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

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

this first chapter orbits around a twentieth-century French philosopher and historian of Iranian mystical literature (Shi‘i, Ismaili, and Zoroastrian) by the name of Henry Corbin (1903–1978). Still on the surface, it traces a particular lineage of impossible thinking through Corbin back to the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung, to the Swiss professor of psychology Théodore Flournoy, and, ultimately, to the American psychologist and philosopher William James and his good friend, the British classicist Frederic Myers. This is a lineage that thinks and writes in French, German, and English. It is very European but also more than a little American.

wish to show that what we are ideally talking about when we use three historically and conceptually related coinages—supernormal, imaginal, paranormal—are some extensively theorized encounters with disembodied, intelligent, and mostly invisible presences who claim to be human, nonhuman, or superhuman. Maybe they are. Maybe they are not. But that is how these words came to be.

What I most wish to show is that these three words have experiential origins.

I suppose if you want to be traditional about it, this is a chapter about the ancestors.

Corbin, a student of Massignon, was deeply influenced by the philosophical work of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whom he knew personally and translated into French.

In 2007, I wrote a history of the institute, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, and today help lead the intellectual-spiritual direction of its private symposia after Murphy’s vision (and Spiegelberg’s paradoxical mystical theology of the “religion of no religion”), which I have described as an evolutionary esotericism or, in Murphy’s words, an evolutionary panentheism.5 I mention such autobiographical facts because I want to make it clear that I do not write here out of some academic neutrality but out of a deeply felt and long practiced intellectual-spiritual activism.

Which is to say: I do not understand Henry Corbin to be writing only about Iranian patterns. I consider him to be writing about ontological truths that can only speak to us in image and narrative of the most astonishing sort and that are still very much with us today in other historical and contemporary experiential forms, including, the UFO phenomenon, to which we will turn soon enough.

have recently identified Corbin as one of many partial exemplars of the superhumanities.7 Corbin displays at least one feature of such thought almost perfectly in his erudite conviction that the human being is a kind of “bi-unity” or “dualitude,” a paradoxical complex of the conscious person and the largely unconscious or superconscious angelic twin, of “consciousness and superconsciousness,” as he put it (the italics are his).

by the superhumanities, I mean something that can take on much more social, historical, and, frankly, ethically edgy forms, something much closer to Corbin’s mentor, Louis Massignon, whose queer mystical activism with respect to French colonialism in northern Africa displays both sides of the superhumanities: their socially active and mystically transcendent dimensions. Massignon, after all, was an ardent anticolonialist and a mystically inclined intellectual who openly used parapsychological categories to explain how he was converted by a long “dead” Islamic saint.

we can seriously entertain the experience-source hypothesis—that is, the hypothesis that basic religious convictions around the world are cultural reworkings of a recurring set of direct experiences and not (only) reworkings of indirect historical contexts or psychosocial constructions. In David Hufford’s terms, this is the idea that, “some significant portion of traditional supernatural belief is associated with accurate observations interpreted rationally. This does not suggest that all such belief has this association. Nor is this association taken as proof that the beliefs are true.”

One of the very few tools that historians of religions have in their theoretical toolbox that is even remotely capable of handling the extensive mental-material paradoxes of the near-death experience is the category of the imaginal. The word and idea are associated with Henry Corbin.

Henry Corbin did not coin or invent the category of the imaginal. It had been in circulation in the study of unusual or extreme religious states for some eight decades before Corbin began to use the term in his own specific senses in the 1960s.

By the twentieth century, there simply was no longer any culturally available model of the imagination that could relate or connect these two dimensions of reality—the ontological and the sense-based material world. To speak in Corbin’s beloved Latin (he had been trained by the great medievalist Étienne Gilson), there was no longer any imaginatio vera, or “true imagination,” available.

The mediating spiritual symbol had become the socially constructed metaphor. All such a secular subject could be in touch with now is the physical world through the senses and a rule-bound cognition. Since there was no longer any way to connect the human to the larger metaphysical world, it was sincerely believed and vociferously declared that there is no metaphysical reality. The material world is all there is, and objectifying science is the only way of knowing what is real. Agnosticism and nihilism were the results. A particular reductive reading of Aristotle had, in effect, erased the spiritual reception of Plato.23 Or so it seemed.

Corbin wasn’t having it. In his own specific (Platonic) terms, he understood the imaginal to name a noetic organ or intellectual-spiritual capacity that was mediating an actual dimension of reality, whose appearances were nevertheless shaped by what he called the imagination créatrice, or “creative imagination,” an astonishing imaging or mythmaking dimension of consciousness that acts well outside any conscious control or apparent human agency—hence the phenomenology of revelation as something given or shown. As Cheetham has argued, Corbin used this key category in his own very specific ways, but he was likely inspired and enthused by Carl Jung’s very similar idea of the “active imagination,” at least from 1949 on, which is when Corbin appears to have first used the expression in a lecture at Eranos.

The structure of the human, as already noted, is thus a kind of paradoxical “dualitude” or “bi-unity,” with the human person accompanied by an angelic twin or companion who can mediate between this Human as Two.

Romantic Origins of the Imaginal First, it is important to realize that, although Corbin’s notion of the imaginal may have been invoked to interpret Iranian mystical literature and possesses its own distinct features, it is very much in line with earlier Romantic philosophy, poetry, art, and music, which sought to vatically—that is to say, out of its own inspiring mystical states—express what M. H. Abrams paradoxically sums up as a “natural supernaturalism.” This Romantic paradox resulted in a series of artforms and philosophies that preserved but also transformed the earlier spiritual modes of humanity, now understood and so expressed in a secular or naturalistic key. Nature is “the perfect image of a mighty Mind.”

Abrams drew on earlier scholarship to provide a two-word definition of Romanticism: “spilt religion.”

Out of these same altered states, at once human and divine, the Romantic movement defined the “symbol” as much more than an arbitrary linguistic sign or artificial metaphor. The symbol participates in that which it expresses. Words are experiences. The Romantic writers also fully recognized that symbols grow cold and stale and must be replaced by other newer symbolic real experiences, which is what they themselves were all about. Hence their poetic, visual, and musical arts. Abrams argues that this, in the end, is a “total revolution of consciousness” that took place, not at all accidentally, during a historical period in Europe and America of political and moral revolution.36 The “High Romantic Argument” is at once a scientific, a spiritual, an artistic, a philosophical, and a political argument. I mean them all when I insist that “words are experiences.”

it is the creative imagination that is the “hinge” between the two great eras of European thought that initiate and announce modernity: the Enlightenment and the Romantic movements. Such an idea, after all, embraces and includes Enlightenment reason, even as it attempts to push it further beyond mechanism and reduction into individuality, intellectual freedom, artistic expression, and the most sublime reaches of the natural cosmos.

The Romantic movement is what Harold Bloom would call “Prometheus Rising,” the man who would defy the gods in Greek mythology, which is also to say, defy the social community. These were artists and intellectuals whose work was inspired by the political dawns of the American and French revolutions, those “terrors” that aligned themselves with the satanic idolatry and blasphemy of self-exaltation and what William Blake would call “vision”—that is, the experienced truth that poetry is often given or heard, and, as such, is prior to and more basic than religion, moral philosophy, or anything else that claims authority over the human.41 For Blake, the imagination is, in truth, the Imagination, as he had it in Milton. It is not a psychological function or tangential byproduct of neural firings. It is “Human Existence itself.” It is what we might now call “consciousness.”

Such a vision of the imagination and the symbol had “one foot in the empirical and one foot in the ideal or transcendental.”42 It was a third space, a middle world that linked all human experience and all human beings.

Docetism and the Monotheistic Symbol Second, Corbin’s imaginal was deeply informed by his own docetic Christology—that is, his convictions that the doctrine of the Incarnation should be interpreted symbolically but not literally: divinity cannot become literal flesh for Corbin, ever. It only “appears” to have done so.

If one can speak in Christian theological terms (that is, with reference to the human and divine natures of Christ), I am a thoroughly heretical thinker who unapologetically affirms the ultimate unity of the two natures of everyone and everything. No exceptions. It is all One. If one wants to speak in more Muslim theological terms, the One God is everyone and everything. No exceptions.

Parapsychology, Eclecticism, and Politics Third, it is very much worth underlining that Corbin’s understanding of the imaginal assumed the presence of parapsychological phenomena. This is evident in his repeated and rather matter-of-fact treatment of clairvoyance, mind reading, telepathy, synchronicity, photisms, and even materialization and a kind of apport or manifested object in the life and teachings of the great Islamic mystical philosopher Ibn ‘Arabī.

Fourth, I have a problem with the ways that Corbin seems to imply—by the very content of the books he published—that the imaginal is somehow reserved for traditional symbols and historical mystics, that the imaginal cannot appear, as it were, in popular or nontraditional sources and “ordinary” people. I think this preference for the historical and the established is simply mistaken, both historically and morally. Indeed, I have insisted on this elite-popular collapse. I would insist that the very same imaginal or unconscious processes that Corbin treated in his Shi‘i, Ismaili, and Zoroastrian sources also appear in contemporary science-fiction writers or comic-book artists.

Harold Bloom, the late Yale literary critic, makes a related case in his admiring preface to an edition of Corbin’s Creative Imagination, pointing out that both the Iranian Sufis and Corbin himself were much more eclectic than Corbin wants to admit.45 Indeed, Bloom wants to push Corbin’s imaginal history and hermeneutic into the professional study of Shakespeare and modern English literature, both well outside any Iranian or even religious register. I think Bloom wants to do this, partly or mostly, because of his own gnostic revelations, with which he tells us, point blank, he was gifted in “three timeless moments” in the same preface.46

Fifth, and finally, this insistence on the eclecticism and transcendence of the creative imagination has real and important implications for the relationship between scholarship and politics. More specifically, Corbin has been criticized for any number of perceived sins: that he was too aligned with the shah and therefore somehow participated in the European colonial project in Iran or, from the opposite direction now, that his work on Iranian mysticism ended up supporting the Iranian revolution of 1978, which deposed the shah in order to establish a theocratic system of government.

First, it is perfectly possible to be a gnostic intellectual (by which I mean someone whose thought emerges from extraordinary experience or direct gnosis) and to care deeply about politics, ethics, and this world. Scholarship on ancient, medieval, early modern, and contemporary gnostic forms of spirituality has advanced significantly since the 1970s, and we now know that not every form of Gnosticism is world-denying or anti-body. We also know that there is no single political or ethical expression of the gnostic orientation: such expressions can range from radical politics, social justice activism, and ethical humanism on the progressive left to dangerous conspiracy-thinking, antimodernism, and authoritarianism on the far right.

I made the argument almost two decades ago that the ancient Gnostics were some of our first and still some of our most radical theorists of religion, particularly in their rejection of the moral monstrosities of the biblical God and their dramatic reversal of key religious assumptions: God did not make us—we made God, the serpent was a figure of gnosis not of temptation, and so on.48 I still think that this is the case. If you want to take religion critically but seriously, to take it apart (and have something deeply meaningful left over), there is no better place to begin than with the gnostic writers, be they ancient, medieval, or modern.

Second, as I have already repeatedly observed, the religious collages or artforms of gnostically inclined individuals and communities are famously eclectic and wildly combinative with ...

This fundamentalist linkage of religious essentialism and nation-state happened in Iran in a Muslim context in 1978. It happened in India in the 1990s and continues to this day within a Hindutva nationalist context (a context in which my own scholarship, by the way, has been condemned, censored, and rejected by specific publics and conservative politicians). A similar project is being attempted in the United States within a white, racist Christian nationalism, where it continues to do endless damage and threaten the very structures of democracy and the intellectual freedom of intellectuals, particularly those analyzing this very white form of racism.

I cannot repeat this enough: impossible thinking is an expression of a deep and most profound humanism, a paradoxical superhumanism that recognizes that what we think of today as the “human” cannot be identified with any culture, religion, or society and that understands the further reaches of this human have indeed been most fully imagined and practiced—if, yes, usually in unconsciously projected and specifically culturally refracted ways—in the symbols, rituals, and myths of the history of religions.

“It Matters Not by What Name It Be Called” I have stated in print that the category of the imaginal was used earlier by Carl Jung’s mentor, the Swiss professor of psychology and interpreter of Spiritualism Théodore Flournoy.

At the turn of the twentieth century, supernormal phenomena were caught between literal belief and rational debunking, neither of which were convincing to those who worked closely with the experiencers. There simply was no way to mediate between the two dimensions of human experience. Corbin would certainly offer a way out half a century later, but he would be mostly ignored.

The Supernormal and the Imaginal Flournoy clearly and confessedly borrowed his central category of the supernormal from the Cambridge-trained classicist Frederic Myers (1843–1901), a superhumanist if ever there was one. He could have just as easily borrowed the imaginal from the same man, as it was Myers who first defined and used the term in a very extensive way in the early 1880s.

most importantly, both terms—the imaginal and the supernormal—carried definite evolutionary dimensions for Myers. Basically, he used both words to describe what we would think of today as paranormal phenomena as evolutionary “buds” or early immature developments of superabilities, like, say, telepathy, that would someday become integrated into consciousness and controlled in an intentional way.

telepathy was probably the signature idea of Myers, along with his notion of the subliminal, which, much like Corbin’s imaginal, could mediate under specific conditions between metaphysical (Platonic) realities and the psychological experience of a historical individual. The subliminal region of the psyche was that realm “below the threshold” (sub-limen) where telepathic communications took place before they emerged up into a dream or vision in symbolic form.

Myers appears to have coined his super-word, the supernormal, around 1885. He was trying to get away from the dualistic or theistic connotations of another earlier super-word, the supernatural, with its centuries-long insistence (it was coined in the thirteenth century) that extraordinary events must possess an agent outside the natural order to be considered genuine miracles. Put simply, they must be from God—“God,” of course, defined by the teachings and authority of the Roman Catholic Church.

*Supernormal.—Of a faculty or phenomenon which goes beyond the level of ordinary experience, in the direction of evolution, or as pertaining to a transcendental world. The word supernatural is open to grave objections; it assumes that there is something outside nature, and it has become associated with arbitrary interference with law. Now there is no reason to suppose that the psychical phenomena with which we deal are less a part of nature, or less subject to fixed and definite law, than any other phenomena. Some of them appear to indicate a higher evolutionary level than the mass of men have yet attained, and some of them appear to be governed by laws of such a kind that they may hold good in a transcendental world as fully as in the world of sense. In either case they are above the norm of man rather than outside his nature.

Myers defined the “Imaginal” as “a word used of characteristics belonging to the perfect insect or imago;—and thus opposed to larval;—metaphorically applied to transcendental faculties shown in rudiment in ordinary life.”

Myers was also thinking of the science of entomology when he wrote of the imaginal. An imago is the final adult form of an insect’s metamorphosis, during which it, for example, develops wings and becomes sexually mature. This final stage is called the imaginal stage. The insect’s immature or adolescent feeding form is called the larval stage. Just as the larval stage of an insect looks nothing like the imago of its adult form (which indeed appears “bizarre” or alien-like in comparison to the larval slug), so too the functioning of the human imagination can metamorphize into extremely strange but astonishingly effective forms, which Myers called “imaginal,” after his beloved bugs.

The French paranormal was a philosophically careful word. It was, in fact, an impossible one in the precise sense that I have defined the term; that is, it inhabited a third epistemic space beyond belief but also beyond reason, at least as the latter was understood and practiced in the contemporary sciences of the time.

The same word, paranormal, would, of course, be endlessly misunderstood and misused later in the twentieth, and now the twenty-first, century until it became a virtual synonym for supernatural, which is precisely what Maxwell was firmly rejecting and moving beyond with his new coinage, as was Myers before him with his own supernormal.

This hard distinction between the paranormal and the supernatural is fundamental to Maxwell’s project. Indeed, he would often write blunt things like, “I do not believe in the supernatural (surnaturel). I do not believe in miracles.”61 Or he would write of “so-called miracles” (“soi-disant miracles”) that religious people mistake as supernatural but that are actually natural forces that likely come from them. More specifically, these real forces come from their own unconscious intensities and convictions, which religion nevertheless shapes and encourages on the social plane in misdirecting and deceptive ways.

Religion was show, but it was a showing of something real in pretended guise.

Maxwell clearly believed (and I think he was correct), that “mysticism” was already waning as a viable category around 1900. The implication was that we needed new terms to discuss these and related phenomena. Maxwell would give us one.

much like Arthur Schopenhauer and a long line of intellectuals before and around him, Maxwell concluded that the anthropology of magic, divination, and witchcraft needed to be rethought, since all these demeaned and dismissed phenomena actually happen. He certainly did not believe the beliefs of these cultures, but he had no doubt that the phenomena happened because of such beliefs. Such beliefs are necessary tricks, but they are necessary for the phenomena to appear.

even after we put as much as we can back on our comparative table, we need to be very careful with words like supernormal, imaginal, and paranormal, especially the last one. The twentieth- and now twenty-first-century transformations of the paranormal back into what is basically the older dualistic notion of the supernatural are clear pop-regressions of the term. They should not be taken as educated uses of the term.

The origins of these three key terms lie not in abstract thought or “primitive” cognitive error but in the endless traumatic and cognitively shocking experiences of countless and often unnamed individuals who, in their own earnest understandings, had made contact with what they believed were other human, nonhuman, or superhuman intelligences. To put an accent on it, these words were not made up out of thin air or fantasy. Individuals suffered them, heard them, saw them, loved them, and even sometimes had sex with them.