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

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

A synchronicity is a human experience in which something happens in the physical environment that uncannily corresponds to something happening in the mental world of a human subject.

They truly coincide. They correspond so strikingly because they have, in fact, split from a common source and, as such, are two halves of an original whole.

neither Pauli nor Jung thought that these were actual examples of randomness or pure chance.

What they finally concluded is that a synchronicity is a powerful expression of a dual-aspect monistic world in which the mental and material domains have decomposed from a more basic One World but still retain a clear sign of their shared ground in how they correspond or speak to one another in unforgettable ways. They are not connected through any cause. They are connected through meaning. Hence the common human response to them: a sense of uncanniness or deep meaning that cannot be quite located.

“There is nothing outside the text.” Except there is. Human beings have been experiencing reality outside language and texts for millennia.

Until, of course, it is not. On a much more profound level, meaning can also work vertically between the two surface domains of the mental and the material dimensions of experience and the deeper One World from which they have emerged or split off. This is where the straight historical event becomes the synchronicity. Atmanspacher and Fuchs call this vertical meaning of meaning “sense.”

Such correspondences between the mental and material domains of ordinary human experience and the One World “below” them are the actual experiential source of the religious senses of the numinous, the uncanny, and the eerie. Beyond or below that still is the mystical sense of unity or identity in the psychophysically neutral ground of all being. In short, we are talking about the very sources of religion before religion. We are also talking about physics—that is, about the behavior of the material world. We are talking about everything. We are also talking about a realm in which space-time is void, there is no place for ordinary causation, and there is no distinction between mental and material.35 That is not physics. That is metaphysics.

It is not that we do not believe enough or reason enough, that we will somehow get to the truth of things if we just believe the right things or do enough science. The problem is that we think we can “believe” or “think” the truth at all. We cannot.

We have to be humble, not because humility is a moral virtue that we need to signal but because humility represents an open-minded recognition of our actual condition and situation. We do not know, and it is quite likely that we cannot know, not because we do not yet have enough information but because our dualistic way of cutting up the world into “belief” and “reason,” into “subjects” and “objects,” is simply false; that is, these dualistic divisions do not correspond to what is actually so.

Again, we split the world into two. We are that two. The world is not two.

I often joke on the lecture circuit that there are just two things one must understand together to understand the UFO phenomenon: radar . . . and revelation. No one ever laughs, probably because they don’t get the joke. People don’t get my joke because they are caught, they are assuming, they think they are our present order of knowledge. (Either that, or it’s just not funny.)

The “inside” of reality . . . not so much. Some go as far as to mock and demean the inside of reality, with their constant refrain that every human experience is nothing but an anecdote, and that many such anecdotes do not add up to evidence. What they really mean is that they have no idea how to study or understand these inner worlds.

They also know, on some level, that to protect their specific understanding of objective material reality, we better ignore or refuse to think about subjective mental reality.

Once we understand our present order of knowledge in this way, it becomes rather obvious why something like the UFO phenomenon has such a difficult time fitting into that order. The reason? It does not follow this binary script. Many UFO phenomena, after all, are neither purely objective nor purely subjective. They are both. Worse yet (or better yet), some of their most extreme instances involve phenomena that simply cannot be rendered as purely material or purely mental. As such, they threaten to collapse altogether this useful distinction between the external and internal worlds.

That is how conventional science works—by rending reality into two and then ignoring one whole side of it, the side of reality, of course, that the scientific method cannot make sense of, cannot understand, not in degree but, again, in principle.

Conventional science works because it gets to set the rules of the game and then pretend that phenomena it has no way of measuring or manipulating do not exist.

This, again, is why conventional science will never get us there: because reality is not so binary. Cosmos and co...

There is a way outside, or to the side, of mathematics that the external and internal worlds communicate, come together in human experience or little mind.

They involve that third space of meaning. Such moments, in short, need to be interpreted, read, engaged. They never speak in clear unambiguous ways. They cannot. That way is the imagination. That way is the fantastic, the fantastic as actual mediation of the real in which the One splits into Two and as an imaginal apparition or materialization.

I mean to suggest, rather, that whatever or whoever is there (and it may well be many things or beings, or us, or the world of the dead), these presences are interacting with the human organism in and through that organism’s imagination, which is itself a feature or dimension of consciousness.

The imagination is the privileged organ of contact, communication, and communion.

the imagination is of an entirely different order. At least in its empowered or activated states, it becomes a revelatory, if always imperfect, organ of mediation and translation.

It is also worth remembering that the imagination shows every sign of being capable of affecting physical objects and events, even the very workings of space and time, often toward some symbolic meaning or contact communication. Think flying, breaking, or falling objects in poltergeist events (signaling anxiety, anger, or some unresolved trauma). Think marks on the body of the visionary in the Christian stigmata or the modern UFO implant.

These are also physical events. There is radar. But revelation often quickly follows or appears in conjunction with the physical events.

Can we read such events literally? I don’t see how. I don’t see how we can believe all these very different and flatly contradictory beliefs. Can we read them instead as symbolic attempts to communicate something of immense human and maybe even cosmic significance, perhaps as “magical” in the technical sense of linking the mental and the material toward some future awakening to the World as One? Yes, I think we can.

Generally speaking, the sign in the contemporary humanities is entirely secular, artificial, arbitrary, and ultimately meaningless, whereas the banished symbol is implicitly religious, spontaneous or “revealed,” and supermeaningful. Most everyone in the humanities today assumes that the “sign is arbitrary”—that is, that texts, words, dreams, and visions all refer to other texts, words, dreams, and visions; in short, all such signs are entirely and completely “constructed” by historical, social, and neural processes and do not refer to anything outside themselves. They cannot. They can only refer to other signs in endless weaves and webs of illusory and always receding meaning—that is, to more and more historically relative signs.

The symbol is very different. The sumbola is from the Greek and literally meant “thrown together” (sum-bollein) and, probably originally, an “agreement” or “contract.” It referred to things like a shard of pottery broken in half and then given to two business partners so that the deal could be recognized later by a perfect match, or the wholeness of the doubled human who had not been split apart into genders and sexualities. In short, the sumbola was a whole that had been literally broken or split into two and then recombined or “thrown together” to form the whole again. Later, the sumbola came to refer to uncanny coincidences (another form of coming together) or to forms of ritual and reading divination that understood the image, the ecstatic poem, or the visionary display as a kind of esoteric cipher into deeper and deeper meanings of the real, which was suffused, soaked, with meaning.39 The correlations here with dual-aspect monism should be more than obvious.

When a person who has had an NDE or a UFO experience comes back and reports a fantastic event of endless sci-fi special effects, the report is almost always expressed as a supermeaningful coincidence of symbols and almost never as an arbitrary collection of culturally conditioned signs. Moreover, the experience often initiates other synchronicities and meaningful mind-matter coincidences in the physical environment. This total event of meaningful symbols and uncanny coincidences is experienced as cosmic truths of astonishing significance—that is, as images and events that participate directly in that which they represent. That is because they do. This is why experiencers, as we saw above, almost always say “it was more real than real.” It was. The visionary display was participating in, probably issuing “from,” that which is actually the case—that is, the real, beyond or before it splits into the subject and object of human experience.

Okay, I actually believe that. There is my credo. I believe that what is symbolically encountered in these fantastic events is the real world manifesting in the body-brain of the experiencer in ways that the person can hear and integrate in some fashion—which is to say that these events are mediated by the “imagination,” which, in these moments at least, is no more, and no less, than a function or dimension of consciousness as such.

So there it is—my credo, my “I believe.” I believe that the World is One, that the Human is Two, and that this One World often appears in the Human as Two in and through the symbols, myths, and dreams of the empowered imagination.

Such ideas, of course, offend and confuse the adequacy of our present scientistic beliefs and humanist projects. They are neither traditionally religious nor conventionally scientific, nor are they simply material or purely mental. They point to a third future space of mind-matter in which we almost certainly participate but have not yet coded in any culturally syntonic and stable manner. This is how one thinks impossibly.

But the phrase also meant teaching the Superman: teaching those who have been so awakened—of every gender and sexuality—into our superhumanity how also to be an embodied, caring, and just human being (that is, a particular person, even a good person). In short, the phrase goes both ways. It is another little poem about the Human as Two, now three words long.

In this much more traditional framework, I can see at this point in my life that my books, and maybe my entire lifework, has been about one thing: teaching humans how to be God and God how to be humans.

I sincerely believe that the former project (teaching humans how to be God) is what the history of religions—still incomplete, still ongoing—has been partially about and where, I hope, at least some of it is headed. I also sincerely believe that the latter project (teaching God how to be human) is what the humanities—still incomplete, still ongoing—has been partially about and where at least some it is headed. And I understand both processes in plural ways. There is no singular answer or solution here. Only endless conversation and experimentation. That is precisely what I mean by the superhumanities—an infinite set of criticisms and conversations with no end.

And yet . . . and yet human beings continue to really and truly experience a beneficent Reality or Presence of unconditional love and acceptance, both within and without the religions, that can be described as, well, as God. I cannot deny that. Nor would I want to do so.

From four decades now of studying gnostic, esoteric, mystical, and psychedelic literatures, which are some of the most sophisticated religious materials on the planet, I have become convinced that what people call God is a plurality or multibeing. Put more simply, we are all, together, collectively, God.

scientifically minded Martin W. Ball: “This is a truth that applies to all, equally, without any exception. God is the only reality, and we are all expressions and embodiments of this one universal being. . . . I am a universal being. In fact, I am the universe. I am reality itself. . . . Reality is my experience of myself, and it is a game—a game that allows me to experience myself as both subject and object simultaneously.”

And so here was Hicks’s story, expressed in a typical third-person trick: “Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death; life is only a dream, and we’re the imagination of ourselves. . . . Here’s Tom with the weather.”

Coincidences point, above all, to this fundamental interconnectedness. They allow us a glimpse of a level of order to our world that is probably too complex for us to understand but that compels us to try, or at least to gaze in awe.”

Put in my own terms, such coincidences, like most paranormal phenomena, are trying to get our attention, to get us to think differently—in fact, to think impossibly: to think through connections, comparisons, correspondences, and meanings and not just through material or social causes.

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.

As I have sometimes joked, God is really just idealism for the masses.

I am perfectly aware that the vision sketched above might be read as suggesting that God is responsible for all the evil, injustice, and suffering in the world. That interpretation would be correct. And incorrect.

That’s what makes religion religious—the transcendence. Of course, that transcendence is coded, and no doubt experienced and limited, in culturally and religiously shaped ways, which then get used for all sorts of dubious reasons, including exclusive and authoritarian ones. Still, all such systems can be read as civilizational expressions of the Human as Two.

In the whole psychology of the “evangel” the concept of guilt and punishment is lacking; also the concept of reward. “Sin”—any distance separating God and man—is abolished: precisely this is the “glad tidings.” Blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to conditions: it is the only reality—the rest is a sign with which to speak of it.

So powerful is such a unitive state that Jesus did not even resist his own gory state crucifixion. He went to the electric chair of the time forgiving those who inflicted it, living the very practice Nietzsche identified as “the evangelical practice.” Death simply did not matter. At that point, or soon after, what would become “Christianity” took over and turned this most radical of teachings into its very opposite: a set of beliefs in the head about Jesus dying for our sins, about sacrifice, death, gore, and the divinity of suffering—in short, the bizarre legal conceptions to which I alluded above.

Such is the history of religions: an ironic and disastrous reversal of the truth of things—that everything is perfect, that there is not the slightest difference between any of us, and that our emotional, personal, legal, political, and moral lives should reflect this most basic fact. That’s the good news. Our lives do not normally reflect this, of course. That’s the bad news. The Human is Two.

And so, I repeat myself. We are God. God is us.

Human beings are not very good at being God. We generally do not know this, of course, and we are very bad at accepting it, coming to terms with it, integrating it into our familial, social, and political lives. Because of some toxic mix of Roman imperialism and Jewish orthodoxy, the life of the most famous godman in Western history ended very badly, to put it mildly.

As little temporary egos, we fear this presence, which threatens to engulf or absorb us, and so we project it into the sky and “believe in God.” Now we feel pious and safe. We submit. We obey. We bow down. We kneel, never realizing that, by doing so, we are denying our own superhuman natures and are secretly worshipping ourselves.