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July 26, 2024
What do we do with the empirical or physical implications of impossible phenomena? And how do these same physical-mental phenomena challenge and change our conceptions of the human, of consciousness, of embodiment, and, perhaps most of all, of the relationship of the human being to space-time and the physical cosmos itself? Actually, how do they change everything?
(divination is globally distributed because it is based on an actual, if unreliable, human ability),
“Knowledge before its time.” There is a double meaning. These detailed “unhappy” images of future history would return to Hurston throughout her life up to the point where they stopped and her life began to flourish.5 She kept quiet about them, but she knew perfectly well that she was not like everyone else—actually, she was like no one else.
She has a theory about impossibility, which is also my own. It goes like this. There are certain human capacities, like precognition, that most people will never know—can never know—not because this is a piece of data that they haven’t been told but because they would not believe such a thing even if they were told. Why? Because they do not have this ability. Accordingly, they cannot know this truth. It is simply not them.
I think Zora Neale Hurston was telling us the truth of her actual life experience, and I think that we need to change our conceptions of the human and the nature of nature, accordingly.
What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then? Samuel Taylor Coleridge
And the third rose? he heard himself thinking. Where do you want me to put it? Lay the album down, and show me where you want the rose put. The third rose. . . . Very carefully and with much excitement he opened the album. A freshly picked rose, maybe such as he had seen but once before, was there in the middle of the page. Happily, he picked it up. Mircea Eliade, Youth without Youth
It was obvious: these things happen to us, as they have always happened to others around the world and throughout human history. They obviously have everything to do with “religion,” and yet we mostly dismiss these events, ignore them, do not speak about them, as if we somehow cannot. We certainly do not integrate them into our thinking and public culture. Basically, we keep them secret because they violate pretty much everything that we are supposed to think about ourselves and the physical world. They are not supposed to happen. But they do.
I never forgot that week. Because of those stories and those silences,
To think impossibly is, first and foremost, to think-with individuals and their experiences, however fantastic these experiences become or, better, precisely because they become so fantastic.
The fantastic so conceived is the beginning of impossible thinking. It, too, is a kind of mutation.
By the fantastic, I mean something that is exotic, outlandish, or shocking (apparently, it is trying to get our attention), something that actually happened in both the material and mental domains, which are in turn being mediated by the imagination. I will define and nuance this opening definition extensively in what follows. Still, it is worth italicizing immediately. By the fantastic, I mean something that is often very physical, empirical, and sometimes even witnessed by many people. I mean something that possesses its own agency and purpose and often changes history, be it of a single
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What he calls “freakish folk” are not tangential to the history of religions. They are the “main event.” That is why fringe phenomena are so very important today. They are only fringe because we have made them so. Such appearances are in fact trying desperately to get our attention and knock us out of our foolish normalcy.
Such experiences require our attention and intention, our cocreation. In a word, they must be interpreted.
I confess that I am more than sympathetic to this shocking sense of discovery, perhaps because I am a historian of religions, and this is how revelation has long worked—as a more or less passive receiving, as a showing or gift that elicits awe, indeed a sense of wonder so great that it often ends up transforming the course of human history. We can question the content of that revelation (I certainly do) and explore its cultural precedents and obvious shaping (I certainly do), but I do not see how we can question the passivity of the revelation itself or the cultural and historical effects that
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Part of how to think impossibly, then, is holding these two levels together: recognizing the passive, given, or shown nature of revelation and also acknowledging and pursuing its culturally or historically constructed expression or appearance. It is that both-and paradox that I am after in these pages. In any case, you picked up this book. Prepare to be abolished.
The presence is not quite humanistic, subjective, psychological, or social, but neither is it entirely material, physical, or empirical. It is both. And it is neither. It is before these. And it is beyond these. Creatures are coming through the walls. And they are coming for us. What we think of as the objective world is at stake. So are we.
Let me lay my cards on the table. I personally think that this is all so because there is no final distinction between subjective and objective states, between consciousness and cosmos. Moreover, and this sounds even more outrageous, the past, present, and future are all one “thing,” and they are constantly interacting outside or to the side of us.
Reality only appears to be divided into mind and matter, into consciousness and cosmos, or into a past, present, and future because you experience it as such. You are the splitter of the real and the creator of linear time.
We think these events are “impossible.” But they are only impossible within our historically constructed frameworks, which means that they are not impossible at all.
I assure you: there is a kind of global renaissance going on around the impossible.
A new order of knowledge is on the horizon. The present book works in front of the curtain. It tries to practice what I have seen up close in public but also what I have heard in private behind the curtain. In essence, this is a kind of intellectual manual on how to think impossibly in full view, in public.15
It is up to us. Impossible phenomena are urgings, nudges, inspirations, premonitions, and pointers, not the full deal. The fantastic is the beginning of impossible thinking—its early realization not its mature practice or public authorization.
And this is the ultimate reason that quantum mechanics and mystical literature correspond so powerfully: because they are finally speaking of different aspects or expressions of the same deeper reality, one “from the outside” (the physics), the other “from the inside” (mystical experience).
Foremost among these colleagues is the Swiss-German quantum theorist Harald Atmanspacher, whose dual-aspect monism I adopted some time ago as my own working ontology and whose recent writings on the “deep structure of meaning” (meaning is real and an “objective” feature of the physical world) with the historian and philosopher of physics Dean Rickles is very close to where I want to go in these pages.
This is a philosophical framework that helps me think about the empirical data of my historical materials that would otherwise go unnoticed or be immediately dismissed. Put a bit differently, I am not doing quantum physics here. I am thinking-with quantum physicists, who are in turn thinking-with me.
In short, we have evolved to win the game of life not to perceive reality as it really is.
Ball has written that if we are serious about the cultural project that follows such discoveries and confirmations, “we’re going to need some philosophy.”20 Which is another way of saying we are going to need the humanities. What I will add here is that we are going to need a long, hard look at extreme anomalous experiences, which, if I am correct, may well be quantum effects just staring us in the proverbial face. They certainly look quantum. But they are also generally mediated by the imagination, and so they also appear as fantastic.
Physics and psychics, it turns out, have been reflecting one another in a double mirror for a long time, pretty much as long as we have had modern physics.
but it has been concluded before by the (idealist) philosophers: it very much looks like to be is to be perceived.
Clearly, sometimes impossible thinking is impossible for the impossible thinker too. I will try my best to inhabit and express this kind of awed humility on the page, or, to speak more colloquially, this honest WTF feeling. In many ways, this entire book can be captured by those three letters and the stunned vulgarism they humorously encode.
Indeed, at least since Authors of the Impossible (2010), I have insisted that myth or story sometimes results in very real and otherwise completely anomalous physical effects—that reality itself has everything to do with how we tell it. Basically, I have read myth in realist terms as the paranormal—that is, as the very dramatic and spontaneous experience in the physical historical world of us writing us, almost always, please note, in traumatic or marginalizing contexts that have everything to do with the social readings of myth and religion of my academic training.
It is more than time to think impossibly—even if this is an order of knowledge before its time.
To think impossibly is a kind of return to origins, then, but to return smarter now, perhaps a bit more jaded, certainly a good deal wiser. To think impossibly is to begin anew.
Corbin, a student of Massignon, was deeply influenced by the philosophical work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whom he knew personally and translated into French.
Heidegger in turn also helped form the German theologian and scholar of comparative religion Frederic Spiegelberg (1897–1994), who fled for his and his family’s lives from National Socialist Germany, where Heidegger remained quite comfortable and protected as a card-carrying Nazi and an anti-Semitic academic and writer.3 Spiegelberg eventually landed at Stanford University in Northern California, where he would mentor the two founders of a future think tank and retreat center called the Esalen Institute—in particular, Michael Murphy (who is my own closest mentor to this day).
Esalen, I wrote about Henry Corbin’s category of the imaginal as a collapse of fiction and reality, especially as this collapse or fusion was known as hurqalya—that “heaven,” interworld, alien Earth, or hyperdimensional vision of history that was so central to Corbin’s Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth (1977) and, soon, to Michael Murphy’s vision of the “future of the body.”
my impossible hypothesis is not about returning to an exclusively vertical perspective. I have no wish to return to the religions. I did not announce my book on Esalen with the subtitle (drawn directly from Spiegelberg) “America and the Religion of No Religion” for nothing. But this does not mean that I am somehow against religion as coded expression of the fantastic either. Rather, what I most desire to do is affirm both the horizontal and the vertical, the ethical and the mystical, and in countless formations or relationships, not just one.
Instead of ignoring them, which is what everyone else in the medical world was doing, he chose to write about them in a little book entitled Life after Life (1975). The book was a bomb detonating in the American spiritual landscape. It sold millions of copies and was translated into numerous languages as it set off a firestorm of endless enthusiasms, religious debates, and future revelations, which continue to this day. Among this firestorm were a number of theological controversies, including an outcry from fundamentalist Christians who were not at all happy that there was no hell or creedal
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The humorless fundamentalists were correct about that. Reading story after story, spiritual journey after journey, the message was crystal clear: belief, much less denominational adherence, was pretty much irrelevant. Everyone goes to heaven.
Life after Life was the book to bring the phrase “near-death experience” into American English and into the popular global religious imagination.
Some of the first in the modern world were penned by mountain climbers who had survived near-deadly falls, mostly in the Swiss Alps.
like the “myth of Er” (why is it a myth?) told by Plato in The Republic (10:614–21): a story about a soldier left for dead who awakens on the funeral pyre twelve days later to tell a fantastic tell of the afterlife, of reincarnation, and of the nature of the soul and its moral choices.
The book collapsed any and all divisions between the popular and the elite—spiritual wisdom was for everyone and anyone.
The phrase “near-death experience” was also, I should add, a comparative phrase through and through. It connected instead of disconnected. It sought patterns not identities, although it also suggested an underlying sameness or unity. It definitively put the accent on what is shared, on how we are all connected to a common if also mediated afterlife—to
In her own words and contemporary understanding, the experience of getting struck by lightning and going to heaven made her much more “spiritual” but much less “religious.”
My point is already a familiar one: if we can learn to think-with such a radical set of experiences (and not reduce these to Krohn’s social surround, psychological makeup, or what she was reading), we can begin to theorize religious experience in ways that are very different from what we are currently doing—which is to say, we can think impossibly.
Henry Corbin did not coin or invent the category of the imaginal. It had been in circulation in the study of unusual or extreme religious states for some eight decades before Corbin began to use the term in his own specific senses in the 1960s.
Eranos was a kind of intellectual retreat center at the villa of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn in Ascona, Switzerland, that hosted a set of annual meetings and lectures from 1933 on, some of which were essentially seed essays for later projects and books that would come to define the comparative study of religion, and especially the comparative study of mystical literature, in the twentieth century. Luminaries included Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Gershom Scholem, Henry Corbin, and Joseph Campbell.25
The structure of the human, as already noted, is thus a kind of paradoxical “dualitude” or “bi-unity,” with the human person accompanied by an angelic twin or companion who can mediate between this Human as Two.27 This is uncannily similar, I must add, to what Elizabeth Krohn saw in the afterworld of her own visions (where every human soul was accompanied by a partner or double).
