How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else
Source entries are currently shown in Spanish; English-first entries arrive with the next cataloguing pass.
Se presenta como un libro sobre lo que la cultura declara imposible y sobre lo que cambiaría si no lo fuera. La apuesta la abre la precognición: «If taken as real (by which I simply mean, “they happen”), such experiences and events (and they are both) would transform the» «Kripal — How to Think Impossibly (2024) · p. 7» —la frase cierra en la página siguiente— «entire order of knowledge upon which our present culture depends, the sciences included» «Kripal — How to Think Impossibly (2024) · p. 8».
Su consigna gremial es explícita: «This is a book about why the humanities must stop ceding reality to the sciences.» «Kripal — How to Think Impossibly (2024) · p. 30». Y su ontología viene con nombre, autor y fecha de caducidad declarada: el monismo de doble aspecto de Harald Atmanspacher, adoptado como armazón de trabajo «Kripal — How to Think Impossibly (2024) · p. 25» y declarado dispuesto a ser abolido «Kripal — How to Think Impossibly (2024) · p. 261».
Cierra en dos axiomas: «The Human may be Two, but the World is One. That is the final gnosis of impossible thinking.» «Kripal — How to Think Impossibly (2024) · p. 260».
885 claims · 1 source · 1 attribution
Attribution
recorded, never asserted«Kripal — How to Think Impossibly (2024) · p. 4»
The chain of the work
the processed witness, in emeraldClaims
885 entries — the work's own voice, with its passage«If taken as real (by which I simply mean, “they happen”), such experiences and events (and they are both) would transform the» — la frase cruza el corte y termina en la p. 8; es la apuesta del prólogo sobre la precognición.
«entire order of knowledge upon which our present culture depends, the sciences included» — cierre de esa misma frase, ya en la página siguiente.
«time goes both ways» — primera de las cuatro consecuencias que enumera, esta para la práctica de la historia.
«because it is based on an actual, if unreliable, human ability» — con eso explica que la adivinación esté distribuida por todo el globo.
«agency can act from the future» — cuarta consecuencia, sobre la causalidad misma.
«Secrecy here is no social stratagem or political gambit. It is a necessary function of the nature of the impossible itself.» — su lectura del secreto en el caso de Hurston.
«if we are going to think impossibly, we should not assume that this thought will be widely accepted. In fact, it will not be. It cannot be.» — la consecuencia social que saca de ahí.
«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.» — el secreto del libro, enunciado en segunda persona.
«the impossible is a function not of reality but of our own present social constructions and subsequent perceptions and cognitions» — traslada lo imposible del mundo a la construcción social.
«the deconstruction of deconstruction. That is the snake biting its own tail.» — así nombra esa maniobra.
«there is a kind of global renaissance going on around the impossible» — su diagnóstico de época; adjudica a Hussein Ali Agrama la «anthropology of the impossible».
«mystical experiences of cosmic unity, clairvoyant visions, near-death experiences, and UFO encounters that are not supposed to happen but do all the time» — así enumera el objeto del libro, tras los sueños precognitivos.
«not because I understand them, nor because I believe them in the terms in which they appear, but because they show every sign of issuing from another order of knowledge and reality outside what we currently think of as “the human.”» — por qué le importan, con la creencia expresamente descartada.
«the adjective mystical works especially well here, as it literally translates from the Greek as secret» — Sigue: indecible, indescriptible, incognoscible.
«if quantum physics and comparative mystical literature are really pointing to or emerging from the same deeper reality, they must correspond. And that is why they do.» — su tesis de correspondencia.
«all turned to comparative mystical literature to make human sense of what the quantum mechanics implied» — lo adjudica a Heisenberg, Bohr, Schrödinger y Pauli.
«the Swiss-German quantum theorist Harald Atmanspacher, whose dual-aspect monism I adopted some time ago as my own working ontology» — declara de quién toma su ontología y que es de trabajo.
«I am not doing quantum physics here. I am thinking-with quantum physicists» — el límite que se pone a sí mismo.
«we have evolved to win the game of life not to perceive reality as it really is» — adjudica el argumento a Donald Hoffman («fitness beats truth»).
«In some sense, we “caused” the big bang.» — así resume la retrocausalidad cosmológica de John Wheeler.
«Wheeler himself would have adamantly opposed much that follows.» — consigna que su fuente se habría opuesto a lo que construye sobre ella.
«at least since Authors of the Impossible (2010), I have insisted that myth or story sometimes results in very real and otherwise completely anomalous physical effects» — reclama continuidad con su obra de 2010, no giro.
«and insist that these models are relative to a particular form of consciousness» — así sostiene a la vez las lecturas reductivas del mito y los efectos físicos del mito: aquellas valen para «the atomized rational academic ego».
«This is a book about why the humanities must stop ceding reality to the sciences.» — la consigna del libro.
«I am long experienced in intellectuals confidently expressing utter certainties concerning matters they know nothing about.» — su queja gremial, en primera persona.
«Anything to not think impossibly» — cierra ahí su objeción a los humanistas que vuelven a los tropos posmoderno, poscolonial, feminista y sociohistórico; en la misma página aclara «it is not that I disagree, at all, with these models».
«Suddenly, I feel like a ghost, a spectral presence haunting the academic certainties» — la escena con que describe su posición en la academia.
«prophetic social spirit and a heavy accent on the altered states of consciousness and knowledge that produced so many of the central ideas of the humanities» — así define las superhumanidades; la frase arranca al pie de la p. 31 y cierra aquí.
«the modern abduction visions replicate, in precise detail, the imaginal of Myers» — enlaza el imaginal victoriano con la morfología insectoide actual.
«The paranormal is insectoid.» — la formulación breve de esa tesis.
«it is well known among seasoned researchers that the UFO is very much connected to the near-death experience (NDE)—the heavenly saucer and the transcendent soul» — adjudica a Joshua Cutchin (*Ecology of Souls*) el estudio más completo del vínculo.
«now sit in our Archives of the Impossible at Rice University» — sobre las «Communion Letters» reunidas por Anne Strieber; en la p. 93 consigna que fueron cerca de 250 000 cartas y que ella depuró una cuarta parte.
«only one of the 144 events» — del informe del ODNI del 25 de junio de 2021, nueve páginas, 144 eventos entre 2004 y 2021, de los que solo uno pudo explicarse.
«Politicians and military officials (and the media) continued to focus almost exclusively on the physical aspects of the phenomenon and continued to ignore their paranormal or impossible effects.» — su objeción a las audiencias del Congreso de mayo de 2022.
«there is definitely something being covered up or lied about» — Sigue: «no one knows what that something is or what it means».
«our culture has grown incredibly stupid around the nature of the soul, or what we would today call “consciousness”» — su diagnóstico cultural, junto al multinaturalismo.
«my own position is very close to that of the astronomer, computer scientist, and medical research investor Jacques Vallee and his “forbidden science,”» — declara alineación, con la mezcla de astronomía, informática, teoría de la información, práctica esotérica y escepticismo ante todo sistema de creencia ovni.
«I am extremely dubious of any and all talk of the “extraterrestrial.” I don’t believe in gods, deities, demons, or aliens. It’s my job.» — su negativa doctrinal más nítida.
«we need to flip from a spatial register (it is not where they are from) to a temporal register (it is when they are from)» — el giro de espacio a tiempo.
«I would say that the UFO often appears to be a time machine and that the so-called aliens look more than a little like human beings from the future» — Añade: o una forma sofisticada de inteligencia artificial futura.
«If I were from the future studying the violent hairless monkeys of the past, I certainly would not go into their troop either. I would send a very smart but very expendable machine.» — su ilustración del argumento anterior.
«we should be approaching the total UFO phenomenon much more like Arrival and much less like The War of the Worlds» — la analogía cinematográfica con que orienta el marco.
«what we finally have in the UFO phenomenon is a physical-spiritual phenomenon that is being grossly misinterpreted as a conventional military threat or potential corporate technology» — su tesis sobre el malentendido de fondo.
«we are trying to shoot down souls. Good luck with that.» — la frase-emblema, que él mismo presenta como paradójica y deliberadamente chocante.
«I am who I am, I think how I think, because of that Night.» — sobre su propia experiencia de Calcuta, noviembre de 1989; y consigna la reserva de que no vio entidad insectoide ni contenido visual alguno.
«that physiological condition is what “let it in,” but it says little, or nothing at all, about what came in» — sobre la parálisis del sueño: acepta el mecanismo y niega que agote el contenido.
«we speak and imagine the aliens into existence. We let them in» — lo adjudica a Jeremy Vaeni, «originally inspired by Whitley Strieber, who has argued much the same».
«whatever produced the astonishing and multiple Sanskrit and vernacular literatures of the medieval and early modern South Asian Tantric traditions are now producing the equally astonishing and multiplex global literatures of the modern UFO encounter and abduction experience» — su gran comparación tántrica.
«I also wish to exempt Michael Rabe and David Gordon White of my sins.» — exime a los dos indólogos de cuyos trabajos toma el *vimana* y los templos circulares de yoginis.
«not because people make up the same stories everywhere, or because of any material transmission» — así descarta difusión e invención, para dejar la fuente experiencial.
«extraterrestrial mythemes are ancient and stable patterns, not modern, much less American, inventions» — la tesis que saca de ahí, con el *Motif-Index of Folk-Literature* de Stith Thompson como sistematización académica.
«the present intellectual focus on “difference” is productive of a particular kind of scholarship and moral concern but is finally not adequate to our actual histories and shared human nature» — su objeción al paradigma de la diferencia.
«probably the best-known and certainly the best-written abduction case of the twentieth century» — así califica *Communion*, de Whitley Strieber.
«I never made such an observation, much less such a diagnosis, until he offered it to me.» — cautela metodológica sobre el diagnóstico de Asperger de «Kevin», hecho en 2001 por «a gentle Quaker psychiatrist».
«By the phrase “Platonic surrealism,” Kevin means to theorize what I would call a fantastic idealism» — su glosa de la fórmula de Kevin, traducida a su propio vocabulario.
«The right side mediates Mind. It is literally “para-normal,” to the left hemisphere» — su neuroanatomía del pensamiento imposible: los hemisferios están «al lado» (*para-*) uno del otro.
«It has to do with what the kabbalistic tradition calls Ein Sof, or the Infinite» — así conecta su cosmos autopoiético con el vocabulario cabalístico, vía Wolfson.
«If I were Jewish, Elliot Wolfson would be my rebbe, my rabbi, my teacher.» — Añade que Wolfson lo negaría, «and that is how he teaches».
«I have been struck over the years how Elliot Wolfson’s corpus reflects, in an almost occult manner, my own thought and writing» — lo dice del espejo especular que recorre esa obra.
«It continuously bends back on itself, very much like the ancient ouroboros biting its own tail.» — describe así la gnosis dialéctica que le atribuye a Wolfson.
«There is something uncanny about this man’s words, something that finally escapes and overflows reason, something that makes me believe in a kabbalah» — Precisa: no una sabiduría puramente judía, sino una gnosis comparativa moderna incrustada en el estudio de las religiones.
«It is thus very important to Corbin, and Wolfson after him, that this place of the Imagination is the same place in Islamic Sufism, Jewish kabbalah, and Christian esotericism» — el imaginal como lugar común de las tres, más las asiáticas que añade Wolfson.
«for an embodied human being, it is the imagination that mediates between the two dimensions of the real» — su simplificación declarada de la paradoja de la imagen en Wolfson.
«a direct state of knowledge that enacts a reversal of orthodoxy» — así define lo gnóstico, siguiendo a Henry Corbin.
«it is perfectly possible to be a gnostic intellectual (by which I mean someone whose thought emerges from extraordinary experience or direct gnosis) and to care deeply about politics, ethics, and this world» — contra el reproche político habitual al gnosticismo.
«From four decades now of studying gnostic, esoteric, mystical, and psychedelic literatures, which are some of the most sophisticated religious materials on the planet» — su balance de cuatro décadas de lectura.
«The supernatural was fashioned to determine traditionally acceptable sanctity» — lee lo sobrenatural como categoría histórica de control doctrinal, no como descripción del mundo.
«Thinking impossibly is not possible for everyone—and not for superficial or accidental reasons but for neurodiverse or spiritual reasons» — la reserva declaradamente no igualitaria de la conclusión.
«Impossible thought is a rather obvious form of intellectual esotericism or academic Gnosticism.» — nombra así su propio programa.
«the humanities themselves are defined by textual deposits that are riven with esoteric traces of the gnostic experiences and subsequent mystical thoughts of their authors» — la tesis que sostiene esa lectura esotérica de las humanidades.
«Further back still, the humanities can be esoterically traced to the still astonishing Friedrich Nietzsche, a godless mystic» — la genealogía de las superhumanidades, tras el humanismo renacentista, el romanticismo, el idealismo alemán, el psicoanálisis y la teoría crítica.
«esoteric trace of German idealism and, behind that, German mystical thought going back to figures like Jakob Böhme and Meister Eckhart» — lo que lee en *geistig*, *Geist* y *Geisteswissenschaften*.
«The Human may be Two, but the World is One. That is the final gnosis of impossible thinking.» — el cierre en dos axiomas.
«any sustainable future ontology will need to be a monistic one» — desarrollo del primer principio, «The World Is One».
«it is the human being that “splits” reality in Two and makes it appear as such. It is not so before or beyond the human knower.» — desarrollo del segundo, «The Human Is Two».
«It is ultimately unspeakable, indescribable, and unnameable» — sobre el Fondo; añade que la matemática solo puede señalarlo, de un modo distante e indirecto.
«As a committed comparativist who takes ontological diversity seriously, I hardly have a final answer, nor would I want one.» — su abstención declarada.
«I bet Grusch had read John Mack. It sure sounds like it.» — apostilla con que cierra la genealogía del «choque ontológico»: Paul Tillich (*Systematic Theology*, 1951), luego John E. Mack para la abducción, luego Don Davis como título de pista de *The Matrix* (1999), y en 2023 David Grusch.
«the history of esoteric spiritual currents in the California counterculture and, more specifically, the history of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur» — de dónde le viene el tema: estaba ya en sus fuentes esotéricas, no lo buscó.
«this uncanny science ends up secreted in intelligence, corporate, and military technologies, thus creating a separate esoteric world, a set of hidden truths or rejected forms of knowledge that are sharply distinct from those presumed in the public sphere» — un esoterismo de Estado: saber rechazado y guardado en tecnología militar y corporativa. La «secularity of science» y la «uncanny science» son términos de Hussein Ali Agrama.
«If I may speak for a moment in the language of some of my own intellectual ancestors, particularly the quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the depth psychologist C. G. Jung, the UFO, or flying saucer, is the ultimate modern “symbol” that participates in both the mental or social world of the subjects who encounter it and in the material world of their own epistemic or sensory experience. Ezekiel’s wheel or disk is the Romantic symbol that participates in what it communicates for a reason. The UFO phenomenon appears to have emerged from a third realm and so manifests obvious mental, social, and historical elements and physical, material, or sense-based features. In Jung’s mature terms, the UFO is psychoid, at once psychic and physical» — declara su linaje —Pauli y Jung— y mete la rueda de Ezequiel en la serie del ovni como símbolo.
«what DeConick might call a “gnostic spirituality.” The different sets of cultural materials resonate so strongly because they are all based on the same kinds of human experiences, which themselves correlate very strongly with a shared neurobiology or human mind, which I understand in transmissive or filter terms, not in productive or epiphenomenal ones. In short, what we have here is a type of alien gnosis» — su hipótesis de fondo experiencial compartido, nombrada con vocabulario gnóstico; «gnostic spirituality» es de April DeConick.
«my early writings on mystical forms of eroticism and the sexualities of Jesus in texts like “The Apocryphon of the Beloved” in my book» — la continuidad que declara entre su erotología mística y su interés por lo paranormal.
«The word tulpa is a rough approximation of the Tibetan sprul pa, or “magical emanation” (that is, the third body of the Buddha» — la etimología del tulpa.
«especially indebted to the “thought forms” of later Theosophical writers like Annie Besant, Bertram Keightley, and Dion Fortune» — y a quién adjudica su formulación moderna: tres autores teosóficos.
«Jason Josephson Storm has argued that, in effect, such thinkers were not left to the side at all—that it was precisely these kinds of anomalous interests that lay at the very origins of the modern human sciences» — la tesis de Josephson Storm sobre el lugar de lo anómalo en el origen de las ciencias humanas.
«Modernity is occult to the core. I can only agree. Indeed, I have spent the last quarter of a century reading and writing about these endless esoteric currents, none more so than a mystically inflected psychoanalysis» — y su adhesión, que es la más explícita del libro.
«The early work of Elliot Wolfson on the theophanic envisioning of the body of God in medieval kabbalah, the identity of mystical experience and scriptural interpretation of the kabbalists, and the homoerotic structures of their ecstatic visions constituted my fifth case study» — de qué obra de Wolfson viene su quinto caso de estudio.
«but also recognized the potential gnostic or esoteric effects such a study could have on the scholars themselves and their careful readers» — y el efecto que le adjudica al estudio esotérico sobre quien lo hace.
«Wolfson enacts this realist impulse quite explicitly in A Dream Interpreted within a Dream, where he puts kabbalistic dream interpretation into conversation with the speculative reaches of quantum mechanics in order to demonstrate how the construal of meaning in the dream is brought into being or actualized through attention, intention, consciousness, and the act of dream interpretation itself» — la interpretación cabalística del sueño puesta a conversar con la mecánica cuántica.
«In this presentist myth, there are no invisible nonhuman agents, no God, no magic, no miracle, no world of the dead, no two worlds of experience, nothing genuinely paranormal or supernatural. There is only misperceived technology» — lo que objeta al reduccionismo tecnológico: el inventario de todo lo que ese mito borra.
«The comparison that links these experiences and events is quite literally magical thinking, but in a most positive and preternatural sense now. Comparison is magic» — la comparación misma como operación mágica.
«Science is basically an occultism, a way of positing a hidden order of things that is invisible to almost everyone, except, of course, to the scientists. And this occultism works» — y la ciencia leída como ocultismo: un orden oculto visible solo para los suyos.
«Little wonder that so many elite mathematicians are Platonists— that they are convinced that numbers and equations are discovered not constructed by the human mind, that mathematics exists in its own right in some esoteric space. There is the occultism again» — el platonismo matemático leído por la misma vara.
«Jung, well read in medieval alchemical texts, called the psychophysically neutral ground the Unus Mundus, or One World, after the Latin expression of a sixteenth-century alchemist named Gerhard Dorn» — el Unus Mundus jungiano adjudicado a un alquimista del XVI, Gerhard Dorn — pasaje de CUERPO que la nota de carga anterior daba por inexistente.
«Jung appears to have changed his mind, however, particularly late in life in his last big work, Mysterium Coniunctionis» — y el cambio de posición que le adjudica a Jung en su última obra mayor.
«why do we so often call magical practice that we do not like or that does harm to others “black magic”? Is not that inherently racist, a conflation of» — su objeción a la nomenclatura del propio dominio.
«the modern American paranormal may well have its deepest historical roots in Africa» — y la genealogía que propone para lo paranormal americano.
«Magical spiritualities tend to place supernormal agency in the human being. They also tend to be private. The religions tend strongly to place supernormal agency outside the human being, even outside the natural order—for example, in “God”—and build up their institutions, scriptures, and rituals as a kind of privileged mediation or medium. They also tend to be public. This, of course, is why public religion has seldom got along with private magic: they fundamentally disagree about where to place the supernormal» — su criterio de deslinde entre magia y religión, que es de dónde sitúan la agencia.
«During these same three centuries, between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand individuals were prosecuted, by Catholics and Protestants alike, for malevolent magic (maleficium) or “witchcraft» — la cifra de procesados por maleficium, con las dos confesiones nombradas.
«There is a kind of hermeneutical loopiness here, a trickster-like twisting and turning that shows numerous signs of being related to the ancient Anglo Saxon “wyrd,” whose connotations of twisting, becoming, and shaping one’s own fate or future are all esoterically traced—but also largely forgotten—in our modern concept of the» — la etimología esotérica de «weird», declarada como tal.
«The religions are fictions, projections, or imaginary constructions that nevertheless share an esoteric ground, which is most clearly realized in the Asian religions or in a philosopher like Plato» — la posición nietzscheana del fondo esotérico común, que declara muy cercana a la suya.
«it goes back to the Romanian historian of religions Ioan Couliano. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Couliano was teaching and writing about the history of mystical literature and paranormal experience and their likely relationships to quantum physics, hyperdimensional geometry, and modern cosmology» — Ioan Couliano como precursor de su propio programa.
«Maxwell concluded that the anthropology of magic, divination, and witchcraft needed to be rethought, since all these demeaned and dismissed phenomena actually happen» — lo que Joseph Maxwell, que acuñó «paranormal» en francés, concluyó sobre la antropología de la magia y la adivinación.
«engaged American and African shamanism as a likely record of otherworldly contact, personally researched the Zimbabwe event, and whose abduction papers are now deposited in our own Archives of the Impossible» — el chamanismo americano y africano en la obra de John E. Mack, cuyos papeles de abducción dice custodiar su propio archivo.
«the flight of witches, demonic levitations, and bilocation» — los fenómenos que enumera del ciclo de la brujería.
«the modern process of disenchantment, or “de-sorcering of the world” (Entzauberung der Welt), as famously observed and named by the German sociologist Max Weber in 1904» — y el desencantamiento, con su nombre alemán y su fecha.
«What do we do with the empirical or physical implications of impossible phenomena? And how do these same physical-mental phenomena challenge and change our conceptions of the human, of consciousness, of embodiment, and, perhaps most of all, of the relationship of the human being to space-time and the physical cosmos itself? Actually, how do they change everything?» — Kripal abre el prólogo con la batería de preguntas que dice que el caso de Zora Neale Hurston fuerza: no si el fenómeno ocurrió, sino qué le hace a la idea de humano, de cuerpo y de cosmos.
«I have long thought of these as the most well-documented and philosophically important of all impossible events.» — Kripal sitúa los fenómenos precognitivos en la cima de lo imposible, por documentación y por consecuencia filosófica.
«If we want to begin to learn how to think impossibly, precognitive phenomena are going to be a key to any such new order of knowledge.» — Kripal hace de la precognición la puerta de entrada al orden de conocimiento nuevo que propone.
«“with whom,” as Maya Angelou diplomatically puts it, Zora Neale Hurston “rarely shared a peaceful hour.”» — Kripal describe al padre de Hurston citando de paso a Maya Angelou; la frase entrecomillada dentro de la suya es de Angelou.
«She kept quiet about them, but she knew perfectly well that she was not like everyone else—actually, she was like no one else. Secrecy was a kind of social protection.» — Kripal lee el silencio de Hurston sobre sus visiones como defensa social, no como recato: es su primera formulación de por qué lo imposible se guarda.
«Hurston does not let her readers escape into easy explanations about this difference. She is clear that she was not sleeping when the visions began» — Kripal cierra la salida onírica: la propia Hurston especifica que estaba despierta, y él lo subraya para bloquear la explicación fácil.
«Precognition and literary creativity, it turns out, are often deeply intertwined. Indeed, a professional writer like Twain openly and confessedly connected them.» — Kripal enlaza precognición y oficio literario, y nombra a Mark Twain como el caso en que la conexión es declarada por el propio escritor.
«Zora Neale Hurston was being led through a life that had already been lived in a future that already existed. This was her “fate.”» — Kripal describe la vida de Hurston como recorrida por un futuro ya existente, y ahí ancla su tesis de que el tiempo va en los dos sentidos.
«Hurston, it turns out, could read Mrs. R. Osgood Mason’s thoughts, and Mason could in turn read Hurston’s mind, despite whatever spatial distance there was between them—for example, while Hurston was “in Alabama, or Florida, or in the Bahama Islands.» — Kripal consigna la telepatía recíproca a distancia entre Hurston y su mecenas, con los lugares que la propia Hurston enumera.
«She has a theory about impossibility, which is also my own. It goes like this. There are certain human capacities, like precognition, that most people will never know—can never know—not because this is a piece of data that they haven’t been told but because they would not believe such a thing even if they were told. Why? Because they do not have this ability. Accordingly, they cannot know this truth.» — Kripal declara suya la teoría de Hurston: lo imposible no se ignora por falta de información sino por falta de la capacidad que lo haría creíble, de modo que el dato no basta.
«This is Storm of the X-Men. I mean, really, Hurston had a lightning bolt painted on her back, and she gets guiding wisdom and her power from, well, storms.» — Kripal lee a Hurston por la vía del cómic: la iniciación de hoodoo con el rayo pintado en la espalda la vuelve, dice, la figura de Storm de los X-Men.
«I think Zora Neale Hurston was telling us the truth of her actual life experience, and I think that we need to change our conceptions of the human and the nature of nature, accordingly.» — Kripal toma el relato de Hurston por verdad de experiencia y saca la consecuencia: lo que hay que cambiar es la idea de lo humano y la de la naturaleza, no el relato.
«If we are going to think-with Hurston, I see few, if any, conventional interpretive options of the visions on the porch, of her perfectly empirical knowledge before its time.» — Kripal declara agotadas las opciones interpretativas convencionales ante las doce escenas del porche, que califica de conocimiento empírico anticipado.
«They cannot be adequately treated as literary metaphors, psychological hallucinations, misremembered exaggerations, cultural representations, discursive strategies» — Kripal enumera y rechaza una a una las lecturas disponibles en las humanidades; la enumeración sigue con la categoría de brazo tendido que, dice, se invoca para salvar el propio sentido de realidad.
«to salvage our own sense of reality. They simply happened.» — remate de esa enumeración: para Kripal las visiones sencillamente ocurrieron, y las categorías que las neutralizan sirven a quien las invoca.
«It was obvious: these things happen to us, as they have always happened to others around the world and throughout human history. They obviously have everything to do with “religion,” and yet we mostly dismiss these events, ignore them, do not speak about them, as if we somehow cannot. We certainly do not integrate them into our thinking and public culture. Basically, we keep them secret because they violate pretty much everything that we are supposed to think about ourselves and the physical world. They are not supposed to happen.» — Kripal sostiene que lo extraordinario le ocurre también a los académicos y que el silencio gremial no viene de que falten casos sino de que los casos contradicen lo que se supone que hay que pensar; dos renglones después añade que sin embargo ocurren.
«To think impossibly is, first and foremost, to think-with individuals and their experiences, however fantastic these experiences become or, better, precisely because they become so fantastic.» — Kripal define pensar imposiblemente como pensar-con la experiencia ajena, y hace del carácter fantástico del relato la razón para tomarlo en serio, no el motivo para descartarlo.
«I needed a neologism to signal something much more than the ordinary sense of thinking with another person. This book explores what is at stake in a kind of thinking-with that takes absolutely seriously the altered state of consciousness and embodiment of the other as a potential form of real knowledge about one’s own self and the material world.» — Kripal declara que el guion de *think-with* es suyo y define el neologismo: tomar el estado alterado del otro como conocimiento posible sobre el mundo material, no solo sobre él.
«My focus is not on Eliade, however, but on those living human beings he might have well called mutants.» — Kripal desplaza el foco del historiador de las religiones a los vivos que encajarían en su categoría de mutante.
«I am perfectly serious, but I am also playful, reflexive, and self-critical. I do not mean the description in any final or perfect sense (I am not even convinced that all altered states are expressions of evolution, or time).» — Kripal acota su propio uso de *mutante* en la misma página en que lo adopta: ni definitivo ni perfecto, y ni siquiera está convencido de que todo estado alterado sea evolución o tiempo.
«The science-fiction language, after all, encodes a particular (Nietzschean) evolutionary esotericism that is still working its way out, still being explored, in that sci-fi genre, for sure, but also in so many modern spiritual-intellectual lives—the human is becoming the superhuman.» — Kripal lee la ciencia ficción como vehículo de un esoterismo evolutivo de raíz nietzscheana que sigue operando fuera del género.
«The fantastic so conceived is the beginning of impossible thinking. It, too, is a kind of mutation.» — Kripal pone lo fantástico como punto de partida del pensamiento imposible y como mutación en sí.
«By the fantastic, I do not mean an exaggerated event in a dream or fantasy that is functioning as a wish-fulfillment or symptomatic expression, as we have the term in psychoanalysis.» — primera de las tres acepciones que Kripal descarta: la psicoanalítica, donde lo fantástico es realización de deseo o síntoma.
«No. The fantastic in these pages is shockingly much more than these standard psychoanalytic, Marxist, and literary categories.» — Kripal cierra el descarte de las tres acepciones corrientes —psicoanalítica, marxista y literaria— antes de dar la suya.
«By the fantastic, I mean something that is exotic, outlandish, or shocking (apparently, it is trying to get our attention), something that actually happened in both the material and mental domains» — la definición propia de Kripal: lo fantástico es algo que efectivamente ocurrió en lo material y en lo mental a la vez, y la frase continúa diciendo que esos dos dominios los media la imaginación.
«By the fantastic, I mean something that is often very physical, empirical, and sometimes even witnessed by many people. I mean something that possesses its own agency and purpose and often changes history, be it of a single person or an entire civilization. I do not mean something that is “good,” neat, and clear. I mean something, or someone, that is known as inherently elusive, apparently by nature and intent, trickster-like.» — Kripal caracteriza lo fantástico como físico, colectivo, dotado de agencia propia y de intención, y expresamente no benévolo ni claro: elusivo por naturaleza, a la manera del *trickster*.
«I mean something is imagined, yes, but something imagined that is mediating, translating, and expressing something superreal, which is what our modern surreal originally meant.» — Kripal admite que el fenómeno es imaginado y a la vez sostiene que lo imaginado media algo superreal, recuperando el sentido original de *surreal*.
«In this understanding of the fantastic, human beings (saints, witches, mediums, and the possessed) literally float off the ground in ecstatic rapture or terrifying possession, and other people watch them, witness this in amazement and fear—which is to say, they find them as impossible as we do.» — Kripal enumera a santos, brujas, médiums y poseídos que levitan ante testigos, y subraya que a esos testigos el hecho les resultaba tan imposible como a nosotros.
«But they are nevertheless reported to happen as historical facts. There are literally thousands of testimonies, as numerous and as reliable as any other historical event that no one ever questions.» — Kripal apoya el caso en el volumen y la fiabilidad del testimonio, comparables, dice, a los de cualquier hecho histórico que nadie discute.
«Eire is adamant. What he calls “freakish folk” are not tangential to the history of religions. They are the “main event.” That is why fringe phenomena are so very important today. They are only fringe because we have made them so.» — Kripal recoge de Carlos Eire que los raros son el acontecimiento central de la historia de las religiones, y añade que su carácter marginal es fabricado por la disciplina.
«I call them superhumans, because that is what they are, which is not at all to say that they are not also humans.» — Kripal fija el término con que nombrará a sus interlocutores dotados, y lo acota en la misma frase: superhumano no cancela humano.
«Except that these people are not just cocreators of knowledge. More like destroyers of knowledge. They abolish me. They annihilate my assumptions.» — Kripal corrige la fórmula académica de la cocreación: sus interlocutores no producen conocimiento con él, le destruyen los supuestos.
«I strongly suspect that what they see and know is shown to them by some other form of mind or intelligence that is also them in some paradoxical sense.» — Kripal formula, como sospecha y no como tesis firme, que lo que el experienciante ve se lo muestra otra mente que a la vez es él.
«one of my deepest intuitions that I will play out in these pages is that the paranormal is culture working in heretofore unimagined ways— expressing itself, yes, but also overcoming, surpassing itself, pointing in new directions and to new futures.» — Kripal define lo paranormal como cultura operando de un modo que se sobrepasa a sí misma, y lo presenta como intuición a desarrollar, no como resultado.
«It is all one sea. There is no final hierarchy or difference.» — Kripal se niega a jerarquizar entre el fondo que se muestra y la superficie cultural que lo expresa: el experienciante y el historiador tienen razón los dos.
«recognizing the passive, given, or shown nature of revelation and also acknowledging and pursuing its culturally or historically constructed expression or appearance.» — Kripal define pensar imposiblemente como sostener a la vez el carácter dado de la revelación y su construcción histórica, sin escoger.
«Let me lay my cards on the table. I personally think that this is all so because there is no final distinction between subjective and objective states, between consciousness and cosmos. Moreover, and this sounds even more outrageous, the past, present, and future are all one “thing,” and they are constantly interacting outside or to the side of us. These impossible things happen precisely because of this fundamental unity of space, time, and mind.» — Kripal declara su posición de fondo: no hay distinción última entre sujeto y objeto ni entre los tres tiempos, y de esa unidad de espacio, tiempo y mente deriva que lo imposible ocurra.
«Alas, it is always inadequate. It is never enough. It cannot be enough, but for reasons that I think we can come to understand. If we cannot think impossibly in any full sense, at least we can come to understand why.» — Kripal acota su propio programa: toda formulación de esa unidad será insuficiente, y lo alcanzable es entender por qué lo es.
«What we have come to realize in the humanities is that our assumed sensibilities around the nature of mind, self and society, and secularism and science are all socially constructed. They are not innocent, natural, or» — el secreto del humanista según Kripal: mente, sociedad, secularismo y ciencia son construcciones sociales; la frase termina en la plana siguiente negando además que sean universales.
«And yet there is a bright flipside to this genetically informed humanist vision of global history: none of these constructions of who we are—these religious, political, ethnic, and racial identities —are permanent, natural, or necessary.» — Kripal saca el reverso favorable del construccionismo: si las identidades religiosas, políticas y raciales son construidas, ninguna es necesaria.
«Accordingly, one begins to suspect—I do, anyway—that the quick and common divisions between the inside and the outside, between the subject and the object, and everything that this split produces in human minds (which includes the entire present order of knowledge of the modern university), may not finally be adequate to our actual cosmic condition.» — Kripal presenta como sospecha propia, no como demostración, que la división sujeto-objeto —y con ella el orden entero del saber universitario— no baste para la condición cósmica real.
«We think these events are “impossible.” But they are only impossible within our historically constructed frameworks, which means that they are not impossible at all.» — Kripal relativiza la imposibilidad: es propiedad del marco histórico que juzga, no del suceso juzgado.
«Impossible things certainly happen in numerous cultural zones and through specific ritual practices on a fairly routine basis. This is why a comparative practice is so necessary, so liberating and healing, but also so devastating to our local assumptions.» — Kripal justifica el comparatismo por la distribución ritual y cultural del fenómeno, y advierte que el mismo movimiento arrasa los supuestos locales de quien compara.
«That is the very first lesson of thinking impossibly: recognizing that the impossible is a function not of reality but of our own present social constructions and subsequent perceptions and cognitions.» — Kripal enuncia la primera lección de su método: lo imposible es función de la construcción social y de la percepción que ella modela.
«That is also the humanist’s secret taken to its furthest point until it bends back on itself and consumes its own historical perspective. That is the deconstruction of deconstruction. That is the snake biting its own tail.» — Kripal lleva el construccionismo hasta volverlo contra sí mismo y llama a eso la deconstrucción de la deconstrucción.
«Contemporary secular thought is based largely on an unconscious way of understanding reality that is very useful for particular projects but essentially incorrect in its exclusions.» — Kripal no acusa al pensamiento secular de inútil sino de inconsciente: sirve para lo suyo y yerra en lo que deja fuera.
«I am most interested in these events and experiences not because I understand them, nor because I believe them in the terms in which they appear, but because they show every sign of issuing from another order of knowledge and reality outside what we currently think of as “the human.”» — Kripal separa su interés de la comprensión y de la creencia: le importan los sucesos porque apuntan a un orden de conocimiento exterior a la idea vigente de lo humano.
«Impossible phenomena are urgings, nudges, inspirations, premonitions, and pointers, not the full deal.» — Kripal rebaja lo que el fenómeno puede entregar por sí solo: es indicio y empujón, y el trabajo de convertirlo en pensamiento queda del lado humano.
«Regardless of such offense, the adjective mystical works especially well here, as it literally translates from the Greek as secret—unspeakable, indescribable, unknowable in any historical, cognitive, rational, or scientific sense.» — Kripal defiende el adjetivo *mystical* por su etimología griega de secreto, es decir, por nombrar lo que no se puede decir ni medir.
«And this is the ultimate reason that quantum mechanics and mystical literature correspond so powerfully: because they are finally speaking of different aspects or expressions of the same deeper reality, one “from the outside” (the physics), the other “from the inside” (mystical experience).» — Kripal explica la correspondencia entre física cuántica y literatura mística como dos vistas, exterior e interior, de una misma realidad.
«Physicists like Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, and Wolfgang Pauli all turned to comparative mystical literature to make human sense of what the quantum mechanics implied.» — Kripal apoya el paralelo en los propios fundadores de la mecánica cuántica, que según él acudieron a la literatura mística comparada.
«“Shut up and calculate” was the norm of physics for much of the twentieth century.» — Kripal nombra así la consigna que, dice, dio tecnología y empleos pero impidió integrar culturalmente lo aprendido sobre el mundo físico.
«In Hoffman’s view, physical objects are not objectively “out there.” They are icons on the screen of our virtual reality game of perception that allow us to maneuver through the world, survive, reproduce, and so “win” the game. They are practical, not actual.» — Kripal resume la posición del neurocientífico de la percepción Donald Hoffman, con la que dice coincidir: los objetos físicos son iconos útiles, no cosas objetivas.
«In short, we have evolved to win the game of life not to perceive reality as it really is.» — la consecuencia darwiniana que Kripal saca de Hoffman, cuya fórmula cita como que la aptitud le gana a la verdad.
«Ball has written that if we are serious about the cultural project that follows such discoveries and confirmations, “we’re going to need some philosophy.» — Kripal recoge la petición del divulgador Philip Ball y la traduce a su propio gremio: hará falta filosofía, es decir, humanidades.
«The historian of science David Kaiser points out that the “hippie physicists” of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s kept the quantum theory of entanglement alive until it could be experimentally established, even as they also linked quantum physics to things like comparative mystical literature and parapsychology.» — Kripal recoge de David Kaiser que fueron los físicos contraculturales quienes mantuvieron viva la teoría del entrelazamiento, y que los mismos ligaban la cuántica a la mística comparada y a la parapsicología.
«In historical fact, the physics of the nineteenth century, especially in England, was deeply implicated in the Spiritualism of the public and the psychical research tradition of the educated Victorian elites.» — Kripal data el enredo entre física e investigación psíquica en la Inglaterra del siglo XIX, con el espiritismo popular de un lado y las élites victorianas del otro.
«Physics and psychics, it turns out, have been reflecting one another in a double mirror for a long time, pretty much as long as we have had modern physics.» — Kripal describe la relación entre física y lo psíquico como un espejo doble tan antiguo como la física moderna misma.
«it very much looks like to be is to be perceived. Or, if you prefer, we live in a participatory universe, one that appears to rely on our forms of awareness and observation for its very existence or coming to be, even, if John Wheeler is right, on a cosmological scale that goes all the way back to the big bang.» — Kripal formula el universo participativo por la vía idealista del ser percibido, y lo extiende a escala cosmológica siguiendo a John Wheeler.
«Wheeler seriously suggested that the big bang was mathematically structured “just right” (like the temperature of Goldilocks’s third bowl of porridge), because we are here in the present and had a retrocausal influence on that initial explosion. In some sense, we “caused” the big bang.» — Kripal expone la retrocausalidad cosmológica de Wheeler: el ajuste fino del origen se explicaría por una influencia desde el presente.
«I probably will never quite accept such strange truths in what follows, since they are so counterintuitive (and Wheeler himself would have adamantly opposed much that follows).» — Kripal se abstiene de suscribir esas verdades que acaba de exponer y consigna además que Wheeler se habría opuesto con firmeza a buena parte de su libro.
«Clearly, sometimes impossible thinking is impossible for the impossible thinker too.» — Kripal aplica su categoría a sí mismo: el pensador de lo imposible también topa con lo que no puede pensar.
«I will struggle with the fundamental nature of myth because I both accept the truths of the reductive social scientific or historical readings of the term (myths are cultural representations, means by which human beings make sense of their lives, and political forms of camouflage and disciplinary power that privilege particular classes of people) and insist that these models are relative to a particular form of consciousness—in this case, the atomized rational academic ego.» — Kripal acepta la lectura reductiva del mito y a la vez la relativiza: esos modelos, dice, valen para una forma de conciencia determinada, la del ego académico atomizado.
«Basically, I have read myth in realist terms as the paranormal—that is, as the very dramatic and spontaneous experience in the physical historical world of us writing us, almost always, please note, in traumatic or marginalizing contexts that have everything to do with the social readings of myth and religion of my academic training.» — Kripal define su lectura realista del mito como lo paranormal, y subraya que ocurre casi siempre en contextos traumáticos o de marginación, justo los que estudia la lectura social.
«Can that double message be heard? Can the paranormal be heard as both a prophetic existentialist cry that involves class, gender, race, and physical death and the temporary transformation of matter and space-time around the gravity of these very sufferings?» — Kripal plantea como pregunta abierta si lo paranormal puede oírse a la vez como grito social y como transformación material del espacio-tiempo.
«If you are not convinced by the evidence, the chances are extremely high that you have not truly struggled with it.» — Kripal atribuye el escepticismo ante la precognición a no haber lidiado con la evidencia, no a haberla pesado.
«But how can such people cognize distant or even future physical immanent events if human consciousness and its relationship to space, time, and matter are what we generally imagine them to be —that is, stuck in the head and perceiving a strictly local physical environment through the senses? The answer is simple: they cannot.» — Kripal convierte el caso en argumento contra el modelo local de la conciencia: si estuviera encerrada en el cráneo, lo que se reporta no podría ocurrir.
«It bears repeating that it is not that I disagree, at all, with these» — Kripal insiste en que no discute los modelos posmodernos, poscoloniales, feministas y sociohistóricos de su formación; la frase termina en la plana siguiente.
«models. Such critical perspectives are perfectly true on their own levels and within their own frameworks.» — cierre de esa reserva: Kripal les concede verdad dentro de su propio nivel y marco, y solo les niega el monopolio.
«Most intellectuals certainly do not want to admit that any of these exceptionally common experiences of the impossible have something essential to do with the physical world of space, time, and matter—that such experiences and events belong in the natural sciences as much as they belong in the humanities, in the departments of physics, biology, and mathematics as much as the departments of history, religious studies, and English. That would mean changing what we do in the humanities and the sciences in institutional ways. That would mean restructuring the very order of knowledge and our universities with it.» — Kripal explica la resistencia gremial por su costo institucional: admitir el estatuto físico del fenómeno obligaría a rehacer el reparto entero de facultades.
«But I still become bored and impatient in such moments, and, I admit, a little disgusted. No wonder we are ignored by the public. I would ignore us too.» — Kripal declara su hartazgo con los tropos críticos de su gremio y le concede la razón al público que los ignora.
«The School of the Superhumanities that I am imagining in these pages will not divide the cosmic human into divisions and disciplines whose constructed boundaries do not in fact exist and whose denials of the impossible have never been convincing. It is more than time to think impossibly—even if this is an order of knowledge before its time.» — Kripal cierra la introducción proponiendo una Escuela de las superhumanidades sin las fronteras disciplinares que considera construidas, y admite que llega antes de tiempo.
«It is also to think-with impossible words—that is, linguistic signs that crystallize the most extraordinary forms of human experience in the codes of culture, otherwise known as language.» — Kripal extiende pensar-con a las palabras mismas: los signos que cristalizan la experiencia extraordinaria dentro del código cultural.
«To think impossibly is a kind of return to origins, then, but to return smarter now, perhaps a bit more jaded, certainly a good deal wiser. To think impossibly is to begin anew.» — Kripal describe su método como vuelta al origen histórico de los términos, no como restauración ingenua.
«Still on the surface, it traces a particular lineage of impossible thinking through Corbin back to the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung, to the Swiss professor of psychology Théodore Flournoy, and, ultimately, to the American psychologist and philosopher William James and his good friend, the British» — Kripal traza el linaje del capítulo de Henry Corbin hacia atrás por Jung y Flournoy hasta William James; la lista termina en la plana siguiente con el clasicista Frederic Myers.
«In the end, I wish to show that what we are ideally talking about when we use three historically and conceptually related coinages— supernormal, imaginal, paranormal—are some extensively theorized encounters with disembodied, intelligent, and mostly invisible presences who claim to be human, nonhuman, or superhuman. Maybe they are. Maybe they are not. But that is how these words came to be.» — Kripal sostiene que los tres neologismos nacieron de encuentros con presencias incorpóreas que se declaraban humanas, no humanas o superhumanas, y se abstiene expresamente de decidir si lo eran.
«What I most wish to show is that these three words have experiential origins. They are not empty or devoid of meaning, much less are they the careless creations of the tabloids, naive enthusiasts, or conspiracy mongers.» — Kripal reivindica el origen experiencial de los tres términos frente a la sospecha de que sean invención de la prensa sensacionalista.
«They encode the long work and careful thought of professional intellectuals, scientists, and independent researchers who had fantastically rich, if usually highly unorthodox, spiritual lives and were personally engaged with thousands of actual human experiences recorded and recovered from all walks of life and classes of European and American society.» — Kripal atribuye los términos a investigadores profesionales de vida espiritual heterodoxa que trabajaron sobre miles de testimonios recogidos en todas las clases sociales.
«Corbin displays at least one feature of such thought almost perfectly in his erudite conviction that the human being is a kind of “bi-unity” or “dualitude,” a paradoxical complex of the conscious person and the largely unconscious or superconscious angelic twin, of “consciousness and superconsciousness,” as he put it (the italics are» — Kripal toma de Corbin la idea del humano como bi-unidad: persona consciente más gemelo angélico superconsciente; la aclaración sobre las cursivas se cierra en la plana siguiente.
«Which is to say: I do not understand Henry Corbin to be writing only about Iranian patterns. I consider him to be writing about ontological truths that can only speak to us in image and narrative of the most astonishing sort and that are still very much with us today in other historical and contemporary experiential forms, including, the UFO phenomenon, to which we will turn soon enough.» — Kripal universaliza a Corbin más allá del material iraní y lo conecta con el fenómeno ovni, que anuncia para más adelante.
«Massignon, after all, was an ardent anticolonialist and a mystically inclined intellectual who openly used parapsychological categories to explain how he was converted by a long “dead” Islamic saint.» — Kripal presenta a Louis Massignon, maestro de Corbin, como el caso donde lo activista y lo místico coinciden, incluida la explicación parapsicológica de su propia conversión.
«Ideally, though, the superhumanities are the humanities as they are already known and practiced today in their full critical and historical scope, but they are the humanities that also fully acknowledge and robustly theorize a vertical or transcendent dimension of the human being.» — Kripal define las superhumanidades como suma, no como sustitución: la crítica vigente más la dimensión vertical del ser humano teorizada.
«This is all exceptionally important, of course (and this is where I would part with Corbin). But it is also half true.» — Kripal marca con nombre su desacuerdo: concede a la mirada horizontal, social y racial del gremio una importancia que Corbin no le daba, y a la vez la llama media verdad.
«my impossible hypothesis is not about returning to an exclusively vertical perspective. I have no wish to return to the religions.» — Kripal acota su propuesta contra la lectura restauradora: no propone volver a la religión.
«Rather, what I most desire to do is affirm both the horizontal and the vertical, the ethical and the mystical, and in countless formations or relationships, not just one.» — Kripal declara que quiere afirmar las dos dimensiones a la vez, y en muchas combinaciones, no en una sola.
«Life after Life was the book to bring the phrase “near-death experience” into American English and into the popular global religious imagination.» — Kripal fecha en el libro de Raymond Moody (1975) la entrada de la expresión *near-death experience* al inglés estadounidense y de ahí a la imaginación religiosa global.
«There were also a few ancient and medieval accounts, like the “myth of Er” (why is it a myth?) told by Plato in The Republic (10:614–21): a story about a soldier left for dead who awakens on the funeral pyre twelve days later to tell a fantastic tell of the afterlife, of reincarnation, and of the nature of the soul and its moral choices.» — Kripal retrotrae el género a Platón, y su paréntesis discute de paso que el relato se clasifique como mito; la fuente imprime *tell* donde se esperaría *tale*.
«was also, I should add, a comparative phrase through and through. It connected instead of disconnected. It sought patterns not identities, although it also suggested an underlying sameness or unity.» — Kripal lee la propia expresión *near-death experience* como comparativa: busca patrones, no identidades, aunque insinúe una unidad de fondo. La frase abre en la plana anterior.
«In 1988, Krohn was struck by lightning in the parking lot of her synagogue on the very day she was about to memorialize the first anniversary of the death of her beloved grandfather.» — Kripal fecha y sitúa la experiencia de Elizabeth Krohn, su amiga y coautora, en el estacionamiento de su sinagoga el día del primer aniversario de la muerte del abuelo.
«Krohn’s extensive experiences in the other world (which, in true imaginal fashion, she insists is both perfectly real and experienced according to the cultural and religious predilections of the seer)» — Kripal subraya que la propia Krohn sostiene las dos cosas a la vez, la realidad del otro mundo y su modelado cultural, que es lo que él llama imaginal.
«Significantly, Krohn’s near-death experience also resulted in numerous paranormal capacities, including seeing auras around people, precognizing death, experiencing various electromagnetic effects involving things like lightbulbs (they would blow out in her presence» — Kripal enumera las capacidades que Krohn adquirió tras el rayo; la lista sigue con la llamada telefónica del abuelo muerto y los sueños precognitivos de catástrofes.
«we can seriously entertain the experience-source hypothesis—that is, the hypothesis that basic religious convictions around the world are cultural reworkings of a recurring set of direct experiences and not (only) reworkings of indirect historical contexts or psychosocial constructions.» — Kripal formula la hipótesis de la fuente experiencial, con su acotación entre paréntesis: la reelaboración cultural no queda negada, solo deja de ser la única.
«In short, by adopting the experience-source hypothesis, we can move away from a strict social production thesis and toward a global phenomenology of religious experience. We can begin to notice both real differences and genuine similarities. We can begin to compare again.» — Kripal presenta la hipótesis como la salida de la tesis de la producción social y como la que devuelve legitimidad al comparatismo.
«Her culturally specific postmortem landscape thus encodes both the human and the superhuman aspects of the soul—the imaginally constructed and the apophatic or mystical Light.» — Kripal lee el paisaje de Krohn, el jardín y la Luz tras las montañas, como cifra de las dos caras del alma: la construida imaginalmente y la apofática.
«I should add that this is my own reading, but I think it is perfectly resonant with Krohn’s experiences and what they portend for us all» — Kripal marca esa lectura como propia y no como declaración de Krohn.
«This, in truth, is what I think many such experiencers should do with willing intellectuals, not so that the experiencers can be told the truth by the intellectuals (we don’t have it) but so that we can all come to a more adequate, more three-dimensional theory of religion together. This, again, is precisely what I mean by thinking-with.» — Kripal propone que experienciantes e intelectuales teoricen juntos, y niega expresamente que el intelectual tenga la verdad que corregiría al experienciante.
«Henry Corbin did not coin or invent the category of the imaginal. It had been in circulation in the study of unusual or extreme religious states for some eight decades before Corbin began to use the term in his own specific senses in the 1960s.» — Kripal corrige la atribución corriente: lo imaginal circulaba ocho décadas antes de que Corbin lo empleara en su sentido propio.
«Corbin himself explains that he derived the term from the French, as in his own neologistic expression le monde imaginal, or “the imaginal world,” a phrase that is not common in French and that Tom Cheetham dates from 1964 on.» — Kripal precisa, apoyándose en Tom Cheetham, de dónde y de cuándo sale el neologismo francés de Corbin.
«Corbin also tells us that he struggled with this word choice, as he did not want to signal the “imaginary,” as the French imaginaire certainly would.» — Kripal explica que la elección de Corbin era defensiva: quería nombrar un orden real y no lo imaginario del francés corriente.
«To speak in Corbin’s beloved Latin (he had been trained by the great medievalist Étienne Gilson), there was no longer any imaginatio vera, or “true imagination,” available.» — Kripal sitúa la pérdida moderna en la desaparición de la *imaginatio vera*, la facultad que conectaba el fundamento inteligible con el mundo sensible.
«It echoes particularly strongly with Arthur Schopenhauer’s German Wahrträumen, or “dreaming the truth” (he was writing of his own precognitive dreaming that contained perfectly precise and banal details about the next day’s events, much like the very specific flowers» — Kripal encuentra el mismo problema en el idealismo alemán y en el *Wahrträumen* de Schopenhauer, que escribía de su propia precognición onírica; el paréntesis continúa comparándolo con las visiones de Hurston.
«It also resonates with the more recent English expression “veridical hallucinations,” which was common in the Victorian psychical research of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (they were writing of apparitions of the dead, or the presumably disembodied, that carried accurate empirical information» — Kripal enlaza lo imaginal con las alucinaciones verídicas de la investigación psíquica victoriana, es decir, apariciones portadoras de información empírica exacta.
«Since there was no longer any way to connect the human to the larger metaphysical world, it was sincerely believed and vociferously declared that there is no metaphysical reality. The material world is all there is, and objectifying science is the only way of knowing what is real.» — Kripal explica el materialismo moderno como consecuencia de una pérdida de mediación, no como resultado de una demostración.
«Agnosticism and nihilism were the results. A particular reductive reading of Aristotle had, in effect, erased the spiritual reception of Plato.» — Kripal atribuye el desenlace agnóstico y nihilista a una lectura reductiva de Aristóteles que borró la recepción espiritual de Platón.
«spiritual capacity that was mediating an actual dimension of reality, whose appearances were nevertheless shaped by what he called the imagination créatrice, or “creative imagination,” an astonishing imaging or mythmaking dimension of consciousness that acts well outside any conscious control or apparent human agency—hence the phenomenology of revelation as something given or shown.» — Kripal define lo imaginal de Corbin como órgano noético que media una dimensión real cuyas apariciones modela la imaginación creadora, autónoma respecto de la voluntad; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«he was likely inspired and enthused by Carl Jung’s very similar idea of the “active imagination,” at least from 1949 on, which is when Corbin appears to have first used the expression in a lecture at Eranos.» — Kripal deriva lo imaginal de Corbin de la imaginación activa de Jung y lo fecha en una conferencia de Eranos de 1949.
«Eranos was a kind of intellectual retreat center at the villa of Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn in Ascona, Switzerland, that hosted a set of annual meetings and lectures from 1933 on, some of which were essentially seed essays for later projects and books that would come to define the comparative study of religion, and especially the comparative study of mystical literature, in the twentieth century. Luminaries included Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, Gershom Scholem, Henry Corbin, and Joseph Campbell.» — Kripal describe Eranos y su nómina como el vivero donde se formó el estudio comparado de la literatura mística en el siglo XX.
«Here was the intermediate world of the mundus imaginalis, the “imaginal world,” which for Corbin is the “place” where myth and symbol happen, where they are true (but not to be taken literally or exclusively), where visions occur and the spiritual body is resurrected.» — Kripal define el *mundus imaginalis* como mundo intermedio donde mito y símbolo son verdaderos sin ser literales, y donde resucita el cuerpo espiritual.
«which is known, or unknown, as a kind of brilliant darkness or black light—“black” because it can never become an object of perception.» — Kripal expone la teología apofática de Corbin: la profundidad divina es luz negra porque nunca puede volverse objeto de percepción, y de ahí concluye que la negrura es ontológica.
«paradoxical “dualitude” or “bi-unity,” with the human person accompanied by an angelic twin or companion who can mediate between this Human as Two.» — Kripal recoge la estructura corbiniana del humano doble con su gemelo angélico mediador; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«In truth, this doubleness can be seen almost anywhere, probably because it is true anywhere.» — Kripal universaliza el doble a partir de los paralelos que trae —Krohn, el doble divino mediterráneo estudiado por Charles Stang— y declara la razón que le atribuye.
«Hence Abrams drew on earlier scholarship to provide a two-word definition of Romanticism: “spilt religion.» — Kripal recoge de M. H. Abrams la definición del romanticismo como religión derramada, es decir, como lo religioso vertido en clave secular.
«Romantic movement defined the “symbol” as much more than an arbitrary linguistic sign or artificial metaphor. The symbol participates in that which it expresses. Words are experiences.» — Kripal opone el símbolo romántico al signo arbitrario: participa de aquello que expresa, y de ahí saca el lema de su capítulo. La frase abre en la plana anterior.
«The Romantic writers also fully recognized that symbols grow cold and stale and must be replaced by other newer symbolic real experiences, which is what they themselves were all about. Hence their poetic, visual, and musical arts.» — Kripal añade la cláusula de caducidad: el símbolo se enfría y hay que reemplazarlo por experiencia simbólica nueva, tarea que atribuye al arte romántico.
«The “High Romantic Argument” is at once a scientific, a spiritual, an artistic, a philosophical, and a political argument. I mean them all when I insist that “words are experiences.» — Kripal reclama las cinco dimensiones a la vez para su propia consigna de que las palabras son experiencias.
«It is no accident, at all, that Coleridge turned to religion to find the ultimate examples of what a symbol is and, more specifically, to Ezekiel’s scriptural vision of the wheels or disks in the sky.» — Kripal subraya que el ejemplo mayor de símbolo en Coleridge es la visión de Ezequiel, con ruedas o discos en el cielo.
«Symbols are not God, who cannot be imagined, but neither are they constructed products of reason. They are forms of real energy that transmit what they themselves are pointing us toward.» — Kripal define el símbolo romántico por doble negación —ni la divinidad ni producto de la razón— y en positivo como energía que transmite aquello a lo que apunta.
«Note that wheels, disks, and a living creature are the Romantic symbols par excellence in this passage. These will all return in our second and third chapters.» — Kripal deja anotado que ruedas, discos y criatura viviente reaparecerán en sus capítulos sobre el fenómeno ovni.
«William Blake saw the creative imagination in the grandest of terms—that is, as the “Divine-Humanity,” as the “Eternal Body of Man.” And he meant all of it. For “All things Exist in the Human Imagination,” and “Mental Things are alone Real.» — Kripal presenta a Blake como el caso más radical: la imaginación creadora es el Cuerpo Eterno del Hombre, y solo lo mental es real.
«In short, there is a vast prehistory of the imaginal in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it lies squarely in English Romanticism and, though I have not treated it here, German idealism.» — Kripal fija la prehistoria de lo imaginal en el romanticismo inglés y declara que deja fuera el idealismo alemán.
«Indeed, as Engell has argued extensively, it is the creative imagination that is the “hinge” between the two great eras of European thought that initiate and announce modernity: the Enlightenment and the Romantic movements.» — Kripal recoge de Engell que la imaginación creadora es la bisagra entre Ilustración y romanticismo, no la ruptura entre las dos.
«For Blake, the imagination is, in truth, the Imagination, as he had it in Milton. It is not a psychological function or tangential byproduct of neural firings. It is “Human Existence itself.” It is what we might now call “consciousness.» — Kripal traduce la Imaginación de Blake al vocabulario actual: no es función psicológica ni subproducto neuronal, es lo que hoy llamaríamos conciencia.
«This same creative imagination, or Imagination, was a most effective means to overcome the dualisms of Cartesian doubt and Newtonian mechanism, in the profound sense that its endless historical formations relied on a linking or relating of the subjective and the objective, time and eternity, matter and spirit, the natural and the supernatural.» — Kripal presenta la imaginación romántica como el recurso con que se salvaron los dualismos cartesiano y newtoniano, ligando sujeto y objeto, materia y espíritu.
«the religions were so different and yet so very similar: they were all expressions of the same creative imagination working its wonders in different contexts and cultures.» — Kripal atribuye a ese modelo la respuesta más audaz al problema de la diversidad religiosa: una misma imaginación creadora obrando en contextos distintos.
«Little wonder that Blake would pen an early little book called All Religions Are One (1788).» — Kripal lee el opúsculo de Blake como consecuencia de ese modelo, y sostiene que las religiones siguen siendo una por su naturaleza poética y simbólica.
«Second, Corbin’s imaginal was deeply informed by his own docetic Christology—that is, his convictions that the doctrine of the Incarnation should be interpreted symbolically but not literally: divinity cannot become literal flesh for Corbin, ever. It only “appears” to have done so.» — Kripal identifica el docetismo de Corbin como el supuesto teológico que sostiene su categoría de lo imaginal.
«Here he is following Islam and an important Koranic passage about how they did not really kill or crucify Jesus but another person or an appearance (4.157). In most forms of Islam, the doctrine of Incarnation is a classical heresy, association (shirk), or untruth.» — Kripal remite el docetismo de Corbin a la azora coránica sobre la crucifixión y al estatuto herético que la encarnación tiene en el islam.
«I confess some discomfort or uncertainty here, since my own theorization of the fantastic insists on both the mental and material dimensions of that which appears in particularly extreme moments of materialization or physical expression: the poltergeist presence literally throws pots and pans around the kitchen to communicate or signal its emotional distress.» — Kripal declara su incomodidad ante el docetismo porque su propia teoría exige lo material: el poltergeist tira ollas de verdad.
«But is the icon of the ghost real? Well, yes. And no. It’s fuzzy. Something is indeed expressing itself, but in terms that cannot, or should not, be taken literally. Here is where I probably agree with Corbin.» — Kripal deja la pregunta sin resolver a propósito y consigna en qué punto sí coincide con Corbin: en que el ícono no debe leerse literalmente.
«I also have no doubt that some people in fact experience divinity or “God” as utterly transcendent to the physical world, but I personally hesitate to sign my name to such a conviction, as I consider these phenomenological reports to be partial or culturally determined ones, not universal truths.» — Kripal concede el dato fenomenológico de la trascendencia absoluta y se abstiene de suscribirlo, por tenerlo por parcial y culturalmente determinado.
«unapologetically affirms the ultimate unity of the two natures of everyone and everything. No exceptions.» — Kripal se declara pensador herético en términos cristológicos y afirma la unidad última de las dos naturalezas en todo y en todos; la frase abre en la plana anterior y sigue diciendo que, en términos musulmanes, el Dios único es todos y todo.
«Because of these transtraditional monistic convictions, I see no reason why we need to follow Corbin’s Docetism in order to employ the imaginal for our own purposes toward our own ends.» — Kripal separa la herramienta del supuesto: usa lo imaginal sin el docetismo que lo acompañaba en Corbin.
«In the end, such an incarnational theology is simply one of countless systems in the history of religions to express and delimit our superhumanity. It is relative and temporary, not absolute and permanent. That is my concern or hesitation.» — Kripal relativiza la teología encarnacional a un sistema entre muchos y presenta su objeción como reserva, no como refutación.
«Third, it is very much worth underlining that Corbin’s understanding of the imaginal assumed the presence of parapsychological phenomena. This is evident in his repeated and rather matter-of-fact treatment of clairvoyance, mind reading, telepathy, synchronicity, photisms, and even materialization and a kind of apport or manifested object in the life and teachings of the great Islamic mystical philosopher Ibn ‘Arabī.» — Kripal subraya que lo imaginal de Corbin daba por sentado lo parapsicológico, incluidos apporte y materialización en Ibn ʿArabī.
«This, of course, is not exactly a criticism of Corbin. I think he was moving in the right direction with his embrace of the parapsychological within the imaginal and the mystical. I suppose I just wish he had moved further and said more.» — Kripal aclara que su reparo a Corbin no es reproche sino insuficiencia: le concede el rumbo y le pide más.
«Fourth, I have a problem with the ways that Corbin seems to imply—by the very content of the books he published—that the imaginal is somehow reserved for traditional symbols and historical mystics, that the imaginal cannot appear, as it were, in popular or nontraditional sources and “ordinary” people. I think this preference for the historical and the established is simply mistaken, both historically and morally.» — Kripal objeta a Corbin haber reservado lo imaginal a los místicos históricos y a los símbolos tradicionales; la frase siguiente reivindica el colapso entre lo culto y lo popular, con un compuesto que la extracción por programa une mal.
«I would insist that the very same imaginal or unconscious processes that Corbin treated in his Shi‘i, Ismaili, and Zoroastrian sources also appear in contemporary science-fiction writers or comic-book artists.» — Kripal extiende lo imaginal de las fuentes chiíes, ismaelíes y zoroástricas a la ciencia ficción y al cómic contemporáneos.
«Harold Bloom, the late Yale literary critic, makes a related case in his admiring preface to an edition of Corbin’s Creative Imagination, pointing out that both the Iranian Sufis and Corbin himself were much more eclectic than Corbin wants to admit.» — Kripal se apoya en el prefacio de Harold Bloom, que atribuye a los sufíes iraníes y al propio Corbin más eclecticismo del que Corbin reconocía.
«For Bloom, then, and certainly for me, Corbin underestimates the eclectic habits of his Iranian sources. The creative imagination is, by nature, wildly appropriating. It does not care a whit for the orthodoxies of the religions, the languages of cultures, the borders of nation-states, or, frankly, the moral concerns of the academy. It endlessly and effortlessly combines anything and everything to express itself.» — Kripal caracteriza la imaginación creadora como apropiadora por naturaleza, indiferente a ortodoxias, lenguas, fronteras y escrúpulos académicos.
«First, it is perfectly possible to be a gnostic intellectual (by which I mean someone whose thought emerges from extraordinary experience or direct gnosis) and to care deeply about politics, ethics, and this world. Scholarship on ancient, medieval, early modern, and contemporary gnostic forms of spirituality has advanced significantly since the 1970s, and we now know that not every form of Gnosticism is world-denying or anti-body.» — Kripal define al intelectual gnóstico por el origen experiencial de su pensamiento y niega, apoyado en la investigación posterior a los años setenta, que todo gnosticismo desprecie el mundo y el cuerpo.
«We also know that there is no single political or ethical expression of the gnostic orientation: such expressions can range from radical politics, social justice activism, and ethical humanism on the progressive left to dangerous conspiracy-thinking, antimodernism, and authoritarianism on the far right.» — Kripal advierte que la orientación gnóstica no tiene signo político único y llega hasta el conspiracionismo y el autoritarismo de extrema derecha.
«I made the argument almost two decades ago that the ancient Gnostics were some of our first and still some of our most radical theorists of religion, particularly in their rejection of the moral monstrosities of the biblical God and their dramatic reversal of key religious assumptions: God did not make us—we made God, the serpent was a figure of gnosis not of temptation, and so on.» — Kripal reitera su tesis de que los gnósticos antiguos fueron los primeros teóricos radicales de la religión, con la inversión del Dios bíblico y de la serpiente como ejemplos.
«If you want to take religion critically but seriously, to take it apart (and have something deeply meaningful left over), there is no better place to begin than with the gnostic writers, be they ancient, medieval, or modern.» — Kripal propone a los escritores gnósticos como punto de partida para desmontar la religión sin quedarse sin nada.
«If, after all, one does not see and say that religious traditions, and especially gnostic traditions, are appropriative and eclectic all the way down (and then some), then fundamentalist or right-wing reception histories of one’s work on the same are always a possibility.» — Kripal presenta el reconocimiento del eclecticismo como defensa contra las recepciones fundamentalistas, que necesitan esencias e identidades.
«Such thought, precisely in its emphasis on the theoretical importance of cross-culturally available anomalous experiences, does not and cannot confirm the exclusivity of any religious tradition (including Islam, Hinduism, or Christianity).» — Kripal sostiene que su método, por transcultural, no puede servir de aval a ninguna exclusividad religiosa.
«I cannot repeat this enough: impossible thinking is an expression of a deep and most profound humanism, a paradoxical superhumanism that recognizes that what we think of today as the “human” cannot be identified with any culture, religion, or society and that understands the further reaches of this human have indeed been most fully imagined and practiced—if, yes, usually in unconsciously projected and specifically culturally refracted ways—in the symbols, rituals, and myths of the history of religions.» — Kripal define su programa como humanismo, con la reserva incluida: lo más lejos que llegó lo humano se imaginó en las religiones, aunque de forma proyectada y refractada.
«I have stated in print that the category of the imaginal was used earlier by Carl Jung’s mentor, the Swiss professor of psychology and» — Kripal introduce una corrección de algo que él mismo publicó; la atribución termina en la plana siguiente con el nombre de Théodore Flournoy.
«This is wrong. Flournoy never used the term to my present knowledge. However, the three related authors (Corbin knew Jung well, who knew Flournoy well) all meant something very similar by the active or creative imagination, even if they interpreted its products in different ways.» — Kripal se desdice por escrito: Flournoy no usó *imaginal*, y lo que sostiene en cambio es la cercanía de los tres autores encadenados por trato personal.
«Indeed, he himself called it the imagination créatrice, or “creative imagination,” more or less exactly like Corbin and Jung.» — Kripal señala que Flournoy usaba ya la misma expresión francesa que después usarían Jung y Corbin.
«From India to the Planet Mars is Flournoy’s study of a Swiss medium named Élise Müller (called Mlle Hélène Smith in the book), who claimed to be both the reincarnation of an Indian Hindu princess and a regular visitor to Mars (hence Flournoy’s telling title, moving a kind of orientalism into outer space).» — Kripal presenta el caso de Élise Müller y lee el título de Flournoy como un orientalismo trasladado al espacio exterior.
«In the process, Flournoy also helped to revolutionize the study of mediumship and trance formations through a relatively new tool: hypnosis. This is quite significant for the history of extraterrestrial esotericisms (the subject of our next chapter), since the same technique, hypnosis, would later play a major role in the production of the alien abduction literature in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.» — Kripal traza la continuidad técnica entre el estudio hipnótico de la mediumnidad y la producción posterior de la literatura de abducción.
«Significantly, Myers’s original English expressions supernormal and imaginal collapsed any final distinction between the mental and the material dimensions of reality and carried strong evolutionary impulses, as we shall soon see.» — Kripal atribuye a Frederic Myers los dos términos y su rasgo común: borran la frontera entre lo mental y lo material, y traen carga evolucionista.
«both devastatingly skeptical and deeply sympathetic when it came to the contents of Müller’s visions and channelings. Hence, he could demonstrate how Müller’s claims to speak a Martian language, to remember a past life in India, and to communicate with dead spirits were no such things. They were creative imaginative products of the medium’s present-life memories that she had forgotten and unconsciously wove back together in her various sittings with the hypnotist.» — Kripal describe la doble postura de Flournoy ante Müller: desmonta el contenido —marciano, vida india, espíritus— como reelaboración inconsciente de recuerdos olvidados. La frase abre en la plana anterior.
«Or rather, the creative imagination did this through her. She herself was innocent.» — Kripal subraya que en la lectura de Flournoy la médium no engañaba: la imaginación creadora operaba a través de ella.
«This nearly unbelievable productive ability of the human mind was what Flournoy meant by the imagination créatrice.» — Kripal fija el sentido que Flournoy daba a la imaginación creadora: la capacidad productiva de la mente que fabricaba el mundo marciano de la médium.
«Significantly, both Flournoy and Müller would become respected patrons of surrealism, a twentieth-century art movement particularly resonant with my present theorization of the fantastic.» — Kripal enlaza a Flournoy y a la médium con el surrealismo y lo declara resonante con su propia teoría de lo fantástico.
«Although he was extremely suspicious of the mythical content of Müller’s mediumship, Flournoy took seriously what he called the “supernormal appearances” of her life. By “supernormal,” Flournoy meant things like telepathy and telekinesis, which he concluded were likely genuine phenomena.» — Kripal distingue en Flournoy dos juicios separados: descreía del contenido mítico y tenía por probablemente genuinos los fenómenos supranormales.
«His final conclusion? That the common assumption that one must choose between the “brutal alternatives” of Spiritualism (the medium was really talking to dead people) and materialism (there is nothing to any of it) “is surely puerile.”52 That is to say, childish and stupid.» — Kripal recoge de Flournoy el rechazo de la disyuntiva entre espiritismo y materialismo, y traduce el adjetivo con que la descarta.
«At the turn of the twentieth century, supernormal phenomena were caught between literal belief and rational debunking, neither of which were convincing to those who worked closely with the experiencers. There simply was no way to mediate between the two dimensions of human experience.» — Kripal describe el mismo callejón epistemológico en 1900 y en Corbin medio siglo después: entre la creencia literal y el desmentido, sin mediación posible.
«He refused to take a position about whether these visions and supernormal abilities were “forerunners of a future evolution” (which is what Frederic Myers thought), or evolutionary survivals from some previous condition (which is what Sigmund Freud would suggest), or “whether they are purely accidental” and so meaningless.53 He did not know, and so he left it at that.» — Kripal consigna la abstención de Flournoy entre las tres lecturas evolutivas, y nombra a Myers y a Freud como los dos polos que él no quiso escoger.
«in December 1882 and theorized it extensively through literally thousands of case studies, linking it in the process to strong emotional connection between loved ones or a strong erotic attraction toward a beloved—“erotic” here understood in the sense of Plato’s Symposium—that is, as a metaphysically oriented eros that can be “held in,” sublimated (Freud was thinking of the Symposium too), and directed ecstatically toward the divine world of Forms.» — Kripal fecha el acuñamiento de *telepathy* por Myers y lo liga al eros del *Banquete* platónico; la frase abre en la línea anterior con la etimología, que la extracción por programa une mal.
«The subliminal region of the psyche was that realm “below the threshold” (sub-limen) where telepathic communications took place before they emerged up into a dream or vision in symbolic form. Today, we might say that psychical phenomena were mediated by and through the unconscious, but only if we understand that unconscious in terms literally transcendent to space-time.» — Kripal define lo subliminal de Myers y pone la condición para traducirlo a inconsciente: solo si ese inconsciente se entiende como trascendente al espacio-tiempo.
«Myers appears to have coined his super-word, the supernormal, around 1885. He was trying to get away from the dualistic or theistic connotations of another earlier super-word, the supernatural, with its centuries-long insistence (it was coined in the thirteenth century) that extraordinary events must possess an agent outside the natural order to be considered genuine miracles.» — Kripal fecha *supernormal* hacia 1885 y explica la palabra como huida del *supernatural* del siglo XIII, que exigía un agente exterior a la naturaleza.
«He turned to early evolutionary biology and abnormal psychology and saw the abnormal and supernormal as existing on a shared developmental spectrum.» — Kripal sitúa el movimiento de Myers: lo anormal y lo supranormal en un mismo espectro de desarrollo, tomado de la biología evolutiva y de la psicología anormal.
«In short, the supernormal was entirely “normal,” but it remained nevertheless “super,” super, at least, to a species that had not yet fully manifested and stabilized these future evolutionary traits. As I have put it in a kind of meme, “the supernormal was super natural but not supernatural.» — Kripal resume la operación de Myers en una fórmula suya: lo supranormal es supremamente natural sin ser sobrenatural.
«It was in this same super natural context, still in the front matter of his masterwork, that Myers defined the “Imaginal” as “a word used of characteristics belonging to the perfect insect or imago;—and thus opposed to larval;—metaphorically applied to transcendental faculties shown in rudiment in ordinary life.» — Kripal recupera la definición que Myers dio de *imaginal* en su glosario, que es entomológica antes que mística.
«Myers was thinking of two distinct bodies of knowledge when he wrote such lines: (1) the extraordinary data on telepathic communications from the dead or from loved ones in danger that he and his colleagues had been collecting for years, and (2) the young science of entomology.» — Kripal identifica las dos fuentes del término en Myers: el archivo de comunicaciones telepáticas y la entomología de su época.
«The imagination in these specific situations—which the Victorian researchers clumsily called “veridical hallucinations”—was somehow operating as a supernormal organ of cognition. It was translating and projecting, for sure, but it was translating and projecting real and accurate information about the external environment.» — Kripal sostiene que en esos casos la imaginación traduce y proyecta, y que lo traducido es información exacta del entorno.
«wings and becomes sexually mature. This final stage is called the imaginal stage. The insect’s immature or adolescent feeding form is called the larval stage.» — Kripal explica el sentido entomológico de *imaginal*: la etapa adulta del insecto frente a la larvaria; la frase abre en la plana anterior definiendo el imago.
«so too the functioning of the human imagination can metamorphize into extremely strange but astonishingly effective forms, which Myers called “imaginal,” after his beloved bugs.» — Kripal traslada la metamorfosis del insecto a la imaginación humana, que en su forma madura resulta extraña y eficaz a la vez.
«The word’s inventor was a highly educated French lawyer and medical doctor named Joseph Maxwell (1858–1938). Maxwell coined the French term in 1903, in his book Les phénomènes psychiques.» — Kripal fecha y firma el acuñamiento de *paranormal* en el francés de Joseph Maxwell, abogado y médico.
«The French paranormal was a philosophically careful word. It was, in fact, an impossible one in the precise sense that I have defined the term; that is, it inhabited a third epistemic space beyond belief but also beyond reason, at least as the latter was understood and practiced in the contemporary sciences of the time.» — Kripal lee el término francés como ocupante de un tercer espacio epistémico, ni creencia ni razón científica de la época.
«In Maxwell’s mind, something paranormal is very much a part of the natural world but is also currently beyond our scientific understanding. He was being very careful. He meant “to the side of” (para-) the normal or the natural, not something outside that natural order, which is what the Latin supernaturalis, or supernatural, had come to mean for specific theological and hagiographical reasons— the miracle of the saint had to come from outside nature, from God, to be a true miracle and so give witness to the supernatural authority of Roman Catholicism.» — Kripal explica el prefijo: *para-* es al lado de lo natural, no fuera, y contrasta con el *supernaturalis* exigido por la hagiografía católica para validar el milagro.
«Indeed, he would often write blunt things like, “I do not believe in the supernatural (surnaturel). I do not believe in miracles.» — Kripal cita el rechazo tajante de Maxwell a lo sobrenatural y al milagro, con el francés entre paréntesis.
«Following Myers, Maxwell also writes of a “subliminal” level of consciousness, and he speculates that many of the psychical phenomena are products of an impersonal consciousness (“conscience impersonelle”) or the collective consciousness of the séance circle, not of a particular person or spirit, as is falsely believed.» — Kripal atribuye a Maxwell la hipótesis de una conciencia impersonal o colectiva del círculo como agente de los fenómenos, contra la atribución a un espíritu.
«In this same sociology of the impossible, Maxwell would point out that five or six people are better than one or two to produce the phenomena (since the phenomena are social).» — Kripal recoge de Maxwell la regla práctica del número de asistentes, que él lee como sociología del fenómeno.
«Such religious objects, pretending spirits, and pseudo-entities focused the energies for the group on a social plane, but they were not the energies. It is much more likely, he suggested, that the paranormal movements of objects, apparitions, and voices were the projected or “exteriorized” manifestations of the emotions, sensitivities, motor capacities, and intentions of the living human beings—or what he sometimes called “organisms”67—seated around the table working together, often unconsciously, with the medium as catalyst and focus. The people were, in effect, haunting themselves without knowing it. Religion was show, but it was a showing of something real in pretended guise.» — Kripal resume la explicación de Maxwell: los objetos religiosos y los espíritus fingidos concentran la energía pero no son la energía, que sale de los propios vivos sentados a la mesa.
«Parakinesis involved movements of objects with contact that was insufficient to produce the observable effects—think floating, levitating, or spinning tables with hands resting on top of the table. Telekinesis involved movement of objects without any physical contact at all.» — Kripal define los dos neologismos vecinos de Maxwell y su diferencia por el contacto.
«Maxwell is very insistent that he does not know the ultimate agency of these paranormal facts. For all he knows, they may in fact be the workings of “some mischievous Kobolds.» — Kripal consigna la abstención de Maxwell sobre la agencia última, con la salida irónica de los duendes traviesos.
«He called for a “future Newton,” who would explain such obviously physical but completely inexplicable forces in a formula more complete than our own, forces that Maxwell recognized were often likened to electricity or a subtle vibration (“une sorte de vibration très faible”) but were clearly not the same thing that the physicists were measuring.76 Again, he wanted a fuller science, not more religion or belief.» — Kripal subraya la dirección de Maxwell: no volver a la religión sino pedir más ciencia, un Newton futuro para fuerzas que no son las medidas por los físicos.
«He also wrote a book on modern forms of mysticism within Theosophy, Le mysticisme contemporain (1893), which he discusses again in Les phénomènes psychiques, confessing that he came upon these texts by accident and that he felt some surprise that “a mystical movement” could find clients at the end of the nineteenth century.» — Kripal registra el libro de Maxwell sobre el misticismo teosófico y su sorpresa de que tal movimiento tuviera clientela a fines del siglo XIX.
«This latter point is important, as Maxwell clearly believed (and I think he was correct), that “mysticism” was already waning as a viable category around 1900. The implication was that we needed new terms to discuss these and related phenomena. Maxwell would give us one.» — Kripal suscribe el diagnóstico de Maxwell sobre el agotamiento de la categoría de misticismo hacia 1900, del que sale la necesidad de un término nuevo.
«He worked with numerous mediums and psychics, including and especially Eusapia Palladino, whom he called a friend. He thought Palladino was the real deal but also acknowledged that she sometimes cheated. He did not hesitate to expose fraud when and where he found it, but he was not so naive as to equate a failed trick, as in Palladino’s case, with an entire panoply of real effects, again as in Palladino’s case.» — Kripal describe el criterio de Maxwell con Eusapia Palladino: denunciar el fraude sin deducir de un truco fallido la falsedad del conjunto.
«He certainly did not believe the beliefs of these cultures, but he had no doubt that the phenomena happened because of such beliefs. Such beliefs are necessary tricks, but they are necessary for the phenomena to appear.» — Kripal formula la posición de Maxwell sobre la magia y la adivinación: la creencia es un truco, y el truco es condición necesaria del fenómeno.
«The paranormal, then, would signal something like “perfectly natural forces that we presently do not understand but that we will someday in the future evolution of the species.” It is not an embarrassment here, something ridiculous, a word to remove from a book or essay title. It is part of the future order of knowledge.» — Kripal fija el sentido original de *paranormal* y reivindica la palabra contra el bochorno académico que hoy la rodea.
«The twentieth- and now twenty-first-century transformations of the paranormal back into what is basically the older dualistic notion of the supernatural are clear pop-regressions of the term. They should not be taken as educated uses of the term. These transformations should be noted and studied as such, for sure, but such linguistic regressions should not be taken as absolute or even necessary by readers and writers who know their history of science.» — Kripal declara regresión el uso corriente de *paranormal* como sinónimo de sobrenatural, y pide estudiarlo como dato sin aceptarlo como definición.
«Words encode such experiences. Words are experiences. We can interpret these experiences in all sorts of ways (with more words), of course, and we should, but we must begin with this fundamental lived context: the presence, urgency, and agency of what we have come to call the dead.» — Kripal cierra el capítulo sobre lo supranormal, lo imaginal y lo paranormal con su consigna: los tres términos codifican encuentros con los muertos, y de ahí hay que partir.
«Eerily, the insectoid, telepathic, and evolutionary themes that fascinated Frederic Myers so and were secretly embedded in the French coinage of the paranormal from his own supernormal would later show up in spectral form in the twentieth- and now twenty-first-century alien abduction literature, where gigantic telepathic insectoids are extremely common, particularly in their mantis forms.» — Kripal enlaza la metáfora entomológica de Myers con las mantis telepáticas gigantes de la literatura de abducción.
«In other words, the modern abduction visions replicate, in precise detail, the imaginal of Myers. What was an entomological metaphor in Myers has become a literal visionary form or physical encounter in the alien abduction literature. The larval stage of the human being has morphed into the future stage of the imaginal, which appears to the present human mind as a superinsect with the exact supernormal power that Myers himself first named in 1882: telepathy. The paranormal is insectoid.» — Kripal sostiene que la visión de abducción literaliza lo que en Myers era metáfora, y remata con la fórmula de que lo paranormal es insectoide.
«Put a bit more responsibly, the category of the imaginal has morphed considerably over the last century and a half, since the 1880s, when it was first introduced. It starts out within the Victorian psychical research tradition in an explicitly evolutionary framework deeply indebted to Charles Darwin but not technically Darwinian (since it possesses a spiritual telos, or purpose).» — Kripal modera él mismo la fórmula anterior y traza la historia del término desde 1880, con la salvedad de que su evolucionismo tiene *telos* y por eso no es darwiniano en sentido estricto.
«It then morphs again over the last five decades up to the present, this time in the ufological and abduction materials, where the imaginal displays both of these earlier meanings—that is, both evolutionary patterns suggestive of a future superhuman state and dialectical or apophatic sensibilities often explicitly indebted to the mystical traditions of the past.» — Kripal cierra la genealogía en la ufología, donde según él conviven el sentido evolutivo de Myers y el apofático de Corbin.
«As counterintuitive as it might sound, it is well known among seasoned researchers that the UFO is very much connected to the near-death experience (NDE)—the heavenly saucer and the transcendent soul.» — Kripal declara conocido entre investigadores el vínculo entre el ovni y la experiencia cercana a la muerte, y lo resume en el par platillo celeste y alma trascendente.
«Of the 144 events noted, 80 involved multiple sensors and were therefore likely caused by encounters with “physical objects.” Many of the UAP events interrupted pilot training or military activity. Some resulted in near collisions in the sky. Most importantly, the new report made clear that only one of the 144 events and encounters reported in the past seventeen years could be explained. Just one.» — Kripal resume las cifras del informe de la Oficina del Director de Inteligencia Nacional de 2021 y se detiene en el único caso explicado.
«Republican representative Mike Gallagher from Wisconsin explicitly raised the time-traveler hypothesis—that is, the idea, which is quite common in the literature, that UFOs might be» — Kripal registra al único legislador que en las audiencias de 2022 planteó la hipótesis del viajero del tiempo; la frase se cierra en la plana siguiente con la fórmula de que el ovni seríamos nosotros desde el futuro.
«That conversation, after all, would have to include the history of religions as well as the neuroscience of temporality and the physics and cosmology of space-time, not to mention the utter disregard the objects and presences show for our national borders and very recent notions of capitalism, moral agency, and personal possession.» — Kripal enumera lo que exigiría tomarse en serio la pregunta ovni, e incluye el desprecio del fenómeno por las fronteras nacionales y por la idea moderna de propiedad.
«Some scholars of the New Age have even argued, quite convincingly, that particular currents or strands of these esoteric movements began among UFO contactees of a particular Theosophical persuasion in the 1950s (this fits the case of one of the earliest witnesses, the businessman Ken Arnold, whose family story sounds very Theosophical to my ear).» — Kripal acepta como convincente la derivación de corrientes esotéricas contemporáneas de contactados teosóficos de los años cincuenta, y añade el caso de Ken Arnold como impresión propia.
«There are also contemporary scholars who link Theosophy and the UFO, especially the Swedish scholar and archivist Håkan Blomqvist.» — Kripal nombra a Håkan Blomqvist como el investigador que más ha ligado teosofía y fenómeno ovni.
«how these same phenomena go back to the nineteenth century, and further back, way further back, into the medieval and Renaissance European worlds, and into the African, Asian, Australian, and South American worlds of the present; and how they repeat, over and over again, the same comparative themes: the large almond eyes, the diminutive and lanky bodily form, the idea of some kind of hyperdimensionality or time travel, the presence of “humanoids,” the religious ambiguity of the messages revealed, the presence of death and the ancestors, the apocalyptic vision, and the radiation burn, swelling, or vomiting.» — Kripal enumera lo que dice haber constatado en los Archives of the Impossible: la profundidad histórica del fenómeno hasta el Renacimiento y el medievo, y la lista de sus motivos recurrentes.
«In historical truth, the phenomenon is everywhere and everywhen, and its comparative patterns are astonishingly stable and consistent. Indeed, it is remarkable how often the act of comparison leads to a growing realization, which is not always welcome, that these things (which may not be things at all) are very, very real.» — Kripal sostiene la estabilidad comparativa del fenómeno en todo tiempo y lugar, y dice que la comparación misma empuja a concluir su realidad, no siempre de buen grado.
«The coming of the saucers in twentieth-century America was definitively tied to the Cold War and its various fears and anxieties. It was the Soviets and, before that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Germans.12 (Now it must be the Chinese.» — Kripal historiza la lectura geopolítica del platillo, que cambia de enemigo con la época.
«Roswell, New Mexico, for example, was just such a nuclear site, where one of the earliest alleged crashes took place in early July of 1947, just after the sighting of private pilot Ken Arnold, which took place on June 24, 1947, near Mount Rainier, Washington. It was the latter event that in fact gave us the expression “flying saucer” through a journalist reporting on the incident the next day. New England has also played a special role. The region boasts the first iconic American case, of the night of September 19–20, 1961, involving a mixed-race couple who were civil rights activists, Betty and Barney Hill.» — Kripal fecha los hitos fundacionales estadounidenses y atribuye la expresión *flying saucer* al periodista que cubrió el avistamiento de Ken Arnold, no a Arnold mismo.
«To put an accent on things, the UFO phenomenon is in fact global, although, of course, its reporting and interpretation are always contingent on surrounding cultural influences.» — Kripal afirma el carácter global del fenómeno y acota en la misma frase que su reporte y su lectura dependen del entorno cultural.
«This is why to study the UFO phenomenon adequately is to study pretty much everything. It is also to come up against, hard, the realization that the institutional or university order of knowledge within which we work and think today, an order that effectively splits the sciences off from the humanities, is simply not helpful, and certainly not reflective of the material-mental reality we are trying to understand.» — Kripal invoca el fenómeno ovni contra el reparto universitario entre ciencias y humanidades, que declara inadecuado.
«The difficult truth is that the UFO phenomenon has both an objective “hard” aspect (think fighter-jet videos, photographs, alleged metamaterials, apparent advanced propulsion methods, missile silo shutdown, and landing marks) and a subjective “soft” or “human” aspect (think close encounters, multiple and coordinated visual sightings, altered states of consciousness, subsequent paranormal powers, visionary displays, and experienced traumatic or transcendent abductions). And both sides—both the objective material and the subjective mental or spiritual dimensions—are needed to get a sense of the fuller picture.» — Kripal enumera las dos caras del fenómeno, la dura y la blanda, y sostiene que ninguna se entiende sin la otra.
«Indeed, three of these insiders go to great lengths in their coauthored Skinwalkers at the Pentagon (the very title fuses the two aspects, since a “skinwalker” is a shape-shifting superwitch in Indigenous American lore) to describe and discuss things like the “hitch-hiker effect.” The latter phenomenon involves military and intelligence professionals apparently being “infected” with occult presences on Skinwalker Ranch in Utah and bringing the phenomenon back home, literally, to their East Coast families.» — Kripal presenta el efecto autoestopista descrito en *Skinwalkers at the Pentagon* como el caso donde lo tecnológico y lo ocultista se funden hasta en el título.
«Kelleher, with whom I have worked on an advisory board for Mr. Bigelow, is explicit about what Skinwalkers at the Pentagon calls “blue orbs.” These are basically intelligent balls of plasma that interact with humans, often at close range, and occasionally penetrate their bodies, sometimes with cancerous effect.» — Kripal describe los orbes azules del programa financiado por Robert Bigelow como plasma inteligente con efectos físicos sobre los testigos.
«As Hussein Ali Agrama has argued, the UFO also calls into serious question the presumed divisions between science and religion, the two reigning epistemologies of the premodern and modern worlds. The UFO basically abolishes what Agrama calls the “secularity of science”—that is, the manner in which science is believed to be a purely material or physical pursuit without spiritual or, in this case, esoteric or mystical dimensions.» — Kripal recoge de Hussein Ali Agrama que el fenómeno ovni derriba la secularidad de la ciencia, es decir, su supuesta ausencia de dimensión esotérica.
«The anthropologist thus writes of a powerful “uncanny science” that is very much active around the UFO but also inevitably maligned by conventional scientists. Accordingly, this uncanny science ends up secreted in intelligence, corporate, and military technologies, thus creating a separate esoteric world, a set of hidden truths or rejected forms of knowledge that are sharply distinct from those presumed in the public sphere.» — Kripal expone la ciencia ominosa de Agrama: repudiada en público, se refugia en lo militar y lo corporativo y produce así un mundo esotérico paralelo de saberes rechazados.
«The point is the same: the fuzzy nature of the sightings is part of their point. The entire realm is “out of focus.” Maybe it must be.» — Kripal convierte la borrosidad de las fotografías en rasgo del fenómeno y no defecto del testigo, con la reserva de un quizá.
«Hence, what I call the “Cold War invasion mythology” has been dominant until very recently. In this mythology, the UFO is seen as the sign of an “alien” invasion that must be fought back or resisted by patriotic, God-fearing citizens.» — Kripal nombra y fecha la mitología de invasión de la Guerra Fría como el marco dominante de lectura del ovni.
«It goes at least as far back as H. G. Wells’s 1897 novel The War of the Worlds, an invasion story (inspired by British colonialism and the overwhelming technological force of the British military in places like New Guinea).» — Kripal retrotrae esa mitología a Wells y la deriva del propio colonialismo británico.
«Only recently have writers and filmmakers begun to move away from this Cold War invasion mythology and toward what we actually see in the encounter cases, if we really study them (as opposed to just assuming things about them). Hence the movie Arrival, by Canadian director Denis Villeneuve, in 2016.» — Kripal señala el giro reciente de la ficción hacia lo que los casos de encuentro efectivamente registran, con *Arrival* como ejemplo.
«And, indeed, in historical fact, human witnesses are often radically transformed by their encounters. They experience, either within the event itself or later develop, new astonishing abilities—think telepathy and, as in Arrival, precognition (the same, again, is true of near-death experiences). Such encounters can also be of a deeply spiritual nature, by which I do not mean “good” or “nice.” People experience awe, fear, uncanniness, and absolute terror. Their worlds are turned inside out and upside down. What they thought was real is no longer so. What they considered to be imagined is actual. Sometimes they adopt new, much more cosmic worldviews.» — Kripal describe la transformación del testigo, con la advertencia expresa de que espiritual no significa aquí bueno ni agradable.
«Such a circular vision of temporality is an idea about space-time that is well known to humanists, from ancient Greek philosophy to Friedrich Nietzsche.» — Kripal reclama para las humanidades la idea de un tiempo circular que la película atribuye a la lengua alienígena.
«My own position? It is always developing and confessedly tentative, and I would be most happy to change it tomorrow, but my general sense is that there is definitely something being covered up or lied about (the misinformation is grotesque and obvious to serious scientific and humanistic researchers), but—and here is the thing—no one knows what that something is or what it means.» — Kripal declara su posición como tentativa y revisable: hay encubrimiento, y a la vez nadie sabe qué se encubre.
«The present situation is so confused partly because our culture has grown incredibly stupid around the nature of the soul, or what we would today call “consciousness,” and its fantastic relationship to the cosmos, which is to say to space and time. We simply no longer understand the shocking multinaturalism (nature behaves differently in different bodies and places) and very physical efficacy of belief, symbol, and myth—how they, in effect, really in effect, create different realities.» — Kripal atribuye la confusión pública al olvido de la eficacia física del símbolo y a la pérdida del multinaturalismo, que define en el mismo paréntesis.
«In such convictions, my own position is very close to that of the astronomer, computer scientist, and medical research investor Jacques Vallee and his “forbidden science,” an artful and lifelong combination of astronomy, computer science, information theory, esoteric practice, and profound skepticism around all UFO belief systems.» — Kripal se alinea con la ciencia prohibida de Jacques Vallee, y subraya que incluye escepticismo hacia todo sistema de creencias ufológico.
«I happen to think that the basic thesis of the Aliens & Artists podcast series—namely, that creativity and paranormal experiences are deeply related—is perfectly correct.» — Kripal suscribe la tesis del pódcast de Stuart Davis: creatividad y experiencia paranormal están ligadas.
«Vision or no, the experience convinced me, quite completely, that nonordinary encounters can result in new forms of insight, wild intuition, and powerful creativity that lie at the very core of some types of cultural production, including, believe it or not, nerdy scholarship.» — Kripal extiende a su propio oficio la conexión entre encuentro no ordinario y producción cultural, aunque en su caso no hubo contenido visual.
«Something like “sleep paralysis” does not do it either. No doubt, that physiological condition is what “let it in,” but it says little, or nothing at all, about what came in.» — Kripal concede la parálisis del sueño como condición fisiológica y le niega valor explicativo sobre el contenido del encuentro.
«Instead, Davis found himself face to face with an eight-foot-tall praying mantis entity standing at the foot of his bed—basically a gigantic insectoid, who was wearing a purple robe with a high collar, no less.» — Kripal narra el encuentro de Stuart Davis con la mantis, que sobrevino al pedir en meditación ver a sus guías espirituales budistas.
«These super synchronicities in the social and biological worlds are what made it so difficult, impossible really, to take the easy way out and read the mantis as his higher spiritual self, as “imaginal” (he will use the word), as some kind of bizarre psychospiritual projection, the debunker’s rhetorical ploy of “hallucination.» — Kripal argumenta que las sincronicidades posteriores, con mantis reales, bloquean la lectura puramente psicológica del episodio.
«These were not just dreams or internal altered states. These were very physical and often literally entomological events.» — Kripal insiste en el carácter físico y literalmente entomológico de los hechos que siguieron al encuentro.
«possible physical implants as quintessential imaginal or mental-material technologies.» — Kripal lee las marcas corporales que Davis se atribuye como posibles implantes, y los llama tecnologías mental-materiales, es decir, imaginales por excelencia.
«She suggested that Davis himself was a mantis in a past life in another dimension—that is, between the physical and the spiritual realms. They are interdimensional, not strictly physical.» — Kripal consigna la lectura de Jacqueline Smith, que sitúa a las mantis entre lo físico y lo espiritual y las declara interdimensionales.
«part of this thinking-with is deep suspicion around the behavior of all such abducting entities (we would be arrested for such behavior)» — Kripal incorpora la sospecha moral al método: pensar-con no excluye juzgar la conducta de las entidades que abducen.
«knows, for example, that the word mantis is related to mantic, itself derived from the Greek mantikos, as “relating to divination,” as well as to mania, which comes from a Greek verb for “to be made mad.» — Kripal deriva *mantis* de la raíz griega de la adivinación y de la manía, y hace de esa etimología un argumento.
«We are back to the deepest sources of human civilization in inspired madness and altered states of consciousness. This is what Stuart Davis calls the “primordial” lineage that produced religion, philosophy, and civilization itself. It is superhuman to the core.» — Kripal sitúa el origen de religión, filosofía y civilización en la locura inspirada y los estados alterados, siguiendo la fórmula de Davis.
«The mantis, it turns out, appears often in the history of religions, the history of art, and human culture more broadly. Indigenous folklore in the Americas and Africa is a particularly fruitful place to look.» — Kripal niega que el encuentro con la mantis carezca de precedente y remite al folclor indígena americano y africano.
«For example, many of the testimonies collected by the folklorist Ardy Sixkiller Clarke are about what Indigenous Peoples call the “star people,” which are described as “more like bugs than men” and as “big insects” with faces that are “half human, half insect,” and even as “mechanical bugs”» — Kripal recoge de la folclorista Ardy Sixkiller Clarke la descripción insectoide de la gente de las estrellas en testimonios indígenas.
«The praying mantis itself is a significant figure in southern African folklore, particularly within Namibian culture, where it functions as an omen or serves an oracular function and possesses a particular trickster nature.» — Kripal documenta la función oracular y de presagio de la mantis en el folclor del sur de África, con su carácter de *trickster*.
«It also takes on the role of a benign god or deity associated with nourishment, resurrection, and creation among the Indigenous Peoples of this same part of the world.» — Kripal añade el papel divino de la mantis en esa misma zona, ligado a alimento, resurrección y creación.
«The praying mantis, known as the king of insects, is also central to the Chinese martial arts, or kung fu, which are derived from various imperial, military-monastic, Daoist, and Buddhist influences.» — Kripal traslada la mantis a las artes marciales chinas y nombra sus vertientes imperial, monástico-militar, daoísta y budista.
«is what one insider ethnographer, Douglas Farrer, has called “the unleashing of hidden human potentials” and “the continual revelation of esoteric embodied knowledge through practice» — Kripal cita al etnógrafo practicante para describir la escuela de la mantis como revelación continua de saber esotérico encarnado; la frase se completa en la plana siguiente.
«The results are, quite simply, superhuman. Here, after all, we encounter the manifestation of “dark or hidden powers (um ging) of the body,” like the “death touch” (dim mak) of mantis practitioners, the telepathic ability to read the opponent, external force transmission, and the inexplicable ability to become very heavy.» — Kripal enumera los poderes ocultos del cuerpo que la tradición de la mantis atribuye a sus practicantes, con sus nombres chinos.
«Farrar asks a series of rhetorical questions of these powers hidden in the human: “Might practitioners acquire the strange capabilities of becoming-telepathic, becoming-invulnerable, or becoming-immovable through some bizarre animal or insect agency?”32 The answer, we are led to conclude, is yes.» — Kripal recoge la pregunta retórica del etnógrafo y declara cuál es la respuesta a la que su lectura conduce; el apellido aparece aquí con otra grafía que dos párrafos antes.
«But it is probably the twentieth-century surrealist art movement that is the most immediate, and most significant, precedent for the mantis theme in the modern abduction experience.» — Kripal propone el surrealismo como precedente más inmediato del motivo de la mantis en la abducción moderna.
«In particular, the female mantis eating the head of the male after copulation was taken as a prime example of the vagina dentata, or the teethed vagina, that was said to be a common castration fantasy, or fear, of the human male within psychoanalytic circles at this time.» — Kripal explica el interés surrealista por la mantis a través del psicoanálisis, y en el mismo pasaje acota que la decapitación poscoital es sobre todo un efecto del cautiverio.
«The French writer Roger Caillois was one of the first commentators on the surrealist mantis in an important 1934 article in Minotaure, a key surrealist publication.» — Kripal fecha y nombra el primer comentario sobre la mantis surrealista.
«Bataille’s argument is that the human is a “discontinuous” being and seeks a kind of mystical “continuity” with the cosmos in two ecstatic acts: death and orgasm.» — Kripal resume a Georges Bataille: el humano discontinuo busca continuidad mística en la muerte y el orgasmo, y esa continuidad es lo que la mantis simboliza para los surrealistas.
«One could posit some kind of mantis experience, much like those recounted above with Stuart Davis, among the surrealist artists (I certainly would), but such thoughts must remain speculative.» — Kripal declara su propia inclinación a suponer un encuentro real entre los surrealistas y a la vez la deja como especulación.
«John Lennon of the Beatles famously saw a small UFO just outside the penthouse apartment that he shared with his personal secretary and then girlfriend, May Pang, on August 23, 1974, at nine o’clock in the evening.» — Kripal fecha y sitúa el avistamiento de John Lennon con testigo presencial.
«In one related vein, Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead claimed to have had a two-day abduction experience on a futuristic spaceship involving insectoid beings, as well as an out-of-body experience and some kind of creative contact with a higher intelligence, which he acknowledges might be “another part of my mind.» — Kripal recoge el relato de Jerry Garcia con la reserva que el propio músico añade: la inteligencia superior podría ser parte de su mente.
«It would be easy, I suppose, to dismiss such accounts as exaggerated bits of promotion or, if you prefer, “drug-induced hallucinations” (that’s always an easy one), except that, often enough, no drugs are involved, and we have endless comparative cases elsewhere.» — Kripal desactiva la explicación por drogas señalando que en muchos casos no las hay y que el material comparado es abundante.
«For the historian of religions, such things are not entirely without precedent, as they echo and update in a new form the much older theme of divine-human hybridity or human deification.» — Kripal lee el motivo de la hibridación genética con los insectoides como versión actual de la hibridez divino-humana y de la deificación.
«Booth walks the tightrope of the impossible thinker, acknowledging, of course, the strong hallucinatory potential of the mushrooms (including the “bad science-fiction movie” nature of the vision that they shared) but also wondering if these molecules might open some door in the mind to interact with actual entities and presences through the hallucinations—that is, whether the drug is a “key opening a door”» — Kripal presenta a Kevin Booth como caso del equilibrio que él pide: reconocer el potencial alucinatorio y preguntarse a la vez si la molécula abre una puerta; la frase sigue en la plana siguiente.
«Afterward, the two friends were both strongly telepathic (a most common result of ufological contact and psychedelic experience).44 They had “a perfectly normal conversation without either one of us opening our mouth.» — Kripal registra la telepatía posterior al episodio de Bill Hicks y la declara resultado frecuente tanto del contacto ufológico como de lo psicodélico.
«Note the theme of an evolutionary esotericism.» — Kripal nombra el hilo que recorre el caso de Hicks y que atraviesa su libro: un esoterismo evolutivo.
«But there is another point to be made here, and it is this: impossible phenomena can come with some very strong social, moral, and political consequences.» — Kripal insiste en la carga política del fenómeno y la ejemplifica con la comedia de Hicks contra el patriotismo, el armamento nuclear y la guerra contra las drogas.
«As I explained to Abrahams for the film, it is a serious (and inhumane) mistake to dismiss and demean Huggins’s memories and experiences. It is also a serious mistake to take them literally. We somehow need to move out of both reason and belief to orient ourselves here.» — Kripal rechaza a la vez el desdén y la lectura literal del caso de David Huggins, y pide salir de la razón y de la creencia.
«For now, only a kind of real paranormal science fiction can begin to do these events some justice. Significantly, Huggins owns literally hundreds of sci-fi movies. This, after all, is the only genre that can do some modicum of justice to his experiences, and no doubt shape them at the same time. Something has to be as wild and bold to capture something, anything, of these events.» — Kripal propone la ciencia ficción como único género capaz de hacer justicia al caso, y concede en la misma frase que también lo modela.
«We might also recall what is probably the most well-known and most sophisticated account of an abduction experience, that of the science-fiction writer Whitley Strieber in his nonfiction Communion (1987). Much of the book is a series of transcripts of hypnosis sessions he underwent with Dr. Donald Klein to make sense of his abduction and bring it into consciousness (recall Théodore Flournoy from our last chapter).» — Kripal remite el procedimiento hipnótico de *Communion* al mismo linaje técnico que el estudio de Flournoy sobre la médium.
«Anne eventually crystallized the massive store of letters down to the five thousand or so that we now have in the archive after Whitley gifted them to us a few years ago.» — Kripal describe cómo Anne Strieber redujo el cuarto de millón de cartas recibidas a las cinco mil que hoy custodia su archivo.
«Nicholas Collins points to one letter writer who describes the female mantis figure she saw as “wonderful,” leaving her feeling “so loved and cherished . . . that everything was harmonious and good.” This woman then relates the encounter to a more traditional Roman Catholic world, to “the Blessed Mother herself.» — Kripal cita, vía Nicholas Collins, una carta donde la mantis femenina se vive como benéfica y se traduce a la Virgen.
«Believe it or not, this fusion of the extraterrestrial in and as the Marian apparition is not at all unusual. Marian apparitions have often been read as coded UFO events, at least since Paul Misraki’s chapter on the Fátima apparitions in Des signes dans le ciel: Les extraterrestres in 1968.» — Kripal fecha en 1968 y en Paul Misraki la lectura ufológica de las apariciones marianas, con Fátima como caso.
«This same comparative connection—Mary and the UFO—is indeed a staple in our Archives of the Impossible collection, present in dozens, if not hundreds, of magazines, newsletters, and commentaries.» — Kripal declara que el paralelo María-ovni es un lugar común documentado en decenas o cientos de publicaciones de su archivo.
«The contemporary Brazilian religion of Santo Daime, which traces its roots back to the middle of the last century and a seven-foot-tall Black prophet by the name of Mestre Irineu, born Raimundo Irineu Serra (1890–1971), is positively filled with insectoid creatures and “clicking” or buzzing revelations, as well as UFOs. The “Daime,” filled with the entheogenic DMT molecule, is its central and most sacred sacrament.» — Kripal sitúa en el Santo Daime brasileño el mismo repertorio insectoide y ufológico, con la molécula enteógena como sacramento central.
«In the blunt terms of the four authors (three of them medical doctors): “DMT often induces experiences that belong to hard science fiction or space opera.» — Kripal cita a los autores de *Inner Paths to Outer Space* sobre el parentesco entre el estado inducido por DMT y la ciencia ficción dura.
«DMT parallel strongly those of “alien abduction,” leading the researchers to suspect an endogenous release of the molecule in the brains and nervous systems of those in whom such encounters take place.» — Kripal expone la hipótesis de la liberación endógena de DMT como explicación del paralelo con la abducción; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«Rick Strassman goes as far as to call DMT “the brain’s own psychedelic.”57 The molecule has been found in every mammal in which we have looked and in innumerable plant species. It is pretty much everywhere in the natural world and appears to play some central role not only in these altered states but probably in the construction of the consensus state we call “reality” as well.» — Kripal recoge de Rick Strassman la ubicuidad natural de la molécula y su posible papel en la construcción de la realidad consensuada.
«Note the clear evolutionary and entomological themes that are so clearly encoded into the experience. Frederic Myers and Joseph Maxwell all over.» — Kripal reconoce en los relatos de colmena y de manipulación del ADN los mismos motivos evolutivos y entomológicos que rastreó en Myers y Maxwell.
«In other words, the encounters, abductions, and even anal rapes were quite real and could not be reduced to brain chemistry; rather, they were happening on another level or in another dimension of reality that was not this material world known to the sciences and their sense-based knowledge.» — Kripal resume la conclusión de Strassman con su propio testigo: los encuentros no se reducen a química cerebral y ocurren en otro nivel de realidad.
«In short, specific molecules can turn the brain into a kind of door or receiver station.» — Kripal formula la tesis del filtro: la molécula no fabrica el contenido, convierte al cerebro en puerta o receptor.
«Gnostic bugs and humanoid mantids are pretty much everywhere in these DMT states, then, including in the art that such states produce or inspire.» — Kripal extiende el motivo insectoide del relato al arte que esos estados producen.
«I should finally add that “buzzing” and entomology have been associated with the flying saucer phenomenon at least since 1951 (there was no “UFO” yet). It was that year that Gerald Heard (an author who also wrote extensively of his own evolutionary esotericism and helped inspire the founding of the Esalen Institute) speculated that the crew of the flying saucers were not only highly evolved but also bee- or insect-like.» — Kripal fecha en 1951 la primera asociación entre platillo, zumbido e insecto, y la atribuye a Gerald Heard, autor de esoterismo evolutivo e inspirador de Esalen.
«On another level, much of the modern paranormal material, and especially the ufological material, looks a good deal to me like what a traditional theologian might call angelology or demonology (the Christian Evangelicals are not wrong to see the latter, although their too common paranoia and quick moral judgment with respect to these other spiritual intelligences are not helpful). In these instances, it is not about the Godhead or the true nature of reality. It is about invisible entities and spectral beings, some of them noble and beneficent, some of them misbehaving very badly.» — Kripal reclasifica el material ufológico como angelología o demonología, y concede a los evangélicos el acierto del diagnóstico mientras les niega la reacción.
«Consider, as a second chapter exemplar, Jeremy Vaeni, my friend and teacher.69 I read him in a long line of nondual and idealist visionaries, none of whom, I must add, sound anything like Jeremy Vaeni. He is both an alien abductee and a kundalini experiencer, two points along the anomalous spectrum that we will encounter again together in our next chapter.» — Kripal presenta a Jeremy Vaeni como visionario no dual y como el punto donde se cruzan abducción y kundalini.
«In terms of the latter theme, Vaeni enacts as the page what he is saying on the page (by having some of his central characters disappear at the end): that the ego does not survive, that it is an illusion, and that all personal forms, including and especially us, are basically actors in some gigantic cultural story, which we would do well not to believe for both moral and philosophical reasons.» — Kripal lee la desaparición de los personajes en los libros de Vaeni como puesta en obra de su doctrina del ego ilusorio.
«I have sincerely called Jeremy Vaeni my teacher because he makes me think that maybe all those previous deified human beings in the history of religions took themselves way too seriously, did not have to die like that, and certainly didn’t have to be tortured by their unfunny, much too serious contemporaries» — Kripal saca de la risa de Vaeni una relectura de los deificados de la historia de las religiones; la frase termina en la plana siguiente con las teologías sangrientas que se les envolvieron encima.
«The history of religions is really sort of morbid if you think about it.» — Kripal remata esa relectura con un juicio sobre su propia disciplina.
«Indeed, Vaeni’s first book encodes the punchline in the very title: I Know Why the Aliens Don’t Land. Why don’t they land? Because there are no aliens, not at least any that are ultimately different from us. “ALL is ALL,» — Kripal explica el título de Vaeni: no aterrizan porque no hay alienígenas realmente distintos de nosotros.
«Vaeni has a fairly distinct theory of religion. And it is not pretty. All the roads (of religion) do not lead to God. They cannot. All religions are human constructions and social functions, “thousands of years of crapola, friend.” Religion is basically us protecting ourselves from us.» — Kripal resume la teoría de la religión de Vaeni: construcción social que sirve para protegernos de nosotros mismos.
«Such “aliens” are “midwives birthing us out of our egos.”77 Or better, “They want us to wake up out of our egos so we can join the sentience of the cosmos (or Kosmos, if you like). It’s not that they refuse to give us this, it’s that they can’t. All they can do is point it out in a way that bypasses ego. They can bypass it, but we have to transcend it.» — Kripal cita a Vaeni sobre la función de partera que asigna a las entidades, con el límite de que ellas solo pueden señalar.
«There is no alien invasion. There is an attempt, largely a missed opportunity, to tell us that we are not, and that our violent nation-states and horrible histories are not really worth preserving —that those histories are there for mourning, not celebrating, that we need to go back to remember and redeem the past, not to deny, preserve, or conserve it.» — Kripal traduce la doctrina de Vaeni a una tesis histórica y moral: no hay invasión, hay una oportunidad perdida de duelo y redención del pasado.
«The early contactee movement of the 1950s was often about what Vaeni calls “Nordic supermodels”: blond, blue-eyed, buxom women—basically “Hitler’s wet dream.» — Kripal recoge de Vaeni la lectura racial del contactismo de los años cincuenta y sus supermodelos nórdicas.
«All three stories are still expressions of “our racist colonial conquests” for Vaeni. Hence the term “alien,” which is what “we also use to describe brown people who want to move to America from other countries we hate because FOX News told us to because they’re selling our racism to us.”82 The “Gray” (a displaced mixture of “black” and “white”) for Vaeni is another obvious racist trope.» — Kripal expone la lectura de Vaeni de las tres rondas del relato ufológico como figuras del racismo colonial, incluido el propio término *alien*.
«Such sentences, of course, imply that the telepathy and mind manipulation—the psychic powers—are quite real but are also being employed to trick us.92 This is a pretense, a ruse, but a pretense and a ruse of something very real.» — Kripal sostiene, leyendo a Vaeni, que el engaño perceptual no niega el fenómeno: la treta misma requiere poderes reales.
«In another current, Vaeni will also deny that there are any such aliens and write eloquently of these visionary forms coming to us to teach the Truth with a capital T, the Truth of Timelessness appearing in time.93 This is why their thoughts are not our thoughts, why their lives are not our lives, why they play by entirely different rules. How could they not? They are coming into space and time from outside space and time.» — Kripal consigna la otra corriente de Vaeni, que niega la existencia de los alienígenas y los lee como la eternidad apareciendo en el tiempo, sin armonizar las dos posiciones.
«Vaeni calls on words like “transrational,” “translogical,” and “transpsychological” to name this experiential paradox—how people like himself make sense, and do not make sense, of what happened to them; how Truth is not outside us, not an object or thing or anything that can be languaged or conceptualized but might nevertheless communicate with us as egos through unbelievable truths, images, and nutty stories; and why the mental illness explanations (“you’re crazy” or “this is a hallucination”) simply do not work to explain their experiences and are often just empty rhetoric.» — Kripal enumera los tres prefijos con que Vaeni nombra la paradoja y por qué la explicación psiquiátrica le resulta retórica vacía.
«As he has long suspected (originally inspired by Whitley Strieber, who has argued much the same), Vaeni thinks that we speak and imagine the aliens into existence. We let them in, as it were.» — Kripal atribuye a Vaeni, con Whitley Strieber como origen declarado, la tesis de que los alienígenas se hablan e imaginan hasta existir.
«That is about as hermeneutical as it gets: they are real, and they are here because we believe they are here. And then it gets more so. We speak them into existence, so that they can speak us out of existence. We are not living in a horror movie with the “aliens” as the monsters. These so-called aliens are showing up in the horror movie that we ourselves have made to get us out of our own stupid movie.» — Kripal formula la vuelta de tuerca hermenéutica: los invocamos para que nos desinvoquen a nosotros.
«This is Western civilization as a colonizing, enslaving, polluting, bombing, nature-destroying mental illness and narcissistic ego, a “sick, separative mind.» — Kripal traduce la doctrina de Vaeni a un diagnóstico de la civilización occidental como ego narcisista y mente separativa.
«That is why the aliens don’t land. That, after all, would simply confirm our illusory separateness. It would tell us what is not so.» — Kripal cierra el argumento de Vaeni: aterrizar confirmaría la separación ilusoria que el fenómeno viene a desmontar.
«Indeed, I worry about this. I worry that the spiritual dimensions might overtake or even erase the physical dimensions in the mind of the reader. I do not wish this to be so. Indeed, my dual-aspect monism—which denies any final distinction between the “mental” and the “material”—implies that these two domains cannot be separated, since they share a fundamental ground or superreality that is both and neither.» — Kripal advierte contra la deriva espiritualizante de su propia lectura y reafirma que su monismo de doble aspecto no permite separar lo mental de lo material.
«It is not just the men. Women have these insectoid encounters too. And these sometimes function as a most powerful challenge to the spiritual or religious reading of the experience, which I have engaged in above.» — Kripal introduce el caso de una experienciante como contrapeso a su propia lectura espiritual del fenómeno.
«The encounters of Karin Austin are most instructive here. Austin was the personal assistant of the Harvard psychiatrist and abduction researcher John E. Mack in the last years of his life. It was Austin who drove Mack to the airport on his way to London, a trip from which he would not return alive (he was struck and killed by a drunk driver on September 27, 2004» — Kripal presenta a Karin Austin por su vínculo con John E. Mack y fecha la muerte del psiquiatra.
«Indeed, Mack includes in Passport to the Cosmos Austin’s drawing of what Austin calls “the fucking bug” (she likes to swear). I used the drawing, not knowing whose it was (Mack only cites “Karin”), in Mutants and Mystics to make a case that the iconography of Spider-Man displays an eerie familiarity with the contact experience.» — Kripal reconstruye la trayectoria del dibujo de Austin, que él mismo reprodujo sin saber de quién era, y su tesis sobre la iconografía de Spider-Man.
«Karin Austin comes from what she calls a “very straightforward materialist background.” She was raised in Florida in a Southern Baptist household (in the early 1990s she would listen to Rush Limbaugh). There was no place in her life for what she calls “California woo” or “New Age babble.» — Kripal subraya el origen materialista y bautista de la testigo, que descarta la explicación por expectativa cultural nuevaerista.
«Still, before she even had language, friendly gray beings with big black eyes floated through a window into her childhood bedroom one night. She called out to her sleeping mother to alert her to the “clowns” in her room. The beings were gone by the time her mother arrived. And she, like most mothers, assured the little one that she was just dreaming.» — Kripal fecha el primer episodio de Austin antes de que tuviera lenguaje, con la niña llamando payasos a los seres.
«What Austin calls the “bottom line” is that she woke up the next day and knew, beyond a shadow of any doubt, that “whatever is happening, has a very physical component.» — Kripal recoge la conclusión de la propia Austin, que es la que le sirve de contrapeso físico a su lectura espiritual.
«Austin has her hunches. She thinks it is entirely possible that the gray beings are some iterations of “human” that reached an evolutionary, biological dead end in our very distant future (thus the interest in, and compatibility with, human DNA), and that the bug was biomechanical, a kind of safety device for those future humans who were intervening in this world of ours.» — Kripal consigna la hipótesis de la propia Austin: grises como humanos futuros en callejón evolutivo, e insecto como dispositivo biomecánico.
«In 2020, it occurred to her that Google Earth could help her find the actual, physical place if it still existed. It turns out that the theme park with the campground, the opening in the trees, and the old rollercoaster is in Connecticut. It was temporarily closed down between 1992 and early 1994, so during her experience in 1993.» — Kripal presenta la corroboración física del escenario de Austin, localizado por satélite y con las fechas de cierre coincidiendo.
«The drawing of the rollercoaster and campground in the trees is a contemporary equivalent of Coleridge’s dream-flower that becomes physical after the dream, which was no simple dream.» — Kripal iguala el dibujo del desconocido con la flor soñada de Coleridge, el emblema que abrió el libro.
«Crucially, Austin points out that the details related above are from explicit memories that did not require hypnosis to recall.» — Kripal subraya que en este caso el recuerdo no pasó por hipnosis, lo que corta la objeción de la sugestión hipnótica.
«Option 1 is fascinating but, as far as I can tell, without any smoking gun. This option comes down to the speculation—and it really is just that—that Frederic Myers experienced (maybe through an available psychoactive substance, like opium, maybe through an endogenous release of DMT» — Kripal abre las cuatro opciones sobre el vínculo entre lo imaginal de Myers y los insectoides actuales, y declara la primera pura especulación sin prueba; la frase sigue con el suceso espectral insectoide, cuyo compuesto la extracción por programa une mal.
«In this suggestion, when he wrote of the wormy “larval” and strange “imaginal” maturity of the insect, or told his well-known parable about the caterpillar munching on the leaves and only vaguely recognizing itself in a butterfly that lands nearby (a parable for him about our supernormal capacities and how we barely recognize that these are signs of our future evolution), he knew personally of what he was writing. Myers, in this model at least, linked his three new words so tightly—supernormal, telepathy, imaginal—because this is what he knew in his own direct but private experience.» — Kripal desarrolla la opción 1 con la parábola de la oruga y la mariposa, y la mantiene como modelo hipotético.
«A weaker form of the same option, let us call it option 2, would be to suggest that Myers saw this pattern in his ethnographic cases and textual materials in some unspecified but nevertheless consistent way.» — Kripal formula la opción 2, que atribuye a Myers una intuición subliminal del patrón a partir de sus casos.
«Option 3 argues that the connection is simply accidental, a kind of historical fluke that is simply a function of my own overreaching mind. In this model, Myers just happened to pick an entomological term that just happens to be connected, visually and conceptually, to the abduction, contact, Indigenous, and psychedelic cases, and I am now inappropriately relating them because these just happen to be literatures about which I know something.» — Kripal enuncia contra sí mismo la opción del azar, es decir, que la conexión sea una sobreinterpretación suya.
«Option 4 counters with a strong physicalist challenge. It is most powerfully represented in this chapter by Karin Austin. It says (or swears) simply: “These things are physically real, and they are entering our three-dimensional reality in ways that we do not understand, and maybe cannot understand at our present evolutionary bottleneck.” But they are very real, more real than real in fact. Bug-like beings keep appearing in our folklore, mythology, and scholarship because there are bug-like beings.» — Kripal da la cuarta opción, la fisicalista, en la voz de Karin Austin: los seres insectoides aparecen en el folclor porque existen.
«I honestly do not know what to think for certain, but the only option I think is simply mistaken is option 3. As much as someone might want it to be so, these comparative reflections are not accidents, are not flukes.» — Kripal se abstiene entre las cuatro opciones y descarta solo la del azar.
«And I end where Vaeni ends—with a nonduality in which we share, or are, the Other, in which the aliens do not land because they are finally us. This is why I have long insisted that Vaeni is my teacher. He finds that remarkable, but I mean it. It’s the nonduality and the humor, together.» — Kripal cierra el capítulo suscribiendo la no dualidad de Vaeni: el otro somos nosotros.
«I do think these apparitional forms are often very deep, unconscious forms of cultural and historical memory of the Atlantic slave trade and Euro-American imperialism. That is why Black people and Indigenous Peoples have very different responses to those disks in the sky.» — Kripal explica por la memoria de la trata y del imperialismo la diferencia de respuesta ante el fenómeno según quién lo vea.
«But I also recognize that much of the general history of religions has been defined by a depressingly similar “servant spirituality,” to use the phrase of my colleague, the historian of early Christianity April DeConick.» — Kripal toma de April DeConick el término con que caracteriza la espiritualidad de siervo que domina la historia de las religiones.
«To be blunt about it, this servant spirituality, which is oh so biblical (with God as a king or lord in the heavens), has also been a slave mentality, as someone like Friedrich Nietzsche saw so keenly.» — Kripal alinea a DeConick con Nietzsche y declara acto seguido que los tiene por acertados a los dos.
«In short, I am suggesting a shared but largely unconscious experience-source hypothesis, what DeConick might call a “gnostic spirituality.” The different sets of cultural materials resonate so strongly because they are all based on the same kinds of human experiences, which themselves correlate very strongly with a shared neurobiology or human mind, which I understand in transmissive or filter terms, not in productive or epiphenomenal ones. In short, what we have here is a type of alien gnosis.» — Kripal nombra su propia posición: hipótesis de fuente experiencial compartida, con el cerebro como filtro y no como productor, y la llama gnosis alienígena.
«Still, I am challenged by Stuart Davis, Jeremy Vaeni, and Karin Austin. I worry that the above hypothesis is too mushy, not physical enough, too “spiritual,” to use a much-abused word. To cite Davis, there is not enough WTF in my thought. I also worry, with Austin now, that it is much too “male” and not surrendering or receiving enough. I have not let go. I suppose that is what I am trying to say with Vaeni’s nonduality material—that we need to be abolished in some profound way, because “we” are the problem itself. I stand challenged, then, and I am most open to be put into question, to be overcome.» — Kripal deja su propia hipótesis en entredicho por sus tres interlocutores y declara la objeción sin resolverla.
«I personally have this lingering conviction that I have never been able to shake. It is this: whatever produced the astonishing and multiple Sanskrit and vernacular literatures of the medieval and early modern South Asian Tantric traditions are now producing the equally astonishing and multiplex global literatures of the modern UFO encounter and abduction experience.» — Kripal declara como convicción persistente, no como demostración, que la fuente de la literatura tántrica y la de la abducción son la misma.
«The late art historian Michael Rabe, for example, described the sacred vimana, the interior “chariot” or “vehicle” of the Hindu temple complex, as “UFO-like.» — Kripal cita al historiador del arte Michael Rabe describiendo el *vimana* del templo hindú como semejante a un ovni.
«In the end, I think the South Asia Tantric materials and the contemporary abduction reports are connected, but I also wish to exempt Michael Rabe and David Gordon White of my sins.» — Kripal asume la conexión como propia y exime expresamente de ella a los dos indólogos que le sirvieron de punto de partida.
«obvious ones, like floating ships, sky baskets, flying boats, sex with the spirits, and star ancestors, through ghost lights, out-of-body journeys, and “implants” (shamanic crystals), down to very specific details, like small humanoids, owl people, mantis beings, large eyes, and even paralysis by a magical object held in the hand.» — Kripal enumera los mitemas ufológicos que dice presentes desde antiguo en las mitologías del mundo, incluidos los cristales chamánicos como implantes; la enumeración abre en la plana anterior.
«As I argued above, I suspect such patterns exist not because people make up the same stories everywhere, or because of any material transmission (oral tales, migrating texts, or cultural products), but because many of these folktale features are experience-based—that is, rooted in universal human potentials (in embodied consciousness).» — Kripal descarta la difusión y la invención paralela y se queda con la fuente experiencial como explicación del patrón.
«If you prefer a more contemporaneous framing—these are all expressions of a shared neurobiology and sexual physiology.» — Kripal ofrece la traducción biológica de su hipótesis: una neurobiología y una fisiología sexual comunes.
«With the Dutch Africanist anthropologist, initiated sangoma diviner, and intercultural theorist Wim van Binsbergen, I am of the conviction that “culture” and “identity” are themselves modern constructions, that human beings are far more potential and cross-culturally capable (“performative” in Van Binsbergen’s ritual terms) than our present models allow.» — Kripal se apoya en Wim van Binsbergen, antropólogo y adivino sangoma iniciado, para tratar cultura e identidad como construcciones modernas.
«Regardless of what many would want to insist, humanity has long been a single species, a species moreover that has absorbed, killed, or had sex with other related hominid species. More to my present point, the human species has also always been a cosmic one that has evolved among the stars.» — Kripal opone a la insistencia contemporánea en la diferencia la unidad de especie y su evolución bajo las estrellas.
«Precisely because of this evolved human nature and this shared cosmic environment, extraterrestrial mythemes are ancient and stable patterns, not modern, much less American, inventions.» — Kripal niega que los mitemas extraterrestres sean invención moderna ni estadounidense.
«Historically speaking, the first widely reported “alien abduction” case (which is not to say, at all, the first abduction case) was in Brazil, not in the United States. This was the 1957 abduction of the farmer and eventual lawyer Antonio Vilas-Boas.» — Kripal corrige la cronología corriente situando en Brasil el primer caso ampliamente difundido, con la salvedad de que no fue el primero.
«Significantly, its sci-fi mythology already involved an implied racial mixing (Spanish and Indigenous, hence the doubled ancestry of Vilas-Boas), an electromagnetic beginning, the production and exchange of sexual fluids, and an evolutionary esotericism in the form of a divine-human offspring pointing toward some kind of “humalien” futurity.» — Kripal desglosa los elementos ya presentes en el caso brasileño de 1957, incluido el esoterismo evolutivo de la descendencia divino-humana.
«It was the slightly later American case of the civil rights activists and mixed-race couple Barney and Betty Hill (another racial mixing), which took place, as already noted, on September 19–20, 1961, that entered American public culture through John G. Fuller’s The Interrupted Journey (1966) and reinforced many of the narrative elements already present in the earlier Brazilian Vilas-Boas case, while also laying down new ones.» — Kripal traza la entrada del relato a la cultura estadounidense por el libro de John G. Fuller sobre los Hill.
«The cover alone of Communion is arguably the most famous and the most culturally reproduced cover in American publishing history.» — Kripal atribuye a la portada de *Communion*, pintada por Ted Jacobs, la fijación del ícono del gris en la cultura popular.
«What people do not generally know about that iconic cover image is that Jacobs was a crime artist—that is, an artist who recreated the visages of criminals for the sake of police investigation.» — Kripal añade el dato de oficio del retratista de la portada de *Communion*: hacía retratos hablados para la policía.
«Strieber would later bravely describe the original abduction as a rape. Again, there was no consent. Vila-Boas and Strieber were both raped by female entities. Let us be clear and blunt about that.» — Kripal nombra la violación sin eufemismo en los dos casos fundacionales; la fuente escribe aquí Vila-Boas y una plana antes Vilas-Boas.
«Obviously, such contemporary cases are not the same as the Sanskrit medieval stories, but they appear to be phenomenologically related in some uncanny ways: the large almond eyes of the flying female abductors; the energetic effects in the lower spine that are often reported at the beginning of such abductions; the endless reports of flight, be it out-of-body or empirical; and the production of bodily fluids—blood, semen, and even feces.» — Kripal acota que los casos no son el mismo y enumera los rasgos que a su juicio los emparientan fenomenológicamente.
«Indeed, Whitley Strieber even suggested in Communion that the triangular form imprinted on his body during his original abduction account may be related to the yantra, or “sacred diagram” or geometrical form, of the Hindu goddess Kali and what he describes as the “Indian Tantras.» — Kripal consigna que el propio Strieber ligó la marca triangular de su cuerpo al *yantra* de Kali.
«Similarly, the Indian Sanskrit stories draw on millennia of mythical exempla and philosophical thought on the experience of human deification and the identification of seminal retention and superhuman power (siddhi), powers which traditionally include and indeed foreground the spiritual or physical power of flight.» — Kripal describe el complejo sánscrito de deificación, retención seminal y *siddhi*, con el vuelo a la cabeza de los poderes.
«Moreover, I see no way to affirm one such cultural complex, say, the medieval South Asian Tantric complex, as worthy of our historical attention and professional expertise and another, say, the modern ufological complex, as less so. I think such moves, which, alas, are all too common, are entirely arbitrary and are forms of boundary policing and cultural essentializing (not to mention colonizing) that prevent us from understanding what is actually going on in our folklore, our cultures, and, indeed, in our own backyards and bodies.» — Kripal declara arbitraria la jerarquía académica que dignifica el material tántrico medieval y desdeña el ufológico contemporáneo.
«I often joke that if an entity from the sky lands in your backyard and engages you in supersexual intercourse, this is obviously hallucination or pathology, or just a wish (there is the psychoanalytic theory of the fantastic). If, however, this takes place in an ancient manuscript, preferably one in a difficult language, then it is “religion” or “history” and can be analyzed endlessly (but never really taken truly seriously; never taken as actually having happened). When we put these two events together and refuse to privilege one over the other, all hell breaks loose.» — Kripal formula en broma la doble vara del gremio: el mismo suceso es patología si es contemporáneo y religión si está en un manuscrito antiguo.
«As big as these ideas are, they are all simply means or ways to explore and better understand Kevin’s developed worldview, a set of new realities that he will variously call an emergent monism, a neutral monism, or, perhaps most accurately, a Platonic surrealism.» — Kripal nombra la cosmovisión de su interlocutor anónimo con los tres rótulos que el propio Kevin usa.
«Kevin often writes me that “reality is what two or more can experience together.”10 He has quantum mechanical reasons for saying that: he is of the conviction that a physical event comes into existence through participation—that is, through a certain twoness but also through a kind of occult sociality that materializes physical reality. There is no ultimate subjectivity or objectivity deep down. Both emerge together from a deeper source, as does any friendship or society.» — Kripal expone la tesis participativa de Kevin, con su sociabilidad oculta que materializa lo físico.
«Perhaps because of this Indigenous family background or genetic line, he writes and speaks often of a shamanic worldview, including a ritual conviction that the proper intentions and rituals can manifest physical reality. Toward these same ritual ends, he does not hesitate to combine Hindu subtle physiology and Indigenous American ritual forms. These are available cultural tools for him. Nothing more. Nothing less.» — Kripal describe el eclecticismo ritual de *Kevin*, que mezcla fisiología sutil hindú y formas indígenas americanas como herramientas disponibles.
«He ended up abusing alcohol and was hospitalized in the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital with a diagnosis of “schizotypal personality” and “magical thinking” (there’s an easy out for the debunking reader» — Kripal consigna el diagnóstico psiquiátrico de su interlocutor y anticipa que servirá de salida fácil al lector escéptico; la frase se cierra en la línea siguiente.
«I should add that I never made such an observation, much less such a diagnosis, until he offered it to me.» — Kripal deslinda su papel: el diagnóstico de autismo lo aportó el propio Kevin, no él.
«The autism, it turns out, is one key, and not just to Kevin’s life story but to spiritual, visionary, and trance accomplishments in the history of religions in general. Kevin firmly believes that many of the greatest saints and mystics in history were autistic as we understand that term today.» — Kripal presenta la tesis de Kevin sobre el autismo de los grandes místicos como clave de lectura de la historia de las religiones.
«She has written extensively that autism and psychical gifts commonly appear together and can be psycho-physiologically related (she relates both to the mediation of a dominant right brain hemisphere).» — Kripal apoya esa tesis en la psiquiatra Diane Hennacy Powell, que asocia autismo y dones psíquicos al predominio del hemisferio derecho.
«Darold A. Treffert has made a related case in his Extraordinary People: Understanding Savant Syndrome.18 He points out that such a savant syndrome, which he also describes as “the genius within us,” likely correlates with a dominant right hemisphere and may, in some cases, have to do with excessively high testosterone levels in the developing fetus» — Kripal suma a Darold Treffert y su hipótesis hormonal sobre el síndrome del sabio; la frase sigue anunciando que las hormonas volverán en el pensamiento de Kevin.
«Cutchin also notes the likely relationship between autism and sainthood and speculates about the rocketing rates of autism in the population coinciding with the sharp rise of the alien abduction experience.» — Kripal recoge de Joshua Cutchin la correlación especulativa entre el alza del autismo y la de la experiencia de abducción.
«He will invoke his training in computer science and write of two very different kinds of being: a constructed or conditioned consciousness that defines the social ego and a cosmic but nonhuman Mind, which are in turn constructed or mediated by the two hemispheres of the brain, one “digital” (the left hemisphere that constructs the nonexistent social ego and works on an on/off or yes/no logic) and one “analog” (the right hemisphere that mediates a very real Mind and is more holistic, pictorial, and atemporal).» — Kripal traduce el modelo de Kevin: ego social digital del hemisferio izquierdo frente a Mente analógica del derecho.
«For Kevin, all patterns preexist in the “Cosmic Imaginal” and bubble up into new life as a result of both Darwinian and non-Darwinian interactions. That is simply what is.» — Kripal expone el Imaginal Cósmico de Kevin como depósito previo de todos los patrones.
«The two hemispheres of the brain are physiologically “to the side” (para-) of one another, even as they work together as a single brain. Hence the Human as Two (and One). The right side mediates Mind. It is literally “para-normal,” to the left hemisphere, which constructs and projects the rational ego as a still-evolving and now self-directed cosmic interface. Here is the neuroanatomy of impossible thinking.» — Kripal recupera la etimología de *paranormal* de Maxwell y la aplica a la anatomía cerebral: el hemisferio derecho está literalmente al lado del izquierdo.
«For example, he uses several Sanskrit words and categories to describe his practice and experiences (like urdhvaretas, kundalini, pingala, and ida), but he cannot always pronounce them correctly. He knows that, and he tells me. And that is a big part of his point. These are just words, after all, words that, for him, point to something physiological and hormonal, something physically real. So, as words, be they Sanskrit or English, and however they are pronounced, they are simply not important. In his own terms: “Wrapping things in Sanskrit doesn’t do anything for me; I’d rather experience it for myself, not be lost in cultural concepts.» — Kripal consigna la indiferencia deliberada de Kevin al vocabulario sánscrito, que él toma por señal de algo fisiológico y no por autoridad textual.
«Take urdhvaretas. This is a common Sanskrit term in Indian thought and mythology that refers to the “seed” or “semen” (retas) being directed “upward” or “backward” (urdhva), often, it is claimed, through a subtle spinal channel, which is sometimes considered to be the spine itself. In any case, this is an especially common category to explain the ascetic redeployment of semen or “seed” toward spiritual or nonsexual ends, up the spinal column, as it were.» — Kripal define el *urdhvaretas* de la tradición india como reconducción ascética del semen por el canal espinal sutil.
«For Kevin, such an idea “is both bullshit and entirely true.” Literal semen does not go up the spinal channel, which is what yogic subtle physiology strongly suggests (with all that “seed” talk), but sexualized energy does. More specifically, testosterone, which can easily cross the blood-to-brain barrier and does indeed travel from the genitals to the brain and back under the right conditions.» — Kripal expone la relectura hormonal de Kevin: la doctrina es falsa en su literalidad y cierta en lo que describe, si se lee testosterona donde dice semen.
«The yogic tradition is entirely correct, then, even if it sometimes literalizes its sex-to-spirit claim in ways that are physiologically false (this would also, by the way, explain the maleness of some of these yogic traditions—they would be about the supereffects of testosterone, after all).» — Kripal salva la tradición yóguica corrigiendo su literalidad, y deriva de ahí una explicación del sesgo masculino de esas tradiciones.
«The ideas here draw from a range of cultural traditions: Hindu Tantric yoga, modern medicine, and ceremonial magic, among them.» — Kripal nombra las tres vertientes que confluyen en la práctica de Kevin, incluida la magia ceremonial.
«The latter, Kevin explains, comes about by confronting trauma or spiritual projections and moving away from the ego of the person to the ego or Self of the larger universe, which Kevin calls by a number of names: “our ego,” the “Universal Subjective,” the “Imaginal,” and even the “true Soul.” There is only one such true Soul, and we all belong to it. It does not belong to any of us.» — Kripal enumera los nombres con que Kevin llama al Sí mismo del universo y su consecuencia: el alma verdadera es una y no es de nadie.
«producer and projector (which is what the left hemisphere does do) but also as a mediator and translator of Mind (which is what the right hemisphere does do). This is how one becomes the universe, because one already is the universe.» — Kripal traduce la práctica a neuroanatomía: el cerebro también media y traduce Mente, y por eso uno se vuelve el universo que ya es. La frase abre en la plana anterior.
«None of this, it should be noted, constitutes an “escape to fantasy lands”—that is, into religious mythology or belief (the Marxist model of the imagination). Rather, there is a strong and practical focus on “the one and only tool we have to evolve,” the interface between the human being and the cosmos—which is to say, the social and psychological ego: “The friction between our ego and the physical world is the true cauldron of evolution and transcendence in-place. You don’t escape to fantasy spiritual worlds. You see that where you stand is already radiant.» — Kripal distingue la práctica de Kevin de la evasión religiosa: el ego y su fricción con el mundo son el crisol, no el obstáculo.
«Very much a part of this is the classic dialectic between asceticism and mysticism, between “keeping it in your pants” and coming (or not coming) in order to parabond with the universe: “Hence my years of abstinence, until about 30,” says Kevin.» — Kripal sitúa la abstinencia declarada de Kevin en la dialéctica clásica entre ascetismo y misticismo.
«One might think from some of the above comments that Kevin is a materialist or reductionist, that he understands kundalini phenomena to be the special effects of sex hormones and human physiology. One might assume a kind of simple hydraulics: push it down here, and it will pop up there. Such a (Freudian) reductionism is admittedly tempting, but it is finally incorrect.» — Kripal se adelanta a la lectura reduccionista de la hipótesis hormonal y la rechaza.
«there can be no reduction in a monistic world.» — la razón que Kripal da para rechazarla: en un mundo monista no hay dos niveles entre los cuales reducir.
«some much larger cosmic signal, receivers, moreover, that can be “tuned” by manipulating the sexual system, hormones and all. Even that set of metaphors is incorrect, though, since, in truth, everything is already connected. There is no receiver, no sender, and no signal in such a monism» — Kripal ofrece la metáfora del receptor sintonizable y acto seguido la retira: en un monismo no hay emisor ni receptor separados. La frase abre en la plana anterior.
«In the end, then, human sexuality can be “flipped”; it can be turned inside out or upside down until it reveals its cosmic nature and manifests its potential ability to parabond with the universe. Of course, it can be flipped again to discuss things like testosterone and oxytocin. Again (and again); it goes both ways. Same difference. It does not matter, or mind.» — Kripal sostiene que la descripción cósmica y la hormonal son reversibles y equivalentes, sin que una reduzca a la otra.
«Kevin knows well what I have written about the Human as Two within a dual-aspect monism, so he playfully writes of his own views as the Human as Three (he likes to tease me). Actually, what I would call his ecology of the whole is in full alignment with the dual-aspect monism that I find most creative and helpful. We are in truth saying the same thing, literally the same thing.» — Kripal consigna la diferencia de conteo con su interlocutor —dos frente a tres— y declara que la discrepancia es de vocabulario, no de fondo.
«If the human being is fortunate enough and can experience this social self or consciousness “die” or, to use the computer metaphor, temporarily go offline, then a deeper or higher form of being might appear, as it does in the yogic traditions under the Sanskrit rubric of nirvikalpa samadhi, or “absorption without thought or form.” This level of being Kevin calls “Awareness.” Such a form of being human (or being nonhuman or superhuman) does not need a body to exist, as conditioned consciousness definitely does (unless, of course, you want to call the entire quantum computer universe a “body”). Put most accurately, then, Awareness is entirely independent of any such individual biological organism, of any body. It is, if you will, an Awareness of the whole by the whole. It is the ultimate ecological thought.» — Kripal identifica la Consciencia de Kevin con el *nirvikalpa samadhi* yóguico y la declara independiente de todo organismo.
«But even this Awareness is not ultimate. Awareness, too, emerges from a deeper level of reality that Kevin calls by different names. The key here, though, is that this level of being is infinitely potential and so neither “material” nor “mental” in any ordinary sense. In philosophical terms, Kevin’s views are very much an example of neutral or dual-aspect monism again, with matter and mind, or the objective and the subjective, both emerging from a deeper monistic ground.» — Kripal sitúa el tercer nivel de Kevin, ni material ni mental, y lo clasifica como monismo neutral.
«There is an important corollary to such a philosophical vision— namely, that one cannot translate easily, or at all, from the ultimate level of Mind or the One to the embodied and socialized level of conditioned consciousness.» — Kripal saca el corolario de intraducibilidad entre el nivel último y el de la conciencia condicionada.
«The mystical is not the moral. The moral is not the mystical. And it is a great mistake to confuse or collapse these two very different scales.» — Kripal separa expresamente la escala mística de la moral y declara error confundirlas.
«This is why mystical states are so difficult to maintain. This is why “God hides.” If God did not hide, if such states of pure Awareness were easily accessible, “if unary consciousness didn’t limit Itself to [or hide in] Awareness, then each temporary being, each ‘delusional being’ would have all the other beings blasted into it and could not function or exist. . . . Awareness is God holding his breath, so that we might all exist.”35 Awareness is the One when it is not being anything in particular, when it is not reflecting back on itself as consciousness of something else. Awareness is God hiding.» — Kripal expone, con la fórmula de Kevin, por qué la divinidad se oculta: sin ese ocultamiento ningún ser particular podría existir.
«Hence, Kevin’s favorite expression for this bigger vision of reality is “Platonic surrealism.” It is “Platonic” for its insistence on a deeper level of truth and reality that is not accessible to human reason and opinion. It is “surreal” for the wildly symbolic, irrational, nonrational, and playful ways it expresses its endless possibilities and potentials, not unlike a surrealist artist trying to paint the superreal or surreal unconscious.» — Kripal desglosa los dos componentes del rótulo de Kevin, el platónico y el surrealista.
«He will also insist that no single myth, narrative, or belief is true. In some profound sense, they all are true since they are all artistic expressions of this same “Platonic Surrealist Unconscious.” There is not no meaning. There is too much meaning. It is not that this or that culture is right. It is that everyone is right.» — Kripal recoge la consecuencia comparativa de Kevin: no falta sentido, sobra, y por eso todas las culturas aciertan.
«Kevin likes to tell this story to make a simple set of points. First, human beings need to imagine things. They need to tell stories. But, second, the things or stories themselves do not matter much and can never be final. Only the little red wagon—that is, the imagination—truly matters. That is because the imagination is grounded in reality itself. Actually, then, it is not that humans need to imagine. It is that the universe is constantly imagining itself, including in and as human beings.» — Kripal expone la teoría del carrito rojo: lo contrabandeado es la imaginación misma, y quien imagina es el universo a través del humano.
«What Kevin calls “sole source rationalism” (and traces back to Descartes) is simply mistaken, then. We are not, nor will we ever be, simply rational creatures knowing an objective world. Reality is imagining itself, including the reasonable self that Descartes imagined to be real (but is not). Until we can really see this—that reality itself is imaginal by nature and intent—we will not be healed.» — Kripal recoge el rechazo de Kevin al racionalismo de fuente única y su consecuencia: el sujeto racional cartesiano también es imaginado.
«Many of them are victims of “the train wreck of monotheism.” Basically, believers in Christian monotheism damn themselves» — Kripal cita el juicio de Kevin sobre el monoteísmo cristiano; la frase sigue en la plana siguiente diciendo que sus creyentes sufren sus propias proyecciones.
«Actually, it can be any way: “I don’t care what people ‘summon.’ Let them summon the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.”38 Again, it is not what is in the little red wagon. It is the little red wagon. “I don’t want to tell people what to imagine. . . . I want to show them how to imagine.» — Kripal remata la teoría del carrito con la indiferencia declarada de Kevin al contenido de lo que se invoca.
«Probably one of the most difficult aspects of Kevin’s thought, which flows directly out of the teachings above, is his insistence that we do not have souls—that the human is really little more than an animal, an animal, moreover, that is constantly creating and projecting tulpas, or thought-forms (including and especially “the soul”), so as to imagine that it is real, that it somehow matters in the bigger picture.» — Kripal enuncia la tesis más dura de Kevin: no hay alma, y el alma misma es un *tulpa* que el animal humano proyecta.
«It is in conversation with this three-body doctrine, and especially the third body, that the concept of the tulpa was born, very recently, it turns out. The word first appears in the work of Alexandra David-Neel in her 1929 book Magic and Mystery in Tibet. The tulpa thus appears in Euro-American culture at a particular historic moment within, as we shall see, early modern Theosophy and paranormal American currents in conversation with Tibetan or Vajrayana Buddhism, which was in turn deeply informed by the earlier Mahayana traditions. It is all one big fusion, “appropriation” all the way down.» — Kripal fecha en 1929 la entrada del *tulpa* a la cultura euroamericana y la sitúa en el cruce de teosofía, corrientes paranormales y budismo vajrayana.
«Eventually, in American folklore—particularly through the writings of authors like John Keel (who was very influential in the UFO and cryptid worlds, particularly for his book The Mothman Prophecies)—a tulpa came to mean a relatively unconscious or “accidental” collective mind-created entity that can become independent and turn on its creator in disturbing ways, a meaning that is quite distant from the compassionate and intentional action of a Buddha, bodhisattva, or even possessing spirit of the earlier Tibetan traditions.» — Kripal traza el desplazamiento semántico del *tulpa* en el folclor estadounidense, de emanación compasiva a entidad accidental que se vuelve contra su creador.
«Still, the tulpa remains a product of a most collaborative and productive cross-cultural dialogue. It cannot be reduced to this or that colonial, Theosophical, paranormal, or Tibetan Buddhist origin or intention.» — Kripal se niega a reducir el *tulpa* a un solo origen, colonial, teosófico, paranormal o tibetano.
«Kevin appears to be reliving this shamanic practice in a Buddhist or Theosophical form (Vajrayana Buddhism, by the way, is often associated with an earlier Tibetan shamanism called Bon).» — Kripal lee la pérdida y recreación del alma de Kevin como la práctica chamánica de recuperación del alma, en clave budista y teosófica.
«Kevin will also sometimes argue for what I once called, following the American writer Charles Fort, the Earth-farm theory; that is, the idea that we are the livestock or biological experiment of higher life-forms.» — Kripal recupera de Charles Fort la teoría de la granja terrestre y se la atribuye también a Kevin.
«We are inside an immense environmental food chain, but we don’t generally know it, and we don’t have to be. Religion is a way we can orient ourselves within this hard ecological truth but also, I assume, imagine and practice ourselves out of this feeding cycle. So understood, religion becomes an evolutionary adaptation, not just to social or biological pressures (of course, it is that too) but also to what are occult or hidden presences and symbiotic feeding processes.» — Kripal deriva de ahí una definición de la religión como adaptación evolutiva a presencias ocultas, y marca como suposición propia la salida del ciclo.
«I cannot help but add here that there is a large literature on alien or cryptid creatures “feeding” on human emotion, including and especially sexual arousal (we saw this theme in chapter 2 with Bobby and the mantis and distantly suggested in the UFO encounter of John Lennon and his lover). Once again, Kevin is hardly alone in his thoughts and visions.» — Kripal remite el motivo del alimento emocional a una literatura amplia, para descartar que sea idiosincrasia de su interlocutor.
«Kevin explains that the human mind must dissociate from the social ego to become or know the projections of a god, demon, monster, poltergeist, or soul. But the human psyche is simply not going to do this under happy, healthy circumstances. It generally takes trauma and torture.» — Kripal expone la condición que Kevin pone al fenómeno: hace falta disociación, y la disociación la produce el trauma.
«Trauma, after all, is a strong correlation of so much extreme religious experience. Happy, healthy people do not experience poltergeists. These alleged ghosts, as I have joked, never show up as rainbows, kittens, and friendly unicorns. They are always breaking, scratching, and screaming shit—projected trauma, suffering, and self-torture.» — Kripal suscribe la correlación con el trauma y la ilustra con el carácter invariablemente hostil del poltergeist.
«This is why paranormal phenomena so commonly appear in or around near-death experiences, extreme illness, war, the evils of racism, and social suffering.» — Kripal enumera los contextos donde el fenómeno se concentra, todos de sufrimiento.
«The negative paranormal, in short, is a clear witness to the social suffering that spawns it (and the social justice for which it cries and haunts). That is the simple truth to it.» — Kripal convierte el paranormal negativo en testimonio del sufrimiento social que lo engendra.
«parts of ourselves. We may be God, but we are also the Devil.» — cierre de esa tesis: para Kripal los demonios son partes escindidas de uno mismo, no reconocidas como propias; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«I have often observed a particular phenomenological feature in modern alien abduction cases: the experience might involve classic kundalini-like phenomena, such as rushes of energy in the spinal region and brain core, accompanying altered states of consciousness, and the sensation of out-of-body floating or flight.» — Kripal señala los rasgos kundalínicos que dice haber observado repetidamente en los casos de abducción.
«Similar phenomena are also evident and often commented on in the anthropology of African healing practices, sometimes as a “rising heat” in the spinal region.» — Kripal amplía el paralelo a la antropología de las prácticas curativas africanas y su calor ascendente.
«Indeed, in one striking email, Kevin said that “Kundalini can be viewed as a UFO encounter inside one’s body,” and “a UFO encounter can be viewed as a Kundalini encounter outside of one’s body.” Referring to the chakras, or “circles,” arranged along the central column within the subtle body of kundalini yoga, the famous spheres of ufological lore become the “dislodged chakras from the body.” Or, if you prefer the flip, “chakras are like ‘orbs’ captured by the body.» — Kripal reproduce la ecuación reversible de Kevin entre kundalini y ovni, con los chakras como orbes y viceversa.
«Before we go there, it is important to recall something on which Kevin often insists: “Kundalini is the Mother of Illusion. Maya and all that.” Put a bit differently, Kevin does not literally believe all the phenomena that appear to him, and yet they happen. He understands perfectly well that they are illusions, but they are illusions actually appearing, truly manifesting, that serve legitimate purposes, whether we understand them at the time or not.» — Kripal explica la postura de Kevin ante sus propias visiones: no las cree literalmente y sostiene a la vez que ocurren.
«There is another way of saying this: “Consciousness is the Trickster.”52 As we have seen above, Kevin means something very specific by “consciousness.” He does not mean anything particularly noble or desirable. He means what we might think of as ordinary banal consciousness, the ego. This is partly the reason Kevin will regularly qualify his language and visions with phrases like “in part,” “in a manner of speaking,” “in a sense,” and, my personal paradoxical favorite, “the metaphor that was not a metaphor.» — Kripal recoge las fórmulas de reserva con que Kevin acota cada afirmación, incluida la metáfora que no era metáfora.
«In the end, these are illusions, but not in the Western sense of not really real. They are illusions in the Indian sense of maya, of the magically “made,” “measured,” or “constructed.” They are also real illusions because reality itself is an illusion. Nothing we know is truly physical, truly real in a materialist sense. Nothing. Again, a profound neutral monism or idealism, a Platonic surrealism, ultimately shines through Kevin’s thought.» — Kripal distingue la ilusión occidental de la *maya* india, que es lo mágicamente hecho y medido, y de ahí la realidad de la ilusión.
«Strikingly, Kevin has not read Henry Corbin. But he has read Jenny Randles, the ufologist who has famously called this same middle space or eerie zone “the Oz effect,” after The Wizard of Oz (1939). There is that fundamental fuzziness again.» — Kripal subraya que su interlocutor llegó al mundo intermedio sin leer a Corbin, por la vía del efecto Oz de Jenny Randles.
«Comedy aside, this utterly bizarre event totally “messed up” Kevin for five full years. There was also what he describes as an overwhelming “data stream,” which went on for years but out of which he could make out nothing coherent. There was just too much information.» — Kripal consigna el costo del episodio para su interlocutor y el flujo de datos ilegible que lo siguió por años.
«Personally, I am not certain how such a quick diagnosis helps, given that so many of the features of Kevin’s summoning are present in other reported UFO encounters (the triangular shape, the black color, the lights, the peopled neighborhood, the utter silence, the gliding, the interaction, and even the rivets). I suppose every such witness could be having a psychotic break. Still, such an explanation ceases to explain much. I am suspicious of the suspicion.» — Kripal recoge que el propio Kevin admite el brote psicótico como posibilidad y responde que el diagnóstico, aplicado a todos los testigos, deja de explicar.
«We can begin by observing that the UFO summoning is part of Kevin’s larger argument that paranormal phenomena are essentially pieces or parts of ourselves that we have projected outward, usually in a traumatic situation or because of a previous trauma and its dissociative nature. These things are projected outward so that we can read them and let them go. They are “semiotic” in nature; that is, they are communications that must be interpreted, even if we cannot fully interpret them» — Kripal resume la teoría de Kevin: el fenómeno es una parte escindida proyectada afuera para poder leerse y soltarse.
«Construed as such, it becomes obvious that such paranormal events are not entirely random, much less meaningless. On the contrary, they are deeply meaningful and can become a part of a healing process.» — Kripal saca la consecuencia terapéutica: el suceso paranormal es significativo y puede integrarse a una curación.
«The summoning of the UFO, like the appearance of the barrel-chested dwarf or the kundalini phenomena for that matter, was all about letting go, letting the illusory parts of us die and wither away so that we can talk to a more evolved form of life.» — Kripal unifica los tres episodios de Kevin bajo el mismo sentido: soltar lo ilusorio del yo.
«Finally, allow me to observe what I hope is fairly obvious by now: there is an indubitable comparative base at work here in the shamanic, kundalini, and UFO literatures, and one that is not culturally arbitrary or historically relative—the human neurological system, or body-brain-spine organism.» — Kripal fija la base del comparatismo en el organismo neurológico, no en la difusión cultural.
«Medieval South Asians and Europeans had spines, brains, and sex hormones, just like modern Americans and Brazilians, and contemporary French, Japanese, and West African peoples.» — Kripal justifica el paralelo transcultural por lo que todos los cuerpos comparten.
«It is the spine, the brain, and the body and—lest I be heard reductively—whatever in turn might shine or transmit through these organic neurological machines.» — Kripal atribuye el fenómeno al cuerpo y añade en la misma frase la cláusula que impide leerlo como reducción.
«The human biological form, after all, need not be thought of as the producer of all this cross-cultural commonality. It might just as well be thought of as the reducer of something else that is fundamentally not us, that is» — Kripal invierte el papel del cuerpo: no productor sino reductor de algo que no es humano; la frase se cierra en la plana siguiente.
«This in no way means that ordinary matter itself is not sacred, is not “radiant,” to use Kevin’s words again. It, too, is “an artifact of Mind”—that is, an expression of some deeper structure or source, call it math or God.» — Kripal cierra el capítulo declarando sagrada la materia ordinaria, con las palabras de Kevin.
«Indeed, science is currently producing endless new realities in which we can imagine and create anew.» — Kripal atribuye a la ciencia la producción efectiva de realidades nuevas, no solo su descripción.
«I do not pretend to understand that all as a socialized ego, as a relative and historical form of consciousness. Nor am I suggesting that we should sign our names to any of the “movies” that have been described so poignantly above by this suffering visionary, whose very thought insists that paranormal phenomena appear in intense trauma and are deceptive by nature.» — Kripal se abstiene de suscribir la visión de Kevin y recuerda que la propia doctrina de Kevin declara engañoso el fenómeno.
«Still, I remain utterly convinced that it would do us well to listen hard and long to Kevin, educated as he is in the hard sciences but also adept in the modern spiritualities. He can teach us to think impossibly, and to laugh impossibly. If we listen to such a being long enough, we begin to suspect that something else might well be beaming through us, taking possession of us, projecting sci-fi movie after sci-fi movie in our dreams, visions, religions, and even in our own backyards. We begin to seriously entertain the likelihood that something is flying around in our folklore.» — Kripal cierra el capítulo pidiendo escuchar a Kevin sin firmarlo, y remata que lo que vuela en el folclor somos nosotros.
«I want to shift my discussion now and move from describing the impossible to theorizing it.1 Of course, we have also been doing this theorizing above, but I now want to do it more explicitly and systematically. This is how we make the impossible possible. More stories, however astonishing, are not going to get us there. We must demonstrate a way to contextualize and locate those astonishing stories in some larger superstory, otherwise known as a theory, to make them meaningful and so plausible.» — Kripal declara el giro de la segunda parte: acumular relatos no basta, hace falta una teoría que los vuelva plausibles.
«We know the impossible happens everywhere and everywhen. What we do not know is how (the scientific question) or why (the humanist question).» — Kripal reparte la pregunta pendiente entre las dos culturas: el cómo a la ciencia, el porqué a las humanidades.
«really comes down to the conviction that it is consciousness itself that is the source of all knowledge and truth—also helped birth the modern comparative study of religion, a practice that vibrates at the core of impossible thinking, mine anyway.» — Kripal deriva el comparatismo religioso moderno de la convicción fenomenológica de que la conciencia es la fuente del conocimiento; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«They certainly developed the latter noun, phenomenology, but mostly, or just entirely, ignored the all-important adjective—transcendental.» — Kripal reprocha a Heidegger, Sartre y Merleau-Ponty haber conservado el sustantivo de Husserl y descartado el adjetivo.
«Working precisely out of these transcendental structures, Husserl called for a “new science” that he believed underlay all forms of knowledge, including and especially the mathematical and scientific ones in which he was originally trained. Such a new science is aimed at the realization of what Husserl called the “transcendental Ego” or “absolute consciousness,” which constitutes an “independent realm of direct experience.» — Kripal expone la ciencia nueva de Husserl y su meta, la conciencia absoluta como reino independiente de experiencia directa.
«He saw such a shift to the transcendental standpoint as a “Copernican reversal” (what I have called a “flip”) and described it as “the greatest existential conversion that is expected of mankind.» — Kripal equipara el giro trascendental de Husserl con lo que él llama el vuelco, y recoge la magnitud que Husserl le atribuía.
«Unsurprisingly, Husserl also worked with a most obvious model of the Human as Two. There is in fact no such thing as the psychological ego. There is only the transcendental ego» — Kripal encuentra en Husserl su propio esquema del Humano como Dos, con el ego psicológico declarado inexistente; la frase termina en la plana siguiente.
«It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Husserl had known some kind of direct mystical experience of this absolute consciousness or transcendental I outside the (nonexistent) social or little psychological self, and that, as Fred Hanna has put it, there is good reason to believe that “Husserl had contacted regions of experience that the vast majority of phenomenologists, during his lifetime and thereafter, simply did not encounter.» — Kripal plantea como sospecha, apoyado en Fred Hanna, que Husserl escribía desde una experiencia mística propia.
«This is also why Husserl so admired Plato, why he once wrote so appreciatively of Buddhist analyses of consciousness,11 and why there are allusions in his conversations to the questions of collective memory, of the monadic unity or plurality of transcendental subjectivity, and even of telepathy as “problems for the future.» — Kripal reúne los indicios: Platón, el budismo y la telepatía como problemas futuros en las conversaciones de Husserl.
«This is why he once quipped that there were “whole sentences” of the medieval mystical writer Meister Eckhart that could be “taken over by him unchanged.”13 Indeed, Colin Wilson has described Husserl and phenomenology itself as “a prosaic way of developing the mystical faculty,” which he compares to the creative vision of poets and painters.» — Kripal cita a Husserl sobre Eckhart y a Colin Wilson sobre la fenomenología como vía prosaica a la facultad mística.
«Husserl’s phenomenological method, for example, begins by refusing or “bracketing” (the famous epoché) what he called the “naturalist standpoint” of the sciences and their naive sense-based positivisms about the “fact-world.» — Kripal describe la *epoché* como suspensión del punto de vista naturalista de las ciencias.
«He calls this apophatic move the “phenomenological reduction” and considered it the necessary secret of obtaining genuine philosophical truth. One cannot arrive at absolute consciousness until one has let go of all sensual and materialist assumptions» — Kripal lee la reducción fenomenológica como movimiento apofático, emparentado con el decir negativo de la mística.
«study of mystical literature in the three Abrahamic traditions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam), arguing for what he calls the “verticality” of religious experience—that is, a global sense of “up,” “above,” or “outside” normal human experience and functioning.» — Kripal define la verticalidad de Anthony Steinbock como sentido global de lo que está por encima o fuera del funcionamiento humano ordinario; la frase abre en la línea anterior.
«Steinbock’s extreme suspicion of ordinary assumptions about the world and the nature and reach of the human being should strike a very familiar chord to the reader by now, as should his celebration of phenomenological reflection as “hyper-normal,” a word that literally means “super-normal.» — Kripal hace notar que el *hyper-normal* de Steinbock traduce literalmente el *supernormal* de Myers.
«Idolatry, for Steinbock, is the very “negation of verticality.” It sets itself against the epiphany of unconditional or absolute love that is so often given in mystical experience within the Abrahamic traditions.» — Kripal expone la idolatría de Steinbock como aplanamiento que niega la verticalidad, y que él encuentra por igual en el secularismo y en el fundamentalismo.
«Alas, the observation that the contemporary academy recognizes only the horizontal or the social is something of an understatement. Unsurprisingly, a figure like Husserl with his pure phenomenology and search for absolute consciousness has been almost entirely forgotten in the contemporary study of religion. Endless reductions of human experience to language, representation, society, brain, and bad politics (but no actual subject) have become the standard fare. In such an ideological culture, what Husserl wanted to put aside as the “natural attitude” has, ironically, become the only attitude.» — Kripal describe la inversión: la actitud natural que Husserl suspendía es hoy la única admitida en el estudio de la religión.
«In the spirit of the impossible, Steinbock will insist that “in principle, one should be open to all kinds of givenness, which is to say, all types of experience, without discrimination, no matter how paradoxical the givens may seem to be.”21 He will insist that academic philosophy has arbitrarily sliced off whole realms of givenness, of human experience, especially those that do not conform to the widespread prejudices of modern thought.» — Kripal recoge el principio de apertura sin discriminación de Steinbock, que después le reprochará no cumplir.
«On one level, the impossible thinking theorized and modeled in these pages differs quite dramatically from figures like Husserl and Steinbock in its unabashed focus not on the experience of transcendental consciousness as such (Husserl) or on mystical experience of unconditional love and a personal God (Steinbock) but on the interface or middle world between this absolute consciousness and the human organism—which is to say, with the imaginal mediations of the fantastic, however outrageous the latter appear.» — Kripal marca con nombres su diferencia con los dos fenomenólogos: a él le interesa el mundo intermedio, no la conciencia absoluta ni el Dios personal.
«Obviously, my own impossible thinking does not make these distinctions between the proper theistic and the improper» — Kripal rehúsa distinguir entre lo teísta admisible y el resto; la frase se completa en la línea siguiente y sigue calificando esa distinción de sospechosamente atada a una cultura.
«Like the phenomenology of verticality, this refusal to distinguish between the popular and the elite, between the “authentic” and the “inauthentic,” between “religion” and “magic,” this intentional oddness, will function as one of our five pillars of impossible thinking in my conclusion. There simply is no impossible thinking without this whacky weirdness, this refusal to distinguish.» — Kripal hace de la negativa a separar religión de magia y lo culto de lo popular uno de los cinco pilares de su método.
«Such a queer comparative table, it should be noted, is hardly Husserlian. Indeed, Husserl’s relatively dismissive comments about “pure fancy” (“phantasie”) being “of a merely imaginative order” as nonempirical by definition—that is, as never being “real data”— could not be further from the spirit of impossible thinking celebrated here.» — Kripal deslinda su mesa comparativa de Husserl, para quien la fantasía pura no era dato real.
«But, on another level, this particular impossible practice— intentionally focused on the imaginal, the supernormal, and the paranormal—is very much in the Husserlian mode in that it is normative and not purely descriptive. It is all about the nature of reality.» — Kripal reclama de Husserl el carácter normativo: su práctica se pronuncia sobre la naturaleza de lo real y no solo describe.
«less a theology. Practice all forms of critical theory. Assume the social, the political, and the moral (namely, the horizontal) but never acknowledge the vertical. Ever.» — cierre del decálogo con que Kripal parodia la epojé de los estudios de religión, que exige no admitir ontología ni teología; el pasaje abre en la plana anterior.
«Not everyone agreed with this setting aside of the normative, of course. The African American theorist Charles H. Long, for example, was central to the history of religions school in which I was trained. He wrote extensively about the ways that Western imperialism, colonialism, and the slave trade have impacted how we think of “religion,” particularly in the United States and its departments of “religious studies.» — Kripal presenta a Charles H. Long como la excepción normativa dentro de su propia escuela.
«But Long also practiced the collapse of the subjective and objective, of the spiritual and the material, which is one of the hallmarks of impossible thinking. He wrote positively of “the imagination of matter” and insisted, in a very phenomenological mode, on the “inner structure of consciousness of homo religiosus,” and this despite the fact that, as he wrote, “several modern disciplines have already decided that the religious life does not exist.» — Kripal rescata de Long la imaginación de la materia y la estructura interna de conciencia, contra las disciplinas que dan por inexistente la vida religiosa.
«None of this means that the material world, the cosmos, is not absolutely central for Long. For his own work, the religious imagination has always been formed in deep dialogue with “technological praxis” (agriculture, husbandry, and so on) and the physical universe (sun, moon, sky, and stone). Such a dialectical structure can never be reduced to one of its poles—that is, to its social and political meanings.» — Kripal subraya que en Long la imaginación religiosa dialoga con la técnica y el cosmos, y que la estructura no se reduce a su polo social.
«and locus of the investigator is probed for that sense of internal ‘otherness’ that might be an analogue to the so-called ‘external otherness’ that scholars encounter in their investigations.» — Kripal cita a Long sobre la escuela de Chicago definida por sondear la otredad interna del investigador como análoga a la externa de sus datos; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«In my own terms, the inner life of the intellectual is the real comparative resonance and source of insight into the external data of ethnography and history—another impossible collapse of the subjective and objective.» — Kripal traduce esa fórmula a la suya: la vida interior del investigador es la fuente de la intuición comparativa.
«Hence Long’s many subtle but real provocations, including his observation that the prophet and the seer, who employ precognitive and clairvoyant powers, are “valid types of experience and expression.» — Kripal recoge de Long la validación del profeta y el vidente como tipos legítimos de experiencia.
«Indeed, if we are to believe Thomas J. J. Altizer, the founder of the death of God theology, Long was convinced of the magical power of the traditional African curse and practiced it, in late 1989, on Altizer himself, who had been “Chuck’s” fellow graduate student.» — Kripal consigna, con la reserva expresa de la fuente, que Long creía en la maldición africana y la habría practicado contra Altizer.
«Hence Altizer relates a dreamlike ecstatic “initiation” involving ghosts, “spirits of those dead who never leave us,” in Hyde Park, Chicago, and goes as far as to argue that such presences were the “instruments” of Mircea Eliade, who lived down the street.» — Kripal registra la iniciación espectral que Altizer se atribuye y su adjudicación de esas presencias a Mircea Eliade.
«The “deep sense of mission” Altizer came to know around the altered states of this spectral initiation led him to call Eliade “father” and resulted in his conclusion that “my way was not ultimately different than his.» — Kripal cierra el caso Altizer: de la iniciación salió la filiación declarada con Eliade.
«It also needs to be said: the neutral bracketing of present-day religious studies is the exact opposite of Edmund Husserl, who was doing something far more profound and important, who was in his own mind working for all of humanity in a distinctly positive, even ecstatic mode.» — Kripal opone la epojé neutral de los estudios de religión a la de Husserl, que a su juicio iba en dirección contraria.
«hermeneutics I respected more. That is still true. When I want to understand Henry Corbin, I ask Elliot Wolfson.» — Kripal declara a Elliot Wolfson su lector de referencia sobre lo imaginal y sobre Corbin; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«his seemingly endless stream of essays and monographs carry tremendous implications for the study of religion—indeed, for the future order of knowledge itself.» — Kripal sostiene que la obra de Wolfson, ignorada fuera de los estudios judíos, alcanza al orden entero del conocimiento.
«Words are experiences, but some such word-experiences, handled with enough intention and attention, can travel “backward.” Hermeneutics constitutes a particular power over time.» — Kripal saca de Wolfson la consecuencia más fuerte: la interpretación puede viajar hacia atrás y por eso la hermenéutica es un poder sobre el tiempo.
«Part of the problem is the sheer scope of Wolfson’s body of work. Who can read all these dense essays and exquisite books, with Talmudic notes that constitute more miniessays and entirely other directions?» — Kripal declara la magnitud de la obra de Wolfson como obstáculo real para leerla entera.
«Where in that list did you stop? I personally possess an adequate knowledge of only the last subject and, on my best days, a smattering of some of the others. I do not read Hebrew, and I possess no adequate knowledge of the history and hermeneutics of kabbalistic literature, much less Jewish studies. I can pretend something of the biblical critical thing, I suppose. Still, I am a gentile, a voice from outside the Jewish tradition.» — Kripal declara por escrito los límites de su competencia ante la cábala: no lee hebreo y habla desde fuera de la tradición.
«We had arrived at the same fundamental conclusion—the orthodox prominence of a kind of esoteric or sublimated male homoeroticism—with completely different cultural materials: he with medieval kabbalistic texts, I with Roman Catholic mystical literature and the Bengali texts surrounding the Shakta Hindu saint Ramakrishna (1836–1886).» — Kripal consigna la convergencia con Wolfson desde materiales inconexos: homoerotismo masculino sublimado en la cábala medieval y en la mística católica y bengalí.
«There was a kind of shock of realizing that the two of us, completely independently and with historically unrelated traditions, had come to more or less identical conclusions about any number of things, from the intensely erotic nature of male ascetic practice to the homoerotic underpinnings of two ostensibly heterosexual symbolisms to the deeply androcentric nature of apparently feminine or androgynous religious imaginaries. Even androgyny is finally masculine here.» — Kripal enumera las conclusiones coincidentes, incluida la de que la androginia de esos imaginarios sigue siendo masculina.
«I have been struck over the years by how Wolfson refuses what every other scholar of religion seems simply to assume (or just wish): a historical positivism or absolute contextualism, a total immanence with not a whiff of transcendence, a kind of intellectual bowing down to absolute multiplicity, complete difference, and, frankly, ultimate meaninglessness.» — Kripal explica su atracción por Wolfson: es el único que no da por sentado el contextualismo absoluto ni la inmanencia total.
«At the same time, Wolfson has also identified and refigured profound transtraditional themes, like the double mirroring of humanity and divinity in both medieval kabbalah and Christian mystical sources, what he calls “the specular entwinning of anthropomorphism and theomorphism: envisioning the divine as human mirrors envisioning the human as divine.» — Kripal recoge de Wolfson el doble espejo de antropomorfismo y teomorfismo compartido por cábala medieval y mística cristiana.
«More radically still, he has always insisted on a kind of transhistorical unity or even identity among the religions at their most radical and most sophisticated, an empty not-one but also a shimmering not-two at the heart of global mystical literature.» — Kripal atribuye a Wolfson una unidad transhistórica de las religiones formulada en la clave apofática del no-uno y no-dos.
«If I may, there is a certain Zen-like or Mahayana Buddhist quality in his work. Wolfson reads like a Jewish Nāgārjuna.» — Kripal describe la obra de Wolfson por comparación con el pensamiento budista de la vacuidad.
«If I had to describe Elliot Wolfson in a few words, I would say that he is a postmodern kabbalist with strong Buddhist convictions in the “emptiness” and apophatic “nothingness” of a shared and universal Godhead, which, very much in line with the» — Kripal resume a Wolfson como cabalista posmoderno de convicciones budistas; la frase se cierra en la plana siguiente, alineándolo con los gnósticos judíos y cristianos antiguos contra el Dios de la Biblia.
«That gnosis is rigorously dialectical and self-reflexive. It continuously bends back on itself, very much like the ancient ouroboros biting its own tail. This serpentine or tail-biting movement (which is also somehow vaguely autoerotic) doubles throughout the Wolfsonian body of work, determining in the process some of that work’s most basic paradoxical insights.» — Kripal describe la estructura del pensamiento de Wolfson con la figura del uróboros que se muerde la cola.
«Hence, also, Wolfson’s insistence that it is entirely traditional to subvert the tradition, that the greatest respect one can show a religious tradition is to engage it in a radically critical» — Kripal recoge de Wolfson que subvertir la tradición es tradicional, y que la crítica radical es la forma mayor de respeto; la frase se cierra en la plana siguiente con que así se la cambia y se la preserva.
«There is no naked truth for Wolfson. The truth can never reveal itself as it really is. The truth can only appear to a human being in the form of an image—which is to say, through a veil. The veil, however, always implies a face, something which is veiled, just as that which is veiled, a face, needs the veil to appear at all.» — Kripal expone el motivo del velo en Wolfson: no hay verdad desnuda, y el velo es condición de que algo aparezca.
«The bottom line is this: the religious symbol of the text or tradition reveals only through concealing and conceals only by revealing.» — Kripal reduce la doctrina del velo a una fórmula: el símbolo religioso revela ocultando y oculta revelando.
«This paradoxical understanding in turn produces a very distinct concept of the image: the image is real. The religious symbol is not a symbol of something else—it is not a metaphor. It has no “intentional” object in the ordinary sense of that term. It is what it is. But it is also what it is not. It is true, and it is not true. But it is very real as an expression of the underlying or overlying Godhead or Infinite.» — Kripal saca la consecuencia: la imagen religiosa no remite a otra cosa, no es metáfora, y es real como expresión del Infinito.
«To put the matter in the terms of Henry Corbin (with whom Wolfson sometimes thinks), this is a “conception of the image as a theophanic apparition that challenges the dichotomatization of the real and imagined.”41 This in turn is why Wolfson will write lines like this: “the contrast between ‘imagined’ and ‘real’ is an altogether misguided formulation.» — Kripal traduce la doctrina a los términos de Corbin y cita a Wolfson declarando errónea la oposición entre imaginado y real.
«Wolfson expresses the same idea again through one of Corbin’s favorite authors, the mystical philosopher and master Ibn ‘Arabī. In the latter’s writings, the imago appears “at the Meeting Place of the Two Seas”—that is, between the “Sea of Meanings” and the “Sea of Sensory Things.» — Kripal sitúa la imagen en el encuentro de los dos mares de Ibn ʿArabī, el de los significados y el de las cosas sensibles.
«perhaps we can simplify them with a single statement: for an embodied human being, it is the imagination that mediates between the two dimensions of the real.» — Kripal condensa la doctrina de la imagen: la imaginación media entre las dos dimensiones de lo real.
«If I may, the Infinite is the Infinite. It is not contained by any border, culture, or social identity. It holds no passport. Nor does it need the permission of any academic or intellectual to be so.» — Kripal niega que el Infinito sea propiedad de una cultura o de una identidad, con la fórmula de que no lleva pasaporte.
«Time, it turns out, can be “ruptured,” and no historical causality and so no historical criticism is absolute. And no such observation is “ahistorical,” a criticism that is sometimes articulated when we arrive at this point. Such positions do, however, work with a much more expanded sense of time and history. In some very real sense, the position is superhistorical, with history now understood as a kind of hyperdimensional process that simply does not work, and has never worked, in just one way or in just three or four dimensions.» — Kripal rechaza de antemano la acusación de ahistoricismo: lo que propone es una historia hiperdimensional, no la salida de la historia.
«The basic problem that Wolfson homes in on is the problem of why the bodiless God of scripture so often has a body in scripture. The easy way out is to read all the bodily descriptions in Jewish scripture in strictly metaphorical ways. God does not have a body, so all the bodily images and language must be something else, metaphors or allegories perhaps.» — Kripal plantea el problema de la corporalidad divina en la Escritura y descarta la salida metafórica.
«Put again, the “ascription of a body to God is not merely a rhetorical device to enunciate the inherent metaphoricity of theological language; it is rather a mode of discourse that calls into question our naturalistic and commonsensical assumptions about human and cosmic corporeality.» — Kripal cita a Wolfson: el cuerpo de Dios no es recurso retórico sino cuestionamiento de nuestros supuestos sobre el cuerpo.
«We begin to intuit that the human body is also God’s body and that God’s body takes on a human structure, what Gershom Scholem famously called “the mystical shape of the Godhead.» — Kripal recupera de Gershom Scholem la figura mística de la Divinidad para nombrar ese espejo entre cuerpo humano y cuerpo divino.
«In the temple of contemplation (itself derived from templum, or “temple”), Elliot Wolfson has allowed us to see that “the divine becomes human and the human divine.» — Kripal cierra la doctrina de la corporalidad con la reciprocidad que atribuye a Wolfson, y con la etimología de *contemplación*.
«Allow me to observe that the soul or spirit is never without a body in the dual-aspect monistic world that I will be explaining in our next chapter. It cannot be, since the fundamental ground that is shining through the visionary symbol, subtle body, or landscape is neither mental nor material—which is to say, it is both, or neither. Similarly, every “spiritual” experience is also a “material” or “physical” event. They can never be truly separated because they are not so separated in the ground of all being.» — Kripal saca la consecuencia para su propio sistema: no hay alma sin cuerpo, ni experiencia espiritual que no sea también física.
«In a truly radical and thoroughly thought through nonduality, there is no such thing as» — Kripal lleva la no dualidad hasta suprimir el par mismo; la frase se cierra en la plana siguiente.
«immanence or transcendence. Both are category mistakes, an application of phenomenological descriptions “up here” in the body-brain to ontic reality itself “down” or “up” there without such a splitting body-brain.» — cierre de esa tesis: para Kripal inmanencia y trascendencia son errores de categoría, descripciones del cerebro proyectadas sobre lo real.
«This, in the end, is why I consider Elliot Wolfson an impossible thinker. He goes where others will not go, and which I suspect is a most productive place to go, but he also recognizes that what he is so paradoxically saying, repeatedly, is probably not translatable» — Kripal declara pensador de lo imposible a Wolfson por reconocer que su propio pensamiento no se traduce; la frase se cierra en la plana siguiente.
«into any social form or political platform, past or present. In other words, he recognizes that his thought is impossible in our present context, and maybe any historical social context.» — cierre de esa observación: la intraducibilidad social del pensamiento de Wolfson es, para Kripal, parte de su valor.
«He ends with a lesson for anyone who might compare: “This would preclude not only the reduction of the other to the same but the reduction of the same to the other.”55 It is paradox all the way down.» — Kripal extrae de Wolfson la regla comparativa: ni reducir el otro a lo mismo ni lo mismo al otro.
«Such an event, the witness relays with utter earnestness, was “more real than real.” It was not a metaphor (it did not refer to something else). It was not a dream (it was not imagined in the banal sense). It was really, even physically, there. It was more real than real.» — Kripal aísla la fórmula que se repite en los testimonios y la lee como negativa del testigo a la metáfora y al sueño.
«This person is reporting another dimension of reality altogether, often with a sense of traumatic shock. The ontological is at the very heart of the experience. We can “bracket” that question, set it aside for the sake of historical description or analysis, but we will, by so doing, set aside what the experiencer most wants to say.» — Kripal advierte el costo de la epojé: al suspender la pregunta ontológica se descarta justo lo que el testigo quiere decir.
«A paradoxical thinker like Elliot Wolfson gives us a plausible and erudite way to balance this “more real than real” with this obvious cultural shaping. He “resolves” the paradox by showing us that the paradox is true.» — Kripal explica qué gana con Wolfson: sostener a la vez la realidad del suceso y su modelado cultural, sin deshacer la paradoja.
«Wolfson thus instantiates what I have elsewhere called the “realist impulse of the cosmic humanities.» — Kripal nombra en Wolfson el impulso realista que atribuye a lo que llama las humanidades cósmicas.
«It is simply not possible to extricate the presence of consciousness from the behavior of reality in either context. As shocking as the conclusion might be, to perceive is to be.» — Kripal cierra el paralelo entre interpretación cabalística del sueño y colapso de la función de onda con la fórmula de que percibir es ser.
«Wolfson pushes the point further, into the heart of matter, by invoking and quoting the German mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl: “The possibility of future connecting with past, of time moving backwards, ‘arises because a gravitational field implies that spacetime is curved, and the curvature might be great enough and extended enough to join a spacetime to itself in novel ways.’” What we end up with is “a closed loop figuratively depicting the object/ subject becoming its own past.» — Kripal recoge, vía Wolfson y Hermann Weyl, la curvatura del espacio-tiempo como condición física del bucle en que el sujeto se vuelve su propio pasado.
«Hence Einstein’s famous remark in a letter he wrote after receiving the news of the death of his friend, Michele Basso, that the distinctions between past, present, and future are ultimately illusory, that time itself is “a stubbornly persistent illusion.» — Kripal cita la carta de Einstein sobre la ilusión persistente del tiempo, con el nombre del amigo tal como lo imprime la fuente.
«One can begin to see why historians would not look too kindly on Einsteinian space-time, why they might want to ignore the advances of theoretical physics, pretend, in effect, they never happened.» — Kripal atribuye a los historiadores un desinterés interesado por la física del siglo XX, porque relativiza su disciplina.
«In the block universe cosmology, developed after the work of Einstein and his teacher Hermann Minkowski, all of time or history—past, present, and future—already exists within an immense cosmic block or space-time continuum that extends from the big bang to however the cosmos finally ends (or “bounces” back). Temporality or our sense of linear time (and so all of “history”) is, in effect, a neurological illusion or phenomenological apparition that our brains produce as we experience ourselves “moving” through this eternal and unchanging spatiotemporal block.» — Kripal expone el universo bloque y hace del tiempo lineal una ilusión neurológica.
«We are not really moving in this cosmology. What we experience as our present bodies and specious selves are merely phenomenological snapshots or single frames along the running (but not really running) film of a “long self” or a “long body” that can be imagined as a decades-long, four-dimensional space-time worm wiggling out from conception to its disappearance in death.» — Kripal describe el yo largo como gusano tetradimensional del que cada instante es un solo fotograma.
«It is well known that one of Nietzsche’s most important teachings, indeed what Michael Allen Gillespie has called his final teaching, was the “eternal recurrence of the same” (“ewige Wiederkunft des Gleichen”), also know more simply as the eternal return.68 The teaching was about the circularity of time and how everything and each of us will be repeated, in our tiniest details, over and over again, not in some serial fashion but in a circular one.» — Kripal presenta el eterno retorno nietzscheano con su nombre alemán y su forma circular, no serial.
«It is important to understand that since Georg Simmel famously rejected Nietzsche’s central teaching in 1907, commentators on Nietzsche have generally followed suit and widely dismissed the eternal recurrence of the same as incoherent and indefensible, as just a little, or a lot, crazy.» — Kripal fecha en Simmel, 1907, el descarte académico del eterno retorno.
«Such metaphorical readings of Nietzsche’s eternal return are simply false ones. As recent Nietzschean scholars, foremost among them Paul S. Loeb, have taught us, such a safe reading is not reflective of Nietzsche’s fierce conviction that, in the words of Loeb now, “he had discovered a fundamental truth about the nature of the cosmos that would change his life and the history of humankind.» — Kripal declara falsa la lectura metafórica del eterno retorno y se apoya en Paul S. Loeb para sostener que Nietzsche lo tenía por verdad cosmológica.
«Indeed, Nietzsche clearly thought of eternal recurrence as the most scientific of truths» — Kripal insiste en el estatuto científico que Nietzsche daba a su doctrina; la frase sigue en la plana siguiente diciendo que se la susurraba a sus discípulos más cercanos como un secreto casi indecible.
«And it came with equally awesome implications, including physical immortality (since these bodies always return exactly as they are) and a kind of retrocausal influence.» — Kripal enumera las consecuencias que le atribuye: inmortalidad física e influencia retrocausal.
«This is the power to influence the meaning and import of the past, if never to change the physical events of that past.» — Kripal acota el querer hacia atrás nietzscheano: cambia el sentido del pasado, no sus hechos.
«I must quickly add that Nietzsche did not understand his eternal return in such block universe terms. He did not have that particular cosmology available to him. He thus argued that the same things repeat themselves eternally within a series of cycles, but these are in fact the same cycle. They are in fact not numerically different.» — Kripal marca la diferencia histórica: Nietzsche no disponía de la cosmología del bloque y su formulación era otra.
«With the simplest “click” from the modern lens of the block universe cosmology, however, Nietzsche’s implausible claim immediately becomes plausible, if also admittedly different (I want to own my own backward-willing or future-reading of Nietzsche here» — Kripal reconoce que su relectura de Nietzsche es ella misma un querer hacia atrás, es decir, una lectura desde el futuro que él asume como propia.
«In the block cosmology, after all, every moment is happening again and again, right now, within the same always-existing, always-so block universe. So is every past moment. So is every future moment. It is all there, at once, simultaneously, happening “over and over again” not in a linear but in a block eternal sense. It is all one immense Now, one gigantic déjà vu universe.» — Kripal traduce el eterno retorno al universo bloque: un Ahora inmenso donde todo ocurre a la vez.
«Here hermeneutics becomes, once again, an actual power over time.» — Kripal repite la fórmula que hace de la interpretación una potencia temporal, no una operación sobre textos.
«Perhaps such information does not really “flow” at all within such a universe. Perhaps, as the mystical literature claims again and again, it is all one thing. If so, reality is just communicating with itself as One, instantly and immediately, altogether in and as the block universe, from “Eternity,” as Husserl might say. This is how we can think impossibly—with a new and much more scientific understanding of temporality and so of history.» — Kripal corrige su propia metáfora del flujo de información: si todo es uno, la realidad se comunica consigo misma sin trayecto.
«In this specific reading back, we can now say that human beings can know, or dream, or, in some cases, literally “see” in a vision what is about to happen, not because they are guessing well or getting lucky in some cosmic poker game, not because they are “intuitive” (another cop-out), but because the event has in fact already happened and they themselves are already physically connected to it, really are it within the world block. There is not the slightest physical separation. It is all One.» — Kripal explica la precognición sin recurrir a la suerte ni a la intuición: el suceso ya ocurrió y el vidente ya está conectado a él.
«Obviously, I do not read such claims with the usual dismissive categories. I read them as honest and relatively accurate phenomenological descriptions of actual encounters with the» — Kripal declara cómo lee los testimonios que acaba de citar: como descripciones fenomenológicas honestas; la frase se cierra en la plana siguiente.
«physical cosmos of a warped or swerved space-time.» — cierre de esa declaración: lo que esos testimonios describen es, para Kripal, un espacio-tiempo curvado.
«My point? That this is why I think I have been so struck by the work of Elliot Wolfson over these decades, why his work has always felt so uncanny to me, so familiar and yet so other. Perhaps I knew of these ideas from our shared future, from this very chapter and book.» — Kripal aplica su propia tesis del tiempo reversible a su lectura de Wolfson: quizá la familiaridad venía del futuro compartido.
«Whether that is so or not, this is one of the surest and simplest ways to recognize an impossible thinker: that time no longer moves in a single direction. It loops and swerves. It visits itself from the future. It is in time, but it is also outside of time. It’s about time.» — Kripal da el criterio con que reconoce al pensador de lo imposible: el tiempo deja de correr en una sola dirección.
«The history of religions, which we might also think of as the comparative study of religion, is deeply indebted to microtextual work, translation, and accurate historical and ethnographic description but also insists, usually at a later point in a career, on bold speculative metaphysics (that is, on thinking and writing about what it all might mean). Comparison is about data, yes, but it is also about theory or modeling what the data taken as a whole suggest. It is about all those important microhistories, but it is also about the big picture and, ultimately, about the nature of consciousness itself, what the intellectual lineage calls» — Kripal define su disciplina como filología y metafísica especulativa a la vez; la frase termina en la plana siguiente con la palabra hermenéutica.
«As Charles Long has argued, probably the most significant feature of the history of religions school is its insistence that there is some kind of deep correspondence between the inner life of the interpreter and that which is being interpreted, between the consciousness of the contemporary scholar and the forms of consciousness encoded in the historical texts and artifacts.» — Kripal recoge de Charles Long el rasgo distintivo de su escuela: la correspondencia entre la vida interior del intérprete y lo interpretado.
«The work of the interpreter is finally to realize, “make real,” the world of the text or tradition being interpreted—to make the impossible possible, as we are saying here and now. This fundamental correspondence or interpretive resonance between the hermeneut and the historical deposits is the deepest source of truth in the intellectual-spiritual practice called “history of religions.» — Kripal define la tarea del intérprete como realización del mundo del texto, y hace de esa resonancia la fuente última de verdad de su oficio.
«my own theory of the fantastic implies, really shouts, that the imagination, particularly within altered states, can become a revelatory translator of paranormal perception and not simply a spinner of daytime fantasies and banal nocturnal dreams.» — Kripal resume su teoría: la imaginación en estados alterados traduce percepción paranormal en vez de fabricar fantasía.
«Actually, I don’t believe anything. I think that the paranormal investigator John Keel had it just right in a cultural meme widely attributed to him and certainly faithful to his body of work: “Belief is the enemy.» — Kripal se declara sin creencias y suscribe la consigna que se atribuye a John Keel, cuya atribución él mismo relativiza.
«I realize today that this particular incarnational theology (the creedal lines refer to the doubled human and divine natures of Christ) has informed nearly everything that I think.» — Kripal reconoce el credo niceno de su infancia católica como matriz de su pensamiento entero.
«selves)—is clearly indebted to that same ancient Christian credo. Jesus is fully human and fully divine. But so am I, and so are you. The human is really the superhuman.» — Kripal universaliza la doble naturaleza cristológica a todo humano; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«Which is to say that I think creeds are really important. They encode centuries of careful thought, vigorous debate (not all of it civil), and extreme forms of revelatory irruptions, like the actual experience of human deification, “becoming divine,” or “being God.” Such creeds bind communities together and split them apart. They can even produce new thought and experience that the early believers could not have possibly foreseen, much less accepted.» — Kripal reivindica el credo como sedimento de irrupciones revelatorias, aun negando creer en él.
«This is the structure of all metaphysical opening or revelation, not because there is no such truth but rather because the human is doubled in all sorts of ways—neuroanatomically (there are two brain hemispheres, or “selves,” in the skull), epistemologically (there is both a knower “in here” and a known “out there,” the latter mediated through the senses and the brain-body), socially (there is always an “inside” and an “outside” to our social experience, a social “outside,” moreover, that the “inside” often finds stupid or absurd), psychologically (the ego and the unconscious, as in a dream), and spiritually (our deeper identities that appear to us in traumatic states as immortal spirits, angelic twins, doppelgängers, apparitions, and so on). I have encoded this multiple doubleness in a little poetic expression that is intended on all these levels: the Human as Two.» — Kripal despliega los cinco niveles en que sostiene que el humano está doblado y explica que su fórmula los abarca todos.
«Such translations cannot be transparent or clear, not because they are some preparatory approximations that could be in principle cleaned up or rendered clear in some future scientific way (such a claim disgusts me) but because this is what a human being is—Two.» — Kripal niega que la oscuridad del símbolo sea provisional y corregible por la ciencia futura: es constitutiva.
«real truth cannot be simplified and appear to human reason in a straight rational form, say, as a logical statement or syllogism.5 Rather, profound truths will always appear to the human being in narrative, symbol, image, and poem. They will not be clean and clear because they cannot be clean and clear.» — Kripal toma de su colega Alexander Regier la tiranía de la claridad, convicción romántica de que la verdad honda solo aparece en relato, símbolo e imagen; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«To speak in more contemporary neuroanatomical terms, the left side of the brain simply cannot understand what the right side of the brain knows, since they speak in two entirely different ways. To seek clarity, then, is simply to impose one set of standards on another. It is a form of tyranny (the word is rich in political connotations), this time of the left brain over the right. It is a symptom of our sickness or unbalance. It is a problem, not the solution. What we want, what we need, is both sides of the brain firing at once and in concert. We want them “talking” together, through reason and imagination, through rational clarity and intuitive symbol.» — Kripal traduce la tiranía de la claridad a neuroanatomía y pide los dos hemisferios en concierto, no el predominio de uno.
«Let me explain. What I mean by this quip is that I understand perfectly well that beliefs are important, that they sometimes actually work. Indeed, my theory of the fantastic requires them and affirms their importance, both personally and socially, as necessary mediations of the divine to the human.» — Kripal aclara su lema: la creencia es mediación necesaria y su teoría la requiere; lo que rechaza es la creencia particular.
«Looked at comparatively (that is, globally), particular beliefs are simply irrelevant. A woman with cancer can be healed by the Blessed Virgin Mary in Fátima, Portugal. Or before the shrine of a Sufi saint in Karachi, Pakistan. Or in a near-death experience floating around a hospital in New York City. Or in a UFO encounter in Colares, Brazil. She can be a French Catholic, an Indian Muslim, an American Hindu, an Indigenous Spanish Amazonian, or anyone else.» — Kripal ilustra con casos de curación que la creencia particular es indiferente al resultado; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«Honest and careful comparison quickly reveals the efficacy and power, even necessity, of belief but also the relativity of any of its local expressions or social identities.» — Kripal separa la eficacia de la creencia, que afirma, de su contenido local, que relativiza.
«In effect, then, I believe everyone. But this also means that I cannot believe anyone. “I believe in belief but not in beliefs.» — Kripal formula la paradoja de su posición comparativa: creerles a todos le impide creerle a alguno.
«The same paradoxical comparative method quickly reveals another uncomfortable truth: beliefs limit what is possible. Beliefs shut down. Beliefs decide. If specific beliefs can be thought of as fishhooks that sometimes catch real fish, it can also be said that beliefs generally only catch fish, and particular kinds of fish that the hook is designed to catch, no less. But, if we extend the metaphor, we can also say that the waters are filled with other sorts of beings, most of which couldn’t care less about these particular belief-hooks. Which is another way of saying beliefs can miss a great deal, really almost everything.» — Kripal usa el anzuelo como figura de la creencia: pesca algo real y solo lo que fue diseñada para pescar.
«Of what would we be capable if we did not limit ourselves through what we believe? This, I take it, was what Nietzsche meant by his most famous declaration that “God is dead.” God (or at least the idea of God being believed) must die so that superhumans might live. Past belief shuts down future possibility.» — Kripal lee la muerte de Dios de Nietzsche como muerte de la creencia que clausura lo posible.
«It gets worse. Particular beliefs can literally demonize common phenomena that are not in themselves sinister or negative but become so when they are believed to be so. Belief is a kind of mirror. So are impossible phenomena. If you believe you are dealing with invading demons, you are probably going to find invading demons. If you believe you are dealing with beneficent angels, you are probably going to find beneficent angels. If you believe you are dealing with extraterrestrials inappropriately involved in our genetics, then you are probably going to find extraterrestrials inappropriately involved in our genetics. In truth, though, you are likely dealing with none of these things. The phenomenon reflects to us what we will, what we fear, who we think we are.» — Kripal sostiene que la creencia demoniza o angeliza el mismo fenómeno, que funciona como espejo del que mira.
«That reflexive quality of the phenomena may well be the very best clue as to what some—maybe many, maybe most, maybe all— these appearances actually are on a deeper level: us. We are all of this. And we are none of it.» — Kripal escalona su propia afirmación —algunas, muchas, quizá todas— antes de concluir que las apariciones somos nosotros.
«Deep down, I suspect that robust paranormal phenomena are not personal or individual at all but fundamentally nonhuman or superpersonal—in a word, “cosmic.” It is not about a mind. It is about Mind.» — Kripal presenta como sospecha que lo paranormal robusto no es personal sino cósmico.
«It is quite obvious to serious researchers that most, maybe all, of the anomalous phenomena are related, are expressions of the same basic iceberg floating above and below the waves: the NDE is related to the OBE (out-of-body experience) is related to the UFO (or what is now called unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAP—another dodge) is related to. . . . “Psi” in fact may simply be another Greek coinage for “stuff we don’t understand about consciousness and its relationship to matter.» — Kripal sostiene que los fenómenos anómalos son un solo témpano, y define *psi* como el nombre griego de lo que no entendemos.
«I laugh out loud when people accuse me of “exoticizing” consciousness. “Well, of course, I do. It is exotic. If you make consciousness normal, if you shove it into your puny categories and social boxes, you miss its true cosmic reach and vast nature. You reduce it to your own relative local notions, which will pass. That’s you, not It.» — Kripal acepta el cargo de exotizar la conciencia y lo devuelve: normalizarla es proyectar categorías locales sobre ella.
«Once one realizes the vastness and interconnected nature of the archival and historical situation, a familiar conclusion that I have already offered quickly follows: more information, more stories, more data is not going to get us where some of us want to go. Rather, what we need is a framework or theory in which to place all this data and so render it, as a whole, plausible and meaningful. Basically, we need a way to connect the dots. We do not need more dots. Intelligence is finally meaningful collection and connection.» — Kripal declara resuelto el problema de la evidencia y abierto el de la teoría: faltan conexiones, no datos.
«The analogy is not perfect, but our situation is a bit like what educated people in the European cities of the seventeenth century thought of all those silly farmers in the countryside who kept talking about rocks falling from the sky. “Rocks can’t fall from the sky, damn it. Stupid farmers. Obvious idiots.” Or that’s what the smart people in the city said. Until they eventually arrived at a new model of what outer space actually is. Turns out the uneducated peasants were correct, that their untutored experiences were perfectly true, even if their interpretations were sometimes off.» — Kripal compara la situación actual con la de los meteoritos en el siglo XVII, y acota que los campesinos acertaban en el hecho aunque no en la explicación.
«I try to make the impossible possible, not only with more and more outrageous stories but, above all, with new thought and theory. We know how to collect. We do not yet know how to connect.» — Kripal resume su propia tarea en la distinción entre coleccionar y conectar.
«They grant struggling human beings different forms of cultural and technological knowledge (laws, writing, agriculture, ritual). They warn them about the end of the world, teach them about the nature of the soul, generally scare the shit out of them, and even sometimes engage them sexually to create divine-human hybrids. That’s the history of religions. That is also the modern UFO phenomenon.» — Kripal enumera el guion común y lo declara idéntico en la historia de las religiones y en la ufología moderna; el pasaje abre en la plana anterior.
«You might think that I am arguing that the ancient religions were misremembered, misperceived, or misunderstood contact experiences with alien astronauts. A young Carl Sagan thought that. So does a contemporary US television series and, no doubt, millions of its viewers. No, I am not saying that. I do not believe that.» — Kripal rechaza expresamente la hipótesis de los antiguos astronautas, y nombra al joven Carl Sagan entre quienes la sostuvieron.
«The error of presentism is the understandable (but always false) presumption that one’s present scientific worldview or grasp of the cosmos is somehow correct or adequate, that we have arrived (or are about to arrive) at the truth of things, and that our present order of knowledge will not change appreciably in the future.» — Kripal define el presentismo como el supuesto de que el orden de conocimiento vigente ya es el definitivo.
«Scientists once told us that we are quickly closing the gaps on all scientific knowledge. Now they are telling us that it appears that all our science—all that physics, chemistry, biology, you name it— applies to only between 2 and 6 percent of the actual universe.11 We went from knowing almost everything to knowing next to nothing in just a few decades. And then they give fancy names to our ignorance: dark matter and dark energy.» — Kripal invoca la materia y la energía oscuras para sostener que el orden del saber cambia, y las llama nombres elegantes de la ignorancia.
«spacefaring physicalist scientism, and subsequently reading it back into human history (often not very well—their grasp of the histories of religion and magic are atrocious). In this presentist myth, there are no invisible nonhuman agents, no God, no magic, no miracle, no world of the dead, no two worlds of experience, nothing genuinely paranormal or supernatural. There is only misperceived technology.» — Kripal describe el mito de los antiguos astronautas como cientificismo proyectado hacia atrás, y le reprocha su manejo de la historia de la religión y de la magia; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«Such enthusiasts have taken Arthur C. Clarke’s “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” and turned it into a universal dogma that denies there is anything like magic at all—it is all technology now.» — Kripal señala la inversión: la ley de Clarke, pensada para asimilar tecnología y magia, se usa para abolir la magia.
«The problem with this “law” is that what we once called magic happens all the time, and it has nothing to do with technology— spacefaring, digital, or otherwise. It has everything to do with consciousness and cosmos, with mind and matter, with our neurobiology and the highly evolved ways that our perceptual apparatus “splits” a single reality into two domains (a mental and a material domain) so that we can survive and thrive.» — Kripal reivindica la magia como suceso corriente y la explica por la escisión perceptual de una realidad única en mente y materia.
«Indeed, the ultimate tertium comparationis, or “third space of comparison,” between the inner and outer world is mathematics. Mathematics is, by far, the most effective symbolic system ever discovered between these two epistemic domains. Numbers are “psychoid,” as Carl Jung put it in his own neologism. They are mental, but they most accurately describe and even predict the behavior and structure of the material world: “the sought-after borderland between physics and psychology lies in the secret of the number.» — Kripal hace de las matemáticas el tercer espacio de comparación por excelencia y recoge de Jung el número como psicoide.
«Comparison in this mathematical sense is not some cognitive process in the head, some abstract way of organizing things in an interesting but finally arbitrary way. It is eerie proof that the external world really does correspond to the internal one. Such a comparative unity also explains what the physicist Eugene Wigner called, in 1960, the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics. Mathematics is so damned effective because the symbol system is “true”; that is, it gives constant witness to an uncanny correspondence between the human mind and the cosmos.» — Kripal explica la eficacia irrazonable de las matemáticas de Wigner por la correspondencia entre mente y cosmos.
«In the end, then, there simply is no fundamental difference between the mental and the material, between the inside and the outside. Deep down (outside or beyond “us”), it is all One World.» — Kripal cierra el argumento de la magia comparativa en la unidad de mundo.
«Put succinctly, dual-aspect monism is a philosophical proposition that states that “the mental (psychological) and the material (physical) are aspects of one underlying reality which itself is psychophysically neutral” (that is, neither mental nor material).» — Kripal da la definición técnica del monismo de doble aspecto que adopta como armazón.
«The one I am invoking is “decompositional,” since it further posits that the mental and the material domains have “split off,” or decomposed, from a previous holistic state, in this case the psychophysically neutral ground, which is an undivided whole or nondual in nature (I would say “in supernature”).» — Kripal precisa cuál de las variantes usa: la que hace de mente y materia una descomposición de un estado previo indiviso.
«I confess I do not like the word “neutral,” since I consider it rhetorically boring, and this fundamental ground of the entire universe is anything but boring. Indeed, coming to know or become this ground of all being is the very goal and purpose of human life for many of the world’s contemplative traditions, about which they have spoken so extravagantly for millennia. Still, I also understand that “neutral” is philosophically precise: it means neither mental nor material. So, I will use it too.» — Kripal objeta el término técnico por retórico y lo adopta igual por preciso.
«There are other tools in this toolbox. Harald Atmanspacher and Christopher Fuchs call this specific proposition “the Pauli-Jung Conjecture,” since it was developed in the private correspondence and later public writings of the quantum theorist Wolfgang Pauli and the psychiatrist and depth psychologist C. G. Jung, and since it is not yet proven as a theorem (hence its conjectural status» — Kripal nombra la conjetura Pauli-Jung y explica que se llama conjetura porque no está probada; la frase sigue en la plana siguiente.
«decompositional dual-aspect monism is a best guess and a working hypothesis, not some dogmatic certainty.» — Kripal declara el estatuto de su propia ontología: hipótesis de trabajo, no certeza.
«It bears repeating that such an ontology is philosophical and not quantum mechanical in nature. It is not a scientific theorem. It is a philosophical framework.» — Kripal insiste en el deslinde: su ontología es filosófica y no un teorema físico.
«This is the meaning of meaning, if you will, a kind of profound “sense” or state that is not intentional or “about” anything other than itself. Monism is the meaning of meaning.» — Kripal distingue el sentido corriente, que remite a otra cosa, del sentido profundo que no remite a nada fuera de sí.
«Such a conjecture may sound relatively innocent, but it will have major consequences, impossible ones, really, for how we think about everything from the writing of history (“what actually happened” is often far stranger than is acknowledged) to the study of religion (religious states of inspiration are often precisely those that display a “third” psychophysically neutral structure) to a science like evolutionary biology (since, certainly for Pauli, that psychophysically neutral ground provides a third space that could have influenced evolutionary history through meaningful coincidences connected through meaning—in short, a kind of guiding self-direction, or autopoiesis).» — Kripal enumera lo que cambiaría si la conjetura valiera, incluida una biología evolutiva guiada por coincidencias significativas.
«For most of their lives, both Pauli and Jung were Kantians with respect to this deeper psychophysically neutral ground; that is to say, they denied that a human being could know the ground as such. To sum up Kant in a single sentence, “the world we experience is not the world as it really is.» — Kripal sitúa a Pauli y a Jung en el kantismo respecto del fondo neutral, y resume a Kant en una línea.
«Jung will also identify this coniunctio with the agnosia (or “unknowing”) of the Gnostics, the affirmation of Plotinus that “all individuals are merely one soul,” the “suprapersonal atman” of the Hindu nondual traditions, and the identity of the individual and universal “tao” of Chinese philosophy and culture.» — Kripal lista las equivalencias que Jung propone para la *coniunctio*: agnosia gnóstica, alma única de Plotino, *atman* y *tao*.
«In short, he saw this One World as the ontological basis of mystical traditions around the world. Reality is One, and so are such realizations of this One. How could they not be?» — Kripal recoge de Jung el Unus Mundus como base ontológica de las místicas del mundo.
«Philosophically speaking, with a dual-aspect monism, “immanence” and “transcendence” are entirely relative to the body and brain. Put differently, there is such a thing as immanence or transcendence, but there are experiences of both in and as the body-brain. Put differently again, immanence and transcendence are epistemic phenomena, not ontological facts. There are no such divisions in reality as such.» — Kripal reduce inmanencia y trascendencia a fenómenos epistémicos del cuerpo-cerebro, sin negar que se experimenten.
«Accessible by mystical experience. It is difficult to overestimate that claim, as it renders the human being capable of a kind of ultimate ontological realization, a third realm, or tertium quid» — Kripal subraya el alcance de la afirmación que acaba de citar: el tercer reino resulta accesible por experiencia mística; la frase sigue negando que se explique por la física o por la psicología.
«In physicists like Arthur Eddington and John Wheeler, then, we find “repeated hints toward a kind of spirituality that transcends the mind-matter split.» — Kripal encuentra en Eddington y Wheeler indicios de una espiritualidad que rebasa la escisión mente-materia.
«Where there is no subject, there is no subjective experience.» — Kripal cita el corolario más duro de sus fuentes: disuelto el sujeto, no hay experiencia subjetiva de la que hablar.
«A synchronicity is a human experience in which something happens in the physical environment that uncannily corresponds to something happening in the mental world of a human subject.» — Kripal define la sincronicidad como correspondencia sin causa entre entorno físico y estado mental.
«What they finally concluded is that a synchronicity is a powerful expression of a dual-aspect monistic world in which the mental and material domains have decomposed from a more basic One World but still retain a clear sign of their shared ground in how they correspond or speak to one another in unforgettable ways. They are not connected through any cause. They are connected through meaning. Hence the common human response to them: a sense of uncanniness or deep meaning that cannot be quite located.» — Kripal explica la sincronicidad como huella del fondo común, conectada por sentido y no por causa.
«In the last quarter of the twentieth century, this intentional notion of meaning was more or less dogmatized in the humanities by postmodern thinkers like Jacques Derrida, who insisted that every meaning is really a grammatical function, that every word points to other words for its meaning, that there is no end to this referentiality, and that humans live in these endless networks of words and can never get out of them. As Derrida put it, there is only what he coined as différance, a new French word that combines the words for “differ” and “defer” to signal an endless deferral of meaning. “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” he famously declared, a phrase that is usually translated as “There is nothing outside the text.» — Kripal reconstruye la dogmatización posmoderna del sentido intencional y cita la fórmula de Derrida en francés y en su traducción corriente.
«Except there is. Human beings have been experiencing reality outside language and texts for millennia. They can do this most fully in what we generally call mystical experiences (although that expression is not quite right, as we have seen), but they can have such experiences within anomalous or excessive events as well, in what we generally call paranormal events.» — Kripal replica a Derrida con el hecho de la experiencia fuera del texto, y acota de paso el propio término *mística*.
«Derrida was perfectly correct on this superficial level. There is no social sign outside of the text, and every sign or word points to other words and social signs. It is a hall of mirrors.» — Kripal le concede a Derrida el plano horizontal del signo social antes de negarle el otro.
«Until, of course, it is not. On a much more profound level, meaning can also work vertically between the two surface domains of the mental and the material dimensions of experience and the deeper One World from which they have emerged or split off. This is where the straight historical event becomes the synchronicity. Atmanspacher and Fuchs call this vertical meaning of meaning “sense.» — Kripal añade al sentido horizontal un sentido vertical hacia el fondo común, que sus fuentes llaman *sense*.
«Such correspondences between the mental and material domains of ordinary human experience and the One World “below” them are the actual experiential source of the religious senses of the numinous, the uncanny, and the eerie.» — Kripal deriva de esas correspondencias el origen experiencial de lo numinoso y lo ominoso.
«In short, we are talking about the very sources of religion before religion. We are also talking about physics —that is, about the behavior of the material world. We are talking about everything. We are also talking about a realm in which space-time is void, there is no place for ordinary causation, and there is no distinction between mental and material.35 That is not physics. That is metaphysics.» — Kripal declara que el terreno al que llega no es física sino metafísica, y lo llama la fuente de la religión antes de la religión.
«It comes down to this. Traditional religion or conventional science will never get us to a solution or resolution of impossible phenomena, not because we do not have enough data but because these two knowledge systems are inadequate in principle.» — Kripal declara insuficientes en principio, no por falta de datos, tanto a la religión tradicional como a la ciencia convencional.
«We do not know, and it is quite likely that we cannot know, not because we do not yet have enough information but because our dualistic way of cutting up the world into “belief” and “reason,” into “subjects” and “objects,” is simply false; that is, these dualistic divisions do not correspond to what is actually so. They refer back to our evolved neurology and cultural histories. Again, we split the world into two. We are that two. The world is not two.» — Kripal pide humildad epistémica y la funda en que la división dual es nuestra, no del mundo.
«I often joke on the lecture circuit that there are just two things one must understand together to understand the UFO phenomenon: radar . . . and revelation.» — Kripal condensa su tesis en un chiste que dice que nadie le celebra: el fenómeno exige a la vez el radar y la revelación.
«This order of knowledge is also an order of values or ontological judgments. The objective material aspects are considered real, whereas the subjective mental aspects of reality are considered less real or even unreal. The “outside” of reality, after all, is manipulable, measurable, and predictable, and we can engineer technology out of it. We can make cool stuff.» — Kripal describe el reparto vigente del saber como jerarquía de valores disfrazada de descripción.
«That is how conventional science works—by rending reality into two and then ignoring one whole side of it, the side of reality, of course, that the scientific method cannot make sense of, cannot understand, not in degree but, again, in principle. Conventional science works because it gets to set the rules of the game and then pretend that phenomena it has no way of measuring or manipulating do not exist.» — Kripal describe la ciencia convencional como método que se fija sus propias reglas y declara inexistente lo que no puede medir.
«This, again, is why conventional science will never get us there: because reality is not so binary. Cosmos and consciousness cannot be separated. We can pretend for a little longer, of course, perhaps to do the conventional science that really needs to be done to get us to a different place. But we are constantly being reminded by impossible phenomena that this is in fact a useful pretense. It is not the real.» — Kripal concede utilidad a la ficción binaria de la ciencia y le niega estatuto de realidad.
«That way is the imagination. That way is the fantastic, the fantastic as actual mediation of the real in which the One splits into Two» — Kripal nombra la vía no matemática por la que los dos mundos se comunican; la frase se cierra en la plana siguiente con la aparición imaginal.
«I do not mean to argue that technological craft, conscious energies, or invisible entities are not involved, are not in the bedroom or in the ocean, or that the being cognized is “only in the imagination.” I mean to suggest, rather, that whatever or whoever is there (and it may well be many things or beings, or us, or the world of the dead), these presences are interacting with the human organism in and through that organism’s imagination, which is itself a feature or dimension of consciousness.» — Kripal blinda su tesis contra la lectura psicologista: la imaginación es el medio del contacto, no su sustituto.
«The imagination is the privileged organ of contact, communication, and communion. Reason is mostly impotent. Language and grammar are something of a joke (Derrida was right). The senses are not reliable: they evolved for other much more practical and adaptive reasons. But the imagination is of an entirely different order. At least in its empowered or activated states, it becomes a revelatory, if always imperfect, organ of mediation and translation.» — Kripal jerarquiza las facultades y pone la imaginación por encima de razón, lenguaje y sentidos, con la acotación de que su mediación es siempre imperfecta.
«In any case, the person in question does not “imagine” such things. The person is shown such things. Hence the revelation of my joke.» — Kripal marca la diferencia entre imaginar y ser mostrado, que es la mitad de revelación de su chiste sobre el radar.
«It is also worth remembering that the imagination shows every sign of being capable of affecting physical objects and events, even the very workings of space and time, often toward some symbolic meaning or contact communication. Think flying, breaking, or falling objects in poltergeist events (signaling anxiety, anger, or some unresolved trauma). Think marks on the body of the visionary in the Christian stigmata or the modern UFO implant. Think communally witnessed alterations of gravity» — Kripal enumera los efectos físicos que atribuye a la imaginación, del poltergeist al estigma y al implante; la lista sigue en la plana siguiente con la levitación del santo.
«The history of religions and folklore is positively filled with these mind-matter moments, as are contemporary UFO encounters. They involve lights or plasmas in the bedroom, craft in the sky, or monsters in the backyard (which rarely harm any human, by the way, so moral lines are being commonly drawn). Trees catch fire. Burn marks appear on the ground. Contactees develop superpowers: they become telepathic, precognitive, clairvoyant, spiritually awake. These are genuinely wondrous events. These are also physical events. There is radar.» — Kripal enumera los efectos materiales del encuentro y hace notar, de paso, que el fenómeno rara vez daña, es decir, que traza líneas morales.
«Can we read such events literally? I don’t see how. I don’t see how we can believe all these very different and flatly contradictory beliefs. Can we read them instead as symbolic attempts to communicate something of immense human and maybe even cosmic significance, perhaps as “magical” in the technical sense of linking the mental and the material toward some future awakening to the World as One? Yes, I think we can.» — Kripal descarta la lectura literal por contradictoria y propone la simbólica, con la magia entendida como enlace entre lo mental y lo material.
«I should make clear what I have already implied above—namely, that the sign so conceived is now almost entirely dominant in the academic world and in our culture more generally, and that the symbol has been out of fashion for decades in intellectual circles and is today generally dismissed, when it is addressed at all.» — Kripal constata el predominio del signo sobre el símbolo en la academia y lo declara un problema.
«Generally speaking, the sign in the contemporary humanities is entirely secular, artificial, arbitrary, and ultimately meaningless, whereas the banished symbol is implicitly religious, spontaneous or “revealed,” and supermeaningful.» — Kripal contrasta el signo secular y arbitrario con el símbolo desterrado, religioso y supersignificativo.
«This is why the psychedelic visionary trip, the abduction event, or the NDE is commonly considered nothing more than a trick in the head, a “hallucination.” It is just a mishmash of culturally determined signs appearing in and as the awareness of the subject (how it is doing this, no one can ever quite say).» — Kripal deriva de la doctrina del signo arbitrario la reducción del suceso visionario a alucinación, y anota que nadie explica cómo.
«Ultimately, the present conception of the sign is nihilistic to the core. It means nothing. Nor does, or can, anything else.» — Kripal declara nihilista la concepción vigente del signo.
«The symbol is very different. The sumbola is from the Greek and literally meant “thrown together” (sum-bollein) and, probably originally, an “agreement” or “contract.” It referred to things like a shard of pottery broken in half and then given to two business partners so that the deal could be recognized later by a perfect match, or the wholeness of the doubled human who had not been split apart into genders and sexualities. In short, the sumbola was a whole that had been literally broken or split into two and then recombined or “thrown together” to form the whole again.» — Kripal recupera la etimología griega del símbolo como tiesto partido que vuelve a juntarse, y la usa como figura de su monismo.
«Later, the sumbola came to refer to uncanny coincidences (another form of coming together) or to forms of ritual and reading divination that understood the image, the ecstatic poem, or the visionary display as a kind of esoteric cipher into deeper and deeper meanings of the real, which was suffused, soaked, with meaning.39 The correlations here with dual-aspect monism should be more than obvious.» — Kripal traza el desplazamiento del término hacia la coincidencia y la adivinación, y lee la imagen como cifra esotérica de lo real.
«When a person who has had an NDE or a UFO experience comes back and reports a fantastic event of endless sci-fi special effects, the report is almost always expressed as a supermeaningful coincidence of symbols and almost never as an arbitrary collection of culturally conditioned signs. Moreover, the experience often initiates other synchronicities and meaningful mind-matter coincidences in the physical environment. This total event of meaningful symbols and uncanny coincidences is experienced as cosmic truths of astonishing significance—that is, as images and events that participate directly in that which they represent. That is because they do.» — Kripal sostiene que el testimonio se formula siempre en clave de símbolo participante y no de signo arbitrario, y le da la razón al testigo.
«What the experiencer is actually reporting, I believe, is a temporary awakening into the One World beyond the “inside” and the “outside” of normal human perception and knowing, even if that One World is still coded in symbolic, mythical, or narrative form within the religious imagination» — Kripal ofrece su lectura, marcada como creencia propia: un despertar momentáneo al Mundo Uno, aún codificado en mito.
«It is perfectly true that the experiencer often conflates the truth of the One World that is shining through with that through which it is shining (that is, the symbolic landscape or mythical narrative). But the impossible thinker does not need to do this.» — Kripal separa la verdad que atraviesa del vehículo que la transmite, y ahí distingue al testigo del pensador.
«Okay, I actually believe that. There is my credo. I believe that what is symbolically encountered in these fantastic events is the real world manifesting in the body-brain of the experiencer in ways that the person can hear and integrate in some fashion—which is to say that these events are mediated by the “imagination,” which, in these moments at least, is no more, and no less, than a function or dimension of consciousness as such. I believe we should not believe the literal contents of such imaginal productions or movies, but we should nevertheless watch and listen to them with great care and attention as moments of contact, communion, and communication with the real.» — Kripal enuncia su credo con su límite dentro: no creer el contenido literal y atender igual al suceso como contacto con lo real.
«I would invoke negative theology and mystical literature here and look for other, more poetic, ways of expressing the same metaphysical truth—some “divine darkness” or Buddhist “emptiness” or Eckhartian “Nothing,” perhaps.» — Kripal prefiere el vocabulario de la teología negativa al término técnico *neutral* para nombrar el fondo.
«There are endless payoffs once we make this “flip,” even if we stick within a more idealist framework (the brain is in mind, the mind is not in the brain).40 For one, pretty much the entire spectrum of religious experience and ideation that are impossible within the present materialist framework begin to become entirely plausible, if not quite likely. The flip makes the impossible possible.» — Kripal enuncia el vuelco y su consecuencia, con la acotación de que lo vuelve plausible, no probable.
«The debunkers are perfectly correct about one thing: if conventional materialism is true, these things cannot be. Too bad they are.» — Kripal le concede al desmentidor la validez del condicional y le niega la premisa.
«Clearly, the problem is the lame rhetoric and unquestioned assumptions, not the phenomena themselves. Multiple anecdotes are real data and add up to theory. And extraordinary claims are not extraordinary at all in the context of the broader history of religions.» — Kripal desmonta las dos fórmulas escépticas de rigor: la anécdota como no-dato y la exigencia de evidencia extraordinaria.
«Rare, indeed, is the human civilization that believes that there is only insentient matter, and that all forms of sentience are accidental byproducts of this dead stuff. Considered comparatively and historically, our present scientific materialism is the clear outlier and is almost certainly in very serious error.» — Kripal invierte la carga comparativa: el materialismo científico es la excepción histórica, no la norma.
«flying saucer as “une réalité mythico-physique,” a “mythical-physical» — Kripal fecha en 1978 y en Bertrand Méheust la fórmula del platillo como realidad mítico-física; la expresión se completa en la plana siguiente.
«So there it is—my credo, my “I believe.” I believe that the World is One, that the Human is Two, and that this One World often appears in the Human as Two in and through the symbols, myths, and dreams of the empowered imagination.» — Kripal formula su credo en tres cláusulas: mundo uno, humano dos, y la aparición del primero en el segundo por la imaginación.
«Indeed, precisely because of this Two-in-Oneness, reality can and does appear in us all the time in openly and robustly paradoxical ways that can fit no present order of knowledge that is organized around the “object” or the “subject”—which is to say, all forms of modern academic knowledge.» — Kripal deriva de su credo la incompatibilidad de lo real con todo saber académico organizado en sujeto y objeto.
«Such ideas, of course, offend and confuse the adequacy of our present scientistic beliefs and humanist projects. They are neither traditionally religious nor conventionally scientific, nor are they simply material or purely mental. They point to a third future space of mind-matter in which we almost certainly participate but have not yet coded in any culturally syntonic and stable manner. This is how one thinks impossibly.» — Kripal sitúa su propuesta en un tercer espacio futuro todavía sin código cultural estable.
«In my own mind, the title phrase meant teaching about the Superman, as the history of religions has been doing for millennia toward very different ends and meanings, and as the humanities could still do, if it simply just chose to do so. But the phrase also meant teaching the Superman: teaching those who have been so awakened—of every gender and sexuality—into our superhumanity how also to be an embodied, caring, and just human being (that is, a particular person, even a good person). In short, the phrase goes both ways. It is another little poem about the Human as Two, now three words long.» — Kripal desdobla el título que descartó: enseñar sobre el Superhombre y enseñarle a él a ser humano justo.
«In this much more traditional framework, I can see at this point in my life that my books, and maybe my entire lifework, has been about one thing: teaching humans how to be God and God how to be humans.» — Kripal resume su obra entera en esa doble enseñanza recíproca.
«That is precisely what I mean by the superhumanities—an infinite set of criticisms and conversations with no end.» — Kripal define las superhumanidades como conversación sin desenlace, no como doctrina.
«On the theological side, I worry about any singular solution or approach when human beings are so incredibly diverse and different. Belief in the One God has too often met the intolerant» — Kripal enumera sus reservas ante la palabra Dios, y la primera es la intolerancia del monoteísmo; la frase se cierra en la plana siguiente.
«destruction and even ruthless slaughter of the other gods (and the communities who worship them). The idea of monotheism itself, for example, has been a historically horrendous one for far too many peoples, a long horror show.» — cierre de esa reserva: para Kripal el monoteísmo ha sido históricamente un largo espectáculo de horror.
«On the philosophical side, I worry about theism in general; that is, I worry about the positing of ultimate value outside the natural world. Accordingly, I have pushed for a new, more expansive naturalism, a super naturalism that can take in all the rogue phenomena without too quickly resorting to some external deity or supernatural force outside the cosmos.» — Kripal propone un naturalismo ampliado que acoja lo anómalo sin recurrir a una deidad exterior al cosmos.
«There are many reasons “God is dead,” then, and I have no desire to bring that bastard back. I am perfectly happy with his long Western funeral. I stand with my colleagues.» — Kripal se alinea con la crítica secular de sus colegas y descarta cualquier restauración teísta.
«And yet . . . and yet human beings continue to really and truly experience a beneficent Reality or Presence of unconditional love and acceptance, both within and without the religions, that can be described as, well, as God. I cannot deny that. Nor would I want to do so.» — Kripal opone al funeral de Dios el dato de la experiencia, que dice no poder ni querer negar.
«Again, I am not proposing any singular solution. I have none. I am simply pointing out that both things happen.» — Kripal se abstiene de conciliar la experiencia de inmanencia total con la de trascendencia perfecta y consigna las dos.
«convinced that what people call God is a plurality or multibeing. Put more simply, we are all, together, collectively, God.» — Kripal declara la conclusión de cuatro décadas de leer literatura gnóstica, esotérica, mística y psicodélica: lo que se llama Dios es una pluralidad y esa pluralidad somos todos. La frase abre en la línea anterior.
«If you prefer a bit of humor, we can invoke the Dutch computer engineer become idealist philosopher Bernardo Kastrup and suggest that God has a massive multiple personality (dis)order, and we are its symptomatic expressions. We are God’s alters.» — Kripal formula la misma tesis con el vocabulario clínico de Bernardo Kastrup: somos los alter de una personalidad múltiple divina.
«And I am not convinced that is only a metaphor, that madness is not sometimes a kind of unrecognized revelation, the beginning of some very serious philosophical reflection.» — Kripal se niega a leer como metáfora la locura de Dios y deja abierta la posibilidad de que sea revelación no reconocida.
«Toward the end of his conscious life, as Nietzsche grew increasingly certain of his own advanced superhuman status, he declared himself to be “all names in history.» — Kripal recoge la declaración de Nietzsche al final de su vida consciente y la lee dentro de su propia visión, no como delirio.
«Consider, as an example, Sharon Hewitt Rawlette. Rawlette comes to us with elite training in the philosophy of mind and ethics at New York University and the École normale supérieure in Paris. From the opening epigraph of her book The Source and Significance of Coincidences (2019), she clearly writes as an impossible thinker, rejecting, from the very beginning, the easy ways out of believing everything and doubting everything and explicitly taking up the paranormal as a philosophical catalyst, not as a literal truth or an easily dismissible piece of nonsense.» — Kripal presenta a Sharon Hewitt Rawlette como pensadora de lo imposible por rechazar a la vez la credulidad y el descarte.
«In the end, Rawlette will argue that “our individual human minds are actually parts of a larger consciousness—perhaps the ‘mind of the universe’—which communicates with us through the medium of coincidences.» — Kripal resume la conclusión de Rawlette: la coincidencia es el medio por el que una conciencia mayor se comunica.
«Put in my own terms, such coincidences, like most paranormal phenomena, are trying to get our attention, to get us to think differently—in fact, to think impossibly: to think through connections, comparisons, correspondences, and meanings and not just through material or social causes.» — Kripal traduce la coincidencia a su propio programa: pensar por correspondencias y no solo por causas.
«As I have sometimes joked, God is really just idealism for the masses.» — Kripal resume en una broma la relación entre la palabra Dios y la posición idealista que suscribe.
«Each developed religious system acknowledges the suffering, evil, or messed up nature of the world and offers some form of transcendence from it. That’s what makes religion religious—the transcendence. Of course, that transcendence is coded, and no doubt experienced and limited, in culturally and religiously shaped ways, which then get used for all sorts of dubious reasons, including exclusive and authoritarian ones.» — Kripal define lo religioso por la trascendencia que ofrece ante el mal, y en la misma frase señala el uso autoritario que se le da.
«Still, all such systems can be read as civilizational expressions of the Human as Two. There is a social ego, which sins, which accrues bad karma, which suffers, which offends the gods or the ancestors, which is trapped in the body, which is caught in an endless cycle of life and death (pick your local language). But there is also this other eternal, empty, immortal, absolute, infinite field of consciousness that no evil, no sin, no action, no suffering, and no god or ancestor can possibly touch for the simplest of reasons: such a field is not composite, is not put together, or, if you prefer, was never born. And something that was never born can never die.» — Kripal lee pecado, karma y ciclo de renacimientos como versiones del mismo esquema doble, y funda la inmortalidad del segundo término en que nunca nació.
«It seems to me that what Christian theology calls unearned grace, or, in another mode, unconditional love and forgiveness, has been personalized with some bizarrely legalized conceptions of God, but this notion of grace is not so different from what some of the Hindu traditions call liberation from all action or karma, or what some of the Buddhist traditions call emptiness beyond and before every self or thing.» — Kripal equipara la gracia cristiana, la liberación hindú del karma y la vacuidad budista, y culpa a la conceptualización legalista de haberla personalizado.
«True forgiveness comes, liberation happens, enlightenment shines forth when one side of the Human is set aside, forgotten, outshined for the other side, the Big Self, which is not a self at all. This is what I think the Sinhalese anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere meant when he observed that the mythos of the Buddha and the mythos of the Christ are structurally the same.» — Kripal explica la equivalencia por el eclipse de una mitad del humano ante la otra, y la respalda con Gananath Obeyesekere.
«But I do not see what any of this has to do with the field of consciousness or life that we seem to share, that we seem to be. I do not think that any of the local religious codes, including the Christian God-talk, are correct, but they all express something that can be shaped and experienced as such, if only we would cease interpreting them so goddamned literally and exclusively. If nothing else, they point toward the Human as Two, even if they can never reach it in their own self-serving languages, customs, and institutions.» — Kripal niega corrección a todo código religioso local y les concede a la vez que apuntan al Humano como Dos.
«I find the same insight again in Nietzsche, in a late book like The Antichrist, the Devil’s title, if ever there was one. Nietzsche’s understanding of Jesus is eerily similar to what I have voiced above (before ever reading his text). “The most spiritual” for Nietzsche are precisely those who see that “the world is perfect.» — Kripal encuentra en *El Anticristo* la misma intuición que dice haber tenido antes de leerlo.
«At that point, or soon after, what would become “Christianity” took over and turned this most radical of teachings into its very opposite: a set of beliefs in the head about Jesus dying for our sins, about sacrifice, death, gore, and the divinity of suffering—in short, the bizarre legal conceptions to which I alluded above. Nietzsche does not flinch at utterly rejecting such a long sickness: “Christianity has been the greatest misfortune of mankind so far.» — Kripal describe la inversión del mensaje evangélico en cristianismo y cita el veredicto de Nietzsche sin suavizarlo.
«Such is the history of religions: an ironic and disastrous reversal of the truth of things—that everything is perfect, that there is not the slightest difference between any of us, and that our emotional, personal, legal, political, and moral lives should reflect this most basic fact. That’s the good news.» — Kripal define la historia de las religiones como inversión desastrosa de una verdad que sí tiene consecuencias morales y políticas.
«And so, I repeat myself. We are God. God is us. Human beings are not very good at being God. We generally do not know this, of course, and we are very bad at accepting it, coming to terms with it, integrating it into our familial, social, and political lives.» — Kripal reitera la identidad y le añade la incompetencia: somos Dios y lo hacemos mal.
«I am thinking here within a particular line of European and American thought that stretches, in its modern rendition anyway, from the German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, through the Czech Bohemian writer Franz Kafka, to the American sociologist of religion Peter Berger and the American literary critic Harold Bloom.» — Kripal declara el linaje en que se inscribe su lectura proyectiva de la creencia, de Feuerbach a Harold Bloom.
«In this lineage, we intuit or actually experience something immortal and indestructible in us, something vast. As little temporary egos, we fear this presence, which threatens to engulf or absorb us, and so we project it into the sky and “believe in God.” Now we feel pious and safe. We submit. We obey. We bow down. We kneel, never realizing that, by doing so, we are denying our own superhuman natures and are secretly worshipping ourselves.» — Kripal explica la creencia en Dios como defensa del ego contra lo inmortal que lleva dentro.
«Basically, belief and God are projective fantasies, forms of spiritual schizophrenia, defense mechanisms against our own indestructible immortal being that will one day swallow whole our tiny insignificant social selves. And yet these projecting beliefs are also somehow true, at least indirectly so, since they give some witness to the Human as Two.» — Kripal declara la creencia fantasía proyectiva y le concede en la misma frase una verdad indirecta.
«God or Reality, it turns out, can easily manifest through a sexually abusive guru who was enlightened. Or a fundamentalist bigot who once knew eternity. It happens.» — Kripal sostiene que la revelación y el abuso conviven en la misma persona sin cancelarse.
«But neither reasonable move taken alone is, in the end, very satisfactory (or very reasonable), as each will erase the other truth and so deny at least half of the superhuman picture.» — Kripal rechaza por igual la condena humanista y la devoción creyente, porque cada una borra la mitad del caso.
«There are some deep historical reasons for this, particularly since the ancient Eurasian world was likely first and foremost a kind of demonological middle world, upon which the “world religions” were built as relatively recent and superficial structures.» — Kripal sitúa un mundo intermedio demonológico como sustrato antiguo sobre el que las religiones mundiales son construcción tardía.
«I understand that there are exceptions, but, for the most part, if there is no suffering or nothing is wrong, there are no robust paranormal phenomena. This is why there is so often a potential connection between the impossible and social justice and social injustice. The impossible is often a materialized cry amid endless social suffering, cruelty, violence, and murder.» — Kripal reafirma con su excepción declarada la correlación entre sufrimiento y fenómeno, y la liga a la justicia social.
«The adoption of Nietzsche’s Superman by the German National Socialist Party (the Nazis) and the same political embrace of the pagan “soul” (“Seele”) of the German nation cast a long and still deathly pall on virtually all discussions of the esoteric and the occult in Germany and Europe as a whole, and this despite the fact that Nietzsche cannot be understood as a proto-Nazi and that “soul” is an ancient and widespread concept (and experience) and in no way restricted to twentieth-century Germany.» — Kripal explica el veto europeo a discutir lo esotérico por la apropiación nazi, y niega que esa apropiación defina ni a Nietzsche ni a la noción de alma.
«Still, impossible phenomena can be and are integrated into fascist, far-right, and authoritarian systems to the present day. In the end, these are human capacities and abilities, and they are simply not morally determined.» — Kripal concede que lo imposible se integra a sistemas autoritarios y declara moralmente indeterminadas esas capacidades.
«because the impossible is human, and because human beings do terrible things to one another, the impossible can be aligned with any human moral system. We are God, but we are also the Devil.» — Kripal saca la consecuencia que da título a su capítulo: lo imposible no trae moral incorporada.
«Particularly in what are sometimes called the monotheistic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and their endless theistic offshoots, the religions have in historical fact generally rejected, persecuted, and even executed extreme experiencers, and for deep scriptural and theological reasons.» — Kripal sostiene que las religiones monoteístas persiguieron al experienciante extremo por razones doctrinales, no accidentales.
«Consider the early Christianities. These spoke of the magus, a word taken from the Persians, that meant “magician” but also a knower of the secrets of natural and divine realms who could manipulate those two realms. Accordingly, one of the exemplary enemies of early Christianity was named Simon Magus—Simon the Magician. Simon was the man who could fly, who none other than the apostle Peter himself prayed to have fall from the sky and break his leg in three pieces, thereby disabling but not killing him. “The Lord” did just that, according to the Acts of Peter, to prove the preaching of Peter and deny the “signs and wonders” of Simon Magus.» — Kripal recupera la etimología persa de *magus* y el caso de Simón el Mago como enemigo ejemplar del cristianismo primitivo, con la caída del vuelo según los *Hechos de Pedro*.
«Hence, also, the Roman Latin and then early Christian category of “superstition,” which served a similar purpose (to dismiss the piety and foolishness of the people). Or Augustine’s sexualized definition of the practice of magical spells and incantations as the “fornication of the soul.» — Kripal añade la superstición romana y la definición agustiniana de la magia como fornicación del alma.
«Both Walter Stephens and Carlos Eire see the stunning rise of demonological treatises and experts in the early modern period as a kind of implicit and immensely sophisticated skepticism—the beginning of modernity itself and its unbelief.29 Eire goes as far as to call the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries the age of devils (which was linked most tightly with that better known moniker, the age of reason).» — Kripal recoge de Walter Stephens y Carlos Eire la lectura de los tratados demonológicos como escepticismo incipiente, y la edad de los demonios como cara oculta de la edad de la razón.
«Sadly, but unsurprisingly, such a malevolent magic was often linked to women, erotic desire, and what was believed to be physical sexual intercourse with the Devil, which in turn projected endless elite male anxieties about the nature and limits of human— particularly female—sexuality, the existence of God, and the reality of the supernatural. In Europe, 75 percent of those executed were women, with Finland as a reverse exception.» — Kripal liga el *maleficium* a la sexualidad femenina y a la ansiedad masculina culta, con la cifra de ejecutadas y su excepción finlandesa.
«Religiously speaking now, the distinction was, and still is, all about where agency is placed. Magical spiritualities tend to place supernormal agency in the human being. They also tend to be private. The religions tend strongly to place supernormal agency outside the human being, even outside the natural order—for example, in “God”—and build up their institutions, scriptures, and rituals as a kind of privileged mediation or medium. They also tend to be public. This, of course, is why public religion has seldom got along with private magic: they fundamentally disagree about where to place the supernormal.» — Kripal distingue magia y religión por el lugar donde cada una pone la agencia, dentro o fuera del humano, y por su carácter privado o público.
«A most profound antimagic and a most devastating disenchantment, working hand in hand, have removed all meaning and story from the objective world as “God” has been increasingly separated from the same.» — Kripal describe antimagia y desencantamiento como un mismo movimiento que vació de sentido el mundo objetivo.
«What actually happened was what Eire calls a series of “reconfigurations of reality,” particularly around the relationship between the supernatural and natural worlds.34 Impossible things might still happen, but since matter and spirit were now being increasingly separated; such things, particularly if they were physical, could only be reinterpreted as bad—that is, as fraudulent or evil, the work of the Devil and his minions.» — Kripal expone, con Eire, la Reforma como reconfiguración de lo real que solo dejó a lo imposible la casilla del fraude o del demonio.
«Still, witchcraft, demonic magic, superstition, the dark arts, credulity, and Catholicism became synonymous in the Protestant mind. In the general Protestant logic (which became the general Enlightenment logic, which became today’s secular logic), no one can “become a different kind of human being suffused with supernatural gifts.”35 There could be no superhuman saints, no divinized bodies or glowing matter.» — Kripal traza la genealogía protestante de la lógica secular vigente, que cierra la puerta a la divinización del cuerpo.
«Indeed, with the doctrine of the “cessation of miracles,” the Protestant traditions attempted to put a temporal limit on what was possible for God—now there simply could be no more miracles after the first century of Christianity (that is, after the biblical era), or so the new Protestant doctrine proclaimed. The relationship between the supernatural and the natural was being severed.» — Kripal presenta la cesación de los milagros como límite temporal impuesto a lo posible.
«It is the contemporary debunking community and the scientistic academy that inherited this earlier demonization of the impossible. It is no longer demons, of course. It is nonsense. The materialism of secularism, in short, is monotheism in disguise, and Protestant to the core.» — Kripal identifica al desmentidor contemporáneo como heredero de la demonización, con el sinsentido en lugar del demonio.
«This is actually a very old Christian conviction that dates back as far as 400 CE and to the central figure of Augustine, who clearly understood that what we consider against nature depends on our limited views of what nature is. The implication is that the “miracle” or “prodigy” would in fact become perfectly “natural,” if we but understood that natural world.» — Kripal remonta a Agustín la idea de que lo contranatural depende de nuestra idea limitada de naturaleza.
«be used for immoral purposes, although the history of magic clearly shows us that this is so.» — Kripal apoya en la historia de la magia que las capacidades supranormales sirven también a fines inmorales; la frase abre en la plana anterior con el miedo al psi de Stephen Braude.
«It is messy. Agency and moral assent are often simply not present in impossible phenomena. Individuals do become possessed against their will. Sorcerers do curse and magically attack others. Demons are accurate phenomenological descriptors of many poltergeist, parasite, and haunting cases, which manifest a clear and disturbing contagion or immunological structure, again completely outside personal assent.39 The early modern history of Christian mysticism, from 1400 to 1700, is a history of possession.» — Kripal sostiene que el consentimiento falta en buena parte del fenómeno y admite *demonio* como descriptor fenomenológico correcto.
«Unsurprisingly, there appears to be some actual correlation between UFO events and geographical places with “devil” in the site name.42 And this correlation is as evident in Indigenous lore and practice (American Indigenous communities avoid these places and associate them with the presence of things like superwitches) as it is in modern English place names.» — Kripal registra la coincidencia entre topónimos diabólicos y sucesos ovni, en el folclor indígena y en el inglés moderno.
«One of the most famous American paranormal researchers of the twentieth century, John Keel, finally concluded that what he was really studying was not ufology but demonology. Keel was onto something.» — Kripal suscribe la conclusión de John Keel de que su objeto era la demonología y no la ufología.
«Still, there is something fundamentally different, especially about the ancestors (the so-called dead) and their active roles in human community, that generally renders the African worldviews much more friendly to the modern American paranormal. Significantly, again, the American paranormal has its roots in Spiritualism, or contact with the dead, which itself has deep connections to African peoples in the United States and the abolition movement. There is the deep linkage of the impossible with social justice again.» — Kripal enlaza el paranormal estadounidense con el espiritismo y con las comunidades africanas ligadas al abolicionismo.
«One of the most basic insights of Long, drawn directly from the Romanian comparativist Mircea Eliade, is that what we generally mean by “the human” is in serious danger of being provincialized by the Hebraic, Greek, and Christian understandings in the Euro-American universities. What we now call “humanity” (humanitas) is in historical fact much more ontologically diverse, if we open our hearts and minds to the Asian, African, and Australian cultural traditions, which is exactly what Eliade’s history of religions attempted to do toward what he called a “new humanism.» — Kripal recoge de Long y de Eliade la advertencia contra una idea de lo humano provincializada por lo hebreo, lo griego y lo cristiano.
«Postcolonial and critical race theories must be central, Long argued, but they also must be practiced alongside other methods that fully acknowledge and robustly engage the verticality of religious experience—that is, the sheer “otherness” or “sacred” nature of these kinds of experiences, including and especially those of the contemporary world.» — Kripal reclama de Long las dos exigencias juntas: teoría crítica de la raza y verticalidad de la experiencia religiosa.
«contact with Europeans into a ritualized hope of technology and material goods, or “cargo,” that would be delivered to them by the gods.» — Kripal describe el culto del cargo, que Long tomaba como modelo de un futuro posible de las humanidades; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«All of this must be rethought, and so reexperienced, after the last five centuries of colonialism, “After Man,” as the Jamaican intellectual Sylvia Wynter put it in the title of a well-known essay.» — Kripal recoge de Sylvia Wynter la fórmula con que nombra la tarea posterior al colonialismo.
«Partly because of all of this, some Black critical theorists have moved to an “ontological blackness”—that is, to an insistence on separating blackness from the color of one’s skin or the horrific histories of the Atlantic slave trade. They fully recognize Long’s colonial past of the Americas, but they also see an ontological blackness as the apophatic or unimaginable source of much profound religious experience.» — Kripal expone la negritud ontológica como fuente apofática de experiencia religiosa, sin cancelar la historia colonial.
«dangerous and terrifying, if also liberating and transcendent (and superhuman, with an emphasis on the siddhis or “superpowers”), and sometimes linked to the marginalized communities of the caste system, the blue Kali is motherly, beneficent, and gentle.» — Kripal ilustra la negritud ontológica con las dos Kali del tantra shakta bengalí, la negra y la azul; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«Kali’s blackness signals a kind of esoteric intensity, a social marginalization, a secret sexual-spiritual practice (often in cremation grounds), and a final liberation or release from the cycle of birth and death. In short, this is a “transcendent blackness,” to employ again Stephen Finley’s apt theorization.» — Kripal lee la negrura de Kali como cifra de intensidad esotérica, marginación y práctica sexual-espiritual secreta.
«Gray’s call is not to compromise our critical theory with respect to race. His call is to engage robustly in such critical theory and to affirm the philosophical roots of an ontological or apophatic blackness that exceeds all attempts to explain the “experiences of the super.» — Kripal precisa que Biko Gray no pide rebajar la teoría crítica sino sumarle la negritud apofática.
«If there is a human universal in the history of religions, it is the anomalous, impossible, magical, or paranormal experience. Africa may or may not be its historical origin, as Van Binsbergen has suggested, but the impossible is in fact everywhere and everyone. It is the human, or superhuman.» — Kripal declara universal la experiencia anómala y se abstiene sobre su origen africano.
«Mack saw these contact events as a “passport to the cosmos”—that is, as inhabiting an actual third space that was neither objective in the sense of the sciences or subjective in the sense of the humanities but something else or more. Put simply, Mack was an impossible thinker.» — Kripal lee el título de John E. Mack como nombre de un tercer espacio, ni objetivo ni subjetivo.
«For many Afrofuturist visionaries, for example, the apocalypse, the end of the world, and so the end of the assumed model of the human, is not some future fear or possibility. It has already happened. The human of the past is over. The human of the future is in process.» — Kripal expone la temporalidad afrofuturista: el apocalipsis no está por venir, ya ocurrió.
«Hers is a future in which Black people are central, in which mixing and matching of all the races is the desired norm and not the exception, and in which the presence of supernormal powers like telepathy are as natural as they are viral and evolutionary—a shaping power of some future race. Hence her early Mind of My Mind (1977).» — Kripal describe el futuro de Octavia E. Butler, con la telepatía como potencia evolutiva y no como excepción.
«One of Butler’s central late messages is that we shape God, even as God shapes us. “God is change,” as she hymned. She meant this quite literally, physically, scientifically. Evolution was one aspect of this changing God or universe, but so was society, and so were people.» — Kripal subraya que Butler entendía literalmente su fórmula de un Dios que es cambio.
«Unsurprisingly, her books have been banned in many states and federal prisons in the United States for obvious affirmations of marginalized peoples, the mixing of all essences or natures, and a keen sense of social justice. And they’ve been banned due to plain social stupidity. Butler was also prescient, almost precognitively so. Books like Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) eerily read like a description of a totalitarian-leaning America under President Donald Trump. The latter novel even contains the phrase “make America great again.» — Kripal registra la censura de Butler y su carácter casi precognitivo, con la frase que su novela de 1998 anticipa.
«suffering, as in mental illness or, to be less medical and more philosophically accurate about it, madness. And I mean this in the most impossible of ways.» — Kripal prefiere el término locura al de enfermedad mental para nombrar el estado por el que llega el fenómeno; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«Let me underline the fact again, then: the link between massively altered mental states and paranormal events is not just a link; sometimes it is an actual identity or coillumination. So much of philosophical thinking about experience and time, and reality itself is “madness” with respect to the social order or common sense. Moreover, the contours of religious experience, especially in its more extreme or acute forms, are classically not what they are in the social order: the two orders of reality are fundamentally different, and often wildly opposed. There are two worlds, not one.» — Kripal eleva el vínculo entre locura y fenómeno a identidad ocasional, y sostiene que los dos órdenes de realidad se oponen.
«The simple truth—it is not simple at all—is that serious philosophical thinking can lead one into madness and mystical revelation, and madness and mystical revelation can lead one into philosophical thinking.» — Kripal hace reversible el camino entre filosofía y locura mística.
«They see the mad state, whose external or third-person medicalized description they assume is sufficient, as productive of a delusion instead of as an inner psychic portal through which the phenomena arrive and appear, always (or mostly), yes, in personally confusing and socially awkward forms.» — Kripal objeta que la descripción médica en tercera persona se tome por explicación suficiente del estado.
«Maybe what we so quickly call the schizophrenic or the psychotic individual is sometimes seeing something, knowing something, about the interconnected or unitive nature of the world that is real. Maybe the truth is “psychotic” with respect to the socialized ego. I cannot shake that thought, that possibility.» — Kripal plantea como posibilidad, y no como tesis, que el estado psicótico vea algo real del mundo unitario.
«The American science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick certainly thought as much. He was hospitalized for schizophrenia, and he had numerous paranormal and mystical experiences that he understood as the secret of his own wild creativity and religious genius. He did not put these states in entirely different boxes. He connected them because they are connected.59 Indeed, Dick honored both sides of the equation by putting the matter in an evolutionary esoteric context when he wrote in his private journals that “the schizophrenic is a leap ahead that failed.”60 The mad state may have failed socially in many ways, but it is still an advance, still a leap ahead.» — Kripal recoge de los diarios de Philip K. Dick la lectura evolutiva y esotérica de su propia esquizofrenia.
«To repeat myself, I personally think that trauma is a key to much of impossible thinking: something has to “split open” the person or social ego before such a subject can know and see in these new ways. Sexual arousal can do that, sometimes. Psychedelics can do that, more often and more reliably. So can car accidents, heart attacks, terrible falls, and racist social systems, sometimes. And that splitting is seldom pretty, much less socially helpful. It is often near deadly, or just deadly. It seriously compromises or even destroys its host or medium. And yet, and yet . . . not always. Sometimes it also helps to produce a kind of literary or philosophical genius, a paranormal virtuoso.» — Kripal enumera lo que abre la escisión y no oculta su costo: compromete o destruye al que la sufre, y solo a veces produce un virtuoso.
«Consider the “spectral turn” of the 1990s and into the new millennium, a most important development in the critical theory of the academy that generally reads the spectral or the common historical experience of ghosts and haunting in terms of traumatic social and personal memory.61 In my own understanding, that spectral turn is more of a half-turn, an important beginning but not a complete turning around. It does not flip. It keeps its eyes firmly on this side of reality, on the social, the political, and the psychological, even as it employs, for its own moral purposes, intrusions from the other side. Still, it is a very important beginning. More to my point, the spectral turn constitutes a keen awareness that the impossible and social justice can be related—indeed “intend” to be so.» — Kripal llama medio giro al giro espectral de la academia: reconoce el vínculo con la justicia social y se queda de este lado de lo real.
«I read this Derridean text, like the philosopher’s late (and quite wonderful) essay on telepathy, as displaying some rather clear esoteric traces of modern thought that speak to earlier spiritual concerns and convictions, particularly via the philosopher’s key category of hauntology. The latter is probably the closest Derrida could come in a playful pun to an actual ontology.» — Kripal lee la hauntología de Derrida como resto esotérico y como la ontología que su autor no podía enunciar.
«Secondary haunting involves critical theories like Derrida’s deconstruction—a kind of academic thinking about haunting that wants to reduce the impossible phenomena to the social and historical plane by reading it as metaphor, memory, and social signal, or in the language of the Lincolns, as “literary representations and figures of the imaginary,” not “agentive revenants” or “ghosts qua ghosts.”63 Never do such authors of secondary haunting really consider “individuals or social groups who experience haunting as something consistent with, and rooted in, their cosmology, ontology, and psychology (the latter term used in the etymologically precise sense: ‘theory of the soul’)”64—which is to say, as religious.» — Kripal expone, con Martha y Bruce Lincoln, el embrujo secundario que reduce el fantasma a figura literaria.
«Primary haunting, on the other hand, involves, well, actual hauntings—basically, ghosts and spirits possessing people, and in precisely the terms of their religious understanding: as something “other than metaphor,” “as possessing an ontological status that is ambiguous, even contradictory, minimally—but emphatically— substantial and real.”65 Here, the ghost is not simply something interior, a matter of consciousness, a projection. Rather, it exists, it really exists “on the borders of the physical and metaphysical.”66 It inhabits a different ontological zone. The Lincolns call their emphasis on primary haunting and a much greater comparative reach their “critical hauntology.» — Kripal define el embrujo primario y la hauntología crítica que lo toma en serio, con el fantasma en la frontera de lo físico y lo metafísico.
«The Lincolns in fact cite the ethnographic case that moved me so while reading the late American anthropologist Mai Lan Gustafsson. It involves an American GI, an ex-marine named Sam who was having nightmares and speaking eerily fluent Vietnamese in his sleep: “Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me. . . . Motherfucker, you give it to me or I will eat your mother’s soul.” A Vietnamese medium Sam visited determined the voice was that of a Vietcong soldier who had been killed and whose bloodied name tag Sam had secretly kept as a souvenir. The medium had the soldier’s name (Hoc Van Nguyen) and the nature of his gory death (a landmine). Sam found the dead man’s mother, performed a ritual at the family altar, and sent the mother a monthly stipend. No nightmarish hauntings followed. They were gone.69 That is impossible thinking.» — Kripal narra el caso vietnamita como ejemplo de embrujo primario resuelto en los términos rituales del propio fantasma.
«It is difficult, for example, to avoid the observation in these anthropological situations that many such “ghosts” are on their way of becoming revered “ancestors,” as the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald had it over sixty years ago now.71 So much for the spectral turn of the 1990s. Loewald was using this language in 1960. No wonder his reframing has been called “a stunning re-definition of the unconscious as a crowd of ghosts.» — Kripal antedata el giro espectral al psicoanálisis de 1960 y su inconsciente como muchedumbre de fantasmas.
«Consider the related notion in the 1950s of what the Hungarian American psychoanalyst Nandor Fodor called the “poltergeist psychosis,” an idea that emerged from the lingering suspicion that poltergeist phenomena are ultimately about the exteriorized emotion and sexual libido of some living, profoundly conflicted person in the room—often, but not always, an adolescent.» — Kripal recupera la psicosis poltergeist de Nandor Fodor, que atribuye el fenómeno a la libido exteriorizada de un vivo.
«spirits and wonders in the sky, all of which relied on an ontology of two intersecting worlds and a subsequent theorization of the parapsychological as a form of “super-nature.» — Kripal describe la ontología de dos mundos intersecados que sostenía el libro de Fodor sobre embrujos, reencarnación y sexo con espíritus; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«It is indeed astonishing how psychologically inflected so many parapsychological events are, how they seem to involve family dynamics, sexual trauma, emotional conflict, and psychopathology —which is to say, human suffering. But they also involve physical objects moving without any apparent means or cause. If this is what the psychoanalyst might call an “exteriorization of emotion,” that emotion is doing some pretty impressive things. In these instances, at least, a more adequate future critical theory would become a kind of superpsychoanalysis that would take the telekinetic ghost, the effective curse, the dramatic possession, and the terrifying haunting to a whole new level of seriousness. Such historical events might remain psychological projections, but projections now of a superhuman nature.» — Kripal propone un superpsicoanálisis que conserve la proyección psicológica y le añada el efecto físico.
«In his mind, the strangest thing about his own family history was his father, who was deeply committed to Spiritualism and Theosophy and who claimed to see ghosts and remember previous lives. Eire’s father also claimed that his father (who died in 1927 from an infected paper cut on his tongue caused by an envelope he licked carelessly) had been expelled from his Jesuit school because he had accidentally caught a glimpse of some Jesuits levitating a table.» — Kripal cuenta el origen familiar espiritista y teosófico del historiador Carlos Eire, con la mesa levitada por jesuitas.
«In the beginning, Teresa feared the levitations. The concern was both hers and her confessors: such levitations, after all, may have been from the Devil. As such, they put her in the inquisitorial spotlight. The demonic reading is not what Teresa finally concluded, but it was certainly the standard interpretive option, and Teresa knew it.» — Kripal sitúa el miedo de Teresa de Ávila ante sus propias levitaciones en la sospecha demoníaca que era lectura estándar de la época.
«As Eire reads the Spanish text, the Vida is a “forced confession” in a riven theological and political context.» — Kripal recoge de Carlos Eire la lectura de la *Vida* como confesión forzada.
«Again, such things produced real fear and doubt not only in Teresa but in her confessors. Hence their advice to the nun to greet her visions of Christ with an obscene hand gesture called “giving the fig”—basically, in today’s English lingo, giving the finger.» — Kripal consigna el consejo de los confesores de recibir las visiones con un gesto obsceno, la higa.
«No wonder that when she finished her Vida all copies were destroyed except one, which was then kept locked away until she died and her sanctity became apparent through postmortem miracles.81 Put simply, Teresa’s impossible phenomena were contested, censored by both herself and her superiors, and only later recovered after her death. Now, at least, she was no longer a woman deceived by the Devil. She was in the process of becoming a saint and doctor of the church, a recognized and revered Catholic superhuman.» — Kripal traza el paso de Teresa de sospechosa de engaño diabólico a doctora de la Iglesia, con la censura de su libro en medio.
«How exactly does one wish these things away with so much documentation, much of it as reliable as any other historical deposit? Eire does not. In two words that sum up his argument and function as his latest book title, They Flew. The title phrase is adamant, and just a bit angry. This is what he calls, in perfect sync with my argument here, a “history of the impossible.» — Kripal declara el título de Eire una afirmación, no una descripción, y lo alinea con su propio programa.
«In an essay entitled “Folklore as an Instrument of Knowledge” (1937), Eliade follows the earlier “psycho-folklore” of Andrew Lang and argues for the empirical reality behind folkloric beliefs. Exactly as the title suggested, Eliade took Joseph of Cupertino’s commonly witnessed flights, along with other well-attested phenomena from Indian yoga and modern parapsychology, as containing a core of historical-physical truth and went as far as to suggest that such “folklore” should function as an “instrument of knowledge.» — Kripal recupera un ensayo de Eliade de 1937 que tomaba por físicamente reales los vuelos de José de Cupertino y lo declara precedente de su propio método.
«For his part, Eire focuses on Joseph and the saint’s Italian shrieks and whoops (urlo! strillo! grido!)—likened to the explosions of gun powder—that made buildings shake, as in an earthquake, and propelled him into an olive tree or up into a church statue perched high above an altar.84 If such explosive cries were not supernatural, they were “at least superhuman.» — Kripal describe los alaridos con que el fraile se impulsaba a los árboles y a las estatuas, con los términos italianos de la fuente.
«It is difficult to disagree. One reads of things like the suspension of time during Joseph’s ecstatic states, the contagious nature of his flights (he could raise into the air anyone he touched, “much like prey in the talons of a raptor”88), an impermeability to burning over candle flame (despite the horrified screaming of nuns), and, perhaps strangest of all, the physical freeze-frame effect of his trances, which extended even to his clothes in a kind of “supernatural cocoon,” within which the natural effects of gravity, space, and time were simply not operable.» — Kripal enumera los prodigios anexos al vuelo de José de Cupertino, incluido el capullo sobrenatural que congelaba hasta su ropa.
«The historical documentation certainly bears this out. The saint flew countless times over a span of some thirty-five years in front of peasant milkmaid and aristocratic duke alike, even the pope himself, in the midst of a Protestant Reformation that would demonize the very superhuman miracles that so defined Joseph’s remarkable life, and on the cusp of a scientific modernity that would deny their very possibility.» — Kripal subraya el carácter público y transversal del testimonio, y su mala fecha histórica, entre la Reforma y la ciencia moderna.
«Following our earlier chapter on Kevin, it is not difficult to recognize in the life of Joseph of Cupertino the socially challenging but spiritually creative presence of someone “on the autistic spectrum.” Joseph’s education was very basic, to say the least. Eire calls Joseph an “idiot savant” and spends numerous paragraphs discussing the “holy fool” of the Christian tradition.» — Kripal aplica al fraile del siglo XVII la lectura neurodiversa que desarrolló en su capítulo sobre Kevin.
«Joseph’s learned contemporaries thought that his theological knowledge was “infused”—that is, that it did not come from learning but from God.91 And one of his most common epithets was Bocca Aperta, or “open mouth.” Joseph would commonly stare into space with his mouth agape.» — Kripal recoge la explicación de época, el saber infuso, y el apodo que le daban por su boca abierta.
«Joseph was certainly both an embarrassment and a danger. The church basically had to hide him the last decade of his life in remote monasteries and churches, as the Inquisition kept a suspicious eye on his doings. They were afraid of him. But the people were not. They took tiles off the roofs to see him and tore up his already poor garments as holy relics in the streets.» — Kripal contrasta el miedo institucional al fraile volador con la devoción popular que le arrancaba el hábito como reliquia.
«levitation (it was patently obvious), and who even levitated with another person, John of the Cross (one of my favorite mystical writers of all time for his apophatic emphasis on nada, or divine nothingness).» — Kripal consigna la levitación conjunta de Teresa de Ávila y Juan de la Cruz, y declara su preferencia por el *nada* apofático del segundo; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«also the World as Two. Eire calls this a “binary understanding of reality.» — Kripal recoge de Eire el supuesto ontológico de la cultura barroca católica —dos niveles, natural y sobrenatural— y lo identifica con su propio Humano como Dos; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«In other words, as I have argued throughout these pages, what is possible or impossible is culturally relative, and nature itself is culturally conditioned, at least within human experience. Culture, as we have come to call it, may not go all the way down, but it goes pretty darn far.» — Kripal declara relativa a la cultura la frontera de lo posible, con la reserva de que la cultura no llega hasta el fondo.
«There is another somewhat shocking way to say this: something like human levitation and flight are certainly enabled and empowered by local religious beliefs, but they are also limited and constrained by them. Belief is necessary. Belief is also limitation.» — Kripal formula la doble función de la creencia: habilita el fenómeno y le pone tope.
«This raises the following questions: What are we actually capable of? What are the limits of the human? Are there any?» — Kripal deja abiertas las preguntas sobre el límite de lo humano en vez de responderlas.
«Hence a line like this from María de Ágreda, the Lady in Blue (for the color of the habit seen by the Jumano people of New Mexico and Texas), on the way her bilocations from Spain to North America were received: “They are accurate about some things . . . but other things have been added and exaggerated.”101 That could well be a motto for the entire history of religions, where fraud and fact, trick and truth, and experience and exaggeration go together again and again, and again.» — Kripal toma la reserva de María de Ágreda sobre su propia leyenda como lema de la historia de las religiones entera.
«María’s reserve and honesty are crucial, particularly since her miracles “dwarfed those of any other saint, including the founder of her order, Francis of Assisi.» — Kripal subraya que la honestidad de la monja pesa más porque sus milagros superaban a los de Francisco de Asís.
«Like the apostle Paul, María always wondered whether she was in the body or not during such spiritual travels. In the end, we are talking about “many improbable things” (“muchas cosas inverosímiles”), as the Inquisition put it in another understatement.104 María’s own “considered opinion of this whole case is that it really happened,” although how or why was never clear.» — Kripal consigna la duda de la propia María sobre si viajaba en el cuerpo, y su conclusión de que el hecho ocurrió aunque no supiera cómo.
«tricksters acting as agents of the devil, the ultimate trickster.”106 All three made it through the gauntlet» — Kripal cita a Eire llamando avatares liminales de lo imposible a Teresa, José de Cupertino y María de Ágreda, suspendidos entre lo divino y lo demoníaco; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«Making something impossible possible does not end the conversation, it turns out. It only initiates the debate, especially on a moral level. To speak in secular terms, the fantastic gives rise to critical theory and moral criticism.» — Kripal advierte que admitir el fenómeno abre la discusión moral en vez de cerrarla.
«I personally think that one of the worst decisions ever made in the literature is the decision not to further research mediums and psychics who were caught cheating. Cheating and actual paranormal phenomena are not mutually exclusive and never have been. The doubled truth is difficult: fraud, deception, and revelation are all often woven imperceptibly together into a tight mix that can only frustrate the purist of any type, including the orthodox gatekeeper, the responsible historian, and the contemporary skeptic.» — Kripal reclama seguir investigando a los médiums descubiertos en fraude, porque engaño y revelación se entretejen.
«phenomenon, not some social or psychological add-on. Accordingly, such events do not follow orthodox lines, whatever those lines happen to be.» — Kripal sostiene que el *trickster* es inherente al fenómeno y no un añadido social; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«They would have her lie beneath the bed of a dying nun to act as a decoy and deflect the demonic assaults to her own body instead of that of the dying sister. Eire comments wryly: “As one might expect, Sor Luisa became something of an expert demonologist as a result of these encounters and also a successful exorcist.» — Kripal recoge de Eire el uso de sor Luisa como señuelo contra los asaltos demoníacos en un convento franciscano español.
«Indeed, if I were to name one feature of these contemporary literatures that cries out for more attention, I would immediately name deception and disinformation, and I do not mean that of the US intelligence organizations and military branches. I do not assume that such inherent misdirections are not in our present best interests. Or that they are.» — Kripal señala el engaño como el rasgo más urgente de la literatura contemporánea, y se abstiene de juzgar si nos conviene.
«The bottom line is this: people did claim to witness “impossible” things, and repeatedly, including the endless levitations of María de Ágreda, during which she was poked and prodded and she even floated around, weightless as a feather, so that others could better gawk at her levitations through a window in her cell door or in public spaces.» — Kripal insiste en el hecho documental del testimonio repetido, con la monja levitando ante mirones que la pinchaban.
«Why are such historical facts ignored now, boxed off as something ridiculous? Why are some of the most astonishing superhuman beings in history essentially forgotten today? Almost anything can be discussed in history, it turns out, except this. Hence the necessity of Eire’s most recent book. Hence the power of his title, They Flew, without the usual question mark. Eire even adds an exclamation point» — Kripal denuncia el único tema vedado a la historia y lee el título de Eire, sin interrogación, como acto de desafío; la frase se cierra en la línea siguiente con la exclamación del epílogo.
«In this book, as well, I seek to push things far beyond the usual academic limitations—and past the religious ones. Take those brackets off. Take the question mark away. Add the stunned exclamation point. Hear the ecstatic and terrified screams, acknowledge the antigravitational flights, and feel the building physically shake around you. Theorize that.» — Kripal pide quitar los corchetes de la epojé y teorizar el hecho, no el testimonio del hecho.
«Newman’s subtle work suggests that, ultimately, the impossible, even in its most negative and destructive forms, implies the positive and ultimately cosmic existence of a shared Mind, of what people call “God.” I think the same is true of the thread that runs throughout this entire book, from the supernormal and imaginal writings of Frederic Myers to the latest insectoid abduction experiences and the related telepathic phenomena. There can be no communication “from a distance” (tele-), much less a shared emotional entanglement (-pathos), if something fundamental is not shared, if there is not, frankly, love.» — Kripal deriva de la etimología de *telepatía* que el fenómeno presupone algo compartido, y lo llama amor.
«The point seems obvious enough: a subjectivity cannot possess another subjectivity unless they share the same basic nature.113 Even demonic possession implies, after all, something shared. The demon is “human,” too.» — Kripal extiende el argumento hasta la posesión demoníaca: también ella supone naturaleza común.
«Newman offers any number of helpful interventions here, including her central notions of the “permeable self” and what she calls “coinherence”—that is, the medieval Christian conviction that persons coinhere or mutually participate in one another, after the model of the Trinity and the three persons of God sharing one divine nature, or the person of Christ who shares both human and divine natures. Theology matters. Theology makes possible what a “person” was or could become in the Christian medieval world.» — Kripal expone la coinherencia de Barbara Newman, modelada sobre la Trinidad, y sostiene que la teología decide qué puede ser una persona.
«In her introduction, she cites contemporary authors, like the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor in A Secular Age on how the modern self is more “buffered” than the premodern self, which was more “porous.» — Kripal recoge de Charles Taylor la oposición entre el yo amortiguado moderno y el poroso premoderno.
«Heyward would not accept this: It “was not a lie, not a falsehood, not a fiction that I concocted and entered for a while. It was an actual life experience of a person, or persons, being raped and beaten.” In Newman’s terms, “Heyward came to believe that her psychic pain had opened her to experience the still greater pain of unknown others.» — Kripal presenta el caso de Carter Heyward, que rechazó la lectura terapéutica de sus recuerdos como fantasía.
«But Newman also goes further still, radicalizing the idea of coinherence or the nonexistence of actual boundaries with ancient biblical convictions, like the mystical theology of the Gospel of John: “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” and “You will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”116 She also cites the Pauline teaching that all are members of the same mystical body» — Kripal remonta la coinherencia a la teología mística joánica y al cuerpo místico paulino.
«Newman is more sympathetic to a reductive rather than a productive theory of the brain-mind relation; that is, she is more than willing to see the brain as a reducer, receiver, or transmitter of mind, not as its producer, as we have it today in the materialist neuroscience.» — Kripal atribuye a Newman la teoría del cerebro como filtro y no como productor de la mente.
«Newman also works with a theory of the imagination that does not reduce the miracle story to a theological fiction but sees it, in modern terms, as an instance of the paranormal—that is, as something perfectly natural but not yet adequately understood.» — Kripal recoge de Newman la lectura del relato milagroso como paranormal, es decir, natural y todavía no entendido.
«There is a legend that Nietzsche finally collapsed into madness while embracing the neck of a horse in a desperate attempt to keep it from being beaten by its owner. The legend is a legend. We do not know if it is true. But it speaks to a counterreception of Nietzsche that is certainly closer to the vision I have taught again in these pages. The superhuman is the man» — Kripal declara leyenda la escena del caballo de Turín y la usa igual como cifra de otra recepción de Nietzsche; la frase se cierra en la plana siguiente.
«though the cruel man does not know it yet), but it is also the horse. It is cross-species compassion. It is life itself. It is the only God. And so am I. And so are you.» — cierre del capítulo: para Kripal el superhumano incluye al caballo, y la compasión entre especies es lo único divino.
«Although many people may not possess direct gnosis (I certainly do not), many do possess hermeneutical sympathy, and for a much more democratic reason: the humanities themselves are defined by textual deposits that are riven with esoteric traces of the gnostic experiences and subsequent mystical thoughts of their authors. To study the humanities is to be inspired by these very gnostic traces. It is to be struck by a kind of lightning, again and again and again.» — Kripal declara que él mismo no tiene gnosis directa y abre la puerta de la simpatía hermenéutica, disponible por los rastros esotéricos de los textos.
«This is why the humanities are the superhumanities. They are guided, really defined, by the altered states of consciousness, embodiment, and knowledge of their authors in broad social, artistic, and intellectual movements from Renaissance humanism, Romanticism, and German idealism to psychoanalysis and phenomenology to more recent movements like feminist theory, queer theory, Black critical theory, postcolonial theory, and contemporary ecocritical literature.» — Kripal deriva las humanidades enteras, del humanismo renacentista a la ecocrítica, de los estados alterados de sus autores.
«Even the present reigning postmodern deconstructions of the humanities, most associated with the figures of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, possess such esoteric traces (consider Derrida’s essay entitled simply “Telepathy” or his call to think-with ghosts in Specters of Marx).» — Kripal encuentra rastros esotéricos hasta en la deconstrucción posmoderna, con el ensayo de Derrida sobre la telepatía como ejemplo.
«I mean it, but in the German sense of geistig, an adjective derived from the noun Geist (“Mind” or “Spirit”) that can mean “intellectual” or “spiritual” and, as such, acts as an esoteric trace of German idealism and, behind that, German mystical thought going back to figures like Jakob Böhme and Meister Eckhart.» — Kripal precisa el sentido de *espiritual* que reclama para las superhumanidades y lo remonta a Böhme y a Eckhart por la vía del idealismo alemán.
«Within this same series of gnostic traces, the Germans refer to the Geisteswissenschaften—that is, the “sciences of the mind (or spirit)” for what the Americans, more banally, call the humanities.» — Kripal contrasta el nombre alemán de las humanidades con el estadounidense, y ve en el primero un rastro gnóstico.
«The secret substructure of this book is the philosophical perspective of dual-aspect monism. There are other ontological options. I do not employ this particular one as the last word. It is a philosophical framework that makes the impossible possible (so I adopt it), not a stopping place (so I am ready to set it down).» — Kripal declara provisional la ontología que sostiene su libro: la adopta porque funciona y se dice dispuesto a soltarla.
«mostly because they are absolute in a monolithic way and so exclude the human beings with whom I most want to think. Such systems can only tell me that these people are lying or are deluded, that their experiences are “coincidences” or “anecdotes,” or that their visionary displays are “hallucinations” with no substance, all of which I find intellectually ridiculous and morally appalling.» — Kripal explica su recelo ante las demás ontologías por lo que obligan a decir de los experienciantes; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«The Human Is Two. The common human experience of this One World is dualistic, or Two. The human being splits reality into two seemingly separate domains—a mental and a material domain. As modern thought has long recognized, these are epistemic states—that is, forms of knowledge and not things-in-themselves (in truth, you do not know objects or other subjects themselves but rather representations of objects or subjects in your mind). What connects, and probably cocreates, these two domains of the mental and the material is the human interface or cognitive and sensory system of the body-brain. Put differently, it is the human being that “splits” reality in Two and makes it appear as such. It is not so before or beyond the human knower.» — Kripal enuncia el segundo de sus dos principios: la dualidad es epistémica y la pone el cuerpo-cerebro que conoce.
«a psychophysically neutral Ground, or One World, that all things and subjects share, from which they all emanate or emerge, and to which they return. This fundamental cosmic Ground is similarly active in scientific domains as distinct as quantum physics, evolutionary biology, and cosmology. It is ultimately unspeakable, indescribable, and unnameable for the simple reason that it is neither mental nor material and so is not an object of human speech, language, thought, or, indeed, intentional (dualistic) knowledge itself, including that of the sciences. Mathematics can capture something of its apparent structure and behavior for a human being, but only in a distant, indirect, third-person kind of way. Mathematical description or modeling can never get at what it is. The human body-brain simply possesses no cognitive, linguistic, or scientific resources to do that. All it can do is point.» — Kripal describe el Fondo neutral como indecible por razón estructural, y le niega también a la matemática el acceso a lo que es; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«But here is the thing. The human being can come to know directly—or, better, become—the Ground of all being (the One) and what it so fantastically expresses or excessively splits (the Two), since the human being is in fact already both. This is where dual-aspect monism, the One that becomes Two, meets comparative mystical literature and the elaborate imaginal, supernormal, and paranormal forms of the history of religions. To think the impossible, then, is to know or imagine oneself as both the Ground and that which the Ground dreams, projects, and lives.» — Kripal salva la indecibilidad por la vía de la identidad: el humano puede llegar a ser el Fondo porque ya lo es.
«One can frame such an experience-event in terms of Zen Buddhism, as Austin does here. Or one can invoke the more abstract categories of dual-aspect monism, as I have done in the present book. Or one can invoke the categories of theism and idealism and a doubled natural and supernatural cosmology. The historian of religions cannot dismiss or demean any of these responses. These are matters of interpretation that really matter. As a committed comparativist who takes ontological diversity seriously, I hardly have a final answer, nor would I want one. I strongly suspect that, in the end, there are multiple answers, all of which really matter.» — Kripal pone su propio marco al mismo nivel que el budista y el teísta, y declara no querer una respuesta última.
«It was used, for example, by Don Davis as a musical title (track 9) for the score of The Matrix (1999), a film that was itself a form of impossible thinking modeled on the ancient lessons of Plato’s Cave (that true reality is not at all like the dark shadows flickering on the sensory cave walls).» — Kripal rastrea la expresión *ontological shock* hasta la banda sonora de una película, y lee esa película como versión de la caverna platónica.
«Like most intellectual expressions encoding radical altered states (or reimagined nation-states), the historical roots of the phrase reach deep into the history of the humanities, really what I have called the superhumanities (the altered states of the humanities). The idea of “ontological shock” ultimately stems back to the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich in his Systematic Theology (1951), where the theologian uses the expression to describe an ecstatic state when “the negative side of the mystery of being—its abysmal element—is experienced.» — Kripal fecha en Paul Tillich, 1951, el origen del choque ontológico y su referencia al lado abismal del misterio del ser.
«Tillich will in fact define any “genuine manifestation of the mystery” as possessing both a subjective and objective dimension and observe that revelation comes through the altered states of “ecstasy” but that it is not reducible to the inevitable psychological expressions of these same altered states of consciousness. Both points resonate powerfully with how I have tried to think impossibly here. Tillich will also silently invoke the history of religions in the figure of Rudolf Otto to define the essential» — Kripal reclama de Tillich dos puntos afines a su método y le señala la deuda callada con Rudolf Otto; la frase se cierra en la plana siguiente.
«Still, as the references to “reason” in the above passage signal, Tillich’s own definition of “ontological shock” is, in the end, not very shocking, as it preserves the lines of his own rational and finally Christian systematic theology.» — Kripal le reprocha a Tillich haber domesticado su propio término dentro de una teología sistemática cristiana.
«He tries, for example, on the page before to distinguish between the presence of the “divine Spirit” in “genuine” revelation events and the “overexcitement” or enthusiasms in “so-called ecstatic movements.” He also tries, on the page after, to argue that genuine ecstasy does not destroy the cognitive or rational function, whereas demonic possession does.» — Kripal documenta las dos fronteras que Tillich traza en las planas contiguas a su definición: revelación genuina frente a entusiasmo, y éxtasis frente a posesión.
«In the end, this kind of theological conservatism is simply not what experiencers experience and John Mack was trying to get at with his own use of the same phrase.» — Kripal opone el testimonio del experienciante al conservadurismo teológico de Tillich y da la razón a John Mack.
«Nothing in his four decades of psychiatric work prepared Mack for a form of human experience and suffering that could not be explained psychiatrically and “was simply not possible within the framework of the Western scientific worldview.» — Kripal presenta el punto de partida de Mack: un sufrimiento sin explicación psiquiátrica y sin lugar en la cosmovisión científica.
«In the book, he defines the suffering of his subjects as “multidimensional trauma,” a phrase that was probably not meant metaphorically, since the suffering involves, well, other spatial and temporal dimensions.» — Kripal lee el trauma multidimensional de Mack en sentido literal, no figurado.
«Mack’s working hypothesis? That we may be witnessing “an awkward joining of two species, engineered by an intelligence we are unable to fathom, for a purpose that serves both our goals with difficulties for each.» — Kripal cita la hipótesis de trabajo de Mack, con su reconocimiento de que la inteligencia implicada es insondable.
«The important point to stress here is that Mack eventually landed pretty much exactly where I have landed in the present book— namely, with a firm sense that the experiencers are intellectual equals, “co-investigators in an exploration of the unknown” (compare my own “thinking-with,” coined in the first few pages of the present book).» — Kripal reconoce en la fórmula de Mack sobre el experienciante como coinvestigador el antecedente de su propio pensar-con.
«This ontological shock—which he defines at MIT in 1992 as the “bleak realization that what they have experienced actually occurred and reality as they have defined it is forever altered» — Kripal fecha y cita la definición de Mack: la constatación sombría de que lo ocurrido ocurrió y la realidad ya no vuelve.
«why the act of comparison is the “flip” that triggers the ontological shock (in these cases, comparison is performed by Mack himself as he relates to the person his familiarity with the various themes of the reported experience from other similar accounts); why the events have no psychiatric explanation; and why it is so very difficult to acquire funding for effective research (since no grant agency will recognize the truth, much less the cosmic importance, of what has actually happened).» — Kripal identifica la comparación misma como detonante del choque ontológico, y enumera sus consecuencias prácticas hasta el financiamiento.
«On a philosophical level, Mack is clear that such ontological shocks follow neither the lines of our scientific objectivisms nor our humanistic subjectivisms and historicisms but call us to posit a third space of the superreal, what I have alternately called the superhuman, the fantastic, and, here in these pages, the» — Kripal alinea el tercer espacio de Mack con los nombres que él mismo ha ido dando a lo mismo; la frase se cierra en la plana siguiente con la palabra imposible.
«Because of his relationship to Kuhn, he understood deeply that the binaries of real/unreal and objective/subjective are theological leftovers of a Western belief system that is now active in the sciences. This is not how reality actually works, what it really is.» — Kripal deriva del trato de Mack con Thomas Kuhn la lectura de los binarios científicos como restos teológicos.
«This same radical disjunction, or not-fitting-in, is why I react so strongly, and so negatively, to phrases like “the paranormal is normal” or “the ordinary is extraordinary.» — Kripal rechaza las fórmulas que normalizan lo paranormal porque borran justamente la disyunción que le importa.
«But this is not what we are trying to think-with here. This is a mechanical “fucking bug” coming out of the wall (and probably the future), a gigantic mantis with a purple cloak who shows every sign of controlling the little praying mantis insects of the biological world, and holy women and men floating and flying in Italian and Spanish churches, convents, and outdoors before thousands of people. How is any of that “normal” or “ordinary”? Obviously, something, or someone, is trying to get our attention. Are we listening? Or are we just reducing it all to our own banality with clever but vacuous phrases? Please stop it.» — Kripal reúne los casos del libro para mostrar que no se dejan domesticar como cotidianos, y pide que se deje de intentarlo.
«Little wonder that these experiencers often believe that this is where the future human will emerge, in this superreality that is at once physical and spiritual, that cares little—or nothing at all—for our assumed moral, psychological, and cultural boundaries. I laugh out loud when I hear military or government officials talking about “threats,” “our airspace,” or “our national borders.” There are no boundaries or borders in this surreality. Nor, frankly, are there individuals, not at least as we conceive them today in the secular world. There are presences coinhabiting one another, communicating with each other on levels for which we only have science fiction today (and the religions of the past).» — Kripal se ríe del vocabulario de fronteras y amenazas aplicado a un fenómeno que, según él, no reconoce límites ni individuos.
«activism: our conclusions are a function of our exclusions. I have also used the metaphor of the table to discuss the same idea.» — Kripal enuncia la primera de sus cinco prácticas con una fórmula propia: las conclusiones dependen de las exclusiones; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«The metaphor of the table is a simple one: the conclusions one reaches about a set of phenomena will be largely a function of what one places on one’s table and so also of what one takes off that table. Take things off the table and you will eventually be able to explain what is left (because you just took everything off the table that you cannot explain). Put more things on the table, however, and things will begin to look considerably stranger. The pieces on the table, moreover, will mean very different things—and likely things that we simply cannot understand with our present concepts and their implicit exclusions. In so many ways, impossible thinking is simply what happens when we do not take things off the table.» — Kripal explica la metáfora de la mesa: la explicación completa resulta de retirar de antemano lo inexplicable.
«I know well the defenses and strategies of the well-meaning person. I have witnessed trusted colleagues taking the impossible off the table in real time, right in front of my eyes. They invoke all the common strategies (hallucination, coincidence, anecdote, and so on), none of which actually work and all of which function more as rhetorical devices or, frankly, moral excuses not to think.» — Kripal describe el retiro de la mesa como acto que dice haber presenciado, y llama a sus fórmulas excusas morales para no pensar.
«Impossible thinking focuses in on particular forms of shocking experience that are given or shown to the individual, that come unbidden, that are not consciously constructed or thought. Such a phenomenological approach is at the very core of what I am proposing in these pages. The method involves taking people’s experiences, no matter how unbelievable they become, with the utmost care and seriousness, and then thinking out of those experiences as premonitions of new critical theory.» — Kripal enuncia la segunda práctica: partir de la experiencia dada y pensar desde ella como anticipo de teoría crítica.
«Welcoming such a high weirdness onto our phenomenological table is a central practice of impossible thinking. Indeed, without this welcome, without this recursive skeptical affirmation, there can be no impossible thought.» — Kripal hace de la alta rareza condición de su método, no ornamento.
«In this same high weirdness, I must insist that it is okay to be tricked, to be wrong. Part of this is the very nature of critical thinking. To think critically is to be constantly corrected, and to be comfortable and at peace with that.» — Kripal incorpora el error y el engaño al método, como parte del pensar crítico.
«A genuine skeptic, after all, is as skeptical of scientific materialism as any other interpretive framework. Such skeptical writers possess astonishing levels of integrity, care, and reflexivity, like all serious intellectuals. Even weirder still, they might begin to question whether human reason, or rationality itself, is up to the task. This is what I mean by questioning the very roots of the questions.» — Kripal define el escepticismo genuino como el que también duda del materialismo, y aun de la razón misma.
«To be involved in high weirdness is precisely a willingness to be duped and deceived, yes, but it is also to entertain the likelihood that the fraud and the fact are not always exclusive of one another. Perhaps this is one reason I have come to see that what finally sets an impossible thinker apart from a traditional historian is precisely the sense that deception may well be an integral part of the phenomenon itself.» — Kripal sitúa la diferencia con el historiador en asumir el engaño como parte del fenómeno y no como su refutación.
«Belief is the enemy,” as John Keel had it, not because there is nothing to any of this but precisely because there is—and because it is not, at all, what it seems to be, what it pretends to be. Belief shuts down. So does debunking. It is better, much better, to be weirdly skeptical of both.» — Kripal reinterpreta la consigna de Keel: la creencia estorba porque hay algo, y ese algo finge ser lo que no es.
«Once one attempts a genuine phenomenology of the weird, it becomes clear that there is a “vertical” dimension to some such experiences that has traditionally been framed as “transcendent” or, if you want to be phenomenological about it, “transcendental.” One allows such a verticality to stand. One does not immediately reduce it to this or that horizontal dimension—to a social process; a political system; a historical context; a gendered, racial, or sexual identity; a psychological need; a biological instinct; a linguistic grammar; a neurological default system; or whatever the reigning reduction might be. All of these are helpful and illuminating. None of them are adequate.» — Kripal enuncia la tercera práctica y enumera las reducciones horizontales a las que concede utilidad y niega suficiencia.
«Of course, transcendence is relative to the subject in a dual-aspect monistic world. It is epistemically true and ontologically false. Outside the human subject, there is neither transcendence nor immanence. There is only the One, which is neither material nor mental, neither immanent nor transcendent. But there is certainly transcendence or an “up” in human experience, Copernicus or no.» — Kripal acota la verticalidad que acaba de reivindicar: es verdadera para el sujeto y falsa para el ser.
«And there are, of course, other modern ways to affirm the vertical dimension of human experience, including the new realities of the sciences, especially mathematics and geometry, which produce the hyperdimensional model first announced in Edwin Abbott’s Flatland of 1884, and evolutionary biology, which produces the endless evolutionary esotericisms of the modern world, definitively beginning with Alfred Russel Wallace’s model of a double evolution, at once biological and spiritual, and quickly morphing into Friedrich Nietzsche’s still unassimilated atheistic vision of the coming superhumans.» — Kripal deriva del *Flatland* de Abbott y de la doble evolución de Alfred Russel Wallace los esoterismos evolutivos modernos hasta Nietzsche.
«Morrison explains coming back into the meat-body with a temporary real-world superpower, in this case the ability to see all things, including a physical cup, in five dimensions. Morrison could also now understand how the human body is in fact a billion-limbed form spread throughout time, and how these individual forms we call the body are simply temporal slices or sensed intersections of that much longer and stranger cosmic form. The superhuman writer finally came to realize that all life-forms on Earth are in essence branches of the same biotic tree, an amoeba-like superorganism or “infant god” feeding on itself within a singular block-universe “AllNow.» — Kripal narra la experiencia de Grant Morrison en Katmandú y su cuerpo de mil millones de miembros extendido en el tiempo.
«It bears repeating one more time: Impossible thought approaches imaginal appearances not as imagined fantasies that are symptomatic of various psychodynamic issues (the standard psychoanalytic answer), or false social illusions meant to distract from social revolution and the hard work of addressing economic injustice (the Marxist answer), or ontologically neutralized comparative patterns or historical descriptors (the traditional religious studies answer), or as tempting tangents that should be ignored for the sake of some religious goal or God (the orthodox religious answer). Impossible thought treats some imaginal appearances as potential mediated revelations of the real. This is a theory of the fantastic as the real. Hence the most common descriptor of these events: it was “more real than real.» — Kripal descarta una a una las cuatro respuestas disponibles —psicoanalítica, marxista, religiosa académica y ortodoxa— y da la suya: lo fantástico como lo real.
«One could cite here Augustine and his threefold classification of visions (corporeal, spiritual, and intellectual, or the visio intellectualis). Or William Blake and his “fourfold vision”—Blake, whose visionary illuminations and channeled poems have evoked for scholars any number of aesthetics and implications, from superhero serial comic art to the most paradoxical nondual philosophies of Hindu and Buddhist Asia.» — Kripal recuerda que la tradición cristiana ya clasificaba las visiones, de las tres de Agustín a la cuádruple de Blake.
«It is also of great significance that a contemporary medievalist like Barbara Newman, whom we treated briefly in chapter 6, has found it helpful to invoke the modern parapsychological category of telepathy to understand the medieval saintly reading of minds and communicate something actual of the power of prayer in medieval Christian writers. Contemplative prayer becomes a kind of ontological permeability, a practiced telepathy or coinherence through the medium of the Mind of God in this most remarkable work.» — Kripal destaca que una medievalista use la telepatía como categoría de lectura y convierta la oración contemplativa en permeabilidad ontológica.
«Whatever religious, poetic, psychedelic, or superhuman framework we choose, the basic idea remains more or less the same: sometimes the imagination imagines the real, “dreams the true” (Wahrträumen) before it happens—that is, outside space and time—as Schopenhauer had it. Sometimes, in other words, the imagination is our best access to what is really and truly out there, if always, yes, of course, in culturally mediated forms.» — Kripal reduce todos los marcos a una misma idea, con el *Wahrträumen* de Schopenhauer como fórmula y la mediación cultural como reserva.
«Impossible thinking is not thinking in only three dimensions. That is entirely possible. It is imagining in four, or five, or more.» — Kripal define su método por el número de dimensiones que se atreve a imaginar.
«I continue to think that precognitive experiences are among our strongest and most promising instances of an alternative rationality. Those who know a future that has not yet happened are thinking impossibly. They are thinking in terms of moving through time, not space. They are actual biological time machines.» — Kripal enuncia la quinta práctica y llama máquinas del tiempo biológicas a quienes precognizan.
«I have been especially influenced here by the work of the anthropologist Eric Wargo. Wargo elegantly employs psychoanalytic theory, dream interpretation, and the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics in order to argue that some of the very paragons of the humanities precognized their intellectual and literary ideas in a future that was already so and then worked toward that already accomplished future» — Kripal expone la tesis de Eric Wargo sobre los creadores que precognizan su propia obra; la frase sigue con un compuesto que la extracción por programa une mal y con el bucle temporal que le da nombre.
«Such time loops are perfectly possible for Wargo in a materialist universe because we live in a “glass block universe” in which the past, the present, and the future are all laid out, are already present, are already so. It is all one big Now.» — Kripal subraya que el bucle temporal de Wargo no requiere abandonar el materialismo, solo el tiempo lineal.
«I am much attracted to Wargo’s model, not because I know it is correct in every specific detail but because the model is an ideal exemplum of impossible thought: it makes the impossible possible by providing a theory for how and why precognitive events are entirely natural. It also has immense implications for what we think of as human culture, religion, literature, and science, really for the entire order of knowledge. If Wargo is correct, everything changes, instantly, and for good reason: the deepest source of human creativity is outside time or, if you prefer, not bound by the linear temporality that we assume to be some kind of iron law (or chain).» — Kripal adopta el modelo de Wargo como ejemplar de método y no como verdad comprobada, y declara su alcance condicional.
«I should add that, in its furthest and most speculative reaches at least, impossible thinking does not restrict this kind of power over time to precognition. It is willing to speculate that one of our major hurdles in understanding impossible phenomena is our insistence on thinking spatially instead of temporally.» — Kripal declara especulativo este tramo y sostiene que el obstáculo mayor es pensar en el espacio y no en el tiempo.
«Many of these cases, which involve things like objects and beings popping in and out of existence, make absolutely no sense—until one begins to think of them temporally instead of spatially, of the objects and beings come from another time, not from another space. Once we can think like that, much that is puzzling falls into place and ceases to look so puzzling.» — Kripal propone el giro temporal como clave del caso ovni: los seres vendrían de otro tiempo y no de otro lugar.
«This is not how the experiencers I think-with understand what has happened to them. They are not believers. They are experiencers, and they are in very painful ontological shock. They did not ask for their experiences. They did not worship, meditate, and practice their way into some kind of wish fulfillment, false form of consciousness, or socially produced hallucination. As Karin Austin has it, the thing physically came out of the wall, out of nowhere, and sat on her chest, while she was perfectly awake. This is not religion. This is science, or superscience. This is not a belief. This is a bug. And a hyperdimensional mechanical one at that. Such events are not “beliefs.” Nor are they supernatural. They are “ultra-natural.”35 AI, or artificial intelligence, from the future seems like a far better interpretation in this particular case than something spiritual, much less something unreal.» — Kripal separa al experienciante del creyente y llama ultranatural, no sobrenatural, a lo que le ocurre; para el caso de Austin prefiere la hipótesis de una inteligencia artificial del futuro.
«Still, I have to walk my resistance to the category of religious belief back a bit, since beliefs give access or at least mediation to specific aspects of reality that would not otherwise be available to the person and community. That seems beyond question.» — Kripal matiza su propio rechazo de la creencia y le reconoce función de mediación.
«But it also needs to be said: religious beliefs are not religions. The former beliefs, based on actual impossible experiences, are ancient. They are expressions of the way things are, as I have tried to argue above. One can believe in the nonphysical form of the soul, because one has experienced it as such, without accepting any of the teachings of a local religion, which one might well find culturally bound, or just oppressive. The latter religions, or cultural systems built up out of these primordial experiences and disciplined through myth, ritual, institution, and authority, are recent and simply not necessary, as the modern secular world shows us in abundance. Religious identity, in particular (that is, belonging to a particular community of belief, a “religion”) is evolutionarily recent and unnecessary. Religious belief is not religion.» — Kripal separa la creencia religiosa, antigua y experiencial, de la religión como sistema institucional, que declara reciente y prescindible.
«Eire’s always apt words (this time about seventeenth-century Spain, “le grand siècle for mystical theology”), “belief in miracles created a space for imposture as much as it did for hope in the impossible.”37 This, I take it, is the real concern of secular and humanist thinkers with respect to religion: belief and fraud go hand in hand. That is so.» — Kripal concede el punto al humanismo secular con palabras de Eire: la creencia en el milagro abre igual espacio a la impostura y a la esperanza; la frase abre en la plana anterior.
«The second thing to say is more positive; in Eire’s words again, belief is the “immortal soul of the imagination” but also of “all mentalities, mindsets, worldviews, epistemic regimes, discourses, social imaginaries, and social facts”38 (these are the catch phrases academics have baptized as somehow more real than that which they attempt to describe). In the supernatural realm, moreover, in the realm of faith, belief appears to be nothing short of “limitless.”39 Put differently, it is finally belief that creates the realities of the critical theories of the academy but also of the marvels and miracles of the historical religions, where people really do fly.» — Kripal extiende la creencia a las propias categorías de la academia, y sostiene que crea por igual la teoría crítica y el milagro.
«The third thing to say is that religion is arbitrary and relative. As culturally coded forms of other people’s impossible experiences, as habits of thought, historical deposits, and concretions of culture, religious beliefs are precious reminders of who we are or might yet become. But can we today really sign our names to any of their elaborate mythologies or doctrinal systems? Most of them simply are not ours. Nor are they those of most people on the planet. There is the impossible as a function of a system again. Can anyone seriously doubt this comparative point?» — Kripal declara la religión arbitraria y relativa, y a la vez preciosa como recordatorio de lo que fuimos o podríamos ser.
«The philosopher made a fierce distinction between belief as “a mere phenomenon of consciousness” (that is, as a thought in the head that refers to nothing at all) and what he called the “‘eternal’ factuality” of the “psychological symbol redeemed from the concept of time” (that is, the religious teaching that is not taken literally but as a parable outside historical development).» — Kripal recoge de Nietzsche la distinción entre la creencia como pensamiento vacío y el símbolo psicológico redimido del tiempo.
«That teacher’s kingdom of God, Nietzsche wrote, is “nothing one expects; it has no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it will not come in a ‘a thousand years’—it is an experience of the heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere.» — Kripal cita la lectura nietzscheana del reino de Dios como experiencia del corazón sin antes ni después.
«Nietzsche also famously equated “great spirits” with “skeptics,” since they, very much unlike the believer, do not land and are not convinced by this or that belief statement. The skeptic is in fact strong, the believer weak.43 The skeptic “overcomes,” to use a Nietzschean word, whereas the believer does not.» — Kripal recoge la ecuación nietzscheana entre grandeza de espíritu y escepticismo.
«Religious convictions are finally “lies.” Indeed, the glory of the Renaissance and its humanitas, its humanism, lies precisely in its attempt at a “revaluation of Christian values”—that is, its unceasing skepticism and questioning, what the German philosopher in another context calls “further experimentation, a continuation of the fluid state of values, testing, choosing, criticizing values in infinitum.» — Kripal lee, con Nietzsche, el humanismo renacentista como transvaloración de los valores cristianos y experimentación sin término.
«There are questions in which man is not entitled to a decision about truth and untruth; all the highest questions, all the highest value problems, lie beyond human reason.” Such an attitude “alone is truly philosophy.”45 There is a most radical and real skepticism, a weird one.» — Kripal encuentra en Nietzsche el límite de la razón ante las preguntas últimas y lo llama escepticismo radical.
«extremely close to the one advanced in these pages—namely, that the belief systems of the religions are so many projections of our own distorted and denied superhuman nature and future realization.» — Kripal declara su propia posición muy próxima a la de Nietzsche sobre religión comparada: los sistemas de creencia proyectan una superhumanidad negada; la frase abre unas líneas antes.
«In this same esoteric spirit, Nietzsche favorably compares Jesus “the sermonizer on the mount, lake and meadow” to “a Buddha on soil that is not at all Indian.” The historical Jesus is like Nietzsche, a “free spirit,” who would have used Sankhya (Indian philosophical) concepts had he lived among Indians, or those of Lao Tzu had he lived among the Chinese. It makes no real difference. “Of course, the accidents of environment, of language, of background determines a certain sphere of concepts,” but these cultural constructions are just that: accidents. Nietzsche, in short, was a most radical comparativist.» — Kripal reclama a Nietzsche como comparativista radical: para él el marco cultural de Jesús habría sido accidental.
«At the end of the day, this one anyway, the entire history of religions looks like so many temporary cinematic projections of our own superhuman nature that we must deny to ourselves—perhaps, as Nietzsche thought, because we are sick, weak, and stupid, or perhaps (much more likely, I think) because of the relative nature of the viewing subject and its inevitable experiences of the phenomenon as elusive, deceptive, and tricky. It has to be like this for us. We cannot turn around and look back at the projector projecting us, not at least as us, as characters on the screen. That would be impossible.» — Kripal se aparta de la explicación nietzscheana por debilidad y propone otra: el sujeto que mira no puede darse vuelta hacia el proyector que lo proyecta.
«Eventually, an answer formed. It was a nonanswer. We have seen it above. It went like this: “Shut up and calculate.” That is actually what the physicists were told for decades. That is how they got jobs. It was the Cold War, and there were bombs to build. Just do the math. Ignore the man behind the curtain.» — Kripal recuerda la consigna con que se acalló la discusión filosófica de la física cuántica y la fecha en la Guerra Fría.
«Unfortunately, we can refigure the present humanist convention in the humanities around anomalous experiences in similar terms: “Shut up and describe.» — Kripal acuña el equivalente humanista de esa consigna para el trato académico con la experiencia anómala.
«I like to imagine three bars that we can attempt to jump over in cases like this. I am thinking of my high school days on the track team. I was quite bad at it, but I remember the high jump pit. Mostly it was lanky teenagers trying to leap backward over a bar, until they couldn’t, which was usually very soon. The bar clanked (it was still metal) and flew a lot. Bodies leaped and fell. Same in this situation. It’s okay to knock the bar off. You will at some point, and maybe quite soon. But we need very specific examples, like Jim’s precog dream experience, to see which bar we cannot get over and, more importantly, exactly why we cannot get over it.» — Kripal propone los tres listones del salto de altura como manera de ubicar dónde se detiene cada lector, y concede de antemano que se tire el listón.
«The first bar of my thought experiment comes down to a question: Do such impossible things happen at all, or are they really nonevents, functions perhaps of miscalculated coincidences, meaningless statistical outliers» — Kripal enuncia el primer listón, el del hecho mismo; la frase sigue con el cerebro buscador de patrones, cuyo compuesto la extracción por programa une mal.
«My own answer to the question goes something like this: People believe impossible things because impossible things happen to people. People around the world believe in a soul that is separable from the body because people around the world have experienced what look very much like their own souls or those of others separating from their bodies. People around the world believe in some form of reincarnation because small children routinely claim to remember, in detail, their previous lives and report them to their parents and family— especially, it turns out, when their previous lives ended violently, suddenly, and unjustly. People around the world practice dream divination because people around the world occasionally dream of the future before it happens. And so on.» — Kripal invierte la pregunta por la creencia: se cree lo imposible porque lo imposible ocurre, y de ahí salen alma separable, reencarnación y adivinación onírica.
«It is really that simple. Belief as intellectual assent to some past creedal statement is perfectly irrelevant in such contexts. It is a simple matter of empiricism and honesty—in these two cases, a mother’s well-founded anxiety and two consecutive nights of a man’s life. This first bar is not too difficult to get over, then. All one really needs is a certain level of hermeneutical charity and sympathy (or a child).» — Kripal declara irrelevante el asentimiento a un credo y reduce el primer listón a empirismo y honestidad.
«Once one is over the first bar, though, the second bar inevitably appears. This second bar involves questions of consciousness or the reach of subjectivity: If these phenomena are a part of our mental world, what do they mean? Can such phenomena tell us something important about ourselves, about subjectivity itself, about the nature and reach of consciousness?» — Kripal enuncia el segundo listón, el de la filosofía de la mente.
«Here one moves beyond sympathetic acknowledgment or pure description to a more philosophical question about the nature of the human being. One sees the anomalous experience, certainly not as a nonevent or cognitive mistake, or even as a curious experience to be described but not followed up on, but as a meaningful sign of some future form of consciousness trying to take shape. One begins to pay attention. One listens. One also refuses to shut up. One interprets.» — Kripal describe el paso del describir al interpretar como negativa a callarse.
«The third bar is already implied in the second bar. The question goes something like this: If these “impossible” phenomena in fact take place in the mental dimension of the human (the first bar) and suggest something important, if future, about the nature and scope of subjectivity (the second bar), might they also signal to us fundamental truths about the objective physical universe? Might such phenomena, then, have something important to say about the behavior and structure of space, time, energy, and matter and their relationship to mind?» — Kripal enuncia el tercer listón, el del cosmos físico, que es el que casi nadie salta.
«Each is also a Gedankenexperiment, a thought experiment, just begging to be thought. We have so thought. Such human experiences clearly imply something like the philosophical position of eternalism or a block cosmology in which the future already exists—a future, moreover, to which we occasionally have some rare but real access. None of this “proves” such a cosmology, of course, but it clearly acts as a very suggestive sign of the same.» — Kripal declara sugerente y no probatorio el valor cosmológico de los sueños precognitivos con que abre y cierra el libro.
«consciousness (first bar) as generators of a philosophy of mind (second bar) toward the scientific modeling of the physical cosmos (third bar). I want us to try to jump over all three bars. Maybe we cannot. But we can try, and it seems good and useful to know where, when, and why the bar falls. And that is how one thinks impossibly.» — última línea del libro: Kripal pide intentar los tres saltos y admite que quizá no se puedan dar, con el valor de saber dónde cae el listón.
About the work
140 entries — what the apparatus and scholarship say about it«How to think impossibly : about souls, UFOs, time, belief, and everything else» — título completo según el asiento catalográfico, con autoría única de «Kripal, Jeffrey J. (Jeffrey John), 1962- author» y sello The University of Chicago Press, 2024.
«That systematization of pseudo-data is approximation to realness or final awakening.» — primer epígrafe del libro, de Charles Fort, *The Book of the Damned*. Los otros dos son de Barbara Newman (*The Permeable Self*) y de Carlos Eire (*They Flew: A History of the Impossible*).
«I saw twelve scenes flash before me» — Zora Neale Hurston en *Dust Tracks on a Road*, citada en bloque como caso inaugural; sigue «I knew that they were all true, a preview of things to come» y «I had knowledge before its time». Voz de Hurston.
«This has something to do with what we call death.» — frase de Anne Strieber, que llega a esta obra por vía de Whitley Strieber. No es formulación de Kripal.
«Remember who you work for.» — de lo que Stuart Davis relata haber oído de una mantis de dos metros y medio con túnica púrpura, la nochevieja de 2010; caso tomado de su pódcast *Aliens & Artists*. Voz de Davis.
«It seems certain to me that shamans and mystics throughout the ages probably had Asperger’s syndrome or something of that nature» — «Kevin», seudónimo, como epígrafe del capítulo 3. Voz de Kevin, no posición de Kripal.
«Most people are digital computers, haunted by flashes of analog Mind.» — Kevin, citado; y en la misma página «Humans are analog/digital processing units for the Cosmic Unconscious of Platonic Surrealism.»
«Eros, Gnosis, Hermes» — rótulo de sección sobre Elliot Wolfson; es la única aparición de «Hermes» en toda la obra.
«absolute reality, intrinsic rightness, and ultimate perfection» — el neurólogo James Austin sobre lo que experimentó en el metro de Londres, citado en bloque; sigue «There was no viewer… there is absolutely nothing whatsoever to fear.» Voz de Austin.
«I hope this revelation serves as an ontological shock sociologically» — David Grusch, verano de 2023, citado como último eslabón de la genealogía del término. Voz de Grusch.
El aparato editorial son los agradecimientos, titulados *A Sociology of the Impossible* (EPUB pp. 290–292), las notas (EPUB pp. 293–345) y el índice (EPUB pp. 346–362): 70 de las 360 páginas indexadas.
«Ultimate redemption would consist of attaining the state of consciousness—or perhaps metaconsciousness—that entails incorporation of all differentiation in indifferent oneness that is ascribed to Ein Sof or to Keter, the divine nothingness marked by the paradoxical coincidence of opposites such that night is day, left is right, white is black, Jew is non-Jew, male is female, and so on. . . . What is required is . . . an apophasis of the apophasis, a venturing beyond to the precipice, the chasm of the excluded middle, where opposites are identical in the opposition of their identity. . . . While it is not at all clear to me that such an ideal can be implemented sociologically without dispelling the very path that leads to it, this may very well be the most daring implication of the messianic potential of the kabbalah» — Elliot Wolfson sobre Ein Sof y Keter, en cita de bloque: la coincidencia de opuestos como redención, y la reserva sociológica con que él mismo la acota.
«Hence Wolfson’s consistent embrace of Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum, or “coincidence of opposites,” as a model of kabbalistic thought and as a forerunner and fulfillment of postmodern theory today. This coincidence or identity of opposites, which violates and transcends the Aristotelian logic that currently defines pretty much the entire academy, is perhaps the deepest structure of all Wolfson’s cognitive structures. Here is how Wolfson describes this deepest of structures early on in Language, Eros, Being: To savor the mystical intuition of the divine as the coincidence of being and nothing—what may be considered for the kabbalist, as his counterpart in medieval Islamic and Christian mystical speculation, the primary ontological binary that comprises other binary constructions, the binary of binaries, we might say—one must reclaim the middle excluded by the logic of the excluded middle, for it is only by positioning oneself in that middle between extremes that one can appreciate the identity of opposites in the opposition of their identity: that a thing is not only both itself and its opposite, but neither itself nor its opposite.39 In the same paradoxical logic, Wolfson will call the Ein Sof, or Infinite, of the kabbalistic traditions the “negation of all negation,” a phrase rich in implications for Wolfson’s use of Continental philosophy and its general failure to negate its own negations and so arrive at something deeper and more real.40 Perhaps it goes without saying, but I will say it anyway as I move into my own modeling of the impossible in the next chapter: the psychophysical ground of dual-aspect monism is similarly conceived. It is “neutral”—which is to say that it is neither mental nor material, which means that it is fundamentally paradoxical to» — y su noción de corporeidad divina en la tradición cabalística.
«Nights and days, hours and minutes, are simply means of determining the measure of time; but these measurements are not time itself. In itself, time is the limit of the persistence of the eternal Form ‘on the surface’ of the accidental matter of this world» — Henry Corbin sobre el tiempo, citado por Wolfson y reproducido por Kripal: cita de tercera mano, así consignada en el propio texto.
«He clearly wants to separate, like so many other religious thinkers, mystical experience as vertical givenness from “everything that is nonrational, weird, exotic, occult, or paranormal» — la lista de lo que Anthony Steinbock excluye de la experiencia mística; Kripal le objeta que así incumple su propia regla.
«since Satan was a ‘natural Magician’ he could ‘perform many acts in ways above our knowledge, though not transcending our natural powers» — Satán como «mago natural» según Thomas Browne (1646), citado por Carlos Eire y reproducido por Kripal: tres voces encajadas.
«may be argued to constitute a domain where the truth claims of African wisdom are not just valid within the local African space of culturally created self-evidence, but may deserve to be globally mediated as a statement of a transcultural truth, and hence superior to current collective representations in the West» — Wim van Binsbergen, antropólogo y adivino iniciado, sobre el estatuto de la sabiduría africana; Kripal añade que le parece plausible.
«the Black Panther (with a superhero origin story lodged in root work—that sacred herb seems a lot like the root Frederick Douglass was given» — Biko Gray adjudicando al root work el linaje del superhéroe negro.
«Davis is thinking especially of the psychedelic visionaries and activists Terence and Dennis McKenna, the occult writer Robert Anton Wilson, and the science-fiction author Philip K. Dick» — el elenco de la «alta rareza» según Erik Davis, con Robert Anton Wilson nombrado escritor ocultista.
«Think of it as a kind of visionary skepticism, or critical gnosis» — y su fórmula, que es de Davis.
«All manner of psi phenomena started happening to me: telepathic communications with people and the beings, out-of-body experiences, the sudden ability to ‘hear’ dead people, channeling and automatic writing about a coming earth emergency, an almost religious concern about the wellbeing of all life on the planet, art that I created compulsively» — Karin Austin declarando en primera persona prácticas de tradición espiritista: canalización y escritura automática.
«One claimed that he was an alchemist from the medieval world» — y «Kevin», seudónimo, sobre las entidades que se le ofrecieron.
«Any phenomenon that is widely and deeply studied becomes central to its field, while puzzling “fringe” phenomena may be ignored for so long that their very existence is forgotten. Yet it is often those same phenomena, when someone finally takes note of them, that force a paradigm shift.» — segundo epígrafe del libro, de Barbara Newman, *The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships*: los fenómenos de borde se ignoran hasta que alguien repara en ellos y fuerzan el cambio de paradigma. Voz de Newman.
«To say that a whole new dimension opened up for me on the spot at that instant, is to understate the magnitude of the experience. . . . It’s hard to explain what actually happened, really, but somehow, that very rational moment of clarity immediately sparked some kind of cognitive firestorm that I can’t describe in precise terms» — tercer epígrafe, de Carlos Eire, *They Flew: A History of the Impossible*, sobre el instante en que se le abrió una dimensión nueva. Voz de Eire.
«I had been trained to never, ever take the supernatural or miraculous as facts in any way, under any circumstances.» — cierre de ese mismo epígrafe de Eire: el adiestramiento profesional que le impedía tomar por hecho lo sobrenatural. Voz de Eire.
«So there must be something wrong with a child that questions the gods of the pigeon-holes. I was always asking and making myself a crow in a pigeon’s nest. It was hard on my family and surroundings, and they in turn were hard on me. I did not know then, as I know now, that people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person that it pleases them to be. And few people want to be forced to ask themselves, “What if there is no me like my statue?”» — epígrafe del prólogo, de Zora Neale Hurston, *Dust Tracks on a Road*. Voz de Hurston.
«told anyone around me about these strange things. It was too different. . . . I had a feeling of difference from my fellow men, and I did not want it to be found out. . . . I was told inside myself that there was no one. . . . A cosmic loneliness was my shadow. Nothing and nobody around me really touched me. It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams.» — Hurston sobre el secreto y la soledad cósmica que le dejaron las visiones, citada en bloque; la frase abre en la plana anterior con las palabras *I never*. Voz de Hurston.
«Time was to prove the truth of my visions, for one by one they came to pass. As soon as one was fulfilled, it ceased to come.» — Hurston sobre el cumplimiento una a una de sus doce visiones y su desaparición al cumplirse. Voz de Hurston.
«It was decreed in the beginning of things that I should meet Mrs. R. Osgood Mason. She had been in the last of my prophetic visions from the first coming of them. I could not know that until I met her. But the moment I walked in the room I knew that was the end.» — Hurston sobre el encuentro con su mecenas Charlotte Osgood Mason como cierre del ciclo profético. Voz de Hurston.
«My soul was with the gods and my body in the village.» — Hurston sobre su propia disyunción, citada por Kripal como la fórmula de su diferencia. Voz de Hurston.
«What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?» — epígrafe de la introducción, atribuido a Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Kripal declara que el libro entero es una respuesta a esa pregunta. Voz de Coleridge.
«And the third rose? he heard himself thinking. Where do you want me to put it? Lay the album down, and show me where you want the rose put. The third rose. . . . Very carefully and with much excitement he opened the album. A freshly picked rose, maybe such as he had seen but once before, was there in the middle of the page. Happily, he picked it up.» — segundo epígrafe de la introducción, de *Youth without Youth* de Mircea Eliade: la rosa que se materializa en la página. Voz de Eliade novelista.
«I remember well the event. I had invited a group of colleagues to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.1 I asked them to come with two things: a story about the most unusual thing that ever happened to them and a theory of the imagination that could explain or at least make sense of this story. Every one of them came with a whopper of a story. No one came with a theory of the imagination.» — Kripal narra el origen del libro en un encuentro de colegas en Esalen: todos traían relato, ninguno teoría.
«This book constitutes my theory of the imagination, particularly as this theory is intuited and foretold in the furthest reaches of the imagination» — Kripal declara qué es este libro; la frase sigue nombrando las historias de quijada caída que oyó en Big Sur, con un compuesto que la extracción por programa une mal y por eso queda fuera de la cita.
«I was happy to rediscover in Eliade’s short-story the key concepts I want to understand better: time, consciousness, and the fantastic foundations of reality.» — Francis Ford Coppola sobre el relato de Eliade que llevó al cine; de esa frase saca Kripal el título de su introducción. Voz de Coppola.
«His mental activity anticipated somewhat the condition men will attain some tens of thousands of years hence. The principal characteristic of the new humanity will be the structure of its psycho-mental life: all that has ever been thought or done by men, expressed orally or in writing, will be recoverable through a certain exercise of concentration. In fact, education then will consist in the learning of this method under the direction of instructors. In short, I’m a “mutant,” he said to himself on awakening. I anticipate the post-historic existence of man. Like in a science-fiction novel, he added, smiling with amusement.» — Dominic Matei, personaje de Eliade, autodescribiéndose como mutante tras el rayo; bloque citado del que Kripal toma el término. Voz del personaje.
«What kind of nonsense is this? Who is this liar? Human beings can’t fly, or kneel on slender tree limbs like little birds, and they have never, ever done so. Such a feat is absolutely impossible, and everyone can agree on this, for sure. Or at least everyone nowadays who doesn’t want to be taken for a fool or an unhinged eccentric. So, how is it that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—the very era that gave birth to aggressive skepticism and empirical science—countless people could swear that they had witnessed some such event? And how is it that some of these sworn testimonies are legal records, archived alongside lawsuits and murder trials, and that the testimonies come from all sorts of people, not just illiterate mud-caked peasants, but also some elites at the apex of the social, intellectual, and political hierarchy? What sense are we to make of this? How does any historian deal with such accounts? How does one write a history of what could never have happened, a history of the impossible?» — Carlos Eire, historiador de la Europa moderna temprana, citado en bloque a propósito de los vuelos de José de Cupertino ante miles de testigos. Voz de Eire.
«The history of the impossible is all about questioning, about being evenhandedly skeptical—that is, being as skeptical about strictly materialist interpretations of seemingly impossible events as about the actual occurrence of the event itself. Counterintuitive as this might seem—given that the impossibility of certain events is deemed unquestionable in our dominant culture» — Eire definiendo su escepticismo parejo, que aplica igual al hecho y a su explicación materialista; el bloque continúa en la plana siguiente. Voz de Eire.
«This book is a plea: “Please stop doing that.”» — Kripal declara qué pide su libro: que se deje de confundir los materiales culturales con la inteligencia que los ordena.
«In any case, you picked up this book. Prepare to be abolished.» — la advertencia con que Kripal cierra el planteamiento de su introducción y describe lo que el libro pretende hacerle al lector.
«I do not invoke such a quantum deep in a dilettantish or a professional scientific way. I am not a quantum physicist and will not pretend to be one. But neither am I a loose cannon.» — Kripal delimita su propia competencia al invocar lo cuántico: ni diletante ni físico, y apoyado en un cuarto de siglo de trato con físicos profesionales.
«Put a bit differently, I am not doing quantum physics here. I am thinking-with quantum physicists, who are in turn thinking-with me.» — Kripal describe el estatuto de su propio libro: es filosófico, no mecánico-cuántico, y por eso puede adoptar el monismo de doble aspecto sin hacer física.
«I will try my best to inhabit and express this kind of awed humility on the page, or, to speak more colloquially, this honest WTF feeling. In many ways, this entire book can be captured by those three letters and the stunned vulgarism they humorously encode.» — Kripal declara el tono que se propone para el libro entero y lo resume en tres letras.
«I confess I also feel very alone. Suddenly, I feel like a ghost, a spectral presence haunting the academic certainties but not capable of speaking to them directly or effectively. It is as if I am dead. All I can do is haunt. I cannot quite appear. I cannot quite matter, much less materialize in full form. I suppose that is somehow weirdly appropriate in this context: I feel fuzzy. I am fuzzy.» — Kripal describe su propia posición en la academia con el vocabulario del fantasma que solo puede acechar, sin llegar a materializarse.
«They see that I am trying to say something new, something that cannot be put in the usual theoretical boxes of human, posthuman, or transhuman. They ask me, then, what I really think, or rather, how I think. They want me to materialize.» — Kripal sobre los colegas que no lo encasillan y le piden el cómo antes que el qué.
«The present book is a fairly detailed record of my own practice of the superhumanities. The book sits just to the side, but also at the side, of the humanities as they exist today within a kind of doubleness: at once a tired boredom and a genuine awe.» — Kripal define qué es este libro respecto de las humanidades vigentes: un registro de su propia práctica, escrito al lado y a favor de ellas.
«In the end, I am publishing this book because I think the connected dots, the impossible phenomena themselves, matter, and because it is more than time to materialize impossible phenomena in the form of new thought, even someday, I hope, in a new order of knowledge—a higher, higher education.» — Kripal da su razón para publicar: materializar el fenómeno en pensamiento nuevo y, algún día, en otro orden de conocimiento.
«Speaking in the third person, he claimed to see, like Moses, “the infinite open country of the true philosophy, the ‘promised land’ on» — Edmund Husserl sobre su propia fenomenología, citado por Kripal, que dice sentirse igual; la frase termina en la plana siguiente diciendo que él nunca pisará esa tierra. Voz de Husserl.
«Truth does not come into the word plainly, but in images and symbols, for that is the only way that the world can perceive it.» — epígrafe del capítulo 1, atribuido al *Evangelio de Felipe*. Voz del texto gnóstico citado.
«I mention such autobiographical facts because I want to make it clear that I do not write here out of some academic neutrality but out of a deeply felt and long practiced intellectual-spiritual activism.» — Kripal declara su posición de escritura tras contar su vínculo con Esalen y con Michael Murphy: no neutralidad académica sino activismo intelectual-espiritual.
«some significant portion of traditional supernatural belief is associated with accurate observations interpreted rationally. This does not suggest that all such belief has this association. Nor is this association taken as proof that the beliefs are true.» — David Hufford, citado por Kripal para enunciar la hipótesis de la fuente experiencial; el propio pasaje trae sus dos límites, que no vale para toda creencia y que no prueba que sean verdaderas. Voz de Hufford.
«consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors. They are the wheels which Ezekiel beheld, when the hand of the Lord was upon him, and he saw the visions of God as he sate among the captives by the river of Chebar. Withersoever the Spirit was to go, the wheels went, and whither was their spirit to go:—for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels also.» — Samuel Taylor Coleridge sobre el símbolo, citado en bloque con su grafía de época; de aquí saca Kripal las ruedas de Ezequiel como símbolo romántico por excelencia. Voz de Coleridge.
«In the month of December, 1894, I was invited by M. Aug. Lemaitre, Professor of the College of Geneva, to attend some seances of a non-professional medium, receiving no compensation for her services, and of whose extraordinary gifts and apparently supernormal faculties I had frequently heard. . . . we seated ourselves in a circle, with our hands resting upon the traditional round table of spiritistic circles. Mll. Smith—who possesses a triple mediumship: visual, auditive, and typtological [rapping]—began in the most natural manner, to describe the various apparitions which passed before her eyes in the partially darkened room. . . . I was greatly surprised to recognize in scenes which passed before my eyes events which had transpired in my own family prior to my birth. Whence could the medium, whom I had never met before, have derived the knowledge of events belonging to a remote past, of a private nature, and utterly unknown to any living person? The astounding power of Mrs. Piper, the famous Boston medium, whose wonderful intuition reads the latent memories of her visitors like an open book, recurred to my mind, and I went out from that seance with renewed hope of finding myself some day face to face with the “supernormal”— a true and genuine supernormal—telepathy, clairvoyance, spiritistic manifestations, it matters not by what name it be called, provided only that it be wholly out of the ordinary, and that it succeed in utterly demolishing the entire framework of present-day science.» — Théodore Flournoy narrando su primera sesión con Élise Müller en diciembre de 1894, citado en bloque de la traducción inglesa de su libro; grafías del impreso, *Mll.* y *Lemaitre*, tal cual. Voz de Flournoy.
«When we speak of abnormal phenomenon we do not mean one which contravenes natural laws, but one which exhibits them in an unusual or inexplicable form. Similarly by a supernormal phenomenon I mean, not one which overrides natural laws, for I believe no such phenomenon to exist, but one which exhibits the action of laws higher, in a psychical aspect, than are discerned in action in everyday life. By higher (either in a psychical or a physiological sense) I mean “apparently belonging to a more advanced stage of evolution.» — Frederic Myers distinguiendo lo anormal de lo supranormal, citado en bloque: ninguno de los dos viola las leyes naturales. Voz de Myers.
«Supernormal.—Of a faculty or phenomenon which goes beyond the level of ordinary experience, in the direction of evolution, or as pertaining to a transcendental world. The word supernatural is open to grave objections; it assumes that there is something outside nature, and it has become associated with arbitrary interference with law. Now there is no reason to suppose that the psychical phenomena with which we deal are less a part of nature, or less subject to fixed and definite law, than any other phenomena. Some of them appear to indicate a higher evolutionary level than the mass of men have yet attained, and some of them appear to be governed by laws of such a kind that they may hold good in a transcendental world as fully as in the world of sense. In either case they are above the norm of man rather than outside his nature.» — entrada de glosario de Frederic Myers para *supernormal*, citada en bloque del aparato preliminar de su obra mayor. Voz de Myers.
«It is more reasonable to think that our nervous sensibility will become more and more refined. It would be rash to believe that the current type of human is the final outcome of evolution. Our species is not only a ring in a chain of beings: the causes that have brought the perfecting of the human species are still active, and it is logical to think that there is in nature above us the same means as there is below us. The latter represent the ancestral types, which recall past forms; the former are perhaps the precursors. They present to us what are considered abnormal faculties today but that will become normal one day.» — Joseph Maxwell citado en bloque, en traducción, sobre lo paranormal como facultad precursora de una evolución todavía en curso. Voz de Maxwell.
«Protest all you want. We are at the end of being us. . . . The first and final alien disclosure is not that aliens don’t exist, it’s that you don’t. It’s that no matter how loudly you protest, you’re not ready for true disclosure, nor will you ever be.» — primer epígrafe del capítulo 2, de Jeremy Vaeni, *Aliens: The First and Final Disclosure*. Voz de Vaeni.
«The main thing to understand is that we are imprisoned in some kind of work of art.» — segundo epígrafe del capítulo 2, atribuido a Terrence McKenna y tomado de *Alien Information Theory* de Andrew R. Gallimore; la fuente escribe el nombre con doble erre. Voz de McKenna.
«I have been seriously thinking and writing about the UFO phenomenon since about 2004. I first struggled with it because I had to do so: it was simply everywhere in the historical and ethnographic sources with which I was working at the time—in this case, the history of esoteric spiritual currents in the California counterculture and, more specifically, the history of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.» — Kripal fecha y explica su propia entrada al tema ovni: no lo eligió, se lo impusieron sus fuentes sobre el esoterismo de la contracultura californiana.
«Kelleher once advised me over dinner, “If you see one, turn and run like hell.» — Colm Kelleher, bioquímico del programa contratado por Robert Bigelow, aconsejando a Kripal sobre los orbes azules; la frase sigue con que ése es su consejo. Voz de Kelleher.
«Joking aside, I am personally stunned by Bobby’s experience because it replicates, in near-perfect phenomenological detail, what happened to me in one early morning in Calcutta in November 1989.» — Kripal declara que el caso de *Bobby* reproduce su propio episodio de Calcuta de noviembre de 1989, del que dice haber salido su obra entera.
«Caillois claimed for the mantis a prestigious ancestry, surmising that it was probably the first insect to have appeared on earth. He described the prolific meanings associated with this creature in the folklore and myths of diverse cultures in which it plays both a divine and diabolical role. . . . He also mentioned the fascination of his artistic contemporaries with the mantis. André Breton and Paul Eluard were described as raising the insect. . . . Caillois’s discussion of contemporaries who were inspired as well as intrigued by the mantis climaxed with Salvador Dali.» — bloque citado por Kripal sobre el artículo de Roger Caillois de 1934, con Breton y Éluard criando mantis y Dalí como remate; la fuente escribe Eluard y Dali sin acentos. Voz del comentarista citado, no de Kripal.
«Well, they didn’t want my f—in’ autograph,” said John. “They were like, little. Bug-like. Big bug eyes and little bug mouths. . . . I was straight that night. I wasn’t dreaming and I wasn’t tripping. There were these creatures, like people but not like people. . . . They did something. But I don’t know what it was. I tried to throw them out, but when I took a step towards them, they kind of pushed me back. I mean, they didn’t touch me. It was like they just willed me. Pushed me with willpower and telepathy.» — John Lennon describiendo a las criaturas insectoides de su departamento, citado en bloque con la censura tipográfica de la fuente. Voz de Lennon.
«I realized our true nature is spirit, not body, that we are eternal beings, and God’s love is unconditional. . . . In fact, the reality is we are one with God, and he loves us. Now if that isn’t a hazard to this country. . . . What’s gonna happen to the arms industry when we realize we’re all one?» — Bill Hicks sobre lo que sacó de su experiencia con hongos y ovnis en Fredericksburg, citado por Kripal como ejemplo de la carga política de lo imposible. Voz de Hicks.
«They all look like that. Yeah. I thought at first it was like a skeleton on a motorcycle or something. It was flying—no, it wasn’t flying. I could just see it, and I see it almost does, really does, look like a praying mantis, only bigger. It’s got great big eyes that just scare the hell out of you.» — Whitley Strieber bajo hipnosis, sesión del 14 de marzo de 1986, describiendo la figura de mantis; transcripción citada por Kripal. Voz de Strieber.
«Probably, because they are not aliens in the simple, conventional manner that is usually assumed. . . . Indeed, what if the visitors are the dead . . . disguised, perhaps, to avoid revealing their true identity to the living?» — Anne y Whitley Strieber respondiendo, en *The Communion Letters*, a por qué los visitantes aparecen junto con fantasmas y apariciones. Voz de los Strieber.
«I am the part of me that’s part of you.”51 Whitley still wears their wedding ring.» — Anne Strieber, ya fallecida, según la cita de Whitley que Kripal recoge como una de sus líneas preferidas. Voz de Anne Strieber.
«Perhaps, instead of searching for aliens in the sky, we should look much closer—inside ourselves, in those places from which we have been receiving messages of alien intelligence for millennia, though few of us have ever paid attention. . . . One notable exception: science-fiction writers who have traveled through these gateways in search of inspiration. There is more science-fiction literature, art, and film that may have been inspired by mind-expanding experiences than most of us suspect, from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to Philip K. Dick’s brilliant novels such as Valis, Ubik, and The Divine Invasion.» — apertura de *Inner Paths to Outer Space*, citada en bloque; Kripal declara la tesis muy afín a la suya. Voz de los cuatro autores del volumen.
«According to the artist Amaringo Shuña, “They are not machines. . . . They are spirits, and come from other dimensions.» — el pintor ayahuasquero Pablo Amaringo Shuña sobre las naves de sus cuadros, citado por Kripal. Voz de Amaringo Shuña.
«Do you get how when the little self sees the big Self, it flees? It erects gods and churches and rules. It worships. What is worship? Worship is a great wall created to divide you from YOU. Words, rituals, rites. . . . That’s all trash, all means of denying our Whole Self. All is All. That necessarily includes the little self—the ego—and its traps, its illusions. This is why you can live ignorantly-ever-after in the shallow end and be every bit as worthwhile as those yucking it up in the deep: it’s all one ocean. . . . Don’t look to Mommy, Daddy, Priest, Jeremy, or Carl Sagan’s corpse. The kingdom is found within, not without. This is why the aliens don’t land.» — Jeremy Vaeni citado en bloque contra el culto y el rito como muros del ego. Voz de Vaeni, no posición de Kripal.
«It’s no overstatement to say that I am science fiction: one part tentacle monster, three parts futurist, all too human. . . . The only fact we may discern about abductions is that something is happening that we cannot experience directly because we filter it through our own fiction, composed of stories, assumptions, and visualizations conjured in fear.» — Jeremy Vaeni sobre sí mismo y sobre el filtro de ficción y miedo por el que llega la abducción. Voz de Vaeni.
«What about our timeless, nondual aspect? Not even aspect— that doesn’t describe it. How about the very sense of being that transcends and includes time, transcends and includes us? Can we be that? Not visit it as if it’s another state of consciousness we slip into for a bit and then come back to normal and bore people with our excited story. Not have flashes of “my” truth.» — Jeremy Vaeni citado en bloque sobre el ser no dual que trasciende e incluye el tiempo; el bloque sigue preguntando qué será entonces del humano. Voz de Vaeni.
«Suddenly, in the middle of the night, I came into full consciousness—as if from anesthesia—to find myself standing in the middle of some trees just inside the curved edge of a forest clearing. As I looked around, I could see about a hundred other people spread out in the woods along with me. About half of them appeared to be dazed human beings in various stages of dress and undress, some wearing pajamas. . . . It was a full-moon night, so the clearing was very well lit. In it, I could see activity and flashes of moving figures. As I struggled to process what was happening, a 5′2″-ish woman who seemed like a nurse walked toward me with a shorter individual beside her. When she stopped in front of me, I glanced down and noticed the smaller person was a child about ten years old. She silently and gently pushed him toward me. Looking into her face to understand what she was asking of me, I realized she was not entirely human. Which was terrifying.» — Karin Austin narrando en primera persona el claro del bosque y la enfermera no humana; bloque citado por Kripal. Voz de Karin Austin.
«Without acknowledging my fear, she nudged the child in my direction again to suggest I had some relationship to it. I was deeply confused. I was not a mother then (or now), and I didn’t have any nieces or nephews. As I looked down at the child to consider our connection, I flushed with panic and distress as I realized he wasn’t entirely human either. I recognized familiar human features in his face (and hers), but the eyes were much bigger than normal, and his hair was white-blond and wispy like a cancer patient’s. He was listless and seemed emotionless, as if autistic.105 My stomach churned. And I’m embarrassed to say that I was disgusted. And angry. . . . With my thoughts scrambling, the non-human “nurse” tried one more time to help me understand. This time, there was an intrusion into my consciousness. She was saying, “Yours.» — continuación del mismo bloque: Austin sobre el niño híbrido que se le presenta como suyo, con su repulsión declarada. Voz de Karin Austin.
«So, if we want to say this is just happening in our minds, I am going to say, ‘Fuck no it isn’t.’ If anything, these encounters have taught me that we do not understand the true nature of reality. Most likely, and perhaps most profoundly, so many things about how the phenomenon operates suggests that consciousness is fundamental and gives rise to the material world, not the other way around.» — Karin Austin cerrando su relato contra la lectura psicologista y a favor de una conciencia fundamental. Voz de Karin Austin.
«There is a beauty in being partially unplugged from the human condition. . . . This is how many autistics feel; that they are not human. Now, of course, genetically I’m human. I just sit on the outer edges of the bell-shaped curve as to what a human is, at least psychologically. It seems certain to me that shamans and mystics throughout the ages probably had Asperger’s syndrome or something of that nature. If you are “born spiritual” like I was, you can make a claim that you are some old soul incarnating again. Or you can just admit to being on the autistic spectrum. It’s hard to say which is or is not true on a case-by-case basis. In any case, spirituality, genius wild creativity, and high-functioning autism seem joined at the hip.» — primer epígrafe del capítulo 3, de *Kevin*, seudónimo, en su texto sobre la kundalini como autismo autoinducido de alto funcionamiento. Voz de Kevin, no posición de Kripal.
«When you let your “personal soul die,” then the only soul that remains is “the Universe”—and then you know ME.» — segundo epígrafe del capítulo 3, de *Kevin*, fechado el 20 de mayo de 2022. Voz de Kevin.
«I have long been of the strong opinion that my earlier erotic interests are connected to my present paranormal ones: I went from queering religion to weirding religion.» — Kripal traza la continuidad de su propia obra, de sus estudios sobre erotismo místico a los paranormales.
«There is always, of course, the slightly embarrassing possibility that one thinks that someone is onto something big because that someone happens to think like oneself. Scholarship can be ventriloquism, and agreement can be camouflaged narcissism.» — Kripal advierte contra su propio método al presentar a su interlocutor: la coincidencia puede ser ventriloquia.
«You have to keep it in your pants. You are simmering in a soup of primal desire. This is called the forcing technique. Please remember: I was a Minnesota farm boy. I had to learn this all. I had to learn that if the stomach is tense, nothing will happen. The heart needs to glow (oxytocin). You pinch off the bottom, get it all revved up, in order to create the “cauldron.” All these hormones are building up. Oxytocin is doing its thing in the heart. It is the very same sexual apparatus that is associated with religion. The result of this reconfiguration is to build new pathways which previously did not exist, to allow for an expansion of already existing human faculties; a form of parabonding with the universe.» — *Kevin*, seudónimo, explicando en bloque cómo aprendió la llave *mulabandhu* y qué entiende por vincularse al universo. Voz de Kevin, no posición de Kripal.
«In the Cosmic Imaginal, obviously visible and not obviously visible systems interact as part of a greater whole. There is no mere matter and no ‘woo spirit.’ Everything is a conjunction of properties and interactions, where Mind, Awareness, and regular meat-brain consciousness all stand equal.» — *Kevin*, seudónimo, sobre el Imaginal Cósmico donde Mente, Consciencia y cerebro están al mismo nivel. Voz de Kevin.
«In short, the author takes Awareness as a field, as in physics, perhaps the first and eternal field that, when it chooses to interact with substance [matter], allows for consciousness. Awareness allows for consciousness but is not consciousness. Consciousness springs from Awareness through an Interface [the body-based ego]. The author also takes Awareness and (primal) substance [or matter] to be different views of the exact same thing, the author holding the philosophical view of Neutral Monism.» — *Kevin* exponiendo su sistema en tercera persona, con los corchetes de aclaración; el monismo neutral declarado por él mismo. Voz de Kevin.
«You and others around you might experience ‘poltergeist phenomena’ at some point. This is not GOOD. This ‘proves nothing.’ This does not make you ‘evolved’ or ‘enlightened.’ It just means you have tortured your psyche and parts have split off. If you become absolutely convinced these ‘beings’ exist, you might even stumble onto how to make them ‘semi-real.’ I did it, crazy person that I was. Nowadays? Not so much.» — *Kevin* advirtiendo contra la lectura del poltergeist como logro espiritual, y declarando haberlo producido él mismo. Voz de Kevin.
«Starting on 11/24/2013, I designed a “summoning ritual” that I felt would be efficacious in the summoning of a so-called “Black Triangle UFO,” which at that time I felt was in fact some manner of coherent-energy life-form, and not any form of “nuts and bolts” craft. The ritual involved what is called “Samyama” [Sanskrit for a “joining” or “unification”], a yoga practice which involves reaching a very deep level of mind and then “letting go,” so that what is visualized becomes a reality.» — *Kevin* describiendo en su propio ensayo el ritual de invocación que diseñó, fechado el 24 de noviembre de 2013; los corchetes de aclaración son de Kripal. Voz de Kevin.
«Massive. Silent. Three red lights, steadily on and this arc-light search light beam in the center. I watched it fly over me and my house from the east to the west horizon over the heavily populated area I lived in. It APPEARED to be the size of, say, a 747 or three, and it appeared to be, say, 500 feet high. Of course, I had no reference points whatsoever, so it could have been the size of the moon, for all I know. It was very polite with me. When I wanted to see other parts of it, it would politely move that direction for me, so that I could see it had no jet engines, or any other kind of engine. . . . It had no aerodynamic surfaces. It had no exhaust and, of course, it was beyond quiet. I could hear small gnats flying around me, but they were very loud in comparison to this thing. . . . Now as it got about halfway across the sky over me, I realized that it was an image projected into my mind, as I could see rivets . . . rivets . . . which is fine, I guess . . . but they never got larger or smaller or more or less distinct, no matter the distance between “it” and “me.” I said in my mind, “You fraud! You shapeshifter! That was very funny of you with the rivets.” I got the sense it liked me, and that it had done that on purpose. It then shape-changed into a pyramid from the movie Stargate [1994]. Then it shape-changed into a ship design from [the television series] Star Trek: The Next Generation. I said, “You silly thing you . . . can’t you do anything except show me things from my own mind?” So it waggled its left arm or whatever in glee and then assumed all three forms simultaneously . . . and it laughed.» — *Kevin* narrando en bloque la aparición del triángulo negro y los remaches que le revelaron que era una imagen proyectada. Voz de Kevin.
«generally seen as the “weird part”—for me it was the rivets. That weird part is the semiotic “message” that you need to decode. It’s pure Little Red Wagon Theory; and what’s in the wagon is only significant on a person-by-person basis. Anyone who claims they have a message for the entire human race, because of such an encounter, is generally full of shit.» — *Kevin* explicando que la parte rara del encuentro es el mensaje a descifrar, y que ese mensaje no es transferible a nadie más. Voz de Kevin.
«And science, understood now in this context, is “the most successful system of magic of all time” (mapping and manipulating all those occult or hidden structures).» — la fórmula sobre la ciencia como sistema de magia, entrecomillada por Kripal con llamada de nota 61; esa nota dice que es comunicación personal de Kevin al autor del 21 de mayo de 2022 (EPUB p. 318), así que la frase es de Kevin y no de Kripal. Levanta la cuarentena de voz declarada en estas Notas.
«At the very last, when the fetters of fear of loss fall from our very human eyes, what we thought of as eternal in and of itself, the “soul” turns out to be a love letter, a data packet, a temporary resonance in the realm of the very small, addressed to the Larger Life itself.» — apertura del cierre que *Kevin* pidió reproducir exactamente como lo escribió; el alma como paquete de datos dirigido a la Vida Mayor. Voz de Kevin.
«My argument rests on taking seriously an alternative understanding of time as a reversible swerve, a scientific perspective that conflicts with the commonsensical view of time’s irreversible linearity. . . . Methodologically, the appeal is to apply a natural scientific model of time to the humanist effort to understand historical experience.» — epígrafe del capítulo 4, de Elliot Wolfson, *Language, Eros, Being*; de aquí toma Kripal el título del capítulo. Voz de Wolfson.
«Among all philosophical attitudes, it has been the virtue of phenomenological philosophy to call into question the naivete that structures our everyday life, our ‘taking it for granted,’ by carrying out a shift of perspective.» — Anthony Steinbock sobre la virtud de la fenomenología, citado por Kripal como precedente de su propio vuelco. Voz de Steinbock.
«There is nevertheless the possibility for the rediscovery of the life of matter as a religious phenomenon—an equal and sometimes alternate structure in the face of the dehumanizing and terroristic meaning of history.» — Charles H. Long sobre la vida de la materia como fenómeno religioso frente al terror de la historia, citado por Kripal. Voz de Long.
«I also want what the churches want: to lead humanity to the Aeternitas. My task to do this is through philosophy. Everything that I have written up to now is preparatory; it is only a development [Aufstellen] of methods. In the course of one’s life, one unfortunately does not arrive at the core, at what is essential. It is so important for philosophy to be led out of liberalism and rationalism, and to be led once more to what is essential, to truth. The question concerning ultimate reality, to truth, must be the object of every true philosophy. This is my life’s work.» — Edmund Husserl declarando el fin último de su filosofía, citado en bloque; los corchetes son de la edición. Voz de Husserl.
«At the turn of the millennium, I was writing my second book, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom (2001), a study of the mystical experiences of scholars of mysticism and how these altered states of consciousness and erotic energy secretly shaped the public scholarship of five major scholars of religion (the human sciences as occult, again).» — Kripal describe su propio libro de 2001 sobre los estados alterados de los estudiosos de la mística, del que Wolfson fue el quinto caso.
«Without delving into the thicket of theoretic grappling that this subject demands, I pose the rhetorical question: What would be the consequences if a historian were to take seriously the conclusion reached on the basis of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity that spacetime—the “mathematical structure” that “serves as a unifying causal background for phenomena”—is to be regarded as a curve? Does this not at least entail the possibility that the past is as much determined by the present as the present by the past?» — Elliot Wolfson respondiendo en bloque a la acusación de anacronismo contra su uso de filosofía contemporánea sobre textos medievales. Voz de Wolfson.
«The special theory of relativity has led some thinkers to speculate that past, present and future events coexist in a unit of space and time called ‘space-time.’ Likewise, mystical experiences sometimes give the impression that past, present and future exist together in an ‘Eternal Now.’ This was certainly true in my own experience.» — Paul Marshall, estudioso de la mística con formación en relatividad especial, citado por Kripal; declara la coincidencia y la funda en experiencia propia. Voz de Marshall.
«Allow me to list a few more examples of what I take to be a shared space-time block. I leave the authors, dates, and places in the footnotes to emphasize that such experiences, being outside space and time as we normally think of these, cannot be completely reduced to these contextual notions.» — Kripal explica una decisión editorial de su libro: manda a las notas autores, fechas y lugares para que el contexto no absorba el testimonio.
«What happened to me between 12:30 and 4 o’clock on Friday, December 2, 1955? After brooding about it for several months, I still think my first, astonishing conviction was right—that on many occasions that afternoon I existed outside time. I don’t mean this metaphorically, but literally. I mean that the essential part of me (the part that thinks to itself “This is me”) had an existence, quite conscious of itself, enjoying itself, reflecting on its strange experience, in a timeless order of reality outside the world as we know it. I count this experience» — testimonio citado en bloque y sin firma en el cuerpo, fechado el 2 de diciembre de 1955; Kripal manda la autoría a las notas a propósito. Voz del testigo.
«When we take off from an airport at night, we are aware of individual runway lights flashing past in succession. But when [we] look down a little later, we see them all existing together motionless. It is not self-contradictory to say that the lights flashed past in succession and also that they exist together motionless. Everything depends on the standpoint of the observer.» — cierre del mismo testimonio, con el símil de las luces de pista visto desde el aire. Voz del testigo.
«Time didn’t run linearly the way we experience it here. It’s as though our earthly minds convert what happens around us into a sequence; but in actuality, when we’re not expressing through our bodies, everything occurs simultaneously, whether past, present, or future.» — otro testimonio citado sin firma en el cuerpo: la mente terrestre convierte en secuencia lo que ocurre simultáneamente. Voz del testigo.
«Rather than feeling frightened by this voice or the unknown person standing outside my basement window late at night, I inexplicably begin to sense a strange, loving energy moving through my whole body, and I begin to cry uncontrollably. After about a minute or so, the figure outside the window vanishes. I then rush out my backdoor to see where he has gone, but there is no one in sight. I write down the incident in my journal. Eventually, I will forget about it completely.» — John Allison, doctorando de Kripal, narrando por escrito la aparición de septiembre de 2013 ante la ventana de su sótano. Voz de Allison.
«I then ran inside, turned on the lights, and things were as I left them before my walk. And I fell upon the basement floor, weeping in joy, clutching my flip flops to my chest, and feeling like I had just been given some unthinkably tremendous gift.» — Allison sobre el cierre del bucle en mayo de 2017, cuando se reconoce como la figura que él mismo había visto cuatro años antes. Voz de Allison.
«I have felt a deep assurance that all moments in time somehow exist simultaneously, and that, for whatever reason, sometimes two moments in time not directly connected to each other in linear causality still somehow “bleed” into and affect each other.» — conclusión que Allison saca de su propio caso, con el verbo que da nombre al sangrado entre momentos. Voz de Allison.
«Romanticism and its aftermath, including Heidegger, well versed in the theosophy of Böhme and its reverberations in the idealist philosophy of Schelling.» — cierre del bloque de Elliot Wolfson sobre la deuda del romanticismo y de Heidegger con la teosofía de Jacob Böhme; el bloque abre en la plana anterior sosteniendo que la especulación esotérica occidental, deudora de la cábala, influyó en la historia de la lingüística. Voz de Wolfson.
«More and more I see the psycho-physical problem as the key to the overall spiritual situation of our age, and the gradual discovery of a new (“neutral”) psycho-physical unitary language, whose function is to symbolically describe an invisible, potential form of reality that is only indirectly inferable through its effects, also seems to me an indispensable prerequisite for the emergence of the new hieros gamos [sacred marriage] that you predicted.» — epígrafe del capítulo 5: carta de Wolfgang Pauli a C. G. Jung del 17 de mayo de 1952, con el corchete aclaratorio de la edición. Voz de Pauli.
«This penultimate chapter is, I hope, the clearest practical statement to date of what I think and, most of all, how I think.1 It will switch gears, as we say, and enter a more philosophical and confessional way of expressing myself. It is autobiographical in genre and intent.» — Kripal declara el género y la función del capítulo 5 dentro de su propio libro.
«Mankind is too young to have beliefs. What we need are good questions.» — Anne Strieber, citada por Kripal junto a la consigna de John Keel sobre la creencia. Voz de Anne Strieber.
«At a generous assessment, approximately half this book is nonsense. Unfortunately, I don’t know which half; and neither, despite all the claims, does anyone else.» — Arthur C. Clarke sobre su propio *World of Strange Powers* (1984), citado por Kripal como ejemplo de la puerta que Clarke dejó entreabierta. Voz de Clarke.
«Quantum theory predicts correlations which cannot be explained by efficient causation, but by decomposing wholes into parts, systems into subsystems. In this process, holistic features become disentangled, and the properties of the emerging parts exhibit holistic, acausal correlations. In physics, such correlations are well known due to quantum entanglement. . . . The Pauli-Jung Conjecture goes one step further and posits that a similar principle is at work in psychophysical systems, including both mental and physical properties in correlation with one another. Here it is evidently inconceivable how efficient causation could operate between such categorially distinct entities as mind and matter. Pauli and Jung agreed that meaning should be regarded as a proper alternative to efficient causation in this case. Pauli even postulated “a third type of laws of nature consisting of corrections to chance fluctuations due to meaningful or purposeful coincidences of causally unconnected events.» — Harald Atmanspacher y Dean Rickles citados en bloque sobre el sentido como alternativa a la causalidad eficiente, con la tercera clase de leyes naturales postulada por Pauli. Voz de Atmanspacher y Rickles.
«Over and above meaning as a subject-object relation, dual-aspect monism offers the option, contrary to Kant, of direct, immanent experiences of the psychophysically neutral reality, which avoids the problem of access to a transcendental realm. If this reality is primordial enough, like an Unus Mundus, it may be aligned with the ‘absolute’ and bring us back to Hegel. Immanent experiences refer to modes of knowledge and meaning that are certainly non-standard, and are reminiscent of Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva.» — Atmanspacher y Rickles contra Kant, citados en bloque: el fondo neutral sería accesible en experiencia inmanente. Voz de Atmanspacher y Rickles.
«We should be a mirror of being: we are God in miniature. . . . Am I supposed to have created the whole universe? Was it the movement of my I that brought this about, just as it brought about the movement of a body? Am I merely a droplet of this force? I comprehend only a being that is simultaneously one and many, that changes and stays the same, that knows, feels, wills— this being is my primordial fact.» — epígrafe del capítulo 6, de los fragmentos póstumos de Friedrich Nietzsche del período de *Así habló Zaratustra*. Voz de Nietzsche.
«This last chapter begins with some theological reflections that were originally included in a conclusion for my 2022 book, The Superhumanities. I did not publish them.» — Kripal declara la procedencia del capítulo 6: una conclusión escrita para otro libro suyo y retirada antes de publicarla.
«Every conversation that has ever taken place was the Universe, God, or the Game talking to itself, playing the parts of interlocutors. We are multiple personalities of the schizoid universal mind.» — revelación psicoactiva citada por Kripal como eco de Bernardo Kastrup; testimonio de la antigua Unión Soviética. Voz del testigo citado.
«This is a truth that applies to all, equally, without any exception. God is the only reality, and we are all expressions and embodiments of this one universal being. . . . I am a universal being. In fact, I am the universe. I am reality itself. . . . Reality is my experience of myself, and it is a game—a game that allows me to experience myself as both subject and object simultaneously.» — Martin W. Ball, citado por Kripal como caso estadounidense y no religioso de la misma revelación. Voz de Ball.
«Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death; life is only a dream, and we’re the imagination of ourselves. . . . Here’s Tom with the weather.» — la noticia positiva sobre el LSD que Bill Hicks pedía y escribía él mismo en tercera persona; Kripal advierte que lo decía en serio. Voz de Hicks.
«We are all coexistent with God members of the Divine body. We are all partakers of the Divine nature . . . He is the only God. But then so am I, and so are you.» — respuesta de William Blake a Henry Crabb Robinson sobre si creía en la doble naturaleza de Jesús, citada en verso por Kripal. Voz de Blake.
«We are swimming in a sea of consciousness, and ultimately our mental life is not separable from the physical world around us, nor from the mental lives of others. Coincidences point, above all, to this fundamental interconnectedness. They allow us a glimpse of a level of order to our world that is probably too complex for us to understand but that compels us to try, or at least to gaze in awe.» — Sharon Hewitt Rawlette sobre lo que muestran las coincidencias, citada por Kripal. Voz de Rawlette.
«form of truth. A holier form. Modern science, in focusing on the physical, has gotten things precisely backward. It has studied the physical because the physical is simpler, easier to see and pin down and dissect. But it is in fact less real. Coincidences, on the other hand, show us what is behind the façade of the physical world: something deeper and more intrinsically significant. Coincidences are the holes in the reductive, mechanistic worldview that allow us to catch glimpses of the vast sea of meaning that awaits us on the other side.» — cierre del bloque de Rawlette que Kripal presenta como manifiesto posible de su propio libro; el bloque abre en la plana anterior. Voz de Rawlette.
«In the whole psychology of the “evangel” the concept of guilt and punishment is lacking; also the concept of reward. “Sin”— any distance separating God and man—is abolished: precisely this is the “glad tidings.” Blessedness is not promised, it is not tied to conditions: it is the only reality—the rest is a sign with which to speak of it. The consequence of such a state projects itself into a new practice, the genuine evangelical practice. It is not a “faith” that distinguishes the Christian: the Christian acts, he is distinguished by acting differently: by not resisting, either in words or in his heart, those who treat him ill; by making no distinction between foreigner and native, between Jew and non-Jew (“the neighbor”—really the coreligionist, the Jew); by not growing angry with anybody, by not despising anybody» — Friedrich Nietzsche en *El Anticristo* sobre la práctica evangélica sin culpa ni recompensa, citado en bloque; el bloque continúa en la plana siguiente y remata en que solo la práctica evangélica lleva a Dios. Voz de Nietzsche.
«While we can and must continue to interrogate racial blackness, I also think there is something to be said for the fact that blackness is the preeminent site of the non-normal, the out-of-bounds, the “beyond” as I once put it. That blackness—a blackness held in the flesh of those deemed black, but nevertheless exceeding them—is, in my mind, the place where discourses and experiences of the super emerge» — Biko Gray citado en bloque sobre la negritud como sitio del más allá; el bloque continúa con el Pantera Negra, los X-Men y los casos de Sojourner Truth, Du Bois y Harriet Tubman. Voz de Gray.
«A specter is haunting the academy: the figure of the ghostly, the phantasmic, and the unquiet dead. Over the last fifteen years, a large and rapidly growing number of works in diverse disciplines—sociology, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, folklore, culture studies, postcolonial studies, race and gender studies, geography, media studies, and communication and rhetoric—have sought to reinterpret stories of haunting as the return of traumatic memory. Within such work, ghosts manifest not as terrifying revenants, but as welcome, if disquieting spurs to consciousness and calls for political action.» — apertura del ensayo de 2015 de Martha y Bruce Lincoln sobre el giro espectral, citada en bloque. Voz de los Lincoln.
«Once, when we were together in a choir, and I was kneeling and about to take communion, it disturbed me greatly [to levitate], for it seemed to me a most extraordinary thing and I thought it would create quite a stir; so I ordered the nuns not to speak of it (for I had already been appointed prioress). At other times, when I have felt that the Lord was going to do the same thing to me (as happened once during a sermon . . . when some great ladies were present), I have lain on the ground and the sisters have tried to hold me down, but everyone has seen me enraptured anyway.» — Teresa de Ávila sobre sus levitaciones en el coro, citada en bloque en la traducción de Carlos Eire; el corchete es de la edición. Voz de Teresa.
«and are not our own masters, we are forced to realize that there is One stronger than ourselves, however painful this truth may be, and that these favors are bestowed by Him, and that we, of ourselves, can do nothing whatsoever. This imprints in us great humility. Indeed, I confess that at first it produced a great fear in me, an awful fear.» — Teresa de Ávila sobre el efecto de los raptos y el miedo que al principio le produjeron; el bloque abre en la plana anterior. Voz de Teresa.
«Physics and mathematics are to be held responsible to a large extent for the return of interest in mystical ways of knowledge. . . . We are entitled to believe that our mind space has amazing properties, the most remarkable of which is that it is not limited to three dimensions.» — epígrafe de la conclusión, de Ioan Couliano, *Out of This World*. Voz de Couliano.
«In revelation and in the ecstatic experience in which it is received, the ontological shock is preserved and overcome at the same time. It is preserved in the annihilating power of the divine presence (mysterium tremendum) and is overcome in the elevating power of the divine presence (mysterium fascinosum). Ecstasy unites the experience of the abyss to which reason in all its functions is driven with the experience of the ground in which reason is grasped by the mystery of its own depth and of the depth of being generally.» — Paul Tillich definiendo el choque ontológico en su *Teología sistemática*, citado en bloque con el par *tremendum*/*fascinosum* de Rudolf Otto. Voz de Tillich.
«This book is about high weirdness, a mode of culture and consciousness that reached a definite peak in the early seventies, when the writers and psychonauts whose stories I tell herein pushed hard on the boundaries of reality—and got pushed around in return. . . . The element of recursion . . . also characterizes high weirdness. . . . Think of it as a kind of visionary skepticism, or critical gnosis. Within this questioning current, the object of weird fascination is folded back into the subject, constructing a strange loop of cultural play, recursive enigma, and extraordinary encounter that makes a raid on the real.» — Erik Davis definiendo su alta rareza, citado en bloque; el bloque continúa en la plana siguiente con las narrativas esotéricas que irrumpen en la experiencia vivida. Voz de Davis.
«crime scenes—dusting carefully for fingerprints, looking for what evidence has been concealed or destroyed, and always arriving at a story about guilt and fault, dissembling and deception (if only the artist’s self-deception). But if the creative imagination is a precognitive imagination, no amount of reducing a work to causes, influences, and intentions can exhaust what is original in it, and it is wrong to see a work as a crime committed, or the artist/writer as a figure to be distrusted and held accountable. The artist, I believe, is no more guilty than Ezekiel was: They are a witness to the impossible. Consequently, I agree with J. F. Martel in his book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice that a better guiding metaphor for how we approach art is an encounter with an alien technology. It follows from this that we should approach criticism more like the investigation of a UFO landing than like a crime scene. An encounter with something extraordinary happened (the inspiration), and it left material evidence behind (the work) that can be forensically examined. The witness is the most important piece of evidence, and warrants a default “hermeneutics of trust” rather than of suspicion.» — Eric Wargo contra la hermenéutica de la sospecha, citado en bloque: la crítica debería parecerse a la investigación de un aterrizaje ovni y no a la de una escena del crimen; el bloque abre en la plana anterior. Voz de Wargo.
«The most shocking entailment of what I am arguing . . . is that the most ingenious works (and probably, by extension, all ‘inspired’ works) are really time loops. What this means is that they are actually uncaused, exactly what debunkers of divine inspiration have always feared—creation from nothing.» — Eric Wargo sobre las obras geniales como bucles temporales sin causa. Voz de Wargo.
«I think it is our physical body, with its quadrillions of material (which just means measurable and thus information-carrying) particles, that connects us to the future and is thus the locus of our supernature. The body is actually a hyperbody, a higher-dimensional being. It is our bodies, including our nervous systems, that carry information from time point B backwards to time point A.» — Eric Wargo situando en el cuerpo físico, y no en un alma, el vehículo de la información que viaja hacia atrás. Voz de Wargo.
«and the faith that something is true: two completely separate realms of interest—almost diametrically opposite realms—they are reached by utterly different paths. Having knowledge of this—that is almost the definition of the wise man in the Orient: the Brahmins understand this; Plato understands this; and so does every student of esoteric wisdom.» — Friedrich Nietzsche sobre la indiferencia del cristianismo ante la verdad frente a la importancia de que algo sea creído verdadero; el bloque abre en la plana anterior. Voz de Nietzsche.
«So, again, one must ask: Why do so few people on earth know about Saint Joseph [of Cupertino]? Why is the evidence ignored or trivialized? Why has he been relegated to the history of the ridiculous rather than to the history of the impossible, or to the science of antigravitational forces?» — epígrafe del epílogo, de Carlos M. N. Eire, *They Flew: A History of the Impossible*; el corchete es de la edición. Voz de Eire.
«At that point I felt this wave of adrenaline rush through my body. all at once, I realized this was in fact a different night than the previous one. and this time the accident was real. I ran outside and a car had been T-boned, rolled several times and landed in my neighbor’s yard. I learned later that a young [man] in the car died.» — *Jim*, copywriter de San Francisco, narrando por carta la segunda noche del accidente que había oído la anterior; Kripal reproduce su minúscula inicial y sus corchetes. Voz de Jim.
«Not “humankind,” but rather superhumans are the goal! I think that all metaphysical and religious ways of thinking are the result of dissatisfaction with humans, the result of the drive for a superior, superhuman future.» — primero de los tres epígrafes que cierran el epílogo, de los fragmentos póstumos de Nietzsche. Voz de Nietzsche.
«I believe that humankind is coming to a point where there’s going to be a huge metamorphosis and our physical bodies—or maybe it’s our invisible bodies—are going to change. . . . I think humanity is going to take an evolutionary leap and things are going to be different.» — segundo de esos epígrafes, de Gloria E. Anzaldúa, *Interviews Entrevistas*. Voz de Anzaldúa.
«You who play the zig-zag lightning of power over the world, with the grumbling thunder in your wake, think kind of those who walk in the dust. . . . Consider that with tolerance and patience, we godly demons may breed a noble world in a few hundred generations or so.» — tercero de esos epígrafes, de Zora Neale Hurston, *Dust Tracks on a Road*: el libro cierra con la misma voz con que abrió. Voz de Hurston.
«There is a kind of unconscious or barely conscious “sociology of the impossible” at work in these pages, by which I mean there is something that is fundamentally unspeakable or unknowable about the endless lines of influence and human relationship that produced such thought.» — Kripal nombra así el título de sus agradecimientos: la red de influencias que produjo el libro es, dice, indecible.
«Up here, on the social and historical plane, these thought experiments were all written over a four-year period, between the very beginning of 2019 and the middle of 2023, at the express invitation of others for specific higher educational purposes. They are also developments of my thought as expressed and performed at over one hundred speaking events in the United States, Canada, and Europe, most all of them before the pandemic. Impossible thinking is thus a kind of thinking-with on the most practical of levels: with thousands of colleagues, listeners, readers, and interlocutors at institutions of higher learning on both sides of the ocean.» — Kripal fecha la escritura del libro entre 2019 y mediados de 2023 y declara su origen en encargos y conferencias.
«The book is divided into two more or less equal parts: one on practice, and one on theory, although these divisions, obviously, are not absolute. It begins with three chapters on the imaginal nature of the near-death literature, the UFO phenomenon, and the abduction accounts that I wrote for three back-to-back conferences in the spring of 2022—at the University of Vienna, Harvard University, and the University of California, Berkeley. I begin the book with these chapters at the request of an anonymous reader, who wanted me to emphasize the personal dimension of impossible thought.» — Kripal declara el origen de la primera parte en tres conferencias de 2022 y el orden del libro en la petición de un lector anónimo.
«This second part begins with a chapter on temporality and hermeneutics, parts of which I wrote for a Festschrift in honor of the historian of medieval kabbalah Elliot Wolfson, whom I have known (and thought-with) for almost three decades now and consider to be one of the most important scholars of religion of my own, or any, generation (chapter 4).» — Kripal declara que su capítulo 4 nació de un homenaje a Elliot Wolfson.
«and the other I begin with some paragraphs from the original conclusion of The Superhumanities that I decided not to publish there but am here sharing as a kind of open secret (chapter 6), now vastly expanded to try to answer an anonymous reader of this book manuscript who asked me the question I get all the time on the lecture and podcast circuit: “What about the negative paranormal, the demonic possession, the palpable sense of evil?» — Kripal explica que el capítulo 6 responde a una pregunta que le hizo un lector anónimo sobre el paranormal negativo y la posesión.
«In the end, this is a book for them. It is about them. It is them. Jeffrey J. Kripal May 25, 2023» — cierre firmado y fechado de los agradecimientos, dedicado a los experienciantes cuyas cartas guarda su archivo.
Concepts treated
Gnosis (conocimiento salvífico) — Categoría operativa del libro, no ornamento: lo gnóstico es «a direct state of knowledge that enacts a reversal of orthodoxy» (siguiendo a Corbin), el pensamiento imposible es «academic Gnosticism», y el cierre del libro es «the final gnosis of impossible thinking».
Ein Sof (el Infinito) — El cosmos autopoiético se dice con el vocabulario cabalístico del Infinito, por lectura de Elliot Wolfson.
Imaginación (phantasia) — El imaginal de Frederic Myers reaparece como morfología insectoide; y el lugar de la Imaginación es el mismo en el sufismo islámico, la cábala judía y el esoterismo cristiano, según Corbin y Wolfson.
Ocultismo (occultisme) — El corpus de Wolfson refleja el pensamiento propio del autor «in an almost occult manner».
Daimon (entidad intermedia, ni ángel ni demonio) — El material ufológico se reclasifica como angelología o demonología, y «demonio» se acepta como descriptor fenomenológico correcto de poltergeists y embrujos; la posesión demoníaca implica naturaleza compartida.
Transvection (el traslado corporal por seres demoníacos) — Las levitaciones son el caso mayor del libro: el vuelo de las brujas y la bilocación en el ciclo de la brujería, las de Teresa de Ávila, las de José de Cupertino ante miles de testigos y las bilocaciones de María de Ágreda.
Anima mundi (alma del mundo) — En el mundo akan y ghanés las mentes individuales, o *sunsum*, se subsumen semiautónomamente en un Alma del Mundo universal, *okra*, según Wim van Binsbergen.
Sefirot (las diez numeraciones) — La redención última se describe como incorporación de toda diferenciación en la unidad indiferente atribuida a Ein Sof o a Keter, la nada divina; el pasaje es de Wolfson, no de Kripal.
Microcosmos (el hombre-mundo) — El epígrafe nietzscheano del capítulo 6 dice que somos Dios en miniatura, y el cuerpo humano es también el cuerpo de Dios en la lectura cabalística de Wolfson.
Secreto (lo que se jura no fijar por escrito) — El secreto es función necesaria de lo imposible y no estratagema social; el libro se dice susurrado; y *mystical* se defiende por traducir literalmente el griego para secreto.
Philosophia perennis (filosofía perenne) — Wolfson insiste en una unidad transhistórica entre las religiones en su punto más radical; Nietzsche, en un fondo esotérico compartido por los sistemas de creencia.
Iniciación (recepción por grados / metamorfosis del ser) — Hurston describe iniciaciones de hoodoo en Nueva Orleans; van Binsbergen escribe como adivino sangoma iniciado; Altizer relata una iniciación espectral en Hyde Park.
Magia Natural — Satán es «natural Magician» según Thomas Browne citado por Eire, y la magia real se define como correspondencia entre estado mental y suceso material, no como tecnología mal percibida.
Mónada (el glifo que condensa el esquema entero) — Husserl alude en sus conversaciones a la unidad o pluralidad monádica de la subjetividad trascendental, junto con la memoria colectiva y la telepatía.