On Sunday I celebrated John Michell for more than a half-century ahead of the curve on UFOs.
Today is about why this English philosopher-mystic believed modern civilization suffered from a peculiar form of blindness.
A lack of perception.
To Michell, earlier civilizations inhabited a world saturated with meaning:
sacred landscapes, symbolic architecture, pilgrimage routes, cosmic geometry,
ritual, myth, seasonal cycles, and a living relationship between humanity and the natural world.
Modernity replaced this with: traffic engineering, commercial zoning, industrial efficiency, and fluorescent-lit nihilism.
The modern world became functional, yes.
But also spiritually anesthetized.
Michell did not reject science.
He rejected reductionism. The assumption that reality consists only of what can be measured, monetized, photographed, or engineered.
This made him appear eccentric in the late twentieth century.
Today, he looks prophetic.
Modern people increasingly report: disconnection, meaninglessness, psychological fragmentation, technological exhaustion, and a persistent sense that something essential has been lost beneath modern life.
Michell would have said: of course—civilization severed itself from sacred space, ritual, pilgrimage. From participation in the cosmos itself.
Ancient people, Michell believed, did not merely observe the world. They corresponded with it.
A mountain was not just geology. A cathedral was not merely construction. A stone circle was not primitive engineering.
Places possessed symbolic and spiritual gravity.
Modernity calls this superstition.
Yet modern civilization increasingly produces human beings wealthy in information but starving for meaning.
This helps explain why people instinctively continue searching for meditation,
psychedelics, retreats, ancient wisdom, and experiences capable of transcending ordinary perception.
The hunger never disappeared.
Michell’s real subject was never flying saucers or ley lines.
It was enchantment.
And maybe how modern civilization accidentally destroyed humanity’s ability to experience it.