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

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

More and more I see the psycho-physical problem as the key to the overall spiritual situation of our age, and the gradual discovery of a new (“neutral”) psycho-physical unitary language, whose function is to symbolically describe an invisible, potential form of reality that is only indirectly inferable through its effects, also seems to me an indispensable prerequisite for the emergence of the new hieros gamos [sacred marriage] that you predicted. Letter from Wolfgang Pauli to C. G. Jung, May 17, 1952

Comparison is about data, yes, but it is also about theory or modeling what the data taken as a whole suggest. It is about all those important microhistories, but it is also about the big picture and, ultimately, about the nature of consciousness itself, what the intellectual lineage calls “hermeneutics.”

such a resonance often relies quite directly on the altered states of consciousness and embodiment undergone by the hermeneut.

The human religious imagination, it turns out, is epic. And it’s not me.

Actually, I don’t believe anything. I think that the paranormal investigator John Keel had it just right in a cultural meme widely attributed to him and certainly faithful to his body of work: “Belief is the enemy.”

Anne Strieber, the wife of the science-fiction writer and American abductee and visionary Whitley Strieber, used to say something similar, if in a more diplomatic way: “Mankind is too young to have beliefs. What we need are good questions.”

The paradoxical structure of impossible thinking, for example, is so important, not as some failure or temporary unclarity but as the very way that particular kinds of truth must appear to a human subject or social person as a passive and culturally conditioned receiver. This is the structure of all metaphysical opening or revelation, not because there is no such truth but rather because the human is doubled in all sorts of ways—neuroanatomically (there are two brain hemispheres, or “selves,” in the skull), epistemologically (there is both a knower “in here” and a known “out there,” the latter mediated through the senses and the brain-body), socially (there is always an “inside” and an “outside” to our social experience, a social “outside,” moreover, that the “inside” often finds stupid or absurd), psychologically (the ego and the unconscious, as in a dream), and spiritually (our deeper identities that appear to us in traumatic states as immortal spirits, angelic twins, doppelgängers, apparitions, and so on). I have encoded this multiple doubleness in a little poetic expression that is intended on all these levels: the Human as Two.

Such a doubled conception of the Human as Two has major implications for how one thinks and imagines the entire spectrum of apparently anomalous phenomena—that is, how one thinks about all those semiotic or meaningful moments in which one-half of this Human as Two is trying to communicate with the other half in symbol, story, and vision or apparition. Such translations, after all, are seldom, if ever, transparent to the rational or egoic half of the human—to that part of us that seeks clarity, reason, and formula.

To speak in more contemporary neuroanatomical terms, the left side of the brain simply cannot understand what the right side of the brain knows, since they speak in two entirely different ways.

I have sometimes quipped that, “I believe in belief but not in beliefs.” Listeners who want straight, easy thoughts, who see only left-brained clarity, look at me strange when I say that. They think that I am trying to be difficult, obtuse, or clever. But I am not. I am just trying to be precise and true.

to holding this or that particular belief. Looked at comparatively (that is, globally), particular beliefs are simply irrelevant. A woman with cancer can be healed by the Blessed Virgin Mary in Fátima, Portugal. Or before the shrine of a Sufi saint in Karachi, Pakistan. Or in a near-death experience floating around a hospital in New York City. Or in a UFO encounter in Colares, Brazil. She can be a French Catholic, an Indian Muslim, an American Hindu, an Indigenous Spanish Amazonian, or anyone else. Honest and careful comparison quickly reveals the efficacy and power, even necessity, of belief but also the relativity of any of its local expressions or social identities.

In effect, then, I believe everyone. But this also means that I cannot believe anyone. “I believe in belief but not in beliefs.”

The same paradoxical comparative method quickly reveals another uncomfortable truth: beliefs limit what is possible. Beliefs shut down. Beliefs decide. If specific beliefs can be thought of as fishhooks that sometimes catch real fish, it can also be said that beliefs generally only catch fish, and particular kinds of fish that the hook is designed to catch, no less. But, if we extend the metaphor, we can also say that the waters are filled with other sorts of beings, most of which couldn’t care less about these particular belief-hooks. Which is another way of saying beliefs can miss a great deal, really almost everything. Of what would we be capable if we did not limit ourselves through what we believe? This, I take it, was what Nietzsche meant by his most famous declaration that “God is dead.” God (or at least the idea of God being believed) must die so that superhumans might live. Past belief shuts down future possibility.

Particular beliefs can literally demonize common phenomena that are not in themselves sinister or negative but become so when they are believed to be so. Belief is a kind of mirror. So are impossible phenomena. If you believe you are dealing with invading demons, you are probably going to find invading demons. If you believe you are dealing with beneficent angels, you are probably going to find beneficent angels. If you believe you are dealing with extraterrestrials inappropriately involved in our genetics, then you are probably going to find extraterrestrials inappropriately involved in our genetics. In truth, though, you are likely dealing with none of these things. The phenomenon reflects to us what we will, what we fear, who we think we are.

We are all of this. And we are none of it.

Deep down, I suspect that robust paranormal phenomena are not personal or individual at all but fundamentally nonhuman or superpersonal—in a word, “cosmic.” It is not about a mind. It is about Mind.

Once one arrives at such a superhumanist conviction, it follows that one of the best sources of knowledge is to shut up, step aside, and listen to people who have experienced something strange or inexplicable, something big and vast. Because of four decades of such listening, I have some sense of the bigger picture—the larger framework in which individuals and communities believe and experience unbelievable things. Part of this overwhelming intuition (and it is overwhelming) is something I have written already above—namely, the conclusion that we have more than enough evidence.

I laugh out loud when people accuse me of “exoticizing” consciousness. “Well, of course, I do. It is exotic. If you make consciousness normal, if you shove it into your puny categories and social boxes, you miss its true cosmic reach and vast nature. You reduce it to your own relative local notions, which will pass. That’s you, not It.”

Whatever this massive interconnected presence is, its textual and visual expressions are completely, totally, absolutely beyond the grasp of any single individual, conceptual schema, or acronym. It is all one big glorious . . . well, something.

try to make the impossible possible, not only with more and more outrageous stories but, above all, with new thought and theory. We know how to collect. We do not yet know how to connect.

Strange beings come out of “the heavens” (from the stars). They appear in the form of glowing disks, crosses, or objects in the sky. They grant struggling human beings different forms of cultural and technological knowledge (laws, writing, agriculture, ritual). They warn them about the end of the world, teach them about the nature of the soul, generally scare the shit out of them, and even sometimes engage them sexually to create divine-human hybrids. That’s the history of religions. That is also the modern UFO phenomenon.

You might think that I am arguing that the ancient religions were misremembered, misperceived, or misunderstood contact experiences with alien astronauts. A young Carl Sagan thought that. So does a contemporary US television series and, no doubt, millions of its viewers. No, I am not saying that. I do not believe that. Why? Because that kind of mythmaking is simply an example of a very common error that historians of science called “presentism.” The error of presentism is the understandable (but always false) presumption that one’s present scientific worldview or grasp of the cosmos is somehow correct or adequate, that we have arrived (or are about to arrive) at the truth of things, and that our present order of knowledge will not change appreciably in the future.

Presentism is nonsense. The order of knowledge always changes, often quite dramatically. Just look at what happened to Newtonian physics in the twentieth century with the rise of quantum mechanics. Or biology in the late nineteenth century and early to mid-twentieth century with the rise of Darwinian comparativism and then the eventual discovery of the...

Now they are telling us that it appears that all our science—all that physics, chemistry, biology, you name it—applies to only between 2 and 6 percent of the actual universe.11 We went from knowing almost everything to knowing next to nothing in just a few decades. And t...

What the modern ancient alien enthusiasts are doing is basically assuming the truth of their own mythology, in this case a kind of spacefaring physicalist scientism, and subsequently reading it back into human history (often not very well—their grasp of the histories of religion and magic are atrocious). In this presentist myth, there are no invisible nonhuman agents, no God, no magic, no miracle, no world of the dead, no two worlds of experience, nothing genuinely paranormal or supernatural. There is only misperceived technology. Such enthusiasts have taken Arthur C. Clarke’s “any sufficiently advance...

Still, Clarke’s humor is redemptive even in this later context and leaves the proverbial door open, or at least a bit ajar: “At a generous assessment, approximately half this book is nonsense. Unfortunately, I don’t know which half; and neither, despite all the claims, does anyone else.”12 That seems basically correct, and very funny.

I would say that there is such a thing as real magic.13 Such real magic is not misperceived or mistaken technology. Much less is it some kind of dreaded “primitive” or “magical thinking” (this is racist). I suppose, if you prefer, you can say that it is a type of biotechnology. People dream of physical events before they happen. Dramatic correspondences between subjective states and material events happen every day. The comparison that links these experiences and events is quite literally magical thinking, but in a most positive and preternatural sense now. Comparison is magic.

Science works in a similar way—between some rather shocking but never really explained correspondences between states of mind and matter. Science is basically an occultism, a way of positing a hidden order of things that is invisible to almost everyone, except, of course, to the scientists.

the ultimate tertium comparationis, or “third space of comparison,” between the inner and outer world is mathematics. Mathematics is, by far, the most effective symbolic system ever discovered between these two epistemic domains. Numbers are “psychoid,” as Carl Jung put it in his own neologism. They are mental, but they most accurately describe and even predict the behavior and structure of the mater...

Little wonder that so many elite mathematicians are Platonists—that they are convinced that numbers and equations are discovered not constructed by the human mind, that mathematics exists in its own right in some esoteric space. There is the occultism again.

Comparison in this mathematical sense is not some cognitive process in the head, some abstract way of organizing things in an interesting but finally arbitrary way. It is eerie proof that the external world really does correspond to the internal one. Such a comparative unity also explains what the physicist Eugene Wigner called, in 1960, the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics. Mathematics is so damned effective because the symbol system is “true”; that is, it gives constant witness to an uncanny correspondence between the human mind and the cosmos.

Mathematics works and mental intentions can magically correspond to material effects without one “causing” the other because these two dimensions are in fact in correspondence: they are both grounded by a deeper reality or an ontological source from which they each emerge and that they both share, that they both are.

Dual-Aspect Monism, or the Meaning of Meaning Philosophically, I am articulating a form of dual-aspect monism—that is, the position that reality is ontologically One but epistemologically Two. We are the “splitters” of reality. Reality itself is not so split.

dual-aspect monism is a philosophical proposition that states that “the mental (psychological) and the material (physical) are aspects of one underlying reality which itself is psychophysically neutral” (that is, neither mental nor material).

There are different forms of dual-aspect monism. The one I am invoking is “decompositional,” since it further posits that the mental and the material domains have “split off,” or decomposed, from a previous holistic state, in this case the psychophysically neutral ground, which is an undivided whole or nondual in nature (I would say “in supernature”).

coming to know or become this ground of all being is the very goal and purpose of human life for many of the world’s contemplative traditions, about which they have spoken so extravagantly for millennia.

bears repeating that such an ontology is philosophical and not quantum mechanical in nature. It is not a scientific theorem. It is a philosophical framework. This does not mean, however, that the Pauli-Jung Conjecture is unrelated to quantum theory. It certainly is. The psychophysically neutral ground in fact bears any number of similarities or possible relations to the unsettling reality, or superreality, posited in quantum theory. Accordingly, what Atmanspacher and Fuchs call “structural elements of quantum theory” might help us elucidate such an ontology if we can use such an ontology and the posited philosophical implications of quantum mechanics upon which it draws with nuance and care.

To put the matter in humanistic terms that may well be related, reality is hermeneutical all the way down. It responds to our interpretations. We change reality by interpreting it.20

Another structural element of quantum theory that is particularly helpful here is its radical holism. It is difficult to make too much of this, since such a holism involves, well, everything. Briefly, conventional science assumes a strictly local cause-and-effect model, with this particular thing bumping into that particular thing and so effecting some physical influence or change. Such an “efficient causality,” Atmanspacher and Fuchs point out in Dual-Aspect Monism, has become the dominant metaphor of modern science. Hence the mechanisms and materialisms of the present reigning worldview. Nature is considered to be one big machine, with countless and relatively independent parts.

This is a complicated philosophical claim that works on two basic levels—a common but superficial level “up here” in the mental and material domains, with the sign or metaphor “intending” or “being about” something else (hence meaning as it is commonly understood in the humanities), and a deep level “down there,” in the psychophysically neutral ground, with the symbol or mystical experience issuing from a reality in which there are no absolute distinctions or differences and where paradox is the norm. This is the meaning of meaning, if you will, a kind of profound “sense” or state that is not intentional or “about” anything other than itself. Monism is the meaning of meaning.

third type of laws of nature beyond efficient causation and blind chance, beyond deterministic and statistical descriptions, is entirely undeveloped in present science.

For most of their lives, both Pauli and Jung were Kantians with respect to this deeper psychophysically neutral ground; that is to say, they denied that a human being could know the ground as such. To sum up Kant in a single sentence, “the world we experience is not the world as it really is.”

Jung will also identify this coniunctio with the agnosia (or “unknowing”) of the Gnostics, the affirmation of Plotinus that “all individuals are merely one soul,” the “suprapersonal atman” of the Hindu nondual traditions, and the identity of the individual and universal “tao” of Chinese philosophy and culture.

this is certainly not the case for the dual-aspect monism of Atmanspacher and Rickles, who often relate their model to earlier European philosophy, including here: “Over and above meaning as a subject-object relation, dual-aspect monism offers the option, contrary to Kant, of direct, immanent experiences of the psychophysically neutral reality, which avoids the problem of access to a transcendental realm. If this reality is primordial enough, like an Unus Mundus, it may be aligned with the ‘absolute’ and bring us back to Hegel. Immanent experiences refer to modes of knowledge and meaning that are certainly non-standard, and are reminiscent of Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva.”

Philosophically speaking, with a dual-aspect monism, “immanence” and “transcendence” are entirely relative to the body and brain. Put differently, there is such a thing as immanence or transcendence, but there are experiences of both in and as the body-brain. Put differently again, immanence and transcendence are epistemic phenomena, not ontological facts. There are no such divisions in reality as such.

This dissolution of the subject-object structure is precisely what “mystical” means for Atmanspacher and Rickles, which, once again, they relate to Hegel and, further back, to Spinoza: “Both Spinoza’s intellectual intuition and Hegel’s absolute join in with such most fundamental immanent experiences, which are often described as mystical revelations. We should repeat, by way of caveat, that they rely on the dissolution of any subject-object split, so that the notion of experience takes on a flavor entirely at variance with subjective experience in our ordinary usage of the term. Where there is no subject, there is no subjective experience.”32 Can we really hear that? Certainly not as psychological subjects or social egos—that is, as the splitters.

it is not just the fairly rare case of mystical knowing of unity, oneness, or the Hegelian absolute that the dual-aspect monistic model makes possible. It is also the much more common human experiences “up here” in the psychosocial world, where the One World can still be known indirectly after it has split into two within human experience and material history but still can communicate something of this deeper unity. Hence, central to the correspondence of Pauli and Jung was a stunning but quite common historical phenomenon (which historians are forever ignoring, underestimating, or simply misreading) that Jung came to call “synchronicity.”

They are not connected through any cause. They are connected through meaning. Hence the common human response to them: a sense of uncanniness or deep meaning that cannot be quite located.

Which brings us into the very heart of the humanities, of course, where meaning, at least since Franz Brentano at the end of the nineteenth century, has been understood as “intentional.” An ordinary meaning, Brentano rightly pointed out, is always intentional, in the sense that it is about something else. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, this intentional notion of meaning was more or less dogmatized in the humanities by postmodern thinkers like Jacques Derrida, who insisted that every meaning is really a grammatical function, that every word points to other words for its meaning, that there is no end to this referentiality, and that humans live in these endless networks of words and can never get out of them.

Derrida was perfectly correct on this superficial level. There is no social sign outside of the text, and every sign or word points to other words and social signs. It is a hall of mirrors.