In a recent email exchange, a correspondent asked me “whats your opinion on astrology?”, to which I replied, “superstitious nonsense”. A further question of “so, what do you think of astral projection or such? Is it all your mind playing tricks on you?” elicited a response which seems to have hit home. So, for all the folks out there who could use a gentle reminder, and for those sane souls swimming in a sea of insanity who just need a little encouragement to employ their own common sense, here’s the response in question.

It’s entirely in the mind, yes. People don’t reincarnate, the chance layout of the tarot cards is unrelated to the passage of future events, there are no real “demons” to evoke or real “Angels” to invoke, and you can’t bewitch your neighbour’s ox by sending vibrations across the astral plane. None of this supernatural stuff is true. None of it.

It’s not “your mind playing tricks on you”, either – if you actually pay attention to what you’re doing, none of this stuff even appears to be real. When you actually believe in this stuff, that’s when your mind plays “tricks” on you, because you’re drawing invalid conclusions based on what you merely think you are seeing, not on what you actually are seeing. It’s no accident that when this stuff is subjected to controlled testing it is found to be entirely imaginary, because what the controlled testing achieves is precisely that: taking the mind’s “tricks” out of the equation, and forcing conclusions to be drawn on the evidence that is actually there, as opposed to the evidence that is merely believed to be there by someone who is already predisposed to believe in it.

Some people want to give credence to this supernatural stuff because they think their “subjective experience” informs them that it’s real, and since everything is “subjective experience”, they might as well believe that it’s real. However, this logic is only ever applied partially, and it’s only ever applied to those things that one already wants to believe in. If “everything is subjective experience”, then it’s that exact same “subjective experience” which informs you that if you jump off a cliff you’re going to hit the bottom and come to a sticky end, no matter how strongly you believe something else will happen. This is always a good test – if you’re not prepared to conduct your “mundane” daily life on the basis of the same beliefs with which you interpret your “occult experiences”, then that’s an indicator that you should be highly, highly suspicious of those beliefs, because it indicates that you don’t actually subscribe to those beliefs in any practical sense at all. Occult, new-age and religious literature in general is jam-packed with trite-sounding philosophical platitudes designed precisely to conceal this simple fact from you.