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

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

In short, what Eliade called for in his early essay and explored in more depth only in his fantastic fiction, Eire accomplishes in abundance (and in the full light of day) in his public scholarship.

Eire calls Joseph an “idiot savant” and spends numerous paragraphs discussing the “holy fool” of the Christian tradition.

In other words, as I have argued throughout these pages, what is possible or impossible is culturally relative, and nature itself is culturally conditioned, at least within human experience.

Belief is necessary. Belief is also limitation.

Carlos Eire is an intellectual-spiritual hero of mine, for his fearless historiography of the impossible, yes, but also for his insistence on telling his own story in two memoirs and for the fact that he has been called an “enemy of the state”—that is, because he has been condemned for his adamant opposition to the authoritarian Communism of his family’s homeland of Cuba.99

Hence a line like this from María de Ágreda, the Lady in Blue (for the color of the habit seen by the Jumano people of New Mexico and Texas), on the way her bilocations from Spain to North America were received: “They are accurate about some things . . . but other things have been added and exaggerated.”101 That could well be a motto for the entire history of religions, where fraud and fact, trick and truth, and experience and exaggeration go together again and again, and again.

Eire will point out that “Teresa of Avila, Joseph of Cupertino, and María de Ágreda were liminal avatars of the impossible, suspended between the divine and demoniac, their sanctity revered and questioned simultaneously, perfectly poised to play the role of tricksters acting as agents of the devil, the ultimate trickster.”

Making something impossible possible does not end the conversation, it turns out. It only initiates the debate, especially on a moral level. To speak in secular terms, the fantastic gives rise to critical theory and moral criticism.

I personally think that one of the worst decisions ever made in the literature is the decision not to further research mediums and psychics who were caught cheating. Cheating and actual paranormal phenomena are not mutually exclusive and never have been. The doubled truth is difficult: fraud, deception, and revelation are all often woven imperceptibly together into a tight mix that can only frustrate the purist of any type, including the orthodox gatekeeper, the responsible historian, and the contemporary skeptic. Many times over, the trickster is inherent in the experience of the phenomenon, not some social or psychological add-on. Accordingly, such events do not follow orthodox lines, whatever those lines happen to be.

Sometimes, moreover, even the trickster can be tricked. I confess that one of my favorite descriptions in Eire’s latest book is the way the nuns of the Spanish Franciscan convent of Santa Clara used Sor Luisa, or Sister Luisa. They would have her lie beneath the bed of a dying nun to act as a decoy and deflect the demonic assaults to her own body instead of that of the dying sister. Eire comments wryly: “As one might expect, Sor Luisa became something of an expert demonologist as a result of these encounters and also a successful exorcist.”109 Why does that make me laugh?

I have been personally moved by numerous academic colleagues who, for example, have witnessed a table levitating in graduate school or concluded that spirits are real, or who refuse to go back to this or that psychedelically induced altered state precisely to avoid encountering terrifying entities. Once was enough, or more than enough. Their fear and caution are palpable, ethically fraught, and ontologically traumatic. These events alter, redirect, and focus entire lives. Why are such historical facts ignored now, boxed off as something ridiculous? Why are some of the most astonishing superhuman beings in history essentially forgotten today? Almost anything can be discussed in history, it turns out, except this.

In this book, as well, I seek to push things far beyond the usual academic limitations—and past the religious ones. Take those brackets off. Take the question mark away. Add the stunned exclamation point. Hear the ecstatic and terrified screams, acknowledge the antigravitational flights, and feel the building physically shake around you. Theorize that.

There can be no communication “from a distance” (tele-), much less a shared emotional entanglement (-pathos), if something fundamental is not shared, if there is not, frankly, love. The point seems obvious enough: a subjectivity cannot possess another subjectivity unless they share the same basic nature.113 Even demonic possession implies, after all, something shared. The demon is “human,” too.

Newman offers any number of helpful interventions here, including her central notions of the “permeable self” and what she calls “coinherence”—that is, the medieval Christian conviction that persons coinhere or mutually participate in one another, after the model of the Trinity and the three persons of God sharing one divine nature, or the person of Christ who shares both human and divine natures.

There is a legend that Nietzsche finally collapsed into madness while embracing the neck of a horse in a desperate attempt to keep it from being beaten by its owner. The legend is a legend. We do not know if it is true. But it speaks to a counterreception of Nietzsche that is certainly closer to the vision I have taught again in these pages. The superhuman is the man (both men, actually—though the cruel man does not know it yet), but it is also the horse. It is cross-species compassion. It is life itself. It is the only God. And so am I. And so are you.

Physics and mathematics are to be held responsible to a large extent for the return of interest in mystical ways of knowledge. . . . We are entitled to believe that our mind space has amazing properties, the most remarkable of which is that it is not limited to three dimensions. Ioan Couliano, Out of This World

Thinking impossibly is not possible for everyone—and not for superficial or accidental reasons but for neurodiverse or spiritual reasons. Thinking impossibly is not a widely available skill that anyone can learn, like, say, riding a bike or constructing a syllogism. Nor is it, frankly, egalitarian. Impossible thought is a rather obvious form of intellectual esotericism or academic Gnosticism. As such, it is a way of thinking that requires either the personal experience of actual gnosis (of the fundamental unity of the human and the cosmos) or a deep hermeneutical sympathy for the gnostic realizations of others.

This is why the humanities are the superhumanities. They are guided, really defined, by the altered states of consciousness, embodiment, and knowledge of their authors in broad social, artistic, and intellectual movements from Renaissance humanism, Romanticism, and German idealism to psychoanalysis and phenomenology to more recent movements like feminist theory, queer theory, Black critical theory, postcolonial theory, and contemporary ecocritical literature.

Thunderstruck, indeed. The lightning bolt was Nietzsche’s primary sign. It was painted on the back of Zora Neale Hurston in a hoodoo initiation ritual. Maybe it should be ours as well.

ultimate difference. The Human may be Two, but the World is One. That is the final gnosis of impossible thinking, whether such a gnostic awakening is directly realized or indirectly interpreted and thought.

And so we will come to this last precognitive story in the epilogue, at which point the loop of the book closes, the snake bites its own tail, and we end as we began. The shape of impossible thinking is circular.

My method, then, is also finally an ethical one. It takes individual human beings at some of their deepest depths, and compassionately so. It listens. And it is perfectly willing to be abolished.

None of this implies that the sciences are not crucial to moving forward. If dual-aspect monism is correct, then every mental experience is also a physical one, and every physical experience is also a mental one. There can be no ultimate split since the ground of all being is not so split.

In so many ways, impossible thinking is simply what happens when we do not take things off the table.

In this same high weirdness, I must insist that it is okay to be tricked, to be wrong. Part of this is the very nature of critical thinking. To think critically is to be constantly corrected, and to be comfortable and at peace with that. But thinking impossibly it is also to practice a skepticism so deep that it questions the very roots of the questions.

There is something more fundamental in this kind of weird skepticism, then. To be involved in high weirdness is precisely a willingness to be duped and deceived, yes, but it is also to entertain the likelihood that the fraud and the fact are not always exclusive of one another.