How to Think Impossibly

This is the brilliant and penetrating sequel to The Superhumanities and The Flip. Any reader seriously engaging with Jeff's thinking cannot help undergoing a mind-expanding and reality-altering experience. Jeff runs the Archives of the Impossible at Rice University, where he holds a chair in philosophy and religious thought. As he has previously argued, experiences are only defined as impossible by virtue of the presuppositions of the materialistic paradigm. Precognitive dreams and telepathic visions are not supposed to happen, but they do happen all the time – indeed, this is the core research domain of the Galileo Commission. The fundamental point is that if such experiences were taken seriously by the Academy, 'they would transform the entire order of knowledge upon which our present culture depends, the sciences included.' (p. ix) Beliefs limit what is possible. (p. 156)

To think impossibly is to think with individuals and their experiences according to what William James called radical empiricism. Nothing is taken off the table as invalid, and our models have to be adequate to the phenomena described. Moreover, many experiences described here are inherently elusive and trickster-like, therefore relegated to the fringes. Jeff's central proposition is that there is no final distinction between subjective and objective states due to a fundamental unity of space, time, and mind. Instances of synchronicity are one example, and can only be understood within such a framework. We should also note that secularism and science are socially constructed, and therefore open to cultural modification – deconstructionism must be deconstructed. Jeff notes that our current order of knowledge is useful as far as it goes, but 'essentially incorrect in its exclusions.' He states that 'Reality only appears to be divided into mind and matter, into consciousness and cosmos, or into a past, present, and future because you experience it as such. You are the splitter of the real and the creator of linear time.' (p. 9) This is quite something to take on board, and only such a view based on idealism or dual aspect monism can make sense of the phenomena discussed here.

The book is divided into two parts: when the impossible happens, and making the impossible possible, all of which leads to a new theory of the imagination and opens up a new order of knowledge. Jeff reminds us that words are experiences, and that we need to incorporate the imaginal in our scheme of reality with a deeper understanding of role of myth and symbolism. It is interesting to read that Myers coined the word supernormal around 1885, relating it to a more advanced stage of evolution. The second chapter discusses the status of the UFO/UAP phenomenon, now coming culturally into focus and which demands taking into account both objective material and subjective mental or spiritual dimensions. Then we come to an extraordinary account of the experiences of Kevin on the autistic spectrum (pp. 97 ff.). He sees the human as three – consciousness, Awareness and metaphysical Mind, which exteriorises itself in and as physical reality. The right hemisphere mediates Mind, and is literally paranormal to the left hemisphere. Awareness is 'entirely independent of any individual biological organism, representing an Awareness of the whole by the whole as a field – it allows for consciousness, but it is not consciousness, which springs from Awareness through the interface of the body-based ego – this is neutral monism. In this view, we don't have souls distinct from Mind – reality is in fact imaginal by nature and intent, as illustrated in the incident where Kevin summons a UFO. He summarises his view by saying that 'We simply Are, and always will be, as a song, a movie, within the Cosmic Imaginal.' (p. 120)

The second part has chapters on the block universe, the world as one and the human as two, and the notion that we are both God and the devil, as Jung pointed out. We have to start from consciousness itself as the source of all knowledge and truth in the transcendental phenomenological tradition, incorporating both the vertical and the horizontal. Jeff discusses the work of Elliot Wolfson based on his major works, noting that the ontological is at the very heart of experience unfolding as one immense Now. Crucially, the kind of experiences described are reflexive - the appearances are us on a deeper level. Jeff explains that reality is ontologically One, but epistemologically Two – Jung and Pauli's Unus Mundus – a world organised by meaning.

Moreover, mystical and synchronistic experience represents the dissolution of the subject-object structure. The key point relating to the present orders of knowledge embraced by traditional religion and conventional science is that they will never achieve a resolution of impossible phenomena, 'not because we do not have enough data but because these two knowledge systems are inadequate in principle.' Absolutely, which is why we need a new world view that will also redefine the pecking order of knowledge. In this new understanding, reality will not be seen as binary – cosmos and consciousness cannot be separated, as also argued by Rick Tarnas. (p. 172)

It is the imagination that is the medium, translator or interface, 'the privileged organ of contact, communication, and communion.' We can only connect the dots 'when we have moved outside our presentism, materialism, reductionism, and scientism.' (p. 177) The chapter on humans as God and the devil is both robust and challenging, another aspect of the human as two. This means that God contains these two polarities, reflecting the fundamental divergence between the church and the Gnostics, and between Victor White and CG Jung on the status of evil. Sharon Hewitt Rawlette notes that we are swimming in a sea of consciousness where our mental life is neither separable from the physical world nor from the mental lives of others – the self is permeable and porous. The conclusion is about how to think impossibly and move beyond any initial ontological shock, including acknowledging the advanced nature of nonhuman intelligence. It is not essentially about belief, but experience as the starting point. In answer to the question why people believe impossible things, this is because impossible things happen to people, and the phenomena under consideration have profound implications for the transformation of our present order of knowledge, especially for conventionally trained academics and scientists, for whom this book is even more essential reading.