Shane Baker
Sep 1, 2018 · 2 min read

This is a thought-provoking piece, but I’m torn in my response to it.

On the one hand, of course we must be mindful of the fact that, in the last two hundred years of American history (maybe even going further back), there have been numerous hucksters out there trying to make a quick buck off of the uneducated/uncritical. Teaching critical thinking is one of the more important jobs that (I hope, I trust) our school systems engage in. It’s angering to think of “enterprising,” unscrupulous individuals preying on the general population. New Age buffoonery abounds, and it’s always tied to capital. The lack of falsifiability of Beckler’s claims, we might say, is what allows her to propagate them.

On the other hand, if we let our critical faculties come full circle (and I completely agree with Edward below), we must also admit the universality, throughout human history, of spiritual or mystical experience. Communion with angels fits the bill for this kind of experience, and let’s not be too quick dismiss it. I would be much more interested in describing and documenting such experiences (like William James, for example), understanding what their prevalence says about the “human condition” than in debunking them in the name of an even higher truth (like science). In academia (and probably in journalism as well) the urge to unmask is so strong, and one’s ability to do it so highly revered, that it becomes hard to know when it has run its proper course. If scientific materialism has become the end-all-be-all, then it has merely replaced religious faith.

(Also, “metaphysical” is not a synonym for hogwash; it is a serious term in traditional philosophy. And, ironically, it is a metaphysical claim to assert that nothing beyond the scientific materialist view is “true”).

Shane Baker

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PhD Student in Literature. I read and write about mystical experience, psychedelics, shamanism, evolution, the body, and psychoanalysis.