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

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

allow me to observe what I hope is fairly obvious by now: there is an indubitable comparative base at work here in the shamanic, kundalini, and UFO literatures, and one that is not culturally arbitrary or historically relative—the human neurological system, or body-brain-spine organism. Every modern human being shares a biological frame that any and all human subjects share or once shared. One could say, for example, that the human body-brain-spine organism is more or less the same everywhere, although, yes, of course, there are also endless psychobiological and neurological variations, including autistic ones on the spectrum.

In this view, it is not any local mythology or religious ideation that appears to produce the globally distributed phenomena that is the UFO. It is the spine, the brain, and the body and—lest I be heard reductively—whatever in turn might shine or transmit through these organic neurological machines.

The human biological form, after all, need not be thought of as the producer of all this cross-cultural commonality. It might just as well be thought of as the reducer of something else that is fundamentally not us, that is nonhuman or superhuman . . . in Kevin’s language—that is ME.

This in no way means that ordinary matter itself is not sacred, is not “radiant,” to use Kevin’s words again. It, too, is “an artifact of Mind”—that is, an expression of some ...

there is no such thing as reduction, nor can there be in a monistic world. And science, understood now in this context, is “the most successful system of magic of all time” (mapping and manipulating all those occult or hidden structures).61 Indeed, science is currently ...

My argument rests on taking seriously an alternative understanding of time as a reversible swerve, a scientific perspective that conflicts with the commonsensical view of time’s irreversible linearity. . . . Methodologically, the appeal is to apply a natural scientific model of time to the humanist effort to understand historical experience. Elliot Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being

More stories, however astonishing, are not going to get us there. We must demonstrate a way to contextualize and locate those astonishing stories in some larger superstory, otherwise known as a theory, to make them meaningful and so plausible. We know the impossible happens everywhere and everywhen. What we do not know is how (the scientific question) or why (the humanist question).

why were the authors who most wanted to theorize exactly these historical moments left to the side of the twentieth century? Jason Josephson Storm has argued that, in effect, such thinkers were not left to the side at all—that it was precisely these kinds of anomalous interests that lay at the very origins of the modern human sciences.4 Modernity is occult to the core.

have spent the last quarter of a century reading and writing about these endless esoteric currents, none more so than a mystically inflected psychoanalysis.

there is another particularly glaring current of modernity that is most relevant here, both for its careful focus on the intricacies of “experience” and the structures of “consciousness” and because it initiates a stream of thought in which the central subject of this chapter, the medieval kabbalah historian and philosopher Elliot Wolfson, participates.5 The same philosophical practice—which really comes down to the conviction that it is consciousness itself that is the source of all knowledge and truth—a...

I am thinking of the intellectual project of the Jewish German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and the school of thought that he spawned, often called the phenomenological tradition, since it concerns itself with philosophical reflection on the “appearances” (phenomena) of consciousness and attempts to get at the essence or structure of this consciousness beyond or before all such appearances, including and especially sensory, cognitive, scientific, and mathematical ones. Martin Heidegger, Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, and M...

Such a new science is aimed at the realization of what Husserl called the “transcendental Ego” or “absolute consciousness,” which constitutes an “independent realm of direct experience.”7 He saw such a shift to the transcendental standpoint as a “Copernican reversal” (what I have called a “flip”) and described it as “the greatest existential conversion that is expected of mankind.”

Colin Wilson has described Husserl and phenomenology itself as “a prosaic way of developing the mystical faculty,” which he compares to the creative vision of poets and painters.

One cannot arrive at absolute consciousness until one has let go of all sensual and materialist assumptions, including, by the way, those that would come to define phenomenology in the person of Martin Heidegger.

No matter how paradoxical the givens may seem to be. On one level, the impossible thinking theorized and modeled in these pages differs quite dramatically from figures like Husserl and Steinbock in its unabashed focus not on the experience of transcendental consciousness as such (Husserl) or on mystical experience of unconditional love and a personal God (Steinbock) but on the interface or middle world between this absolute consciousness and the human organism—which is to say, with the imaginal mediations of the fantastic, however outrageous the latter appear.

His argument also clearly privileges the monotheistic—which is to say, a “Personal” presence.23 The phenomenological tradition follows this, alas, basically ignoring the fantastic that actually appears, opting instead for the orthodox past, the acceptable and thinkable, and the religions themselves: the possible. There are no gigantic insectoids, precognitive dreams, or UFOs in the backyard in this particular stream of thought. There are a few important, literally telepathic precedents, but these are only recently being held up as important, part of the present renaissance, perhaps.

Impossible thinking embraces every religious experience that can or cannot be slotted into a theistic model, including entirely private and popular ones. All of this is on the comparativist’s table. Like the phenomenology of verticality, this refusal to distinguish between the popular and the elite, between the “authentic” and the “inauthentic,” between “religion” and “magic,” this intentional oddness, will function as one of our five pillars of impossible thinking in my conclusion. There simply is no impossible thinking without this whacky weirdness, this refusal to distinguish.

this particular impossible practice—intentionally focused on the imaginal, the supernormal, and the paranormal—is very much in the Husserlian mode in that it is normative and not purely descriptive. It is all about the nature of reality. It is not an example of what is generally thought of as “religious studies” today. The latter discipline, as part of the conventional humanities, is defined by a very different kind of bracketing that can be summarized like this: “Set aside all beliefs, yours or theirs. Do not consider whether such a human experience, conviction, or conclusion is ‘true’ or not—that is, whether it corresponds to reality in some way—but rather describe everything neutrally. Do not take a position. Do not admit an ontology, much less a theology. Practice all forms of critical theory. Assume the social, the political, and the moral (namely, the horizontal) but never acknowledge the vertical. Ever.”

Yes, there is terror and suffering, but there are also the stars and cosmic hope: “There is nevertheless the possibility for the rediscovery of the life of matter as a religious phenomenon—an equal and sometimes alternate structure in the face of the dehumanizing and terroristic meaning of history.”29 There is the both-and.

If there is anything I possess in great measure, it is finitude, limitation, and fallibility. I certainly claim no complete knowledge, total reading, or adequate comprehension of the Wolfsonian oeuvre, and I will pretend none here.

why was I so drawn, and still am, to Elliot Wolfson’s work? What was it that so attracts this most inadequate reader? I think I know.

Such a paradoxical thinking that emphasizes both radical historical particularity and ontic emptiness-fullness is extremely familiar to the historian of Asian religions. It is no accident at all that so much that Elliot Wolfson writes looks a good deal like some kind of Continental philosophical fusion of the medieval kabbalah Ein Sof, or Infinite, and some of the most sophisticated streams of Buddhist and Hindu thought.

Wolfson’s consistent embrace of Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum, or “coincidence of opposites,” as a model of kabbalistic thought and as a forerunner and fulfillment of postmodern theory today. This coincidence or identity of opposites, which violates and transcends the Aristotelian logic that currently defines pretty much the entire academy, is perhaps the deepest structure of all Wolfson’s cognitive structures. Here is how Wolfson describes this deepest of structures early on in Language, Eros, Being:

There is no naked truth for Wolfson. The truth can never reveal itself as it really is. The truth can only appear to a human being in the form of an image—which is to say, through a veil. The veil, however, always implies a face, something which is veiled, just as that which is veiled, a face, needs the veil to appear at all. The bottom line is this: the religious symbol of the text or tradition reveals only through concealing and conceals only by revealing.

This paradoxical understanding in turn produces a very distinct concept of the image: the image is real. The religious symbol is not a symbol of something else—it is not a metaphor. It has no “intentional” object in the ordinary sense of that term. It is what it is. But it is also what it is not. It is true, and it is not true. But it is very real as an expression of the underlying or overlying Godhead or Infinite. To put the matter in the terms of Henry Corbin (with whom Wolfson sometimes thinks), this is a “conception of the image as a theophanic apparition that challenges the dichotomatization of the real and imagined.”41 This in turn is why Wolfson will write lines like this: “the contrast between ‘imagined’ and ‘real’ is an altogether misguided formulation.”42 Words are experiences.

“The image, which serves as the coincidentia oppositorum that bridges transcendence and immanence, apophasis and kataphasis, invisibility and visibility, and thereby facilitates the epiphany of incarnational forms that escape the threat of idolatry, is not derived from the corporeal world of space and time; it is what imparts meaning to the objects of that world.”

I understand that these are difficult phrases, but perhaps we can simplify them with a single statement: for an embodied human being, it is the imagination that mediates between the two dimensions of the real.

It is thus very important to Corbin, and Wolfson after him, that this place of the Imagination is the same place in Islamic Sufism, Jewish kabbalah, and Christian esotericism. Wolfson himself will also add the Asian traditions, particularly Buddhist, Hindu, and Daoist scriptural texts, of which he knows more than a little. Indeed, he will often comment that the further one goes down a particular path, the more likely one will find oneself in the heart of another path, however historically unconnected they might in fact be.

Time itself, a topic to which we will return soon enough, is also quite different in such a quest. Time, it turns out, can be “ruptured,” and no historical causality and so no historical criticism is absolute. And no such observation is “ahistorical,” a criticism that is sometimes articulated when we arrive at this point. Such positions do, however, work with a much more expanded sense of time and history. In some very real sense, the position is superhistorical, with history now understood as a kind of hyperdimensional process that simply does not work, and has never worked, in just one way or in just three or four dimensions.

In Wolfson’s more careful terms, this is “a time, in which the past remains present to the future, in which the future is already present to the past, just as the notes of a musical phrase, though played successively, nevertheless persist all together in the present and thus for a phrase.”49 And here is Wolfson again, now approvingly quoting Corbin: “Nights and days, hours and minutes, are simply means of determining the measure of time; but these measurements are not time itself. In itself, time is the limit of the persistence of the eternal Form ‘on the surface’ of the accidental matter of this world.”50 That is difficult to understand and paradoxical to our little temporally bound minds. Exactly.

the soul or spirit is never without a body in the dual-aspect monistic world that I will be explaining in our next chapter. It cannot be, since the fundamental ground that is shining through the visionary symbol, subtle body, or landscape is neither mental nor material—which is to say, it is both, or neither. Similarly, every “spiritual” experience is also a “material” or “physical” event. They can never be truly separated because they are not so separated in the ground of all being. The same is true with what we so naively call “sex” and “spirit.” The materialists are right, but they are also half right. In a truly radical and thoroughly thought through nonduality, there is no such thing as immanence or transcendence. Both are category mistakes, an application of phenomenological descriptions “up here” in the body-brain to ontic reality itself “down” or “up” there without such a splitting body-brain.

Ultimate redemption would consist of attaining the state of consciousness—or perhaps metaconsciousness—that entails incorporation of all differentiation in indifferent oneness that is ascribed to Ein Sof or to Keter, the divine nothingness marked by the paradoxical coincidence of opposites such that night is day, left is right, white is black, Jew is non-Jew, male is female, and so on. . . . What is required is . . . an apophasis of the apophasis, a venturing beyond to the precipice, the chasm of the excluded middle, where opposites are identical in the opposition of their identity. . . . While it is not at all clear to me that such an ideal can be implemented sociologically without dispelling the very path that leads to it, this may very well be the most daring implication of the messianic potential of the kabbalah.

Words are experiences. It is easy to invoke quick explanations at this point, usually around some lame understanding of the imagination, or maybe some plodding delusional “hallucination.” Anything to return us to a flatland materialistic worldview that can be controlled and manipulated. None of them work. Oh, they might work to soothe the convictions of the reductionist and distract us once more from what is patently obvious to the experiencer, but such a person is not describing a delusion or an ordinary dream. This person is reporting another dimension of reality altogether, often with a sense of traumatic shock.

But here is the problem: these stunned descriptions of what is more real than real are all different. The otherworldly landscapes, the entities, and the ships are not at all alike. Moreover, and more seriously still, many of them are manifestly modeled on cultural and historical references that we can easily recognize. A paradoxical thinker like Elliot Wolfson gives us a plausible and erudite way to balance this “more real than real” with this obvious cultural shaping. He “resolves” the paradox by showing us that the paradox is true.

The Real Nature of Time As if that were not enough, what is equally remarkable about the Wolfsonian corpus is that it means to make a claim on reality, on physical reality, on space-time and causality themselves. Wolfson thus instantiates what I have elsewhere called the “realist impulse of the cosmic humanities.”

Wolfson also enacts this realist impulse in the prologue to Language, Eros, Being, and it is there that I most want to go in the final part of this chapter. Before I do, however, it is worth pointing out that there is a particular intellectual lineage at work in such moments. Such a realist impulse goes at least as far back as the ecstatic nineteenth-century figure of Friedrich Nietzsche. More immediately, however, it goes back to the Romanian historian of religions Ioan Couliano.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Couliano was teaching and writing about the history of mystical literature and paranormal experience and their likely relationships to quantum physics, hyperdimensional geometry, and modern cosmology. He was asking, in so many words, why historians were writing about “history,” as if time really were a simple linear causal process, when we have known, since Einstein, that this is simply not so, that time does not likely work like this at all. In effect, Couliano was asking this bracing question: How should we think and write about the history of religions, and in particularly about mystical experiences and paranormal events, in a post-Einsteinian universe?

Hence Couliano’s bizarrely beautiful introduction to The Tree of Gnosis, where he begins to explore what is essentially a Platonic model of historiography, with hyperdimensional idealist forms interacting in three-dimensional historical time with different actors and movements as these forms play out their different cognitive possibilities.58 Basically, he was writing of the interaction of eternity and time. Hence, also, his little pote...

Wolfson takes up the question of Einsteinian space-time in order to answer a most obvious and common criticism of his work: that there is something anachronistic or inappropriate about employing twentieth-century Continental philosophy to medieval kabbalistic literature. Put simply, you cannot use present categories of thought to interpret the meanings of the past. Not if space-time is curved, not if the future can reach back to the past to change or reveal its potential meanings: Without delving into the thicket of theoretic grappling that this subject demands, I pose the rhetorical question: What would be the consequences if a historian were to take seriously the conclusion reached on the basis of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity that spacetime—the “mathematical structure” that “serves as a unifying causal background for phenomena”—is to be regarded as a curve? Does this not at least entail the possibility that the past is as much determined by the present as the present by the past?61 This, of course, was Ioan Couliano’s question (and deeply resonant with Nietzsche’s answer about the circularity of time and our potential superhuman powers over it).

Einstein’s famous remark in a letter he wrote after receiving the news of the death of his friend, Michele Basso, that the distinctions between past, present, and future are ultimately illusory, that time itself is “a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

One can begin to see why historians would not look too kindly on Einsteinian space-time, why they might want to ignore the advances of theoretical physics, pretend, in effect, they never happened. Reality has fundamentally changed beneath their feet, but best not to look. Just keep walking on the surface of things, pretending that history is purely linear, that causality only works in one direction. This new reality, after all, presumes the final illusory status, or at least the relativity, of their discipline and, presumably, of themselves. It implies that space-time is, to quote the physicists themselves again, one immense “block,” and that causal influence can move both forward and backward within such a block universe.

Such a model is speculative, like all cosmological hypotheses (and the metaphor of the “block” is too, well, blocky), but it is seriously maintained by numerous physicists and cosmologists, is supported by Einstein’s relativity theory, and has received major philosophical attention.63 In the block universe cosmology, developed after the work of Einstein and his teacher Hermann Minkowski, all of time or history—past, present, and future—already exists within an immense cosmic block or space-time continuum that extends from the big bang to however the cosmos finally ends (or “bounces” back). Temporality or our sense of linear time (and so all of “history”) is, in effect, a neurological illusion or phenomenological apparition that our brains produce as we experience ourselves “moving” through this eternal and unchanging spatiotemporal block. We are back to Wolfson’s metaphor of the entire musical score being present as we hear individual notes or movements.

The Return of the Eternal Return It is well known that one of Nietzsche’s most important teachings, indeed what Michael Allen Gillespie has called his final teaching, was the “eternal recurrence of the same” (“ewige Wiederkunft des Gleichen”), also know more simply as the eternal return.

It is important to understand that since Georg Simmel famously rejected Nietzsche’s central teaching in 1907, commentators on Nietzsche have generally followed suit and widely dismissed the eternal recurrence of the same as incoherent and indefensible, as just a little, or a lot, crazy. When they are feeling more generous, they read eternal recurrence as an “idea” to which the philosopher reasoned and that we can now play with and “think” in our heads, as if it were nothing more than a cognitive act of neurons and education, or some moral experiment designed to get us to accept the unchangeable details and directions of our lives.

As recent Nietzschean scholars, foremost among them Paul S. Loeb, have taught us, such a safe reading is not reflective of Nietzsche’s fierce conviction that, in the words of Loeb now, “he had discovered a fundamental truth about the nature of the cosmos that would change his life and the history of humankind.”

Loeb’s reading, again, one of the central claims of Thus Spoke Zarathustra—woven right into the narrative arc of the book that Nietzsche himself considered to be his most important, indeed, to be world-changing—is the claim of “willing backward” (“Zurückwollen”). This is the power to influence the meaning and import of the past, if never to change the physical events of that past. This, of course, constitutes a willed interpretation of the past from the future that changes the meaning of that past, not dissimilar to how Elliot Wolfson’s philosophical readings of medieval kabbalah change and transform the meanings of those historical kabbalistic texts. Hence his use of twentieth-century figures like Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and especially Martin Heidegger to read Hebrew authors from the medieval period. Once again, the phenomenological tradition.

Nietzsche did not understand his eternal return in such block universe terms. He did not have that particular cosmology available to him. He thus argued that the same things repeat themselves eternally within a series of cycles, but these are in fact the same cycle. They are in fact not numerically different.

More often than we imagine, the humanist’s “historical experience” does not work historically at all and looks a lot like the natural scientific model that allows for retrocausal influences, particularly as we find it in the block cosmology. Put a bit differently, some of the most extraordinary moments of historical experience, singular life events that the individuals never forget and so are by definition “set apart,” confirm a natural scientific model of time, including and especially the ability of the future to reach back to the past or present.

In this specific reading back, we can now say that human beings can know, or dream, or, in some cases, literally “see” in a vision what is about to happen, not because they are guessing well or getting lucky in some cosmic poker game, not because they are “intuitive” (another cop-out), but because the event has in fact already happened and they themselves are already physically connected to it, really are it within the world block. There is not the slightest physical separation. It is all One.

They arose from ecstatic epiphanies of mind. They were not the result of simple cognitive processes, logical syllogisms, or social processes and practices. They just appeared. I have been saying this simple truth for decades, at least since Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom (2001), where, not at all accidentally, I also first engaged the work of Elliot Wolfson.