Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

  Similarly, Charles Fort never confused the alien Mind, or what he called X, with the human brain, for, as he put it, “the way of a brain is only the way of a belly” (LO 560). That is to say, the brain is finally a material reality, whereas Mind is something else, something alien, something really, really weird.

  Materialism, Fort’s “way of a belly,” is the dominant model in neuroscience now. I understand this. I also recognize, with Victoria Nelson, that the greatest taboo among serious intellectuals is “the heresy of challenging a materialist worldview.”33 I am issuing just such a challenge here. In doing so, I have no illusions about trying to go back to any premodern answers. I am simply pointing out that our present Dominant can only be maintained by damning, through willed or benign neglect, what Edward Kelly and his colleagues have called the “rogue” phenomena of the history of animal magnetism, psychical research, and paranormal experience.34 I am proposing the filter thesis here not to “believe” anything (including the filter thesis, which I would be happy to toss aside before something better), but because whereas the materialist models cannot even recognize the existence of the rogue data, much less explain them, the filter thesis can do both. Moreover, the filter thesis has the inestimable advantage of being capable of embracing both the findings of modern neuroscience (as applicable to the brain) and the most astonishing data of the psychical research tradition (as applicable to Mind). Mine is thus finally a reasonable, rational choice, not a decision to “believe” anything at all.

  Happily, this same bimodal psychology also helps explain why the literature of the fantastic is “fantastic.” That is to say, it explains why the fascinated reader (of a text or of an actual life event) cannot determine whether the occult event is real or not. Recall Todorov’s defining discussion of the fantastic, with which we opened our journey:

  The person who experiences the [fantastic] event must opt for one of two possible solutions: either he is the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination—and laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then his reality is controlled by laws unknown to us. . . . The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty.35

  The filter or transmission thesis explains this “duration of uncertainty” by pointing out that a paranormal event can be both real and unreal, both fiction and fact. It can be real and factual to the extent that it is a genuine expression of Mind beyond brain. It can be unreal and fictional to the extent that it is a filtered, translated, or imagined expression of Mind in and through the linguistic, identity, and cultural capacities of the (left) brain. The reader’s moment of hesitation, the moment of the fantastic, which of course happens in the reader’s head, then, finds its resolution in the very structure of that head, that is, in the fact that there are not one but two brains in there, and that one of them is filtering pure consciousness, while the other is translating and projecting that pure consciousness into multiple social, cultural, and religious fictions. Hence my dialectic of consciousness and culture, which can now be seen as an ideal theoretical reflection of the dialectical neuroanatomy of the human brain itself.

  From Realization to Authorization: Toward a Hermeneutics of the Impossible

  Our four authors of the impossible realized through their radical reading and writing practices that they were caught in a world they did not write, that they were being written, literally, as they spoke, and especially when they spoke, language being what it is—the ultimate magical spell, the most powerful hypnotic inducer of the consensual trance of social reality. What begins to make such individuals authors of the impossible is their radical reflexivity. What finally makes them authors of the impossible, however, is their metadecision to stop reading the paranormal writing us, step back “on the page,” and begin writing the paranormal writing us.

  There are at least two stages in this writing practice. In the first stage, what I would like to call Realization, the individual begins to suspect that paranormal processes are real. Realization is finally achieved when one comes to understand that such events are not only real, but also inherently participatory, that is, paranormal events often behave very much like texts: they appear for us but rely on our active engagement or “reading” to appear at all and achieve meaning.36 In some fundamental way that we do not yet understand, paranormal phenomena are us, projected into the objective world of events and things, usually through some story, symbol, or sign. Realization is the insight that we are caught in such a story, that we are embedded in a myth expressing itself through matter, a myth, alas, over which we have little control. Realization is finally the insight that we are being written.

  The second stage, what I want to call Authorization, begins when we decide to step out of the script or story we find ourselves caught in (call it culture, society, or religion) and write ourselves. If Realization is the insight that we are being written, Authorization is the decision to do something about it. If Realization involves the act of reading the paranormal writing us, Authorization involves the act of writing the paranormal writing us. Which is another way of saying that what finally makes an author of the impossible is the insight that because paranormal processes can replicate literary processes and literary processes can replicate paranormal processes, writing can become a paranormal practice.

  If we were to translate all of this back into our concluding thought experiment or “What if?” and its neuroscientific terms, we might say that what this impossible writing practice involves is the consciousness of the author figuring out that what the left brain is up to is eminently practical and necessary but not really real, that consciousness is not the ego or the person-as-mask (persona), and that the rules of the social game or religious theatre are just that: rules of a game, roles on a stage.

  To author one’s world, however, whether literally or metaphorically, implies the use of language, which is a left-brain capacity. So an author of the impossible is not someone who has shut down the left brain with all its critical and linguistic powers and tender sense of individual identity. I do not mean to be so simply dualistic. Rather, an author of the impossible is someone who has ceased to live, think, and imagine only in the left brain, who has worked hard and long to synchronize the two forms of consciousness and identity and bring them both online together. Finally, an author of the impossible is someone who has gone beyond all of these dualisms of right and left, mystical and rational, faith and reason, self and other, mind and matter, consciousness and energy, and so on. An author of the impossible is someone who knows that the Human is Two and One.

  I find such an (im)possibility incredibly empowering. If, after all, we can begin to understand and act on these insights, we might at least begin to take back the book of our lives from those who wrote us long ago, for their own good reasons, no doubt, and begin writing ourselves anew, for our own good reasons now. Our ancestors and their deities were completely ignorant of such new good reasons, just as we are completely ignorant of the good reasons and concerns of two thousand years from now. Our system must damn the old ones, and ours will be damned in turn. This, in the end, is all I have tried to say in the present book. It is also what I tried to say, in different ways and with different authors, in all my other books.

  Maybe that is all I have to say.

  In any case, I do not pretend for a moment that such an (im)possibility explains everything about what we have come to call, for our own reasons and ends, the psychical and the paranormal. I have argued here that such phenomena are profoundly involved with the production of human intention and cultural narrative, that is to say, I have focused on the why-questions of meaning and story and not on the how-questions of explanation and cause. The simple truth is that I have no idea how a table floats off the floor and taps out messages for a young philosophy graduate student, or how dying loved ones appear in dreams and rooms at the precise time of their passing. I haven’t the slightest clue how curtains and tableclot
hs burst into flames around pubescent girls and boys, or how authors encounter in “real life” scenes that they have imagined in their fiction or dreams. Most of all, I have no idea how dreamlike UFOs appear on radar screens, stop cars, and burn people. What I do know is that to the extent that these events involve symbols, myths, stories, and altered states, the literary critic, the anthropologist, and the historian of religions will have as much to say about them as the physicist, the neuroscientist, and the fighter-jet pilot.

  Impossible (Dis)Closings

  TWO YOUTHFUL ENCOUNTERS

  All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics.

  —William Blake to an epistemologically challenged angel in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

  We want you to believe in us, but not too much.

  —An alien to Nebraska law officer Herbert Schirmer

  When I decided to write this book, I had nothing invested in the strangest and most troubling of the material, the UFO material. I originally treated these phenomena because I realized that I would never understand the American superhero mythologies, toward which I was then writing, without taking into account the mythology of the alien, the UFO encounter, and the abduction narrative. I was simply trying to understand this mythical material as a responsible historian of religions. I was being a good boy. I had certainly never seen a UFO.

  Turns out I was wrong about that. Turns out I had seen one as a boy, and a quite big one at fairly close range, although I have absolutely no memory of this encounter. I only learned of it recently from my mother. She was visiting Houston (the city of spaceships, the Rockets, the Astros, and, as we like to brag, one of the first words uttered on the moon: “Houston, the Eagle has landed”). We were watching television together when a quite silly automobile commercial came on screen. It featured a typical disc-shaped UFO. Mom casually asked me if I remembered the day that we saw one. “What?!” I replied in so many eloquent words. She went on to explain how when I was about six and my brother Jerry five, the four of us were on our way to South Dakota for a family event. It was 1969 or so. It was night. As we drove down the dark highway somewhere in northern Nebraska, a very large, rectangular-shaped object appeared in the sky. It had lots of colored lights on it. “So could it have been a military plane or something?” I asked. This was a reasonable question. SAC, or Strategic Airforce Command, is in Omaha, a few hundred miles to the east. “No,” Mom replied just as casually and surely. “It was not shaped like a plane of any sort. It was rectangular. And it was very large. And it seemed to be following us. We all watched it for quite awhile. It was scary.”

  So there is another damned fact, so damned I still have absolutely no memory of it. As far as I am concerned, it never happened. But apparently it did. The clear sense of the uncanny with which Mom spoke of it was matched by Dad’s calm confirmation of it all when I asked him about Mom’s memories, and this despite his usual skepticism of all such claims (I was with him once when he discovered the likely source of some ghostly music allegedly heard in a local abandoned graveyard—a crumbling schoolhouse tucked away in the trees with an old piano in it, whose exposed strings could have easily hummed in the wind). Jerry was less helpful but equally to the point when he wrote back in answer to my brotherly request for his own precise memories: “Dude, I was five.” Not that age helps much here. Neither Mom nor Dad has the slightest idea what it was. Only that we all saw it, that it was real.

  So there is a story, a story I didn’t even know I had. Here is another, again from my own life, but now from my adolescence and youth and in a distant, buffered, unconscious mode that can be read in many ways, including in very traditional orthodox ways (that is, through the eyes of Catholic piety, whose reading I once fully accepted).1 The simple truth is that nothing is really very clear here, that nothing is either really simple or clearly true. And that is my point.

  We’ve already encountered this impossible story before, many times, but we have never had the chance to tell it and so make it seem possible. It would do us well now to return to it here at the very end, not to reach any final closure of meaning, much less to give the “correct” reading, but to perform and finalize our own fantastic uncertainty. The story involves the events of Fátima, Portugal, in the second decade of the last century. It has usually been read, with some justification, within the mythological system of Roman Catholicism. I am now going to read it, with some justification, within the mythological system of the ufological literature.

  “Here comes a whopper,” as Charles Fort would say. . . .

  Three little shepherds. Jacinta was just seven years old, her older brother, Francisco, nine. Their cousin, Lucia, was ten. Within a few years both Francisco and Jacinta would be dead, and Lucia, at the tender age of fourteen, would be secretly whisked off to a private boarding school in Porto, far from her home town. She was instructed not to tell anyone where she was going, nor to tell anyone who she was. She was also not to speak of the extraordinary events that transpired for six consecutive months between May 13 and October 13, 1917. She would have to leave all of her loved ones. She could write only to her mother, and this only after the letters from the child or the mother were passed through a vicar of the church. Poor Lucia’s immediate response to such a traumatic demand was very clear: she compared her fate to being “buried alive in a sepulcher.” She refused to go. But then she later allowed herself to be persuaded, to be buried. She would later enter a cloistered convent, where she would spend the rest of her life in silence and solitude. All that she wrote had to be passed through a bishop’s hand, and the Holy Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (what was once the Holy Inquisition) reserved the right to grant or deny authorization for any visitor.2

  What sort of secret knowledge could possibly justify this kind of lifelong vigilance and control? What on earth did Lucia witness?

  “What in the heavens” would be more accurate. There are some who believe that what the three children experienced, with literally tens of thousands of corroborating witnesses spread out over exactly half a year, was the most spectacular religious event of the twentieth century. They may be right. What it all means, however, is an entirely different question, and perhaps in the end an impossible one.

  Here are some of the facts, at least as they can be gleaned from the historical record, from the newspapers of the time, which widely covered the clockwork-like events, and from archival documents. It began on Sunday, May 13, 1917, in a rocky, desolate cove in the district of Fátima, Portugal.3 There, while tending their sheep, the three children witnessed flashes of lightning (without thunder) and then saw a small young woman standing on top of an oak tree. Lucia conversed with her, in Portuguese. The children returned home and, of course, immediately told the fantastic story to their family.

  “If the kids saw a woman dressed in white, who else could she be but Our Lady?” Lucia’s father, António, asked with some reason. But his ten-year-old daughter was not so sure. Nor was his wife, Maria Rosa. More skeptical by nature, she asked Lucia to specify exactly what she had seen. The girl made herself quite clear: “I never said that it was Our Lady—rather, a small, pretty lady. . . . She told me that we should continue to go there for six consecutive months, on the 13th of each month, and that at the end of that time, she would tell us who she was and what she wanted of us.”4 Maria Rosa would remain circumspect and careful about what her daughter had seen. In The Official Interrogations of 1923, she is recorded as testifying that her daughter had “said that she saw a small, pretty lady; that her dress was completely white; and that to the question, ‘Where are you from?’ she had pointed to the sky, saying she was from there.”5

  Originally, little Lucia was even more uncertain. In her Memoirs, she relates how she considered not returning in July for the third encounter, since she feared that the apparitions might be the work of the Devil—hardly a ringing endorsement of a transparent and unproblematic Marian reading.6 Later, in the convent and under the watchful eyes of the bishop and her ecclesial superi
ors now, Lucia would adopt, no doubt sincerely, the orthodox interpretations and write about the events accordingly. The little woman dressed in white from the heavens had indeed become “Our Lady of Fátima” from Heaven. It was an easy transformation. Lucia’s father had been right all along.

  Maybe. Memories, much less memoirs, are famously malleable, and differing details and alternative interpretations in the newspapers and the historical records abound—so many glitches in the Matrix of Roman Catholicism. The Lady was said to be a little over one meter tall and fourteen to fifteen years of age. She did not look like the images of the Blessed Virgin known in the devotional iconography of the local churches. She was enveloped in a kind of light that was more beautiful than the sun and very bright. Her dress, which appears to have hugged her body somewhat, covered her from the neck to the feet and emitted a similar white light. Some descriptions have her wearing a robe or cape extending to her knees, something on her head (it is not at all clear what), and a chain with a golden ball attached to it at about the level of her waist. She had black eyes and looked serious. Her mouth did not move when she spoke. She did not use her feet when she moved. Rather, she glided or floated.

  The children obediently returned every month as instructed, each time with more people in tow. In June there were about 40; in July over 4,000; in August 18,000;7 in September 30,000; in October, between 50,000 and 70,000, depending upon which account you accept. But, really, who could count them all now? Interestingly, not everyone could see the apparitions, and those who did often saw quite different things. And then there was the weird but beautiful “buzzing.” When the Being of Fátima spoke to the children, the witnesses often heard a distinct insectoid buzzing, like a bee or cicada or, as another had it, “like that which is heard next to a hive, but altogether more harmonious, even though words were not heard.”8