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

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

Consider the reflecting image of the mirror. The specular image of the mirror, including the double mirror, shines throughout Wolfson’s corpus. There is a certain optics here, which also encodes both a hermeneutics and a kind of postmodern gnosis that is, by definition, not restricted to any particular tradition or culture. That gnosis is rigorously dialectical and self-reflexive. It continuously bends back on itself, very much like the ancient ouroboros biting its own tail. This serpentine or tail-biting movement (which is also somehow vaguely autoerotic) doubles throughout the Wolfsonian body of work, determining in the process some of that work’s most basic paradoxical insights.

Accordingly, I have been struck over the years how Elliot Wolfson’s corpus reflects, in an almost occult manner, my own thought and writing. I am not exaggerating. There is something uncanny about this man’s words, something that finally escapes and overflows reason, something that makes me believe in a kabbalah—that is, a received tradition, not of a purely Jewish wisdom, mind you, although that is part of it too, but of our own modern and now postmodern comparative gnosis embedded in the comparative study of religion. Hence, also, Wolfson’s insistence that it is entirely traditional to subvert the tradition, that the greatest respect one can show a religious tradition is to engage it in a radically critical fashion and thereby to change and preserve it.

There is an ontology behind or beneath Wolfson’s reflecting words. Hence Wolfson’s consistent embrace of Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum, or “coincidence of opposites,” as a model of kabbalistic thought and as a forerunner and fulfillment of postmodern theory today. This coincidence or identity of opposites, which violates and transcends the Aristotelian logic that currently defines pretty much the entire academy, is perhaps the deepest structure of all Wolfson’s cognitive structures.

the reality of the image but also with what the image cannot image. Wolfson often communicates this key idea through the motif of the veil. There is no naked truth for Wolfson. The truth can never reveal itself as it really is. The truth can only appear to a human being in the form of an image—which is to say, through a veil. The veil, however, always implies a face, something which is veiled, just as that which is veiled, a face, needs the veil to appear at all.

This paradoxical understanding in turn produces a very distinct concept of the image: the image is real.

we can simplify them with a single statement: for an embodied human being, it is the imagination that mediates between the two dimensions of the real.

In the temple of contemplation (itself derived from templum, or “temple”), Elliot Wolfson has allowed us to see that “the divine becomes human and the human divine.”53 And that is the final meaning of “embodiment” for Elliot Wolfson.

In a truly radical and thoroughly thought through nonduality, there is no such thing as immanence or transcendence. Both are category mistakes, an application of phenomenological descriptions “up here” in the body-brain to ontic reality itself “down” or “up” there without such a splitting body-brain.

was “more real than real.” It was not a metaphor (it did not refer to something else). It was not a dream (it was not imagined in the banal sense). It was really, even physically, there. It was more real than real. Words are experiences.

Wolfson enacts this realist impulse quite explicitly in A Dream Interpreted within a Dream, where he puts kabbalistic dream interpretation into conversation with the speculative reaches of quantum mechanics in order to demonstrate how the construal of meaning in the dream is brought into being or actualized through attention, intention, consciousness, and the act of dream interpretation itself, much as the act of observation is said to “collapse the wave function” in one interpretation of the quantum mechanical experiment. It is simply not possible to extricate the presence of consciousness from the behavior of reality in either context. As shocking as the conclusion might be, to perceive is to be.

there is a particular intellectual lineage at work in such moments. Such a realist impulse goes at least as far back as the ecstatic nineteenth-century figure of Friedrich Nietzsche. More immediately, however, it goes back to the Romanian historian of religions Ioan Couliano.

He was asking, in so many words, why historians were writing about “history,” as if time really were a simple linear causal process, when we have known, since Einstein, that this is simply not so, that time does not likely work like this at all. In effect, Couliano was asking this bracing question: How should we think and write about the history of religions, and in particularly about mystical experiences and paranormal events, in a post-Einsteinian universe?

Couliano’s bizarrely beautiful introduction to The Tree of Gnosis, where he begins to explore what is essentially a Platonic model of historiography, with hyperdimensional idealist forms interacting in three-dimensional historical time with different actors and movements as these forms play out their different cognitive possibilities.58 Basically, he was writing of the interaction of eternity and time.

I ask all my PhD students to read two essays: Couliano’s “A Historian’s Toolkit for the Fourth Dimension” and Wolfson’s “Prologue: Timeswerve/Hermeneutic Reversibility.”60 It is my own conviction that these few pages contain some of the most provocative lines ever written in the modern study of religion.

Put simply, you cannot use present categories of thought to interpret the meanings of the past.

It is well known that one of Nietzsche’s most important teachings, indeed what Michael Allen Gillespie has called his final teaching, was the “eternal recurrence of the same” (“ewige Wiederkunft des Gleichen”), also know more simply as the eternal return.68 The teaching was about the circularity of time and how everything and each of us will be repeated, in our tiniest details, over and over again, not in some serial fashion but in a circular one.

And then, suddenly, a voice in my head said, “Now is the time.” And somehow, I knew what I was going to do.

I rushed up to the basement window and I then put my forehead against the house, closed my eyes, and just “sent” this feeling of love and comfort to my younger self with the whole of my being. I don’t know how long I stood there doing this, but when I was done “sending” this message, I looked down, and the basement lights were off. I then ran inside, turned on the lights, and things were as I left them before my walk. And I fell upon the basement floor, weeping in joy, clutching my flip flops to my chest, and feeling like I had just been given some unthinkably tremendous gift. I often now wonder what would have happened if I had not somehow sent a message to myself during my years in crisis.

Since this event, I have felt a deep assurance that all moments in time somehow exist simultaneously, and that, for whatever reason, sometimes two moments in time not directly connected to each other in linear causality still somehow “bleed” into and affect each other.

An “unthinkably tremendous gift.” “This was easily one of the most important events of my entire life.” Sit with those phrases, and then try to ignore them. Try to pretend that such events do not matter, do not possess historical agency, cannot be a very special part of what we so confidently call “history.”

That this is why I think I have been so struck by the work of Elliot Wolfson over these decades, why his work has always felt so uncanny to me, so familiar and yet so other. Perhaps I knew of these ideas from our shared future, from this very chapter and book. Whether that is so or not, this is one of the surest and simplest ways to recognize an impossible thinker: that time no longer moves in a single direction. It loops and swerves. It visits itself from the future. It is in time, but it is also outside of time. It’s about time.

More and more I see the psycho-physical problem as the key to the overall spiritual situation of our age, and the gradual discovery of a new (“neutral”) psycho-physical unitary language, whose function is to symbolically describe an invisible, potential form of reality that is only indirectly inferable through its effects, also seems to me an indispensable prerequisite for the emergence of the new hieros gamos [sacred marriage] that you predicted. Letter from Wolfgang Pauli to C. G. Jung, May 17, 1952

This penultimate chapter is, I hope, the clearest practical statement to date of what I think and, most of all, how I think.1 It will switch gears, as we say, and enter a more philosophical and confessional way of expressing myself. It is autobiographical in genre and intent. There is good reason for this.

Actually, I don’t believe anything. I think that the paranormal investigator John Keel had it just right in a cultural meme widely attributed to him and certainly faithful to his body of work: “Belief is the enemy.” Anne Strieber, the wife of the science-fiction writer and American abductee and visionary Whitley Strieber, used to say something similar, if in a more diplomatic way: “Mankind is too young to have beliefs. What we need are good questions.”

We started every mass in my little Nebraska hometown by reciting it together: “Light from light, true God from true God, one in being with the Father.” I realize today that this particular incarnational theology (the creedal lines refer to the doubled human and divine natures of Christ) has informed nearly everything that I think. My present writing, for example, on the superhumanities—that is, the academic humanities as already encoded with the “super” experiences of their historical authors (precognitive dream, evolving superhumans, and doubled selves)—is clearly indebted to that same ancient Christian credo.

Jesus is fully human and fully divine. But so am I, and so are you. The human is really the superhuman.

Which is to say that I think creeds are re...

Such creeds bind communities together and split them apart. They can even produce new thought and experience that the early believers could not have possibly foreseen, much less accepted.

One of the most important principles of how to think impossibly is something that we have already seen in the chapters above but that is worth underlining now: to think impossibly is to think doubly, to think as Two.

the “tyranny of clarity,” which was a basic Romantic conviction that real truth cannot be simplified and appear to human reason in a straight rational form, say, as a logical statement or syllogism.5 Rather, profound truths will always appear to the human being in narrative, symbol, image, and poem.

In effect, then, I believe everyone. But this also means that I cannot believe anyone. “I believe in belief but not in beliefs.”

same paradoxical comparative method quickly reveals another uncomfortable truth: beliefs limit what is possible. Beliefs shut down. Beliefs decide.

Which is another way of saying beliefs can miss a great deal, really almost everything. Of what would we be capable if we did not limit ourselves through what we believe?

The phenomenon reflects to us what we will, what we fear, who we think we are. That reflexive quality of the phenomena may well be the very best clue as to what some—maybe many, maybe most, maybe all—these appearances actually are on a deeper level: us. We are all of this. And we are none of it.

Deep down, I suspect that robust paranormal phenomena are not personal or individual at all but fundamentally nonhuman or superpersonal—in a word, “cosmic.” It is not about a mind. It is about Mind.8 Which means that anyone’s experience is, in actual truth, “my” experience on a deeper level or, better, all “our” experience. This is why, I think, extreme experiencers so often want so much to write about their experiences—or why those experiences want to be written about: because those experiences were never really theirs in the first place; because they were always everyone’s, or no one’s.

most, maybe all, of the anomalous phenomena are related, are expressions of the same basic iceberg floating above and below the waves: the NDE is related to the OBE (out-of-body experience) is related to the UFO (or what is now called unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP—another dodge) is related to. . . . “Psi” in fact may simply be another Greek coinage for “stuff we don’t understand about consciousness and its relationship to matter.”

more information, more stories, more data is not going to get us where some of us want to go. Rather, what we need is a framework or theory in which to place all this data and so render it, as a whole, plausible and meaningful. Basically, we need a way to connect the dots. We do not need more dots. Intelligence is finally meaningful collection and connection.

The comparison that links these experiences and events is quite literally magical thinking, but in a most positive and preternatural sense now. Comparison is magic.

Science is basically an occultism, a way of positing a hidden order of things that is invisible to almost everyone, except, of course, to the scientists. And this occultism works.

Little wonder that so many elite mathematicians are Platonists—that they are convinced that numbers and equations are discovered not constructed by the human mind, that mathematics exists in its own right in some esoteric space. There is the occultism again.

Philosophically, I am articulating a form of dual-aspect monism—that is, the position that reality is ontologically One but epistemologically Two. We are the “splitters” of reality. Reality itself is not so split.

Put succinctly, dual-aspect monism is a philosophical proposition that states that “the mental (psychological) and the material (physical) are aspects of one underlying reality which itself is psychophysically neutral” (that is, neither mental nor material).

The one I am invoking is “decompositional,” since it further posits that the mental and the material domains have “split off,” or decomposed, from a previous holistic state, in this case the psychophysically neutral ground, which is an undivided whole or nondual in nature (I would say “in supernature”).

also understand that “neutral” is philosophically precise: it means neither mental nor material.

Harald Atmanspacher and Christopher Fuchs call this specific proposition “the Pauli-Jung Conjecture,” since it was developed in the private correspondence and later public writings of the quantum theorist Wolfgang Pauli and the psychiatrist and depth psychologist C. G. Jung, and since it is not yet proven as a theorem (hence its conjectural status).

Every measurement, in short, changes that which is being measured.

To put the matter in humanistic terms that may well be related, reality is hermeneutical all the way down. It responds to our interpretations. We change reality by interpreting

itself. Monism is the meaning of meaning.

Philosophically speaking, with a dual-aspect monism, “immanence” and “transcendence” are entirely relative to the body and brain. Put differently, there is such a thing as immanence or transcendence, but there are experiences of both in and as the body-brain. Put differently again, immanence and transcendence are epistemic phenomena, not ontological facts.

In physicists like Arthur Eddington and John Wheeler, then, we find “repeated hints toward a kind of spirituality that transcends the mind-matter split.”31 Much of this new spirituality—which we might call either postreligious or postsecular—will involve the dissolution of “experience” itself, since all experience is phenomenologically dualistic (that is, an intentional expression of a subject-object split). This dissolution of the subject-object structure is precisely what “mystical” means for Atmanspacher and Rickles, which, once again, they relate to Hegel and, further back, to Spinoza: “Both Spinoza’s intellectual intuition and Hegel’s absolute join in with such most fundamental immanent experiences, which are often described as mystical revelations.