Medusa’s Curse
The Cult of Stone

2,996 words

First they came for elves, and I remained silent because I never met an elf. Then they came for Gods, and I remained silent because I never felt their presence. Then they came for ghosts, and I remained silent because I never saw a ghost. Then they came for consciousness, and I did not exist.
– Unknown mortal

***

Once upon a time man was born into a world full of wonder and terror. Earth seemed to expand into infinity, hiding who knew how many secrets. City lights did not yet blind us to the full glory of the night sky and the land was virgin and untamed. That there was a mysterious higher force behind nature seemed almost self-evident. Whence did everything come?

It didn’t take long for men to start drawing upon their experiences to create a worldview explaining how the cosmos functions. Untainted by grand abstract philosophies, they regarded everything they experienced as a real part of the world. Thus stood side by side weather and gods, medicine and magic, mathematics and astrology, architecture and geomancy. After all, things such as encounters with ghosts and other beings were already recorded in the texts of the earliest known civilization, Sumer. It is not particularly surprising, then, that most people up until quite recently considered them an indisputable part of life.

Yet it is true that atheists existed as early as ancient Greece. Were they the first ones to awake or to fall asleep? Were they, as modern discourse teaches, intellectual supermen that saw through the baseless beliefs of their kinsmen, or was the cause of their disbelief something else?

The fact that an individual can even be an atheist certainly tells us something about existence. Their philosophical arguments are not without merit, especially so in the domain of deconstructing rigid religious dogmas that curiously claim contradictory things while proclaiming themselves to be the sole possessors of truth. At the root of the materialist conviction, however, lies the absence of personal experience of the supernatural and the ensuing disappointme­nt. The entire worldview rests on the notion that if I haven’t experienced something, everyone else must be mistaken about its existence. Any materialist reading this undoubtedly protests that his views rest on an objective and rational methodology, yet upon closer examination we will see that its foundations are as flimsy as of those who claim biological research proves the equality of all men, when it does the opposite.

Systemic hallucinations?

The materialists have developed their own ways of explaining the enduring presence of paranormal phenomena. The answer, they claim, is very simple. It’s all hallucinations born out of neurological errors. The perception of a supernatural event does not have its origin in the outside world. This is a legitimate theory, so let us put it to test.

First, we will analyze the ancient phenomenon of people reporting ghost sightings. There have been many accounts of witnessing translucent men that disappear into nowhere, and it is surely one of the most common supernatural occurrences. Materialists debunk them in the following way:

1. If the event was witnessed by only one person, it is immediately dismissed as a hallucination.
2. If the event was witnessed by several people, but they heard scary stories about the place beforehand, it is refused on the grounds of group hallucination and suggestion.
3. If the event occurred unexpectedly and is attested to by several people that saw the exact same thing, it’s refused on the grounds that they must be lying and fantasizing.

The hallucination theory has subtle implications to it. If it’s correct, it follows that the events cannot, for example, relay information about a distant event or information that is independently verified by unsuspecting strangers (such as the same ghost in a specific that has been witnessed by people over decades). As such, the third category is the most revealing one. The only criterion by which the skeptic refutes it is his own idea of how the world should work. In other words, it is refused solely on ideological grounds.

Another common experience is that of departed loved ones visiting you. Surely, it must be only a coping mechanism of the mind stricken with grief. Yet when you speak to people who have experienced this, when you read the literature, and listen to interviews dealing with this topic, you will find out one peculiar thing: it is not uncommon for people to experience a vivid dream barely distinguishable from waking reality in which a loved one, who just unexpectedly died, says his farewells, before anyone even knows it through material means. I have personally spoken with a woman that experienced a dream visitation simultaneously with her brother and there have been similar testimonies in my family. How do the so called skeptics explain this? They don’t. These cases must not have happened, because they cannot explain them within their hallucination paradigm.

Should they be forced to explain them, they have no option but to call the witnesses liars. In that case, however, they have another problem to deal with. These cases are qualitatively the same as those that they happily include in their debunking tomes. Therefore the phenomena that they can reasonably explain (i.e. the first and second category) are considered real but hallucinatory, and those that they cannot explain are deemed to be outright fabrications. It is as if a doctor testing his experimental treatment of fever used a particular thermometer to note down patient’s temperatures but insisted that when it shows someone still has a fever, it’s an error of the thermometer, which he then merrily continues to use for measurements that fit his theory.

To drive the point even further, let us briefly consider the mysterious ball lightning. It’s essentially a floating spherical object of light that appears suddenly and without an apparent cause. Reports vary widely: it can pass through walls, leave burn marks, explode, be multicolored, smell of sulfur, and so on. It is a very rare phenomenon that has been reported all over the world. Despite the fact that apparitions and ghosts are more common, it’s taken more seriously. How is that possible? Why is a group of people that witnesses a ball of light passing through walls inside a building considered credible, while the same group witnessing a ghost passing through would be laughed at? Since ball lightning is regarded as a purely physical phenomenon, it doesn’t threaten the preconceived materialist notions of how the world should work.

Thus materialists with their grand abstract theories removed from reality stoop down to the level of the belief in systemic racism, only here they substitute all-powerful racism with all-powerful hallucinations. For thousands of years and in every place they have ever been, blacks end up living in crime and poverty. The mysterious force of racism is somehow responsible for their problems even in places far removed from other races. Likewise, ghosts and the dead – not to mention other beings – have presented themselves to mankind for millennia. Ancient peoples were not fools, they discussed myths, religious beliefs, and supernatural events. They were more than capable of logical reasoning. Pliny the Elder – wondering whether it could be true – recounted a tale of a man who had a near-death-experience and saw that his brother, who was far away at the time, was dead. When he came back into his body, he later found out that the brother really died. In modern research, NDEs where people discover someone else died and relay the information before anyone knows it by material means are called “Peak in Darien.”

Despite what the skeptics might believe, the doctors researching NDEs are well aware that the burden of proof is on them. The crux of their work revolves around validating what the almost-dead individual saw in an “out-of-body” state. Their unanimous conclusion after examining thousands of cases and questioning the medical personal, who affirm patient’s claims, is that people during NDEs are able to accurately describe what was happening, both visually and auditorily, not only inside the operating room but also in other ones.

Deep down, we all know that if several people sitting at a table witness some sudden and unexpected event, it simply happened. No, their biochemical processes in the brain didn’t just randomly sync up to create a coordinated group hallucination. It takes a special kind of demented circular reasoning to absolutely reject the possibility of supernatural phenomena. “Apparitions are just baseless hallucinations and if an apparition happened before anyone knew the person was dead it must be a lie, because we know apparitions are hallucinations.” Does this sound familiar? This is the same type of thinking employed by anti-racists. “Sure, some research suggests that IQ is hereditary and it differs among races, but it can’t be right since we already know every race is equal, so what’s the fuss about?” As in Marxism, a beloved grand theory takes precedence over reality.

I implore materialists reading this to rethink whether their worldview is so ironclad and whether they really know as much about supernatural experiences as they believe.

Note on religion and the supernatural

All this sounds interesting, you may think, but then why do religions across the world seem to disagree with each other, unlike science? We are dealing with frontiers of knowledge here and so it happens that the frontiers of science are just as fecund with irreconcilable and unverifiable theories. Having exhausted the possibilities of modern technology, we are now staring at an impenetrable wall. The mystery of dark matter, for example, may be as disappointing as that it simply can’t ever be detected by human instruments. It is normal within physics for laws to be valid only within a limited framework. The laws of classical physics are valid only on a certain scale. Apply them on a quantum scale, and they cease to be correct. Just because the supernatural cannot be explained within classical physics does not mean that it does not exist. It has its own logic and laws largely unknown to humans.

The more fleeting something is the harder it is to study it and arrive at conclusions. This is as true for physical phenomena as for the supernatural. If physicists have their personal theories that clash with others and can likely never be verified it should not be surprising that metaphysicians have their own conflicting ideas.

Leveling of reality

People aware of themselves as more than mere physical bioelectrical systems, aware of more than just eating, fornicating, aging, and dying bodies run headlong into the isolation imposed upon them as a result of the other obiter dictum that holds that, if a person feels he is more than just body, he is wrong.

To thoroughly participate in physical life and be respectable among one’s contemporaries, one had best reduce one’s awareness to fit. And so people usually do.
– Ingo Swann, To Kiss The Earth Goodbye

Having dealt with the dialectical side of the issue, let us turn toward the metaphysical and (meta)psychological. Why do so many people feel disconnect from anything transcendent?

Many a reader of this essay would agree that egalitarianism is nonsense. There are people who are inherently superior by the virtue of their inborn qualities. A genius cannot lend his capabilities to an average man no more than he can give sight to a blind man. There is therefore an impassable disconnect between them. Minds differ greatly in how they process information and what information they process. As far as their individual experiences go, we might, if we are feeling bold, say that they quite literally live in different worlds.

One can easily underestimate the aristocratic nature of the senses. We take it for granted that people walking on the same street are perceiving it more or less identically. Nevertheless, there is not a single sense that does not greatly differ between individuals. Everyone has experienced a disagreement with a fellow human about sensory input. Is it this color or that one? Do you hear the hum or not? Do you smell that? Is the water cold or hot? And it isn’t just about raw data either: A highly intelligent person taking an IQ test sees patterns where the less intelligent sees only gibberish.

Some people lack a physical sense altogether. Let’s imagine a world where humans and animals don’t exhibit the sense of smell save for a very specific chemical under unknown circumstances. This chemical forms and dissolves rather quickly, but humans encounter it often enough – on average two times during a lifetime – that tales about the strange sensation of smell have been recorded since the dawn of history, and people still report its occurrence. Undoubtedly, there would be skeptics, “champions of reason,” arguing that it is a mere hallucination.

Supernatural phenomena in our world are in a similar position. It’s practically impossible to foretell them. And since we are taught that everything in life revolves around perpetually filling the senses with stimuli, the chance that we will ever notice something beyond the deafening music in our ears and the never-ending stream of images on our displays is slim. When it nonetheless does by some miracle penetrate the incessant noise, our teachers – often the same Marxist-adjacent academics who taught us to race doesn’t exist – duly instruct us to dismiss it as an illusion.

A stellar example of such an all-knowing intellectual is Michael Shermer, the co-founder of The Skeptical Society and something of an atheist superstar, “the vanquisher of pseudoscience.” Among others, he dedicated his work to exposing the “irrational folly” of racialism and doubting the Holocaust.

In a blog post that was both admirable and pathetic, ”Infrequencies,” Shermer revealed that after his wife’s grandfather died he experienced a minor strange event of his own and struggled to interpret it skeptically, ending the post with the following words:

I have to admit, it rocked me back on my heels and shook my skepticism to its core as well. I savored the experience more than the explanation.

The emotional interpretations of such anomalous events grant them significance regardless of their causal account. And if we are to take seriously the scientific credo to keep an open mind and remain agnostic when the evidence is indecisive or the riddle unsolved, we should not shut the doors of perception when they may be opened to us to marvel in the mysterious.

The same man that wrote this spent the preceding decades telling people that no, their supernatural experiences absolutely could not be real. He published a book after book proudly explaining “in-depth” the “fallacious and subjective” nature of such beliefs. And yet it took one insignificant event that even I wouldn’t consider particularly interesting for him to be “shaken to his core.”

As I previously suggested, the materialist conviction is born out of personal bitterness at not having experienced anything profoundly supernatural. It’s an attempt to drag everyone down to the same level, an egalitarian doctrine par excellence. It’s not very different in its methods and rhetoric from other egalitarian ideologies. Unsurprisingly, it’s one of the “elite” beliefs among academics signaling how noble and clever they are. Locked inside their ivory towers, they construct elaborate theories purporting to explain subjects that they conveniently have little to no real experience and knowledge of: systemic racism, Freudian psychoanalysis, Marxist economics, materialism, etc. All try to shove the real world into their narrow box of how the world should work like according to their cherished beliefs.

The plight of the modern world comes from its insistence that everyone has to agree and understand. What this inadvertently results in is that any egalitarian ideology can only consider that which is common to both idiots and geniuses, the blind and the sighted. Hence modern politics and culture revolve around promises to fulfill physiological needs. Nothing else is permitted to be considered, since it does not exist for everyone.

People of yore, who saw oaths as supernaturally binding and consequently preferred death to dishonor, are portrayed as alien and foolish, because honor is not a property that can be dissected and bodily existence is all there is.

The greatest tragedy of present humanity is that it has convinced itself feelings, thoughts, and other living forces are mere metaphors for activities of matter when the opposite is true. A detailed examination of the classic materialist theory of consciousness reveals that it is completely nonsensical and contradictory. It is easy to forget that from the materialist point of view, the clever abstraction called “neuron” is nothing more than a group of atoms. Does it make any sense whatsoever that deterministic “domino effects” between atoms became conscious when they are connected in a particular way? It’s beyond the scope of this essay to deal with the topic in great detail, but it has not escaped my attention that Annaka Harris, an author and wife of the influential atheist and neuroscientist Sam Harris, has reached the inescapable conclusion that a thorough analysis of the claim that inner experience is an illusory epiphenomenon of matter is logically incoherent. Honest atheists (now more of an agnostic) like the content creator Alex O’Connor, who interviewed Annaka Harris on this topic, admit that indeed consciousness must somehow be a fundamental quality.

Concluding thoughts

Our enemies have deconstructed race, sex, optimism, religion, natalism, heroism, self-sacrifice, and just about anything that gives man a sense of purpose and order in life. Now they are busy deconstructing themselves. Consciousness does not exist. Free will does not exist. You do not exist. Good, let them believe that. While they sit in their in their rooms full of doubt, angst, and sorrow, we sow the seeds of a future world, our world.

They, projecting their inner turmoil and emptiness, see nothing but darkness. Humans are just meat puppets in a gloomy, oppressive mechanical universe, are they not? Let us be Aryans. Let us know that after each night comes day and that life is full of mysteries. Gods, elves, gnomes, spirits, demons, and magic never left us.