Jeffrey J Kripal is a professor of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He is the author of 10 books on the history of mysticism, psychology and the paranormal. His latest, How to think impossibledraws on a range of sources, including Gnosticism, quantum physics and English romantic philosophy, to attempt a new theory of mind and the imagination.
At the root of some of your understanding of imagination, and your argument that current theories of thought “leave too much off the table”, seems to be an experience that happened to you in Kolkata in November 1989. Can you describe what that entailed?
I was working on my first book, Kali’s childand I was very sick; I had some kind of flu or food poisoning. I went to sleep and I woke up, but my body didn’t wake up. And some kind of strange energy came from the room or more probably came from my body. I thought that the electrical circuits in the walls had somehow malfunctioned and I had been electrocuted. I had a classic out-of-body experience, and when I finally got back into my body and woke up, it felt like something inside of me had been unloaded. Huge amounts of information, and I had no context for it.
You have studied the experience of this kind of phenomenon. Do you think it made you more open to it?
Absolutely. This is what they would have called shakti in this Tantric worldview. But I mean, I’m the white guy from the USA, and it wasn’t part of my agency, as we say.
Do you look back on it as a kind of before and after moment?
This made me very suspicious of my suspicions. So when people later told me about their out-of-body experiences, or their near-death experiences, or even their abduction experiences, I was like, “Yeah, that can happen.”
Were you more cynical before?
I began adult life in a Benedictine seminary. So no, it didn’t come out of the blue. I grew up in a German farming community in Nebraska. I was the odd child; I really wanted to know, what the hell are we doing here? In the seminary I thought: this is not sufficient.
Throughout history, as you write, all cultures have tried to explain individuals who have had these experiences of what you call “impossible thinking”. i suppose for example, Lives of the Saints is one record of them?
You need impossible things to happen to become a saint, but they have to be the right ones [Roman Catholic] things. But why take things off the table that don’t fit your worldview?
Did that belief make you a heretic in academic circles?
I would say that most intellectuals are sympathetic [to mystery]but they are in the closet. In other words, they don’t want to talk about “impossible thinking” because they will lose prestige or authority.
How much have you experimented with hallucinogens?
My only real encounter with psychedelics was at a full-fledged retreat in Brazil. It was ayahuasca. I have not had the experiences that some people report. I have not met God. But I had a lot of the physiological effects they talk about: dissolution of consciousness and so on.
I’m probably dumb, but I didn’t understand the connection between your update of Coleridge’s model of the imagination – what you call double-aspect monism, the sense that imagination can take us beyond the false division of spiritual and material realities – and these experiences such as seeing ghosts or giant praying mantises appearing at the end of people’s beds. How is this related?
What I’m trying to say in the book is that many people have these strange experiences, but no one really has a model of the imagination that can explain them. I am trying to develop one. I push back against this idea that the imagination is only about imaginary mental states. The example I give a lot is precognitive states: dream-like states, where people see the future as a set of physical events.
You have recorded and collected many examples in you Archives of the impossible at Rice University.
Yes. To me, they are the most amazing because sometimes they are exact down to very banal details.
Is it your argument that there are elements of relativity and quantum mechanics, particularly challenges to notions of strictly linear time, that support these possibilities?
I’m not a physicist, but one of the science writers I’ve read is Philip Balland what Phil is saying is, look, we have to create a culture and a way of thinking that is quantum. We still insist on living in a Newtonian world.
What do you mean in simple terms some kind of measurable cause and effect universe?
We still want to believe that space and time are dead environments in which things happen. We know this is not true. Quantum physics requires new metaphors. The relationship between Newtonian physics and quantum physics is very similar to, for example, that between critical theory and impossible thinking. Newtonian physics works well up to a point, but we know that’s not all that’s going on.
to newsletter promotion
Let me ask about, for example, your thoughts on UFO sightings. You’re suggesting that this happens more often to people who have had near-death experiences because, I guess you’re arguing, those people’s hold on “normal” reality is weaker?
I think the normal way of thinking about a UFO as some kind of alien spaceship is naive. I think something is going on that is much more related to our spiritual history in ways we don’t understand. We interpret it in this technological way: it is a spaceship. It can’t be, you know, the world of the dead. god forbid
Why do you think trauma or grief allows us this kind of information?
The standard neuroscientific or materialist model is that the mind is produced by the brain, period. I don’t think this is correct. I think that the brain and the body translate or mediate mind in very complicated ways. It makes perfect sense to me that these are really moments of trauma where mediation is compromised, and other forms of mind are visible.
You are quite off on the word hallucination. Why do you feel is it a reductive term?
I just think people pull that word out of thin air when they want to dismiss these things. One [alternative] explanation is that we sometimes [experience] mind that is somehow cosmic and not local.
Do you think scientific method should be used to investigate these experiences?
I love science! We are on a laptop, we are looking at each other across the sea! But let’s let science be science, and let’s not pretend it’s the only way to know the world.
-
How to Think Impossible: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Faith, and Everything Else by Jeffrey J Kripal is published by the University of Chicago Press (£28). To the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
