Long modernism and the exponential unknown

Alexandra David-Néel, dragged up in Tibetan gear

 

 

 

 

“The belief in psychic phenomena, in miracles and in magic is as alive in our days as it was in the Middle Ages. What we have gained is the freedom to speak of these things and to attempt the experience of them without having to fear the stakes of the Inquisition.”

In her brief preface to the 1965 edition of Magic and Mystery in Tibet, Alexandra David-Néel summarises succinctly the longest-lasting and lowest-valued effect of modernism: freedom to experience and to speak about the mysterious, the unknown, the unexplainable.  

Explainers and documenters of ineffable mysteries, from Blavatsky to David-Néel, from Colin Wilson to Bruce Duensing — and countless others, before, during and after — have assayed altered perceptions and acuity of human awareness of the unknown and catalogued its materialisation in mysterious expressions.

Inspired by keen intellects, compendiasts and enthusiasts foraged, gathered and syncretized, producing mélanges of knowledge-at-the margins, particularly relating to the occult. The modernist syncretic strand tracing hidden and lost knowledge, developed during the past 150 years from the monolithic occult, has been re-constructed into separate, often discrete, fields of knowledge. A reader browsing mysteries now finds references to parapsychology, paranormality, spirituality, alternate and hidden histories, lost knowledges and alternative lifestyles, magic, miracles and demonology. And UFOs. And ghosts. Maybe angels, too, if you like.

By the 1970s, a kind of journalism noir of self-narrated research quests, literature reviews and comparative studies mediated an aggregated body of knowledge on the mysterious unknown. At the same time, academic studies of the unknown were starting to flourish in parallel with US government research on parapsychology, and other subjects.

In the 1990s there had never been so much unknown, and so much of the unexplained explained, and so much more of it under investigation, and so little known about it. At that time it was still possible for a person with an interest in the unknown to claim that they knew as much as there was to know about it.

The examples, the feelings, the objects, the repetitions, the similarities. Listing the unknowns and their attributes is not nothing. The greater work is in finding ways to communicate understanding that the search will likely reveal no final state, and that the first good results will come from recognising that human responses are real. Even responses to ineffable unknowns.  

Dean Radin has shown that responses to and effects of particular experiences can be measured using scientific methodology, whether these responses and effects are regarded as improbable and/or replicable.

In the matter of the unknown, in everyday settings where unknowns are most often responded to, quality of questioning has yet to catch up with free expression of experience. Our responses to stimuli may be entirely predictable, if not entirely rational. But not questioning equates to not imagining, which is both impossible and undesirable.

Steps to take in exercising freedoms to talk about the unknown include: determining functions of ‘unpredictable’; measuring products of material responses to indiscernible, unidentifiable, unknown stimuli; realising and measuring unknown stimuli; analysing discursive, linguistic and aesthetic aspects of both responses to unknown stimuli and the subjects of responses.

Image: Preus Museum, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons