The Super Natural Quotes

“It is very easy to claim a theory of everything if you get to decide what that everything is. It is very easy to explain everything on the table if you have put everything you cannot explain underneath it in the wastebasket.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“Instead of shunning the darkness, we can face straight into it with an open mind. When we do that, the unknown changes. Fearful things become understandable and a truth is suggested: the enigmatic presence of the human mind winks back from the dark. WHITLEY STRIEBER, COMMUNION”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“who are we, that we so conceal ourselves from ourselves?”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“films like The Never-Ending Story (1984), Stranger than Fiction (2006), and The Adjustment Bureau (2011). Have you seen any of these films? Then you understand hermeneutics. In each case, the story revolves around a protagonist engaging his own life as a fictional story being written either in this world or in another, seemingly by someone else. As he reads and interprets the text of his life, however, he discovers that its story or plot changes. He discovers the circle or loop of hermeneutics. He discovers that as he engages his cultural script as text creatively and critically he is rereading and rewriting himself. He is changing the story.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“There appeared among our letters in 1988 a remarkably vivid account from a woman in Australia, who had been doing housework in the middle of the day when some very strange creatures had abruptly appeared in her sitting room. She observed a willowy being with dark, slanted eyes and a group of short, stocky ones in “brown shrouds,” who seemed to her to be workers, while the tall one was more of a supervisor. It proceeded to overpower her with its mind while the workers moved about in the background, doing what she could not imagine. After a ferocious mental struggle, during which she literally tried to crawl out of the house as she could no longer walk, all went dark. When she woke up, it was hours later. She never found out what had happened to her during that missing time. Presumably, though, the creatures who put her through this ordeal know—and perhaps, also, that is something close to the secret of the ages. In any case, one wonders, looking at Lorie Barnes’s story and the story of the Australian woman, if we are not seeing the outline of a very remarkable and unsuspected structure: we are the kobolds. They are us working, somehow, in the fields of the soul. And one day, many of the living will join them down this very strange path, as we enter this other level of humanity, where what is hidden to us in this state, is the grammar of their ordinary truth.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“Debates about the imagination and its role in human knowledge go back in the West to ancient Greece around the secrets and enigmas of the revealed “symbol” and its relationship to the more plodding ways of reason and rational knowledge. The most recent chapter of that larger conversation goes back to the eighteenth century and what we now call the Romantic movement. The poets and philosophers of the latter asked: What is the imagination? Is it simply a spinner of fantasies? Or can it also become a “window” of revealed truths from some other deeper part of the soul or world? Or, better yet, like some secret two-way mirror in a modern-day police station, is the imagination both, depending on whether one is looking at or through its reflecting surface, that is, depending on which side of it one is standing? Can one stand on both sides?”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“What we need to do now,” he mused, “is make better sci-fi movies so that we can have better contact experiences.” That is hermeneutics.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“the fundamentally paradoxical ways that our very subjectivities are constituted: as cultural scripts, as texts written before us as us. It is confusing being a novel, a piece of fiction that considers itself a simple fact.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“the shimmering movement of God’s hand across time, drawing life toward the knowledge of him. I”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“In spite of rationalism’s disdain for the particular, the personal, and the unwholesome [the modern debunker’s anecdotal], the drift of all the evidence we have seems to me to sweep us very strongly towards the belief in some form of superhuman life with which we may, unknown to ourselves, be co-conscious. We may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries, seeing the books and hearing the conversation, but having no inkling of the meaning of it all.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“Would we, if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese, cattle? Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen that now functions, satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way of compensation? I think we’re property.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“We have only faith to guide us, say the theologians. Which faith? It is my acceptance that what we call evidence, and whatever we think we mean by intuition and faith are the phenomena of eras, and that the best of minds, or minds best in rapport with the dominant motif of an era, have intuition and faith and belief that depend upon what is called evidence, relatively to pagan gods, then to the god of the christians, and then to godlessness—and then to whatever is coming next. . . . . If now, affairs upon this earth be fluttering upon the edge of a new era, and I give expression to coming thoughts of that era, thousands of other minds are changing, and all of us will take on new thoughts concordantly, and see, as important evidence, piffle of the past. CHARLES FORT, LO!”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“I might refer here to Jeff’s concept of the Human as Two, and mention that these may be glimpses, as it were, through the fence that surrounds Charles Fort’s famous comment in Book of the Damned, “I think we’re property.” We are little, curious animals, as it were, peering through the slats of the fence that surrounds our barnyard, and seeing beyond the edge not another world, but a more real vision of ourselves reflected as noumena and wondering, “What is that?”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“We human beings have a great defect, which is that we are all too often willing to both spread and enforce our ideas with violence.”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“I have learned, over the years, to see the actions of our visitors as a sort of illustrative language, communication built out of images and events. For”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

“It is one thing for the government to reveal that UFOs are intelligently guided objects of unknown origin and another to assume that this means that “they” are here. Should we ever come into more general contact with what I encountered—assuming that is even possible—they will not be offering us plans for a starship, or a trade in exotic electronics. What will be on offer, I would suggest, is a journey into a whole new understanding of reality and the part we play in it. The “alien” is as much a herald from the dark of the universe as it is a signal from the depths of our own minds. The”
― Whitley Strieber, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained