The Challenges of a Heterdox Real

Just something I've been pondering...how do we deal with intermittently replicable phenomenon & how do we know when we are being deceived by forces capable of manipulating reality?

Something Gordon White said (quoted?) stuck with me - "Maybe the Spirits are Real but the Gods are just in your head."

Combine that with the Trickster & The Paranormal work by Hansen and we're in a bit of bind once we step off the shore of physicalism. 

Spirits can pretend to be gods/God, and different spirits can even impersonate gods/God at different times. This might explain situations where a harsher deity ends up associated with a gentler one or vice versa. (Perhaps an obvious example being the difference between OT & NT? Also various transitions in Hinduism?)

Reality can bend, which to me makes a certain amount of sense since "laws" of physics are really regularities. Throw in a metaphysics where consciousness is at least responsible for causality (I think this is almost certain personally) and we can have even odder little moments such as teleportation of objects.

Add in a variety of phenomenon and ecological systems of the subtle worlds (think of how different NDE afterlife can sometimes (often?) be from mediumship descriptions from shamanic astral travel) and things are even more mixed up.

So in a reality that itself is malleable,that contains some possible combination of God, gods, astral/etheric entities, ghosts, Psi, aliens, channeled entities, etc...how does one decide what's what?

Indeed, I'm uncertain one can.
In the the middle of June on my favorite local motorcycle road I passed an unmarked car. He wrote me enough tickets, to suspend my drivers licence for a year. A week later I get a letter from the IRS saying I had underpaid my taxes to the sum of twenty six hundred dollars. The week after that my truck gets broken into and six hundred worth of work tools are stolen.
A few day's after an old friend repays a five thousand dollar loan that I had written off years ago.
The end of July I go down to the courthouse to find out why I had not received a court date on the tickets I had gotten the previous month only to find out that they had no record of them.
I think the universe is telling me something. But I haven't the foggiest what that something is.

Ramble On The Real

So in reality, the outcome of every coin toss is unpredictable: maybe it will come down, maybe it won’t. (NOTE: I realize I'm being flippant here, but bear with me.) The Real inheres in this unpredictability, this maybe. It points a strange, unknowable order that hides behind our preconceptions, habits, and judgements. In fact our habits— all the armature of culture — form a kind of veil to protect us against it. The Real is the interzone where anything could happen, all things are possible and no amount of expert knowledge can enable us to predict what might come next, or even what is actually going on in a given situation. In the book I qualify it with the term “radical mystery” — radical because it goes right to the root of things. “The dream hath no bottom.” This mystery isn’t a problem that has yet to be solved; it is naked reality itself, as experienced when the veil falls away.

The Real is the excess that makes every Weltanschauung we super-apes construct necessarily limited and ultimately inadequate. We never get to the bottom of things. We never arrive at the final truth. There is always something that eludes us. The concept of the Real is predicated on the notion that reality exceeds the capacities of human reason — absolutely. 

Picture the following scene, a cartoon cliché. You’re standing on a darkened street corner at night. Suddenly an immense form appears on the brick wall ahead, a terrible, monstrous shadow cast by something coming around the corner. When the creature casting the shadow finally appears, it turns out to be an inoffensive kitten. The whole thing was a trick of the light. 

Now, according to our conventional way of seeing things, the part of the scene where “truth" is revealed is the moment when the kitten shows itself. It’s at that point that you realize that the monstrous shadow was an illusion, that what was actually coming towards you was in fact the most mundane, benign, and knowable of God’s creatures. Yet if we entertain the concept of the Real I’ve just outlined, things change. The moment you were closest to “truth” — the moment you were most in touch with the Real — was in the interval during which you did not know what you were looking at. For then the monstrous shadow pointed you to a zone of potentiality with which you are not familiar, an open space between the little world you think you know and the big, real, unknowable world. What I mean to say here is that it is in moments of uncertainty, when we don’t know what we’re looking at, that we are epistemologically aligned with the true nature of existence.