Reality Is Strange

How to Think Impossibly:
About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else
by jeffrey j. kripal
chicago, 312 pages, $35 

In the academic sphere of the history of religion, there are two “elephants in the room.” Both are set on trampling the discipline to death, but neither are truly acknowledged. The first is the disbelief of many scholars of religion, veiled and softened by a postmodernist refusal to accord definitive meaning to anything. The second is the fact that other scholars of religion are themselves believers who often sedulously avoid the appearance of faith commitments lest they be considered unfit to make historical judgements. As a result, fundamental questions that come easily to the non-academic—questions like “Does God exist?,” “Is revelation true?,” or “Are supernatural phenomena real?”—get short shrift among historians of religion. There is a growing movement in the discipline, however, to get a conversation started about ontological reality. These scholars reject the orthodoxy of recent decades that approached every phenomenon as culturally constructed and shunted ultimate questions into the realm of the unaskable. Jeffrey Kripal is one such scholar, and How to Think Impossibly is his latest contribution to a bold effort to grapple with the notion that people who experience the impossible might actually be telling the truth.

Kripal argues that there is plenty of evidence that the impossible happens. Not just the “soft” claim that people genuinely experience the impossible, but also the “hard” claim that impossible events actually happen. People foresee the future in specific detail; UFOs are detected on radar; people interact with giant insects, experience timeslips, and generate thought-forms that take on physical existence. We have chosen to structure our systems of knowledge, Kripal argues, so as to push such phenomena to the fringe; but they are not really fringe, and they happen to many people who simply lack the vocabulary and conceptual framework to talk about them, and who fear ridicule and disbelief.

The term “impossible” is, for Kripal, a convenient stand-in for more contested terms like “supernatural” and “paranormal”—although Kripal does not actually think the supposedly impossible is really impossible at all. How to Think Impossibly is a manifesto for a radical overhaul of our systems of knowledge, in the light of Kripal’s conviction that human existence and reality are not limited to the realm of the physical. It is a call to set aside the tired tropes of constructivism that come from a desire to do anything rather than confront the “impossible” and the questions it raises. It is also a set of proposals about how we could begin to understand reality once the impossible has been accepted into our understanding of the universe.

Kripal’s proposals for renewing our understanding of reality may prove the most controversial aspect of his project, emerging as they do from his own unconventional spiritual journey. As the author himself acknowledges, Kripal draws inspiration from the Gnostics of the early centuries of Christianity, and How to Think Impossibly is inflected by a certain hostility to organized religion in general and Catholicism in particular. Kripal outlines how a new, integrated worldview where the sciences and humanities are accorded equal explanatory power might replace the knowledge economy of today’s universities. He argues for a revival of a non-religious “New Age” spirituality bridging the sciences and humanities, advocating a monist conception of the universe in which human consciousness is not distinct from reality itself. Phenomena like UFOs, tulpas, ghosts, and precognition are at once real and generated from the self. Yet the modern university is itself the descendant (or perhaps the wreckage) of a medieval knowledge economy that was just such an integrated whole. The integration of the “sciences” and “humanities” against the background of the assumed reality of the supernatural has happened before.

If we can justly criticize Kripal for passing over the medieval synthesis—or, at least, for not explaining why it is unworthy of consideration as a model for a future knowledge economy—then there are other aspects of his critique of religion that believers ought to heed. I do not think faith is restrictive or limiting, as Kripal does, but it is undeniable that historians of religion with a personal faith (and I include myself in this) seldom do a better job of wrestling with the reality of supernatural phenomena than secular materialists. It is all too easy for believers to become apologetic for the impossible truths that, in theory, they ought to be defending—eager as they are to be received as “normal” members of society, and of the academy. If Kripal is right that reality is not as secular materialism tells us it is (and I suspect he is) then religious believers ought to be the first to offer an alternative outlook, rather than providing cover for the materialists by shepherding any dissent from secular orthodoxies into the realm of personal religious belief. If the spiritual world is truly real, that matters—with all the disturbing consequences that follow.

Jeffrey Kripal’s How to Think Impossibly correctly diagnoses a genuine and pressing problem: the failure of Enlightenment-derived models of what reality is and the sorts of things we are taught to believe can and cannot happen. We can no longer bury our heads in the sand and pretend that fantastical phenomena such as out-of-body experiences and instances of non-linear time do not occur. We should be open to modifying our picture of reality to accommodate such evidence, and open to the possibility that science cannot explain everything.

But Kripal’s prescription and belief that such phenomena arise ultimately from a self that is one with the universe seems a return to the past rather than a genuinely new departure (or, as Kripal insists, an anticipation of a future form of human consciousness). It is unclear to me why ancient Gnostics, Buddhist mystics, nineteenth-century Spiritualists, and modern UFO contactees have better answers to offer than the great theologians. But in this remarkable yet controversial book, Kripal is right to confront us with a high strangeness that challenges our sense of the scope of normality and reality. Even once we have affirmed that the “impossible” happens, our interpretations of it will continue to differ in fundamental ways.

Francis Young is a British historian and folklorist. 

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Original by Maurits Cornelis Escher, photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões, via Creative Commons. Image cropped.