Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred Read online

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 2010 by The University of Chicago

  All rights reserved. Published 2010.

  Paperback edition 2011

  Printed in the United States of America

  20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 2 3 4 5 6

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45386-6 (cloth)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-45386-3 (cloth)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45387-3 (paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-45387-1 (paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45389-7 (e-book)

  Frontispiece: Ailleurs (circa 1960) by Arthur-Maria Rener (1912–91). Vallee private collection, hanging over the Vallee-Hynek parapsychological library. Used with permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Kripal, Jeffrey John, 1962–

  Authors of the impossible : the paranormal and the sacred / Jeffrey J. Kripal.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-45386-6 (cloth: alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 0-226-45386-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Parapsychology—History. 2. Religion—Psychic aspects. 3. Myers, Frederic William Henry, 1843–1901. 4. Society for Psychical Research (Great Britain) 5. Fort, Charles, 1874–1932. I. Title.

  BF1028.K75 2010

  130—dc22

  2009029969

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  AUTHORS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

  The Paranormal and the Sacred

  JEFFREY J. KRIPAL

  THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

  CHICAGO AND LONDON

  for David

  for taking many chances on an aspiring author of the impossible who has tried his best not to become an impossible author

  Read a book, or look at a picture. The composer has taken a wild talent that nobody else in the world believed in; a thing that came and went and flouted and deceived him; maybe starved him; almost ruined him—and has put that damn thing to work.

  —CHARLES FORT, Wild Talents

  DIMENSIONS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AN IMPOSSIBLE OPENING: The Magical Politics of Bobby Kennedy

  INTRODUCTION: Off the Page

  Definitions and Broken Lineages

  Restoring a Lineage

  Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal as Meaning

  The Fantastic Narrative of Western Occulture: The Paranormal as Story

  1. THE BOOK AS SÉANCE: Frederic Myers and the London Society for Psychical Research

  After Life

  Myers and the Founding of the S.P.R.

  The Subliminal Gothic: The Human as Two

  The Supernormal and Evolution: The World as Two

  Telepathy: The Communications Technology of the Spirit

  The Perfect Insect of the Imaginal

  The Telepathic and the Erotic: Myers’s Platonic Speech

  2. SCATTERING THE SEEDS OF A SUPER-STORY: Charles Fort and the Fantastic Narrative of Western Occulture

  The Parable of the Peaches: Fort’s Mischievous Monistic Life

  Collecting and Classifying the Data of the Damned: Fort’s Comparative Method

  The Three Eras or Dominants: Fort’s Philosophy of History

  The Philosophy of the Hyphen: Fort’s Dialectical Monism

  Galactic Colonialism: Fort’s Science Mysticism and Dark Mythology

  Evolution, Wild Talents, and the Poltergeist Girls: Fort’s Magical Anthropology

  3. THE FUTURE TECHNOLOGY OF FOLKLORE: Jacques Vallee and the UFO Phenomenon

  Forbidden Science (1957–69)

  Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers (1969)

  The Invisible College (1975)

  The Present Technology of Folklore: Computer Technology and Remote Viewing in the Psychic Underground

  The Alien Contact Trilogy and the Mature Multiverse Gnosis

  Sub Rosa: The Three Secrets

  The Hermeneutics of Light: The Cave Become Window

  4. RETURNING THE HUMAN SCIENCES TO CONSCIOUSNESS: Bertrand Méheust and the Sociology of the Impossible

  A Double Premise

  Méheust and the Master

  Science Fiction and Flying Saucers

  The Challenge of the Magnetic and the Shock of the Psychical

  “If Only One of These Facts . . . ”: The Impossible Case of Alexis Didier

  The Collective Mind: Bateson, De Martino, Vallee, and Jung

  Agent X: Projection Theory Turned Back on Itself

  CONCLUSION: Back on the Page

  The Eclipse of the Sacred and the Psyche in Modern Oblivion

  Consciousness, Culture, and Cognition: The Fantastic Structure of the Mind-Brain

  From Realization to Authorization: Toward a Hermeneutics of the Impossible

  IMPOSSIBLE (DIS)CLOSINGS: Two Youthful Encounters

  REQUIRED READING (THAT IS NEVER READ): A Select Annotated Bibliography

  SOME MORE DAMNED ANECNOTES

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  All things cut an umbilical cord only to clutch a breast.

  —CHARLES FORT, The Book of the Damned

  Professionally speaking, one’s intellectual and personal debts are inscribed in one’s footnotes, but such secreted allusions seldom carry the full force of all those connections of person, place, and project that make a work of scholarship finally “pop” into view. Nor, alas, do long lists of names on an acknowledgments page. So I will try to write sentences here, and keep things short and to the point, which is to say, to the person.

  The book is dedicated to T. David Brent, the editor of all six of my Chicago monographs (the sixth still coming to be). I do not underestimate, and I cannot overestimate, what David and the press’s support have meant to me over the years, both those of the past and those spread out into the future (for publishing books is very much about the future). I mean every word of the dedication, and then some.

  Michael Murphy and the Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research have generously supported an annual symposia series that I conceived and subsequently direct on the paranormal and popular culture in Big Sur each May. The latter is part of Esalen’s Sursem research group on postmortem survival, of which I am deeply honored to be a part. Much of the talent of these two symposia series, and particularly Sursem, is represented in the pages that follow. Of special note are Stephen Braude, Adam Crabtree, Edward Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Dean Radin, Russell Targ, and Charles Tart.

  Two of my four authors of the impossible, Jacques Vallee and Bertrand Méheust, also deserve special mention. Jacques went out of his way to welcome me into the inner sanctum of his home and library, shared with me many unpublished materials and secret stories, and responded to my thoughts about his work with helpful criticism and further insight. Bertrand was gracious and patient with an American English speaker struggling through thousands of pages of his erudite French. He even went so far as to declare what were clear translation errors on my part philosophical insights. This was very flattering. And very funny. I’ve fixed those errors. The reader can draw his or her own conclusion about what that means. I have also laughed a great deal with Bertrand, mostly in Big Sur, where he was once attacked by the dreaded black Spider-Man. That was very funny too. I deny everything.

  I must also mention Victoria Nelson, whose work in The Secret Life of Puppets (Harvard, 2001) played a special role in the inspiration—it is really more of an uncanny haunting—for this book. Vicki has been a constant source of suppo
rt, advice, and mind-bogglingly detailed editorial help. She also helped introduce me to other academics and professional writers more or less secretly working on such matters. One of the main goals of the present work is to help create a safe, or at least a safer, intellectual space within the humanities and the arts so that such writers working “off the page” can come back “on the page” and enlighten us about the deeper dialectics of consciousness and culture.

  In terms of the Fort materials, I must thank Jim Steinmeyer, Fort’s recent talented biographer. Fort is a veritable ocean in which one can easily get lost and drown. Jim’s biography came at a crucial time for me and showed me my own way through the waves and fishes. The following individuals have also played key roles in one way or another: Kelly Bulkeley, who generously described (or compassionately lied about) my treatment of the neuroscientific materials as “just right”; Brenda Denzler, who taught me about the history of ufology and the professional costs involved in such anomalous interests; David Hufford, who taught me that materialism and rationalism are not the same thing, at all; Chad Pevateaux, my graduate student who has accomplished innumerable source-checking, editing, and indexing tasks for me with his usual Derridean verve and Blakean grace; and Jody Radzik, whose nondual experiences have long functioned for me as a kind of living mirror in which I can catch a fleeting glimpse of my own X. Thank you all.

  Finally, I must thank Scott Jones of XL Films. XL Films has optioned this book for a feature documentary now in process. Scott showed great enthusiasm for the cinematic potentials of my thought and is presently teaching me that the paranormal mysteries of reading and writing extend into the acts of viewing and seeing as well. We are back to Plato’s Cave and those shadows of social, historical, and religious truth projected on the cave wall now called a theater screen. Happily, there is also a way out of the cavelike theatre, always, of course, through that back door and sticky floor behind the projector.

  Only spilled soda pop and bad carpet block our way out now . . .

  An Impossible Opening

  THE MAGICAL POLITICS OF BOBBY KENNEDY

  A dear friend, a great scientist, now dead, used to tease me by saying that because politics is the art of the possible, it appeals only to second-rate minds. The first-raters, he claimed, were only interested in the impossible.

  —ARTHUR C. CLARKE, The Fountain of Paradise

  An opening is a beginning, but it is also a hole.

  I want to open with a story that could not have possibly happened, which happened. I have chosen this story carefully. It is neither abstract nor distant to me. I know the central visionary well and can vouch for his complete integrity and honesty. I have absolutely no doubt that this event happened to this individual as described below. What it, and countless other stories like it, mean is quite another matter. Which is why I wrote this book.

  I will suggest no adequate explanation for this impossible possibility. The simple truth is that I do not have one. Nor, I suspect, do you, or anyone else for that matter, other than, of course, the professional debunker, whose ideological denials boil down to the claim that such things never happened or, if they did, that they are just “anecdotes” unworthy of our serious attention and careful thought. Such mock rationalisms, such defense mechanisms, such cowardly refusals to think before the abyss will win nothing here but my own mocking laughter. Each of us, after all, is just such an irreducible, unrepeatable, unquantifiable Anecdote.

  Adam is a friend, a colleague, a former Benedictine monk, an accomplished academic author, and a practicing psychotherapist. In 1968, he was living in Toronto, Canada. A little after 3:00 a.m. on June 5th, he suddenly awoke—instantly and completely. Here is what he wrote when I asked him for a full and precise account of what happened next:

  I couldn’t figure out what was happening. As far as I knew there had been no noise, I felt no pain or discomfort. I turned on the light and, not knowing what else to do, reached for the transistor radio beside my bed. I flicked the “on” switch. I did not know what local station I had tuned to during the day, but, being the middle of the night and the AM band subject to those strange late-night bounces, now a distant station had supplanted the local one. It was a California station. The radio voice, a newsman of some sort, was asking Robert Kennedy a question [he was fresh off a victory in the California presidential primary election and was passing through a hotel kitchen on his way to a press conference]. The newscaster was walking with Kennedy and his entourage. As I listened, I heard sounds of mayhem. When the newsman was able to get his wits together, he said, with uncontrollable emotion, that Kennedy had just been shot. I was stunned. I could hardly believe what I was hearing. For the next hour or so I remained glued to this distant station, listening as the bits and pieces of news were put together to construct a picture of what had happened, and finally hearing the sad word of Kennedy’s death, some time later.1

  The emotional effect of all of this on Adam was as immediate and as dramatic as his sudden awakening in the middle of the night: “I was devastated. I was an admirer of Kennedy and impressed by his campaign. I had seen him the previous fall at the Exhibition Grounds in Toronto where he had attended a football game and had even shaken his hand as he left the area.” The experience would not leave him, would not let him go:

  Later, when I reflected on what happened to me in those few minutes that night, I began to realize that something truly extraordinary had occurred—for several reasons: (1) I had never before (and have never since) gone instantaneously from a sound sleep to total wakefulness; (2) the fact that when I reached for the radio it was tuned to a position on the dial that would give me that particular California station; and (3) the fact that the events of the assassination occurred within five minutes of my sudden awakening. Was this coincidence? I simply could not bring myself to accept that explanation. Could it have been some kind of ESP, some kind of telepathic communication from Kennedy picked up perhaps at random? At first sight that may seem possible. But a little thought showed me that this explanation was not adequate. Events had to happen in my room in precisely the right way for this to occur, and there is no way that telepathy could have arranged them. Even if, as some might believe, a telepathic communication could have awakened me in that strange way, the telepathic explanation could not account for the physical state of things that was needed for the event to occur as it did, nor could it account for the crucial timing of my movements over those first few minutes after awakening. By that, I mean that it could not account for my radio being set at the very frequency at which the broadcast would occur, and it could not account for the fact that I turned on the radio at precisely the moment when the event was being broadcast. Besides, there are many other things I could have done instead when suddenly awakened, such as getting up to see that everything was all right in the house or getting a drink, but in fact I immediately reached over and turned on that fatefully tuned radio.

  And there was more:

  For years I could not understand why, even given the paranormal dimensions of this experience, it was me to whom it happened. Then in the early 1980s I had occasion to study the traditional magico-spiritual system of the Hawaiian Islands, called “Huna.” In his exposition of this fascinating doctrine, Max Freedom Long described the Huna belief that when people have some kind of meaningful contact with each other, a “sticky thread” comes into existence that connects the two and continues to connect them wherever they go for the whole of their lives. Without going into the implications of this belief, I would just like to say that when I read this I suddenly remembered that night in 1968, but also, and especially, my handshake with Robert Kennedy. I recalled that handshake very vividly. That day I was, of course, very moved to be shaking the hand of a man who so greatly impressed me. But something else, something very odd also affected me. It was how his hand felt. It was a strange impression that I could not get out of my mind at the time. Without realizing it, when I reached out toward Kennedy, I had expected to feel a warm moist hand, a
nd what I felt instead really puzzled me. He hand was very dry, almost like leather. I was taken aback by the feeling, because it was so different from what I was expecting. Now, as I read Long’s words about those “sticky threads,” that contact with Kennedy’s hand came back vividly to me. Viewing the experience in terms of the Huna view of the world, for the first time some bit of light seemed to be cast on the “Why me?” question. A vibrant thread of connection was there, and it was along that thread that the events of June 5, 1968, were strung. Even though questions remained, and even though this new insight did not remove the mystery of the event, I seemed to feel a little more understanding of one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.

  For what it is worth, Adam was not alone in his nightly vision. Alan Vaughan, the writer who would coauthor Dream Telepathy (1973) with Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner, identified sixty-one precognitive dreams in his own journals (the researcher as researched), including two he wrote down on May 25, 1968, that he felt indicated Robert Kennedy’s life was at risk. Vaughan wrote Krippner a detailed letter about them.2 Kennedy was shot a week later.

  Still, it is also true that Adam’s story remains a tricky one. It can, after all, be read in two very different ways. Inside the box, that is, from within Adam’s own experience, there was something clearly and unmistakably uncanny about it. Outside the box of those personal experiences, however, an observer could just as easily read the story as a series of striking coincidences, and nothing more. One is left, then, with a profound hesitation—a fundamental uncertainty or question mark.

  But what if this sense of coincidence is precisely what is inside the box, and it is Adam’s uncanny sense of things that is operating “outside the box,” as we say? What if there are patterns and plots in our lives that simply cannot be read and understood from a normal sense-based perspective? And what if paranormal experiences like Adam’s are a kind of signal from or refraction of this other dimension of time and space into the brain and its box?