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So I will start this journal by saying that im a complete beginner coming in anything related to the occult, as well as a complete sceptic in anything related to magic. My motivations to start these studies has been simply to understand consciousness more. The elements that make up our bodies are part of a cosmic cycle of tremendous scale. The fact that conscious experience is the only indisputably real ontological feature of reality without an empirically proven material cause leads me to believe there must be more to our subjective experience. Our thoughts matter, the way the we feel about things matter, the changes we make in other people's lives, I believe there is power and value in the very act of existing. To study the consciousness is to study the unseen.
The first chapter I want to cover is about history. Setting up a base to understand how spiritual experiences have developed over time, and how is it that the abrahamic religions that shaped me came to be. For some reason people have this notion that ancient civilizations where somehow less smart than us, however this has been proven to be wholly untrue. There in nothing fundamentally different about the way our brain operates today, compared to someone's brain 2000, 5000, or even 20,000 years ago. People have "thought" in the same manner for approximately 300,000 years. The first person to imagine something mustve felt crazy, to create something with your mind that is not there, this is the first instance of real magic ever, the first thought.
About the first spiritual experiences in humans.
Long before civilizations carved the names of their gods into stone, humanity's first spiritual experiences likely emerged from a much simpler question: What is hiding behind the world we can see? Early humans lived in an environment filled with uncertainty. Every rustling bush, distant shadow, or sudden storm could mean the presence of danger, or an unseen force. Cognitive science suggests that natural selection favored a mind that preferred false positives over deadly mistakes. It was safer to assume that something possessed intention than to ignore a genuine threat. Its possible that this tendency to perceive agency in ambiguous events became the foundation from which religion eventually emerged.
This idea is closely related to animism, one of the oldest known forms of spirituality. Animism is the perception that thigns are alive: that rivers possess will, mountains have spirits, forests listen, and storms carry intention. Rather than seeing the universe as an assembly of lifeless matter, early humans saw it as a world inhabited by living presences. Some researchers argue that this perception was an extension of an evolved survival instinct, while others view it as humanity's earliest intuition that reality contains dimensions beyond ordinary perception. Regardless of its origin, animism became the seed from which nearly every ancient religion would stem.
Yet humans did something no other known animal achieved. While many animals appear capable of detecting agency or responding to invisible threats, humans developed symbolic language, abstract reasoning, and the ability to imagine collectively. These abilities transformed instinct and imagination into energies, entieties, rituals, and eventually theology. The invisible became populated with ancestors, spirits, gods, and cosmic deities. What possibly begun as a survival strategy evolved into humanity's search for meaning, purpose, and our place within the universe. Which raises a deeper question that remains unanswered: What is consciousness itself? Science has made extraordinary progress in explaining matter, energy, evolution, and how the brain works, yet no consensus exists regarding why subjective experience exists at all. We can describe neurons, electrical signals, and neuroscience, but we still cant explain why it feels like something to be conscious.
Throughout history, mystical schools have treated consciousness not as a product of the brain, but as the medium through which reality is experienced and transformed. Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Neoplatonism, Hindu philosophy, and countless traditions begin with the assumption that the visible world is only one layer of existence. Whether these traditions describe an objective metaphysical reality or symbolic maps of the human mind remains a question, but they all begin with the mystery of consciousness itself.
Perhaps humanity's first spiritual experience was not the invention of gods, but the moment our ancestors realized that the universe was deeper than what their senses could reveal. It is from this ancient current of thought that the religions of the Near East; including the Canaanite tradition; would eventually emerge.
Guthrie, S. (2002). Animal animism: Evolutionary roots of religious behavior. In I. Pyysiäinen & V. Anttonen (Eds.), Current approaches in the cognitive science of religion. London, England.
Peoples, H. C., Duda, P., & Marlowe, F. W. (2016). Hunter-gatherers and the origins of religion. Human Nature, 27(3), 261–282.
The first chapter I want to cover is about history. Setting up a base to understand how spiritual experiences have developed over time, and how is it that the abrahamic religions that shaped me came to be. For some reason people have this notion that ancient civilizations where somehow less smart than us, however this has been proven to be wholly untrue. There in nothing fundamentally different about the way our brain operates today, compared to someone's brain 2000, 5000, or even 20,000 years ago. People have "thought" in the same manner for approximately 300,000 years. The first person to imagine something mustve felt crazy, to create something with your mind that is not there, this is the first instance of real magic ever, the first thought.
About the first spiritual experiences in humans.
Long before civilizations carved the names of their gods into stone, humanity's first spiritual experiences likely emerged from a much simpler question: What is hiding behind the world we can see? Early humans lived in an environment filled with uncertainty. Every rustling bush, distant shadow, or sudden storm could mean the presence of danger, or an unseen force. Cognitive science suggests that natural selection favored a mind that preferred false positives over deadly mistakes. It was safer to assume that something possessed intention than to ignore a genuine threat. Its possible that this tendency to perceive agency in ambiguous events became the foundation from which religion eventually emerged.
This idea is closely related to animism, one of the oldest known forms of spirituality. Animism is the perception that thigns are alive: that rivers possess will, mountains have spirits, forests listen, and storms carry intention. Rather than seeing the universe as an assembly of lifeless matter, early humans saw it as a world inhabited by living presences. Some researchers argue that this perception was an extension of an evolved survival instinct, while others view it as humanity's earliest intuition that reality contains dimensions beyond ordinary perception. Regardless of its origin, animism became the seed from which nearly every ancient religion would stem.
Yet humans did something no other known animal achieved. While many animals appear capable of detecting agency or responding to invisible threats, humans developed symbolic language, abstract reasoning, and the ability to imagine collectively. These abilities transformed instinct and imagination into energies, entieties, rituals, and eventually theology. The invisible became populated with ancestors, spirits, gods, and cosmic deities. What possibly begun as a survival strategy evolved into humanity's search for meaning, purpose, and our place within the universe. Which raises a deeper question that remains unanswered: What is consciousness itself? Science has made extraordinary progress in explaining matter, energy, evolution, and how the brain works, yet no consensus exists regarding why subjective experience exists at all. We can describe neurons, electrical signals, and neuroscience, but we still cant explain why it feels like something to be conscious.
Throughout history, mystical schools have treated consciousness not as a product of the brain, but as the medium through which reality is experienced and transformed. Hermeticism, Kabbalah, Neoplatonism, Hindu philosophy, and countless traditions begin with the assumption that the visible world is only one layer of existence. Whether these traditions describe an objective metaphysical reality or symbolic maps of the human mind remains a question, but they all begin with the mystery of consciousness itself.
Perhaps humanity's first spiritual experience was not the invention of gods, but the moment our ancestors realized that the universe was deeper than what their senses could reveal. It is from this ancient current of thought that the religions of the Near East; including the Canaanite tradition; would eventually emerge.
Guthrie, S. (2002). Animal animism: Evolutionary roots of religious behavior. In I. Pyysiäinen & V. Anttonen (Eds.), Current approaches in the cognitive science of religion. London, England.
Peoples, H. C., Duda, P., & Marlowe, F. W. (2016). Hunter-gatherers and the origins of religion. Human Nature, 27(3), 261–282.