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

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

On a much more profound level, meaning can also work vertically between the two surface domains of the mental and the material dimensions of experience and the deeper One World from which they have emerged or split off. This is where the straight historical event becomes the synchronicity. Atmanspacher and Fuchs call this vertical meaning of meaning “sense.”

Traditional religion or conventional science will never get us to a solution or resolution of impossible phenomena, not because we do not have enough data but because these two knowledge systems are inadequate in principle.

We need to stop relying so much on either our traditional religion or our conventional science. We must understand that our models are inadequate.36 We have to be humble, not because humility is a moral virtue that we need to signal but because humility represents an open-minded recognition of our actual condition and situation. We do not know, and it is quite likely that we cannot know, not because we do not yet have enough information but because our dualistic way of cutting up the world into “belief” and “reason,” into “subjects” and “objects,” is simply false; that is, these dualistic divisions do not correspond to what is actually so. They refer back to our evolved neurology and cultural histories. Again, we split the world into two. We are that two. The world is not two.

our present order of knowledge is organized along a hierarchy of values within a specific materialist metaphysics. We might think of the sciences as disciplined forms of knowledge concerned with the behavior of matter or “objective” reality, with the number or mathematics as the privileged symbolic medium. We might think of the humanities as disciplined forms of knowledge concerned with the expressions of mental reality or “subjective” reality, with the text or narrative as the privileged symbolic medium. So, object and subject, number and narrative, mechanism and meaning.

This order of knowledge is also an order of values or ontological judgments. The objective material aspects are considered real, whereas the subjective mental aspects of reality are considered less real or even unreal. The “outside” of reality, after all, is manipulable, measurable, and predictable, and we can engineer technology out of it. We can make cool stuff.

Biology is messier, as it has to contend with that annoying category of “life,” which it generally refuses to grant any ontological or “real” status. The social sciences (psychology and sociology) are definitely hovering somewhere in the middle of this hierarchy, wanting to be “hard” sciences but forever having to study “soft” human beings.

Once we understand our present order of knowledge in this way, it becomes rather obvious why something like the UFO phenomenon has such a difficult time fitting into that order. The reason? It does not follow this binary script. Many UFO phenomena, after all, are neither purely objective nor purely subjective. They are both. Worse yet (or better yet), some of their most extreme instances involve phenomena that simply cannot be rendered as purely material or purely mental. As such, they threaten to collapse altogether this useful distinction between the external and internal worlds. This is why so many contemporary scientists who are quite sympathetic to, say, extraterrestrial civilizations or alien spacecraft in our solar system are openly hostile and emotionally demeaning to abduction experiences. They are reasonably okay with the material objective aspects of the phenomena (the radar), but they are arrogant and dismissing when it comes to the subjective aspects of the phenomena (the revelation). They want to chop the phenomena in two and deal with only its objective or material aspect. They don’t get the joke. They can’t get the joke.

Conventional science works because it gets to set the rules of the game and then pretend that phenomena it has no way of measuring or manipulating do not exist.

This, again, is why conventional science will never get us there: because reality is not so binary. Cosmos and consciousness cannot be separated.

The Imagination as Medium, Translator, or Interface

There is a way outside, or to the side, of mathematics that the external and internal worlds communicate, come together in human experience or little mind. Such moments do not yet represent a complete coming together, an actualized “not two” of cosmos and consciousness. But they often do point or signal in this same cosmos-is-consciousness-is-cosmos-is-consciousness direction, if always in an indirect, coded, symbolic, or mythical way. They involve that third space of meaning. Such moments, in short, need to be interpreted, read, engaged. They never speak in clear unambiguous ways. They cannot. That way is the imagination. That way is the fantastic, the fantastic as actual mediation of the real in which the One splits into Two and as an imaginal apparition or materialization.

The imagination is the privileged organ of contact, communication, and communion. Reason is mostly impotent. Language and grammar are something of a joke (Derrida was right). The senses are not reliable: they evolved for other much more practical and adaptive reasons. But the imagination is of an entirely different order. At least in its empowered or activated states, it becomes a revelatory, if always imperfect, organ of mediation and translation.

Can we read such events literally? I don’t see how. I don’t see how we can believe all these very different and flatly contradictory beliefs. Can we read them instead as symbolic attempts to communicate something of immense human and maybe even cosmic significance, perhaps as “magical” in the technical sense of linking the mental and the material toward some future awakening to the World as One? Yes, I think we can.

The Fantastic Symbol: A Mythico-Physical Reality There is a final issue here. It has to do with the different natures of representation, image, language, and what is sometimes called, at least in the study of religion, the sign versus the symbol (two very different conceptions). This takes us back to the two natures of “meaning” in Atmanspacher and Fuchs, a superficial level in the social or textual sense and the “deep structure of meaning” related to the psychophysically neutral ground. Reference and sense, to use their language.

the sign in the contemporary humanities is entirely secular, artificial, arbitrary, and ultimately meaningless, whereas the banished symbol is implicitly religious, spontaneous or “revealed,” and supermeaningful. Most everyone in the humanities today assumes that the “sign is arbitrary”—that is, that texts, words, dreams, and visions all refer to other texts, words, dreams, and visions; in short, all such signs are entirely and completely “constructed” by historical, social, and neural processes and do not refer to anything outside themselves. They cannot. They can only refer to other signs in endless weaves and webs of illusory and always receding meaning—that is, to more and more historically relative signs.

In this view, there is no meaning in the real world—which is to say, the objective physical world. Meaning is an anthropomorphic hang-up, a projection. In fact, reality is meaningless, and we are all just lost in our webs of words and representations, in sign after sign, which gives us the illusion of meaning when there is in fact none. Ultimately, the present conception of the sign is nihilistic to the core.

The symbol is very different. The sumbola is from the Greek and literally meant “thrown together” (sum-bollein) and, probably originally, an “agreement” or “contract.” It referred to things like a shard of pottery broken in half and then given to two business partners so that the deal could be recognized later by a perfect match, or the wholeness of the doubled human who had not been split apart into genders and sexualities. In short, the sumbola was a whole that had been literally broken or split into two and then recombined or “thrown together” to form the whole again. Later, the sumbola came to refer to uncanny coincidences (another form of coming together) or to forms of ritual and reading divination that understood the image, the ecstatic poem, or the visionary display as a kind of esoteric cipher into deeper and deeper meanings of the real, which was suffused, soaked, with meaning.39 The correlations here with dual-aspect monism should be more than obvious.

the experience often initiates other synchronicities and meaningful mind-matter coincidences in the physical environment. This total event of meaningful symbols and uncanny coincidences is experienced as cosmic truths of astonishing significance—that is, as images and events that participate directly in that which they represent. That is because they do.

Okay, I actually believe that. There is my credo. I believe that what is symbolically encountered in these fantastic events is the real world manifesting in the body-brain of the experiencer in ways that the person can hear and integrate in some fashion—which is to say that these events are mediated by the “imagination,” which, in these moments at least, is no more, and no less, than a function or dimension of consciousness as such. I believe we should not believe the literal contents of such imaginal productions or movies, but we should nevertheless watch and listen to them with great care and attention as moments of contact, communion, and communication with the real.

I often refer to this deeper reality as nonhuman or superhuman. A dual-aspect monist who is more precise than me might want to refer to it as “neutral” (that is, as neither material nor mental). I would invoke negative theology and mystical literature here and look for other, more poetic, ways of expressing the same metaphysical truth—some “divine darkness” or Buddhist “emptiness” or Eckhartian “Nothing,” perhaps. In any case, I mean to refer to a presence that is cosmic, everywhere, everywhen, because it is nowhere and nowhen (that is, not restricted to space or time but always appearing to us evolved primates in space and time).

We can finally begin to connect the dots—but only when we have moved outside our presentism, materialism, reductionism, and scientism, and only when we no longer conflate the spontaneous revealed symbol of ecstatic vision with the arbitrary cultural sign of ordinary language and egoic experience.

The debunkers are perfectly correct about one thing: if conventional materialism is true, these things cannot be.

We can ignore them with all sorts of lame and unquestioned rhetorical tricks (“multiple anecdotes do not add up to evidence,” “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and so on), but none of this does anything to stop the phenomena from appearing.

Multiple anecdotes are real data and add up to theory. And extraordinary claims are not extraordinary at all in the context of the broader history of religions.

my credo, my “I believe.” I believe that the World is One, that the Human is Two, and that this One World often appears in the Human as Two in and through the symbols, myths, and dreams of the empowered imagination. Indeed, precisely because of this Two-in-Oneness, reality can and does appear in us all the time in openly and robustly paradoxical ways that can fit no present order of knowledge that is organized around the “object” or the “subject”—which is to say, all forms of modern academic knowledge.

We should be a mirror of being: we are God in miniature. . . . Am I supposed to have created the whole universe? Was it the movement of my I that brought this about, just as it brought about the movement of a body? Am I merely a droplet of this force? I comprehend only a being that is simultaneously one and many, that changes and stays the same, that knows, feels, wills—this being is my primordial fact. Friedrich Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”

the phrase “teaching the Superman” stuck with me.2 I may have let it go, but it did not let me go, partly because I think it is closer to what Friedrich Nietzsche—who was so central to that book (although almost no one can really hear him today)—actually intended by his seminal term the Übermensch, partly because of my affection for American popular culture, where the Superman and superhumans of all sorts are everywhere, but mostly because it expresses exceptionally well my esoteric pedagogy, with which I opened both that earlier book and this one: the not so simple truth is that I was, and still am, teaching the Superman.

I can see at this point in my life that my books, and maybe my entire lifework, has been about one thing: teaching humans how to be God and God how to be humans. I sincerely believe that the former project (teaching humans how to be God) is what the history of religions—still incomplete, still ongoing—has been partially about and where, I hope, at least some of it is headed. I also sincerely believe that the latter project (teaching God how to be human) is what the humanities—still incomplete, still ongoing—has been partially about and where at least some it is headed.

On the philosophical side, I worry about theism in general; that is, I worry about the positing of ultimate value outside the natural world. Accordingly, I have pushed for a new, more expansive naturalism, a super naturalism that can take in all the rogue phenomena without too quickly resorting to some external deity or supernatural force outside the cosmos.

On the historical, moral, and psychosexual sides, almost any God-talk carries massive violences against colonized, enslaved, marginalized, and victimized peoples and cultures; vast historical tracks of scientific ignorance, or just pure idiocy; and, not to be underestimated, countless personal traumas in people’s family memories, psyches, and shame-tortured bodies.

There are many reasons “God is dead,” then, and I have no desire to bring that bastard back. I am perfectly happy with his long Western funeral. I stand with my colleagues.

am perfectly aware that these transcendent experiences appear to conflict with the other common human experience of injustice, suffering, evil, fate, and determinism. All I can say here is that it is obvious to me that both forms of human experience are quite genuine (in the simple sense that “they happen”), and so both need to be taken into account toward any fuller picture of who and what we really are.

From four decades now of studying gnostic, esoteric, mystical, and psychedelic literatures, which are some of the most sophisticated religious materials on the planet, I have become convinced that what people call God is a plurality or multibeing. Put more simply, we are all, together, collectively, God.5 If you prefer a bit of humor, we can invoke the Dutch computer engineer become idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup and suggest that God has a massive multiple personality (dis)order, and we are its symptomatic expressions. We are God’s alters.

Or God’s madness. And I am not convinced that is only a metaphor, that madness is not sometimes a kind of unrecognized revelation, the beginning of some very serious philosophical reflection.

I began this chapter with an epigraph from Nietzsche. Toward the end of his conscious life, as Nietzsche grew increasingly certain of his own advanced superhuman status, he declared himself to be “all names in history.”12 In the vision that I have been sketching here, or that Bill Hicks was joking about, he really was.

perhaps my personal favorite happens to be from the British poet and visionary William Blake (no doubt because my own theory of the imagination resembles his). Blake was widely considered to be “mad” (of course) in his own time. My favorite story about Blake involves his friend Henry Crabb Robinson being terribly concerned about Blake’s orthodoxy—that is, about his proper Christian beliefs. Robinson was right to be concerned, it turns out, though not quite in the way he expected. Here is Blake’s reply to his friend’s anxious question about whether Blake really believed that Jesus was true God and true man. Not to worry, Blake sung in a few lines: We are all coexistent with God members of the Divine body. We are all partakers of the Divine nature . . . He is the only God. But then so am I, and so are you.

As I have sometimes joked, God is really just idealism for the masses.

I find the same insight again in Nietzsche, in a late book like The Antichrist, the Devil’s title, if ever there was one. Nietzsche’s understanding of Jesus is eerily similar to what I have voiced above (before ever reading his text). “The most spiritual” for Nietzsche are precisely those who see that “the world is perfect.”19 Hence the philosopher’s “psychology” of the gospel, or what he calls in his older Protestant language the “evangel.” In the whole psychology of the “evangel” the concept of guilt and punishment is lacking; also the concept of reward. “Sin”—any distance separating God and man—is abolished: precisely this is the “glad tidings.” Blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to conditions: it is the only reality—the rest is a sign with which to speak of it. The consequence of such a state projects itself into a new practice, the genuine evangelical practice. It is not a “faith” that distinguishes the Christian: the Christian acts, he is distinguished by acting differently: by not resisting, either in words or in his heart, those who treat him ill; by making no distinction between foreigner and native, between Jew and non-Jew (“the neighbor”—really the coreligionist, the Jew); by not growing angry with anybody, by not despising anybody; by not permitting himself to be seen or involved at courts of law (“not swearing”); by not divorcing his wife under any circumstances, not even if his wife has been proved unfaithful. All of this, at bottom one principle; al...

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.

It needs to be openly admitted and underlined, then: these millennial-long attempts to integrate the super and the human have not gone so well.

for the most part, if there is no suffering or nothing is wrong, there are no robust paranormal phenomena. This is why there is so often a potential connection between the impossible and social justice and social injustice. The impossible is often a materialized cry amid endless social suffering, cruelty, violence, and murder.

because the impossible is human, and because human beings do terrible things to one another, the impossible can be aligned with any human moral system. We are God, but we are also the Devil.

What actually happened was what Eire calls a series of “reconfigurations of reality,” particularly around the relationship between the supernatural and natural worlds.34 Impossible things might still happen, but since matter and spirit were now being increasingly separated; such things, particularly if they were physical, could only be reinterpreted as bad—that is, as fraudulent or evil, the work of the Devil and his minions.

“They are accurate about some things . . . but other things have been added and exaggerated.”101 That could well be a motto for the entire history of religions, where fraud and fact, trick and truth, and experience and exaggeration go together again and again, and again.

I am convinced that most all experiences of the sacred are mediated by endless psychological and social filters—“invented,” if you want to say that, or “constructed,” as many prefer to say today. But this does not mean that such showings are not mediating something very real. Nor does it mean that there is not sometimes real human fraud, like the painted stigmata or fake wounds of Christ that Eire discusses on one of the three judged nuns he features.

I personally think that one of the worst decisions ever made in the literature is the decision not to further research mediums and psychics who were caught cheating. Cheating and actual paranormal phenomena are not mutually exclusive and never have been. The doubled truth is difficult: fraud, deception, and revelation are all often woven imperceptibly together into a tight mix that can only frustrate the purist of any type, including the orthodox gatekeeper, the responsible historian, and the contemporary skeptic. Many times over, the trickster is inherent in the experience of the phenomenon, not some social or psychological add-on. Accordingly, such events do not follow orthodox lines, whatever those lines happen to be.

40. I really cannot stress these historical and intellectual roots enough. The study of religion is a combination of Enlightenment reason and Romantic imagination, even though the latter has been occluded in recent decades. This is one reason I focused so on the figure of William Blake as actual inspiration in two of my early books, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) and The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). To speak in contemporary terms, I really do think the historical roots of the gnosis of the superhumanities lie here, in English Romanticism and German idealism. Hence, also, the importance of the imaginal symbol of revelation in this line of creative writing and thinking.

The language here is distinctly Buddhist. The Buddhist tradition often posits “strands” of identity that separate and come back together in different life-forms. None of these are permanent, however.

I am thinking of Elliot Wolfson’s long engagement with Martin Heidegger, probably the major figure in the phenomenological tradition. See, for example, Elliot R. Wolfson, Heidegger and Kabbalah: Hidden Gnosis and the Path of Poiesis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019). Much in line with what I have argued about the humanities (that they are really the superhumanities—that is, deeply inflected by mystical thought), Heidegger was likely influenced by Meister Eckhart. See John Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (Athens, OH: Ohio University Thought, 1978).

Husserl was “bitterly disappointed” by Heidegger’s Being and Time. He considered Heidegger’s work to be only about the surface elements of consciousness, “a description of human existence in its everyday character, which completely missed the whole point of the phenomenological reduction” (Dermot Moran, foreword to Husserl, Ideas, xvii).