Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred by Jeffrey J. Kripal Page A

beliefs and practices.” 56 Occulture for Partridge, then, is that dark, nocturnal, fertile side of Western culture without which the public elite culture cannot be fully understood and out of which any number of popular cultural movements have sprung, usually in direct or indirect opposition to the reigning public and elite orthodoxies.
    Particularly important here is what we might call the comparative practices of popular culture, which, it turns out, are often just as radical—indeed, often more so—than those of elite scholars, whose disciplined intellectual practices often end up disciplining them right back into the established order of things, where they can get and keep a job. Popular comparative practices work differently. They often appear exaggerated or outrageous. They are. This is how they escape the various social, political, and intellectual censors of their own social surround—by being serious by not being serious. Essentially, popular culture “flies low,” well under the radar.
    It is also worth underlining the fact that Partridge’s central notion of re-enchantment requires for both its logic and energy an earlier and equally profound disenchantment. Occulture is not a matter of naive belief, much less of orthodox faith. It is only possible after a robust and radical criticism of “religion.” Like Owen’s occultism, then, Partridge’s occulture is a very modern phenomenon that has already incorporated the secular and the scientific. Which is not to say that occulture is entirely secular. Far from it. The category of occulture implies that there is a sacred dimension to secularization, that Western culture is not becoming less religious, but
differently
religious. Occulture, then, represents a dialectic, a “confluence of secularization and sacralization,” not a final victory of one process over the other. 57
    I want to take up Partridge’s key notion of occulture and develop it in my own directions in the pages that follow. More specifically, I want to suggest that the experience of reality—a “reality posit,” as the cultural psychologist Richard Shweder has put it—is produced from the dialectical dance of consciousness and culture, always on a particular historical and material stage. 58 As Mind and the neurobiological hardware of the human brain are “cultivated” in different social, religious, and linguistic frames, the experience of reality shifts and changes accordingly. Reality itself—or so I am assuming—does not change, but what is generally possible and impossible to experience as real does appear to change from culture to culture, as each culture actualizes different potentials of human consciousness and energy. Such a dialectical model, I should stress, is both universalistic and relativistic at the same time. There is radical Sameness. And there is radical Difference. And neither can be sacrificed to the other.
    In this model, the human being can be thought of as a kind of living musical instrument born into the world capable of playing any tune, any language, any belief system. Each culture, each historical period, each religious system, each family, however, will privilege only certain keys and will downplay, deny, or simply ignore others. Consider the research on human language acquisition. An infant,
any
infant, is born capable of speaking any language on the planet, but as the infant develops, the brain synapses and vocal abilities quickly lock onto a specific set of language skills until it is very difficult to learn other speech patterns. By the age of six or so, the brain is now wired for a specific language, by thirteen or so a specific culture and worldview. The universal musical instrument has become a very particular and local one.
    It is within this same dialectical context that I understand occulture as a kind of public meeting place of spirit and matter, as the place where