Jeffrey Kripal, How to think impossibly about souls, UFOs, time, belief, and everything else, 2024.

 

People believe impossible things because impossible things happen to people. You don't need to believe any of the belief systems that build up around such extraordinary experiences to acknowledge that the experiences in fact happened.

If there is indeed truth to astrology, then I think it's axiomatic that we are wittingly or otherwise in touch with other 'universals', beings from the elite of all those trillions of stars around us. Impossible? Given our Cartesian thinking, yes. The unknown otherworldiness behind any such communication—and there is lots of evidence that something unknown and otherworldy is going on—requires impossible thinking.

 

During the past two 'scientific' centuries, but in fact going back to the time of Plato, we have accumulated a huge amount of inexplicable, impossible personal experiences of otherworldly phenomena, events. The first recorded near-death experience was told by Plato in The Republic, the myth of Er (why 'myth'?), the account by soldier left for dead who awakens on the funeral pyre 12 days later, and gave a detailed account of his time there, much like those who survive a lightning strike or a near-death experience today. You've never heard of Er? Neither had I. Like the thousands (millions?) of UFO experiences, it is ignored, dismissed, blotted out. Our monotheisms were founded on such sightings, such 'myths' – Ezekiel's wheels, Elija's departure in a fiery chariot.

 

Kripal tries to put some epistemological order into what to date is a junkyard straight out of a sci fi movie by Lem, Stalker II. This requires wrestling with the nature of consciousness, belief, reality itself. All of this happens because of altered states of consciousness. So we begin with consciousness, which we don't understand, but can fiddle with using psychedelics to open a door in the mind to interact with actual entities through hallucinations. Or discipline using religious ritual. Both license and discipline can achieve states of consciousness that defy reality.

 

1/ Before we get to the little green men, we must deal with precognitive events, which transform the entire order of knowledge upon which our present culture depends, the sciences included. They are well documented though left as bizarre footnotes rather than given the attention they deserve. My interest in all this is prompted by my own precognitive nightmare predicting my father's sudden death a few months later. Looking back now, it indeed transformed my life, though I was clearly moving towards these changes unconsciously. Who knows? When you have such an experience, it is one to respect.

They call into question

*the practice of history (time goes both ways),

*the history of religions (divination is globally distributed, relies on human abilities),

*the philosophy of mind (consciousness and cognition are not stuck in the present skull cavity or this temporal slice of a body),

*causality itself (agency can act from the future).

*linear time vs block time.ⁱ

Documented testimonies from Zora Hurston (12 predictions ending with Mrs Osgood Mason), Kipling, Twain, Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Tolkien, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Lem, Philip K Dick. Schopenhauer coined Wahrtraumen (dreaming the truth) to describe his many precognitive dreams that contained perfectly precise and banal details about the next day's events.

 

2/ Second on the list of weird things is lightning. There are many instances of survivors who have had an after-death experience, where they could choose to stay or return (though warned that would be painful). Coppola's Youth without Youth (1976) is based on Mircea Eliade's last novel, explaining time, consciousness, and the fantastic foundations of reality. The novel follows the life of Dominic Matei, an elderly Romanian intellectual, Eliade's hero-doppleganger, who is struck by lightning, which allows him to live a new life with startling intellectual, paranormal, capacity, anamnesis,ⁱⁱ instant recall. Kripal befriended one of these lightning survivors, Elizabeth Krohn, struck by lightning in 1988. She was gone 2 weeks in afterlife time, but only a few seconds eastern standard time. She became a celebrated children's author, and was notable for blowing out lightbulbs in her presence, getting a phone call from her deceased grandfather, and precognitive dreaming of major historical events.

 

3/ Lightning leads us to near-death experiences (NDE). From Plato's Er to the popularization of climbers' testimonies in the 1890s and the explosion of literature in recent years, with better scientific equipment and knowledge of the brain providing more explanatory power.

 

4/ Which brings us to the little green men and abductions, visitations. This is not just a space age phenomenon. Abductions are integral to all religions. The form of alien is insectoid, the vehicles space age long before airplanes. They are too many, too intensely experienced, too similar for all to be frauds.

 

5/ And finally religions. Lourdes, Fatima, Our Lady of Guadaloupe, Maria do Agreda (the Lady in Blue). Islam is a world of the seen and unseen, with jinns and angels in constant communion with humans and God. To Vaeni, they are 'midwives birthing us out of our egos.'ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Left/ right hemisphere duality

 

If anamnesis is possible for many (most? all?), then we can conceive of a new humanity with a more evolved psycho-mental life, with encyclopedic recovery of the past ,through a regime of concentration which allows direct access to the wealth of information of the past. Even if this is possible only to a small adaptive elite, then these humans can be considered evolved mutants, harbingers of a new post-historic superrace.

 

We have two domains, material and mental, mediated by the imagination. Duality got a bad name with Descartes. Mind-body, subject-object. Brain research settles the matter with left-right hemispheres as digital-analog, the left cold and rational, the right so otherworldly (holistic, pictorial, atemporal). We know now that our current dismissal of Descartes' 'ghost in the machine' to be just a bad case of throwing the baby soul-spirit out with the materialist bathwater.

 

It turns out the bathwater doesn't even exist (in our quantum world), that the only reality we know for sure is Descartes 'I think', or rather consciousness itself, so we now must apologize to poor baby, dust him/her off and try to figure out how to educate him/her to become that inner-outer superperson, subject-object together. i.e., the bathwater gets an honorable mention. All this involves impossible thinking, reliance on imagination that is mediating, translating and expressing something superreal, surreal.

 

The Catholics have lots of 'freakish folk', documented by fellow UFOlogist Carlos Eire. They are in fact the main event, however embarrassing. Two centuries ago, before secular materialism took hold, they were mainstream, though just accepted as miracles. We still hear about such freaks, but only in scandal sheets.

 

Think of a religious eccentric like St Teresa of Avila (d 1582), who levitated uncontrollably during mass or whenever. This ability to levitate is mentioned in one sentence in Wikipedia as if embarrassing, but is central to her life and sainthood. (She was embarrassed and prayed that it would stop, which it did.)

 

The 17th c Fransciscan friar Joseph of Cupertino (d 1663) experienced miraculous levitation and ecstatic visions throughout his life, famously perching on delicate limbs of olive trees, which made him the object of scorn. He was rejected then reluctantly admitted to the Franciscan Order. His superiors tried to hide him away in a remote monastery but the people came to relish his miracles. He was canonized a century later, having narrowly escaping the Inquisition.

 

Kripal suspects such weirdos see and know as if revealed to them by some other form of mind or intelligence that is also them in some paradoxical quantum sense. Such a form of mind uses the cultural bits and pieces that are lying around to express itself. Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic, Lem's Stalker. We confuse the bits and pieces (thrown plates, flying saucers) with whatever message, meaning is intended.

 

Lots of hermeneutics. Just as we can reconsider astrology in our age of computers and orbiting telescopes, we can amass the thousands of weird otherworldly experiences documented and try to 'break the code', put the weirdos in context and use imagination and reason to shape a technology that combines our mind-body duality in an all-purpose monism. The impossible emerges from a knowing place before and beyond the subject/object split, in our Age of Separation.

 

Towards a scientific UFOlogy

 

We can start with 'experience' vs 'event'. There is nothing without me-us in the middle. That nonmaterial 'I-me' is now back at the center, pre-Copernicus and post-Einstein. The universe is conscious and so are we. We live in a participatory universe. The cosmos is conscious. Yikes! our tiny (but egotistical) ego protests. The impossibleness is a function not of reality but of our own present social constructions, perceptions.

 

In reality space, time and mind are all one. Past, present and future are all one big, fat 'thing', block time, constantly interacting outside of us. Future is already present in past, just as notes of musical phrase though played successively persist together in the present and thus form a phrase. In a sense, music creates historical time.

Our sense of linear time is a neurological illusion produced as we experience ourselves moving through this eternal and unchanging spatiotemporal block, like a 4-D worm wiggling out from conception to its disappearance in death. Mystical experiences point at the truth, give the impression that past, present and future exist together in an Eternal Now.

 

Kripal argues our nonphysical mind processes are ultimately centered on a monistic ground (Godhead?), beyond time-space, that your physical emanation is the confused, neurotic, superficial chattering time-space version of the real you. Quantum mechanics and mystical literature speak to the different sides, the same deeper reality, one 'from the outside' (physics), the other 'from the inside (mystical). Bohr and Schrodinger turned to comparative mystical literature to make human sense of what the quantum mechanics implied. Modern physics and psychics have been reflecting each other from the start.

 

Quantumness redefines 'real'. Kevin: 'Reality is what two or more can experience together.' Subject-object, mind-matter melt away in our most elevated (or deepest) connections with the Other. The Matrix is a good starting point, where physical objects 'out there' are merely icons on the screen of our virtual reality game of perception that lets us maneuver through the world, survive, reproduce and so 'win' the game. Fitness beats truth.^iv We evolved to 'win the game', not to perceive reality as it really is.

 

The Matrix plot centers on aliens using us as a power source, a fuel, but Kripal points to some abduction experiences to suggest cold, insectoid aliens get off on our flashy inner worlds, full of very colorful flights of fancy. It is our Godlike consciousness that is so special. We are like babies with joy sticks and a hard drive beyond our ken, but now, Kripal argues, we have matured enough to do both—win the game and perceive reality as it really is—as part of a new Science of Man.

 

Kripal sees hints of the new science not only in weird experiences, but in myths, religions, the humanities, which are in fact inspired by past weird experiences. Consciousness is not to be dismissed as an afterthought to materialist science. It is the center of our science, with our factoid obsession really only playing a subordinate role. Contact events, especially shamanic, are a passport to the cosmos, inhabiting an actual third space neither objective nor subjective. As with all scientific revolutions, a new paradigm is taking shape. Kripal uses new terms to shake us up. Learn-with, experiencers. The weird things straddle both natural science events as well as humanities-type experiences. To think impossibly is a kind of return to origins (mystery, miracles) smarter, more jaded, wiser.

 

His mentors include Nietzsche, and Husserl with his transcendental phenomenology, not Heidegger and Sartre's material atheistic version. And Henry Corbin (d 1978), Henry James, Frederic Meyers, and Karl Jung. Corbin, through his study Iranian Shia mysticism, posited the human as bi-unity, a paradoxical complex of the conscious person and the largely unconscious, superconscious angelic twin. He combines imagination and reality, the socially active and mystically transcendent, with the angelic twin, doppleganger. We function in a material world according to a nonmaterial alter-ego (which we berate, occasionally compliment).

 

The point ultimately is to align your mind with the universal mind. Stoicism. The outer you and its angelic twin do not always appear together in ways that we can appreciate. They work in different dimensions and scales, horizontally (in our five sense dimensions) and vertically (other dimensions, spiritual). Kripal was raised a Catholic and both deplores the Protestant reformationS and the loss of the sacred that Protestantism ushered in with the Renaissance and rise of Science. Our angelic twin lost its moral compass, leaving behind only the confused chatterer.

 

Eire documents how ruthless religionS were to persecute weirdos, witches and homosexuals (50,000 witches executed gruesomely from 1400-1600), though a handful like Teresa of Avila and Joseph of Cupertino managed to dodge the bullet. He respects religion (not so much religionS) as an important vehicle for the weird, but is an important figure in Esalen, where he launched his book Esalen (2008) with the subtitle America and the Religion of No Religion.

 

19th c romanticism reveled in a revolution of consciousness. The literature of the period was full of striving to transcend. Coleridge focused on Ezekiel's wheel in the sky. But scientism left no room and it was not until Raymond Moody's Life after Life (1975) that serious consideration began. As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia in 1965, Moody encountered psychiatrist, Dr. George Ritchie, who told Moody about an incident in which he believed he had journeyed into the afterlife while dead for nearly nine minutes at the age of 20. Life after Life became a bestseller and was translated into numerous languages. Christians were not happy as there was no hell or creedal requirement for salvation. So we witnessed the reenactment of past inquisitions, though now, without deadly consequences. 

 

Kripal is keen to formulate a new methodology, starting with

*The use of altered states of consciousness as generators of a philosophy of mind and a truly scientific modeling of the physical cosmos.^v

*The experience-source hypothesis, that basic religious convictions are cultural reworkings of a recurring set of direct experiences and not just reworkings of indirect historical contexts or psychosocial constructions. Experiences are direct, embodied connection with the Real, which can be ordinary things, but perceived with heightened awareness, not our regular 5-senses surface perceptions.

Whatever presences interact with humans, it is through our imagination, i.e., our consciousness. Reason is mostly impotent. Language and grammar something of a joke (Derrida). The senses are not reliable. They evolved for other much more practical and adaptive reasons. Clearly the imagination shows every sign of being capable of affecting physical objects and events, even the workings of space and time, toward some symbolic meaning or communication.

*Perennialism incorporates a global phenomenology of religious experience, comparing them to determine real differences and genuine similarities. 

*The garden is a central symbol, always appearing in heightened NDEs, hinting at Eden as the Alpha where we began and the Omega whence we return, a portal, gate.

*Kripal likes to 'think-with' his experiencers, emulate, empathize, adopt, mix their thought with his.

 

As I read, I realized why I/many are fascinated by the Middle Ages. People took for granted spirits, jinn, angels. I.e., people intuited, believed there were other forces at work than those we can 5-sense-with. Religion is an evolutionary adaptation to what are occult or hidden presences. We lost religion and our awareness of this hidden world, became the hostage of materialist science, which literally killed all the jinn when we desacrilized the universe, so we no long have access to channel them.

I have always been suspicious of facts, number-crunching, as missing the point. Facts are boring, soulless, but life is exciting, full of … life! Over my lifetime, science has matured to acknowledging that weird idea.

 

Some more ideas for a new epistemology:

*Kripal asserts that laughter is essential to the new way of being/ thinking. His heroes,Stuart Davis, Jeremy Vaeni and experiencer Kevin all insist that laughter is philosophically important. It makes fun of and so transcends the silly social ego. Impossible thinking involves not just a thinking-with but also a laughing-with. Kevin: If your 'spiritual journey' has always been pleasant, you've probably just been masturbating. Science should be play, Nietzsche's Gay Science.

*There can be no communication from a distance (tele-), much less a shared emotional entanglement (-pathos) unless something fundamental is shared, i.e., love. A subjectivity cannot possess another subjectivity unless they share the same basic nature. The demon is human too. We intuit this in education, the teacher drawing out the unconscious knowledge, the student draws out the inspiration of the teacher, both connecting in love.

*Corbin understood that the imaginal world was a noetic organ/place or intellectual-spiritual capacity that was mediating an actual dimension of reality, Jung's creative imagination, a mythmaking dimension of consciousness, where myth and symbol happen, where they are true, where visions occur and the spiritual body is resurrected. A phenomenology of revelation. Humans are a bi-unity, the human person accompanied by an angelic twin who mediates between our dimension and the other(s).

*A sign is a simple referent, arbitrary and ultimately meaningless, whereas a symbol participates in that which it expresses, an anthropomorphic hang-up, a projection, a mishmash of culturally determined signs.

Gospel of Philip: Truth did not come into the world naked but in symbols and images.

It is implicitly religious, revealed, supermeaningful to us. Without us/some listener listening for the symbol, there is no sound. Words are experiences. Symbols are not God, who cannot be imagined, but neither are they products of reason. They are consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors. Wolfson: no naked truth. truth can only appear to a human in form of an image, through a veil.

 

Profound truths cannot be clean and clear. Only narrative, symbol, image, poetry. To insist on clarity is to replace one set of standards on another, a form of tyranny. The problem, not the solution. We need both sides of the brain firing at once and in concert, talking together through reason and imagination, rational clarity and intuitive symbol. Words are experiences. 'Real' must be 'imagined', embody meanings and subtilize the sensory thing, bring it to life.

 

Corbin's imaginal follows Christian Docetism, that the incarnation should be treated symbolically, not literally, which agrees with the Quranic passage about how they did not really kill Jesus but another person or an appearance. Once you accept that weird is not so weird, that flying plates, crucifixion are indeed facts but we haven't figured out what they mean, that the world, world history is full of impossible things, the messy details of religions take on less import. The message is the message. The symbol is true.

 

Kevin: Humans are analog/digital processing units for the cosmic unconscious of platonic surrealism. The digital interface was under darwinian evolution at first, but now with the modern world, it's becoming self-directed evolution. Better yet, we are like shortwave radio transmitter-receivers. There is a shared but largely unconscious experience-source hypothesis, a 'gnostic spirituality' that is universal. Different sets of cultural materials resonate so strongly because they are all based on the same kinds of human experiences, which themselves correlate very strongly with a shared neurobiology or human mind.^vi

 

The right hemisphere mediates Mind to the left hemisphere which constructs and projects the rational ego as a still-evolving and now self-directed cosmic interface. We must move back to right hemisphere-dominant as at birth. The otherworldy role of brain is to mediate and translate Mind. This is how one becomes the universe, because one already is the universe.^vii If you manage to go offline, turn your whiny social ego off, then a deeper or higher form of being might appear (Real Awareness) entirely independent of your biology. Awareness of the whole by the whole. Awareness as the fundament, the ground of impossible thinking. But too much of this and you are a nutcase, schizo, autistic. That's why 'God hides.' Platonic surrealism: Platonic for insistence on a deeper level of truth and reality, surreal for the wildly symbolic, irrational, nonrational, and playful ways it expresses its endless possibilities.^viii

 

Vaeni suggests that the aliens might be us from another time, dropping in to help out, with hints that the laws of physics are not really laws 'but actually mere suggestions.'^ix Guardian angels? He excuses their flying plates as happening from different times, 'coming into space and time from outside space and time.' We need to think of time hermeneutically, block time (me/you from dust to dust), stop blocking out meaning 'with our crap including our intellectual crap.'^x Vaeni thinks that we speak and imagine the aliens into existence. We let them in, as it were. This is about as hermeneutical as it gets: they are real, and they are here because we believe they are here. We speak them into existence, so that they can speak us out of existence.^xi

 

As for the practicality of Kripal's project, the idea of an elite superperson (thank you Neitzsche) makes sense from an evolutionary point of view. Nature is full of hierarchy and misfits. The most intriguing in human society is the stable 5% of males who end up homosexual. Hardly an elite, but the evolutionary purpose still defies explanation. Other misfits, also more for the more complex males, include schizophrenia, color blindness, autism. Are these just faulty evolution or do they have hidden meaning? Kripal focuses on autism as a possible evolutionary step towards nonhuman intelligence, devoid of messy emotions. Again, not all autistics, as there are many reasons for autism. He speculates about the rocketing rates of autism coinciding with the sharp rise of alien abduction experiences.

 

Finally, for those of us who can't boast of possessing direct gnosis,^xii we can still use our intellect, hermeneutical sympathy to others and texts, to explore our dreams, relish the gnostic experiences and mystical thoughts of past experiencers, ponder the magical unknown as our own dark matter/ energy that we can't usually see but that influences us, begin to believe again in our spiritual guardians, our local aliens, speak them into existence.

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My favorite Kripal 'proofs':

Re little green men, in Zimbabwe in 1994, the otherworldly craft and its alien occupants appeared to a group of more than 60 racially diverse school children (no abductions). There's a documentary Ariel Phenomenon (2022) linking it to their African ancestors.

Re time travel, John Allison. Saw male in red shorts outside his basement window at night. Voice in head 'you're going to be okay.' 4 yrs later after illness, depression, feeling better, saw light in apt as he came home and saw his younger self inside. He remembered his vision and came up to the window and sent him that feeling of love and comfort. Consciousness is expansive. Here a meaningful sign of a future form of consciousness trying to take shape.

Re telepathy, Karin Austin. Her vision ended in an abandoned theme park, the opening in the trees and an old rollercoaster. She later found it in Connecticut with Google maps. It was closed 1992-4. Her vision in 1993. Another unrelated person also saw the same theme park. The imagined is the real. Superphyiscal in hyperdimenionsal ways that we cannot imagine with the three dimensions in which our brains and cognitive capacities have evolved and to which we have culturally adapted.xiii