Re Psalm 131:1:
Yahweh, my heart isn’t haughty, nor my eyes lofty; nor do I concern myself with great matters, or things too wonderful for me.

Also a beautiful affirmation, which I claim. But there’s a reason why I tried to redirect your attention to 131:2, and the sense of the passage, rather than this. Because :1 has been used by a lot of Pentecostal churches, including the cult in which I was born, as an general-purpose anti-intellectual club with which to stamp out innocent exploration of spiritual reality and questioning of leadership, as well as a scientific approach to the universe.

I believe with Paul that it’s a matter of conscience for the individual believer as to where to say ‘no, I do not feel I can handle this material right now (or perhaps ever, because I believe it to be false)’. And that I think is a God-given safety instinct. It’s important to not let oneself be overwhelmed or distracted even by things that are true but not immediately relevant. But for me, I have had to admit – with some fear and distress – that the Holy Spirit for the last couple of years has gently trying to draw my attention to phenomena I had filed under the ‘don’t want to go there’ box. Eventually I gave in. He can be quite persuasive.

And the point of Psalm 131 to me is that it is the attitude of heart that matters. One dare not approach spirituality with the intent to use it as a source of power or separation from others. But I believe we live in a time of wonders and miracles, and that there are very important and specific answers to questions the human race has been asking with great intensity and distress in the last century, which have already been provided – and we would be ungrateful to God if we were to ignore the extraordinary messages He has already sent.

I think God does repeat Himself if we miss a few messages, but not always, and that He takes delight in spreading His answers across multiple sources. So that we learn to trust one another. Which is a skill that must be learned and can be deeply painful. And sometimes we make mistakes and trust sources that are not from God. But wanting a good thing too hard is not a sin, any more than a parent would punish a child for trying to grow up too fast. Sometimes, yes, we must slow down for our own safety. But there does come a time when we have to step out of old safety zones and risk a few skinned knees. And trust that if we look for bread, we won’t find stones or snakes.

131:2 Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with his mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me.

5:16 As for me, I will call on God. Yahweh will save me.
55:17 Evening, morning, and at noon, I will cry out in distress. He will hear my voice.
55:18 He has redeemed my soul in peace from the battle that was against me, although there are many who oppose me.

1:5 But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all liberally and without reproach; and it will be given to him.

The search for the voice of God in quietness within, and the promise that all wisdom is available for those who honestly search for it within themselves. (Because where else would a loving God put it? Somewhere difficult, out of the way, outside ourselves that only an elite few can access?)

‘The occult’ means simply ‘things that are hidden’. The sense of ‘hiddenness’ is very real and very strong when it comes to spiritual and paranormal phenomena, and there are two types of of this hiddenness. One is good, one not so good. I’m interested in the first kind.

Some things are hidden not because anyone goes out of their way to hide them, but simply because by their very nature they tend to be sneered at, despised, and ignored, because they don’t fit into the existing mental pattern of the world. In our current scientific age, the paranormal tends to fall into this category, because it’s not strictly reproducible under controlled laboratory conditions. However, it’s also confusing because this deep shunning by Western ‘official’ science of the paranormal is *also* hidden, in many ways, due to Western pop culture’s enthusiastic *embracing* of the same ‘spooky’ stuff in the 20th century. We’re a sort of split personality culture over this stuff. We deny a wider spiritual world exists while in our every fantasy desperately wishing that it’s there. This state of affairs can’t continue forever. We need to sort out once and for all whether spirituality is real, or not. If it’s real, let’s quite pretending and start investigating.

So there is a large category of things which some people may consider ‘hidden’ which I think are actually open secrets – widely available, but often ignored or difficult to parse the true meaning of because until you’ve encountered some kind of spiritual reality, the words the mystics and contemplatives use seem to be deliberately obscure and contradictory. They’re not, but they’re trying to write coherently about things that we don’t yet have words for.

The Gospel is one of these, I think. The field of Christian mysticism particularly interests me because there has been so much written about it over two millennia, from the Church Fathers on, and it’s all now widely available on the Internet – and yet, so far, we in the early 21st century West know very little about this heritage. There are also resonances between the core elements of Jesus’ life and message and the teachings of many other religious and spiritual groups. We need to be honest and open about how and where these connect. We don’t need to be afraid of this. If what Jesus taught was true, then truth is confirmed as truth wherever it appears.

Other things, however, are hidden because by their intrinsic nature they are violent, exploitative, and debasing. Those who seek these kinds of secrets tend to hide them because they want to achieve power for themselves and deny that power to others, and because they themselves are not fundamentally comfortable with the nature of what they’re dealing with. That kind of power is dangerous and corrosive and should be avoided.

One of the surprising things I learned early in life, from my involvement in a Christian cult, is that both these kinds of spiritual power, the light and the darkness, can be present in the same group and sometimes even in the same person.

Pentecostal churches particularly suffer from this, but you see it in many organisations. It can cause immense emotional distress to people who don’t understand that genuine miracles and spiritual experiences and deeply abusive, wounding, manipulative behaviour can coexist and one does not invalidate the other. Eventually the true miracles will go away if the abuse is not fixed. But in the meantime, the situation can be complicated, and neither the Bible, the name of Jesus nor rituals and hierarchy can shield people from the dark side if they don’t have some basic personal spiritual survival skills. I’m not saying the Bible can’t help – but you can draw a number of contradictory lessons from it, and ultimately you have to make a choice as to whether you believe in a God of love or a God of punishment, and that choice does not come from a text but from within one’s heart. And it can be a deeply wrenching decision to make.

The other surprising discovery I made was that many of the key Western ‘occult’ traditions seem to have originated from Judaism and contemplative and mystical Christianity. Jakob Boehme and Emmanuel Swedenborg, for instance, have been hugely influential in shaping the so-called ‘occult’ but were deeply devoted Christians. More recently, discovering A Course In Miracles was life-changing for me, as I recognised a voice in it that I have long associated with that of Jesus, and to me it resonates with the teaching of the Gospels and suddenly makes Paul intelligible.

On the other side of the equation, there are closer links than many Christians would find comfortable: Alisteir Crowley (of whom I’m not a fan) had an Exclusive Brethren upbringing, while Tim LaHaye of Left Behind has financial links to Reverend Moon. It’s a strange old world, and the ordinary categories of ‘safe religion vs dangerous occultism’ don’t always apply.

To me, the key factor in deciding whether a spiritual teaching is worth investigating is: does it teach love? Does it teach forgiveness? Does it teach freedom? Does it allow you to use your mind? Does it teach compassion for the poor and for nature? If it hits those points, then to me it seems like it’s approaching the right track, because there is One God, and therefore Truth is not contradictory, no matter where we might find it.