Beyond the Occult Read Online Free PDF

brute matter, ‘man is a useless passion’ who is doomed to defeat. Yet Dostoevsky recognized that if there is life after death, this fact would change everything.
    This, then, is why I regarded the evidence of the paranormal as so important. According to modern Western philosophy, which begins with Descartes, it is the philosopher’s duty to ‘doubt everything’ until he has achieved some area of ultimate certainty — no matter how small — on which he can take his stand. Unfortunately, this method has failed to yield any kind of certainty. It led Bishop Berkeley to doubt the existence of the material world and David Hume to doubt cause and effect, and even the existence of the ‘self’. It led Sartre to conclude that ‘it is meaningless that we live and meaningless that we die’, and Camus to regard human life as ‘absurd’. The most fashionable of modern French philosophers, Jacques Derrida, is quite simply a descendant of Heraclitus, who believes that there is no such thing as ‘underlying meaning’ (which he calls ‘presence’) in the universe; the only reality is the endless flux of matter.
    When
The Occult
appeared in 1971, it soon became apparent that many people who had regarded me as a kind of maverick existentialist now believed that I had turned to more trivial topics, and abandoned the rigour of my ‘Outsider’ books. To me, such a view was incomprehensible. It seemed obvious to me that if the ‘paranormal’ was a reality — as I was increasingly convinced that it was — then any philosopher who refused to take it into account was merely closing his eyes.
    To begin with, most modern philosophers seem united in denying that man has a central ‘self’ (or soul). The Scottish philosopher David Hume started this revolution in the 18th century when he declared that, ‘when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other … I never catch myself at any time’. Sartre declared that man has no ‘self’; what he thinks of as ‘himself’ is really created by the outside world, ‘the gaze of others’. And this is the position that has been accepted by French philosophers ever since. Derrida, who is celebrated for his theory of ‘deconstruction’, believes that the ‘self’ is a delusion that has been created by ‘metaphysical’ philosophers, whom he rejects with contempt.
    Sartre’s close ally Simone de Beauvoir expressed the same notion when she wrote (in
Pyrrhus and Cinéas
):
    I look at myself in vain in a mirror, tell myself my own story, I can never grasp myself as an entire object, I experience in myself the emptiness that is myself, I feel that I am not.
    In other words, man is a purely superficial creature; the sense of selfhood is like a mere reflection on the surface of a pond. Sartre carried this view to its logical conclusion when he declared that there is no such thing as the ‘unconscious mind’.
    Yet as soon as we begin to study the paranormal, we immediately encounter the existence of all kinds of powers that contradict Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Far from being a mere reflection on the surface of a pond, man seems to be like an iceberg whose most important part is hidden below the surface. Of course, Freud and Jung had already told us about the ‘unconscious’ (the word was actually invented by Leibniz). But it would seem that even they underestimated its powers. Even the anecdotes I have recounted above seem to indicate that the part of the ‘self’ hidden below the water line possesses virtually magical powers.
    Of course — as Dostoevsky recognized — the ultimate contradiction of the view that we possess ‘no self’ would be an actual proof of life after death, for without a self, there would be nothing to survive death. This ultimate proof eludes us; but the existence of other paranormal powers seems to leave no doubt of the truth of the ‘iceberg’ view of the human mind. Moreover, it seems