Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  Vallee returned to this sentiment again as late as 2007, in “Consciousness, Culture, and UFOs.” He was now sixty-eight. Although confessedly frustrated with “this festival of absurdities” to which the public prominence of alien abductions and hypnotic regression had effectively reduced the study of aerial phenomena, Vallee insists that he has not lost his hope that “someday we will be able to sort out the signal from the noise and get to work on the real UFO phenomenon” (FS 1:208–9). This is precisely what he and Hynek had written in Challenge to Science all the way back in 1966. Vallee no doubt has his old friend and fellow Rosicrucian traveler in mind when he writes:

  Let me remind you again that the phenomenon is indeed a real manifestation in a physical sense. . . . We are dealing with physical objects that interact with their environment through the emission of light and other electromagnetic radiation, through mechanical and thermal effects, and through psychophysiological changes in the witnesses who are in close proximity to the phenomenon. . . . The believer’s mistake is to ascribe meaning and credence to the secondary perception, the mental image created by our brain to account for the stimulus. The skeptic’s mistake is to deny the reality of the stimulus altogether, simply because the secondary perception seems absurd to him or her. What we take to be reality may, in fact, be a mere appearance, or projection, onto the “screen” of our four-dimensional space-time world from a much more complex, multidimensional, more fundamental reality. More than two thousand years ago, Plato described this very scenario in his allegory of “the cave,” where sensory reality turned out to be mere shadows on the cave wall, projections from the higher reality of Ideal Forms beyond the cave. Real progress lies between the two equally close-minded attitudes of the believer and the skeptic.101

  Which is to say that real progress lies in the attitude of the gnostic, the man or woman who does not confuse the two-dimensional shadows on the flat cave wall with the “other dimension” outside, who understands that symbols are just that—symbols. They are not literally true. But neither are they completely false. Truth shines through them. They are not the truth.

  The Hermeneutics of Light: The Cave Become Window

  This same spirit was borne out beautifully in my first meeting with Vallee, with which I began and with which I will now close. As we sat in his living room and got to know one another that December day high above the city, Jacques began speaking of my books that he was reading and their specific use of the word “hermeneutics,” a term that was new to him but with which he was quite taken now. It is not difficult to see why. Recall that the term, as I have used it here at least, encodes an approach to the paranormal as meaning and story and insists on the interpreter’s creative role in the interpretation. Such a definition could easily be used as a kind of poor paraphrase for Jacques Vallee’s corpus of work on the UFO encounter. Since 1968, he has cautioned his literalizing readers away from any naive objectivist interpretation of the UFO phenomena. He has recognized for forty years now that these encounters have every mark of being staged, that they have something to do with the magical and mystical structures of human consciousness, and that they draw on ancient mythology and folklore—in a word, that they are stories. He has also shared with me a more personal fact, namely, that, although he has known some successful remote-viewing experiments, most of his own mystical experiences, which have involved intimations of the future, have inevitably come to him during writing.

  It is not difficult, then, to see why he was so attracted to this particular term among the literally hundreds of thousands that I had sent him in the form of my books. It captured quite well what he had been doing his entire adult life. And then he went further still. He proposed an analogy, the analogy of stained glass for what he called “hermeneutics in action,” that is, an interpretation of higher-level symbols from the point of view, and for the benefit, of the common person. He spoke specifically of how stained-glass windows are able to refract an infinite cosmic light that has traveled from untold distances and times before it takes shape in the glass and is able to express itself in the human symbolic language of metaphor, symbol, and word. He also spoke about how the light of the imaged windows is never the same. It is different each day, each hour, even each minute, as the sun moves overhead and beams down on the glass at different angles and with different intensities.

  Such an analogy took on an entirely different light, literally, when we entered Jacques’s study. One entire wall is dominated by five beautiful stained-glass windows, each of which he has made with his own hands. It took him three years in all to construct them. Here are the central symbols of his literary corpus and his mystical life on display, in full living color, no less. At the top of each stained glass window there is a single glowing rose. Everything that takes place in that room is thus truly and literally sub rosa. There also, in the first window, is a familiar friend, Bishop Agobard. He is holding a book in his hand entitled—what else?—Magonia, as he blesses a man coming down from a beam of light to protect him from the crowd below, which no doubt wants to kill him as some kind of demonic magician.

  I saw many other symbols in those five windows. As I looked, the light laughed as often as it shone. There was, for example, a grinning, cartoon-like devil modeled, Jacques told me, after a similar imp from the Cathedral of Chartres. He held a prism in his hands so that he could screw up the heavenly light beaming down from above. There was also a knight holding the Holy Grail, the Egyptian goddess Isis signaling secrecy with her finger over her mouth as she held the Liber Mundi or Book of the World (again, reality or nature as a secret text to be read). There was an alchemical furnace; the Queen of Heaven emerging, Picasso-like, from different dimensions; the priest Melchizedek; and the medieval nun, mystic, painter, and writer Hildegaard of Bingen. I must admit that I understood little of this. My time was too brief and the symbols too personal, intimate, and playful. But one thing was obvious enough. It was clear to me that, for Jacques Vallee, there is a cosmic light shining through the earthy metaphors and colorful symbols of the history of religion, mysticism, and folklore. The paranormal is very real, although it is always refracted, reflected, and filtered through the magical structures of human consciousness (including that little cartoon devil), which we still do not understand because we have continued in our science to look out instead of in. This is our most fundamental and most important secret, our psychic existence sub rosa.

  And so we spend our days in a cramped Cave of Consensus, watching so many fake movies on a foggy screen or dark wall, pretending that it’s all real, all “out there.” Sometimes, however, just sometimes, our cave wall becomes a stained glass window and we see another kind of light shining through reality. What was once a hard “object” now becomes a translucent “window.” Most, of course, even now continue to mistake the colored glass for the light itself. Most replace the cosmic with the earthly, the universal with the local, the symbol with the truth. Unable to distinguish between the two, they do not know. They experience and believe. Or they do not believe. They reason and deny the literal truth of the symbols. Both the believer and the skeptic capture an important part of the situation, but both are wrong about the other part.

  Others, however, somehow manage to shake loose from both their religious and rational chains, turn around, and look back at the projector and its brilliant beam of light. Then everything changes, instantly and forever. They have been granted a passport to Magonia. They leave the cave. Now the problem is not the movie. It is the people watching the movie, who do not yet know that they are watching a movie.

  four

  RETURNING THE HUMAN SCIENCES TO CONSCIOUSNESS

  Bertrand Méheust and the Sociology of the Impossible

  No culture is able to achieve the integral fullness of the real, nor can any develop all the potentialities of the human being, for the latter is always in excess of itself. . . . Each culture explores certain sectors of the real, privileges and develops certain dimensions of experience, and, because of thi
s fact, sacrifices other dimensions, other possibilities, which return to haunt it (the return of the repressed!), against which the culture protects itself through a number of mechanisms.

  —BERTRAND MÉHEUST, Le défi du magnetisme

  Les mythes se pensent dans l’homme.

  Myths think themselves in man.

  —CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS, The Raw and the Cooked

  Unlike Jacques Vallee and despite his own intense interest in the subject, our fourth and final author of the impossible, Bertrand Méheust, has never seen a UFO. Nor again, despite his voluminous writings on the history and interpretation of psychical capacities, has he been the recipient of unusual telepathic gifts or precognitive or imaginal visions. He does, however, often experience very strange and striking coincidences.

  One such event happened in the spring of 2008, around and indeed apparently mirroring a symposium to which I had invited him at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, on the nature of consciousness and postmortem survival. It began on the plane to San Francisco from France. Méheust was reading my Esalen, and more particularly the opening pages where I discuss the hermeneutical nature of synchronicity, that is, the phenomenon of striking coincidences involving texts whose reading and interpretation coincide precisely with the world revealing itself as a text to be similarly read and interpreted. As he read and interpreted my words on the synchronicity of reading and interpretation, the man seated next to him broke in. He was a Buddhist meditation teacher who had taught at Esalen. He had also been involved with the Indian philosopher of consciousness Krishnamurti. They chatted for hours, much of it about Krishnamurti and his ideas about the unconditioned nature of consciousness. When the two got off the plane, the public address system in the airport synchronized with their conversation and called them to return to consciousness: “Calling Mr. Krishnamurti. Mr. Krishnamurti. Will Mr. Krishnamurti please come to . . . ”1

  “I am known for that,” Bertrand explained to me with a grin as he finished telling me this story soon after he landed. “My friends know it happens often. Some of them think that this is because I think in connections, making connections between things that no one else has thought to combine. Maybe that’s it. Maybe I am a Connector.”

  I would put it this way. Bertrand Méheust is a super-comparativist who sees connections where others do not and cannot. Until, that is, he writes about them. But he does more than write about such invisible connections. He also attracts them to himself through his existential openness to a universe in which everything is really and truly connected. His, then, are not simply comparative patterns. They are also comparative events.2

  A Double Premise

  I begin with this story related to Méheust’s reading of my own written work not to prove anything purely and simply objective, but to acknowledge a certain synergy between our writings and to take it yet further. I take it as a sign with which to think. And why not? Bertrand Méheust practices what I have called a hermeneutical mysticism, which is to say that he experiences the world as a series of signs or meaning events to read, interpret, and then write out again in his own written work. And as he reads and writes, he is read and written. This is how he lives, how he comes to be.

  It is in this spirit anyway that I would like to suggest that Bertrand Méheust’s written corpus can be read as flowing from a double premise, which the reader is free to read as Méheust’s or my own. I end my chapter reflections with Bertrand Méheust, then, not simply because most of his books appear after those of our first three authors of the impossible (although he and Jacques Vallee are really contemporaries), but also because his intellectual training and hermeneutical—really Hermetic—sensibilities are extremely close to my own. In essence, then, these are also my conclusions.

  The first part of our double premise involves the claim that the humanities have something important to offer the study of psychical and paranormal phenomena. By the humanities, I mean all those fields of study within the modern university that focus on the nature and construction of meaning, value, beauty, and narrative in the history of human experience as the latter has been crystallized in such activities as philosophy, religion, art, literature, and language. By the humanities, I mean all those forms of thought that intuit that reality is not just made up of matter and numbers and causality (which is what the natural sciences assert), but also of meaning and words and stories. By the humanities, I mean the study of consciousness encoded in culture.

  The second part of our double premise involves the claim that psychical and paranormal phenomena have something important to offer the humanities, that such phenomena can help bring the humanities back to consciousness, if you will. The simple truth is that we have quite a few ideas and some general consensus about what culture is, but no real idea, no real consensus about what consciousness is. When, then, intellectuals try to create comparative systems that can relate consciousness to culture and culture to consciousness, they naturally falter and fall back into cultural systems, that is, into things we know something about, like discursive practices, histories, social systems, power, and politics. Basically, they reduce consciousness to culture.

  Accordingly, intellectuals are generally quite resistant to the possibility that consciousness can effectively reveal itself as fundamentally beyond or against culture (although the ideal notion of a “counterculture” certainly hinted at this possibility3). And the vast majority of intellectuals would positively deny that consciousness can exist without culture. Psychical and paranormal phenomena, on the other hand, strongly suggest that certain, very special forms of human consciousness are in actual fact not reducible to local cultures, even if they must finally express themselves in the terms and languages of those very cultures. They provide us with some of the most suggestive evidence that consciousness and culture cannot be collapsed into one another but work together, in incredibly complex ways, to actualize different human potentialities, different forms of reality, different (im)possibilities.

  The encoding of consciousness in culture, then, is no simple material process, as if consciousness and culture are “things” that can be objectified, quantified, and measured separately. There are no such things. Nor is there any Archimedean point for the humanist, no perspective from which everything can be definitively measured and judged once and for all as a stable object. Quite the contrary, the humanist study of consciousness is practiced by consciousness. Which is to say that this is an inherently reflexive practice, a meditation in the mirror, with all the mindboggling paradoxes of subjectivity and objectivity that such an image suggests. “The eye with which I see God,” Meister Eckhart wrote, “is the same eye with which God sees me.” The exact same thing is true of the mystical humanities and the study of consciousness by consciousness.

  This encoding of consciousness in culture, moreover, is a radical dialectical process between two forms of human experience (one internalized as consciousness, one externalized as culture) that is as much about repression as expression, as much about the suppression or wilting of potentialities as their education and actualization. And no conscious culture can do it all. To develop one set of human skills is inevitably to ignore, and probably discourage or even demonize, another. What is possible and impossible within a particular temporal and spatial frame, then, is to a very large extent psychoculturally loaded, constructed, or even determined (take your pick).

  At first glance, this may sound reductive and relativistic, and to some extent it is (depending on what you pick), but only if one’s perspective is restricted to that of a single psyche or culture. This is where the most radical act of all comes in: comparison. Radically conceived (as I am conceiving it here), comparison respects no cultural or religious system as representing the truth of things. From the perspective of the larger, indeed universal, psychocultural processes captured under the comparative rubrics of “anthropology,” “history of religions,” or “cultural psychology,” however, such a method can point to collective forms of consciousness, le
vels of metaphysical freedom, and degrees of imaginal power virtually unthinkable in contemporary theory.4 In culture, any culture, we are bound to that which is deemed possible. In the comparative imagination that can relate consciousness to culture and culture to consciousness, we begin to free ourselves for the impossible. We begin, with Fort, to step out of the movie screen and, with Vallee, to leave the rat maze.

  What an author of the impossible like Bertrand Méheust finally teaches us, then, is that we really do shape our worlds, even if we do not fully determine them. We are magicians all. But as whole cultures extended through centuries of time, we are much more than a collection of knowing and unknowing magicians stumbling about with their consensual spells called Language, Belief, and Custom. We are veritable wizards endowed with almost unbelievable powers to shape new worlds of experience and realize different aspects of the real. We are authors of the impossible.

  Méheust and the Master

  Bertrand Méhuest was born on July 12, 1947. His only complaint to his mother was that he was not born three weeks earlier, on June 24, the day Kenneth Arnold spotted those nine skipping, shining discs over Washington State and so initiated a new era in the mythology of the West. Arnold was a wealthy businessman flying his own private plane. Méheust was born into a poor family with few financial resources and even fewer social connections.

  As his birth-wish might suggest, Méheust’s early work and first book, in 1978, were on ufology. He would go on to complete an M.A. in 1981, for which he wrote a thesis on William James. Between 1985 and 2003, he worked almost exclusively on the history of animal magnetism and psychical research. He would be awarded a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Sorbonne for this work in 1997. He would also produce two major works of historical scholarship, a two-volume history of this same material (his Ph.D. thesis) and a study of the nineteenth-century superpsychic Alexis Didier (1826–86).5