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

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

Rawlette’s ending is well worth quoting in full, as it can also serve as a kind of concluding manifesto for the present book: If there is one unfailing message I have gleaned thus far from my experiences of coincidences, it is this: The Mysterious numinosity that we sense in our moments of deepest meaning and greatest love is not an illusion. Those moments are not just side effects of chemicals in our brains, hormones selected by evolution to cause us to mate and procreate and protect our offspring. What we feel in the most intense moments of our lives, those feelings are real. Realer than the physical world we see. Coincidences show us that the physical world is actually built from those feelings, rather than the other way around. That is, our feelings are of a higher order of reality than the subatomic particles studied by physicists. They are a “wholer” form of truth. A holier form. Modern science, in focusing on the physical, has gotten things precisely backward. It has studied the physical because the physical is simpler, easier to see and pin down and dissect. But it is in fact less real. Coincidences, on the other hand, show us what is behind the façade of the physical world: something deeper and more intrinsically significant. Coincidences are the holes in the reductive, mechanistic worldview that allow us to catch glimpses of the vast sea of meaning that awaits us on the other side.