High Strangeness: Where the Soul Meets Technology
Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning that at no additional cost to you, I will receive a commission if you click through and make a purchase. HarvBishop.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program to provide a means to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.
BY HARV BISHOP
Catholic Mystics and the Weird History of the Internet
Esoteric researcher David Metcalfe is a master of spiritual kink.
Spiritual kink are occurrences that don’t fit and aren’t easily explained: spiritually aware machines, traumatizing spiritual experiences, UFOs, aliens, ghosts, psychic phenomena, objects that vanish and then reappear to name a few.
You might be thinking “that’s some weird s***, too weird for me.” Well, newsflash, if like many of my readers you believe that your intentions and thoughts shape your reality, then you’ve already crossed the bridge into spiritual kink. To a straight Sunday churchgoer, you may as well say you believe in ghosts and aliens. And since we’ve crossed that bridge, we kind of owe it to ourselves to explore some of the other spiritual wisdom that comes from walking on the wild side.
David Metcalfe is our guide to the wild side in this interview series.
Who is David Metcalfe?
Those who study the paranormal— the world of psychics, ghosts, UFOs and, yes, mind manifestation practices– have a term for the unexplainable: “High strangeness.”
David Metcalfe, a leading independent esoteric writer, artist and scholar, believes that great spiritual wisdom can be found in “high strangeness,” the unexplainable, the weird.
The weird and strange are found in liminal spaces, says Metcalfe. Liminal spaces are borders including the strange images in the moments between waking and sleep, where you’ve left one reality, but aren’t yet in another.
“It’s tapping into the subliminal,” says Metcalfe, “the unconscious, the kind of things that flow underneath our day-to-day consciousness. That kind of thing really attracts me. That’s where the potent stuff exists. The weirder areas of culture that I look at have always been an area of fascination throughout my life.”
Metcalfe finds spiritual wisdom outside of mainstream culture. That includes everything from New Thought practices to folk magic practices in the southern US, psychical research, dream symbol books in gas stations, the Latinx Santa Muertos death cult, and evangelical Christian exorcism practices.
He also researches the ways in which the weird intersects with our contemporary media and culture. News stories, web searches, and reality shows shape the way we understand and explain our spiritual and outside-the-norm experiences to ourselves and others. Metcalfe co-authored a chapter, “Where Soul Meets technology,” with comparative religion scholar Diana Paskula in the Oxford University Press edited anthology “Believing in Bits: Digital Media and The Supernatural.” (E-book now on sale at Amazon #Commissions earned)
He has worked in academia, business, and digital media. He always encounters paranormal experiencers wherever he is.
“It’s just been a blast experience honestly that I’ve been able to live in all these different worlds,” Metcalfe reflects. “That is in itself a liminal life. Focusing on the liminal has allowed me to bridge a bunch of different things that normally don’t get bridged.”
The Spirituality of Machines
We’ll start this exploration of technology and the soul with a WTF moment.
In 2013, self-described “magic experience designers” Ferdinando Buscema and Mariano Tomatis performed a mind-bending ESP experiment at a conference organized by the web magazine Boing Boing. Using a replica of a machine created by a 14th century Catalonian mystic designed to discern spiritual truth that had been updated for the 21st century, the magic designers revealed the computer password of one of Boing Boing’s founders.
The shock, delight, surprise and WTF expression on the founder’s face couldn’t be faked. He did change the password. I’ll link the video below.
Watching the video induces cognitive dissonance. Things are suddenly outside of everyday, logical order and our sense of possibility is stretched. Is it genuine mind reading with the aid of technology? Or is it the product of illusion and a virtuoso stage magician’s craft? And the bigger, overriding question is how does technology– via a medieval machine made of nested circles and symbols connected to a computer app — intersect with the spiritual?
I posed those questions to Metcalfe, who designed the wheel replica used at the conference. It was built by Metcalfe’s craftsman nephew Ian. The three nested cipher-like wheels were originally created by Ramon Llull, a 14th century Spanish missionary and contemplative. Each of the nested wheels compressed larger theological concepts from the Abrahamic faiths into short-hand symbols. As the different wheels were turned like a combination lock on a safe the symbols realigned in new combinations revealing different meanings.
Metcalfe is agnostic on the question of whether Busecema and Tomatis’s use of the wheels was mystical or stagecraft. In either case, he notes, the result can be magical in terms of expanding consciousness.
“Ferdinando’s performances induce a state of wonder in the participants,” he says. “They experience an expanded awareness of life’s possibilities, which in some cases may even lead to surprising synchronicities and a deeper sense of their own human potentials.”
To address the second question, the intersection between the spiritual and technology, Metcalfe points to famed media theorist Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan argued that technology innovations extended human capacities. “In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan writes of how a wheel on a cart is “an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye, clothing is an extension of the skin, electric circuitry an extension of the nervous system…”
Llull’s wheel was technology that gave expression to the soul, says Metcalfe.
“He got this idea for his system literally on a mountaintop experience where he had this divine download revelation,” says Metcalfe.
Llull believed his wheel, now known as the Llullian wheel, could prove the existence of God. It also was the basis of Llull’s contemplative practice. Denied a formal Latin education, Lull was exposed diverse influences including the mystical Jewish Kabbalah, Arabic science, and the mystic Sufi tradition of Islam.
“In terms of the work that he did coordinating languages and translating languages,” says Metcalfe, “Llull saw his work as a missionary to bridge the Abrahamic traditions– Islam, Judaism and Christianity– through language. And through organizing language you would come to understand true divinity. He wanted to organize these things so you couldn’t argue with it. His system used symbolic wheels, comparative charts, memory and contemplative aids. He called it the art of memory or the Great Art which facilitates union with the Divine. It was technology that created functional devices aligned with a deep spiritual practice.”
Llul’s system was anchored with symbols for the qualities of Divinity in which he thought all three faiths would find agreement including Goodness and Eternity. He also sought to unify all forms of knowledge in his symbols and wheels including theology, natural science and philosophy. Although Llull sought to unify the faiths, he was shaped by his times and wanted to use his logic machines to convert Jews and Muslims. The Catholic church still hasn’t decided whether Llull is a heretic or a saint. His work inspired later western mysticism and esoteric practices.
Llull’s wheels are also precursors to today’s machine learning, or what is called Artificial Intelligence, according to Metcalfe. Metcalfe and Pasulka note, in Believing in Bits that “he [Llull] opened a space to begin thinking about machines capable of logic and reason.”
Metcalfe told me: “Llull’s wheel allows one to alternate propositions in relation to each other in a way that is essentially the core component of most machine learning algorithms. The functionality of Llull’s wheels provides the basics for computing as we know it today.”
Divine downloads
“Flash forward to now, and the ethnography that Diana Pasulka did for her book American Cosmic,” Metcalfe reflects. “There are scientists now that are having similar experiences to Llull where they’re having these download experiences, they’re having these flashes of intuition, and sometimes in situations where they feel they’re actually in communication with something. It’s not just downloading into their brain, but they’re actually having a conversation with this kind of numinous quality; what they describe as a separate intelligence. That goes back to Ramon Lull and he’s having this experience where he feels he’s talking to God. You can go throughout history and see people talking to angels so there’s this fascinating history with technology and spirituality. It hasn’t been looked at as much as it could be or should be. Skeptics say these things are just people’s flights of fancy. But when flights of fancy are creating patents for new technology, that’s something to look into.”
The Weird History of the Internet
Technology also met the soul in the early days of the internet, including the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), an effort to link computers for academics and national defense in the late 1960s. It was essentially a precursor of today’s internet. Famed tech pioneer and Ufologist Jacques Vallee was active with the ARPANET project.
Answers Before the Questions
“I get a kick out of this now after having looked at Vallee’s early work with the ARPANET because they were working on video conferencing. And one of the papers that came out of that said that computer conferencing could connect to an altered state of consciousness. What they were finding was that with computer conferencing and these early, early emails, and message boards was that people would ask a question, and it would be time stamped. Then if you look at the time log, those questions would have been answered from someone in France or across the country a few seconds or a few minutes before the question was asked. So, you would have these interesting, essentially psychic experiences that could be tracked because they were logged.”
When I was on a Zoom call with Metcalfe he said, “Harv, right now you’re in Colorado and I’m in Georgia. So now space doesn’t exist. I can see you. You can see me. That changes the way that we perceive space. That also changes the way we perceive time, and that’s what they experienced getting these weird, seemingly precognitive events where answers are being given before the question.”
“I think anybody who spends a lot of time online, especially if you use social media, knows synchronicities are incredibly common,” continues Metcalfe. “There’s been a lot of writing on algorithmic tracking and ads popping up. But even before that the synchronicities were fairly intense. Then there are synchronicities that occur between individuals that have nothing to do with algorithms. They were finding early on that these synchronicities were happening and thinking about it as an enhancement of human cognition and intellect and asking what does that mean for the mind.”
What that meant for the mind according to Metcalfe and Pasulka’s anthology chapter was a hyper-connected global technology that mirrored and connected to the Oneness of Ultimate Reality or the Divine. They say this was true for the 14th century mystic Ramon Llull, who lived in a time of intense cross-cultural communication, and it was true for the Catholic 20th century mystical priest-scientist Teilhard de Chardin who foresaw a leap to global and cosmic consciousness. It was true for McLuhan, influenced by Chardin, who proclaimed a media-connected “global village” in the 1960s, and for Vallee and other internet visionaries.
‘The Third Mind’
“We think of the internet now and it’s very accepted in our lives with smartphones and all,” says Metcalfe. “However, the internet has an incredibly weird history. The Stanford Research Institute’s (SRI) remote viewing program used psychic abilities for intelligence gathering during the Cold War. They also had a program at SRI looking at using an early version of the internet for the augmentation of human intellect. So, you know, it was seen as a cybernetic system that would basically sync-up all these different individuals into a sort of coordinated mind, you know, a ‘third mind.’ That’s not looking back on it and imposing that interpretation. That is literally the kind of thing that they were doing.”
Metcalfe and Pasulka write that the democratic and soul-transforming potential of these early efforts were lost as the programs became more focused on corporate and military goals.
“Jacques Vallee was involved in both the remote viewing program, to some extent, and he was at SRI at the time they were doing the internet work,” Metcalfe told me. “He was using the computer network connecting the folks who are doing the psychic remote viewing program via global teleconferencing. There was this conversation going on. The ARPANET was being developed to augment and enhance human cognition. Then the psychic remote viewing program is exploring the boundaries of human cognition. Both programs were asking what are the boundaries of our perceptual systems? And they were looking at it in a very technical way, trying to get it so that it was scientifically wrapped up and replicable so that it could be given as a tool, a technology, that can be given to anybody. It was this really interesting blend.”
In many ways the potentials of that era for soul-transforming technologies available to anyone are now being realized in our time as close as an app on your phone. In part two of our interview with Metcalfe, we’ll look at some of those new approaches and explore why randomness is essential for both machines and humans for spiritual growth.
Books mentioned in this article
(#Commissions earned)
(#Commissions earned)
