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

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

I am thinking here within a particular line of European and American thought that stretches, in its modern rendition anyway, from the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, through the Czech Bohemian writer Franz Kafka, to the American sociologist of religion Peter Berger and the American literary critic Harold Bloom.22 In this lineage, we intuit or actually experience something immortal and indestructible in us, something vast. As little temporary egos, we fear this presence, which threatens to engulf or absorb us, and so we project it into the sky and “believe in God.” Now we feel pious and safe. We submit. We obey. We bow down. We kneel, never realizing that, by doing so, we are denying our own superhuman natures and are secretly worshipping ourselves.