But wasn't it there millennia before communism?
I think that religions need to differentiate between psychic experiences themselves and *philosophies* of psychic experience. They need to also guard against the assumption of evil, just because they don’t have a doctrine for it.
For example, a legitimate psychic experience might be that a woman might suddenly be concerned for her mother’s welfare, out of the blue, so calls her on the phone. Her mother is fine, but halfway through their chat her mother experiences chest pains and has to call 911 because she is having a heart attack.
Nothing truly offensive about that, unless you assume that any such experience is inherently evil, even if not apparently so.
However, if the daughter is suddenly concerned for her mother’s welfare, *and* attributes it to an ancient Egyptian cat god, there is a reasonable complaint that could be made by a religion that her interpretation is heretical to their beliefs.
There is a common, but ill studied phenomena where the wiring of the brain is crossed, so that sensations detected by one sense are interpreted by another sense. It is called “synesthesia”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia
There are 60 known kinds of synesthesia, probably more, and they give those people who have them different perspectives on reality in some way.
For example, some people “see” music as color. Importantly, this might even make them more capable than ordinary people, with their perceptions. While an ordinary orchestral conductor is hard pressed to hear where an error is taking place in a single instrument in a symphony, a synesthete who sees music as color can “see” the “wrong” color of an out of tune instrument, much more easily.
The reason for this is that our hearing is roughly logarithmic, but our color perception is acute, with some people able to distinguish almost one million different colors.
So, the bottom line for religion is that it should accept psychic abilities at face value, unless it is being faked for criminal fraud, unless whoever is claiming it also claims unique religious insights. That is the line psychics should not cross.