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

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

one will never understand the full phenomenon by doing so. One will just continue the nonsense, the game, the distraction. And that is precisely why I think the UFO subject is so incredibly important: it bears a particular power to challenge, even abolish, our present order of knowledge and its arbitrary divisions into the objective and the subjective. Whatever the UFO is, after all, it simply does not behave according to such rules and assumptions. It certainly couldn’t care less about the concerns and categories of our militaries, politicians, and academics.

If I may speak for a moment in the language of some of my own intellectual ancestors, particularly the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the depth psychologist C. G. Jung, the UFO, or flying saucer, is the ultimate modern “symbol” that participates in both the mental or social world of the subjects who encounter it and in the material world of their own epistemic or sensory experience. Ezekiel’s wheel or disk is the Romantic symbol that participates in what it communicates for a reason. The UFO phenomenon appears to have emerged from a third realm and so manifests obvious mental, social, and historical elements and physical, material, or sense-based features. In Jung’s mature terms, the UFO is psychoid, at once psychic and physical.

Allow me to speak from the humanities—thought not in the way my colleague Timothy Morton jokes of the humanities as being “candy sprinkles on the cake of science.” I am not here to drop candy sprinkles on your cake. I am here to say something about that cake, or maybe its eating.

Hence, in Arrival, Dr. Louise Banks develops the ability to precognize the future as she gradually learns that time, like the grammar of the alien language she is deciphering, is circular not linear. Such a circular vision of temporality is an idea about space-time that is well known to humanists, from ancient Greek philosophy to Friedrich Nietzsche.

My own position? It is always developing and confessedly tentative, and I would be most happy to change it tomorrow, but my general sense is that there is definitely something being covered up or lied about (the misinformation is grotesque and obvious to serious scientific and humanistic researchers), but—and here is the thing—no one knows what that something is or what it means. Put a bit differently, there is a there there, and it may well possess a very physical dimension, but no human being knows what that there really is, including those institutions (government or corporate) that naively think they control it toward some kind of national security interest or profit motive.

We simply no longer understand the shocking multinaturalism (nature behaves differently in different bodies and places) and very physical efficacy of belief, symbol, and myth—how they, in effect, really in effect, create different realities. Too many of our political and media elites think it is all nonsense, except, of course, for their beliefs, symbols, and myths—that is, their own realities.

my own position is very close to that of the astronomer, computer scientist, and medical research investor Jacques Vallee and his “forbidden science,” an artful and lifelong combination of astronomy, computer science, information theory, esoteric practice, and profound skepticism around all UFO belief systems.

My point? That we should be approaching the total UFO phenomenon much more like Arrival and much less like The War of the Worlds.

Let me be blunt. I strongly suspect that what we finally have in the UFO phenomenon is a physical-spiritual phenomenon that is being grossly misinterpreted as a conventional military threat or potential corporate technology but that no one really understands, much less can reverse engineer with our present strictly physicalist assumptions. To speak paradoxically and, I hope, shockingly, we are trying to shoot down souls.

happen to think that the basic thesis of the Aliens & Artists podcast series—namely, that creativity and paranormal experiences are deeply related—is perfectly correct.

I am personally stunned by Bobby’s experience because it replicates, in near-perfect phenomenological detail, what happened to me in one early morning in Calcutta in November 1989. Unlike Bobby, though, the results of what I call “that Night” were more than a blood-pressure reading. The result was a lifetime of scholarship (including this book). I saw no such insectoid entity in that literally shocking event (I initially thought I was being electrocuted), even if Kali, literally the “Black One,” the Hindu Tantric goddess I was trying to understand at that time, is sometimes compared to a spider with eight arms.

What to do with all the physical events, with “history,” as academics like to say? (As if they know how that works.) These were not just dreams or internal altered states. These were very physical and often literally entomological events. The praying mantis insects, for example, began showing up at key moments to and around very specific individuals, including a number of artists (a producer, a director, a cinematographer, and a line editor, who had terminal cancer and would soon die) working on a trilogy of films—a trilogy, by the way, that Davis firmly believes that he wrote out of the signal shot into his body that night (again, I feel the same about my books, including this one).

That is why the aliens don’t land. That, after all, would simply confirm our illusory separateness. It would tell us what is not so.

I worry that the spiritual dimensions might overtake or even erase the physical dimensions in the mind of the reader. I do not wish this to be so. Indeed, my dual-aspect monism—which denies any final distinction between the “mental” and the “material”—implies that these two domains cannot be separated, since they share a fundamental ground or superreality that is both and neither.

I am suggesting a shared but largely unconscious experience-source hypothesis, what DeConick might call a “gnostic spirituality.” The different sets of cultural materials resonate so strongly because they are all based on the same kinds of human experiences, which themselves correlate very strongly with a shared neurobiology or human mind, which I understand in transmissive or filter terms, not in productive or epiphenomenal ones. In short, what we have here is a type of alien gnosis.

I personally have this lingering conviction that I have never been able to shake. It is this: whatever produced the astonishing and multiple Sanskrit and vernacular literatures of the medieval and early modern South Asian Tantric traditions are now producing the equally astonishing and multiplex global literatures of the modern UFO encounter and abduction experience.

I am of the conviction that “culture” and “identity” are themselves modern constructions, that human beings are far more potential and cross-culturally capable (“performative” in Van Binsbergen’s ritual terms) than our present models allow. I am also of the conviction that the present intellectual focus on “difference” is productive of a particular kind of scholarship and moral concern but is finally not adequate to our actual histories and shared human nature. Regardless of what many would want to insist, humanity has long been a single species, a species moreover that has absorbed, killed, or had sex with other related hominid species.

There is always, of course, the slightly embarrassing possibility that one thinks that someone is onto something big because that someone happens to think like oneself. Scholarship can be ventriloquism, and agreement can be camouflaged narcissism.

your typical expression of mental illness. Kevin, however, is indeed autistic and self-identifies as being diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome, a generally high-functioning form of autism on the spectrum that results in general impairments in social functioning but also the ability to focus intensely on a single subject. I should add that I never made such an observation, much less such a diagnosis, until he offered it to me.

Kevin firmly believes that many of the greatest saints and mystics in history were autistic as we understand that term today.

The contemporary American psychiatrist Diane Hennacy Powell has argued in similar directions. She has written extensively that autism and psychical gifts commonly appear together and can be psycho-physiologically related (she relates both to the mediation of a dominant right brain hemisphere).

Darold A. Treffert has made a related case in his Extraordinary People: Understanding Savant Syndrome.18 He points out that such a savant syndrome, which he also describes as “the genius within us,” likely correlates with a dominant right hemisphere and may, in some cases, have to do with excessively high testosterone levels in the developing fetus (we will see this focus on hormones return in Kevin’s thoughts).

Kevin will also relate aliens, autism, and shamanism, even the lie that is the “I,” but he will speak a somewhat different language again. He will invoke his training in computer science and write of two very different kinds of being: a constructed or conditioned consciousness that defines the social ego and a cosmic but nonhuman Mind, which are in turn constructed or mediated by the two hemispheres of the brain, one “digital” (the left hemisphere that constructs the nonexistent social ego and works on an on/off or yes/no logic) and one “analog” (the right hemisphere that mediates a very real Mind and is more holistic, pictorial, and atemporal).

Kevin explains the basic difference between nonautistic people and autistic people like himself: “Most people are digital computers, haunted by flashes of analog Mind. I live in a pool of Mind but have difficulty interfacing with digital (non-autistic) humanity.” Or now, in a rather stunning few sentences that combine the history of philosophy, art, computer science, and evolutionary biology: “Humans are analog/digital processing units for the Cosmic Unconscious of Platonic Surrealism.” The digital interface is still under active development: “it was under Darwinian evolution at first, but now with the modern world, it’s becoming self-directed evolution.”

By the phrase “Platonic surrealism,” Kevin means to theorize what I would call a fantastic idealism, a vision about the fundamental nature of Mind exteriorizing itself in and as physical reality, often—particularly in autistic states—in a surreal or sci-fi way. For Kevin, all patterns preexist in the “Cosmic Imaginal” and bubble up into new life as a result of both Darwinian and non-Darwinian interactions. That is simply what is.

The two hemispheres of the brain are physiologically “to the side” (para-) of one another, even as they work together as a single brain. Hence the Human as Two (and One). The right side mediates Mind. It is literally “para-normal,” to the left hemisphere, which constructs and projects the rational ego as a still-evolving and now self-directed cosmic interface. Here is the neuroanatomy of impossible thinking. It’s all in your head, for sure. Or much better, it is your head but all of it, not just one side.

In Kevin’s mind, this early awareness was likely a result of “autistic early brain development,” which can also be seen in his childhood nickname, “Pumpkin Head.”22 He possessed full technicolor sensory modalities in this autistic brain and big head as far back as he can remember. Still, he did not speak until he was five years old. He was endlessly bullied and beaten as a young boy in a cruel and stupid society that did not understand him, that could not understand him. He writes of “extreme child abuse growing up.”23 I am sure that is an understatement.

Put neuroanatomically, we must move from the left hemisphere to the right and begin to understand the brain not as only a producer and projector (which is what the left hemisphere does do) but also as a mediator and translator of Mind (which is what the right hemisphere does do). This is how one becomes the universe, because one already is the universe.

what I would call his ecology of the whole is in full alignment with the dual-aspect monism that I find most creative and helpful. We are in truth saying the same thing, literally the same thing.

Kevin is no fan of all the talk of “consciousness” these days in the philosophy of mind, including my own. And for one simple reason: he understands the term in a very different sense than I do; he defines it in the sense of the social self or ego. The ego is “conditioned consciousness”: “what we all experience in the daily world if we are not in the grip of something mystical.”32 Such a level of the human is simply not real. It is socially and psychologically constructed. It is an illusion.

If the human being is fortunate enough and can experience this social self or consciousness “die” or, to use the computer metaphor, temporarily go offline, then a deeper or higher form of being might appear, as it does in the yogic traditions under the Sanskrit rubric of nirvikalpa samadhi, or “absorption without thought or form.” This level of being Kevin calls “Awareness.” Such a form of being human (or being nonhuman or superhuman) does not need a body to exist, as conditioned consciousness definitely does (unless, of course, you want to call the entire quantum computer universe a “body”). Put most accurately, then, Awareness is entirely independent of any such individual biological organism, of any body.

But even this Awareness is not ultimate. Awareness, too, emerges from a deeper level of reality that Kevin calls by different names. The key here, though, is that this level of being is infinitely potential and so neither “material” nor “mental” in any ordinary sense. In philosophical terms, Kevin’s views are very much an example of neutral or dual-aspect monism again, with matter and mind, or the objective and the subjective, both emerging from a deeper monistic ground.

Here is Kevin, laying out the fuller system in his own words: “In short, the author takes Awareness as a field, as in physics, perhaps the first and eternal field that, when it chooses to interact with substance [matter], allows for consciousness. Awareness allows for consciousness but is not consciousness. Consciousness springs from Awareness through an Interface [the body-based ego]. The author also takes Awareness and (primal) substance [or matter] to be different views of the exact same thing, the author holding the philosophical view of Neutral Monism.”33 In other places, in a more idealist vein, Kevin will use “Mind,” with a capital M, to gloss this deeper “exact same thing.”

The mystical is not the moral. The moral is not the mystical. And it is a great mistake to confuse or collapse these two very different scales. Hence the importance of the autistic condition, absorbed in Awareness, again: “If you live in unary consciousness [in Awareness] for too long, you start to be unplugged from the human experience entirely, which can be problematic. There’s nothing ‘noble’ or ‘elevated’ or ‘enlightened’ about this. You are simply taking a break from ‘reality’ and hanging out with ‘the One.’ Which is great and all, but making use of this state, being practical—those are real considerations.”34

Awareness is God holding his breath, so that we might all exist.”

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.

The Little Red Wagon Theory Very much related to this multiple unity or Platonic Surrealism is what Kevin calls his Little Red Wagon Theory. This is his theory of the imagination.

Kevin likes to tell this story to make a simple set of points. First, human beings need to imagine things. They need to tell stories. But, second, the things or stories themselves do not matter much and can never be final. Only the little red wagon—that is, the imagination—truly matters. That is because the imagination is grounded in reality itself. Actually, then, it is not that humans need to imagine. It is that the universe is constantly imagining itself, including in and as human beings.

What Kevin calls “sole source rationalism” (and traces back to Descartes) is simply mistaken, then. We are not, nor will we ever be, simply rational creatures knowing an objective world. Reality is imagining itself, including the reasonable self that Descartes imagined to be real (but is not). Until we can really see this—that reality itself is imaginal by nature and intent—we will not be healed. We will keep imagining, quite falsely, that our egos and their gory stories are real.

Actually, it can be any way: “I don’t care what people ‘summon.’ Let them summon the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.”38 Again, it is not what is in the little red wagon. It is the little red wagon. “I don’t want to tell people what to imagine. . . . I want to show them how to imagine.”

“We Don’t Have Souls” Probably one of the most difficult aspects of Kevin’s thought, which flows directly out of the teachings above, is his insistence that we do not have souls—that the human is really little more than an animal, an animal, moreover, that is constantly creating and projecting tulpas, or thought-forms (including and especially “the soul”), so as to imagine that it is real, that it somehow matters in the bigger picture.

Enter the category of the tulpa, a temporary mind-created entity in contemporary paranormal folklore. The concept and experience of the tulpa emerges over millennia, first from older Buddhist traditions (which also deny there is any permanent soul or self), especially the Mahayana or “Great Vehicle” teaching of the three bodies of the Buddha.

There is too much to say here around what I have called the traumatic secret. Trauma, after all, is a strong correlation of so much extreme religious experience. Happy, healthy people do not experience poltergeists.

Here is how Kevin puts the idea, always succinctly: “It’s generally trauma that opens doors in the psyche. . . . Since ‘trauma’ opens the doors more than anything, that’s why ‘the Other’ tends to manifest as ‘evil’ and not ‘good.’ . . . It took me freaking nearly forever to learn why the ‘Phenomenon’ is nearly universally ‘nasty’ and not ‘good.’ It’s because the part of the human mind that brings it in is hurt and nasty. . . . That’s the simple truth to it.”

it is important to recall something on which Kevin often insists: “Kundalini is the Mother of Illusion. Maya and all that.” Put a bit differently, Kevin does not literally believe all the phenomena that appear to him, and yet they happen. He understands perfectly well that they are illusions, but they are illusions actually appearing, truly manifesting, that serve legitimate purposes, whether we understand them at the time or not.

“Consciousness is the Trickster.”

In the end, these are illusions, but not in the Western sense of not really real. They are illusions in the Indian sense of maya, of the magically “made,” “measured,” or “constructed.” They are also real illusions because reality itself is an illusion. Nothing we know is truly physical, truly real in a materialist sense. Nothing. Again, a profound neutral monism or idealism, a Platonic surrealism, ultimately shines through Kevin’s thought.

The actual appearance of the UFO a few days later reads like something right out of the books of Henry Corbin and his category of the imaginal, the intersection or middle world of the ideal Platonic transcendent and the material realm of matter and physical form.

I suppose every such witness could be having a psychotic break. Still, such an explanation ceases to explain much. I am suspicious of the suspicion.

What should we take away from this? We can begin by observing that the UFO summoning is part of Kevin’s larger argument that paranormal phenomena are essentially pieces or parts of ourselves that we have projected outward, usually in a traumatic situation or because of a previous trauma and its dissociative nature. These things are projected outward so that we can read them and let them go. They are “semiotic” in nature; that is, they are communications that must be interpreted, even if we cannot fully interpret them (hence the overwhelming data stream?).