How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

When a person who has had an NDE or a UFO experience comes back and reports a fantastic event of endless sci-fi special effects, the report is almost always expressed as a supermeaningful coincidence of symbols and almost never as an arbitrary collection of culturally conditioned signs. Moreover, the experience often initiates other synchronicities and meaningful mind-matter coincidences in the physical environment. This total event of meaningful symbols and uncanny coincidences is experienced as cosmic truths of astonishing significance—that is, as images and events that participate directly in that which they represent. That is because they do. This is why experiencers, as we saw above, almost always say “it was more real than real.” It was. The visionary display was participating in, probably issuing “from,” that which is actually the case—that is, the real, beyond or before it splits into the subject and object of human experience.