Peering deep into the hat

I watched a few minutes of a video YouTube recommended, “Showing the Mormon Church NO MERCY w/ John Dehlin & Carah Burrell,” but pretty quickly got bored with their midwit takes. The video begins with a clip of what they apparently thought was one of the highlights, Carah saying this:

Joseph Smith was a sincere believer in this, like Christian mysticism, this Christian occult practice or this treasure digging? The fact is that Mormons themselves, you guys don’t believe that that’s an actual believable practice of how to find things within the earth, to put rocks into hats and say, Yep, God’s making the words appear here on this rock. Write it down. This is the most holy scripture of all time. You know that that’s not how your God would actually bring you the most correct scripture on earth, through the same mechanism that Joseph Smith was doing these illegal treasure digs in.

To drive her point home, she took out an actual hat and demonstrated how silly people look when they’re staring into hats. I don’t think she actually had a rock in there, though. The hat was empty.

I then turned to the final chapter of John Keel’s book The Eighth Tower. He compares scientists to audience members trying to figure out how a conjurer pulled a rabbit out of his hat:

A rabbit cannot spring from a hat, they reasoned, if it is not first introduced into the hat somehow. They could not grasp the ancient truth that even though the hat always seems empty, it is always full. The rabbit does not come from the sorcerer’s sleeve but only crosses from one delusion to another.

Dr. [Maurice] Bucke peered deep into the empty hat and found only a rose-colored mist that had to be God.

Peering deep into a hat is a pretty unusual thing to do. Joseph Smith literally did so and saw the word of God. Immediately after hearing a reference to that, I read it, as a metaphor this time, but still with reference to divine revelation and the production of a spiritual book. (The “rose-colored mist” reference is to the mystical experience that led Bucke to write Cosmic Consciousness.)