Science, Philosophy, and Magic?

The Role of the Occult in Shaping What We Perceive as Reality

“On that day, however, he [Carl Gustav Jung] was dressed in a Japanese Ceremonial Gown so that, in the light of the late afternoon, he looked like a magician or a priest of some ancient cult.”—Miguel Serrano

As much as people nowadays denounce Christianity for being anti-science, the Christian patriarchal mode of thinking has, in fact, led men to the fundaments of modern sciences, the scientific worldview, namely 1) that the world is ‘real’ (i.e., objectively physical), 2) that time is linear (progresses from an origin to a past, present, and future), and 3) that things happen for a reason (the world is governed by causal logic).

This masculine mode of thought, of course, opposes that of the irrational female point of view that 1) the world is a mental projection, 2) time is a timeless Now, and 3) things can happen for no reason. The masculine view is called scientific, and the female is called magical. But both exist for good reason!

Heidegger and Magic

Philosophers may rightfully counter that men’s material science can only measure a perceived physical reality, but it cannot, using its scientific methods, say much about the non-measurable aspects of reality. This is why modern science still struggles to define what time, space, and motion are. Is time a particle? Is motion a figment of the brain’s imagination?

German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) famously declared the end of philosophy. In his later teachings, Heidegger appeared to be alluding to the existence of magic, namely the possibility that one might transform the occult, or the unconscious, into overt and conscious realities, merely by imagining them so.

To philosophers like Heidegger, and to occultists like Ernst Schertel, reality was nothing but a collection of imagined perceptions and perceived imaginations. And these figments, they thought, could be entirely overruled by reimagining the future. So, in this post, I want to contribute to a discussion about the potential for magic as a creative force, summoning new realities into being from nothing.

Two Premonition Dreams and One Real Prison Adventure

As you may know, I was arrested on September 21st of this year on accusations of “sedition” and “threats”. On October 2nd, the judge sentenced me to my pretrial detention of 12 days. When I was freed again, I soon remembered having dreamed about going to prison before—and I had recorded my dreams in a dream log.

I had, in fact, dreamed about going to prison three times before I was ultimately arrested:

On the morning of June 20th, 2023, I had recorded a dream of myself going to prison—and being released again after a lenient sentence—in a manner very similar to what perspired that late September 2024. My dream accurately described my athletic activities in the prison’s courtyard, for example, where prisoners are “aired” for an hour a day. My dream also foresaw my release through a series of staircases past glass walls and doors, exactly as it was at the PI Alphen aan de Rijn where I was held.

The accuracy of this dream vis-à-vis the real experience suggests to me that premonition dreams are real.

Prior to my arrest, I had had another premonition dream on August 11th, 2024. The details I recorded from this dream were half wrong but also half accurate. I dreamed about police knocking on my door in the middle of the night, and about myself being awake before they arrived. On September 21st, that happened. I dreamed about a SWAT team coming in to search my house, thinking it being used as a drug lab. There was no SWAT team, but police did search my car, and in prison, I did meet people who ran drug labs from their homes (just not me).

I also dreamed that police confiscated my winter jackets. In prison, I didn’t have my jackets with me (or any other clothing besides what I was wearing at the time of my arrest). I specifically dreamed about having my wallet, keys, car key, and IDs with me. These were indeed the items I had with me when I entered prison, and I was returned these items upon my release on October 3rd.

In a third dream—while I was sleeping in my prison cell—I imagine that I would be released on a sunny day, and that I would be looking to retrieve my bicycle that I had left behind in a city center. In reality, I was indeed released on a sunny day, and indeed I did go look for my bicycle (and found it), just as in the dream.

A New Theory of Reality: My Theory of Compression

You can’t use information from premonition dreams unless you are aware that they exist. You should then keep a dream log to record your nightly fantasies. And you’d have to develop a skill in determining what dreams are premonition dreams, since not all of them are. Though my dreams didn’t exactly come true the way I had imagined them, their general themes did come true, and in my case, at least half the details were eerily accurate.

I thus began to wonder under what model of reality premonition dreams might be real? I came up with a Theory of Compression (and Decompression) of Future Present States:

Imagine that the present moment holds a definite state of reality. I.e., we can never change the present in its present moment. But we can plan to alter our future. We change the future’s present by planning, acting, deciding, thinking, and dreaming about it.

The summation of these future-oriented activities leads to a gradual closing of a certain window of opportunity. Namely, the window of the future present that is nearing us. As the future, say a month from now, approaches us, the envisioned reality must become ever more defined, until it becomes the new definite present state of things that can no longer be influenced or change.

The process leading up to a new and desired future present state does not begin with definiteness. It rather begins with an undefined, unclear mess: we don’t yet exactly know, at first, what we want our future to be like. We haven’t begun to imagine it yet (and many people never do).

We, as individuals, may choose not to participate in future-oriented activities. Furthermore, we may, indeed, “go wherever the wind blows” when it comes to planning for the future. But others do plan for the future, even the wind. And so we may choose to live life passively, at the hands of those who shape the future for us. Or we may choose to become active shapers of the future.

As with planning and booking next year’s holiday, our decisions become more and more fixed as time goes by, until the eventual holiday is experienced. We only experience the one version of our holiday that we ultimately steer towards. The world, of course, also thwarts and shapes our desires. The hotel we first chose may turn out to be too expensive by the time we decide to book, so we settle for a cheaper option, or perhaps go camping instead. Or, perhaps, the flight to our desired destination was cancelled, so we hopped on a last minute trip to a totally random destination.

Nevertheless, as we approach our future time-of-departure, more and more decisions will already have been made. We begin to relax into the potential definite state of our holiday. Usually, a few days or a few our before our departure, we’ve come to terms with our decisions. We now take them for granted. This process of moving ourselves from an undecided, unimagined place toward a lived and experienced vacationing is what I call the process of compression.

Compression, in this sense, means we take a blurry, unclear future and we begin to mold it—compress it—into its definite form (the future present we are going to experience). The way we compress this unknown future into something known resembles the way a potter turns a blob of sand and water into a decorated flower pot. Once the pot is finished, the potter stops making decisions for it. His compressive activities have reached a final state—until, one day, the pot falls and breaks into a thousand shards, thereby releasing its compressed energy back to the world.

At some point, we have “compressed” all future potential into a definite result, whether it be a flower pot, or a 7-day hotel trip to Bang Kok, or something greater affecting the whole world. After we’ve settled on a final result, by experiencing it in the present, the experience becomes part of our past. “I made a flower pot last year.” “We went to see the elephants in the zoo of Bang Kok last summer.” “I gave the people a new God and they worshiped Him.”

Now, something extraordinary happens. Our memories, though they may be recorded on video or photo or other image carriers, perhaps handwritten diaries, begin to decompress. Yes, our past decompresses again as we lose track of all the details. We forget. We can’t remember our lived experience perfectly any longer. After all, we have other things to do, such as looking forward to new future, or attending other matters in the present.

Some memories we entirely forget, others we cherish more. But even the most cherished memories begin to fade. Why is that? Where do events go after everyone has forgotten about them and no records of the events survive? They merge back into the uncompressed, indefinite, back into the occult, or the unconscious. What has been forgotten returns the world to become new potential for new future presents.

(Here, I might then argue that time is cyclical, though not circular. We use the uncompressed energies to shape our future present. Once we have experience that future present, the history of it gradually decompresses. Once entirely forgotten, the energy has been fully released back into the undefined mess we started with, only to be reused for designing new futures.)

The Potential Reality of Premonition Dreams

Here is why I think premonition dreams, therefore, can be a reality under this model: As we approach a certain future date, we may be able to access the state of compression of future events. I.e., we may begin to see the contours of what the future is going to be like—barring sudden and unexpected disruptions. Just as a potter sets out to produce some object out of clay, at some point it becomes clear to us, observers, that he is making a flower pot instead of a sculpture. As long as the pottery’s ceiling doesn’t collapse onto the potter and his creation, we may be pretty certain to assume that he is going to produce a flower pot.

Our best way to access knowledge of the present state of compression of future-presents is, in my view, through dreams and exstasis. This lies beyond the realm of a material science but is easily accessible to anyone who becomes aware of his personal dreams and visions. Once we identify that some of our dreams are, indeed, premonition dreams, we can start reading the forces that are always flowing in a state of increased compression toward new futures.

By reading the shape of these compressions—by aptly interpreting our dreams and visions—we gain access to imperfect but better than random knowledge of the future.

Dreams and so on aren’t supposed to be picture-perfect predictions of the future, since that future hasn’t taken shape yet! But the shaping is on its way already in the form of these compressing forces. By recognizing the shape of the future, the same way we recognize the shape of a bunny in a formation of clouds, we gain advance knowledge of future events. We become seers and seeresses.

So it doesn’t surprise me that ancient peoples had their prophets, shamans and druids. They were people practicing a forgotten art of reading the compression, of listening to their dreams. The future hasn’t been definitively decided upon yet. There is still time (potential!) to change it.