The Superspectral Ecology
“The phenomenon is a meta-system, not a bunch of spacecraft. It adapts to its environment, as the cinema does. Think of the movie industry as a meta-system. We just need to find the projector.”
—Jacques Vallée
Wherever one engages with the supernormal, and sets their intention upon mystery, the trickster always and everywhere appears. The cosmic jester, in all his grotesque embodiments, is the guardian of gnosis. Any attempt to organize information into a superordinate system creates living hallucinations. All adventures toward secret knowledge entail a process of “unknowing” that looks little different from insanity. In truth, the intrusion of “ultimate reality” into the senses can only be experienced as a procession of monsters.
It is the researcher of the ultra-mundane, the parapsychology experimenter, that willfully trespasses into the boundary realm of the trickster. His subject, in its form, is an artifact of the secret commonwealth. For instance, extra-sensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis (PK) inherently transcend boundaries. They overcome delineation between mind and mind (telepathy), mind and matter (clairvoyance and PK), time constraints (precognition), and barriers between life and death (channeling, necromancy).
In a similar vein, the magician with his illusions defies our expectations of possibility, our common notions of probability, revealing a structural bond between psi and trickery. Psi transgresses the lines between imagination and reality, subjective and objective, the symbol and its meaning, as well as between the internal and external worlds. When one suddenly encounters psychic phenomena for the first time, it is this flood of paradoxes, this over-unity of opposites, that overwhelms and paralyzes the psyche.
Apprehending the occult significance of structure and boundary, along with their disruption and crossing, is integral to framing the endless encounters with the cosmic jester—the hoaxer, the doppelganger, the mocking synchronicity—that haunts every researcher of the paranormal. After all, the Trickster makes this world.
