Authors of the Impossible Quotes

“Why continue to tolerate a kind of armchair skepticism that has everything to do with scientistic propaganda and nothing at all to do with honest, rigorously open-minded collection, classification, and theory building, that is, with real science and real humanistic inquiry?”
― Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

“That position comes down to this. The world is not simply composed of physical causes strung together in strictly materialistic and mechanical fashion requiring, say, a physics for their complete explanation. The world is also a series of meaningful signs requiring a hermeneutics for their decipherment. Whatever they are, UFOs “vibrate in phase” with our forms of consciousness and culture. We thus cannot even conceive of them outside or independent from their observation. This most basic of facts puts into serious doubt the adequacy of any traditional scientific method. Such methods, after all, work from an ideal of complete objectivity, which in turn demands an effort to eliminate all interference with the observer. But what if the observer is the very mode of the apparition? What if the observer is an integral part of the experiment?”
― Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

“My history has been that of a soul struggling into the conviction of its own existence. —FREDERIC MYERS, Fragments of Inner Life”
― Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

“Consciousness and its sensory capacities, he claimed, are “doubtless still modifiable in directions as unthinkable to me as my eyesight would have been unthinkable to the oyster,”90 and the human being has “evoked in greatest multiplicity the unnumbered faculties latent in the irritability of a speck of slime” (HP 1:76). In short, just as it has in the history of life on this planet, consciousness will continue to evolve from the normal to the supernormal, and this to the extent that it can gain “a completer control over innate but latent faculty.”
― Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred