The Danger Dimension: How Spiritualism and the Occult Are Messing with Something They Shouldn’t

Lewis Ungit, 6/1/24

Andrew was late to pick up his daughter from the bus stop and ran through a small orchard only to learn it was muddy and full of puddles. He was both in a hurry but also trying to avoid the puddles. A branch caught his pant leg, he slipped in the mud, and crashed down hard on a stone. It was at that moment that something very strange happened. He left his body. 

“I could see myself lying face down in the puddle. I was filled with terror,” he said in the essay he wrote for the Guardian. He worried for his family. Then somehow he left his body there in the orchard and went to the bus stop and could see his daughter get off the bus. He then somehow went back home and saw his other two daughters – one getting ready for bed, the other sleeping on the couch. And then he started to rise out of this world and into the sky but then he heard a voice telling him to go back. And in an instant he was awake. [1]

Stories like this are fascinatingly common. They are often referred to as near death experiences. People “die” but just for a moment and often describe things that they would not otherwise be able to describe. They see themselves outside their body. They are able to travel outside their body. They often see a vision of heaven or hear a voice they think is God. 

But this “out of body” experience is not limited to people who are dying. Incredibly similar experiences are recounted in many other contexts. People who meditate often claim that they can leave their body. People who practice the occult often claim they can leave their body. People who take strong psychedelics often claim that they can leave their body. The CIA once did experiments on “remote viewers” who were able to leave their bodies and describe places that no natural explanation could explain them being able to describe. It is as though in certain circumstances we can step outside of our three dimensions and into the other dimension. 

But the movement is not always us leaving our three-dimensional life and stepping into another dimension. Sometimes it is the opposite. Some people have claimed to have successfully in some way brought the other dimension into our three dimensions. This can simply be an attempt to learn about it and quantify it (as many do as they study dark matter and string theory) or it can be actually attempting to conjure and contact things within it (as so often happens with the occult). These entities can help tell the future, move things, curse things, and influence people. 

Once we get past our skepticism that this other dimension exists, we see that this dimension is always next to us and is at least in theory and apparently sometimes in practice, accessible and contactable. 

Now the question is should we. Should we intentionally mess with this dimension. Should we seek to, for example, learn how to remote view? Or should we take heavy psychedelics and seek to interact with entities that we meet on our trips? Should we try to contact the dead?

Now here is the interesting thing: when I ask this question to my friends, family and associates, I often get two very different answers. Either they enthusiastically say, yes. Or they recoil. There is rarely a middle ground. Either they view the prospect of going somewhere new and being able to have powers that seem almost superhuman as an obvious good, or they view it as a very dangerous thing. 

So which is right?

In the following, I am going to make the case that the latter not the former is the wise course. 

Imagine you are a 10-year-old child who walks from your mother’s apartment downtown to and from elementary school every day. Every day you walk past an alley that usually has people talking, playing music and sometimes sleeping in it. Would it be a good idea for you, the 10 year old, to cross the street and enter that alley? Talk with the people in it? Trust what the people tell you to do? Share information with them? Go with them? Any parent would immediately say, “no”. Stay away from strangers and do not talk to them and especially do not go into that alley. 

Why? Do we know for sure that the people in that alley would abuse, steal from, or otherwise hurt that child? No we don’t. But we do know that it is a very big unknown and such things are very possible. With such a giant risk and so many unknowns, we tell our child to steer clear. 

Let’s now consider another scenario. We have the opportunity to meet aliens from outer space. Do we do it? This specific question has been asked of many scientists. Should we, the scientists have been asked, intentionally send signals into space in an attempt to contact aliens? Physicist Mark Buchanan argued that this would be reckless. He writes, 

“Any civilization detecting our presence is likely to be technologically very advanced, and may not be disposed to treat us nicely. At the very least, the idea seems morally questionable.” [2]

The argument here is that when you do not know much about what you are interacting with (i.e. how powerful it is, what its moral intentions are, etc) you should steer clear.

A real life example of this is when the Spanish showed up in Mesoamerica. When King Moctezuma II saw the Spanish show up, should he have interacted with them or not? He had no idea how powerful they were. He didn’t know about the germs they brought with them that would devastate his people. He didn’t know that their morality (shaped by Christianity) would look very askance at the human sacrifices his priests practiced at an industrial rate. These strangers were a big unknown. But he welcomed them in and the great empire of the Aztecs ceased to exist soon after.

So how does all this relate to the “other dimension”? The claim by science, the occult, and organized religion is that it is an unknown realm that has, at least potentially, great power and the moral and ethical nature of it is ambiguous at best. And so by the same principles outlined in the examples above, we should reject any attempts to contact or interact with this dimension. 

But I would argue that it goes beyond simple ignorance. I would argue that a wide variety of data show that we do know more about this other dimension better than we pretend. The effects of attempting to contact the other dimension via occult methods have been shown to correlate with mental illness. Consider this study from C. Scharfetter of the University of Zürich’s School of Psychiatry, 

“In mediumistic psychoses, the splitting of non-ego parts of the psyche leads to a manifestation of schizophrenic symptoms. Dangers for mental health are an ego inflation by self-attribution of “superhuman” power.” [3]

At least at times, Scharfetter places the causality in reverse: placing the madness as the cause of the occult experiences but the association and correlation is real. And the correlation he finds has been observed in other studies. In a study of over one thousand participants, Zlatko Šram of the Croatian Center for Applied Social Research found, “people who practice black magic or have otherwise occult bondage in their history are particularly susceptible to comorbidity of depression and psychopath.” [4]

And if what I argued in my book, the Return of the Dragon, is true: that the use of psychedelics is a form of occult encounter, the evidence gets stronger. In Tell Your Children, author Alex Berenson documents the many studies that show the causal relationship between marijuana and mental illness. He writes, “Dozens of well-designed studies have linked marijuana with psychosis and schizophrenia. Researchers have found marijuana users are much more likely to develop schizophrenia.” [5]

And when we look at history, we also see that there are negative effects of occult practices. Throughout the history of humanity, we see that those who are deeply into the occult tend to also get into dark practices such as human sacrifice, pedophilia and oppression of the weak. In the Return of the Dragon, I toured world history looking at the strong relationship between the use of drugs for spiritual purposes and human sacrifice but I could do a similar study with the occult (that often incorporated drugs). But a survey of the ancient world where magic reigned is not a pretty history. The mystical religions around the world – with their shaman and witch doctors – all too often mixed in dark practices with their occult practices. Notoriously the Mesoamericans practiced human sacrifice, pedophilia, and brutality to the weak among them but the same can be said of the indigenous peoples of almost all regions of the world. And as recently as the Middle Ages, we see these dark themes present. Much of the witchcraft of this era wasn’t as innocuous as modern retellings suggest. Even if some witch trials were wild injustices, other prosecutions reveal that many of the concerns about witches were valid. Stealing of babies, human sacrifice, and drug use were all present in at least some of the cases involving witches. 

And finally, moving to the theological, we are told by Christian traditions that the other dimension is also not neutral. The Bible is full of warnings against mediumship (Leviticus 19:31), magic (Revelation 22:15) and witchcraft (Galatians 5:20). The warnings are stark and the dangers are said to be great. 

So let’s get back to this question of leaving our body. Of somehow exiting our three dimensions and entering some other dimension. Whether we do so with drugs or with occult practices or through meditation, we simply can’t assume this dimension is neutral or safe. It is potentially powerful, potentially dangerous, and very ambiguous morally. And so when we consider this question: should we access the other dimension? The answer has to be responded to with the same terror that a mother would have if their child asked if he should enter the alley and talk to the people there. It should be rebuffed in the same way that King Moctezuma II should have rebuffed the Spanish. It is a terrifying prospect that shouldn’t be messed with. 

There is a veil that separates us from the other dimension and both science and the occult claim to have ways to access it – to either cross over or, perhaps even more terrifyingly, invite that which is over to come to us. And there are enough warnings and dangers combined with unknown powers that any sane assessment would be to leave it alone. 

Endnotes

[1] Andrew Clover “ My out-of-body experience”, The Guardian, 8/2/2014. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/aug/02/my-out-of-body-experience

[2] Rebecca Boyle, Why These Scientists Fear Contact With Space Aliens, NBC NEWS, 2/8/2017 https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/the-big-questions/why-these-scientists-fear-contact-space-aliens-n717271

[3] Scharfetter C. Okkultismus, Parapsychologie und Esoterik in der Sicht der Psychopathologie [Occultism, parapsychology and the esoteric from the perspective of psychopathology]. Fortschr Neurol Psychiatr. 1998 Oct;66(10):474-82. German. doi: 10.1055/s-2007-995287. PMID: 9825253.

[4]De Gruyter Open, Occult practices feed both depression and psychopathy, Medical Press, January 23, 2017,  https://medicalxpress.com/news/2017-01-occult-depression-psychopathy.html

[5] Berenson, Alex. Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence . Free Press. Kindle Edition.