline, and the artist's job is to map those unto their own understanding, their own experience.² The ideas and inspiration may come from without, but the formulation, the execution, and the connections between various concepts, come from us.

The 19th Century Spiritist View

There is an intriguing book from the 19th century which contains material that the Anglican priest Stainton Moses “channeled” from a supposedly higher source using automatic writing.³ As with all such sources, this should be taken with a big chunk of salt. But one passage struck me as very relevant to our discussion here.

Stainton Moses, the medium, asks the higher source:

“What do you mean exactly by inspirational mediumship?”

Answer:

“We mean the suggesting to the mind the thought which is not framed in words. It is the highest form of communion only practicable when the whole being is permeable by spirit-control. In such cases, converse with spirits is maintained mentally, and words are not necessary; even as in our higher states we have no voice nor language, but spirit is cognisant of spirit, and intercourse is perfect and complete.”

In other words, Moses’ source contrasts this more subtle form of wordless higher communication with the more brutal “channeling” using automatic writing, where the consciousness of the medium is bypassed. It is here, in this more subtle mode, where the lines blur between perceiving our own thoughts and perceiving thoughts from without; perhaps in some sense the distinction disappears entirely.

The Spiritist movement of the 19th century perhaps was still a little too immersed in modernist thought, and so things were framed in dualistic terms of “spirit-control,” “personal spirit guides,” and so on, which became the basis for some of the later New Age beliefs.

While such framing might not be wrong if approached with appropriate care and skepticism, I think it is very fruitful to try to leave the modernist mindset and look at such subtle “guidance from above” as something natural, as something that we can direct our attention to just as we can direct it towards a physical object. It is a matter of perceiving thought and feeling, discerning them, and using them as a source and inspiration that we can then translate and bring into our world.

Notice, however, that this is a very subtle affair, and it’s easy to delude oneself that one is talking to angels or spirit guides or whatnot, and to lose touch with reality. Extrasensory perception is part of life, it seems to me, but common sense still applies. Also worth noting is that the perception of the subtleties of our thoughts and feelings takes practice, because they are often overshadowed by brute desires, expediency, and emotional identification.

But we also should notice that much of our thinking about the world, about what’s possible and isn’t, is conditioned by very recent modern ideas, and that the hard lines between perception and the physical world, between perception and feeling, and between ideas and the physical world might be more blurry than they seem. This opens up many possibilities, such as a certain subtle guidance from above, a Pauline “communion with the Spirit” or even “prophesizing,” that is, a careful personal relationship with the higher (or, as the Christian tradition likes to call it, the Holy Ghost). We might call it communication, union with the higher, or just a carefully attended to intuition: it doesn’t really matter, as long as we are aware of the dangers of delusion fueled by emotional thinking and blind spots, as well as of the subtle nature of these matters.

If we are to bring something better to this world, fighting demons and their manipulations might not be enough: we also need to learn how to enlist the higher forces for good.

Always with both feet on the ground, and our critical mind firmly engaged.

Paid subscribers have access to the full archive, as well as the Deimos Station, a Slack channel a few of us substackers have set up to discuss things and have some fun.

1. Steiner uses the German word for perception, Wahrnehmung, a word with an interesting history: it used to mean “to pay attention, to direct one's attention to something”—its origins are therefore more in line with pragmatic epistemologies that emphasize the general act of the will to attend to something, as opposed to merely “taking in” external data. Only during the 16th century did its meaning change to our more modern sense of sensory perception. Steiner contrasts this more general sense of Wahrnehmung with another German word, Empfinden, which to his mind refers more directly to sensory perception.

See passage in Rudolf Steiner’s Die Philosophie der Freiheit here: http://fvn-archiv.net/PDF/GA/GA004.pdf#page=63&view=Fit

2. Steven Pressfield, in his deservedly famous book, The War of Art, calls this higher source of inspiration his Muse and describes in detail how his interactions with her work.

3. Stainton Moses, More Spirit Teachings, available as a book or online here: http://www.meilach.com/spiritual/books/morest/mspteach.htm