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

Consciousness
both
occults or hides itself in material and symbolic forms
and
allows itself to be seen, “as if in a mirror,” so that it can be cultivated and shaped into definite, but always relative, forms. Occulture, then, both conceals and reveals. Its popular and elite expressions—from a ten-cent superhero comic book to this book—should not be taken literally. Ever. But neither should they be dismissed as meaningless or unimportant. They, after all, reflect and refract some of the deepest dimensions of the real.
    The provocative work of Owen and Partridge can be fruitfully read alongside Victoria Nelson’s
The Secret Life of Puppets
, a beautiful study of the Neoplatonic, gnostic, or Hermetic “soul” of Western culture as temporarily repressed and demonized. Here Nelson gives us a brilliant study of the modern demonization of the soul as puppet, robot, or cyborg and the bracketing (really repressing) of the deeper questions of human consciousness within contemporary intellectual culture. In the process, she examines what we too will encounter below, that is, the imaginative exile of Spirit into the furthest reaches of “outer space,” from where, of course, it returns to haunt us as the Alien.
    For Nelson, this demonization and subsequent alienation is born of an exaggerated and unbalanced scientism, a one-sided Aristotelianism that she sees us now moving beyond before a balancing Platonic resurgence. It is not about one or the other, though. It is about both. It is about
balance
. Western intellectual, spiritual, and cultural life, at their best and most creative anyway, work through a delicate balancing act between this Aristotelianism (read: rationalism) and this Platonism (read: mysticism). The pendulum has been swinging right, toward Aristotle, for about three hundred years now. It has now reached its rationalist zenith and is beginning to swing back left, toward Plato. Which is not to say, at all, that Western culture will somehow become irrational and unscientific again, that we suddenly won’t need Aristotle or science any longer. This vast centuries-long process is ultimately about balance, about wisdom. It is also about making the unconscious conscious, about realizing and living our own secret life:
    The new sensibility does not threaten a regression from rationality to superstition; rather, it allows for expansion beyond the one-sided worldview that scientism has provided us over the last three hundred years. We should never forget how utterly unsophisticated the tenets of eighteenth-century rationalism have left us, believers and unbelievers alike, in that complex arena we blithely dub “spiritual.” Even as we see all too clearly the kitsch of much New Age religiosity and fear the rigidity of rising fundamentalism, we remain alarmingly blind to our own unconscious tendencies in this same direction. Our conventional secular bias whispers to us that the ideas we see naively articulated on the cinema screen (ideas as blasphemous to secular humanists as they are to the religious orthodox), if they are to be taken seriously at all, signal a backward slide into religious oppression and intolerance. What our perspective does not allow us to recognize is the positive and enduring dimension of such ideas when they are consciously articulated in our culture. We forget that Western culture is equally about Platonism and Aristotelianism, idealism and empiricism,
gnosis
and
episteme
, and that for most of this culture’s history one or the other has been conspicuously dominant—and dedicated to stamping the other out. 59
    Such a Platonic balancing or mystical revival, of course, cannot enter the house of elite culture directly. Its kitsch clothes and tastes in movies are too easily rebuffed, demeaned, belittled, and shamed by the scientistic and pious doorkeepers. So it walks around the house and comes in the back door, through the imaginative products of