Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

It is the fundamental nature of the universe to evolve in such a way that there are increasing possibilities for what can happen in the next adjacent moment. There is thus over time not only more in the sense of another moment but also more in the sense of what can happen in that moment. This is how matter emerged, and then living matter emerged, and then conscious matter emerged, and then whatever is next will emerge. Such cosmic innovations only became possible after a period of time and with other things happening first. Meaning they were impossible up until a certain moment. I call this "unfoldment"--the accelerating possibilization and "expansion" of eventhood itself.

So what COULD unfold next? I suspect the emergence of psychoid matter--a kind of monist being that is physical and ideational at the same time, and ultimately neither. Such is the implication of various anomalous phenomena like uaps, ghosts, psychic powers, synchronicities, mystical states, psychedelic experiences, magical manifestations, religious miracles, alien abductions, NDEs, and a vast array of thought forms including cryptids and various supernatural "tulpa-like" and archetypal beings:

"In his later work, Carl Jung introduced the concept of the psychoid to describe phenomena that appeared to operate at the threshold between psyche and matter. The psychoid was neither purely psychological nor fully physical, but occupied an intermediate domain where symbolic meaning and objective events seemed to coincide.

Jung developed the psychoid concept in response to observations that could not be adequately explained by psychological processes alone, including synchronistic events and anomalous correspondences between inner experience and external reality.

Crucially, the psychoid was not proposed as an explanatory model, but as a boundary marker — an acknowledgment that certain phenomena resisted reduction to established psychological or biological mechanisms."----- https://spiritidinstitute.org/jung-and-t...-boundary/

“We are all future butterflies who think, wrongly, that we are just slugs. And we are evolving, whether we admit it or not, into something else. Something with wings.”― Jeffrey J. Kripal, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal

I've become fascinated by how immaterial concepts, entities, and private apparitions (infomorphs) can actually influence the outer world via controlling the mind of the person they inhabit. Of course, that's something older than the hills when it comes to psychological thrillers also trying to be pseudo-supernatural horror flicks.

But I don't feel that we appreciate that movie trope enough. For instance, gods and occult spirits as nothing more than spreading thought-viruses and occasional hallucinations of the mentally ill have been transforming societies for thousands of years -- wreaking both constructive results and murderous havoc.

It really is close to the case of something intermediate like Jung's psychoid. The immaterial agents aren't externally physical and yet they still have causal interaction with it thanks to the people that they "possess". And when they are a thought-virus they become inter-subjectively real via their residing in multiple members or massive populations. Rather than confined to a single person like, say, Katie in Saint Maud (who is actually haunted by more of an off-brand, super-demented version of God that's not really contagious or trying to replicate itself). 

The terror of God's presence: Forgoing the classic formula of a slasher or demon-possession film, Saint Maud challenges viewers to imagine a twenty-first-century world where a person can speak to God and where God speaks back. In a fleeting 84-minutes, it shows us that for some people, God is real. And that realness can lead to some pretty horrific places.

Strangely resonant with your thoughts, I have long noticed a correlation between what is believed as the body of the risen Christ and aliens. It is a kind of body that partakes in both materiality AND imaginality. Jesus is said to have even demonstrated to Thomas that he was no mere insubstantial ghost by letting him poke his side wound. Yet later on he appears incognito as a fellow traveler to two walking disciples only to vanish the moment he was recognized. Abduction experiencers describe this same paradoxical hybrid state of matter/psyche, with the visitors leaving physical traces and marks yet walking thru walls like oneiric interlopers from some mythical underworld. Even cryptids like Bigfoot display this strange duplicity of being physical yet apparitional at the same time. Angels can be wrestlers, ghosts can stomp on stairways, and UFOs can give sunburns. Jung's concept of the psychoid helps to cast these experiences in a fresh and exciting light, suggesting the fundamental unifying reality where mind and matter merge as one.