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

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

Mind, the One, or the ultimate level of reality is multiple, superimposed (as in a quantum mechanical explanation), and infinitely potential. It is a bit deceptive, then, to consider it as “one thing.” It is really everything. It is a plural unity, or a unified plurality. Hence, Kevin’s favorite expression for this bigger vision of reality is “Platonic surrealism.” It is “Platonic” for its insistence on a deeper level of truth and reality that is not accessible to human reason and opinion. It is “surreal” for the wildly symbolic, irrational, nonrational, and playful ways it expresses its endless possibilities and potentials, not unlike a surrealist artist trying to paint the superreal or surreal unconscious. Thus, Kevin will also sometimes speak and write of the “Platonic Surrealist Unconscious” because this level of being is simply not accessible or knowable to the conditioned consciousness of the social self.