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Connection, Consciousness, Wisdom

When did you become spiritual?

People have been asking me that. It’s a huge departure from my previous atheistic, cold rationalist self.

It started with Mel Gibson.

No, not that movie. I watched a clip of Joe Rogan where Mel Gibson spoke of how he received healing for a liver disease. He said this Qi Gong master used chi without touch to heal him. The force was so strong he was pressed against the wall and lifted off the ground 8 inches. He could barely believe what happened. Afterwards he went to a priest to ask if this was demonic. The priest assured him that this didn’t need to be demonic.

What struck me is that Mel Gibson had no reason to talk about this on the show. He sounded kind of crazy. Why would he bring this up at the risk of losing face? Something about the way he told the story made me curious.

I looked up “John Chang,” the pseudonym of this Qi Gong master. There are even videos of him online demonstrating amazing powers. He’s able to perform pyrokinesis, the ability to start a fire in crumpled up newspaper with just his qi. He’s taken on students who are able to push light objects over from a distance with just a qi burst. John Change also heals people by channeling qi directly into the body through acupuncture needles. These remarkable healings are done for free. He doesn’t charge. They say he’s already a millionaire in Indonesia and has no need for money. If he did all this for money it would be suspect, but he seems to genuinely be a spiritual master. These videos are decades old. He stopped showing his powers because his spiritual masters chastised him for displaying them in public.

I watched these at the end of February 2025. Soon after I bought Enter Mo Pai: The Ancient Training of the Immortals by James Van Gelder. I read it all and learned much. Unfortunately the particular style of qi gong, mo pai, that John Chang uses is quite dangerous. It is necessary to learn under a master who knows the process and can sense your energy. The qi can be disruptive and the master guides you to the next phase.

However the book expanded my mind of what’s possible. It also spoke of various styles of spiritual development including yogic systems. I bought the next book from the author, Enter the Infinite which is more broadly about the “natural path” to enlightenment and activating all energy centers.

Soon after I started looking into the Telepathy Tapes, the podcast about some non-verbal autistic people who are able to psychically communicate. I would have found this much less interesting before and dismissed it if I hadn’t started reading more about spirituality. The podcast took an awesome turn to discussing remote viewing, consciousness, and all kinds of great topics.

Is the world just physical?

The big debate of the podcast and what makes the mainstream resist the idea of telepathy is the materialist world view. In our western culture we have largely accepted the scientific narrative that the physical world is all there is. If there is consciousness it comes from the body. There’s no causation without the physics of interaction. If there is something else, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

I’ll step back a bit to chart my metaphysical path.

When I was a child I was raised with Christianity by my parents. The philosophical problem of evil really bothered me. It kept me up at night. How could the god of the bible allow such evil in the world? How could I be allowed to suffer like I had? Around age 11 I gave up Christianity and was in a spiritual limbo.

I was still very interesting in spirituality and the occult. I read all kinds of books and completed my own astrological chart. I read about mediums, psychics, ghost, unexplained mysteries, all kinds of stuff! I looked into paranormal investigators. I was closer to believing in God as “Great Spirit” than anything related to organized religion. I wanted to find the answer. I looked for commonalities among all belief systems.

When I started college I studied philosophy. While searching for meaning in and of life I met a bunch of professors and other seekers who were largely materialists. The question nagged at me. I spent semesters learning about philosophy of religion. Taking on the identity of a rational, critical thinker I let go of my spiritual beliefs. I also worried that spirituality could lead to mental instability. I figured being scientific would keep me more mentally stable. Around the age of 19 I became an agnostic atheist - I didn’t believe in god, and I didn’t think we could know god.

I didn’t entirely give up on the project of meaning in life. I eventually wrote it all out built on a materialist paradigm.

Certain ideas still nagged at me like The Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman. He argues evolution implies we don’t see reality much at all, as in less than 1% if that. His arguments are quite convincing and equally unsettling. I set them aside but did include the fitness-beats-truth theorem in my work as it has significant implications for epistemic humility.

Fast forward to 2025, and I’m reading all kinds of works again, listening to audiobooks, and watching videos to expand my mind. When I was a teenager I saw a lot of conflicting material which was difficult to get a handle on. Now I’m starting to see many of the commonalities.

From Enter Mo Pai and Enter The Infinite I had a short list of source material to start reading. I’ve read all kinds of books about spiritual development, psychic self defense, and magic. There’s a ton of excellent works out there.

If you’re just getting into the weird stuff I highly recommend Extraordinary Knowing. The book was phenomenal at a rigorous person’s encounter with the unusual.

In 1991, when her daughter’s rare, hand-carved harp was stolen, Lisby Mayer’s familiar world of science and rational thinking turned upside down. After the police failed to turn up any leads, a friend suggested she call a dowser—a man who specialized in finding lost objects. With nothing to lose—and almost as a joke—Dr. Mayer agreed. Within two days, and without leaving his Arkansas home, the dowser located the exact California street coordinates where the harp was found.

Deeply shaken, yet driven to understand what had happened, Mayer began the fourteen-year journey of discovery that she recounts in this mind-opening, brilliantly readable book. Her first surprise: the dozens of colleagues who’d been keeping similar experiences secret for years, fearful of being labeled credulous or crazy.

Extraordinary Knowing is an attempt to break through the silence imposed by fear and to explore what science has to say about these and countless other “inexplicable” phenomena. From Sigmund Freud’s writings on telepathy to secret CIA experiments on remote viewing, from leading-edge neuroscience to the strange world of quantum physics, Dr. Mayer reveals a wealth of credible and fascinating research into the realm where the mind seems to trump the laws of nature.

She does not ask us to believe. Rather she brings us a book of profound intrigue and optimism, with far-reaching implications not just for scientific inquiry but also for the ways we go about living in the world.

Aside from this, researcher Dr. Dean Radin has written several excellent books on magic and psi, Supernormal and Real Magic. He’s done a ton of actual scientific experiments on psi along with meta-analyses. In podcasts he says “the existence of magic is proven beyond doubt.” If the data is accurate that’s true. It’s got the P-values and the seven-sigma proof. Often the experiments show a significant difference based on human attention. There is a measurable difference, but for most normal people doing the experiments the difference is not extreme like disappearing objects. The magic, micro-psychokinesis, is often in shaping probability outcomes, so the mind does interact with the world by consciousness alone.

Actually in talking to people about this I come across how little many are willing to believe. These unusual cases are too far outside of their experience. In fact I’ll likely write a separate article about this topic. Dr. Radin has also covered this in his works. Most people who are against the idea of psi phenomena say they would need a clear example in their own lives like Dr. Mayer’s Extraordinary Knowing.

Much of this is based around cultural world views. In fact the siddhis of Buddhism teach supernatural abilities may develop on the path to enlightenment. Telepathy can just happen at certain stages of meditation. Healing is a typical ability. Once you experience phenomena like this you need a different world view to integrate them.

Why aren’t there people levitating and setting stuff on fire where I live?

This is a little more of a complex question, but people do have reasons. Beyond all this work I highly recommend my two Tom’s, Tom Campbell and Tom Montalk. As far as I’m concerned they cover a lot of ground about reality.

Tom Campbell has created something extraordinary, a theory of everything, even more awesome he wraps it in a pun, My Big ToE. I partly found him from Robert “Bob” Monroe who Tom worked closely with for many years. His explanation for why we don’t see people using their powers all over is related to his psi-uncertainty principle. A factor is his view that reality is actually a virtual reality, like a simulation. We are parts of consciousness which are being trained to lower our entropy and become love.

This Tom has some extreme claims. He’s written them all out and recorded an audiobook on top of doing all kinds of podcasts. I’ve listened to him quite a bit. It’s nice to see how he openly accepts discussion of psi phenomena and consciousness. If the universe is a simulation it does explain many phenomena. He also doesn’t push things. He says if something doesn’t agree with your experience then you don’t need to believe it. He hopes his theory helps people build their own theories of everything.

My other Tom, Montalk, is basically an occult historian. Like Campbell he has a physics background. As far as anyone I’ve come across I think Montalk has one of the best models of the world. He covers a lot of the negative aspects of our reality which essentially relates to modern gnostic thought. It’s difficult to really challenge his ideas because they come from such occult sources. You’d basically have to be in the field, but you can tell from the clarity of his writing that he’s a serious thinker. A large part of what Montalk covers is aliens or non-human intelligence. I’ve now read all of his works. I highly recommend them.

A Different Outlook

Really my spiritual development comes from the philosophy of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn argues that science progresses by evermore robust theories that explain the phenomena studied. When anomalies build up a new theory comes along which explains all the previous data and the new anomalies, eventually this new theory is widely adopted.

I now believe the universe is fundamentally consciousness. This idealism encompasses all of the material world we see and “supernatural” phenomena. I’m continually developing my ideas. You can read more in my current micro-philosophy. I’ve grown from even that, but it’s a good checkpoint. I’ll need to re-write my meaning of life work, but there’s still some good stuff there.

I’ve also contemplated the hard problem of consciousness which is about how the experience of consciousness can arise from pure materialism. Previously I thought we would figure it out eventually, but this is actually a kind of scientism, a faith in the materialist paradigm. It may very well be impossible to solve with that limited view. Panpsychism has a mirror of the problem in the combination problem which may have some solutions. Many people like Bernardo Kastrup’s idea of analytical idealism for good reason; it solves many of the conundrums we face. I highly recommend looking into them. Now I lean towards a kind of analytical idealism that gives rise to panpsychism. Similar to Tom Campbell, consciousness could exist outside of our universe but “thought” our universe into existence by applying computational rules that give birth to recursive emergence in creating increasingly complex systems that generate further consciousness. Then idealist consciousness connects to these systems. That’s our virtual reality trainer. Idealism is looking from the top down and panpsychism is looking from the bottom up.

There are other factors in my reasoning I won’t put here just yet. I’ll say I’m continuing to integrate my past experiences which are best explained by these works. I have a lot I’d like to put out there.

I’m not a follower of any organized religion, but I do follow the Buddha and Jesus Christ.