Our Yearning For Mystery
THE TIMES in which we live seem ideal for a renascence of spiritism.
Mass anxiety exists among people of various cultures, social and economic conditions. People are running scared. The older generations feel threatened by the younger, the younger are frustrated and angry. This anger is focused on the dehumanization of life, the bigness of social institutions.
"I am a human being. Do not fold, spindle or mutilate" is a sign often found in campus demonstrations. With these words students protest the ubiquity of computers and I.D. numbers, of mechanical responses to human problems. It's hard to get simple things done, pressures only seem to increase, the future isn't perceived as in any sense bright.
Problems of war, of environmental pollution, of poverty and injustice have people of all ages uptight. But especially the young, who possess the greatest amount of future.
And so people look for a way out. They look inward to psychedelic drugs, music, strobe lights; they look outward to sexual experience, the sort of simplicity represented by communal living.
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There's a mystical element to all this. There's an attempt to wash away what can be seen — the machine, the dirt, the fear, the injustice, the uncertainty — with what cannot be seen but can only be felt.
Not felt with the hands, but with the heart; not filling the belly, but touching the spirit, maybe only touching it as with a feather — but touching it.
Another age might have turned to the church with its anxiety and desire for a mystical element in life. But to many people, today's church seems impotent because it is identified with the problems it should be solving. They see the church as a mere authenticator of the American establishment. The individual is a unit to be counted in large church meetings, his money rung up, just as he is counted by business, university and government for their purposes. Real estate is more important than compassion and justice. Spiritual authority is lost in a maze of uncertainty. Dead tradition and erratic change annihilate mystery. Beauty's holiness, or holiness's beauty, fades before pragmatism and expediency.
But the desire for mystery, our hunger for something beyond computers and commuting, will be satisfied: because we're human. I am a human being. I laugh, I weep, I fear, I sit and watch the ocean break on shore under pale moon. I ask whether there is anything beyond ocean and moon, tears and laughter, body and hands.
Perhaps still more, the human bound to sidewalks and garbage, noise and pollution, who never sits by the ocean looking across unbroken sky, sees his need, humanity's need, for something beyond.
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Astrologers answer those feelings. Mediums respond. For a fee, whether it's paid directly or by paying for the newspaper or magazine that carries a horoscope column.
But don't put them down for this. The psychiatrist also charges a fee. So does the church, or at least it accepts offerings. And what they deliver is often void of mystery.
Anxiety is answered by astrology. Horoscopes may indicate what the stars have dictated for us. If they do, to be forewarned is to be forearmed.
Dark death is penetrated by mediums, or so they claim. A seance opens a door to the beyond and permits a voice to come through, a voice that may tell us what the condition of our loved one is. The voice will not tell us much, but it will vaguely confirm our hope that death is a door rather than a wall. And it will comfort us.
But can we be sure? Can we know that the voice really comes from the other side, that the medium isn't a fake?
And if the medium has actually established communication with the spirit world, can we be sure that the spirits are truthful and not lying? Perhaps the voices from beyond are meant to delude rather than enlighten us.
There's at least a possibility that we are plunging into deeper problems that those we already face when we consult mediums or follow our horoscope.
Eileen J. Garrett is a medium and president of the American Society for Physical Research. She speaks about America's current obsession with the "shabby trade of the soothsayer" in her book, The
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Sense and Nonsense of Prophecy. "On the one hand [America] is hardboiled enough to sneer at anything it cannot see or understand. On the other hand, it is gullible enough to patronize the fortunetellers who infest our cities. It spends large sums of money to hear such astounding revelations as 'You're a good friend but a dangerous enemy' or 'Don't argue with your boss next Wednesday.' People who profess to tell fortunes with spectacular ease often have sensitivity to a marked degree, which they deliberately use and abuse."
Maybe there's a better way.
