Material and spiritual

Animist cultures attributed a soul to every living being, animal or vegetable, and the material, rocks, mountains, the stars. Western rationalism has on the contrary tried to strip the material, and finally living things as well, of any transcendent dimension.

The only exception are humans, to whom it had to leave a conscience. Although consciousness itself would eventually be reduced to an epiphenomenon doubling the brain mechanisms, purely biological. At least that is the mainstream thinking, which may have had the advantage of stimulating research.

The acquisitions of neuropsychology are admirable. brain stimulation now enabled us to know configurations related to a large number of psychic activities. The mistake would be to assume that the neural mechanisms explain everything. Instead, we must rethink things as soon as paranormal phenomena are proven.

The observations listed by parapsychology, like the ability to self-develop psychic abilities demonstrated by Evolutionary Ecopsychology, demonstrate that neuronal explanation is not exhaustive. It is actually an avatar of the rationalist dogma that tends to exclude a priori any supermaterial element to explains everything from purely biological mechanisms.

The representation of our mental functioning would decline if instead on two sides: one including all the neurological aspects of emotions and thought, obeying the rules of matter (taking place in ordinary spacetime, cell biology) and logic (cause and effect), closely related to sensory perception. This side hides in another: the one psychic phenomena take place in, place of archetypes or Essences, which we have access either by unconscious channels (Jung’s collective unconscious) or psychic abilities.

Western man is somehow amputated conscience of one half of the cosmos, the largest half because that’s where spiritual life lies and therefore the ultimate meaning of existence. From this follows a general feeling of “malaise in civilization” that Freud struggled to explain, due to a deep and difficult to verbalize frustration.

Evolutionary ecopsychology does not intend to return to a naive animism, attributing to objects or animal spirits modeled on the human psychic functioning. Animism appears rather as itself an avatar of the loss of access to the paranormal, reserved to shamans or priests, who too often end up drawing a form of power.

Things look different from the time when psychic abilities prove to be perfectly natural and accessible to all. It doesn’t remain much room for domination, manipulation or exploitation of his neighbor to happen. On the contrary, what we see profiling is a sort of “spiritual democracy” where everyone would be directly connected to the source of truth that are the archetypes, and guidance that provide clairvoyance and other channels of communication with the transcendent side of the cosmos.

That way undergoes, a spontaneous harmonization of the spiritual and the material, both at the scale of the individual conscience and the scale of societal values.