Are psychic powers really against God?

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Of course not. Let’s briefly discuss the history of the occult.

Judaism has always been a highly dynamic religion. Before the canonization of the Torah and even after, rabbis explored all manner of different ways to connect with the deity. Since not all adherents were in one place, scattered pockets worked out how to worship in all kinds of ways.

This is unsustainable politically so eventually a core set of Jewish beliefs had to be created and spread and, if needed, enforced. Militant Judaism fought each other to enforce orthodoxy even more than they fought foreign incursion to protect themselves.

Even with an orthodoxy and warfare, Judaism has always been relatively tolerant of different ways to express. It’s hard to impress on someone just looking at the intolerance, but in actuality militant Judaism was the minority and only expressed itself when there was existential threat to the community. In times of peace Jews shared and thrived and it’s this brotherhood that is primarily responsible for their survival to this day.

This tolerance was inherited by Christianity when the Jewish community split two thousand years ago. You only hear and contemplate the intolerance because that’s how the brain works. You only see the 10 years of warfare, not the 9990 years of peace. In reality there’s not much reason for people to get all high and mighty about how other people interact with God.

The occult grew out of a different way of interpreting the events depicted in the gospels. The relationship between knowledge and faith has always been a fascinating one, and Judaism is built on top of bodies of knowledge that have been created and shared, through generations.

Rarely, however, does this interest in knowledge start to override faith. Certain groups around the time of Jesus did start to go down that road, and we generally call that strain of religious thought gnosticism. This comes from the Greek word for knowledge, gnosis. Any time you add an ‘ic’ to a Greek word you’re describing someone who thinks that word is important enough to build ideology from. The ideology is referred to with the suffix ‘ism’. A gnostic therefore is someone who thinks spiritual knowledge is more important than faith, and gnosticism is a general word used to describe the ideology that knowledge overrides faith.

Gnostics aren’t Christians and can have an immense variety of positions on the subject matter of the gospels. They don’t follow the orthodox version of events. This can be for many reasons, including the simple fact that their facts are simply wrong, but it’s important to realize that this point of view, this ideology, is older than the orthodoxy it found itself against. If you’ve been pronouncing tomato a certain way and the orthodoxy comes in and tells you the correct way to pronounce it is a different one, you might want to go tell them to go climb a tree.

And so these gnostics, remember this is the modern word for them, only one or two of these groups actually called themselves Gnostics, but remember it’s the general idea we’re talking about here, kept doing what they do while Christians took over the rest of the globe. It’s the traditions and beliefs and theology of this kind of spirituality that occult practitioners draw from. The language, culture, terminology, theology, and practice of a group of people that, fundamentally, believe that knowledge is the true path to God, that faith is good, but knowledge is true power.

Is it anti-God? Fundamentally, that comes down to your feelings on the whole concept of orthodoxy. Is what is orthodox true? To answer this question we can come full circle and return to the reasons why an orthodoxy emerged in the first place and then look at how the mechanics manifest in our current lives.

And it cannot be escaped, when you look closely at history, that orthodoxies only emerge when they become politically necessary. Politics is about protecting societies from themselves and others. The only reason it’s worth fighting wars is for the greater good. Orthodoxy is a weapon to use in that war. Wars conclude when the threat is gone. When a war is concluded, you put your weapons down. Orthodoxy is a weapon of war.

To claim that orthodoxy is necessary in peace is what I would call anti-God. God does not want you using weapons on each other unnecessarily. There’s even a whole book of the Bible devoted to it, Judges. It speaks of the time the scattered Hebrew tribes fought endless wars against each other. Religious society had to spring up in order to stop it. God, the ultimate sovereign, gave His chosen people a set of rules to live by and Judaism is defined by these laws.

But endless and intrusive orthodoxy, the idea that there can only be one way to live, goes very much against this spirit, but that doesn’t ever stop humans from trying to impose it on each other, for nakedly greedy reasons. God is the sovereign, not man. God is all-powerful, He does not need orthodoxy in order to express His wishes and guide humanity.

Psychic practice emerges from the occult which ultimately derives from gnosticism, which emerged as an alternative form of worship thousands of years ago. It places knowledge and experience over faith and a personal relationship with the deity. This is what you’re truly doing to yourself when you explore psychic modes of spirituality. Is it anti-God? No, that’s impossible.

But you’re robbing yourself of something that many many people believe is more important.

I developed psychic senses many years ago. Through their development, I realized that perception isn’t what we think it is. Perceptive modes are mixed together in a continuous fashion rather than split apart in a discrete one. We generally experience these as feelings. If you “attune” to a person, you’re inviting God to plant different thoughts and feelings into your head, which contribute to your overall sense of who that person is.

Rest your mind of the exhausting worry that extra-sensory perception isn’t real. It is real. Your brain isn’t a machine that reacts deterministically to your five senses. It has random thoughts and wonders that don’t really come from anyplace you could understand the logic behind. The more you look at logic, the more stuff will happen to you that will escape that logic, it’s a fundamental aspect of being human.

But when you invoke the ‘psychic’ label, now you’re talking about a body of knowledge and practice specifically intended to guide your spiritual development. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the knowledge or practices, but it should be considered that you might be putting the cart before the horse when it comes to God. God doesn’t mind, but you might if you understood all the implications.