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

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

The paradoxical structure of impossible thinking, for example, is so important, not as some failure or temporary unclarity but as the very way that particular kinds of truth must appear to a human subject or social person as a passive and culturally conditioned receiver. This is the structure of all metaphysical opening or revelation, not because there is no such truth but rather because the human is doubled in all sorts of ways—neuroanatomically (there are two brain hemispheres, or “selves,” in the skull), epistemologically (there is both a knower “in here” and a known “out there,” the latter mediated through the senses and the brain-body), socially (there is always an “inside” and an “outside” to our social experience, a social “outside,” moreover, that the “inside” often finds stupid or absurd), psychologically (the ego and the unconscious, as in a dream), and spiritually (our deeper identities that appear to us in traumatic states as immortal spirits, angelic twins, doppelgängers, apparitions, and so on). I have encoded this multiple doubleness in a little poetic expression that is intended on all these levels: the Human as Two.