The Reality of Spirits (Paranthropology)

Entity encounters and the therapeutic effect of the psychedelic mystical experience

Anna Lutkajtis

All usual warnings about psychedelic usage apply.

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Sleuthing An Immortal Goddess

Gabriel Roberts

She said to me as she tread across the roof of the dome, “Of course it’s me, dummy!  I’m she who dances to keep the world full of splendor.”  

Her implications meant that without her dancing, all beauty in the universe would disappear and be lost forever.  I was not allowed to see her, but could only see the imprint of her foot as it tread, like the wind leaves its imprint on dunes.  

As she tread across the dome, the roof rained all the fine jewels as they fell toward me like floating feathers, dripping pearls like milk.  The vision waned and I returned to my LSD state, which was beginning to fade and told Albert and Macy about my experience.

She told me that she had called me to the wilderness in order to set my path in motion, that it was what I needed to hear at the time.  She also said that this was just my rite of passage, that the real work was just beginning and I was finally ready to take a much bigger voyage. 

I told David Metcalfe and Dr. Aaron Cheak about my experiences and was shocked to hear that my experience with the divine feminine was a dead ringer for visions of Tara...

Jo Hickey-Hall is joined by author, Patrick Harpur well known to many for his book, 'Daimonic Reality: A Field Guide to the Otherworld'.

https://www.harpur.org/x1Daimonic.htm
https://www.harpur.org/patrick.htm

Here we talk about Patrick’s family’s relationship with the Otherworld and whether an openness to the existence of fairies aids the potential for personal encounters. We ponder the eccentricity of our modern western culture in denying the existence of daimons and Patrick offers ideas about which gods may be ruling us at this time.

The Whisky Rant: When We Met The Neighbours

Gordon White

Does it not fascinate you that there was a first sorcerer, a first shaman, a first act of magic?

There is considerable, understandable interest in how our art tumbled down from Egypt and Greece. Both civilisations irrevocably changed the shape of western magic.

But taking a macro view, an overemphasis on these two regions is rather like coming into the cinema for the last five minutes of Return of The King. Shouldn’t we be curious about what happened in the rest of the trilogy?

Homo erectus kicked around for almost two million years, our fully-modern brains are 200,000 years old. 

And yet in the archaeological record there is a time before burial and a time after it.

Somewhere along our journey we acquired a spirit world.

The Whisky Rant: When We Met The Neighbours

Gordon White

A brief quote which points to something I was thinking,

The anthropologist Donald E Brown says “the seeking of altered states of consciousness is a human universal”. In fact, it’s not just a human universal, we share it with vast parts of the animal kingdom.

... which is to say, humans are not necessarily unique in these respects - I briefly had a thought about animal magic as one aspect which might exist, as well as animal mourning. Though I'm on speculative territory with the mention of magic, I'm not sure we can easily draw a line and categorically rule it out.

Join Bernardo Kastrup, leading voice in modern idealism, and Robert Falconer, an IFS expert in "unattached burdens," for a thought-provoking exploration of the intersection between idealist philosophy and the phenomenon of spirit possession. Dive into questions about the nature of consciousness, the metaphysical foundations of reality, and how spirit possession might be understood within an idealist framework. This event promises to challenge your assumptions and expand your perspective on mind, spirit, and reality.

Most of the article is about the last book Sahlins worked on, which deals very much with spirits - what he calls "metapersons" believed in by people around the world, but there are some arguably paranormal incidents mentioned as well:

The Enchanted Worlds of Marshall Sahlins

Anna Della Subin

...When the academic reviews of The New Science of the Enchanted Universe began to appear, following its publication a year after Sahlins’s death, I noticed a strange phenomenon: For a genre conventionally prosaic, the scholarly critics kept having encounters with the metaperson of Sahlins himself. When Katherine Pratt Ewing, a professor of Islam at Columbia University, sat down to write her review at her dining table on a Sunday morning, she suddenly found herself slipping into “an almost hypnagogic state in which Marshall was a felt presence,” she recalled in HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. “It wasn’t a matter of belief about whether this was possible—it just was.” Ewing later realized that Sahlins had appeared to her on the morning of his memorial service, held at the University of Chicago on April 3, 2022.

“I kept trying to imagine how he would take my comments,” the anthropologist Carlos Fausto wrote in another piece for HAU. “Would he act like a benevolent or a mean-spirited ancestor?” Ancestors, Sahlins had wryly observed, are ambivalent powers, usually the most moralistic of all metahuman types. They are needy, even though “they are not actually in need of anything,” to quote the Swiss ethnographer Henri Junod. At the memorial service, Sahlins’s former doctoral student Sean Dowdy gave a eulogy, and he was certain—for a moment—that he saw Sahlins sitting in the crowd, carrying himself with a shabby dignity. Dowdy spoke of how the late professor had been appearing to him in dreams. In one, Dowdy walked up the stairs to Sahlins’s house on University Avenue. Sahlins opened the door wearing his usual navy-blue sweater vest, greeted Dowdy with a smile, and asked him how the mourning had been going.

It seemed to me that Sahlins, ever since his death, was continuing to develop the arguments of The New Science in a new way. (The book was meant to be a trilogy, if only Sahlins had more time.) The scholar Frederick B. Henry Jr., another former student and longtime friend, worked tirelessly to prepare the manuscript for publication. Henry told me how, as he was driving down a highway in Princeton to an early morning appointment, he suddenly realized that Marshall was sitting in the passenger seat. He stayed there for 10 minutes, as Henry’s hair stood on end and a wave of joy and sadness overcame him. “I found myself belly-laughing at some unidentifiable joke he had manifested beside me to deliver,” Henry recalled. Sahlins was inimitably demonstrating his point, of the immediacy of the spirit world that ever surrounds us. “It is the flip-side, behind the mirror of our limited being,” Henry wrote to me. “None of it need be considered paranormal in the slightest. It is part and parcel of our human condition…. I will eventually become a metaperson, to someone. So will you.”