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

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

God or Reality, it turns out, can easily manifest through a sexually abusive guru who was enlightened. Or a fundamentalist bigot who once knew eternity. It happens. We can focus on the abuse and the bigotry and condemn the man (it’s usually a man, isn’t it?), which is what humanists generally do, and with perfectly good reason. Or we can focus on the shining-through and the revelation, which is what believers generally do, and with perfectly good reason. But neither reasonable move taken alone is, in the end, very satisfactory (or very reasonable), as each will erase the other truth and so deny at least half of the superhuman picture.

Apparently, people will take the human or the super but cannot figure out how to put them both together. Obviously, we have not really come to terms with our own superhumanity. We have only reveled in our reasonable righteousness or our projecting devotion.

paranormal phenomena do not usually appear unless something is going very wrong, is out of joint, and is trying to heal itself by speaking its pain in figurative ways. We saw this above with Kevin’s thought. I understand that there are exceptions, but, for the most part, if there is no suffering or nothing is wrong, there are no robust paranormal phenomena.

This is why there is so often a potential connection between the impossible and social justice and social injustice. The impossible is often a materialized cry amid endless social suffering, cruelty, violence, and murder.

(the earliest reference in the Western literature to a near-death journey, by the way, is in a war-story told by Plato).

I am observing what I think is obvious and needs to be robustly addressed: because the impossible is human, and because human beings do terrible things to one another, the impossible can be aligned with any human moral system. We are God, but we are also the Devil.

Simon Magus—Simon the Magician. Simon was the man who could fly, who none other than the apostle Peter himself prayed to have fall from the sky and break his leg in three pieces, thereby disabling but not killing him. “The Lord” did just that, according to the Acts of Peter, to prove the preaching of Peter and deny the “signs and wonders” of Simon Magus.

The supernatural was fashioned to determine traditionally acceptable sanctity—that is, to separate a doctrinally correct holiness (embodied in a saint) from the doctrinally and morally unsound lives of those around whom marvelous events also often spiked (people have long known that the marvelous is not the moral).

Both Walter Stephens and Carlos Eire see the stunning rise of demonological treatises and experts in the early modern period as a kind of implicit and immensely sophisticated skepticism—the beginning of modernity itself and its unbelief.29 Eire goes as far as to call the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries the age of devils (which was linked most tightly with that better known moniker, the age of reason).

In Europe, 75 percent of those executed were women, with Finland as a reverse exception.

As many have noted and explained, this same distinction between a monotheistic God and a natural world lies behind the rise of conventional science and the modern process of disenchantment, or “de-sorcering of the world” (Entzauberung der Welt), as famously observed and named by the German sociologist Max Weber in 1904. A most profound antimagic and a most devastating disenchantment, working hand in hand, have removed all meaning and story from the objective world as “God” has been increasingly separated from the same.33

In the general Protestant logic (which became the general Enlightenment logic, which became today’s secular logic), no one can “become a different kind of human being suffused with supernatural gifts.”35 There could be no superhuman saints, no divinized bodies or glowing matter. It is all demon-magic, if one is religious (in a Protestant sort of way), or it is pure delusion or plain fraud, if one is secular.

Indeed, with the doctrine of the “cessation of miracles,” the Protestant traditions attempted to put a temporal limit on what was possible for God—now there simply could be no more miracles after the first century of Christianity (that is, after the biblical era), or so the new Protestant doctrine proclaimed. The relationship between the supernatural and the natural was being severed.

It is quite another thing to suggest that these are human capacities that lie squarely in “nature,” whatever that is. This is actually a very old Christian conviction that dates back as far as 400 CE and to the central figure of Augustine, who clearly understood that what we consider against nature depends on our limited views of what nature is. The implication is that the “miracle” or “prodigy” would in fact become perfectly “natural,” if we but understood that natural world.

As the analytic philosopher Stephen Braude has taught us in a lifetime of books and essays, we fear psi, particularly its further psychokinetic reaches as “super-psi” (another super-word).38 Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, we generally deny that these powers can be used for immoral purposes, although the history of magic clearly shows us that this is so. It is messy. Agency and moral assent are often simply not present in impossible phenomena. Individuals do become possessed against their will. Sorcerers do curse and magically attack others. Demons are accurate phenomenological descriptors of many poltergeist, parasite, and haunting cases, which manifest a clear and disturbing contagion or immunological structure, again completely outside personal assent.

The early modern history of Christian mysticism, from 1400 to 1700, is a history of possession.

We ignore all of this at our own significant ignorance. But people wish to be ignorant: better not to think about something that cannot be thought in one’s own rational or moral terms.

In the end, things like abductions are called abductions for a reason. Human agency is absent in so many of these cases. Things—terrifying, abusive, and invasive things—are done to people.

Unsurprisingly, there appears to be some actual correlation between UFO events and geographical places with “devil” in the site name.

On the simplest and most obvious of levels, why do we so often call magical practice that we do not like or that does harm to others “black magic”? Is not that inherently racist, a conflation of “black” with “bad”? And how many times does the Devil or a demon appear as a black figure in the Christian imagination?45 Isn’t this just a bit—or a lot—suspicious?

Unsurprisingly, the modern American paranormal may well have its deepest historical roots in Africa.

The ontological and cosmological understanding of the Southern African divinatory idiom, for example, generally locates the extrasensory production in the “self-evident intercession of possessing or guiding ancestors,” while in the Akan, Ghanian, or West African world, “individual minds are, as forms of what is locally called sunsum, considered to be semi-autonomously subsumed in a universal World Soul, okra, and it is this interconnectedness which eminently accounts for telepathy, precognition and veridical divination.”48 In short, the same “impossible” phenomena can be theorized and so made possible in different ways.

the American paranormal has its roots in Spiritualism, or contact with the dead, which itself has deep connections to African peoples in the United States and the abolition movement. There is the deep linkage of the impossible with social justice again.

Charles Long is most helpful here again. One of the most basic insights of Long, drawn directly from the Romanian comparativist Mircea Eliade, is that what we generally mean by “the human” is in serious danger of being provincialized by the Hebraic, Greek, and Christian understandings in the Euro-American universities. What we now call “humanity” (humanitas) is in historical fact much more ontologically diverse, if we open our hearts and minds to the Asian, African, and Australian cultural traditions, which is exactly what Eliade’s history of religions attempted to do toward what he called a “new humanism.”

My contemporary Black colleagues will put an accent on Long with their pointed observations that Black peoples have not shared in the formation of understandings of the human. Indeed, these cultures and communities have been the “savage,” “primitive,” or “nonhuman” opposite against which the Euro-American human has largely defined itself in endless social evolutionary scales. These colleagues will also reflect on how the “superhuman” is a more or less accurate descriptor of Black self-understandings, myth, ritual, dance, art, and extraordinary experience, from ancient Egypt to the contemporary Americas, as long as we remain critically aware of how little Black intellectuals, artists, and activists have participated in the formation of the human in the elite public discourse of Western culture.

my earliest work orbited around a Hindu Tantric goddess named “Black” (Kali). As it turns out, in an almost perfect display of ontological blackness, there are two major forms of Kali in the Shakta Tantra of West Bengal. Whereas the black goddess Kali is dangerous and terrifying, if also liberating and transcendent (and superhuman, with an emphasis on the siddhis or “superpowers”), and sometimes linked to the marginalized communities of the caste system, the blue Kali is motherly, beneficent, and gentle. Kali’s blackness signals a kind of esoteric intensity, a social marginalization, a secret sexual-spiritual practice (often in cremation grounds), and a final liberation or release from the cycle of birth and death.

In short, this is a “transcendent blackness,” to employ again Stephen Finley’s apt theorization.

While we can and must continue to interrogate racial blackness, I also think there is something to be said for the fact that blackness is the preeminent site of the non-normal, the out-of-bounds, the “beyond” as I once put it.

That blackness—a blackness held in the flesh of those deemed black, but nevertheless exceeding them—is, in my mind, the place where discourses and experiences of the super emerge: space travel (in the blackness of space); the Black Panther (with a superhero origin story lodged in root work—that sacred herb seems a lot like the root Frederick Douglass was given); and even the X-Men (that community of beings no longer deemed human, but nevertheless deeply intriguing and terrifying to the normative world).

W. E. B. Du Bois spoke of clairvoyance.

If there is a human universal in the history of religions, it is the anomalous, impossible, magical, or paranormal experience.

It is the human, or superhuman.

For many Afrofuturist visionaries, for example, the apocalypse, the end of the world, and so the end of the assumed model of the human, is not some future fear or possibility. It has already happened. The human of the past is over. The human of the future is in process.

One of Butler’s central late messages is that we shape God, even as God shapes us. “God is change,” as she hymned.

Butler was also prescient, almost precognitively so. Books like Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) eerily read like a description of a totalitarian-leaning America under President Donald Trump. The latter novel even contains the phrase “make America great again.”

Let me underline the fact again, then: the link between massively altered mental states and paranormal events is not just a link; sometimes it is an actual identity or coillumination.

The simple truth—it is not simple at all—is that serious philosophical thinking can lead one into madness and mystical revelation, and madness and mystical revelation can lead one into philosophical thinking.

I do not wish to deny or diminish the human suffering. I wish to recognize it and see it healed, but also to potentially honor and listen to that which is sometimes coming through. Maybe what we so quickly call the schizophrenic or the psychotic individual is sometimes seeing something, knowing something, about the interconnected or unitive nature of the world that is real. Maybe the truth is “psychotic” with respect to the socialized ego.

To repeat myself, I personally think that trauma is a key to much of impossible thinking: something has to “split open” the person or social ego before such a subject can know and see in these new ways. Sexual arousal can do that, sometimes. Psychedelics can do that, more often and more reliably. So can car accidents, heart attacks, terrible falls, and racist social systems, sometimes. And that splitting is seldom pretty, much less socially helpful. It is often near deadly, or just deadly. It seriously compromises or even destroys its host or medium. And yet, and yet . . . not always. Sometimes it also helps to produce a kind of literary or philosophical genius, a paranormal virtuoso. Those are the superhumans who change history and mutate culture. In the end, these leaps ahead did not fail. They took us with them.

More to my point, the spectral turn constitutes a keen awareness that the impossible and social justice can be related—indeed “intend” to be so.

Martha and Bruce Lincoln

The Lincolns rightly criticize Derrida for basing his theorization of the ghost on a single text (act 1 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet) and work on a much broader global canvas (Martha Lincoln is an anthropologist who works in Vietnam, and Bruce Lincoln is among our most gifted, fearless, and capacious historians of religions). Most significantly, they want to draw a sharp distinction between what they call secondary and primary haunting.

Secondary haunting involves critical theories like Derrida’s deconstruction—a kind of academic thinking about haunting that wants to reduce the impossible phenomena to the social and historical plane by reading it as metaphor, memory, and social signal, or in the language of the Lincolns, as “literary representations and figures of the imaginary,” not “agentive revenants” or “ghosts qua ghosts.”

Primary haunting, on the other hand, involves, well, actual hauntings—basically, ghosts and spirits possessing people, and in precisely the terms of their religious understanding: as something “other than metaphor,” “as possessing an ontological status that is ambiguous, even contradictory, minimally—but emphatically—substantial and real.”

The Lincolns in fact cite the ethnographic case that moved me so while reading the late American anthropologist Mai Lan Gustafsson. It involves an American GI, an ex-marine named Sam who was having nightmares and speaking eerily fluent Vietnamese in his sleep: “Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me. . . . Motherfucker, you give it to me or I will eat your mother’s soul.” A Vietnamese medium Sam visited determined the voice was that of a Vietcong soldier who had been killed and whose bloodied name tag Sam had secretly kept as a souvenir. The medium had the soldier’s name (Hoc Van Nguyen) and the nature of his gory death (a landmine). Sam found the dead man’s mother, performed a ritual at the family altar, and sent the mother a monthly stipend. No nightmarish hauntings followed. They were gone.69 That is impossible thinking.

Consider the related notion in the 1950s of what the Hungarian American psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor called the “poltergeist psychosis,” an idea that emerged from the lingering suspicion that poltergeist phenomena are ultimately about the exteriorized emotion and sexual libido of some living, profoundly conflicted person in the room—often, but not always, an adolescent.

It is indeed astonishing how psychologically inflected so many parapsychological events are, how they seem to involve family dynamics, sexual trauma, emotional conflict, and psychopathology—which is to say, human suffering.

Carlos Eire. Eire grew up, as it were, with the anomalous. In his mind, the strangest thing about his own family history was his father, who was deeply committed to Spiritualism and Theosophy and who claimed to see ghosts and remember previous lives. Eire’s father also claimed that his father (who died in 1927 from an infected paper cut on his tongue caused by an envelope he licked carelessly) had been expelled from his Jesuit school because he had accidentally caught a glimpse of some Jesuits levitating a table.

John of the Cross (one of my favorite mystical writers of all time for his apophatic emphasis on nada, or divine nothingness).

This early essay is a very clear precedent for my own impossible thinking.83 Eliade would camouflage the same thesis (he was convinced of it) in his fantastic literature, most obviously in his autobiographical novel, Youth without Youth, with which I quietly began the present book.