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Writer's pictureThad McKraken

3 Fundamentally Incorrect Assumptions About Consciousness that Define Modern Science


Posted By: Thad McKraken OCT 20, 2015


Being a mystic in the supposedly modern era is odd, to say the least. Being a spirit medium is even stranger, especially when you have a difficult time accepting that you’re a spirit medium in the first place. As a matter of fact, the idea that I’m some sort of “spirit medium” isn’t even something that occurred to me until roughly a year ago. Up until that point, the idea seemed ridiculous. I suppose it’s mainly because most people who publicly proclaim themselves as such are obvious frauds. As far as I can tell, to make money as a spirit medium, what you do is tell people that their dead relatives totally love them and are in a better place. That’s about it. That’s how you get paid and/or on television as a supposed “spirit medium.” You lie about your ability to communicate with people’s dead relatives to make them feel better about their relationship with death.


Do some of these people actually possess legit psychic abilities? Probably, but I don’t entirely trust people who don’t put themselves in trance states to induce these conversations. Can they contact your dead relatives directly? Maybe on some occasions, but they’re absolutely going to tell you that they can regardless of whether or not this is true because that’s how they make money. The problem with all alternative spirituality in general is capitalism. How do you profit from the idea that people can get greater kicks by tweaking their own brain chemistry than they ever will buying useless bullshit they don’t need? (Hey, tip your mystic and download my book for less than a decent cup of coffee.) These ideas run counter to the culture of expansionary capitalism by suggesting that we need to expand internally toward godhood rather than externally towards planetary collapse. It’s sort of amazing that these shamanic concepts are considered so dangerous that we made laws against their propagation. (Legalize DMT!) But, hey, that’s where we’re at.


So, how did I start suspecting I was some sort of spirit medium? Fun story on that, actually. What happened was that one night after falling asleep, I found myself awake in a hypnagogic/sleep paralysis state. There were black whisp of smoke entities circling like sharks around me near the ceiling. Tons of them. This is a spooky occurrence that was happening to me a lot at the time. However, on this occasion, something different and entirely unexpected went down. Suddenly, one of these black whisp freaky beings detached itself from the swarm, swooped down and attached itself to my spectral head. Then for a second it took control of my consciousness and directly imparted a jarring message to me via telepathic link:


YOU ARE A SPIRIT MEDIUM!


Huh, I never actually conceptualized it that way before — believe it or not. I suppose because most spirit mediumship is so fucking stupid. No one said it could involve things like sex and drugs, but I must confess the signs were always there. I’d been in communication with extra dimensional forms of intelligence since I started playing around with Robert Monroe’s techniques for astral projection as a teenager, not to mention the unholy insectile art beings I encounter on psychedelics. (I write about these things constantly on Facebook, like my new page if you’re curious.) The problem I had with accepting the reality of these talents in the first place, much like my position as a mystic, sorcerer, whatever you want to call it, had far more to do with cultural programming than the supposed craziness of the all.


That’s the thing. I’m not crazy. If I was, there’d be an easy culturally accepted designation for what I experience. There’d be support groups and what not. The problem lies in the fact that I’m not. I’m currently writing this during down time at my corporate gig in the tech industry. I’ll go home tonight to my beautiful wife and adorable pug. I spend half my free time watching sports for Christ’s sake. I have a degree in psychology and what I found is that, in the field of psychology, there’s no accounting for people like me. People who see visions and hear voices in willfully induced trance states. People who have psychic dreams. People who have schizophrenic symptoms but aren’t remotely crazy by a stretch of the term. I went into psychology trying to figure out why I see omni-dimensional daemon lords under the influence of mushrooms only to leave with an expensive, rather worthless degree. I was exactly no closer to the answer than I was beforehand. What I did learn is that the field of psychology is bullshit because it not only refuses to take on these things, but rather cowers in a corner hoping they’ll go away. And so we’re left with bullshit like the Long Island Medium.


And that’d be the point to this article? You know what’s crazy? Materialism. Seriously, any time you talk about the Occult, or shamanism, or any sort of alternate spiritual practice on the internet, you’ll get one of those conformist “skeptical” half wits popping up accusing you of being a simpleton who believes in fairy tales. Except that I don’t. In fact, I didn’t believe in these things at all until they started happening to me. I was forced to change these obviously incorrect and quite primitive beliefs in light of new evidence/experience. I thought astral projection was nonsense. Turns out it wasn’t. I thought sex magick was crazy. Again, wrong. What I love is that these supposedly super smart people always cite things like rationality and science to make their arguments. Yet, what I’ve had to confront is that materialism itself is roughly the most irrational belief system imaginable. Not to mention depressing as fuck. What fundamentalist atheists truly believe deep down is that people are really smart and that we’ve totally got shit figured out. This is maybe the most batshit thing anyone could think about anything, but hey, conformity. It’s an entirely socially acceptable belief, and it’s simultaneously completely nutter, just like religion.


Why? Well, last time I checked, people are thinking shit around me at all times. I can’t pick up on any of that consciously, and yet these thoughts are going to ultimately dictate their behavior, which is a decidedly physical thing. Everything you see in the supposedly physical world started out as an unseen thought in the invisible reaches of the imagination and was eventually borne into the world through action. See the problem? Materialism looks at the actions of humanity and simultaneously posits that the origins of these actions “aren’t real.” Of course it takes having multiple ontological shock type experiences to realize you’ve been fed a preposterously incomplete model for understanding the universe since birth, but once you get there, hey, it gets even more alienating, so you’ve got that to look forward to. Why? Because everyone around you not only buys into this shit, but simultaneously acts as if it were gospel. Which is why after years of having otherworldly visitations from what I call 4th and 5th dimensional time space perceptual entities, I’ve been forced to entertain the idea that modern science as it is practiced, is ultimately based on several ideas that are just as fundamentally incorrect as thinking the earth is flat. Let’s do this thing:


Fundamentally Incorrect Assumption Number #1:


All Consciousness Must Be Bound By a Physical Body and Exist Within a Linear Time Based Narrative


This is the big one. Remember how I started this off talking about being a reluctant spirit medium? Yeah, I did that for a reason. As a society, we love to talk about evil spirits and spirituality without stopping to think about what the fuck that means…at all. What it means is that there are sentient forms of intelligence that aren’t bound to bodies like we are. In the spirit world you can fly through walls (which aren’t actually solid from that perspective), lock onto other plotlines in the material world, see other people’s thoughts and traverse through the infinite expanse of higher dimensional spacetime. It’s quite hilarious that, for years, I kept receiving these lesson plans in my lucid dream states and what I like to call astral contact encounters, yet I still couldn’t grasp it. The tone to all these lessons was quite similar, like, hey idiot, this is NOT hard to understand. It’s spirit world 101 stuff we’re feeding you here. Why is this so hard for you to get? The problem, of course, lies in the fact that we’re raised from birth to think this is impossible. And before you get all, “I believe in science and reason” on me, ask yourself what evidence we have indicating that consciousness only exists within bodies. There is exactly no evidence suggesting this, just a materialistic and anthropocentric assumption. As a matter of fact, all of us spend half our time dreaming. To this day science has zero definitive explanation of why this is, which is something I found more than a bit fascinating as a psychology student. They come up with all sorts of complicated theories about survival in caves and recollecting daily events but ultimately concede that they don’t honestly know. You’re just sort of told that, for the purpose of your studies, you’re going to pretend the materialistic theories are correct because entertaining the alternative is too much to handle.


Another way of putting that would be that the universe of consciousness is vastly more complex than humanity is even capable of comprehending. Of course, if you say this in regards to outer space based on physics, it’s widely accepted, but when you insinuate the same thing in psychology based on transpersonal experiences, no dice. Mainstream science and materialism in general are essentially humanity’s way of saying, well, consciousness is too complicated for us to understand (again, can’t figure out something as basic as dreaming). So, because that’s too hard, let’s just pretend like it isn’t a thing because we’re fucking babies. And what you get then is people thinking that they’re very, very smart when they demonstrably don’t know dick in the grand scheme. People building predator drones when they could be making lucid dream machines. It’s all very depressing and the idea that consciousness is forcefully bound to bodies and doesn’t exist without them is roughly the most unimaginative way of looking at the universe imaginable. Truth is, I’m fairly sure we could all port in and out of our bodies at will if we just practiced it a bit or studied things like DMT and astral projection in any sort of rational manner. We don’t do this because what we’d find in these states would shatter the foundations of our consensus reality even further. Through my pursuit of magick I’ve been repeatedly shown that the entire plotline of humanity looks like a developing star from a distant 5th dimensional perspective. It’s a tiny blip and from that higher perspective, all time is happening at once as the perception of time is subjective in the first place. You think a mosquito perceives time in the same manner that we do?


A decent metaphor would be that consciousness is like a video game simulation that you can port into at the beginning, then exit, then port back into near the end, the exit, then port back into in the middle. Or like a movie in the editing process where you could splice footage in the beginning, middle, or end, but that looks like a singular work in progress to the director. Actually, fuck that, it’s more like a dream. That’s a better metaphor. Why? Because a dream is something you wake up from, just like life, which brings me to the next popular assumption.


Fundamentally Incorrect Assumption Number #2:


Death is the End of Consciousness and We Need to Fight It


You hear a lot about the wars we fight as a nation and the drug war, but you rarely hear about the war we’ve always fought with death. I have no idea why this theme has nudged its way into my life so forcefully, but it has. I used to work in the assisted living business. Good god, the horror. Fact of the matter is, we all behave as if death is this terrible thing that we’re constantly battling, but why do we think this? The evidence we have indicating that death is the end of consciousness is essentially, well, we can’t see spirits flying out of bodies.


Another way to put that is, we have no evidence. We have an assumption based on perception. I don’t see wireless internet either but here I am, using it to write publicly. Have you ever read anything about Near Death Experiences? My mom had one years before giving birth to me. Very common story, she encountered an enormous all-forgiving white light that made her come back to reality because her work wasn’t done here. But that isn’t what she wanted. That’s right, when you read these accounts you’ll find them curiously consistent. In a lot of cases, these people encounter beings and beg to not have to come back to our world. Wait, did you say beg to not come back? Yep. Death is apparently often so intensely peaceful that it makes our waking lives in body prisons seem like hell in comparison.


Our lives don’t have to be this brutal. If we could come up with a drug, calculated sound pattern, magnetic pulse to the dome, or some combination of all these things that replicated the near death experience, none of us would take this realm as seriously as we do. Whereas psychology has been unable to “prove” that near death experiences are “real” (depending on who you read), it’s certainly shown that they change the behavior of those who experience them. My mom for instance took up an interest in astral projection and a bunch of other things people consider “new age-y” bullshit because of her encounter.


You know where the vast majority of human suffering comes from? People taking shit way too seriously. It goes back to the first fundamentally incorrect assumption. But basic thanatophobia is a big factor as well. As long as you think that death is the end of consciousness, your likelihood of acting as such and turning into an insufferable asshole with no qualms about fucking everyone over for your own benefit increases drastically. Such is the crux of our culture. If we saw the bigger picture, none of us would give nearly as much of a fuck about things like wars, professional athletics, owning a mansion, corporate profit margins, and other such frivolities. As soon as science (and science fiction) figures out that space was never the final frontier and that death is, we’ll seriously be onto something. Once we realize that life is but a dream, a dream you wake up from, we’ll start trying to figure out how to better understand this larger narrative we’ve found ourselves ensnared in. Which brings me to the final assumption.


Fundamentally Incorrect Assumption Number #3:


Humans are Not Only the Center of the Universe, but Also the Most Intelligent Creatures In It


It’s sort of amazing how far people go to bolster their own egos. When you get right down to brass tacks, most human logic is based around the idea that we’re the center of the universe. Most of us behave as if this is true. For a long time we thought the sun revolved around the earth, then we realized that was ignorant. We’re going to run into the same thing regarding consciousness. The problem with thinking of humanity as the smartest, most evolved beings in the universe, is that we quite obviously don’t know shit. It’s sooooo depressing. From that perspective, nothing makes sense. We don’t know why we’re here, why we die, why we dream, why we breed out of control, etc. Hell, as previously mentioned, even materialistic science tells us that 90% of everything in the cosmos is made up of invisible shit outside our perception (dark matter, dark energy). So wow, the most advanced organisms in the universe are so stupid they don’t understand anything of significance. Makes me want to drink a hundred beers just thinking about it. And then we take subjectivity out of the equation to simplify our beliefs even further. I’m pretty sure that just because Taylor Swift’s albums sound like auditory torture to me, doesn’t mean they sound that way to everyone else. People seem to spend a lot of money and time obsessing over them, and a lot of those people don’t sort of want to fuck her like I do as a heterosexual man. I mean, I would never argue that she isn’t easy on the eyes. The ears are another story.


I mention this because most of the time when I’ve brought up the subjective nature of human perception to the more hard science-y people I’ve known, they stare at me like I’m fucking nuts. This is weird because you’re asking the basic philosophical questions of an inquiring 4-year-old and you’re greeted with angry confusion. Why would you think about stuff like that, they wonder? Well, maybe because when you do, you realize that you weren’t just looking at the former planet Pluto on your computer. You were looking at an image taken of Pluto from a camera at a great distance, from a human perspective. That’s not the same thing. Last time I checked, the planet earth currently looks like a computer screen where I’m typing this fun stuff out because I’m bored at work.


Perspective is everything, and on account of us not knowing shit, I’d say that the human perspective is a ridiculously limited one. Of course the reason I think about this sort of thing has to do with me summoning Gods via sex magick. From what they’ve shown me, not only are we not the most intelligent species in the universe, we’re basically insects in comparison. Oh, and they’re us…from outside of time. And THAT idea is a challenge to everything we’ve been raised to believe, but is it crazy? Maybe, but I’ve never been able to figure out why exactly. It’s like, that can’t be true because…ummm…conformity I guess? I’ve got nothing. It just seems insane because our entire society is now and has always been Batshit with a capital B. This is the conclusion I have come to after all these years and you know, when you seriously contemplate our culture’s dominant spiritual beliefs from either the religious or atheist perspective, it’s the only conclusion that makes any logical sense.




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