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July 26, 2024
One basic feature, really the first, of impossible thinking is its desire to go big, to make the grand comparison or see the big picture. Impossibility itself, one realizes with something of a shock, is mostly a matter of scale and place. It is also a function of exclusiveness and inclusiveness—how much one is willing to take in and try to understand together.
personally have this lingering conviction that I have never been able to shake. It is this: whatever produced the astonishing and multiple Sanskrit and vernacular literatures of the medieval and early modern South Asian Tantric traditions are now producing the equally astonishing and multiplex global literatures of the modern UFO encounter and abduction experience. I am not quite alone in this lingering guess.
Indeed, Whitley Strieber even suggested in Communion that the triangular form imprinted on his body during his original abduction account may be related to the yantra, or “sacred diagram” or geometrical form, of the Hindu goddess Kali and what he describes as the “Indian Tantras.”
Impossible thinking involves not just a thinking-with but also a laughing-with.
There is no ultimate subjectivity or objectivity deep down. Both emerge together from a deeper source, as does any friendship or society. This is his neutral or dual-aspect monism.
For what it is worth, I have long been of the strong opinion that my earlier erotic interests are connected to my present paranormal ones: I went from queering religion to weirding religion.12 Same thing.
he writes and speaks often of a shamanic worldview, including a ritual conviction that the proper intentions and rituals can manifest physical reality.
The autism, it turns out, is one key, and not just to Kevin’s life story but to spiritual, visionary, and trance accomplishments in the history of religions in general. Kevin firmly believes that many of the greatest saints and mystics in history were autistic as we understand that term today.
He points out that such a savant syndrome, which he also describes as “the genius within us,” likely correlates with a dominant right hemisphere and may, in some cases, have to do with excessively high testosterone levels in the developing fetus (we will see this focus on hormones return in Kevin’s thoughts).
Cutchin also notes the likely relationship between autism and sainthood and speculates about the rocketing rates of autism in the population coinciding with the sharp rise of the alien abduction experience.
Kevin explains the basic difference between nonautistic people and autistic people like himself: “Most people are digital computers, haunted by flashes of analog Mind. I live in a pool of Mind but have difficulty interfacing with digital (non-autistic) humanity.” Or now, in a rather stunning few sentences that combine the history of philosophy, art, computer science, and evolutionary biology: “Humans are analog/digital processing units for the Cosmic Unconscious of Platonic Surrealism.”
The right side mediates Mind. It is literally “para-normal,” to the left hemisphere, which constructs and projects the rational ego as a still-evolving and now self-directed cosmic interface. Here is the neuroanatomy of impossible thinking. It’s all in your head, for sure. Or much better, it is your head but all of it, not just one side.
By his own memory, Kevin was aware in the womb. As the Hindu yogic tradition had it, he was “born with an active kundalini.”
talk), but sexualized energy does. More specifically, testosterone, which can easily cross the blood-to-brain barrier and does indeed travel from the genitals to the brain and back under the right conditions. The yogic tradition is entirely correct, then, even if it sometimes literalizes its sex-to-spirit claim in ways that are physiologically false (this would also, by the way, explain the maleness of some of these yogic traditions—they would be about the supereffects of testosterone, after all).
there is a strong and practical focus on “the one and only tool we have to evolve,” the interface between the human being and the cosmos—which is to say, the social and psychological
he defines it in the sense of the social self or ego. The ego is “conditioned consciousness”: “what we all experience in the daily world if we are not in the grip of something mystical.”
Awareness is the One when it is not being anything in particular, when it is not reflecting back on itself as consciousness of something else. Awareness is God hiding.
Hence, Kevin’s favorite expression for this bigger vision of reality is “Platonic surrealism.” It is “Platonic” for its insistence on a deeper level of truth and reality that is not accessible to human reason and opinion. It is “surreal” for the wildly symbolic, irrational, nonrational, and playful ways it expresses its endless possibilities and potentials, not unlike a surrealist artist trying to paint the superreal or surreal unconscious.
He will also insist that no single myth, narrative, or belief is true. In some profound sense, they all are true since they are all artistic expressions of this same “Platonic Surrealist Unconscious.” There is not no meaning. There is too much meaning. It is not that this or that culture is right. It is that everyone is right. Such is the deconstruction of deconstruction.
First, human beings need to imagine things. They need to tell stories. But, second, the things or stories themselves do not matter much and can never be final. Only the little red wagon—that is, the imagination—truly matters. That is because the imagination is grounded in reality itself. Actually, then, it is not that humans need to imagine. It is that the universe is constantly imagining itself, including in and as human beings.
Reality is imagining itself, including the reasonable self that Descartes imagined to be real (but is not). Until we can really see this—that reality itself is imaginal by nature and intent—we will not be healed. We will keep imagining, quite falsely, that our egos and their gory stories are real.
“It’s no surprise that humans tell crappy stories.” Many of them are victims of “the train wreck of monotheism.” Basically, believers in Christian monotheism damn themselves, suffer their own projections, and believe in fictions like heaven and hell or damnation and salvation. It’s “a spell of degradation, lies, imprisonment and eternal death.”37 It does not have to be this way, though.
The concept and experience of the tulpa emerges over millennia, first from older Buddhist traditions (which also deny there is any permanent soul or self), especially the Mahayana or “Great Vehicle” teaching of the three bodies of the Buddha. The first of these bodies is the dharmakaya, literally the “truth body,” often identified with the entire universe or reality as such. The second of these bodies is the sambhogakaya, literally the “enjoyment body,” through which the Buddha and bodhisattvas inhabit the various heavens and perform their miracles through the superhuman powers (iddhi, rddhi,
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The word first appears in the work of Alexandra David-Neel in her 1929 book Magic and Mystery in Tibet.
He repeats his observation that humans are tulpa-creating or soul-creating machines; that is to say that the social ego, person, soul, or self may be an illusion, but it is projected from something Other:
The ‘Other’ becomes enlightened, not us. We exist for the purpose of another. Somebody has to be at the rear end of the dog pack, and that’s us. We provide a valuable function for the Larger Ecosystem. We are tulpa-creating machines.”
Kevin puts the idea, always succinctly: “It’s generally trauma that opens doors in the psyche. . . . Since ‘trauma’ opens the doors more than anything, that’s why ‘the Other’ tends to manifest as ‘evil’ and not ‘good.’ . . .
Kevin said that “Kundalini can be viewed as a UFO encounter inside one’s body,” and “a UFO encounter can be viewed as a Kundalini encounter outside of one’s body.”
Kevin often insists: “Kundalini is the Mother of Illusion. Maya and all that.” Put a bit differently, Kevin does not literally believe all the phenomena that appear to him, and yet they happen. He understands perfectly well that they are illusions, but they are illusions actually appearing, truly manifesting, that serve legitimate purposes, whether we understand them at the time or not. There is another way of saying this: “Consciousness is the Trickster.”
What is important is the summoning elements, as when someone is abducted and feels like it is physical. Summoning is a dual thing. It occurs from both sides, as it were. There is a kind of shadowy pocket between the two worlds, an interface or liminal place. There is an intersection of reality where Platonic ideals meet the physical world.
But he has read Jenny Randles, the ufologist who has famously called this same middle space or eerie zone “the Oz effect,” after The Wizard of Oz (1939). There is that fundamental fuzziness again.
It laughed. Comedy aside, this utterly bizarre event totally “messed up” Kevin for five full years. There was also what he describes as an overwhelming “data stream,” which went on for years but out of which he could make out nothing coherent. There was just too much information.
We can begin by observing that the UFO summoning is part of Kevin’s larger argument that paranormal phenomena are essentially pieces or parts of ourselves that we have projected outward, usually in a traumatic situation or because of a previous trauma and its dissociative nature. These things are projected outward so that we can read them and let them go. They are “semiotic” in nature; that is, they are communications that must be interpreted, even if we cannot fully interpret them (hence the overwhelming data stream?).
but if this “UFO” does indeed flow [through] the “Oz mechanism,” which generally flows through the midbrain as a result of trauma on some level, there will also be an element of “the Other” in it; generally seen as the “weird part”—for me it was the rivets. That weird part is the semiotic “message” that you need to decode. It’s pure Little Red Wagon Theory; and what’s in the wagon is only significant on a person-by-person basis. Anyone who claims they have a message for the entire human race, because of such an encounter, is generally full of shit.
The summoning of the UFO, like the appearance of the barrel-chested dwarf or the kundalini phenomena for that matter, was all about letting go, letting the illusory parts of us die and wither away so that we can talk to a more evolved form of life. And what is that more evolved form of life? It is us again, but on a cosmic level now: “When you let your ‘personal soul die,’ then the only soul that remains is ‘the Universe’—and then you know ME.”
While we can sometimes “dream a better dream” as a “soul” or a “spirit” after all the veils fall, and Mind is revealed, we discover all our attempts to cheat death, to create something enduring to fight against a cold and chaotic Universe were pure foolishness. We simply Are, and will always be, as a song, a movie, within the Cosmic Imaginal, and when it is intermission, and slumber flows throughout the House, we smile at Ourselves as we always do, after having watched all our movies, and watch them yet again, with another set of properties, another set of interactions, and just for funsies,
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Still, I remain utterly convinced that it would do us well to listen hard and long to Kevin, educated as he is in the hard sciences but also adept in the modern spiritualities. He can teach us to think impossibly, and to laugh impossibly.
We begin to seriously entertain the likelihood that something is flying around in our folklore. Us.
from describing the impossible to theorizing it.
This is how we make the impossible possible.
Modernity is occult to the core.
Indeed, Colin Wilson has described Husserl and phenomenology itself as “a prosaic way of developing the mystical faculty,” which he compares to the creative vision of poets and painters.
Impossible thinking embraces every religious experience that can or cannot be slotted into a theistic model, including entirely private and popular ones. All of this is on the comparativist’s table. Like the phenomenology of verticality, this refusal to distinguish between the popular and the elite, between the “authentic” and the “inauthentic,” between “religion” and “magic,” this intentional oddness, will function as one of our five pillars of impossible thinking in my conclusion. There simply is no impossible thinking without this whacky weirdness, this refusal to distinguish.
I remember well how we were constantly told in the 1980s that such a religious studies method is not what Husserl’s phenomenology was about. Wow, that was an understatement. The phenomenology of religion in which we were trained was a setting aside of all ontological questions for the sake of the fair or neutral comparison of religious forms and patterns and, in other modes, toward various critical theories (mostly psychoanalytic, feminist, postcolonial, race, and queer theory at that point in time). One could certainly think normatively, but only on the social and historical plane. That was
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Altizer’s death of God theology (which was Nietzschean to the core) was a part of the history of religions school that Long helped to found, and which had its own experiential beginnings. Hence Altizer relates a dreamlike ecstatic “initiation” involving ghosts, “spirits of those dead who never leave us,” in Hyde Park, Chicago, and goes as far as to argue that such presences were the “instruments” of Mircea Eliade, who lived down the street. The “deep sense of mission” Altizer came to know around the altered states of this spectral initiation led him to call Eliade “father” and resulted in his
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It is so important for philosophy to be led out of liberalism and rationalism, and to be led once more to what is essential, to truth. The question concerning ultimate reality, to truth, must be the object of every true philosophy. This is my life’s work.34 I cannot think of anything more impossible today. Truth itself.
If there is an intellectual who knows how to think impossibly, it is Elliot Wolfson.
what the kabbalistic tradition calls Ein Sof, or the Infinite,
We had arrived at the same fundamental conclusion—the orthodox prominence of a kind of esoteric or sublimated male homoeroticism—with completely different cultural materials: he with medieval kabbalistic texts, I with Roman Catholic mystical literature and the Bengali texts surrounding the Shakta Hindu saint Ramakrishna (1836–1886).
As far as I can tell, Elliot Wolfson has done as much as anyone to emphasize and explore historical differences and textual nuances, even when such differences and nuances are anything but congratulatory. Think of his extensive explorations of Jewish phallomorphism (the metaphorical prominence of the male phallus) and the ontological subsumption of the female into the male in Speculum, his long meditations on medieval Jewish exclusivism and essentialism (really a kind of anti-Christian conviction) in Language, Eros, Being, or his radical critique of theism, or theomania, in Giving Beyond the
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