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

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

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. Such moments do not yet represent a complete coming together, an actualized “not two” of cosmos and consciousness. But they often do point or signal in this same cosmos-is-consciousness-is-cosmos-is-consciousness direction, if always in an indirect, coded, symbolic, or mythical way. 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.