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

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

Hence Abrams drew on earlier scholarship to provide a two-word definition of Romanticism: “spilt religion.”

Out of these same altered states, at once human and divine, the Romantic movement defined the “symbol” as much more than an arbitrary linguistic sign or artificial metaphor. The symbol participates in that which it expresses. Words are experiences. The Romantic writers also fully recognized that symbols grow cold and stale and must be replaced by other newer symbolic real experiences, which is what they themselves were all about. Hence their poetic, visual, and musical arts. Abrams argues that this, in the end, is a “total revolution of consciousness” that took place, not at all accidentally, during a historical period in Europe and America of political and moral revolution.

In short, there is a vast prehistory of the imaginal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it lies squarely in English Romanticism and, though I have not treated it here, German idealism.

Indeed, as Engell has argued extensively, it is the creative imagination that is the “hinge” between the two great eras of European thought that initiate and announce modernity: the Enlightenment and the Romantic movements.

The Romantic movement is what Harold Bloom would call “Prometheus Rising,” the man who would defy the gods in Greek mythology, which is also to say, defy the social community.

For Blake, the imagination is, in truth, the Imagination, as he had it in Milton. It is not a psychological function or tangential byproduct of neural firings. It is “Human Existence itself.” It is what we might now call “consciousness.”

Such a vision of the imagination and the symbol had “one foot in the empirical and one foot in the ideal or transcendental.”42 It was a third space, a middle world that linked all human experience and all human beings. It was also, I should point out, the “boldest reply” to the problems of human diversity and unity, since such a model could explain why the religions were so different and yet so very similar: they were all expressions of the same creative imagination working its wonders in different contexts and cultures. Little wonder that Blake would pen an early little book called All Religions Are One (1788).

Corbin’s imaginal was deeply informed by his own docetic Christology—that is, his convictions that the doctrine of the Incarnation should be interpreted symbolically but not literally: divinity cannot become literal flesh for Corbin, ever. It only “appears” to have done so.

In most forms of Islam, the doctrine of Incarnation is a classical heresy, association (shirk), or untruth.43

The creative imagination is, by nature, wildly appropriating. It does not care a whit for the orthodoxies of the religions, the languages of cultures, the borders of nation-states, or, frankly, the moral concerns of the academy. It endlessly and effortlessly combines anything and everything to express itself.

First, it is perfectly possible to be a gnostic intellectual (by which I mean someone whose thought emerges from extraordinary experience or direct gnosis) and to care deeply about politics, ethics, and this world.

and we now know that not every form of Gnosticism is world-denying or anti-body.

I made the argument almost two decades ago that the ancient Gnostics were some of our first and still some of our most radical theorists of religion, particularly in their rejection of the moral monstrosities of the biblical God and their dramatic reversal of key religious assumptions: God did not make us—we made God, the serpent was a figure of gnosis not of temptation, and so on.

I observe all of this to reflect on the political and moral implications of the impossible thinking I am trying to trace, theorize, and model in these pages. Such thought, precisely in its emphasis on the theoretical importance of cross-culturally available anomalous experiences, does not and cannot confirm the exclusivity of any religious tradition (including Islam, Hinduism, or Christianity).

I cannot repeat this enough: impossible thinking is an expression of a deep and most profound humanism, a paradoxical superhumanism that recognizes that what we think of today as the “human” cannot be identified with any culture, religion, or society and that understands the further reaches of this human have indeed been most fully imagined and practiced—if, yes, usually in unconsciously projected and specifically culturally refracted ways—in the symbols, rituals, and myths of the history of religions.

Flournoy also helped to revolutionize the study of mediumship and trance formations through a relatively

the Victorian classicist and psychical researcher Frederic Myers. Significantly, Myers’s original English expressions supernormal and imaginal collapsed any final distinction between the mental and the material dimensions of reality and carried strong evolutionary impulses, as we shall soon see.

Flournoy was both devastatingly skeptical and deeply sympathetic when it came to the contents of Müller’s visions and channelings.

Flournoy would have none of this either-or thinking. Only both-and thinking, or what I am calling impossible thinking, was remotely adequate.

would he jump to conclusions about what it all meant and where it was all going. He refused to take a position about whether these visions and supernormal abilities were “forerunners of a future evolution” (which is what Frederic Myers thought), or evolutionary survivals from some previous condition (which is what Sigmund Freud would suggest), or “whether they are purely accidental” and so meaningless.53 He did not know, and so he left it at that.

the Cambridge-trained classicist Frederic Myers (1843–1901), a superhumanist if ever there was one.

both terms—the imaginal and the supernormal—carried definite evolutionary dimensions for Myers. Basically, he used both words to describe what we would think of today as paranormal phenomena as evolutionary “buds” or early immature developments of superabilities, like, say, telepathy, that would someday become integrated into consciousness and controlled in an intentional way.

Myers actually coined the word “telepathy” (“pathos-at-a-distance”) in December 1882 and theorized it extensively through literally thousands of case studies, linking it in the process to strong emotional connection between loved ones or a strong erotic attraction toward a beloved—“erotic” here understood in the sense of Plato’s Symposium—that is, as a metaphysically oriented eros that can be “held in,” sublimated (Freud was thinking of the Symposium too), and directed ecstatically toward the divine world of Forms. Indeed, telepathy was probably the signature idea of Myers, along with his notion of the subliminal, which, much like Corbin’s imaginal, could mediate under specific conditions between metaphysical (Platonic) realities and the psychological experience of a historical individual.

French lawyer and medical doctor named Joseph Maxwell (1858–1938). Maxwell coined the French term in 1903, in his book Les phénomènes psychiques.

In Maxwell’s mind, something paranormal is very much a part of the natural world but is also currently beyond our scientific understanding. He was being very careful. He meant “to the side of” (para-) the normal or the natural, not something outside that natural order, which is what the Latin supernaturalis, or supernatural,

and productive career. He worked in law, including progressive attempts to push the legal landscape into reproductive and abortion rights and sex education. He worked in medicine, particularly around psychopathology. He worked in the psychical research of the place and time. He also wrote a book on modern forms of mysticism within Theosophy, Le mysticisme contemporain (1893), which he discusses again in Les phénomènes psychiques, confessing that he came upon these texts by accident and that he felt some surprise that “a mystical movement” could find clients at the end of the nineteenth century.78

Moreover, much like Arthur Schopenhauer and a long line of intellectuals before and around him, Maxwell concluded that the anthropology of magic, divination, and witchcraft needed to be rethought, since all these demeaned and dismissed phenomena actually happen.

Protest all you want. We are at the end of being us. . . . The first and final alien disclosure is not that aliens don’t exist, it’s that you don’t. It’s that no matter how loudly you protest, you’re not ready for true disclosure, nor will you ever be. Jeremy Vaeni, Aliens: The First and Final Disclosure

In other words, the modern abduction visions replicate, in precise detail, the imaginal of Myers. What was an entomological metaphor in Myers has become a literal visionary form or physical encounter in the alien abduction literature.

The paranormal is insectoid.

As counterintuitive as it might sound, it is well known among seasoned researchers that the UFO is very much connected to the near-death experience (NDE)—the heavenly saucer and the transcendent soul.

As Whitley often comments, Anne once emerged from her research into these letters (one can still see her colored penciled notes on the letters themselves) stating, “This has something to do with what we call death.”

Before December 2017 (that is, before the New York Times articles), it was not uncommon for people to assume that the UFO phenomenon was not serious, that it was “New Age,” or that it was somehow a “California thing.” This is not entirely wrong, since the New Age movement in fact took the UFO phenomenon seriously (it was correct about so many things) and spun out a number of UFO religions. Some scholars of the New Age have even argued, quite convincingly, that particular currents or strands of these esoteric movements began among UFO contactees of a particular Theosophical persuasion in the 1950s (this fits the case of one of the earliest witnesses, the businessman Ken Arnold, whose family story sounds very Theosophical to my ear).

There are even humorous postcards in the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University to this effect—ones that comedically identify flying saucers as “Californians.” It is funny. But it is not true, and it has never been true

some of the earliest and most dramatic documented modern encounters have been near nuclear military sites around the country,

Roswell, New Mexico, for example, was just such a nuclear site, where one of the earliest alleged crashes took place in early July of 1947, just after the sighting of private pilot Ken Arnold, which took place on June 24, 1947, near Mount Rainier, Washington. It was the latter event that in fact gave us the expression “flying saucer” through a journalist reporting on the incident the next day. New England has also played a special role.

The Indigenous communities of the Americas are filled with UFO lore, as are Canada, Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, to name some of the most reported.

To put an accent on things, the UFO phenomenon is in fact global, although, of course, its reporting and interpretation are always contingent on surrounding cultural influences. This is why to study the UFO phenomenon adequately is to study pretty much everything.

Indeed, three of these insiders go to great lengths in their coauthored Skinwalkers at the Pentagon (the very title fuses the two aspects, since a “skinwalker” is a shape-shifting superwitch in Indigenous American lore) to describe and discuss things like the “hitch-hiker effect.” The latter phenomenon involves military and intelligence professionals apparently being “infected” with occult presences on Skinwalker Ranch in Utah and bringing the phenomenon back home, literally, to their East Coast families.

Kelleher, with whom I have worked on an advisory board for Mr. Bigelow, is explicit about what Skinwalkers at the Pentagon calls “blue orbs.” These are basically intelligent balls of plasma that interact with humans, often at close range, and occasionally penetrate their bodies, sometimes with cancerous effect. Kelleher once advised me over dinner, “If you see one, turn and run like hell. That’s my advice.”17

The UFO basically abolishes what Agrama calls the “secularity of science”—that is, the manner in which science is believed to be a purely material or physical pursuit without spiritual or, in this case, esoteric or mystical dimensions.

particularly the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the depth psychologist C. G. Jung, the UFO, or flying saucer, is the ultimate modern “symbol” that participates in both the mental or social world of the subjects who encounter it and in the material world of their own epistemic or sensory experience.

In Jung’s mature terms, the UFO is psychoid, at once psychic and physical.

And, indeed, in historical fact, human witnesses are often radically transformed by their encounters. They experience, either within the event itself or later develop, new astonishing abilities—think telepathy and, as in Arrival, precognition (the same, again, is true of near-death experiences). Such encounters can also be of a deeply spiritual nature, by which I do not mean “good” or “nice.”

My own position? It is always developing and confessedly tentative, and I would be most happy to change it tomorrow, but my general sense is that there is definitely something being covered up or lied about (the misinformation is grotesque and obvious to serious scientific and humanistic researchers), but—and here is the thing—no one knows what that something is or what it means. Put a bit differently, there is a there there, and it may well possess a very physical dimension, but no human being knows what that there really is, including those institutions (government or corporate) that naively think they control it toward some kind of national security interest or profit motive.

If you gave me enough beer and asked me to be blunt about the situation, asked me what I really thought, I would say that we need to flip from a spatial register (it is not where they are from) to a temporal register (it is when they are from). I would say that the UFO often appears to be a time machine and that the so-called aliens look more than a little like human beings from the future—or, in some contact cases, a sophisticated form of future artificial intelligence.

Let me be blunt. I strongly suspect that what we finally have in the UFO phenomenon is a physical-spiritual phenomenon that is being grossly misinterpreted as a conventional military threat or potential corporate technology but that no one really understands, much less can reverse engineer with our present strictly physicalist assumptions. To speak paradoxically and, I hope, shockingly, we are trying to shoot down souls. Good luck with that.

Joking aside, I am personally stunned by Bobby’s experience because it replicates, in near-perfect phenomenological detail, what happened to me in one early morning in Calcutta in November 1989. Unlike Bobby, though, the results of what I call “that Night” were more than a blood-pressure reading. The result was a lifetime of scholarship (including this book). I saw no such insectoid entity in that literally shocking event (I initially thought I was being electrocuted), even if Kali, literally the “Black One,” the Hindu Tantric goddess I was trying to understand at that time, is sometimes compared to a spider with eight arms. Still, there was no visual content. Okay, it felt like I was having sex with a many-armed superspider (maybe I was), but I saw no such thing. Vision or no, the experience convinced me, quite completely, that nonordinary encounters can result in new forms of insight, wild intuition, and powerful creativity that lie at the very core of some types of cultural production, including, believe it or not, nerdy scholarship. It happened to me. I am who I am, I think how I think, because of that Night.

working on a trilogy of films—a trilogy, by the way, that Davis firmly believes that he wrote out of the signal shot into his body that night (again, I feel the same about my books, including this one).

And this was all before Davis met Jacqueline Smith, who revealed at a 2016 UFO conference that she had been visited by mantis beings at noon on—get this—New Year’s Eve. She also claims to have mantis DNA. She suggested that Davis himself was a mantis in a past life in another dimension—that is, between the physical and the spiritual realms. They are interdimensional, not strictly physical.