Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred
Se presenta como un intento de ensanchar lo pensable en el estudio de las religiones, no de explicar el fenómeno: «I am not asking us to know more. I am asking us to imagine more» «Kripal — Authors of the Impossible (2010) · p. 36». Su autor se declara historiador de las religiones y no científico ni filósofo «Kripal — Authors of the Impossible (2010) · p. 17», y declina la explicación desde la primera página del capítulo de apertura «Kripal — Authors of the Impossible (2010) · p. 10».
Su aporte al corpus es un vocabulario, no una tesis sobre los objetos: lo psíquico y lo paranormal como lo sagrado en tránsito entre registros «Kripal — Authors of the Impossible (2010) · p. 18», el fenómeno como *meaning event* «Kripal — Authors of the Impossible (2010) · p. 37», la *occulture* tomada de Partridge «Kripal — Authors of the Impossible (2010) · p. 40» y la cadena filtro–permiso–traducción «Kripal — Authors of the Impossible (2010) · p. 302». El libro se construye sobre cuatro autores —Myers, Fort, Vallee y Méheust— y declara que las conclusiones del último son también las suyas «Kripal — Authors of the Impossible (2010) · p. 237».
1029 afirmaciones · 2 fuentes · 1 atribución
Atribución
se consigna, jamás se afirma«Kripal — Authors of the Impossible (2010) · p. 2»
Cadena de la obra
el testimonio procesado, en esmeraldaAfirmaciones
1029 entradas — la voz de la obra, con su pasaje«Popular culture is our mysticism. The public realm is our esoteric realm. The paranormal is our secret in plain sight» — invierte el lugar donde se busca lo esotérico.
«Myers, Fort, Vallee, and Méheust are not part of the scholarly canon» — que define lo pensable e imaginable en el estudio profesional de la religión.
«the study of religion as a discipline, as a structure of thought» — se ha limitado a sí mismo en la medida en que siguió a la cultura occidental en este punto.
«I do not, of course, attribute any personal intention here. I am not accusing anyone of anything» — acota el alcance de ese diagnóstico.
«I have deep reservations about the objectivist epistemologies that control much of psychical research» — Añade que algunas ideas de Fort son sencillamente locas, «but, to his humorous credit, so did he».
«I am defining the psychical as the sacred in transit from a traditional religious register into a modern scientific one» — definición operativa, declarada como tal.
«I am defining the paranormal as the sacred in transit from the religious and scientific registers» — hacia un registro paracientífico o de «science mysticism».
«in the paranormal, both the faith of religion and the reason of science drop away» — Aparece en el horizonte del pensamiento una suerte de superimaginación.
«the paranormal becomes a living story or, better, a mythology» — el término de llegada es mitología, no explicación.
«I am not asking us to know more. I am asking us to imagine more» — la fórmula del programa.
«paranormal phenomena are semiotic or hermeneutical phenomena in the sense that they signal» — simbolizan o hablan a través de una brecha entre el yo socializado y un campo inconsciente o superconsciente.
«They are not simply physical events. They are also meaning events» — su tesis firmada y repetida.
«as a professional scholar of religion, I consider it my job not to believe» — Declara que se toma ese compromiso profesional muy en serio.
«I am as baffled as anyone by this material, and I offer no rational or religious certainties here» — solo corazonadas intuitivas y direcciones posibles.
«I offer my hermeneutical model of the paranormal only as a contribution» — nunca como solución final ni completa.
«I want a new game» — dicho de las reglas de juego materialistas vigentes.
«they are authors of the (im)possible. Finally, in the third and deepest sense» — los tres sentidos del título: escriben sobre lo imposible, lo autorizan al escribirlo, y sus prácticas de escritura son parientes de lo paranormal.
«They thus both author and author-ize it» — el segundo de esos sentidos, en su juego de palabras.
«Realization is finally the insight that we are being written» — y «Authorization is the decision to do something about it»: el cierre metodológico.
«An author of the impossible is someone who knows that the Human is Two and One» — la definición final del tipo que el libro construye.
«I have no idea how a table floats off the floor» — ni cómo aparecen ovnis oníricos en pantallas de radar, paran coches y queman gente: abstención declarada en la última página.
«I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher, however. I am a historian of religions» — su declaración de oficio.
«what I am attempting» — tiene poco que ver con los protocolos y la estadística del laboratorio parapsicológico y todo con los métodos textuales, narrativos y etnográficos de los primeros investigadores psíquicos.
«There is radical Sameness. And there is radical Difference» — Ninguna puede sacrificarse a la otra: la dialéctica conciencia/cultura que sostiene su universalismo y su relativismo a la vez.
«for both intellectual and mystical reasons» — así declara su incapacidad para trazar distinciones netas entre lo real, lo religioso y lo ficcional.
«because I myself experienced something similar, if far less dramatic, many years ago» — declara experiencia propia a propósito de la gnosis de Philip K. Dick.
«more true to my own gnostic imagination» — se declara gnóstico en el sentido de método, no de doctrina.
«Mind is not the brain, but Mind is indeed filtered through the brain» — «We are both. The Human is Two»: la tesis del filtro.
«the metaphor of 'translation.' What is permitted to cross the threshold, after all, is not only filtered» — añade *translation* a la corrección terminológica de Edward F. Kelly, que prefería *permission* a *transmission*.
«before something better» — declara que estaría contento de descartar la tesis del filtro por otra mejor: la propone sin *creerla*.
«The last forty years of theory have in many ways been very much about a quick retreat» — de todo encuentro real con lo sagrado en tanto sagrado.
«The sacred is a critical category that can seldom be fit into the categories of faith and piety» — ofende por igual a la epistemología de la fe y a la de la razón: es una tercera cosa, como lo paranormal.
«Either way, it seems to me, the study of religion wins, and wins big» — la apuesta bilateral: si la neurociencia reduce todo esto, tanto mejor; si no puede, se está ante algo grande.
«what we have are some very fine left-brain methods, but no accepted and significantly developed right-brain methods» — el diagnóstico de método del que sale su llamada.
«I am not proposing that we surrender the powers of reason and critical theory. I am not antireason or antiscience» — la cautela con que enmarca todo lo anterior.
«We need both engines to fly» — la justificación de que ciencia y hermenéutica coexistan.
«Serjeant Cox» — a quien adjudica, probablemente, la acuñación de «Psychic Force» en carta de 1871 a William Crookes.
«the terms psychic and psychical possess elite intellectual roots and were born in the professional academy» — corrige la genealogía popular del vocabulario.
«no doubt after the then cutting-edge technology of the telegraph» — así explica que Myers acuñara *telepathy* en 1882.
«on the analogy of the abnormal» — así explica *supernormal*, acuñado por Myers en 1885.
«The seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonist Henry More appears to have coined the category» — «the imaginall», en 1642, en su *Psychodia Platonica*: le quita a Corbin la invención de lo imaginal y se la adjudica a More, con Myers como primer teórico consistente en el estudio de la religión.
«often hidden, rejected and oppositional beliefs and practices associated with esotericism» — la definición de *occulture* que toma de Christopher Partridge.
«Occulture, then, represents a dialectic» — «a confluence of secularization and sacralization», no una victoria final de ninguno de los dos procesos.
«a historiography called» — *psychofolklore*: los teóricos del mesmerismo leyendo el pasado religioso a la luz de la investigación psíquica.
«Psychical Research» — tuvo entrada de tres páginas, firmada por James Leuba, en la *Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics* de Hastings, y no la tiene en la *Encyclopedia of Religion* de Eliade.
«the human personality for Frederic Myers is an evolving story written into and read out of the cosmos» — dentro de lo que Myers llamó «progressive immortality».
«they did not equate rationalism with materialism» — dicho de Myers y su círculo: es la bisagra de toda la reconstrucción.
«the subliminal; (2) the supernormal; (3) the telepathic» — y (4) *the imaginal*: los cuatro estados-palabra de *Human Personality*.
«even the most extraordinary events are located along a spectrum that stretches back to the most ordinary ones» — el monismo gradualista que adjudica a Myers.
«Charles Fort discovers the paranormal in the normal» — la fórmula con que lo distingue de Myers.
«Fort's radical monism expresses a world in which it is not so much that nothing is supernatural» — sino que todo lo es.
«the evil of specialization» — el reproche de Fort, que Kripal glosa: la especialización impide ver las conexiones ocultas entre dominios.
«The normal of Myers's supernormal has dropped away» — dicho del léxico del *super-* de Fort: super-bat, super-biology, Super-Sargasso Sea, super-mind.
«In short, the paranormal is writing, or projecting, us» — la lectura que hace del manuscrito perdido *X* de Fort, resumido por Dreiser.
«strange orthogenetic gods» — los que Fort decía que lo guiaban, tras sintetizar a Spencer y a Haeckel.
«the Old Dominant of Religion» — primero de los tres Dominantes de Fort; el presente es el de la Ciencia materialista.
«Everything is one thing» — el cierre del argumento fortiano del fraude que es hecho.
«a pioneering computer scientist and venture capitalist who purchases rare editions of Paracelsus» — Que escribe como un humanista de inclinación mística: así presenta a Vallee.
«Jacques Vallee dwells exactly where I have suggested the contemporary gnostic intellectual dwells» — Añade de inmediato: «These are my terms, not his».
«a kind of social control system, certainly not as a deposit of eternal truths» — así resume la desconfianza de Vallee hacia la religión institucional.
«For Vallee, Western thought, truly serious thought beyond the surfaces of rationalism and religion, is fundamentally an esoteric project» — la adjudicación más fuerte que le hace.
«Magonia» — el término que Vallee toma del arzobispo Agobardo de Lyon (779–840).
«they are no longer probably extraterrestrial, and they are almost certainly not literally true» — dicho de los ovnis en *Passport to Magonia*, que siguen siendo reales.
«UFO appearances may be part of a huge» — «control system», un termostato mitológico planetario que ajusta los sistemas de creencia de culturas enteras a lo largo de enormes lapsos.
«By psychic, Vallee does not mean» — «psychological», sino «the interactions between consciousness and physical reality».
«The universe is not a universe. It is not One. It is a multiverse» — así lee el punto de *Dimensions*, con Magonia como universo paralelo coexistente.
«Instead it appears to be inter-dimensional and to manipulate physical realities outside of our own space-time continuum» — la tesis interdimensional, frente a la de la visita extraterrestre.
«Vallee is not engaging the history of Western esotericism as a scholar of Western esotericism» — sino «as a Western esotericist»: la distinción de la que depende toda la lectura.
«the deepest of the group» — dicho de Steiner en el itinerario hermético de Hynek, que va de Max Heindel a Manly P. Hall y termina en la rama rosacruz de San José, que luego deja.
«Three forms of secret knowledge thus shape the thought and so the texts of Jacques Vallee» — la gnosis del futuro, la de la multidimensionalidad y la de la rosacruz.
«a heretic among heretics» — Vallee exiliado a la vez de los desacreditadores racionalistas y de los creyentes ufológicos.
«Science-fiction et soucoupes volantes» — primer libro de Méheust, de 1978, subtitulado *Une réalité mythico-physique*.
«Roue fulgurante» — la novela de Jean de la Hire hallada en un desván en 1974, fechada en 1908: casi cuarenta años antes de Kenneth Arnold y de los Hill.
«mystical event» — la proporción comparativa de Méheust: suceso místico es a hagiografía lo que el fenómeno ovni es a la ciencia ficción.
«Méheust refuses to reduce consciousness to culture» — A la vez muestra que la conciencia debe expresarse a través de la cultura.
«the unnameable thing» — *la chose innommable*: el ovni manifiesta propiedades intencionales y frustra toda explicación psicológica y sociológica.
«a public face involving physical matter and causality» — Una cara esotérica, *une face ésotérique*, de sentido e información: la doble faz de lo real.
«Not only is the Human Two. So too is the World» — la extensión de la tesis del filtro al mundo.
«technologized Hermes» — el ovni como retorno del arquetipo hermético reprimido, donde lo alto y lo bajo dejan de percibirse como contradictorios.
«Guardian of the threshold» — así reporta la lectura de Méheust del psicoanálisis freudiano: formación de compromiso que incorporó y domesticó el material magnético.
«the most gifted magnetic seer of the century» — dicho de Alexis Didier (1826–86).
«My own concern» — «is the ecology of mind», el programa presente de Méheust, tomado de Gregory Bateson.
«the paradox of a culturally-conditioned nature» — la fórmula que toma de Ernesto De Martino y su *Il mondo magico*.
«We have come full circle» — dicho de Beauregard, cuya tesis declara idéntica a la de Myers hace más de cien años.
«In essence, then, these are also my conclusions» — sobre el capítulo de Méheust: declara suya la posición que expone.
«Those are my conclusions» — lo repite al abrir la conclusión del libro.
«Eliade founded a certain intellectual lineage at the University of Chicago» — «a lineage in which I was trained», bajo su sucesora Wendy Doniger.
«At least he recognized the problem of the paranormal as something that will have to be central» — dicho de Ioan Couliano: funda en su diagnóstico, no en su modelo, cuya exactitud declara no saber.
«The present book can be read as one long commentary on that single line» — la línea de Dean Radin sobre que la teoría cuántica nada dice de sentido y propósito, y el psi crudo sí.
«Derrida was wrong about that» — objeción nombrada, tras citar su «There has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts».
«he figured out how to suppress psi and finally make it go away» — objeción de método a J. B. Rhine, dicha en boca de parapsicólogos contemporáneos.
«unfortunately relegates the mythical and mystical dimensions of the encounter experience» — reserva sobre Leslie Kean, cuyo rigor investigativo llama a la vez «a game-changer».
«the heresy of challenging a materialist worldview» — con Victoria Nelson: «I am issuing just such a challenge here».
«I will suggest no adequate explanation for this impossible possibility» — la abstención mayor, en la primera página del capítulo de apertura.
«The simple truth is that we simply don't know what is going on here» — Con las metodologías materialistas y los relativismos culturales absolutos vigentes, «we cannot know».
«I have focused on the why-questions of meaning and story and not on the how-questions» — de explicación y causa: abstención de método declarada.
«not to reach any final closure of meaning, much less to give the» — *correct* reading: así declara su relectura ufológica de Fátima, deliberadamente indecisa.
«I will not go into the details here, mostly because I don't understand them» — abstención declarada sobre la morfodinámica de Couliano.
«Neither Mom nor Dad has the slightest idea what it was» — sobre su propio avistamiento de hacia 1969 en el norte de Nebraska, que no recuerda y solo conoce por el relato de su madre.
«I want to open with a story that could not have possibly happened, which happened.» — abre el libro con el caso de Adam, ex monje benedictino que despertó de golpe la madrugada del 5 de junio de 1968 y sintonizó la emisora californiana que transmitía el atentado contra Robert Kennedy.
«I know the central visionary well and can vouch for his complete integrity and honesty.» — así funda la credibilidad del caso: en el conocimiento personal del testigo, no en un protocolo.
«I have absolutely no doubt that this event happened to this individual as described below.» — afirma el hecho y deja aparte lo que significa, que es, dice, la razón por la que escribió el libro.
«Still, it is also true that Adam’s story remains a tricky one.» — reconoce que el caso admite lectura interna, de anomalía, y externa, de coincidencia.
«And what if paranormal experiences like Adam’s are a kind of signal from or refraction of this other dimension of time and space into the brain and its box?» — la formula en interrogante, no en tesis: la experiencia como refracción de otra dimensión del tiempo y el espacio en el cerebro.
«I begin with such questions not to pretend some knowledge that I do not possess (like the professional debunkers or the true believers), but to provoke and perform our almost total ignorance of such things and, more positively, to call us out of our rationalist denials and naïve assumptions into something more.» — declara que su función es actuar la ignorancia, no repararla, y que el desacreditador profesional y el creyente comparten la pretensión de saber.
«I am not after easy rational solutions, much less beliefs in this or that cultural mythology. I am after liberating confusions. I am after the Impossible.» — el programa enunciado en negativo doble: ni solución racional ni creencia.
«The literature of fantasy and the fantastic, especially in science fiction, is much in demand, but we still do not know its intimate relationship with the different occult traditions.» — plantea como hueco de investigación el parentesco entre literatura fantástica y tradiciones ocultas.
«Whereas such marvels are vociferously denied (or simply ignored) in the halls of academic respectability, they are enthusiastically embraced in contemporary fiction, film, and fantasy.» — el desequilibrio del que parte: se paga por el prodigio en la ficción y se lo niega en la academia.
«Jules Eisenbud came to the conclusion through his research on the psychokinetic abilities of Ted Serios (who could mentally imprint detailed images on photographic film under carefully controlled conditions) that, “man has in fact within him vast untapped powers that hitherto have been accorded him only in the magic world of the primitive, in the secret fantasies of childhood, and in fairy tales and legend.”» — reporta la conclusión de Eisenbud sobre Serios y la alinea con los mitos del cómic de superhéroes.
«The British classicist and psychical researcher Frederic Myers was the exception to this rule, but even he was not much of an exception.» — sobre la ausencia de estos autores en el canon del estudio de la religión.
«But who reads James’s close friend and intimate collaborator on the other side of the ocean?» — la pregunta con que mide el olvido de Myers: a William James se lo lee en el campo, a su colaborador íntimo no.
«Research adopted the slightly longer adjective psychical as an unsatisfactory but workable descriptor for its own scientific pursuits.» — así fecha la adopción del término por la Society for Psychical Research, con la insatisfacción declarada por sus propios fundadores.
«An American branch was founded three years later, in 1885, with William James of Harvard University as one of its key founding figures and certainly the most eloquent and sophisticated proponent of “psychical research” on this side of the Atlantic.» — la rama americana de la S.P.R., tres años después de la fundación de Cambridge en el invierno de 1882.
«In order to counter such unwanted connotations (and the fraud that often accompanied their theatrical display), the terminology of psi was introduced by British psychologist Robert Thouless in 1942 as a neutral scientific term designed to replace the more loaded terms of the psychical, the paranormal, and the occult.» — la acuñación de *psi* leída como operación de neutralización léxica.
«J. B. Rhine took this domesticating and unifying process further and adopted parapsychology as the preferred term for the field.» — llama domesticación al paso de lo psíquico a la parapsicología de Duke.
«I have much admiration for the intellectual courage and pioneering spirit of parapsychologists and the numerous thinkers who have critically analyzed this data and drawn out its philosophical implications without regard for the very real professional costs and taboos that still surround the subject.» — la reserva positiva con que acompaña su objeción de método a la parapsicología.
«By the sacred, I mean what the German theologian and historian of religions Rudolf Otto meant, that is, a particular structure of human consciousness that corresponds to a palpable presence, energy, or power encountered in the environment.» — fija el tercer término del que dependen sus dos definiciones, y lo toma de Otto.
«Otto captured this sacred sixth sense, at once subject and object, in a famous Latin sound bite: the sacred is the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that is, the mystical (mysterium) as both fucking scary (tremendum) and utterly fascinating (fascinans).» — glosa la fórmula latina de Otto en registro deliberadamente coloquial, y subraya que es a la vez sujeto y objeto.
«Leuba’s startling words about a “dark opening” still apparently open, still seemingly possible in 1918, is a clear reminder that we have inherited a certain forgetting.» — de la entrada de Leuba en la enciclopedia de Hastings deriva su tesis del olvido disciplinar, no una tesis sobre el fenómeno.
«Aristotle opens his discussion of the subject with the remark that it is difficult either to ignore the evidence or to believe it.» — la ambivalencia que rastrea desde la antigüedad, aquí sobre los sueños proféticos en Aristóteles.
«Dodds thanked Graf for his book, but then immediately added: “But I have no interest anymore in Greek religion. I am only interested in paranormal phenomena.”» — reporta el desplazamiento tardío de E. R. Dodds, helenista, hacia la investigación psíquica.
«In his Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Immanuel Kant grappled, sarcastically but deeply, with Emanuel Swedenborg’s seeming noumenal powers, which included one famous scene on June 19, 1759, when the spirit-seer saw a Stockholm fire, the advance of which he accurately described to a garden party in Göteborg, Sweden, as the fire raged three hundred miles away, stopping just three doors down from his own home.» — el caso de Kant ante Swedenborg, consignado con las dos caras que Kripal le atribuye: sarcasmo y seriedad.
«A bit later, Hegel wrote appreciatively on animal magnetism, extrasensory perception, and a kind of World Soul, all key components of his astonishing vision of a kind of cosmic Mind or absolute Spirit (Geist) coming into fuller and fuller consciousness through history, culture, religion, philosophy, and, now, Hegel and his deep readers.» — adjudica a Hegel el magnetismo animal como componente, no como curiosidad marginal.
«Similarly, Schopenhauer engaged reports of the incredible powers of intention and mind-over-matter to fashion his own philosophy of Will.» — lo mismo con Schopenhauer, que según Kripal experimentó él mismo la precognición.
«What is in fact illusory are our common everyday perceptions, which can only show us the real as it is mediated to us through our senses and mental categories.» — así resume la inversión de Schopenhauer, siguiendo a Kant: no es ilusoria la clarividencia, sino la percepción ordinaria.
«Since then he has written five especially provocative books, all of which orbit around the questions posed by that floating, tapping table and his intuitive suspicion that it was the three of them who controlled the table with still unknown, unconscious, unacknowledged powers.» — sobre Stephen E. Braude, filósofo analítico, y la sesión improvisada de la que salió su obra.
«The scholarly result? Nothing, until he got tenure» — la observación con que Kripal mide el costo profesional del tema, a propósito de Braude.
«and to ask whether “a transcendental region of human faculty,” a “region X,” might not exist.» — así presenta la pregunta que Andrew Lang abre en *The Making of Religion* (1899).
«It was this kind of field research and comparative collecting that led him finally to conclude that magical beliefs are not groundless superstitious or gross examples of bad thinking left over from a prescientific age, which is exactly what his most prestigious peers thought, but rather, that “[m]an may have faculties which savages recognize, and which physical science does not recognize. Man may be surrounded by agencies which savages exaggerate, and which science disregards altogether, and these faculties and agencies may point to an element of truth which is often cast aside as a survival of superstition.”» — la conclusión de Lang, que Kripal contrapone a la de sus pares más prestigiosos.
«In Lang’s mind, in other words, “certain obscure facts are, or may be, at the bottom of many folklore beliefs.”» — la fórmula que resume para él la posición de Lang: hechos oscuros al fondo del folklore.
«A half century later, the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino went so far as to claim that the data of ethnography and folklore, and now of psychical research, strongly suggest “the paradox of a culturally-conditioned nature, and all its embarrassing implications.”» — la fórmula de De Martino que Kripal retoma como suya al cerrar el capítulo de Méheust.
«More impressively still, Michael Winkelman demonstrated a striking “correspondence between parapsychological research findings and anthropological reports of magical phenomena” toward the thesis that real-life spontaneous magical experiences have their deepest (that is, ontological) basis not in social processes or logical mistakes (which, again, is what has traditionally been argued), but in extreme emotional states, largely unconscious primary process thinking, and “innate universal human potentials closely associated with psi abilities.”» — reporta el trabajo de Winkelman con la base ontológica declarada, contra la explicación social o lógica.
«In other words, magical powers are real.» — así traduce Kripal la tesis de Winkelman, en una línea sola y sin acotarla en el sitio.
«Pierre Janet, the pioneering French psychologist whose work deeply influenced a young Sigmund Freud, discovered, in the words of historian Alex Owen, “what magicians have traditionally claimed—that it is possible to hypnotize a subject from a distance.”» — el hallazgo de Janet dicho con la formulación de Alex Owen.
«He also realized, correctly, that hypnotism replicated the earlier phenomena of Mesmerism (which in fact were much more robust and impressive), and he wrote his minor thesis on Bacon and the alchemists.» — de Janet, y con la valoración de Kripal metida entre paréntesis: los fenómenos mesméricos eran más robustos que los hipnóticos.
«Indeed, he even forged his category of synchronicity out of his correspondence with one of his patients, the pioneering quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli.» — el origen que adjudica a la sincronicidad de Jung.
«In the words of George Gamow, the “Pauli Effect” boiled down to the strange fact that an “apparatus would fall, break, shatter or burn when he merely walked into a laboratory.”» — el efecto Pauli reportado por Gamow, que Kripal consigna como parte del ambiente del que sale la sincronicidad.
«Although originally dismissive, Freud became convinced that there was a kernel of truth in such occult phenomena.» — reconstruye el giro de Freud, que reconoció en público en un ensayo de 1925 y escribió seis sobre transferencia de pensamiento.
«Freud’s colleague and biographer Ernest Jones was concerned that such a development would end in “the essential claim of the occultists,” namely, “that mental processes can be independent of the human body.”» — la objeción de Jones, consignada con su motivo.
«Freud could finally not bring himself to allow such dangerous things into public debate.» — el saldo que atribuye a Freud: convicción privada, silencio público.
«A bit later, Edith Turner wrote of her encounter with spirits and experience of psychical abilities, and Margaret Mead wrote appreciatively on psychical matters, encouraging her intellectual peers to study even the most extraordinary examples of this literature, including the data emerging from the then still secret “remote viewing” or psychical espionage programs of the U.S. military.» — sigue la serie antropológica hasta Turner y Mead, con el dato de que Mead recomendaba leer la literatura del espionaje psíquico.
«It took a long professional quest into the history of psychical research, cold war remote viewing, and quantum physics in order to arrive at a tentative, and now public, thesis about the reality of what Mayer calls, with a phrase that can only be called a gross understatement, “extraordinary knowing.”» — sobre la psicoanalista Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer y el término con que nombró el fenómeno.
«series of popular panels on anomalous phenomena in the analytic session for the annual meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association—the return, no doubt, of Freud’s repressed insights into the mystical and telepathic nature of profound analytic empathy.» — lee los paneles que Mayer organizó con Carol Gilligan como retorno de lo reprimido por el propio Freud.
«The latter’s The Spiritual in Art, for example, is clearly indebted to the “Thought Forms” of Theosophy and the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner.» — adjudica a Kandinsky deuda teosófica declarada, en la serie que abre con Mondrian.
«Hence Bruce Mills has recently written about the mesmeric and magnetic currents that played such an important role in the creation of a distinctly American literature in the middle of the nineteenth century, and Alex Owen has written about “the symbiotic relationship among vitalism, occultism, and advanced literary ideas”» — apoya en Mills y en Owen la tesis de que la corriente magnética está en la formación de literaturas enteras.
«whose magical name was Demon Est Deus Inversus or “The Devil is God in Reverse” (they just called him “Demon”), might have been an extreme case, but he was hardly alone when he confessed to John O’Leary in a letter that the “mystical life is the centre of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”» — sobre W. B. Yeats: caso extremo, dice, pero no aislado.
«today those ghostly sensibilities are continuously ridiculed as naive and self-serving, as if real scholarship can only proceed by denying the reality of that which it claims to study.» — el reproche al gremio, dicho como condición que la erudición se autoimpone.
«And so that ancient “taboo against contact with supernatural forces are with us still,” parapsychologist George Hansen observes with respect to the academy, “though in veiled form.”» — toma de Hansen el diagnóstico del tabú académico, con la grafía del libro.
«This should not surprise us, Hansen goes on to suggest, for although taboos have always been violated “in order to release magical power,” there is a real cost for such transgressive acts.» — el costo como parte del mismo mecanismo, no como accidente.
«Anthropologically speaking, however, “releasing magical power” is very much akin to “being culturally creative,” so it is perhaps not too surprising to find, once again, some of the strongest occult interests in a founding thinker, which are then later denied, actively demonized, or just politely overlooked.» — el patrón que dice encontrar una y otra vez en los fundadores de disciplina.
«As a way of concluding the essay, Eliade takes the historicists to task for claiming faithfulness to the historical documents, until of course these documents violate their own positivistic and materialistic worldviews.» — reporta la objeción de Eliade a los historicistas.
«he would later “camouflage” them in his literary writings, and particularly in the novella The Secret of Doctor Honigberger, which he explicitly identifies as a species of littérature fantastique.» — así explica el paso de Eliade a la ficción: lo que no cabía en prosa científica.
«Eliade was not always so forthcoming about the experiential core of his writing, however.» — la reserva con que acota lo anterior: la franqueza de Eliade fue tardía y parcial.
«In each scholarly case, Eliade pointed out, the contemporary scholarship took up historical phenomena judged to be pure nonsense, if not veritable black magic, and “abundantly proved their theoretical coherence and their great psychological interest.”» — reporta el argumento de Eliade sobre Scholem, Corbin y Faivre: lo tenido por sinsentido resultó coherente al estudiarse.
«I am certainly trying to offer his question a series of possible answers in the pages that follow.» — sitúa su propio libro como respuesta a la pregunta que Eliade dejó abierta sobre ciencia ficción y ocultismo.
«Nowhere is this more apparent and obvious than in Eliade’s fellow Romanian and Chicago colleague Ioan Couliano.» — el relevo de la línea: de Eliade a Couliano.
«Couliano was clearly moving toward a fusion of quantum physics and the history of religions before he was murdered in a toilet stall one sad spring day in 1991.» — el proyecto que Kripal le atribuye a Couliano y su interrupción violenta.
«Couliano’s lifelong interest in magical and gnostic matters was reflected in a rich personal occult life.» — adjudica a Couliano práctica, no solo estudio.
«Couliano invokes the same Flatland to describe how the history of religions can be imagined as “a sequential interaction of multiple systems of thought.”» — la analogía de *Flatland* de Edwin Abbot en la lectura de Couliano, tal como Kripal la expone.
«They interact with history at every moment, and the chronological sequence they form is a sort of sequential puzzle, like the four prongs of the fork viewed from the perspective of the Flatlander.» — la imagen del tenedor visto por el habitante del plano: la secuencia histórica como corte de algo que no es secuencial.
«He shattered our little box. He wrote “off the page,” outside our Flatland.» — dicho de Couliano; *off the page* es también el subtítulo de la introducción del libro.
«any ordinary history of religions that relies exclusively on textual-critical, social-scientific, or political analyses (from Foucauldian constructionism and postcolonial theory to philology and materialist cognitive science) is woefully inadequate to the task of understanding and interpreting the paranormal,» — el veredicto de método sobre su propia disciplina, con la lista de enfoques nombrada.
«Paranormal phenomena, after all, dramatically violate those firm epistemological boundaries that, since Descartes, have increasingly divided up our university departments (and our social reality) into things pertaining to matter and objective reality (the sciences) and things pertaining to human experience and subjective reality (the humanities).» — sitúa el reparto ciencias/humanidades como herencia cartesiana, y el fenómeno como lo que la incumple.
«Paranormal phenomena, however, bring the subjective component back in, and with a vengeance—the return of the repressed in all its fury.» — nombra el retorno con vocabulario freudiano y sin suavizarlo.
«Mack concluded what many thoughtful observers of such ufological matters have concluded, namely, that, taken alone, the framework of modern science is simply insufficient here.» — reporta la posición de John E. Mack sobre las abducciones.
«Rather, “multidisciplinary studies combing physics with comparative religion and spirituality are needed to further consider how the interdimensional bridging properties of the abduction phenomenon might work.”» — la propuesta de Mack citada, con la grafía *combing* del libro.
«Combining physics and comparative religion, of course, is exactly what Ioan Couliano attempted in his critique of the Flatland of the field.» — enlaza la propuesta de Mack con el intento de Couliano.
«Accordingly, to approach such phenomena as subjective things, as “anecdotes” or “coincidences,” as interesting internal states that have no real connection to the external physical world of objects and events is to seriously misunderstand them.» — la mitad subjetivista del error doble que denuncia.
«Similarly, however, to approach such phenomena as objective, quantifiable, replicable things “out there” is inevitably to miss them, or to just barely see them.» — la otra mitad: el objetivismo del laboratorio los pierde igual.
«Obviously, though, when the object becomes a subject and brain matter begins to express meaning, we are no longer in the realm of the natural sciences.» — el punto donde, dice, el fenómeno sale de la jurisdicción de la ciencia natural.
«My goal in the pages that follow is not to demean or deride the sciences (quite the contrary, I will end with them), nor to arrive at some false sense of rational or religious certainty—I possess neither—but to expand the imaginative possibilities of contemporary theory through a certain authorization of the Impossible.» — declara el objetivo con sus dos exclusiones y anticipa que cerrará el libro con las ciencias.
«In the first and simplest sense, I intend to state the obvious, namely, that these are authors who write about seemingly impossible things: think telepathy, teleportation, precognition, and UFOs.» — el primero de los tres sentidos del título, el más llano.
«Although paranormal phenomena certainly involve material processes, they are finally organized around signs and meaning.» — concede el proceso material y sitúa el orden en el signo.
«If we are being written, in just what kind of story do we find ourselves? My own answer to this question is crystallized in a single phrase: the fantastic narrative of Western occulture.» — la fórmula que da nombre a su modelo, planteada como respuesta a una pregunta narrativa.
«I adopt the notion of a fantastic narrative from the Bulgarian literary critic Tzvetan Todorov. My specific employment of the category of occulture draws its inspiration from the work of the American historian of British occultism Alex Owen, the British historian of contemporary alternative religion Christopher Partridge, and the American literary critic and writer Victoria Nelson.» — declara sus cuatro préstamos teóricos con nombre y disciplina.
«Occultism, from the Latin occultus for “hidden” or “secret,” is a broad umbrella term that scholars use to discuss a wide variety of ideas, beliefs, and practices» — trata el ocultismo como término paraguas de académico, no como identidad de sus practicantes.
«I do not “believe” all the tales I will tell you in the pages that follow, however convinced I may sound in this or that passage.» — la advertencia sobre su propio tono, puesta por delante del material.
«What I am trying to do is recreate for the reader what the field researcher calls “unbounded paranormal conditions,” that is, a place in space and time, in this case a text recreated and realized in your mind, where—to speak very precisely now—really, really weird shit happens.» — declara que el objeto del libro es producir una condición de lectura, no probar hechos.
«Owen points out that this otherwise confusing diversity is underpinned and organized by a single overarching idea, namely, “that reality as we are taught to understand it accounts for only a fraction of the ultimate reality which lies just beyond our immediate senses.”» — toma de Alex Owen la unidad que ordena la diversidad de lo oculto.
«It is precisely this doubleness, at once rational and mystical, logical and mythical, that defines the occult for Owen.» — el ocultismo moderno definido por su doblez, no por su irracionalidad.
«In her own words: “it is the crucial alignment of rational consciousness with the apparently irrational world of the myth-creating unconscious that produces the powerful experience of the occult ‘real.’”» — la formulación de Owen citada entera, que Kripal acerca luego a la vacilación de Todorov.
«What we have, then, is essentially “a shift in register from belief to imagination,” which in turn played a major role in initiating the secularizing processes that created modern culture.» — lee el ocultismo moderno como pieza de la secularización, no como reacción contra ella.
«The point here is a quite radical one, namely, that, far from being an irrational escape or a collection of nonsensical superstitions, the occult “was itself intrinsic to the making of the modern at the turn of the century.”» — el punto que declara radical y que toma de Owen.
«Partridge makes a similar argument with respect to the final decades of the twentieth century, that is, the decades just behind us now.» — extiende a Partridge y al siglo XX tardío lo que Owen sostuvo del cambio de siglo anterior.
«Such a dialectical model, I should stress, is both universalistic and relativistic at the same time.» — declara que su modelo no elige entre universalismo y relativismo.
«In this model, the human being can be thought of as a kind of living musical instrument born into the world capable of playing any tune, any language, any belief system.» — la imagen del instrumento vivo: la capacidad es universal.
«Each culture, each historical period, each religious system, each family, however, will privilege only certain keys and will downplay, deny, or simply ignore others.» — el otro lado de la imagen: cada cultura selecciona unas teclas y desatiende las demás.
«Occulture, then, both conceals and reveals.» — la fórmula con que fija el doble movimiento del término.
«The provocative work of Owen and Partridge can be fruitfully read alongside Victoria Nelson’s The Secret Life of Puppets, a beautiful study of the Neoplatonic, gnostic, or Hermetic “soul” of Western culture as temporarily repressed and demonized.» — suma a Nelson y con ella la tesis del alma neoplatónica reprimida y demonizada.
«The pendulum has been swinging right, toward Aristotle, for about three hundred years now.» — la figura del péndulo con que describe trescientos años de cientificismo aristotélico.
«It has now reached its rationalist zenith and is beginning to swing back left, toward Plato.» — el diagnóstico de retorno platónico, dicho como movimiento en curso.
«Our conventional secular bias whispers to us that the ideas we see naively articulated on the cinema screen (ideas as blasphemous to secular humanists as they are to the religious orthodox), if they are to be taken seriously at all, signal a backward slide into religious oppression and intolerance.» — nombra el prejuicio que quiere desactivar, y anota que esas ideas ofenden por igual a laicos y a ortodoxos.
«gnosis arises out of the “sub-Zeitgeist” of science fiction, superhero comic books, fantasy, and especially film.» — sigue a Nelson en el sitio donde localiza la gnosis contemporánea; la fuente parte con guion la palabra que precede.
«This material is fundamentally gnostic or, better, Hermetic for Nelson, which is to say that it is very much about a cosmic form of consciousness that participates in the material world but also transcends and overflows that world.» — precisa el término que prefiere para Nelson: hermético antes que gnóstico.
«Whether disturbing or touching, demonic or divine, by consuming such “art forms of the fantastic,” Nelson suggests, “we as nonbelievers allow ourselves, unconsciously, to believe.”» — el mecanismo que toma de Nelson: la ficción autoriza la creencia que la conciencia laica no admitiría.
«Dick explicitly identified this cosmic consciousness with the teachings of early Christian gnosticism and wrote eight thousand pages of interpretation in his private journals—known to his fans as the Exegesis—in order to explain it to himself.» — sobre Philip K. Dick y la *Exegesis*, con la cifra que da el libro.
«Dick’s biographer, Lawrence Sutin, is very clear that Dick’s later work flowed out of the author’s metaphysical encounters with this superbeing or Sci-Fi Spirit.» — apoya en el biógrafo la continuidad entre la experiencia de 1974 y la obra posterior de Dick.
«He also called this entity Zebra, for its ability to hide in the world, and Brahman, for its omnipresence and mystical nature.» — los otros nombres que Dick dio a Valis, según Kripal.
«For all the subsequent confusion he sowed, Phil never really doubted that the visions and auditions of February–March 1974 (2-3-74) and after had fundamentally changed his life.» — separa el efecto, que no duda, de la realidad del suceso.
«Whether or not they were real was another question.» — la acotación inmediata: el cambio de vida no decide la ontología.
«Which is all to say that Phil Dick wrote out of that fundamental hesitation, that both-and, that real-unreal place that is the surest mark of the fantastic.» — sitúa a Dick en la vacilación que define el género, no en la creencia.
«It would be easy, of course, to assert that a sci-fi author like Dick is not “really” religious, that he is pretending a revelation that he does not in fact possess, that his vast Exegesis was the result of temporal lobe epilepsy and a subsequent paranoia and hypergraphia.» — enuncia la lectura reductora antes de rechazarla por poco histórica, no por falsa.
«altogether more historical, though, to admit that what we now call “religion” is closer to what we now call “fiction” than anyone is willing to admit, that living mythology has always followed along the tracks of whatever science was available at the time, and that there are no good intellectual reasons (as opposed to ideological or religious ones) to distinguish whatever was speaking through Dick’s gnostic systems from whatever was speaking through the systems of the early Christian and Jewish gnostic authors.» — la equiparación entre Dick y los gnósticos antiguos, con el motivo declarado: no hay razón intelectual para separarlos.
«Hence Nelson’s precise (and, in my mind, correct) invocation of the Platonic realm to describe Dick’s Valis, “a meta-organism identical in all its features to Plotinus’s World Soul.”» — suscribe la lectura de Nelson que empareja Valis con el Alma del Mundo de Plotino.
«With Tzvetan Todorov, moreover, I want to suggest that it is precisely through this experiential irruption and this subsequent inability to decide what is real and what is fictional within a text (or a life) that the fantastic as the Impossible sparks and inspires.» — con Todorov, hace de la indecisión el motor y no el defecto.
«Indeed, Todorov defines the fantastic as “a break in the acknowledged order, an irruption of the inadmissible within the changeless everyday legality.”» — la definición de Todorov citada tal como la usa.
«Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous.» — el corolario de Todorov: decidir expulsa del género.
«It is the reader’s hesitation, then, between a natural, reductive, or fictive reading and a supernatural, occult, or realist reading that constitutes the first and most important condition of the fantastic.» — traslada la condición del texto al lector, que es donde su libro quiere operar.
«The American horror and science-fiction writer Stephen King has written about his occult understanding of the creative writing process as an archaeological event through which one discovers and digs up a preexisting story, which he compares to a dinosaur skeleton buried in the ground.» — usa a King como caso contemporáneo de la escritura entendida como desenterramiento, no como invención.
«Similarly, Myers thought that certain forms of knowledge—mathematical, geometric, and poetic knowledge in particular—preexist their human discovery in this other realm, and that such knowledge can be “brought down” into the world through the birth of a particularly gifted soul or genius.» — la anamnesis platónica en la lectura que Kripal hace de Myers.
«These are impossible convictions. But precisely as such, they witness admirably to what I have called a hermeneutical model of the paranormal, that is, they witness to the power of words and texts to encode human memories» — así nombra lo que le interesa de esas convicciones: no si son ciertas, sino de qué son testimonio.
«It is difficult to overestimate what these convictions in the book-as-séance meant for Frederic Myers, or for anyone who attempts to read him deeply now, since, as we shall soon see, it is these textlike “chains of memory” that constitute one aspect of the personality and provide some of the most suggestive signs of its survival of bodily death.» — enlaza el libro como sesión con las cadenas de memoria que Myers hace prueba de supervivencia.
«Read and written thus, we are all occult novels composed by forces both entirely beyond us and well within us. As a One that is also Two, we author ourselves, and we are authored. We live in the possible, but we are lived by the Impossible.» — la fórmula del capítulo, con el juego autor/autorizado que sostiene todo el libro.
«Myers at least believed that, “[w]e are still in the first moment of man’s awakening intelligence; we are merely opening our eyes upon the universe around us.”» — la esperanza de Myers citada con su corchete editorial.
«Myers was quick to point out that the argument against the survival of the soul was barely a generation old when he was writing, and that the evidence for survival a mere decade.» — el argumento cronológico de Myers contra el materialismo, reportado sin arbitrar.
«He thus diplomatically confessed his admiration for Christ, but he also noted that Christ’s pioneering work, like the Norsemen’s discovery of America, grows more and more distant with each passing year and is, in the end, simply impossible to trace accurately in the waves of the ever-shifting sea of time.» — la metáfora del descubrimiento de América con que Myers desplaza la autoridad del cristianismo hacia el hallazgo nuevo.
«Science was conquering all, and it did not look good for the believer.» — así resume la crisis victoriana de la que sale la investigación psíquica.
«Emily Williams Kelly points out that Myers had been schooled in the mid-nineteenth-century liberalism of John Stuart Mill, who had argued that new knowledge is created by avoiding the extremes and taking truths from both sides of an honest argument.» — la formación de Myers según Emily Williams Kelly, que Kripal usa para explicar su vía media.
«It is precisely here, in this transit of the sacred out of a traditional religious register and into a new scientific one, in this bold claim of a genuinely new spiritual discovery that can only be had by disciplined research and study, that “the psychical” rises on the horizon of Western thought.» — sitúa el nacimiento de lo psíquico en el punto exacto de su definición de tránsito.
«Myers, in other words, belonged to a group of elite intellectuals who refused to be dogmatic about either their religion or their science.» — la posición doble del grupo de Cambridge, que es la bisagra de su reconstrucción.
«By a science of religion, then, they did not intend a method that would necessarily reduce the religion to the science (although it just might).» — el programa con su reserva puesta entre paréntesis por el propio Kripal.
«Both their Enlightenment hostility to traditional religion and their Romantic openness to religious experience are worth emphasizing here.» — insiste en que las dos herencias operan a la vez y no se cancelan.
«Such passages constitute more strong evidence that the modern popular distinction between the “religious” and the “spiritual” is by no means a recent invention, but in fact reaches at least as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century, that is, to the birth of modern science.» — fecha en el XIX la distinción que hoy se cree reciente.
«All five categories, after all, are eminently modern constructions witnessing to the same broad individuation processes of Western society whereby religion is increasingly “psychologized,” that is, identified as a psychological experience not bound by traditional religious authority.» — lo psíquico, lo oculto, lo paranormal, lo espiritual y lo místico como cinco construcciones modernas de un mismo proceso.
«These five terms, however, use different methods, focus on different sorts of reports, and so do different cultural work.» — la acotación que impide fundirlas: mismo origen, distinta función.
«Although Myers was certainly deeply influenced by the history of Western mysticism, particularly in its Platonic and Neoplatonic origins, and although he employs the terms “mystical” and “mysticism” in various ways throughout his corpus, his work is also best located in the latter streams of method and thought.» — ubica a Myers del lado de lo psíquico y lo paranormal pese a su formación platónica.
«Hence he can suggest that at least some mystical and occult events are both empirically real and entirely consistent with natural, though as yet unexplained, laws or patterns.» — la fórmula de Myers con su límite dentro: algunos sucesos, y leyes todavía no explicadas.
«Obviously, Myers and his colleagues were not out to celebrate the Virgin’s virtues, nor were they interested in privileging any other specific mythological expression of the cosmic influx, be it the Catholic’s or the Muslim’s.» — sobre Lourdes: lo que buscaban no era el símbolo mariano sino el influjo que suponen debajo.
«Nor, however, could it be bound by a scientistic perspective that conflated rationalism and materialism.» — el otro límite del mismo programa, y la distinción que Kripal dice haber aprendido de Hufford.
«Frederic Myers knew how to let go. Looking back on his life, he traced four major periods of conviction: Hellenism, Christianity, Agnosticism, and what he calls “the Final Faith.”» — las cuatro etapas con que ordena la biografía intelectual de Myers.
«This period ended, however, in 1864 when Myers visited Greece and realized that this was a vanished world.» — el fin del helenismo de Myers, fechado en el viaje.
«After his return to England, he converted to a particularly emotional form of Christianity through the ministrations of a young and beautiful woman named Josephine Butler, in whose particular form of sanctity (and Myers’s excessive response to it) many of Myers’s friends suspected more than piety.» — la conversión cristiana de Myers ligada a Josephine Butler, con la sospecha de sus amigos consignada.
«Gauld, for example, describes Butler’s erotically charged methods in some delicious detail, summarizing her ministry as “the spiritual seduction of promising young men.”» — apoya esa lectura en el biógrafo Alan Gauld.
«Indeed, Myers went so far as to call Darwin “a liberator of mankind.”» — la valoración de Darwin que Myers subraya en cursiva, según Kripal.
«After Darwin, Myers points out, we can no longer see sin as a defect in our relationship to some higher power. We must understand it now in the context of earlier evolutionary development. It deserves no punishment. It is simply an example of our ancient instincts reasserting themselves.» — la reinterpretación darwinista del pecado como desarrollo detenido.
«It was in this way that Myers finally took his revenge on his boyhood’s hated hell—by making it look silly and unnecessary in Darwin’s bright light.» — el motivo biográfico que Kripal atribuye a esa operación doctrinal.
«There was both a positive foundation and a constructive purpose to his final worldview, namely, the “principles of continuity and evolution.”» — los dos principios sobre los que se apoya la Fe Final de Myers.
«It is clear that he was already putting the text together in 1896, when he arranged for Richard Hodgson and Alice Johnson to complete it upon his death (HP 1:ix).» — la obra magna quedó encargada a Hodgson y a Johnson antes de morir su autor.
«In truth, Myers was hardly writing from scratch in these final years, since much of the text was culled from the first sixteen volumes of the Proceedings,» — *Human Personality* como compilación de los *Proceedings* y el *Journal* de la S.P.R., no como obra escrita de una vez.
«He was especially fond of the Romantic poets, like Wordsworth, since he considered their poetic access to the deeper realms of the human personality to be superior to that of “the saints and illuminés of various creeds.”» — Myers prefiere al poeta sobre el santo como vía de acceso a la personalidad.
«The truth is, as William James pointed out in a eulogy for his friend, Frederic Myers was, in the end, a Romantic thinker.» — el veredicto de James sobre Myers, que Kripal suscribe.
«I cannot stress this point enough, as it underlines and emboldens my own hermeneutical and literary approach to psychical phenomena.» — declara que su método sale de la formación humanista de Myers, no de la parapsicología.
«Nowhere is the textual nature of Myers’s soul more obvious than in the famous “cross-correspondences” affair that broke out a few years after his death. This involved different women on different continents (including Alice Fleming, the sister of Rudyard Kipling, who was living in India) receiving bits and pieces of classical poetry and personal allusions, allegedly from Myers, that his colleagues then had to piece together and interpret in order to establish their possible postmortem source.» — el caso de las correspondencias cruzadas expuesto con sus protagonistas y su mecánica interpretativa.
«Nowhere do we find a more mischievous suggestion that, yes indeed, for Frederic Myers and his colleagues the soul is a hermeneutical reality, that is, a multilayered text that must be interpreted to be seen at all.» — el alma como realidad hermenéutica: la fórmula que el libro extiende luego al ovni.
«In November of 1899, Myers was diagnosed with Bright’s disease. His heart would now enlarge and his arteries deteriorate. On the first day of 1901, he arrived in Rome, where a certain Dr. Baldwin injected him with an experimental serum» — la enfermedad y el tratamiento experimental con suero de glándulas de cabra; Myers murió el 17 de enero de 1901.
«Such pursuits finally taught him that there was no way to rescue his faith through historical studies.» — el estudio histórico-crítico de la religión como causa, no como consecuencia, de la pérdida de fe de Myers.
«Realizing that he could no longer in good conscience fulfill the terms of his appointment— which required him to affirm the doctrines of the Church of England—he resigned his fellowship and assistant tutorship at Trinity.» — la consecuencia institucional de esa pérdida.
«Sidgwick and Myers, like most of their academic contemporaries, were initially repulsed by the phenomenon of Spiritualism, which had spread in the 1850s and ’60s to England from the crude hinterlands of America, where it had first erupted in the spring of 1848 in Hydesville, New York.» — el rechazo inicial de los futuros fundadores de la S.P.R. al espiritismo, y la fecha de Hydesville.
«It was one thing when men like Mark Twain or Abraham Lincoln engaged Spiritualist beliefs and confessed to precognitive intuitions of their own or their loved one’s deaths.» — separa la creencia de figuras públicas del espectáculo de las sesiones de pago.
«Things were not entirely bleak, however. For one thing, as numerous historians, including Gauld himself, have pointed out, these outlandish belief systems often encoded the most progressive and socially liberal visions of the time, visions that would only find realization decades later when the broader culture in effect “caught up” with what the spirits had been saying for quite some time.» — el saldo político del espiritismo, dicho con Gauld y sin idealizarlo.
«This was no doubt a function of the fact that the majority of mediums and seers were spiritually empowered women.» — así explica el sesgo liberal del espiritismo en materia de género y sexualidad.
«The men may have controlled the conservative public churches, but the women were running the progressive private séances.» — el reparto de autoridad que atribuye al periodo.
«One of the most puzzling aspects of Spiritualism, and indeed of psychical and paranormal phenomena in general, is the confusing ways the seemingly genuine phenomena were unmistakably mixed up with the fraudulent shenanigans, and often in the very same individual—we are back to the fantastic and the key moment of hesitation before a marvel encountered as fiction or fact.» — la mezcla de fraude y fenómeno en una misma persona, leída como caso de la vacilación fantástica.
«Nor does it seem to be a simple matter of either-or, as the true believers and professional skeptics both have it.» — rechaza la disyuntiva que comparten, dice, el creyente y el escéptico.
«Rather, it is almost is if the real needs the fake to appear at all, as if the fact relies on the fiction to manifest itself, only to immediately hide itself again in the confusion of the fantastic hesitation that follows.» — la tesis del fraude necesario, enunciada en condicional y con la grafía *is if* del libro.
«It is as if the sacred is itself tricky.» — la formulación corta de lo anterior, atribuida a lo sagrado y no al medium.
«Even the well-documented medical placebo, after all, is a fake that has real effects.» — el ejemplo con que hace plausible esa mezcla.
«I am reminded here of something the contemporary physicist and psychical researcher Russell Targ once shared with me, namely, that he first became aware of the reality of telepathy when, as a young stage magician in New York, he realized that he was receiving genuine telepathic information from within the mentalist trick he was performing on stage.» — reporta el testimonio de Targ como caso del mismo mecanismo.
«The trick was a trick, but it was also, somehow, catalyzing the real deal.» — la conclusión de ese caso, dicha con su vacilación dentro.
«The eminent French physiologist Charles Richet, who participated in extensive experiments with Palladino, was convinced of her powers, cheating or no cheating.» — sobre Eusapia Palladino y la convicción de Richet, con el fraude reconocido.
«During one such experiment, he claimed to have held one of her phantom hands for a full twenty-five seconds.» — el episodio que Richet reclama, consignado como reclamo.
«It was impossible moments like these with what were called “physical mediums” that led Richet to coin a new word: ectoplasm (another paranormal term of elite intellectual origins).» — la acuñación de *ectoplasma* como otro término de origen académico, no popular.
«Home could do things like play accordions without the use of his hands, float out of and back through a second-story window (before three witnesses), and stretch his body as if it were rubber.» — lo que se atribuía a Daniel Dunglas Home, en la enumeración de Kripal.
«The Roman Catholic Church charged him with witchcraft.» — la respuesta institucional al caso Home.
«Gauld explains how “a big, hairy hand came down from the ceiling. Myers seized it in both of his; it diminished in size until it resembled a baby’s hand, and finally melted in his grasp.”» — la primera de las dos experiencias que, según Kripal, empujaron a Myers a investigar.
«The second event happened on May 9, 1874, when the Spiritualist preacher William Stainton Moses showed his notebooks to Myers and his close colleague Edmund Gurney.» — la segunda, fechada, con el nombre del espiritista.
«A few years later, William Barrett conceived the idea of gathering together a group of scientists, scholars, mediums, and Spiritualists in order to pursue experiments on psychical phenomena together. On January 6, 1882, he called the first meeting,» — el acto fundacional de la S.P.R. con su composición mixta declarada.
«Sidgwick was elected president. Six working committees were formed: on thought-reading, Mesmerism, the magnetic researches of Karl von Reichenbach (who, in 1845, had published an influential book on a blue cosmic vital force he called “od” or the “odic force”» — los seis comités de la sociedad, con la fuerza ódica de Reichenbach entre ellos.
«In a fascinating move, the society members decided that it made the most sense not to go to a far away country where such beliefs and experiences were allegedly still common, but to stay at home and anthropologize their own English countryside and cities.» — el gesto metodológico que Kripal subraya: hacer etnografía de la propia sociedad.
«The society’s Proceedings—for which major figures like James, Freud, Jung, Theodore Flournoy, and William McDougall all wrote—began publication in 1882.» — la nómina de firmantes de los *Proceedings*, que usa como prueba de la centralidad perdida.
«The society studied the famous founder of Theosophy, Madame Blavatsky, for example.» — el caso Blavatsky como ejemplo del trabajo crítico de la sociedad.
«Hodgson discovered double-sided drawers opening up into the Madame’s bedroom and obtained damning confessions from her servants.» — lo que Richard Hodgson encontró en la India por encargo de la S.P.R.
«In this same empirical spirit, the society also functioned as a court of professional skeptics for famous public cases.» — la S.P.R. como tribunal escéptico, no como capilla de creyentes.
«The book contained 702 documented cases, focusing on what they came to call “crisis apparitions,” that is, spontaneous hallucinations of a loved one who in fact dies within twelve hours on either side of the apparition.» — la definición operativa de aparición de crisis en *Phantasms of the Living*, con su ventana de doce horas.
«Pellew was known by many (including Hodgson) as a local historical figure who had been killed in an accident a few weeks before he began speaking through Mrs. Piper.» — el control más célebre de Leonora Piper, George Pellew, presentado con su identidad verificable en vida.
«In this life, he was an outspoken critic of psychical phenomena who, as Deborah Blum has it, “had made a half-joking promise” a few months before he was killed.» — el dato que hace del caso una prueba para los propios investigadores.
«Gauld points out that nearly every serious psychical researcher who came into contact with Mrs. Piper eventually became convinced that her powers were real, and many came to the impossible conclusion that spirits were indeed communicating to the living through her trances and automatic writing.» — el efecto de Piper sobre los investigadores, reportado con Gauld y sin suscribir la conclusión.
«Basically, he took the altered states of consciousness that he encountered in the field and transformed them into the altered words that he expressed in his writing practice. He took all those hundreds of séances and transformed them into the Book as Séance.» — la operación que atribuye a Myers: estados alterados convertidos en palabras alteradas.
«In the pages that follow, I would like to trace, both reasonably and speculatively, some of the pathways—psychological, biological, traumatic, fantastic, and erotic—through which Myers accomplished this unique linguistic alchemy.» — anuncia su propio plan y marca que parte del recorrido será especulativo.
«Not surprisingly, Breton loved Myers. Indeed, he affectionately referred to the elaborate architectonics of Myers’s psychological system as a “gothic psychiatry.”» — la fórmula de André Breton para el sistema de Myers.
«in a kind of eulogy for Myers he published in the Proceedings, James aligned his recently deceased friend with the “romantic” imagination against what he called the “classic-academic” mind, which wants only straight logical lines and neat categorical boxes.» — el contraste de James entre imaginación romántica y mente clásico-académica.
«Myers even suggested that subliminal material and various unusual automatisms might manifest in an especially clear way when the left, language-processing hemisphere of the brain is damaged or suppressed.» — la hipótesis hemisférica que Kripal atribuye a Myers y retoma en la conclusión del libro.
«This is also how Myers thought automatic writing worked: essentially, the right brain and its specific energies become dominant over the left brain and its waking self.» — la escritura automática explicada por dominancia del hemisferio derecho.
«In other words, for the psychical phenomena to manifest, it is usually necessary for the normal state of awareness, the social ego, to be temporarily suppressed (as in sleep, trance, or ecstasy) or traumatized (as in an accident or near-death experience).» — la condición que fija para la aparición del fenómeno, con su *usually* dentro.
«The situation, however, was more radical than Huxley’s chemical metaphor suggests, for in the light of the new physics and his own psychical research, Myers had already realized that fundamental terms like “material” and “immaterial” were beginning to waver.» — corrige a Huxley por corto: la distinción misma se disuelve.
«He observed that “it is no longer safe to assume any sharply-defined distinction of mind and matter,” and he predicted that “our notions of mind and matter must pass through many a phrase as yet unimagined.”» — la previsión de Myers citada con la grafía *phrase* del libro.
«Yet when we subject matter to certain drastic treatments, like CERN’s Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, then we can see quite clearly that matter is not material at all, that there is no such thing as materialism, and that the world is way, way weirder than we thought.» — el argumento contemporáneo con que sostiene esa disolución.
«He even intuited, before Einstein, that space may not be absolute: we must, he reasoned from his psychical data, “be ready to conceive other invisible environments or coexistences, and in a sense to sit loose to the conception of Space, regarded as an obstacle to communication or cognition”» — atribuye a Myers una intuición sobre el espacio anterior a Einstein, derivada de sus datos psíquicos.
«Accordingly, he did not argue from the special or completely anomalous case.» — el método de Myers, dicho por lo que evita.
«He argued from the common cases through the less common cases to the relatively rare cases and, finally, toward the horizon of the seemingly impossible ones, which now, precisely because of this gradation or spectrum method, began to look more than a little possible.» — el método de gradiente que hace verosímil lo extremo por continuidad con lo ordinario.
«If we could track how the self devolves or falls apart, he reasoned, we might also be able to figure out how it evolves» — la simetría entre lo patológico y lo genial que Myers explota.
«Myers argued that the human personality can be thought of as operating on two major functional levels, each of which is normally separated from the other by a “threshold” (limen).» — el modelo duplex con el umbral que da nombre a lo subliminal.
«But it would also be difficult not to misunderstand Myers’s particular distinction between the subliminal and supraliminal levels of the human personality.» — advierte que la distinción se malentiende con facilidad.
«The subliminal may at times look like a “chamber” or basement (and Myers was very clear that the subliminal is by no means always positive or inspirational), but it was a basement that Myers insisted could suddenly open out into a vast psychical sea.» — el sótano que se abre al mar: la diferencia con el inconsciente freudiano, con la reserva de Myers dentro.
«Again, Myers recognized the problem and explicitly rejected such a notion.» — dicho del dualismo rígido: Myers, según Kripal, lo vio venir y lo rechazó.
«I am using the expression not as a metaphysical statement implying an absolute dualism (which I also reject), but as a helpful heuristic device that captures» — declara que *the Human as Two* es herramienta heurística y no tesis metafísica.
«mostly because Myers’s metaphysical conception of the subliminal region of the psyche was far more robust and expansive than Freud’s instinctual personal unconscious.» — la razón que da para no confundir lo subliminal de Myers con el inconsciente freudiano.
«famous interpreter, William James, described as that “continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our minds plunge as into a mother-sea or reservoir.”» — acerca el Yo subliminal de Myers a la conciencia cósmica de James, con Bucke de fondo.
«If the chain of memories is too weak, that is, if these specific memories are forgotten, or if there is no binding meaning or stable story to hold them together, we may have a partial or dual or multiple personality operating, but not a coherent self.» — la cadena de memoria como condición de la unidad del yo en la lectura que hace de Myers.
«He even used, alas inconsistently, the capitalized Self, Personality, or Individuality to refer to the total Self, much in the way Jung later did to express the psychological state of the actualized individual, that is, the human person whose conscious ego is in tune with both the individual and collective unconscious.» — anota la inconsistencia terminológica de Myers y su parentesco con el Self de Jung.
«Myers uses such a prismatic effect to suggest that the light of consciousness is not singular at all, that consciousness can be broken up into various bands, much like white light can be separated into a rainbow of colors.» — la metáfora del prisma con que Myers pluraliza la conciencia.
«Most of the light spectrum, moreover, particularly that beyond the infrared (on the lower end) and ultraviolet (on the higher end), appears well outside the bands of everyday awareness.» — la parte del espectro que queda fuera de la percepción ordinaria.
«But this hardly means that such bands of consciousness are unreal.» — la inferencia que extrae de la metáfora: invisible no es irreal.
«Contrary to what many want to assume, pathological and mystical states are not mutually exclusive, and both are related to the suppression of the social ego.» — la coexistencia que se niega a resolver: lo patológico y lo místico salen del mismo mecanismo.
«The human being is certainly a material being almost seamlessly embedded in the physical world, but, in the words of Edward Kelly now, the human personality is also “rooted in a hidden, wider environment that underlies and interpenetrates the world of ordinary experience, at bottom a spiritual or ‘metetherial’ realm lying beyond the material as classically conceived.”» — la glosa de Edward F. Kelly sobre lo *metetherial*, que Kripal adopta.
«It is more accurate to say that, for Myers, the World is One, but that it is experienced by us in two different ways—in a naturalistic and social way via our supraliminal self, and in a spiritual or “transcendental” way via our subliminal Self.» — corrige la lectura dualista: el modelo es bimodal, no de dos mundos.
«This point on the spectrum, however, is neither stable nor absolute.» — el umbral entre lo supraliminal y lo subliminal, dicho como móvil.
«It is a compromise, a temporary adaptation determined, Myers speculated, by something like Darwin’s natural selection.» — el umbral explicado por selección natural, según la especulación de Myers.
«In short, just as it has in the history of life on this planet, consciousness will continue to evolve from the normal to the supernormal, and this to the extent that it can gain “a completer control over innate but latent faculty.”» — la evolución de la conciencia como control creciente sobre facultades ya presentes.
«but he was very much a Platonist or, perhaps better, a Neoplatonist when it came to the extraterrene or spiritual processes, that is, he believed that extraterrene evolution flowed from an earlier involution, that that which evolves into our spiritual consciousness was always already there from the beginning.» — el reparto que atribuye a Myers: Darwin para lo terrestre, neoplatonismo para lo espiritual.
«So, for example, he felt it necessary to posit the primordial existence of a “primal germ,” which possessed what he called panaesthesia or an “undifferentiated sensory capacity” that later evolved into the various sensory organs known to biology and psychology (HP 1:xiv).» — la *panaesthesia* del germen primordial como punto de partida del esquema.
«He recognized, of course, that this view is inconsistent with natural selection in the strict biological sense.» — consigna que el propio Myers reconocía la inconsistencia de su esquema con el darwinismo estricto.
«He thus wrote of how an “overruling intelligence” may have something to do with the evolution of mind and morality.» — la inteligencia rectora que Myers admite para la evolución moral.
«He explained to T. H. Huxley his dream of a “new branch of Anthropology” that might be crafted out of a study of Spiritualist phenomena.» — el proyecto de Alfred Russel Wallace, consignado con su destinatario.
«In other words, Wallace realized that science leads, inexorably, to ontological questions.» — la lectura que Kripal hace de Wallace: la ciencia desemboca en ontología.
«Myers’s own words, Wallace entertained the idea “that some influence, resembling that of man on the domestic animals, may have been brought to bear upon primitive man . . . and that some power of spiritual communion, differentiating man from the lower races, may have been thus originated.”» — la hipótesis de Wallace sobre una influencia externa en el origen humano, citada por vía de Myers y con la elipsis del libro.
«Despite all of this, Wallace was never entirely comfortable with the S.P.R., not because he thought its members were being too credulous, but because he thought that they were being too suspicious.» — el desacuerdo de Wallace con la S.P.R., consignado por su dirección exacta.
«In the end, Myers arrived at a kind of mind-body dualism, fully convinced that a mind uses a brain, and that the “human brain is in its last analysis an arrangement of matter expressly adapted to being acted upon by a spirit” (HP 2:254).» — el dualismo de Myers con la mente como término primario.
«Thought and Consciousness are not, then, random products of biological processes.» — la consecuencia que extrae para la evolución.
«Little wonder, then, that Darwin shied away from the word evolution, citing its common mystical connotations as inappropriate to his own purely naturalistic understandings.» — el dato que usa para mostrar que *evolución* llegaba ya cargada de místico.
«What I am suggesting here is that it was precisely this same Romantic and essentially mystical stream of thought, now fused with Darwinian biology, that Myers and Wallace picked up on and developed further in the second half of the nineteenth century in the mirror of their own Spiritualist and psychical data.» — declara la genealogía romántico-idealista de la que hace venir a Myers y a Wallace.
«Myers at least is quite clear that the history of spirit communication gives witness to “the evolution of human personality” and that his work speaks “of faculties newly dawning, and of a destiny greater than we know” (HP 1:19).» — la comunicación espiritista leída por Myers como indicio evolutivo.
«He even suggests that humanity may be able to hasten its own evolution and openly encourages his readers to see that their greatest duty is to increase the intensity of their mystical life and so come to recognize “that their own spirits are co-operative elements in the cosmic evolution, are part and parcel of the ultimate vitalizing Power” common to all religions (HP 1:23, 219).» — la exhortación práctica de Myers, con la que su obra deja de ser solo descriptiva.
«Hence the first occurrence of the phrase “supernormal power” appears within yet another of his Greek coinages, hyperpromethia, defined as a “supernormal power of foresight; attributed to the subliminal self as a hypothesis by which to explain premonitions” (HP 1:xvii).» — la acuñación griega de Myers para la previsión subliminal.
«Similarly, he turns to his Latin in order to coin the word retrocognition in order to refer to “Knowledge of the Past, supernormally acquired” (HP 1:xxi).» — la contraparte latina, para el conocimiento del pasado.
«Hence Myers could write of “a shifting of man’s psychical centre of gravity from the conscious to the sub-conscious or subliminal strata of his being—and accompanied by the manifestation of powers at least not obviously derivable from terrestrial evolution.”» — el desplazamiento del centro de gravedad psíquico, con el *at least* de Myers dentro.
«It is certainly true that the data can suggest the existence of hidden superpowers. But it is also true that such a conclusion finally relies on a particular interpretation of the data.» — el límite epistemológico que pone al material de Myers.
«Put more precisely, the supernormal arose not from the data alone, but from the ways Myers interpreted its patterns and their» — precisa que lo supernormal es producto de interpretación, no de dato bruto.
«We do not really have a cause, at least not one we can safely identify and agree upon yet.» — la abstención sobre la causa, mantenida mientras expone el modelo.
«This looks a lot like what Jung would later call a synchronicity.» — lee lo *coincidental* de Myers como anticipación de la sincronicidad.
«This originary appearance of the supernormal and the coincidental suggests that much, maybe everything, about how we read Frederic Myers comes down to how we manage just three terms: coincidence, cause, and comparison.» — los tres términos de los que, dice, depende toda lectura de Myers.
«What sets apart Myers’s comparative method is that he will indeed posit a cause between the coincidence of a subjective vision and an external physical event.» — lo que distingue el método de Myers: postula causa donde otros ven coincidencia.
«He will bestow a specific set of meanings on this cause (he will call it supernormal and link it to evolution), and he will give this causal mechanism a new name—telepathy.» — la operación de nombrar como parte del argumento, no como su consecuencia.
«When there is no coincidence of time or fact between a vision and an external event, Myers calls these visions “delusional.”» — el criterio de Myers para separar visiones.
«When there is such a meaningful coincidence, he calls them “veridical.”» — la otra mitad del criterio.
«A “phantasm of the living” was defined as the appearance of someone in a dream or vision who was either alive but would be dead within twelve hours or who had not been dead for more than twelve hours.» — la definición operativa que la S.P.R. usaba para su catálogo.
«Basically, Myers suggested that a collective apparition may be the sighting of a traveling clairvoyant in some sort of spiritual double or subtle body.» — la explicación de Myers para las apariciones colectivas.
«He called the “point in space so modified by the presence of a spirit that it becomes perceptible to persons materially present near it” a phantasmogenetic center (HP 1:xix).» — la definición del centro fantasmogénico, término que reaparece en el capítulo de Vallee.
«There were even reciprocal cases in the files of the S.P.R. in which the traveling clairvoyant saw an individual at a distant locale and the individual saw the clairvoyant, hence the reported “bilocations” of Catholic saints.» — el caso recíproco, que enlaza con la bilocación hagiográfica.
«Not finding him, he came back into the house, picked up a newspaper another friend had just given him, and read the first piece of news that he saw. It happened to be on the death of the old Cambridge friend whom he had just seen in his window (HP 2:57).» — el caso del reverendo G. M. Tandy, expuesto con su locator interno de *Human Personality*.
«When Robert returned home two days later, his two sisters were astonished to learn that he had in fact been singing that exact song at that exact time at a church function in North Dakota.» — el caso de la señora Margaret Q. R., que Kripal clasifica como audición verídica y no alucinación.
«He was so impressed that he ended a business trip he had just begun and immediately took the next train home to tell his parents what he had seen.» — el caso de Misuri: la aparición de la hermana muerta y el efecto sobre el testigo.
«It is interesting to see how the society debated this particular story. Frank Podmore, for example, wanted to argue that the» — introduce el desacuerdo interno de la S.P.R. sobre ese mismo caso.
«Obviously, this leaves a good deal unanswered, like how such a projection could extend from St. Louis to St. Joseph, but this is precisely the sort of thing that they came to call telepathy.» — la objeción de Kripal a la hipótesis de Podmore, y el nombre que la sociedad daba al hueco.
«Myers, on the other hand, sees much more. He sees a pastoral or emotional purpose in the telepathic event.» — la otra lectura, la de Myers, consignada sin arbitrar entre las dos.
«Myers thus ranks this case as an example of “a perception by the spirit of her mother’s approaching death” (HP 2:27–30).» — la clasificación que Myers le da al caso.
«Myers understood consciousness not as a discrete or stable phenomenon, but as a broad spectrum of potentialities that are actualized at different points in space and time.» — el espectro de potencialidades como definición operativa de conciencia en Myers.
«Thoulet himself underlines the weirdest part, namely, that he had dreamt of a telegram that had not been sent yet: “I had seen it ten days before it existed or could have existed.”» — el sueño premonitorio del profesor J. Thoulet, con su propio subrayado.
«It was out of thousands of stories like these that Myers coined the term telepathy in 1882, no doubt after the then cutting-edge technology of the telegraph and telegram.» — la acuñación de *telepathy* como derivada del material de casos y de la tecnología del momento.
«Mr. Goodall speculated that the donkey’s collapse may have been caused by “terror at some apparition of the dying child.”» — el caso de Edward A. Goodall, cuyo burro se desplomó cuando, dice, murió su hijo.
«Gauld also humorously reminds us that the spirits often claimed famous names, with Benjamin Franklin being one of their favorites, “perhaps because his electrical skills made him seem a likely inventor of the ‘Spiritual Telegraph.’”» — la metáfora del telégrafo espiritual, con Franklin como firmante preferido de los espíritus.
«On the other side of the equation, many of the earliest inventors of the new radio technology—Nikola Tesla, Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Lord Raleigh—were all intimately involved in psychical research and sometimes imagined their science along similar occult lines.» — el préstamo va en los dos sentidos: los inventores de la radio también investigaban lo psíquico.
«American writer Upton Sinclair would soon frame his own successful experiments with telepathy as a kind of “mental radio,” with none other than Albert Einstein writing the preface.» — el caso de Sinclair y el prólogo de Einstein, consignado como dato.
«Myers defined telepathy as “the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognized channels of sense”» — la definición de Myers citada con la reserva de los sentidos *reconocidos*.
«The “telepathic law,” as Myers came to call it, thus became the bedrock theoretical construct of Human Personality.» — la ley telepática como núcleo teórico de la obra magna.
«Myers chose a coinage that literally means “feeling at distance” (telepathy), and not “voice at a distance” (telephony) or “writing at a distance” (telegraphy).» — el argumento etimológico con que subraya el componente emocional del término.
«telepathic communications appear to escape or subvert the rational censor, which would otherwise deem them impossible and so prevent them from happening at all;» — la censura racional como obstáculo del propio fenómeno, no solo de su reconocimiento.
«telepathic communications could occur either between two living minds, or, more rarely, between a departed spirit and a living one.» — el alcance que Myers da a la telepatía, con su *more rarely*.
«What we have to do, Myers suggests, is shift our focus from the supraliminal to the subliminal.» — el desplazamiento de atención que el modelo exige.
«Now it is true that Corbin brought the imaginal into contemporary scholarly prominence. But it is not true that he invented the term.» — la corrección de atribución, concedida a Corbin la difusión y negada la invención.
«The imaginal is not the imaginary, though.» — la distinción de la que depende toda la categoría.
«The imaginal is in touch with and translating a higher dimension of reality, what Myers would have called the extraterrene.» — lo imaginal como traducción de una dimensión real, no como fantasía.
«The imaginal is the imagination on steroids.» — la formulación coloquial con que fija la diferencia de grado.
«What Myers intended to communicate here was the idea that the human imagination under certain very specific conditions can take on extraordinary or supernormal capacities that represent hints of a more highly evolved human nature.» — la lectura evolutiva de lo imaginal en Myers, con su condición dentro.
«In his own more technical terms, such altered states of consciousness were “preversions” that represented “[a] tendency to characteristics assumed to lie at a further point of the evolutionary progress of a species than has yet been reached” (HP 1:xx).» — la acuñación *preversion* de Myers, citada con su definición y sus corchetes.
«Hence just as the larval stage of an insect looks nothing like the imago or mature image of its adult form (which indeed appears “bizarre” or alienlike in comparison to the larval slug), so too the images of the human imagination can mature into extremely strange but nevertheless accurate evolutionary forms as imaginal visions or veridical hallucinations» — la parábola de la larva y el imago, que da su nombre a lo imaginal; *alienlike* va junto en la fuente.
«And it was Plato who “was the first larva to insist upon the imaginal characters.”» — la broma de Myers sobre Platón, citada dentro de la frase de Kripal.
«We are realizing that we may not be slugs after all.» — el corolario que extrae de la parábola.
«We need no such speculations, however, in order to establish that the telepathic and the erotic are intimately linked phenomena for Frederic Myers, that, somehow, these two dimensions of the human condition are expressing the same deep metaphysical unity of things.» — el vínculo entre telepatía y eros, declarado sin apoyarse en especulación.
«It was the “gravity” of the psychical world, the binding idea that explained almost everything for Frederic Myers, from spirit communication and poetic or philosophical genius, to crisis apparitions and possession, to the efficacy of prayer, the communion of saints, and the ancient doctrine of the World-Soul, even the actions of a possible Divine Spirit.» — la telepatía como fuerza unificadora del sistema entero de Myers.
«Telepathy requires another human being, whereas telaesthesia does not.» — el criterio que separa los dos términos de Myers.
«It is also important to note that, although telaesthesia is clearly related to telepathy, they are not the same thing.» — insiste en no fundirlos, pese al parentesco.
«Myers suggests that, as far as such subliminal uprushes or impossible authorizations are intellectual, they also tend to be telaesthetic, that is, they bring “direct knowledge of facts of the universe outside the range of any specialized organ or of any planetary view” (HP 1:111).» — la telaestesia como conocimiento directo sin órgano sensorial mediador.
«We are no longer reading a scientific treatise or a piece of literary criticism. Myers becomes a poet again, and he is giving a speech now.» — anota el cambio de registro en el pasaje erótico de *Human Personality*.
«It is worth repeating, in my own terms now: by his own stark confession late in life and in his own final statement, a metaphysical understanding of the erotic lay at the very heart and center of Myers’s lifework.» — la adjudicación central del capítulo, declarada como reformulación propia.
«Thus, whereas Janet’s “planetary view” sees “sexual instinct as the nucleus of reality around which baseless fancies gather,” the “Platonic view” regards such “earthly passion as the initiation and introduction into cosmic sanctity and joy” (HP 1:xxxi).» — las dos lecturas del eros que Myers contrapone, con sus etiquetas.
«Although he plays at a certain balance between Janet and Plato, it is very clear where Myers himself stands on the debate.» — señala que el equilibrio de Myers es aparente.
«He stands with Plato and his conviction that it is eros that generates genital desire and the creative energies of philosophy, law, poetry, art, culture, and society itself.» — la posición de Myers según el *Symposium*: el eros precede al deseo genital y lo excede.
«It is my own intuitive sense, which I cannot prove or establish beyond a reasonable doubt, that it is here that Myers gives himself away;» — declara el límite de su propia lectura biográfica antes de sostenerla.
«But he never really let Annie go.» — el amor por Annie Hill Marshall como motor persistente de la investigación de Myers.
«There were early alleged signals from Annie in Myers’s extensive sittings with mediums, but it was not until 1899 that Myers received his first clear communication from his beloved, this time through a medium named Rosina Thompson.» — las sesiones con Rosina Thompson, fechadas y consignadas como *alleged*.
«In any case, it was these late sittings with Rosina Thompson that Myers considered his very best evidence for the soul’s survival of bodily death.» — lo que el propio Myers tenía por su mejor prueba.
«The best evidence and final proof was systematically suppressed by Myers’s widow, Eveleen Myers, who actively censored her late husband’s Human Personality by excising all the key passages about Annie Hill Marshall.» — la censura de la viuda, dicha con nombre y con su efecto sobre la obra publicada.
«Sir Oliver Lodge, head of the physics department at the University of Birmingham, flatly refused, although he agreed not to publish the whole thing.» — la respuesta de Lodge a la viuda de Myers, que le pedía colaborar en la supresión.
«We might speculate, that is, that his philosophical quest was driven, exactly as in Diotima’s speech, by the altered states of eros, by the love of a deceased Beloved and the forces unknown to science that he appears to have known in her presence, both while she was still living and after she had died.» — la hipótesis con Diotima al fondo, enunciada como especulación declarada.
«It was in this way that the erotic subsumed the traumatic in Myers’s Human Personality.» — el orden que establece entre las dos vías del capítulo.
«This was how Love finally conquered Death.» — la fórmula con que cierra el argumento sobre Myers.
«It must be admitted that this connection between the telepathic and the erotic is not immediately obvious, unless of course one has experienced exactly such a connection in one’s own life.» — la concesión y la condición: el vínculo se ve desde la experiencia propia.
«Recall here that our only source for what Myers describes as his “personal experience of forces unknown to science,” which he tells us he will not tell us about, is the very text that his widow later censored and controlled, that is, his “Fragments of Inner Life.”» — el problema de fuente: la única fuente del secreto es el texto censurado.
«Obviously, when Frederic Myers refuses to tell us a secret in a text that was not made public until after his death and that we know his widow subsequently censored, we must be more than a little wary.» — la cautela que se impone antes de leer esa negativa.
«He points out that Myers fell madly in love with Annie Marshall at the exact time he began investigating Spiritualism.» — la coincidencia cronológica que Gauld señala y Kripal usa.
«This, Gauld speculates, is partly explained by the fact that Annie herself showed mediumistic talents and attended séances with Myers.» — la explicación parcial de Gauld, consignada como especulación suya.
«I am not sure what else needs to be said here, other than the textual fact that some of the most passionate and powerful passages in Human Personality have been erased.» — el saldo del capítulo, dicho como hecho textual y no como interpretación.
«By his own confession, he clearly accepted the reality of psychical phenomena.» — sobre Charles Fort: aceptaba el fenómeno psíquico.
«He affirmed the occult powers of the British superpsychic D. D. Home,» — el caso concreto que Fort aceptaba.
«But he was deeply suspicious of all talk of (or with) departed spirits,» — el límite exacto del asentimiento de Fort: rechazaba el espiritismo, no lo psíquico.
«It is precisely this ordinariness that makes Fort’s thought so extraordinary.» — la razón por la que Fort le importa: lo paranormal en la vida diaria, no en el gabinete.
«Fort, that is, locates the paranormal not simply in the rare experiences of a telepathic communication (although it appears here too)» — dónde sitúa Fort el fenómeno, con la concesión entre paréntesis.
«He finds it rather, in Colin Bennet’s words now, in “the full light of noon on a thronged high street, from crowded rooms, from reports of ship’s captains, baffled farmers, puzzled housewives, and scared families.”» — la escena del material fortiano, dicha con Bennet; el libro escribe así el apellido en este lugar.
«Fort felt that specialization prevents us from seeing the hidden connections between different domains of knowledge and data.» — el motivo del reproche de Fort a la especialización.
«He knew,” Damon Knight explains, “that we can only see what we are looking for,» — la formulación de Damon Knight sobre Fort, que coincide con la advertencia metodológica del propio libro.
«Ordinary theologians have overlooked crabs and periwinkles,” he noted wryly» — la ironía de Fort contra la teología, citada dentro de la frase de Kripal.
«He was an intellectually promiscuous adventurer, a journalist of the metaphysical in search of what we might call, with only slight apologies to Freud, the parapsychology of everyday life.» — la fórmula con que define el oficio de Fort.
«He would collect tens of thousands of notes on such anomalies.» — la escala del archivo de Fort.
«This was a nightly ritual that appeared to have only reinforced Charles’s most basic conviction that “the imagined and the physical” were deeply intertwined, if not actually identical on some level:» — la ida al cine como refuerzo de su convicción monista.
«It was Dreiser who bought and printed some of Fort’s early humorous short stories and, more importantly, acted as a literary agent of sorts for Fort’s first and most famous “nonfiction” book, The Book of the Damned.» — el papel de Theodore Dreiser en la publicación de Fort, con las comillas que Kripal pone a *nonfiction*.
«Dreiser basically threatened his own publisher: if he didn’t publish Fort, he wouldn’t publish Dreiser.» — cómo se publicó *The Book of the Damned*, según Kripal.
«Fort denied in principle any stable distinction between fiction and reality.» — el principio del que salen todas las demás posiciones de Fort.
«Nor, as we have already noted, did Fort believe in any stable distinction between the imagined and the physical (WT 1010).» — la segunda distinción que Fort niega, con su locator interno de *Wild Talents*.
«Indeed, it is so powerful (and potentially perverse) that Fort suggested in more than one context that we are all living in someone else’s novel, which was not a particularly good one.» — la consecuencia extrema de esa negación, con la ironía de Fort conservada.
«There thus can be no final conclusions or firm beliefs or even arguments “in the fiction that we’re living,” only what he calls “pseudo-conclusions” and “expressions” (WT 1009).» — el vocabulario con que Fort sustituye la conclusión.
«Dreiser was stunned by the thesis of X, which involved the idea that all of earthly biological and social reality is a kind of movie (we would now say “virtual world”) projected from the rays of some unknown alien consciousness.» — la tesis del manuscrito perdido *X*, conocida por el resumen de Dreiser.
«He would also back down from his thesis that X was emanating from Mars, which, since Percival Lowell’s Mars and Its Canals (1906), was commonly believed to be lined by canals and inhabited by intelligent beings.» — el abandono de la hipótesis marciana, situado en su contexto astronómico.
«Such striking lines strongly suggest that the acts of collection, comparison, and systematization were not simple or banal activities for Charles Fort.» — la colección y la comparación como prácticas cargadas, no como tarea de archivo.
«They constituted a kind of an occult metapractice that could lead, at any moment, to just such a sudden awakening.» — el archivo de Fort leído como práctica oculta orientada a un despertar.
«Fort’s obscure claim that “systematization of pseudo-data is approximation to realness or final awakening” (BD 22).» — la frase de Fort en que Kripal apoya esa lectura, declarada oscura por él mismo.
«He had also burned twenty-five thousand of his notes earlier in the century.» — la quema de notas, con la cifra que da el libro.
«It is also not difficult to see why Steinmeyer suggests that X was not emanating from Mars but from Albany, New York, that is, from the memories of Fort’s hated father and all those terrible, basically “evil,” controlling punishments.» — la lectura biográfica de Jim Steinmeyer, consignada como suya.
«In this view at least, Fort’s paranoid extraterrestrial fantasy finds its psychological origins in overwhelming childhood trauma.» — acota esa lectura con un *in this view at least*, sin adoptarla ni descartarla.
«Not that he thought that things could ever be definitively classified into stable essences.» — el límite del clasificador Fort: clasificaba sin creer en la clasificación.
«He would think of the world as a vast Oneness where anything could become anything else, where things were not things at all but relations.» — el monismo relacional de Fort en la exposición de Kripal.
«The moral of the parable is two-edged and remarkably nuanced.» — sobre la parábola de los duraznos, que se niega a reducir a una sola lección.
«On another level, the parable appears to suggest something a bit deeper, namely, that even the real nature of things does not reflect the real nature of things.» — la segunda lectura de la parábola, formulada en paradoja.
«Fort would have laughed at that one, and then added: “or peaches.”» — el chiste con que Kripal cierra el monismo fortiano.
«By “solving all the problems in the world,” what Fort likely meant was that his Super-checkers game was like every other system human beings have invented: it was a game, with artificial rules that are more or less useful, but that can also always be bent or ignored and are in the end more or less arbitrary.» — la lectura del juego de damas de mil seiscientas casillas que Fort inventó, como figura de todo sistema.
«The Fortean universe operates remarkably like this Super-checkers game.» — la extensión de esa figura al cosmos entero de Fort.
«This indeterminacy is not tangential to the subject.» — la indeterminación como asunto, no como defecto de exposición.
«Like a quantum event that can be measured as a particle or a wave—and Fort knew all about this—this indeterminacy is the subject.» — la analogía cuántica, con la nota de que Fort la conocía.
«Fort again engages in precisely this rhetorical move: he will often cite scientific explanations for his anomalous events, but only to show how far they fall short, how silly they really are in the face of the offending data.» — la operación retórica de Fort descrita como tal, no como argumento.
«Like a good fantastic writer, he will strip such naturalistic explanations of internal probability.» — el procedimiento que Kripal lee con la fórmula de Solovyov.
«Fort’s texts fulfill another requirement of Todorov’s genre, that is, they integrate the reader into the fantastic world that they are portraying.» — el segundo requisito de Todorov que Fort cumple.
«Fort thus brings the fantastic into the real world, or better, he shows that the real world is already fantastic, and always has been.» — la inversión que atribuye a Fort: no lleva lo fantástico al mundo, lo encuentra ahí.
«In the end, however, it may be even more accurate to suggest that Charles Fort is finally a comedian of the fantastic, that it is his humor, above all else, that rhetorically creates the metaphysical hesitations and open-ended nature of his texts.» — el humor como el operador que produce la vacilación.
«Fort, in his usual style, lampooned both the faithful and the rational explanations.» — sobre la ciudad fantasma de Ashland, Ohio, de marzo de 1890: la burla va a los dos lados.
«Only then can we approximate a Truth we may never reach but that is nevertheless worth reaching for.» — la meta que atribuye al método fortiano, con su límite dentro.
«At this point, he sounds remarkably like Derrida on différance, or Foucault on the episteme as a temporary and relative order of knowledge and power.» — la resonancia postestructuralista que concede antes de negarla.
«negatives of one another, that Fort is more like the opposite of Derrida and Foucault, acknowledging both Difference and Sameness but finally privileging Sameness:» — la corrección: Fort es el negativo fotográfico de esos autores, porque privilegia la semejanza.
«Fort will go on to define “existence” as a shifting, unstable intermediate zone between what he will later call the Negative Absolute and the Positive Absolute, but which he calls here, in a more mythical vein, “hell” and “heaven.”» — la definición fortiana de existencia como zona intermedia.
«Error results when parts attempt to be wholes, when the bug imagines itself as fundamentally different from the mouse in the same orange cheese.» — la teoría del error que extrae de la imagen del queso.
«He was deeply bothered by how easy it is to disregard or damn a datum.» — el motivo del método fortiano: la facilidad con que un dato se descarta.
«Fort adds his “super” and makes of the Super-Sargasso Sea a kind of metaphorical space in which he will gather all of his damned data until the waters around the swimming reader are filled with floating and falling debris, “material for the deep-sea fishes to disregard” (BD 119).» — el Super-Sargasso Sea explicado como espacio metafórico de acumulación, y su procedencia legendaria.
«It is not simply a matter of stuff randomly falling through the texts, however.» — matiza la imagen: no es caída azarosa, es relación.
«That feeling, that bump, is called a “coincidence.”» — nombra la sensación que el método fortiano persigue.
«He knew that this relation was partly a function of his own interpretive inclinations, but he also suspected that it was really “out there,” that it was not simply a» — sobre el método comparativo de Fort: relación interpretada y a la vez sospechada como real.
«In the end, he concluded that at least some of these coincidences were an expression, like everything else, of “an underlying oneness” (WT 850).» — la unidad subyacente como término de llegada de las coincidencias, con el *at least some* dentro.
«But the world is not all Sameness. There is also real Difference.» — el contrapeso que impide leer a Fort como monista puro.
«He simply allows them to be themselves, sets them on the same comparative table, and then watches them deconstruct each other: “We have only faith to guide us, say the theologians. Which faith?” (LO 712).» — la mesa comparativa como técnica: los sistemas se desmontan solos.
«In the end, however, no Difference can survive the ultimate Sameness.» — el saldo del monismo fortiano, dicho sin suavizarlo.
«Security and certainty, moreover, are little more than species of a “bright and shining delusion,” for “we are centers of tremors in a quaking black jelly” (NL 335).» — la gelatina negra temblorosa, imagen del nexo subyacente.
«To interpret the world, then, for Fort is first to accept the data as real data, to not disregard that which has been damned by science or religion as “irrational” or “anecdotal” or “impossible,” but to allow all the pieces and parts, and especially the anomalous ones, to fall into place through the bumps in the nexus called “coincidences” until a picture begins to emerge within the black jelly,» — el procedimiento fortiano expuesto como método interpretativo completo.
«Whereas the latter almost always lack a metaphysical base, indeed consciously and vociferously eschew one as the Great Sin, Fort clearly possessed a developed and consistent monist metaphysics through which he read, and into which he subsumed, the “differences” and “gaps” of his anomalous material.» — lo que separa a Fort de los postmodernos: tiene metafísica declarada.
«He may have also recognized that every such linguistic system of thought is without a final base or stable standard, that it is more or less arbitrary, that it must exclude or “damn” data to exist at all, but that the damned always return to haunt it and, finally, to collapse it.» — el mecanismo de exclusión y retorno que ordena la historia según Fort.
«By means of the inclusion of ever greater swaths of data, human thought is developing for Fort, and this toward what he called “the gossip of angels,” that “final utterance” that “would include all things.”» — la charla de ángeles como término final de la inclusión.
«This final utterance, however, must paradoxically be “unutterable” in our “quasi-existence, where to think is to include but also to exclude, or be not final” (BD 249).» — la acotación que hace inalcanzable ese término: pensar es excluir.
«Obviously, then, if Charles Fort practiced a kind of postmodernism, and I agree with Bennett that he did, it was a paranormal postmodernism akin to what David Ray Griffin has called a “constructive” or “revisionary postmodernism,” which Griffin, much like Fort before him, links to both a naturalistic» — el emparejamiento con Griffin, declarado como acuerdo con Bennett.
«Whereas the first two Dominants work from the systemic principle of Exclusionism, that is, they must exclude data to survive as stable systems, the New Dominant works from the systemic principle of Inclusionism, that is, it builds an open-ended system and preserves it through the confusing inclusion of data, theoretically all data, however bizarre and offending, toward some future awakening.» — los dos principios opuestos con que Fort ordena los tres Dominantes.
«Fort liked the number three, perhaps because it had “mystic significance” in earlier religious systems (NL 474), perhaps because Nikola Tesla, the American inventor and “mad scientist,” believed that the vibrations he received from Martians on his wireless apparatus seemed to come in triplets (NL 494).» — las dos razones que ofrece, ambas en condicional, para la tríada fortiana.
«Fort is brutal on both religion and science, although he makes, as we shall see, some crucial concessions to each that end up defining the dialectical contours of his own third system.» — el trato simétrico a los dos Dominantes, con las concesiones anunciadas.
«As the latter passage makes clear, what the two Dominants of religion and science share is their Exclusionism, a basic intolerance that inevitably leads, particularly in the case of religion, to real-world violence.» — lo que iguala a los dos Dominantes: excluir, y con ello la violencia.
«Religion, then, is a kind of consensual trance that settles over an entire civilization and era.» — la religión leída como trance colectivo, en la lectura que Kripal hace de Fort.
«Fort can write of a “scientific priestcraft” who shout “Thou shalt not!” in their “frozen textbooks” (NL 315).» — el sacerdocio científico, con las palabras de Fort dentro de la frase de Kripal.
«Where science errs for Fort is in its pride, in its arrogance, in its failure to recognize its own limitations.» — precisa que el reproche de Fort a la ciencia es de soberbia, no de método.
«Such thunder outside signals for Fort the approach of a New Dominant, a new era, of which he is the prophet: “affairs upon this earth” are “fluttering upon the edge of a new era,” he asserts, “and I give expression to coming thoughts of that era” (LO 712).» — Fort como profeta declarado del Nuevo Dominante.
«He does not imagine, of course, that his particular expressions of this new era are absolute, only that they include more and exclude less and so better approximate the Truth of things.» — el límite que Fort se pone: incluir más, no acertar del todo.
«It implies, after all, its own demise.» — dicho del *intermediatismo*: el término lleva dentro su propia caducidad.
«Both belief and explanation, or faith and reason, are now replaced by a more humble acceptance and a more daring expression.» — el par que sustituye a creencia y explicación en el Nuevo Dominante.
«Hence Fort’s hostility to naive religious beliefs, which lock us into a previous era’s revelations, which prevent us from progressing into the future: “That firmly to believe is to impede development. That only temporarily to accept is to facilitate” (BD 13).» — la hostilidad de Fort a la creencia firme, con su formulación.
«In Charles Fort, however, in what we might now precisely call the paranormal, the sacred leaves both the religious and the scientific registers and enters a still undefined, still irresolvable parascientific register.» — aplica a Fort su propia definición de lo paranormal como tránsito de lo sagrado.
«At least three corollaries materialize out of Fort’s New Dominant—what I would call, or better, what I would express as a New Science, a New Religion, and a New Self or Soul.» — los tres corolarios que Kripal deriva del Nuevo Dominante, declarados como formulación suya.
«In truth, however, what I am calling Fort’s New Science and New Religion are really two sides of the same unnamed coin—a New Gnosis. Fort did not speak or write in such a way. But I do in order to rename that New Dominant of his, that new epistemology that draws deeply on both the data of faith and the methods of reason without being bound to either;» — nombra la Nueva Gnosis y advierte de inmediato que el término es suyo y no de Fort.
«He saw immediately what it would take the broader culture another forty years to realize, namely, that the line between quantum physics and mysticism is a very thin one.» — lo que adjudica a Fort sobre la física cuántica, con cuarenta años de adelanto.
«Fort’s final conclusion follows logically: it is no longer possible to be a materialist.» — la conclusión que extrae de la nueva física, presentada como consecuencia lógica en Fort.
«Just as Fort offers the outlines of a New Science based on quantum physics and psychical research (and, as we shall see, evolutionary biology), he also offers the outlines of a New Religion through the same disciplines.» — las mismas disciplinas fundan las dos mitades de la Nueva Gnosis.
«Fort’s New Religion was, of course, really a New Heresy: “In my own still hereticalness— and by heresy, or progress, I mean, very largely, a return, though with many modifications, to the superstitions of the past”» — la Nueva Religión como herejía que retorna a la superstición, con la definición del propio Fort.
«Fort certainly does not believe in any personal God. But he recognizes how psychically useful such a God is.» — la posición doble sobre Dios: sin creencia y con función.
«He calls the spiritualists and the scientists the “two tyrannies” that bully the data. “On one side, the spiritualists have arbitrarily taken over strange occurrences, as manifestations of ‘the departed.’ On the other side, conventional science has pronounced against everything that does not harmonize with its systematizations. . . . One is too dainty, and the other is gross”» — las dos tiranías sobre el dato, en palabras de Fort y con la elipsis del libro.
«He was, in his own words, a materialist-immaterialist.» — la autodescripción de Fort que Kripal toma como fórmula de su monismo dialéctico.
«But then he backs up and pulls away from such an absolute reductionism.» — el retroceso de Fort ante su propia formulación reduccionista de la mente.
«is an expression of his wider “philosophy of the hyphen,” or what we have already encountered as his Intermediatism. This Intermediatism is in turn grounded in a deeper monism, but a monism striving to express itself within a real, if somewhat tenuous, plurality:» — la filosofía del guion, nombre de Fort para su intermediatismo, con su base monista y su pluralidad concedida.
«In the end, though, this individuality is always unstable in Fort’s texts.» — el límite de la individualidad fortiana.
«There is a One and a Many, but the Many appears in the One, not the other way around.» — el orden entre unidad y pluralidad en Fort.
«Hence any identity can only come to be by “drawing a line about itself,” that is, by excluding everything else that there is.» — la identidad como acto de exclusión, en la lectura de Kripal.
«Such an act appears to be finally futile for Fort, “just as would one who draws a circle in the sea” (BD 6–7).» — la imagen del círculo trazado en el mar, con la que Fort desactiva esa identidad.
«The individual, then, for Fort is finally not a subject, but a “sub-subject,” that is, a form of consciousness within an Ultimate Subject:» — la identidad individual como sub-sujeto dentro de un Sujeto Último.
«In truth, “nothing final can be found in all the bridge, because the bridge itself is not a final thing in itself, but is a relationship between Manhattan and Brooklyn.”» — la analogía del puente de Brooklyn: lo real como relación pura.
«For the intermediatist, Fort explained, there is one answer to all questions, one solution to all problems: “Sometimes and sometimes not,” or “Yes and no.”» — la respuesta única del intermediatismo a toda pregunta.
«But it is also true that there is a consistent narrative or Super-Story woven into the heart of his four books, a story without which these texts would have little power over their astonished readers.» — la Super-Historia como lo que da fuerza a los cuatro libros de Fort.
«It is a unique genre of modern metaphysical literature for which we really do not have a word yet, but for which I would like to propose one now: science mysticism.» — acuña el término para el género en que sitúa a Fort.
«What sets apart a work of science mysticism like Fort’s Wild Talents (1932) or Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics (1975), then, is that such texts claim significantly more purchase on reality than either science fiction or professional science does.» — lo que distingue al género: la pretensión de realidad, con sus dos ejemplos.
«To hone our terms yet further, we might adopt Fort’s own spectral language and say that, while neither science mysticism nor science fiction obtains a complete existence, science mysticism is real-unreal whereas science fiction is unreal-real.» — la distinción entre los dos géneros, formulada con el vocabulario del propio Fort.
«But the two genres are clearly dependent on one another and merge in the middle.» — la acotación que impide separarlos del todo.
«What I am suggesting is that Charles Fort took a still nascent science-fiction trajectory and fused it with his own data of the damned in order to create a new genre of writing that I am calling science mysticism. This was science fiction come alive. This was fantasy as fact, or at least quasi fact.» — la operación de Fort, con el *at least quasi fact* que la acota.
«According to the literary critic Brian Stableford, the novel had its creative origins in Wells’s private reflections on Western colonialism and in his study of Darwinian biology.» — el origen colonial de *The War of the Worlds* según Stableford.
«But it was European colonialism that affected him most directly.» — precisa cuál de los dos orígenes pesa más en Wells.
«If, then, we are like deep-sea fishes bumping our noses up against things we do not, and probably cannot, understand, Fort suggests now that we are also watched, even manipulated, by “super-constructions” passing above us in the atmosphere, in a kind of psychical space or spatial dimension he likes to call the Super-Sargasso Sea.» — las superconstrucciones y el mar de los Sargazos como espacio psíquico.
«What the theologians, demonologists, and psychical researchers were really studying without realizing it were “beings and objects that visited this earth, not from a spiritual existence, but from outer space” (NL 419–20).» — la reinterpretación fortiana de todo el material religioso previo como visita extraterrestre.
«Fort remains unclear or undecided about almost all of the specifics of his alien hermeneutic, although the general storyline remains quite consistent.» — la indecisión de Fort sobre los detalles, consignada como tal.
«Fort, for example, goes back and forth about whether the spaceships are of a material, a spiritual, or some other subtle or “highly attenuated” matter (NL 420).» — el ejemplo concreto de esa indecisión.
«But Fort expressly rejected such language, mostly because he did not understand it and thought it to be an intellectual cop-out: “Oh, yes, I have heard of ‘the fourth dimension,’ but I am going to do myself some credit by not lugging in that particular way of showing that I don’t know what I’m writing about” (NL 567).» — el rechazo de Fort al vocabulario dimensional, con su razón declarada.
«Fort suggests this expansion is necessary to prevent an “explosion,” that we need, as it were, “San Salvadors of the Sky” or “a Plymouth Rock of reversed significance, coasts of sky-continents” (NL 314).» — la expansión hacia lo alto en vocabulario colonial invertido.
«Fort goes back and forth on this. In places, we are clearly the colonized, hence he compares our sighting of super-constructions in the sky to “savages upon an island-beach” gazing out at three ships in the bay on October 12, 1492 (NL 471).» — la inversión colonizador/colonizado, con la fecha que Fort elige.
«Our cognitive maps, including Fort’s own, are clearly filled with silly and gross errors:» — incluye a Fort en su propio diagnóstico.
«Given that he thought these “new lands” were just a few miles above us, that the earth was the center of the universe, and that modern astronomy was all wrong about the vastness of space, we must grant Fort significantly more than thirteen pages of gross and stupid errors.» — el saldo del error fortiano, dicho con la propia concesión que Fort pedía.
«The truth is, as Damon Knight pointed out, that much of New Lands is simply embarrassing to read now.» — el juicio de Damon Knight sobre *New Lands*, que Kripal suscribe.
«He gave one a fanciful name, “Melanicus . . . Prince of Dark Bodies.”» — el nombre que Fort da a una de sus superconstrucciones.
«Fort finds this “notion that we must be interesting” a very curious one (BD 143).» — la objeción de Fort al antropocentrismo del contacto.
«He will also, however, entertain the more democratic idea that there are some worlds that are trying to communicate with all of us.» — la variante que Fort también admite, sin decidir entre las dos.
«Earth may not be a colony at all. It may be a farm:» — la hipótesis de la granja, que abre el material gnóstico del apartado siguiente.
«Which brings us to one of the most striking, and most gnostic, aspects of Fort’s system, that is, his notion that the principle mechanism by which we are kept in our pens is religion. What Fort shouts in these most remarkable of passages is what some Jewish and Christian gnostics shouted in the first few centuries of the common era, namely, that orthodox religion, to the extent that it privileges violent deities demanding sacrifice, is demonic not metaphorically, but really. Those who do not know believe that they worship God. They in fact worship demons.» — la tesis demoníaca de la religión en Fort, emparejada con la gnosis antigua y con la grafía *principle* del libro.
«as if the people, Fort suggests, were “human batteries” that the occult events were feeding upon, thus growing more brilliant “with nourishing ecstasies” (LO 655).» — los avivamientos de Northumberland leídos por Fort como alimento de lo oculto.
«Fort does not believe in spontaneous combustions. But he’s willing to entertain the existence of “beings, that, with a flaming process, consume men and women, but . . . mostly pick out women.”» — la posición de Fort sobre las combustiones, con su negación y su alternativa.
«Fort seems most convinced of the alien-invasion thesis and in a subsequent demonic theory of religion.» — cuál de las hipótesis de Fort le parece la más sostenida por él mismo.
«We have submitted to our own colonization, and through the very mechanisms of our deepest belief and most heartfelt piety no less.» — la colonización consentida por vía de la piedad, en la lectura de Kripal.
«Central to both of these last two books was the notion that evolution, or Development, as he preferred to call it in his un-Darwinian capitalized language, has intentionally endowed certain human beings with anomalous physical and psychical abilities toward some distant end or future goal:» — *Development* como el nombre que Fort da a una evolución con propósito.
«Fort called these evolving magical powers gifted in the womb “wild talents,” by which he meant “something that comes and goes, and is under no control, but that may be caught and trained” (WT 1049).» — la definición de *wild talent*, con su parte entrenable.
«He even suggests that “the spiritualists are reversedly right—that there is a ghost-world—but that it is our existence—that when the spirits die they become human beings” (WT, 898).» — la inversión fortiana del espiritismo, consignada con su locator tal como lo imprime el libro.
«He suggested, for example, that they were all “specializations” of some much larger shape-shifting power.» — los talentos salvajes como especializaciones de un poder mayor.
«himself called this metapower trans-mediumization, a term that appears to be a combination of Catholic sacramental theology’s transubstantiation (the sacred power of the Eucharistic rite to transform ordinary bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ) with the materialized objects and substances (think: ectoplasm) that seemed to manifest through a few talented mediums.» — la etimología que Kripal propone para *trans-mediumization*, declarada como conjetura.
«Regardless of its linguistic origins and intended allusions, the term for Fort signaled the ability of the imaginal to become real and the real imaginal, or, in his own words now,» — la función del término, que no depende de su etimología.
«Fort is proposing here is a kind of imaginal evolution, a biological process driven by an unidentified, and probably unknowable, Imagination.» — la evolución imaginal, con el *probably unknowable* que la acota.
«Such a superpower not only drives biological evolution. It also is at the base and center of psychocultural evolution, an especially elaborate process for Fort that selects out different human potentials and actualizes them when they are needed, that is, when they become “marketable” at a particular time and place» — la extensión a la evolución psicocultural, con el criterio de mercado que Fort usa.
«Evolution is that process that expresses and represses the wild talents latent in us all.» — la evolución fortiana como expresión y represión a la vez.
«He was suggesting, I gather, that these pyropsychic scenes served symbolic purposes, that is, that they were meant to express rage and not cause physical harm.» — lectura de los casos de niños que provocan fuego, marcada con un *I gather*.
«Fort is an evolutionary thinker of sorts, but one who insists on a kind of intelligent design,—an intelligent design, however, without a Designer.» — la fórmula exacta de la ortogénesis fortiana.
«There is no Christian God in his system. We would say now that “God” is an emergent property of a system for Fort: “I am God to the cells that compose me,” he would write» — el lugar de Dios en el sistema, con la frase de Fort.
«He thus prefers to think of the “Geo-system” as a kind of huge egg, an “incubating organism of which this earth is the nucleus.”» — el Geo-system como huevo en incubación.
«Human beings are “cellular units” in this Embryo called Earth. It is all “one integrating organism, and we,” Fort now sings, “have heard its pulse”» — la Tierra como embrión y los humanos como sus células, en el Desarrollo Superembrionario.
«Teleportation is the natural mechanism through which the Super-Embryo of Earth distributes things where they are needed at the moment.» — la teleportación como función distributiva del organismo terrestre, no como prodigio.
«As nineteenth-century documented reports of “manna” in Asia Minor suggested to Fort, the stuff, once needed desperately thousands of years ago, just keeps on falling into the present, despite the fact that no one needs it any longer.» — la crítica de Fort a los fenómenos obsoletos que siguen ocurriendo.
«Fort rejected this idea—why is not clear, as he clearly did think that the common images of God amounted to idiocy, or at least shining Stupidity—but he pressed the point further anyway.» — el editor quiso titular *Lo!* como *God Is an Idiot* y Fort se negó; Kripal declara no saber por qué.
«Fort remains troubled by what happened over those months. He can’t shake the conviction that there was some relationship between his state of mind and all those pictures falling.» — el propio Fort experimentando, y sin poder descartar la relación.
«It is difficult to accuse this man of hubris: Say that I experimented about a thousand times.» — introduce con esa defensa la cita de Fort sobre el número de sus pruebas.
«Thus appears the magical outlines of Fort’s Third Dominant, the era of witchcraft. Whereas this age of materialism, the industrial era, trains young men “to the glory of the job” and convinces them that “all magics, except their own industrial magics, are fakes, superstitions, or newspaper yarns,” Fort dreams of a coming era in which human beings can openly acknowledge, harness, and hone their wild talents (WT 1028» — la era de brujería como Tercer Dominante, contra la magia industrial que la niega.
«Humorously, again as if to protect himself from the implications of his own thought, he imagines “batteries of witches teleported to Nicaragua where speedily they cut a canal by dissolving trees and rocks,”» — las baterías de brujas, y la lectura del humor como protección ante la propia idea.
«But still, what do these things signal, what do they mean? Quite a lot, Fort suggests, for “the knack that tips a table may tilt an epoch” (WT 1045).» — la frase de Fort con que Kripal justifica no descartar el material menor.
«We can smile at such scenes, and laugh at Fort’s outrageousness, not to mention his keen psychological descriptions of the gossip of girls. But there would be many others who would seriously posit something called super-psi. And still others who would dream of similar psychotronic displays, namely, cold war psychic spies and something called “remote viewing.” And they were perfectly serious.» — la broma de Fort como anticipo de programas que existieron de verdad.
«It was in this way that Charles Fort sang his saga with volume and page numbers. It was in this way that he laid the seeds of a Super-Story through those monistic peaches, that marching data of the damned, the philosophy of the hyphen, the New Era of witchcraft, quantum teleportations, super-constructions in the sky, New Lands, falling fishes, galactic colonialism, evolutionary superpowers, and gum-chewing poltergeist girls. By so doing, he set the table for later writers of the anomalous, of the pulp magazines and early science fiction, the UFO, and those most popular of all possessors of wild talents, the American» — el inventario entero de la Super-Historia y su descendencia literaria.
«For now, it is enough to acknowledge that if Charles Fort had any reliable and truly indisputable wild talent, it was his talent as a writer.» — el único talento salvaje que le concede sin reservas.
«In the end, then, the real wizardry of Charles Fort resides not in the turkey-track shop window (although those were pens), or in all those falling apartment pictures, but in those four wonderful books and the weird ways they might reveal hidden patterns and new meanings and so order the world anew for their stunned readers.» — la magia de Fort situada en la escritura y en su efecto sobre el lector.
«If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.» — el cierre del capítulo, en registro coloquial.
«It was not just what Vallee writes, although that is impossible enough.» — abre el capítulo desplazando el interés del contenido a la manera de escribir de Vallee.
«He obviously does not consider time absolute, nor does he idolize local culture as the measure of all things.» — las dos negaciones que Kripal atribuye a Vallee y que lo separan del relativismo cultural.
«Vallee’s comparative imagination adamantly refuses to be located in any single order of knowledge.» — la comparación de Vallee como método sin domicilio disciplinar.
«He is thus dismissive of “the constipated rationalists who are the new arbiters of French thought” (FS 1:192).» — el desprecio de Vallee al racionalismo francés, con sus palabras.
«He similarly scoffs at the Enlightenment rationalist philosophers, who trapped us all in a boring “bureaucratic cage for two centuries” (FS 1:97).» — la jaula burocrática de la Ilustración, en la lectura de Vallee.
«He thus confesses a “lack of faith in the common images of God.”» — la posición de Vallee ante la religión, dicha por él.
«Mysticism, for Vallee, has nothing to do with religion and its doctrinal formulations.» — la separación entre mística y religión que Kripal le adjudica.
«Beyond reason and beyond belief, then, Vallee writes as a man who possesses or, better, is possessed by, a form of secret knowledge or gnosis.» — la gnosis prohibida como posición de escritura, con la corrección de Kripal sobre quién posee a quién.
«His intellectual heroes are men like Nikola Tesla, that modern American wizard who combined future electrical, radar, and radio technologies with occult ideas in ways so weird that they were genius;» — los héroes intelectuales de Vallee, empezando por Tesla.
«It should be stressed that Jacques Vallee’s secret knowledge is not simply a function of his mysticism.» — advierte que el secreto de Vallee es también literal: archivos y acceso.
«Vallee, after all, is a man who worked, in an unofficial capacity, for four years on an independent study of the files of a government project (Project Blue Book) with military professionals and scientists who knew things others did not, should not, and could not know.» — los cuatro años de Vallee sobre los archivos del Project Blue Book.
«Their idea of research was to form commissions composed of rocket scientists and chase UFOs with jet fighters with the intent of shooting one down.» — lo que la burocracia militar entendía por investigación.
«When Vallee writes of the paranormal —and this is what really drew me to his impossible writings—he is not thinking of purely internal states or subjective conditions, however interesting and profound.» — declara qué le atrae de Vallee: que el fenómeno no es solo interior.
«He is thinking of a potentially hostile force that deeply concerned nation-states and their militaries for decades, of an advanced future technology that has easily escaped our best fighter jets, and of a puzzling presence of truly mythological proportions that has secretly shaped our folklore, our religious beliefs, and our cultures for millennia.» — las tres caras del fenómeno en Vallee: militar, tecnológica y mitológica.
«What, after all, we are approaching here is a particular moment in Western cultural history when the mystical and magical qualities of human consciousness became the object of tax-funded secret research programs, where the paranormal became a matter of national security, and where governments tracked occult forces on radar systems and chased them with supersonic planes.» — el desplazamiento que enmarca el capítulo: lo místico convertido en asunto de seguridad nacional.
«We are also approaching the idea of a future technology of folklore through which we might imagine parallel universes and holographic visions projected back through time in order to reprogram our own cultural software, with or without our present permission.» — la tecnología del folklore que da título al capítulo, enunciada en condicional.
«In such a fantastic world, a UFO may remain a physical “object,” while at the same time functioning more like a symbol or metaphysical “window” into another plane or dimension, a portal in space-time through which we imaginally encounter not an alien race from another planet but our own evolved species from another time.» — el ovni como objeto y ventana a la vez, y el encuentro leído como con nuestra propia especie futura.
«Jacques Vallee was a war baby.» — abre la biografía de Vallee por la guerra, nacido en 1939.
«He notes that this was the year that the film The Wizard of Oz and the superhero Batman appeared.» — la coincidencia cultural de 1939 que el propio Vallee anota.
«Vallee thus grew up in postwar France in the 1940s and ’50s, fully aware that there were forces beyond his little neighborhood and country that could have a tremendous impact on his life and world.» — el marco de formación que Kripal le atribuye.
«Later, Muller would deny in a French television interview that astronomers ever see anything but satellites, shooting stars, and planes.» — el episodio de censura en el observatorio francés, con el nombre del director.
«Radar at Washington’s National Airport had tracked a cluster of objects over restricted airspace near the Capitol building.» — el caso de radar sobre el Capitolio, que Kripal consigna como hecho registrado.
«There is no end to such stories of cover-ups, confiscations, even suspicious deaths.» — el volumen del material de encubrimiento en los diarios de Vallee.
«Vallee points out that this had been widely assumed and often alleged, but never effectively proven.» — el estatuto de la acusación antes de los diarios: supuesta, no probada.
«His published journals, he feels, prove it (FS 1:3).» — la pretensión de Vallee, consignada como suya con un *he feels*.
«Vallee’s interest in UFOs began during the European wave of 1954. From France to England to Italy, the headlines and airwaves were filled with stunning and confusing reports. Falling “angel hair” was particularly common in Italy, as it had been at Fátima forty years earlier with the perfectly timed, monthly apparitions of a being from the sky (FS 1:128). During the three-month wave of sightings, Vallee gathered newspaper clippings and glued them into a book.» — el arranque biográfico del interés de Vallee, con el *angel hair* que enlaza con Fátima.
«Michel had argued that such beings, if real, must be so superior to us that anything we think about them carries the intellectual weight of an eight-year-old boy staring at the equations of Einstein’s blackboard.» — la tesis de Aimé Michel sobre la superioridad de los supuestos visitantes.
«Yes, a young Vallee answered back, but even the eight-year-old may grow up and outsmart Einstein.» — la réplica de Vallee, que abre la vía de la mutación cultural de la especie.
«Within two years of meeting him, Vallee would describe Hynek as a “mystical man,” and this despite Hynek’s public persona as an arch-skeptic.» — la doble figura de J. Allen Hynek, escéptico público y místico privado.
«A journalist by the name of Bill Bequette picked up on the last metaphor and coined the expression “flying saucer”» — el origen periodístico del término, y la nota de que las naves de Kenneth Arnold no tenían esa forma.
«Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining concluded that the saucers were indeed “something real and not visionary or fictitious.”» — el veredicto militar temprano, citado con su fuente nombrada.
«Keyhoe, noting the tendency for the saucers to be sighted over military and nuclear facilities, put the matter in its scariest terms: “It looks as though they’re measuring us for a knockout.”» — la lectura alarmista de Donald Keyhoe, consignada como suya.
«By this time, the air force seems to have concluded that, whatever the damned things were, they were not a threat to national security, not an immediate one anyway.» — el saldo oficial, con el *seems* y el *not an immediate one anyway*.
«Most ufologists, however, including Vallee, argue that it was mostly about not studying the phenomenon too deeply, downplaying or simply ignoring the most difficult cases, and calming the public.» — la lectura contraria del Project Blue Book, atribuida a los ufólogos y a Vallee.
«but in fact Hynek, like Lieutenant General Twining, would become convinced of the reality of UFOs—a reality, however, that he was careful not to define in any naively objectivist fashion.» — el giro de Hynek, con la reserva que Kripal subraya sobre qué clase de realidad.
«Vallee worked closely, if unofficially, with Hynek on Project Blue Book for four years, between 1963 and 1967, and played a key role in changing Hynek’s view of the problem.» — el vínculo y las fechas de la colaboración.
«Anatomy of a Phenomenon begins with a historical correction that is in some sense the key to Vallee’s entire corpus on these aerial mysteries.» — el primer libro de Vallee y la corrección que, dice, ordena toda su obra.
«The Basel Broadsheet of 1566 clearly shows dozens of black and white round objects in the sky.» — el pliego de Basilea de 1566 entre los antecedentes gráficos que Jung reprodujo.
«Vallee points out that space travel has only very recently become a technological possibility, hence the earlier accounts were not interpreted, and could not have been interpreted, as ships from outer space.» — el argumento histórico de Vallee: la lectura extraterrestre es reciente aunque el fenómeno no lo sea.
«Vallee was clearly open to the widely held belief that UFOs were evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations attempting contact or, more darkly, reconnaissance.» — la posición temprana de Vallee, que después abandonará.
«Vallee attributes the first truly scientific expression of the theory to Dr. J. E. Lipp, who had written a classified report in 1949 on the subject for the air force’s Project Sign.» — la adjudicación de Vallee al informe clasificado de Lipp.
«Lipp had concluded that visits from Mars, the usual science-fiction scenario, was unlikely at best,» — el descarte de la hipótesis marciana en el informe de 1949.
«Vallee would continue to develop and change his typologies, but his efforts would eventually be superseded by the classification model Hynek developed for the Center for UFO Studies (CUFO), which he then published in his The UFO Experience (1972).» — el relevo de la tipología de Vallee por la de Hynek.
«Hynek was never comfortable with what would become the category of close encounters of the fourth kind (CE4), as in an abduction or onboard experience, which is how Spielberg’s movie really ends, at the base of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming— the new mountain of revelation.» — la incomodidad de Hynek con la cuarta categoría, y la lectura del final de Spielberg.
«As for his part, Vallee would not only accept the necessity of this fourth category as a phenomenological descriptor; he would also add a fifth, that is, close encounters of the fifth kind (CE5), in which humans are physically harmed (or, ironically, healed) in some lasting way by the encounter.» — la quinta categoría que Vallee añade, con daño o curación.
«Hynek remains open to whether their own signal in the noise is of a physical or psychological nature, “or even a heretofore unknown phenomenon” (as we have already seen, this tertium quid or “thought of the third” occurs throughout the literature of the impossible).» — la abstención de Hynek, leída como otro caso del *tertium quid*.
«But he had concluded that there is indeed radium in the pitchblende and that “it is in every respect a challenge to science.”» — la metáfora de Hynek con el radio de Curie: hay señal dentro del ruido.
«Such a folklore approach was not entirely new.» — acota la novedad de *Passport to Magonia* antes de exponerla.
«He imagined “colonies of colonies of colonies,” and he deftly used the mythical memories of contact with European colonizers from North America and sub-Sahara Africa in order to suggest that other “contact myths” may encode ancient encounters with galactic astrononauts, who “would probably be portrayed as having godlike characteristics and possessing supernatural powers.”» — el antecedente de Carl Sagan; el libro imprime *astrononauts* y así se cita.
«Bullard recognizes that Vallee is doing something different here: in his terms now, Vallee’s “message was actually subversive of this standard view and the beginning of a new perspective on UFOs, one that diminished them from the answer for all mysteries to just one offshoot of a large mystery encompassing religion, mythology, folklore, and paranormal experience.”» — la lectura de Thomas E. Bullard sobre lo que Vallee cambia.
«Mathematical theory, Vallee explained to me, often has to confront the fact that two contradictory theories can explain the same data.» — el argumento formal con que Vallee justifica no cerrar la interpretación.
«We cannot begin by assuming what UFOs are.» — la regla de método que Kripal extrae de esa conversación.
«He thus sees his task as one of collection, classification, comparison, and, finally, theorization.» — los cuatro pasos del método de Vallee.
«We are like flies crawling across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: We cannot see what angels and gods lie underneath the threshold of our perceptions.» — la imagen de las moscas en la Capilla Sixtina, que Kripal usa a dos filos.
«The other suggests that, if we could fly back a bit and obtain a true historical consciousness, this might constitute a true gnosis, that is, an effective deliverance from culture and consciousness as they presently co-create (and co-constrict) themselves.» — el segundo filo: la conciencia histórica como gnosis posible.
«They are not what they appear to be.» — la fórmula corta sobre los ovnis en *Passport to Magonia*.
«Deception and absurdity, Vallee insists now with a growing conviction, are part of what the phenomenon is communicating, what it intends to teach us about the nature of our world.» — el absurdo como mensaje y no como ruido, en Vallee.
«Hence those humorous, nonsensical, but vaguely profound statements made by the occupants of the American “airship” wave of 1897, widely reported in the newspapers across the country. Here is one: “We are from Kansas.” Here is another: “We are from ANYWHERE, but we’ll be in Cuba tomorrow” (IC 29). A technological koan in the sky. A metaphysical joke.» — la ola de aeronaves de 1897 leída como koan tecnológico.
«This is a different man writing in 1969, or perhaps it is the same man allowing himself to write now in a very different way. The statistics, databases, and scientific methodology of the two first books now float into the background, and a distinct and quite beautiful lyricism enters the text.» — el cambio de escritura que hace de Vallee, para Kripal, un autor de lo imposible.
«men whom Vallee praises as “remarkable for the strength of their independent thinking,” who belonged to “a major current of thought distinct from official religion” (PM 10).» — a quiénes elogia Vallee en el episodio de Agobardo: a los campesinos que creían en Magonia, no al arzobispo.
«The recognition of a parallel between UFO reports and the main themes of fairy-lore is the first indication I have found that a way might exist out of this dilemma [of the UFO phenomenon],” Vallee explains (PM 111).» — el paralelo con la tradición feérica como salida del dilema, en palabras de Vallee y con el corchete del libro.
«They point to something else, or to somewhere and somewhen else.» — la fórmula de Kripal para el estatuto de los relatos: señalan a otra parte y a otro cuándo.
«Vallee concludes: “It would be nice to hold on to the common belief that the UFO’s are craft from a superior space-civilization, because this is a hypothesis that science fiction has made widely acceptable” (PM 56).» — la concesión de Vallee a la hipótesis extraterrestre antes de retirarla.
«But this cannot be a complete answer. Why? Because the theory looks too much like a belief.» — la razón por la que Vallee descarta la respuesta extraterrestre.
«Vallee locates the UFO phenomenon squarely in the history of religions, where the human witness “is the only tangible vehicle of the story” (PM 44).» — el testigo humano como único vehículo tangible del relato.
«We are not who we seem to be. We are alien to ourselves (PM 57).» — el desplazamiento del extraño: de la nave al observador.
«Vallee also wishes to make a historian’s point, namely, that we have a very unique opportunity before us, an opportunity to observe and study folklore in the making.» — el folklore en formación como objeto de observación directa.
«Sulphur indeed. We read, for example, of a “parallel universe” called Elfland where time operates in an Einsteinian fashion way before Einstein.» — el material feérico leído como física anticipada, en el archivo de Vallee.
«His library includes an entire section dedicated to the history of erotic mysticism and sexual magic, with everything from Aleister Crowley and Tantra to Wonder Woman.» — el inventario de la biblioteca de Vallee, que Kripal visitó.
«It is also worth noting in this context that Vallee’s beloved wife, Janine, appears in his journals, always beautifully and graciously.» — el dato personal que Kripal introduce junto al material erótico.
«Vallee insists that the sexual component is central to the alien narratives, and that it points again to the history of folklore and religion, this time to the folklore of witchcraft and sexual magic.» — la centralidad del sexo en los relatos, y hacia dónde apunta según Vallee.
«Vallee features what is probably the most famous case of such alien sexual encounters: the Brazilian episode of Antonio Villas-Boas, first reported in English in 1965 in three separate issues of Flying Saucer Review.» — el caso Villas-Boas con su procedencia editorial.
«The case of Barney and Betty Hill, a mixed-race couple from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is equally bizarre and equally important, as theirs is the first fully documented abduction account in the literature.» — el caso Hill como primera abducción documentada.
«The event was not as sexualized as the Villas-Boas case, but it did involve classical (and absurdly primitive) surgical procedures that appear to carry reproductive connotations.» — la diferencia entre los dos casos, con la valoración de Kripal entre paréntesis.
«It would be quite easy, of course, to read all of this as some kind of simple shared hallucination, the result of too much driving on a mesmerizing dark highway in the middle of the night later called up and constructed by hypnosis.» — enuncia la lectura reductora del caso Hill antes de rechazarla.
«It would be easy, but wrong.» — el rechazo, en una línea.
«Vallee’s conclusion about the sexual component of such incredible stories is something of an ironic understatement: “For Villas-Boas or Betty and Barney Hill would certainly have had a hard time before the Inquisitors if they had lived in the seventeenth century” (PM 124).» — la conclusión irónica de Vallee, que enlaza abducción y proceso de brujería.
«It acts like a material myth, a physical dream.» — la fórmula de Kripal para lo que combinan los casos Hill y Villas-Boas.
«Vallee is certain of only one thing now, namely, that science is not up to the task of explaining the UFO phenomenon.» — la única certeza que atribuye a Vallee en esta etapa.
«It is rather “an instance of a deeper problem,” which is to say that it is a paranormal problem (PM 157).» — el ovni subsumido en el problema paranormal más amplio.
«Vallee rejects such speculations as scientifically groundless, but one suspects—I do anyway—that he is more drawn to this kind of impossible science-fiction thinking than he will allow himself to admit in print here.» — desacuerdo declarado con Vallee, y marcado como sospecha propia.
«(1) that the behavior of a superior intelligence, whether from the stars or from some other dimension of this planet, would not necessary appear sensible to our own cognitive and sensory capacities;» — primera de las tres proposiciones que cierran *Passport to Magonia*; el libro imprime *necessary*.
«(2) that the puzzle of time and, I assume, the possibility of time-travel, renders intergalactic or multiple-earth scenarios more, not less, likely;» — segunda proposición, con el *I assume* que Kripal añade de su cuenta.
«(3) the subject of UFOs as a whole suggests “a myth that could be utilized to serve political or sociological purposes” (PM 162).» — tercera proposición: el mito ovni como herramienta política.
«Vallee does not claim to know whether such a cosmic hoax is being perpetrated by an alien race from another planet, or by our own race from a distant time in the future or from another dimension right now.» — la abstención de Vallee sobre el origen del engaño.
«He states very clearly that his speculations “will contradict both the ideas of the believers and the assumptions of the skeptics” (IC 28).» — Vallee declarando que su posición incomoda a los dos bandos.
«Vallee seems to have in mind a kind of cosmic Puppet Master, a “manufacturer of unavoidable events,” as he puts it in one of his short stories, who pulls the strings of history from above and prevents us from developing our own psychic potentials.» — el sistema de control leído como titiritero cósmico, con la frase de la ficción de Vallee.
«It is not an easy thing to entertain the possibility that one’s deepest-held beliefs are mechanisms of control, that one is bound, defined, and restricted by one’s own, largely unconscious, categories, that one is secretly a puppet or, to employ the more modern neuroscientific reductionism, that we are all biological robots programmed to believe that we are not robots.» — el costo de la tesis del control, y su paralelo con el reduccionismo neurocientífico.
«Moreover, they maneuver in ways that violate the most basic laws of possible flight patterns, which renders a term like “flying” equally suspect.» — la razón por la que Vallee desarma el propio nombre del objeto.
«Second, UFOs have been active throughout human history, always appearing and acting in the cultural terms of the place and time.» — segunda tesis de *The Invisible College*: el fenómeno se viste de su época.
«Third, the structure of space-time as we know it implies that the question “Where do they come from?” may be meaningless, and may be better asked as “When do they come from?”» — tercera tesis: el desplazamiento del dónde al cuándo.
«Fourth, the key to the UFO phenomenon “lies in the psychic effects it produces (or the psychic awareness it makes possible) in its observers.”» — cuarta tesis: la clave está en el efecto sobre el testigo.
«Fifth and finally, Vallee sees meaning in the absurdity of the narratives, a meaning he will call the metalogic of the encounter stories.» — quinta tesis: el absurdo como *metalogic*.
«Such a metalogic, which appears as absurdity from the outside, more or less guarantees that the encounters will be rejected by the elite members of the target society (that is, by professional academics and scientists)» — el absurdo como camuflaje que asegura el rechazo de las élites.
«The fact that we have no methodology to deal with such an impact is only an indication of how little we know about our own psychic world.» — el vacío de método leído como dato sobre nosotros, no sobre el fenómeno.
«Vallee also intuits profound similarities between UFO abductions and “the initiation rituals of secret societies.”» — el paralelo entre abducción e iniciación.
«He can see no better way to explain the data and the clear “pattern of manifestations, opening the gates to a spiritual level, pointing a way to a different consciousness, and producing irrational, absurd events in their wake.”» — el patrón que Vallee dice no poder explicar mejor de otro modo.
«Vallee happily ignores such exclusions and treats the two damned fields together, essentially doubling (if not squaring) the provocations of his thought.» — el cruce de ufología e investigación psíquica, que ambas comunidades evitaban.
«The second point to make is that the psychic technology Vallee imagines depends on the manipulation of time as well as space.» — la tecnología psíquica de Vallee opera sobre el tiempo, no solo sobre el espacio.
«Such a hypothesis—which is a common trope in science fiction, not to mention well within the imagination, if not the present technology, of contemporary physics—implies that these need not be space aliens from another planet.» — la consecuencia: los visitantes podrían venir del futuro y no de otro planeta.
«Vallee once thought that science was enough, that it would eventually recognize the reality of paranormal phenomena and so generously and definitively expand our conception of what it means to be human.» — la esperanza inicial de Vallee, que Kripal presenta como abandonada.
«Science cannot supply the key to our psychic crisis.» — el veredicto al que llega Vallee.
«Its strict commitment to a method that only recognizes objects prevents it from even admitting the presence of psychical phenomena, which are objects and subjects at the same time.» — la razón estructural del fracaso del método, en la exposición de Kripal.
«Nor, though, will we find our answer “in some secret file in Washington.”» — el otro descarte de Vallee: tampoco el archivo secreto tiene la respuesta.
«The solution to our psychic crisis, he suggests in the very last lines of the book, “lies where it has always been: within ourselves. We can reach it any time we want” (IC 209).» — el cierre de *The Invisible College*, citado en su sitio.
«The first program was something called the Augmentation of the Human Intellect, for which Vallee worked for a little over one year,» — el primero de los programas de SRI en que Vallee participó.
«Vallee quickly grew disillusioned with such people once he realized how little they actually knew about paranormal subjects and how impossible it was to ever really know who was telling the truth.» — la desilusión de Vallee con la burocracia militar y de inteligencia.
«It all struck him as a very silly and childish game.» — el juicio de Vallee sobre ese mundo, reportado por Kripal.
«Historically speaking, this program was originally set up by Stanford alumn Harold Puthoff in the spring of 1972.» — el origen del programa de SRI, con la grafía *alumn* del libro.
«Swann arrived only to learn that they wanted to see if he could manipulate the recorded output of a superconducting magnetometer or quark detector, a kind of supersensitive compass used to register subtle magnetic fields that was located in a vault below the building.» — la primera prueba a Ingo Swann, con el aparato descrito y su blindaje.
«To the great puzzlement of the physicists, Swann successfully and dramatically altered the output of the magnetometer in their presence.» — el resultado que Kripal reporta como reportado por los físicos.
«Pat Price, their other star seer, remotely viewed a supersecret site, even noting the codes and labels on some important files locked inside cabinets.» — el caso de Pat Price, segundo vidente del programa.
«In the privacy of his journals, he could even speculate in a kind of techgnostic code about “a level of reality where information is common to all beings.”» — la especulación privada de Vallee sobre un nivel de información compartida.
«Vallee essentially argued here that the human mind needed some such address to locate what it was seeking, even if it were an artificial or “virtual” one (FS 2:196).» — el aporte conceptual de Vallee al programa: la idea de dirección.
«The group eventually adopted this idea, at first using longitude and latitude coordinates (which are arbitrary artificial constructs anyway) and later, at least in the Stargate Program at Fort Meade, shifting to arbitrary computer-generated numbers after the unusual discovery that, indeed, the nature of the “address” did not matter.» — el hallazgo de que la dirección podía ser arbitraria.
«Geller attributed his powers to a childhood encounter that he had at four or five in a Tel Aviv city garden, where a beam of light» — el origen que Uri Geller da a sus capacidades, consignado como atribución suya.
«Historians of American religion have not even begun to process and evaluate these histories, which is rather odd given the base fact that the entire program was founded on what is essentially a religious presupposition, namely, that human consciousness is not bound to the body or brain.» — el reproche a su propio gremio: el programa descansa en un supuesto religioso sin estudiar.
«Consider the case of Joseph McMoneagle. In a stunning second chapter of his book Mind Trek, McMoneagle describes collapsing in an Austrian restaurant in 1970 and finding himself floating above the street in the rain outside.» — introduce el caso de McMoneagle como su ejemplo extremo.
«It would be easy, of course, for the skeptic to declare all of this “purely subjective,” except for the historical fact that Joseph McMoneagle, empowered by these unimaginable metaphysical energies, returned to life as commanded and became the premiere remote viewer for the U.S. government’s secret paranormal program.» — el argumento con que rechaza la lectura puramente subjetiva: el hecho histórico posterior.
«Now he could do things like remote view, in 1979, the interior of an immense Soviet Naval structure in northern Russia, including a weird submarine inside that fit no present standard. He also estimated the launch to be about four months in the future.» — la predicción sobre el submarino soviético, con su fecha.
«McMoneagle had his “I told you so” moment, though. About four months later, within just a few days of his prediction, American spy satellites showed the never-before-seen Typhoon submarine (560 feet long) being floated out to sea through a channel the Soviets had recently dug from the building to the icy waters.» — el desenlace del caso, con las cifras que da el libro.
«Physicist Edwin May, who directed the remote viewing research from 1985 until 1995 and worked very closely with McMoneagle, described his friend and colleague to me as “the most certified psychic in the country.”» — el testimonio de Edwin May, recogido por Kripal en primera persona.
«In 1984, it awarded McMoneagle a Legion of Merit for “producing crucial and vital intelligence unavailable from any other source.”» — el reconocimiento oficial, citado con su formulación.
«Reason and faith had abandoned him, and he was left alone now, very alone, in his difficult gnosis.» — la posición de Vallee tras dejar SRI.
«There were some major well-established academics who quietly supported him, usually behind the scenes.» — el apoyo académico existió, pero sin publicarse.
«But, for the most part, Vallee and Hynek were alone in their published convictions.» — el aislamiento de los dos en letra impresa.
«The book antagonized his closest colleagues in ufology and left other researchers completely puzzled.» — el efecto de *Messengers of Deception* sobre su propio campo.
«Even the channeled aliens didn’t like it.» — la ironía con que reporta las objeciones canalizadas al libro.
«They asked him, through a friend named Valerie, to change the title, which they apparently found offensive.» — el detalle del episodio, consignado con su cadena de transmisión.
«He had, however, become more convinced of the multidimensionality of the cosmos;» — la dirección en que evoluciona el pensamiento de Vallee en los ochenta y noventa.
«Confrontations suggests something equally discomforting, namely, that sometimes “We are hunted for.”» — la variante de Vallee sobre la frase de Fort: no pescados, cazados.
«Deer hunters in the Parnarama region of Brazil sit in hammocks in trees at night and use flashlights to hunt for deer in the brush below. In the early 1980s, these deer hunters began reporting incidents of being caught in the bright beams of “chupas” hovering above them.» — los casos brasileños de los *chupas*, expuestos con su escena.
«Another, named Raimundo Souza, was not so lucky. His hunting partner described how when Raimundo struck a match in their hammock one night, a chupa immediately appeared above them, as if the match had revealed their position. The partner climbed down in terror and hid in the bushes all night long. The next morning he found his partner dead on the ground, with purple marks on his body.» — el caso con muerte, narrado con la fuente del relato declarada.
«Vallee is careful to note that the cause of death in such cases is seldom clear.» — la cautela de Vallee ante esos mismos casos.
«Dr. Wellaide Cecim Carvalho de Oliveira chose to stay. She shared with Vallee the odd symptoms she treated over and over. Her patients all had the same story, which was basically a version of that of the deer hunters. A weird immobilizing beam about one inch in diameter would hit them, always on the upper body. Blackened wounds of red or purple would appear immediately. Hair would fall out the next day. Within a week, they were fine, though.» — el testimonio médico de la doctora Carvalho de Oliveira, con su cuadro clínico y su desenlace.
«The objects were never alone. On numerous photographs taken by journalists they are seen accompanied by smaller probes.» — la ola de Colares de 1977, con los objetos y sus sondas menores.
«Vallee states that the latter are now buried in some military drawer and that an unnamed American firm purchased the entire set of photographic negatives from the Brazilian newspapers: “Somebody in the United States owns a collection» — el destino del archivo fotográfico según Vallee, consignado como afirmación suya.
«The signal is not only lost in the noise. It is completely drowned out by the noise.» — la metáfora de Hynek llevada a su extremo.
«1990, then, he discovered that he was something of an underground legend, and that Passport to Magonia had been circulating for years in samizdat form, that is, in a retyped version secretly distributed among trusted friends and close colleagues.» — la difusión clandestina de Vallee en la Unión Soviética.
«He learned that many Soviet intellectuals were comfortable with his control-system thesis, which they had picked up from The Invisible College (“invisible colleges are second-nature to us,” one of them noted, no doubt with a smile» — la recepción soviética de la tesis del sistema de control.
«When the New York Times picked up on one Russian sighting and subsequent site visit that included the biolocation technique, they printed it as “bilocation,” thus rendering an already puzzling news event virtually meaningless.» — el error de traducción de *biolocación* a *bilocación*, consignado como tal.
«The epilogue to the latter edition is a concise summary of his mature gnosis, which was still defined by an impossible double conviction: in the metaphysical reality of Magonia, and in the foolishness of accepting the standard ufological readings.» — la doble convicción que atribuye al Vallee maduro.
«The ufonauts, he wrote now, “continue to behave like the absurd denizens of bad Hollywood movies,” and their “technology is a simulacrum—and a very bad one at that—of obsolete human biological and engineering notions”» — el juicio de Vallee sobre los ufonautas, citado literal.
«It was French author Jacques Bergier (whom we will meet below, in chapter 4, as the coauthor of the immensely influential 1960s Fortean classic The Morning of the Magicians), who pushed Vallee in the 1970s to see that the main lesson to learn from the UFO phenomenon was that the universe we live in is not single, not one (uni-).» — de dónde le viene a Vallee el multiverso, con el enlace al capítulo de Méheust.
«He also thought that Western esoteric traditions “flow from the same idea”» — el esoterismo occidental leído por Vallee como una misma corriente.
«It is at the level of multiple universes and control systems of consciousness that the UFO phenomenon becomes scientifically interesting, not at the simplistic level of a search for the ‘propulsion system’ of unidentified flying objects”» — dónde sitúa Vallee el interés científico del asunto.
«The first Vallean secret constitutes what we might call the gnosis of the future.» — el primero de los dos secretos, nombrado por Kripal.
«The second Vallean secret is very much related to the first.» — el segundo, la gnosis de la multidimensionalidad, presentado como derivado del primero.
«They cannot be exhausted by reason or context.» — dicho de los sucesos religiosos: ni la razón ni el contexto los agotan.
«We are so many “electromagnetic chauvinists,” as Michael Murphy likes to put it.» — el término que toma de Michael Murphy para la estrechez perceptiva.
«He is not an electromagnetic chauvinist.» — lo que, según Kripal, distingue a Vallee del resto.
«His journals, for example, are peppered with examples of tantalizing precognitive dreams and remarkable synchronicities or what he calls “intersigns,” the latter which he takes as evidence that reality itself—very much like a Freudian dream—is “overdetermined.”» — los *intersigns* y la sobredeterminación de lo real, en vocabulario freudiano.
«One does not explain or “prove” such thinking to others.» — el límite de comunicabilidad que Kripal atribuye a esa forma de pensar.
«He told me quite simply that he does not believe in “the God of the Bible.”» — la posición de Vallee sobre el Dios bíblico, dicha a Kripal en persona.
«He accepts the ambiguous and always fallible historical record that something happened, that is, that a series of profound religious events occurred, which were then recorded in scriptures by way of human memory and community.» — lo que Vallee sí concede al registro escriturario.
«We need not believe in the literal existence of aliens—do not misread me here—in order to recognize and admire the boldness of such a move.» — la advertencia de lectura que Kripal intercala, contra la interpretación literal.
«It is quite another to come up with an explanation for all those spinning disks, or to realize the theological implications of what is being suggested, symbolically, through such an alien hermeneutics.» — separa el registro del hecho de la implicación teológica de la hermenéutica alienígena.
«As a consequence, they come up with impossible ideas that, if taken seriously, “could bring Theory to its knees” (FS 1:128).» — lo que estaría en juego si se tomaran en serio esas ideas.
«It calls into serious question “the entire history of human belief, the very genesis of religion,» — el alcance de la puesta en cuestión, con las palabras de Vallee.
«Jewish tradition, Vallee notes, forbade the study of the chariot until the scholar was over thirty.» — el dato que Vallee toma de la mística de la *merkabah* y de Scholem.
«Vallee was first introduced to the Rosicrucian tradition in college at the Sorbonne, when a young woman with whom he had many philosophical conversations approached him one day after her grandmother’s death.» — el origen biográfico del rosacrucismo de Vallee.
«Hynek spoke passionately and often, if usually in private, of a twenty-first-century science that would take the paranormal seriously and so free us from our own present cultural provincialism (FS 1:5).» — el programa que Hynek sostenía en privado, según los diarios de Vallee.
«He pursued an active interest in truly anomalous phenomena and became fascinated with parapsychology, especially the alcoholic psychic Ted Serios, whose impossible ability to imprint images on photographic film psychoanalyst Jules Eisenbud has documented and philosopher Stephen Braude has analyzed, both with great care (FS 1:240).» — el interés de Hynek por Serios, que enlaza el capítulo con la introducción del libro.
«He was nineteen when he authored these lines.» — la edad de Vallee al escribir su rechazo del condicionamiento conductual.
«Vallee insists that he has not lost his hope that “someday we will be able to sort out the signal from the noise and get to work on the real UFO phenomenon” (FS 1:208» — la esperanza que Vallee declara conservar.
«The believer’s mistake is to ascribe meaning and credence to the secondary perception, the mental image created by our brain to account for the stimulus.» — el error del creyente en el esquema de la percepción secundaria.
«The skeptic’s mistake is to deny the reality of the stimulus altogether, simply because the secondary perception seems absurd to him or her.» — el error simétrico del escéptico.
«Which is to say that real progress lies in the attitude of the gnostic, the man or woman who does not confuse the two-dimensional shadows on the flat cave wall with the “other dimension” outside, who understands that symbols are just that» — la actitud gnóstica leída con la alegoría de la caverna.
«He has also shared with me a more personal fact, namely, that, although he has known some successful remote-viewing experiments, most of his own mystical experiences, which have involved intimations of the future, have inevitably come to him during writing.» — el dato con que Kripal une a Vallee a su tesis del autor de lo imposible: la experiencia llega escribiendo.
«He proposed an analogy, the analogy of stained glass for what he called “hermeneutics in action,” that is, an interpretation of higher-level symbols from the point of view, and for the benefit, of the common person. He spoke specifically of how stained-glass windows are able to refract an infinite cosmic light that has traveled from untold distances and times before it takes shape in the glass and is able to express itself in the human symbolic language of metaphor, symbol, and word.» — la analogía del vitral, propuesta por el propio Vallee y expuesta entera.
«He also spoke about how the light of the imaged windows is never the same.» — la variabilidad de la luz como parte de la analogía.
«Here are the central symbols of his literary corpus and his mystical life on display, in full living color, no less.» — los cinco vitrales que Vallee fabricó para su estudio.
«Everything that takes place in that room is thus truly and literally sub rosa.» — la rosa del vitral leída al pie de la letra: cuanto pasa ahí es *sub rosa*.
«He is holding a book in his hand entitled—what else?—Magonia, as he blesses a man» — el vitral del obispo Agobardo con el libro *Magonia*.
«I must admit that I understood little of this.» — la abstención de Kripal ante la simbología personal de Vallee.
«It was clear to me that, for Jacques Vallee, there is a cosmic light shining through the earthy metaphors» — lo que sí declara haber entendido.
«The paranormal is very real, although it is always refracted, reflected, and filtered through the magical structures of human consciousness» — la fórmula que cierra el capítulo: real y filtrado a la vez.
«Sometimes, however, just sometimes, our cave wall becomes a stained glass window» — la excepción que salva la analogía de la caverna, con su doble acotación.
«They have been granted a passport to Magonia.» — el cierre del capítulo tercero.
«Now the problem is not the movie. It is the people watching the movie, who do not yet know that they are watching a movie.» — el desplazamiento del problema del fenómeno al observador.
«Unlike Jacques Vallee and despite his own intense interest in the subject, our fourth and final author of the impossible, Bertrand Méheust, has never seen a UFO.» — presenta a Méheust por lo que no tiene: experiencia directa del fenómeno.
«comparativist who sees connections where others do not and cannot.» — la definición de Méheust; el libro parte con guion la palabra que antecede, *super-*.
«He also attracts them to himself through his existential openness to a universe in which everything is really and truly connected.» — la apertura existencial como causa, no solo como disposición.
«Bertrand Méheust practices what I have called a hermeneutical mysticism, which is to say that he experiences the world as a series of signs or meaning events to read, interpret, and then write out again in his own written work.» — la mística hermenéutica aplicada a Méheust, con el término declarado como propio.
«And as he reads and writes, he is read and written.» — la reciprocidad que sostiene el título del libro.
«I end my chapter reflections with Bertrand Méheust, then, not simply because most of his books appear after those of our first three authors of the impossible (although he and Jacques Vallee are really contemporaries), but also because his intellectual training and hermeneutical—really Hermetic— sensibilities are extremely close to my own.» — la razón declarada del orden del libro: cercanía intelectual, no cronología.
«The first part of our double premise involves the claim that the humanities have something important to offer the study of psychical and paranormal phenomena.» — primera mitad de la premisa doble del capítulo.
«The second part of our double premise involves the claim that psychical and paranormal phenomena have something important to offer the humanities, that such phenomena can help bring the humanities back to consciousness, if you will.» — segunda mitad, que da título al capítulo.
«The simple truth is that we have quite a few ideas and some general consensus about what culture is, but no real idea, no real consensus about what consciousness is.» — la asimetría de la que sale la reducción de conciencia a cultura.
«When, then, intellectuals try to create comparative systems that can relate consciousness to culture and culture to consciousness, they naturally falter and fall back into cultural systems, that is, into things we know something about, like discursive practices, histories, social systems, power, and politics.» — el mecanismo del defecto, descrito sin acusar a nadie.
«Basically, they reduce consciousness to culture.» — el resultado, en una línea.
«Psychical and paranormal phenomena, on the other hand, strongly suggest that certain, very special forms of human consciousness are in actual fact not reducible to local cultures, even if they must finally express themselves in the terms and languages of those very cultures.» — la irreductibilidad afirmada con su concesión inmediata a la cultura.
«Quite the contrary, the humanist study of consciousness is practiced by consciousness.» — la circularidad que impide un punto de Arquímedes para el humanista.
«We are veritable wizards endowed with almost unbelievable powers to shape new worlds of experience and realize different aspects of the real.» — la conclusión que extrae de Méheust, con su límite en la frase anterior: moldeamos sin determinar.
«He would go on to complete an M.A. in 1981, for which he wrote a thesis on William James.» — la formación académica de Méheust, con James como primer objeto.
«It was Michel, in fact, who helped Méheust find a publisher for his first book on flying saucers and science fiction, which appeared in March of 1978, after which both men engaged in a long and fruitful correspondence.» — el papel de Aimé Michel en la publicación del primer libro de Méheust.
«thought in cosmic terms and looked upon humanity as a transitional species evolving toward a spiritual identification with the entire universe.» — la visión cósmica de Aimé Michel: la humanidad como especie de tránsito.
«observed his fellow playmates, with whom he could not play, as entranced “somnambulists” acting out a dreamlike social script» — el origen biográfico de esa mirada, en la infancia con polio de Michel.
«stressed the limits of human knowledge and our fundamental inability to understand what might be at stake in something like a UFO or a truly alien form of consciousness.» — el lado pesimista de Michel, que corta contra su propio optimismo evolutivo.
«He was also appalled by what Méheust calls “the mystery of cosmic evil,” and especially “the absolute scandal” of the suffering of animals.» — el sufrimiento cósmico que queda fuera de la síntesis de Michel, dicho con las palabras de Méheust.
«He eventually came to the conclusion that physics and science as a whole are the richest and most promising veins of a new mystical worldview.» — dónde situaba Michel la vena de una nueva mística.
«Louis Pauwels was a French editor and publisher who, with his collaborator, the chemical engineer and former Resistance fighter Jacques Bergier, published Le Matin des Magiciens in 1960.» — la ficha del libro que funda el renacimiento forteano francés.
«Although the invocation of magic and a certain cosmic spirituality were the primary rhetorical strategies here, what these authors were really proposing was what they called a fantastic realism.» — separa la retórica mágica del programa efectivo de Pauwels y Bergier.
«Bergier were ultimately after, then, was precisely what Fort represented for them, that is, “a new mental structure”» — lo que Pauwels y Bergier buscaban en Fort: una estructura mental nueva.
«They tell us that the phrase itself, fantastic realism, was indebted to both the surrealism of André Breton, whom Pauwels describes as “a very great friend,” and the general methods of Charles Fort, whom the authors openly acknowledge as “one of our most cherished idols,”» — la doble deuda declarada del realismo fantástico: Breton y Fort.
«I am not speculating here. I am simply taking the authors at their word.» — declara que la genealogía no es reconstrucción suya sino declaración de los autores.
«A deep mystical humanism, or what they called “That Infinity Called Man,” constitutes one of the deepest messages of the book.» — el humanismo místico como mensaje de *Le Matin des Magiciens*.
«Whereas Breton, for example, had explored the Freudian regions of sleep and the unconscious, Pauwels and Bergier were now exploring “their very opposites: the regions of ultra» — el giro del sueño a la vigilia; el libro parte con guion la palabra *ultra-conscience*.
«Central to this awakened state—the constant phrase invokes Gurdjieff—was the realization that the line between the imaginary and the real is a very thin one, that reality seen truly is truly fantastic.» — el estado despierto, con la fuente gurdjieffiana de la fórmula anotada.
«To employ the language of the British psychical researcher Hilary Evans, what we appear to have here is neither exactly fiction nor pure fact. It is “faction.”» — el término *faction* tomado de Hilary Evans para la narrativa ovni.
«The same could be said, of course, about that strange fusion of fact and fiction we call “religion.”» — extiende la categoría a la religión misma.
«And indeed, like Vallee before him, Méheust is very clear that the UFO phenomenon manifests all sorts of folkloric, religious, and spiritual themes.» — la continuidad entre Vallee y Méheust en este punto.
«Through his association with the S.P.R., he had become convinced that the extraordinary transformations of the body (stigmata, luminosities, seeming imperviousness to pain or fire, various magical or psychical powers, even apparent human flight in the cases of Teresa of Avila and Joseph of Copertino) reported in the hagiographical literature were real.» — la posición del jesuita Herbert Thurston sobre los fenómenos hagiográficos.
«Sometimes, moreover, the parallels were nearly exact, as for example when St. Francis was “zapped” by the beams of light that bestowed on him his stigmata wounds (UFO encounters often zap people with beams of light and leave odd scars or wounds).» — el paralelo entre estigmas y haces luminosos de los encuentros.
«Méheust began to suspect that just as Christian mysticism had produced a certain type of fictional literature that clearly exaggerates but also preserves the experiences of the saints, so too the UFO phenomenon produces a certain type of fictional literature, science fiction, that exaggerates but also preserves the experiences of the witnesses and contactees.» — la proporción comparativa de Méheust, expuesta entera.
«The science-fiction literature, however, was written for cheap adolescent entertainment and was generally not known by the later abductees.» — el dato que impide reducir la abducción a lectura previa de ciencia ficción.
«Contrary to first expectations, whereby one would simply reduce the later abductions to the earlier cultural fantasies that had entered the public realm, Méheust’s own understanding of this morphing of science fiction into occult experience is much more complicated, as he sees these alien narratives as engaging real metaphysical ground and as being dependent on the earlier imaginal frame of science fiction.» — la posición de Méheust: dependencia del marco imaginal y suelo metafísico real a la vez.
«They clearly cannot be reduced to subjective fantasies. But they also, just as clearly, behave like dreams, like myths or “super-dreams” seen in the sky (SF 117, 200, 215, 229, 289, 296).» — las dos negativas simultáneas, con los locators internos de Méheust.
«Méheust thus refuses, like a good author of the fantastic, to allow the reader to settle into any comfortable conclusion concerning the final nature of the experiences under discussion.» — la indecisión como técnica deliberada, no como falta de tesis.
«We have more than enough evidence, up to eighty thousand cases reported around the world, Méheust notes.» — la cifra de casos que Méheust maneja.
«And yet we have nothing, not a single piece of incontrovertible evidence.» — la otra mitad de la paradoja probatoria.
«Working much like a mystical text, they reveal themselves only to conceal themselves.» — el ovni leído con la lógica del texto místico.
«Apparently, they can never be known as they are.» — el límite, marcado con un *apparently*.
«Whatever it is, it exists “before all determination” (SF 19, 33» — la *chose innommable* anterior a toda determinación.
«Accordingly, the UFO phenomenon creates epistemological conditions that are inherently solipsistic, circular, and maddeningly paradoxical for those who attempt to engage it (SF 277» — las condiciones epistemológicas que el fenómeno impone a quien lo estudia.
«They can also be scarily mimetic, as, for example, when they literally hunt hunters or fish for fishermen, as we saw with Vallee’s study of the Latin American cases (SF 201, 203).» — el carácter mimético, enlazado con los casos brasileños del capítulo anterior.
«Méheust avoids both of these rationalist and religious extremes, consistently arguing instead for a richer and more nuanced position.» — el rechazo simultáneo del reduccionismo subjetivista y del objetivismo ingenuo.
«Whatever they are, UFOs “vibrate in phase” with our forms of consciousness and culture.» — la fórmula de Méheust sobre la sincronía entre fenómeno y conciencia.
«But what if the observer is the very mode of the apparition?» — la pregunta que desarma el protocolo de observación.
«He felt that this absurdity was not accidental or meaningless, that it was somehow part of the message.» — el absurdo como parte del mensaje, no como ruido, en Méheust.
«Aimé Michel highlights the same in his preface to Méheust’s book, “Requiem pour des chiméres trés anciennes” (“Requiem for Some Very Old Chimeras”), a potent little gnostic essay in which the author expresses his disgust with “the ideologues and the theologians,” that is, with the representatives of reason and faith, neither of whom, he suggests, have really confronted the facts of the case at hand.» — el prefacio de Michel, con la grafía francesa que imprime el libro.
«But does not this nonsense itself make sense? Is not this genre of absurdity entirely appropriate, even expected, before the possible presence of another thought (SF 68)?» — la pregunta de Michel que convierte el sinsentido en indicio.
«Hence Michel’s fantastic realist mantra, which is also Méheust’s mantra, “to envisage everything and to believe nothing” (SF 323).» — la consigna de método compartida por maestro y discípulo.
«For Méheust, the symbolic function is about communication between different orders of reality, orders so different that they cannot communicate to one another in any» — la función simbólica como puente entre órdenes heterogéneos.
«There can be no direct or one-to-one translation, not because the process is being intentionally deceptive or ridiculous, but because a fisherman is trying to talk to a fish.» — la imagen que explica el absurdo sin recurrir al engaño.
«Méheust thus notes the central role of “bubbles”» — las burbujas cristalinas como símbolo recurrente en las dos literaturas.
«“encasements” common in both the sci-fi and encounter literatures.» — la continuación del mismo pasaje; el libro parte con guion la palabra que antecede.
«Such symbols are relays, as it were, from something invisible and structurally unknowable, something truly alien, to our own local forms of culture and consciousness» — el símbolo como relé entre lo desconocido y lo local.
«It also, alas, renders the possible impossible to the extent that a culture or a person loses the ability to think symbolically.» — la pérdida del pensamiento simbólico como causa de lo imposible.
«This, Méheust points out, is simply to mistake our own cultural moment—which happens to be imbued by a modern sci-fi register and a cold war space race—as somehow privileged and absolute, that is, as applicable to all place and time in the universe.» — el error de literalizar: tomar el registro propio por universal.
«They are not literal messages. They are not what they seem to be.» — la consecuencia inmediata para los mensajes de los ocupantes.
«In essence, Méheust suggests, the UFO occupants do not behave like biological creatures.» — el argumento contra la lectura biológica de los ocupantes.
«Méheust frankly worried that the success of his first book—and it was quite successful, both culturally and commercially—was due to its “mistiness.”» — la autocrítica de Méheust sobre su propio éxito.
«He had underestimated, that is, “the work of the successive filters through which the real passes before it appears to us”» — la autocrítica de Méheust: había subestimado los filtros sucesivos.
«This, of course, is the same idea that authors like Hynek and Vallee had called “the signal in the noise.”» — la equivalencia entre los filtros de Méheust y la señal en el ruido.
«(1) Méheust’s notion of l’oubli du magnetisme or “the forgetting of [animal] magnetism” within Western intellectual culture, a two-century process that coincides with the erasure of the paranormal within intellectual culture and its subsequent migration into “the safety” of popular culture;» — primer tema de *Somnambulisme et médiumnité*, con la migración a la cultura popular.
«(2) the related notion of “shock zones” or “stop concepts” through which he explains how later systems of thought—like Freud’s psychoanalysis, Breton’s surrealism, or Bergson’s creative evolution and philosophy of consciousness—both beat back and incorporated the earlier metaphysical defiances and shocks in order to preserve, but also to expand slightly, the epistemological boundaries of Western culture;» — segundo tema: las zonas de choque y los conceptos tope.
«(3) the central idea of décrire-construire or “description-construction,” which in turns builds on the aforementioned theory of human consciousness as a reservoir of potentialities that can be actualized within different worlds and persons at different places and times through various intellectual practices,» — tercer tema: describir es construir, sobre una conciencia entendida como reservorio de potenciales.
«One way of thinking about Méheust’s project is to read it as an elaborate delineation of these fundamental postmodern insights with respect to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century cultural wars surrounding animal magnetism and psychical research, but toward a very specific, and deeply subversive, end.» — sitúa a Méheust dentro de la lógica postestructuralista y anuncia que la excede.
«Basically, what Méheust demonstrates is how the present regime of power and knowledge—a regime defined by materialism, determinism, objectivism, and scientism—came about through the disciplining, suppression, and finally forgetting of the metaphysical shock of the psychical, which can indeed be read with the tools of postmodernism but finally overflows and overwhelms these.» — el argumento entero, con su límite: el material desborda las herramientas que lo describen.
«He relativizes the relativizers, as the sociologist of religion Peter Berger might say.» — la operación de Méheust sobre Foucault y Derrida, dicha con la fórmula de Berger.
«It is not so absurd to ask, then, “if the culture in which we live has not finished completing the occultation of a psychism sui generis” (SM 2:122» — la pregunta de Méheust sobre la cultura del olvido.
«Victor, it turned out, could predict in these states the future course of his own treatment and healing with calenderical precision.» — el caso de Victor Race con Puységur en 1784; el libro imprime *calenderical*.
«More astonishingly still, he could also diagnose the conditions of other patients and prescribe effective treatments for their ills.» — la segunda capacidad atribuida a Victor Race.
«It studied the matter for five years only to issue a report in 1831 that concluded that most of the magnetic phenomena were in fact quite real and effective.» — la comisión oficial francesa que validó los fenómenos magnéticos.
«A scandal erupted, and, as sometimes happens in the history of psychical research, if a skeptical body does not like the conclusions of one study, it simply organizes another,» — el mecanismo institucional con que se revirtió el dictamen.
«Hence the next commission was directed by Dubois d’Amiens, who, not accidentally, also happened to be the major figure» — quién presidió la comisión siguiente, y por qué eso importa.
«The two camps went to war over experimental protocol, the experiments were not able to take place, and, as Méheust puts it, “magnetism was vanquished by forfeit.”» — cómo se cerró la disputa según Méheust: por incomparecencia, no por refutación.
«Such a thing, of course, can hardly be imagined. We have forgotten that much.» — el olvido medido por lo que hoy resulta impensable.
«And indeed, Puységur’s magnetic sleep, much like Myers’s subliminal Self, was no Freudian unconscious.» — la corrección de Méheust a la lectura freudiana de Puységur.
«Méheust argues, Freud’s psychoanalysis acted in effect as a “Guardian of the threshold”» — el psicoanálisis como guardián del umbral, en la formulación de Méheust.
«In one of Méheust’s most striking images, psychoanalysis was a kind of “back fire” (contre-feu) set in the hills to stop the spread of an approaching metaphysical blaze» — el contrafuego: se incorpora el material para detenerlo.
«Méheust also points out, again correctly in my opinion, that an epistemological system like that of psychoanalysis grants very particular insights that the earlier mesmeric and magnetic models simply could not (e.g., oedipal and libidinal dynamics)» — la concesión al psicoanálisis, suscrita por Kripal.
«There is no “free lunch” for Méheust, then, no perfect system.» — el corolario: todo sistema cuesta algo.
«Every system, any system, conceals as it reveals and reveals as it conceals.» — la fórmula general, que reaparece en la *occulture* del inicio del libro.
«Méheust argues that major twentieth-century intellectual movements incorporated aspects of psychical research, but primarily as a strategy to resist them, to stop them in their tracks,» — la incorporación como forma de contención.
«Méheust defines these “stop concepts” (concepts butoirs) as “notions which, no doubt possessing an incontestable heuristic power, have at the same time a strategic function, that of limiting,» — la definición de *concepts butoirs*, con su poder heurístico reconocido.
«In effect, such concepts function on a cultural level as means to stop a moving “train of thought.”» — la función cultural del concepto tope.
«This is the striking notion that human intellectual and social practices, particularly in their naming and institution-creating functions, somehow circumscribe reality, somehow create the real for a particular place and time.» — la tesis de *décrire-construire* enunciada en su forma general.
«It is as if our intellectual and social practices “switch on” and “switch off” a set of latent universal human potentials.» — la imagen del interruptor, con el *as if* que la acota.
«His thought is much more sociological, although it never ceases to be psychological as well.» — lo que separa a Méheust de la metafísica individualista de la Nueva Era.
«Which is all to say that Bertrand Méheust is much closer to Michel Foucault than to A Course in Miracles.» — la ubicación de Méheust, dicha por contraste con dos referencias precisas.
«But neither would he deny the possibility that an individual psyche, temporarily freed from its cultural constraints (which include the personal ego), might demonstrate “impossible” powers and capacities.» — la salvedad que impide leer a Méheust como puro constructivista.
«He would thus insist that a culture’s sense of reality—what is possible, what is impossible —is largely circumscribed or “set up” by social practices, historical institutions, and previous cultural battles by which the lines were drawn and the real circumscribed.» — lo posible y lo imposible como saldo de guerras culturales previas.
«What we seem to have here, after all, is a basic sense that, although there is a fundamental base to what human beings experience as reality, this reality behaves differently in different historical periods and linguistic registers.» — la base fundamental y su variación por registro, sin sacrificar ninguna de las dos.
«Fort had it exactly right again then: “Or that the knack that tips a table may tilt an epoch.”» — la frase de Fort retomada para el mismo punto.
«True to form, Méheust refuses to buffer the shock for us, or just barely does so.» — el modo de escritura de Méheust: no amortigua el choque.
«But it could have chosen otherwise.» — dicho de la modernidad y su camino materialista: fue una elección, no un destino.
«Again, the real is fluid for Méheust.» — la fórmula corta de su posición.
«The learned consensus was that endoscopy was generally more reliable than exoscopy (SM 1:179» — la jerarquía que los magnetistas establecían entre visión interior y exterior.
«On the contrary, they became more fantastic still.» — los poderes magnéticos no se atenuaron con el tiempo, se volvieron más extremos.
«The Comte de Szapary, for example, described the state of magnetic lucidity as a “third state” in which the life of the body and the superior functions of the mind clarify or enlighten one another until they provoke the emergence of new faculties (SM 1:315).» — el tercer estado del conde de Szapary entre los teóricos-practicantes del magnetismo.
«J. P. F. Deleuze suggested that such powers are always present but well hidden, effectively and necessarily suppressed by the pressures of daily life and practical action.» — la tesis de Deleuze: los poderes están y la vida práctica los reprime.
«They thus only manifest in exceptional states of consciousness, like somnambulism, or in sudden interruptions and sufferings, within traumatic and dissociative conditions, as we would say now.» — las condiciones de aparición, traducidas al vocabulario disociativo actual.
«Julian Ochorowicz would articulate a similar sensibility, which had been more or less common with the magnetic theorists since Puységur, namely, that the powers of mental suggestion and the forms of magnetic lucidity evident in rare and gifted subjects almost certainly exist “in germ” in every human being (SM 1:582; cf. 1:157).» — la facultad latente en todos, común a los magnetistas desde Puységur.
«For others, this “fugitive” or “anarchic” character of the magnetic phenomena, this boundless reservoir of potentialities, should profoundly transform our image of the human being and, consequently, render any final model of human nature, and so any general or universal method of therapy, impossible (SM 1:257).» — la consecuencia radical: ningún modelo universal de naturaleza humana.
«In the light of such impossible potentialities and possible actualizations, human nature begins to be seen as fundamentally contextual and unconditioned, that is, as dialectical.» — la naturaleza humana como dialéctica, ni fija ni arbitraria.
«Such insights, Méheust reminds us, put into stark contrast the naive objectivism of the scientific method with respect to paranormal phenomena, a method whose philosophical assumptions about determinism, objectivity, nature-as-given, and stable “facts” can only operate by effectively denying, suppressing, or even destroying this psychocultural Gestalt.» — por qué el método objetivista no puede alcanzar este material.
«Méheust articulates the counterproposition as “the idea that the phenomena of somnambulism are not invariable manifestations of the human soul, but that they should be thought of as the actualization of hidden virtualities—an actualization rendered possible only in certain contexts, and therefore variable” (SM 1:275).» — la contrapropuesta de Méheust, citada con su locator interno.
«There is a moral contribution to make here as well, for there was also a “dark side” to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theorizations of the magnetic powers, particularly surrounding the potential for evil that numerous thinkers saw in such occult capacities—essentially, a modern version of the traditional lore around black magic.» — la dimensión moral del material, con su antecedente en la magia negra.
«Or, alternatively, we might detect what will later be theorized as a “fear of psi” and watch how the natural paranormal capacities of the human being are almost always demonized, from the early modern Inquisition trials, where such abilities were literally linked to the devil, to the most recent Hollywood movie or television hit, where the gifted one is forever getting hunted down and dying.» — la continuidad de la demonización, de la Inquisición al cine.
«There was even talk of performing “experimental crimes,” that is, of seeing whether a person could be mentally forced to commit an “experimental suicide” (with a revolver loaded with blanks) or perform “fictitious poisonings.”» — hasta dónde llegó la especulación sobre la sugestión criminal.
«For Méheust, then, “the central operation of the science of hypnotism is to eliminate completely the magnetic hypothesis of an occult interaction between two human beings” (SM» — la operación que Méheust atribuye a la hipnosis frente al magnetismo.
«Consider the case of Charles Binet-Sanglé, a medical doctor whose authoritarian fantasies regarding occult influence recorded in his La fin dusecret or The End of the Secret (1922) literally end volume 1 of Méheust’s Somnamublisme et médiumnité.» — el caso de Binet-Sanglé; el libro imprime así el título francés y el de Méheust.
«It would be a serious mistake, though, to claim—as many ideologically driven skeptics have claimed—that the paranormal somehow automatically leads to fascism or right-wing politics.» — el desacuerdo con los escépticos que ligan lo paranormal al fascismo.
«Méheust is very clear on this point: the full history presents us with no necessary relationship or link between the psychical data and any particular political system.» — la posición de Méheust sobre esa supuesta ligadura política.
«There is no need, Méheust points out in the very last line of volume 1, “to underline the posterity of these phantasms” (SM» — el cierre del primer volumen de Méheust, con su reserva.
«This was already apparent in the ways that the Being whom Puységur could not name related to the marquis in ways that would have been entirely inappropriate for a young peasant like Victor Race.» — la autonomía que el estado magnético daba al sujeto frente a su clase social.
«For these authors, in other words, “the fundamental suggestion is the belief in the power of suggestion.”» — la sugestión fundada en la creencia en su propio poder.
«Ideas are forces, they realized, and the most powerful idea of all is the idea of the force of ideas.» — la formulación recursiva de ese mismo punto.
«He quickly concluded that the materialism of Mesmerism was mistaken and that what was in fact at work in these extraordinary states was not “fluids,” tiny “atoms,” or the “workings of the spheres,” but the nearly omniscient and seemingly omnipotent power of a vast magnetic Mind.» — el giro de Puységur del fluido a la Mente.
«Mills’s own point is simple but profound here, namely, that the psychological insight of the above quote is “as applicable to literary creation as to medical practice or social reform.”» — el paso de Bruce Mills de la lógica mesmérica a la creación literaria.
«they were artful and useful props, but certainly not literal physical causes.» — el estatuto que se daba a los imanes y a los rituales magnéticos.
«Jaurés then posited a classic homo duplex doctrine by which the human being is seen as possessing two distinct but related forms of consciousness:» — Jean Jaurés en la serie del *homo duplex*, con la grafía del libro.
«When I spoke to him about his work, he shared with me his observation that this is a question that must not be asked in French intellectual circles.» — lo que Méheust le dijo sobre el veto que pesa en el medio académico francés.
«in the philosopher Henri Bergson and his earlier cited description of the universe as une machine à faire des dieux, that is, “a machine for making gods.”» — la fórmula de Bergson dentro de la genealogía evolutiva de Méheust.
«Although Bergson followed Christian mystical theology in his position that mysticism represented a more evolved stage of the spiritual life than psychical abilities, he also thought that it was what Méheust describes as “the potentialities evolving through the psychic phenomena” in which this élan manifests in human nature in a way that can be scientifically, collectively, and cumulatively studied» — la jerarquía de Bergson y su apuesta por el estudio científico de lo psíquico.
«He does not do this. And this constitutes his most important intellectual intervention.» — la intervención de Méheust consiste en no reducir los fenómenos a representación.
«Méheust thinks that the phenomena are very likely genuine. They are not only representations or simply discourses (although they are certainly those things too).» — la posición de Méheust con su concesión entre paréntesis.
«It all looks like a vast forgetting, a massive cultural repression, a tragic denial of our own potential nature.» — el Gran Olvido nombrado con sus tres términos.
«Méheust was still being careful. He still hoped for a university position.» — el costo profesional que condicionó la escritura de Méheust.
«It only takes one white crow to prove that all crows are not black, James pointed out.» — el argumento del cuervo blanco en la formulación de William James.
«So, too, it only takes one proven case of telepathy to establish that the mind is not bound by the brain and the body.» — la aplicación del argumento al caso de la telepatía.
«The Jamesian white crow became a kind of battle cry or philosophical symbol for early (and later) psychical researchers, but the faultless logic it represents is already present in Kant’s honest philosophical frustrations with the dreams of the Swedish spirit-seer.» — el antecedente kantiano del mismo argumento, frente a Swedenborg.
«Because of both this repressive cultural climate and the incredibly short span of the seer’s public career, Méheust sees Alexis as a kind of Icarus figure, a tragic being who attempted to fly too high, who tried to expand the human condition past where his culture, and his own body, was willing to go.» — Alexis Didier como figura de Ícaro, con las dos causas que Méheust señala.
«This in fact is one of the major points of Méheust’s study of Didier—how elaborate and careful many of the experiments in fact were.» — el rigor de las pruebas decimonónicas como argumento central de Méheust.
«The real point of the book, however, is not to defend the nineteenth-century intellect before the dogmatic skepticism of contemporary intellectual culture.» — acota cuál no es el propósito del libro de Méheust.
«It is to establish the genuineness of Didier’s powers, and then to tease out their philosophical and anthropological implications.» — cuál sí lo es, dicho sin rodeos.
«Such a sectarian division of labor, he points out, essentially paralyzes the inquiry and prevents any real progress toward an adequate resolution of the question at hand.» — el reparto entre sociología y parapsicología como obstáculo, según Méheust.
«If all the gods are projections of human nature, as modern projection theory argues so convincingly, then might not human nature itself be considered a veritable supergod?» — la inversión de la teoría de la proyección, enunciada en pregunta.
«Peter Berger put the same “flip” this way in his A Rumor of Angels: “If the religious projections of man correspond to a reality that is superhuman and supernatural, then it seems logical to look for traces of this reality in the projector himself.”» — el mismo giro con la formulación de Berger.
«Winter approaches these historical events through a classic cultural-context argument, that is, by suggesting that the profound social inequalities between the elite Western surgeons» — la lectura contextualista de Alison Winter sobre el hospital de Calcuta.
«She also points out that, unlike in Britain, where the mesmerized often displayed power over the mesmerists, in Eisdale’s Calcutta hospital the whole point was to render the mesmerized subject completely unconscious and entirely passive beneath the surgeon’s knife.» — la inversión colonial del magnetismo: de sujeto con poder a objeto pasivo.
«Yes, of course, Méheust answers, such scenes do in fact reenact the social conditions of Victorian society and British colonial power, and they are inexplicable without such historical contexts.» — la concesión de Méheust al argumento contextual.
«But they also did happen, and this also needs to be explained.» — el límite de esa concesión, en una línea.
«The perspectives of the sociologist and the parapsychologist, in other words, can be joined, can be made complementary, but only if we are willing to step out of both our antihistoricism and our resistance to the metaphysical implications of the actual historical data.» — la condición doble para combinar sociología y parapsicología.
«Méheust proposes an elegant model of human potentiality and cultural actualization: “If the alleged facts reveal themselves as sufficiently attested, then it is also necessary to consider them as a potentiality of the human spirit, rendered possible by a certain context”» — el modelo de Méheust, con su condicional intacto.
«Both men are empowered by a strange, “almost superhuman” force that first appears just short of puberty, that is, at twelve years of age.» — el paralelo entre Alexis Didier y el Louis Lambert de Balzac.
«Méheust argues that the impact of literature on society is much deeper and much more mysterious than we realize.» — la tesis de fondo sobre literatura y realidad.
«The case is somewhat different with Charles Baudelaire, however, as this particular fiction-fact parallel involved Baudelaire’s mystical theory of poetry, which, or so Méheust suggests, was essentially a reworking of psychometric convictions involving the “auratic perception” of physical objects.» — el caso Baudelaire, marcado como sugerencia de Méheust.
«Skeptics may dismiss such things, but detectives and police departments use what works.» — el argumento pragmático sobre la psicometría aplicada.
«According to Méheust, such scenes appear to have influenced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his most famous character, Sherlock Holmes.» — la genealogía que Méheust traza de Didier a Holmes.
«Méheust believes that Doyle read about Didier in English sources that were widely available, took a psychical practice with which he was very familiar, that is, psychometry, and transposed it “into a mythical capacity for hyperdeduction” (VP 248).» — el mecanismo exacto de esa transposición, atribuido como creencia de Méheust.
«Méheust clearly acknowledges the similarities in approach, as does Vallee.» — el reconocimiento mutuo entre los dos autores.
«Vallee embraces the incorporation of science fiction into the discussion (indeed, he has written five science-fiction novels, and he pioneered the folklore approach), but he also points out that unexplained aerial phenomena hardly began in 1947.» — el punto en que Vallee acota a Méheust: el fenómeno precede a la ciencia ficción.
«It is also what we might call the “Western fallacy,” for these phenomena are by no means restricted to Europe or North America.» — la segunda falacia que Kripal nombra, junto a la modernista.
«Vallee, in other words, points toward a realist conclusion that is in no way dependent on modern science fiction.» — el saldo de esa objeción de Vallee.
«For Bateson, “mind” is not something restricted to the human skull.» — la premisa de Gregory Bateson que Méheust adopta.
«Hence there can be no final separation of the mental and the physical.» — la consecuencia de esa premisa.
«detested dualism, supernaturalism, or any other theory or theology that separated what he called the “necessary unity” of mind and nature.» — la posición de Bateson, dicha por lo que rechaza.
«Accordingly, Méheust was especially keen on demonstrating, through a work like Somnambulisme et médiumnité, how the mentality or form of mind of a particular culture shifts, changes, and morphs over time, that is, how it regulates itself.» — la ecología de la mente aplicada a la historia cultural.
«It is on this crucial point—which is also the central point of these four chapters—that Méheust also invokes the work of the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino, and especially the latter’s The Magical World.» — declara que este punto es el centro de los cuatro capítulos del libro.
«Magical practices presume a form of human consciousness or collective mind that is much more embedded in the natural world than our own present form of mind in the West.» — la tesis de De Martino sobre la mente mágica.
«We have moved out of this state of mind in order to gain certain things (foremost of these being the individual), but we have also lost certain things (like our communion with the natural world).» — el balance de pérdidas y ganancias, sin nostalgia ni triunfalismo.
«In his 1954 Weltwoche interview, Jung expresses his central thesis that the UFO phenomenon may be an attempt by the collective psyche to balance itself, to dream itself aright after a long night of materialism, that the real lesson here is not little green men but our own hopelessly inadequate understanding of our own psychic worlds.» — la tesis de Jung en la entrevista suiza que la prensa desvirtuó.
«They are deceivers and shape-shifters, tricksters on a mission to violate boundaries and sow confusion.» — los ovnis leídos como tricksters, en la línea que Bullard y Méheust prolongan.
«When Jung finally published his book on flying saucers in 1958, he was still attempting to clarify himself, still struggling with the glowing trickster in the sky.» — la posición de Jung, consignada como inacabada.
«It is certainly not surprising that Jung would have such a dream at that point in time.» — el sueño de Jung sobre ovnis, situado en su momento biográfico.
«Now it turns out that we are their projections.» — la inversión que el sueño opera sobre la teoría de la proyección.
«Humor or no, however, it is difficult to read him and not come away with the sense that Charles Fort was fairly certain that X is out there, that it is real, and that we are not.» — la lectura de la X de Fort, con la misma inversión.
«Perhaps not surprisingly, there are many Fortean scenes in Méheust.» — la presencia de Fort en el material de Méheust.
«Since there was no record of them crossing the border, they accused the couple of entering the country illegally.» — un caso de teletransportación en el archivo de Méheust, contado por su desenlace burocrático.
«Fort used the letter X to express this dramatic reversal of projection, this sudden sense that we are the projections of someone else’s dream, movie, or novel.» — la función de la letra X en Fort.
«He is being honest about the data and about what it suggests to him.» — la valoración que hace de la posición de Méheust ante el fenómeno.
«With respect to the UFO phenomenon, he can write in 2007 that “that which interests me today is less the flying saucer (that is to say, the collective mythological dimension constructed and attested by the coincidence of science fiction and the flying saucers) than the UFO, that is to say, the X that it perhaps reveals” (SF 28).» — el desplazamiento tardío de Méheust del platillo a la X, con su *perhaps*.
«Indeed, myth may be precisely the means through which we can best approach the unknowable (SF 295).» — el mito como vía de acceso a lo incognoscible, no como error.
«It need not be a form of unconsciousness. Quite the contrary. It may be seen as “a divine incarnation as literature” (un avatar littéraire) (SF 185).» — la fórmula de Méheust: el mito como encarnación divina en literatura.
«When Méheust, then, writes of “Agent X,” he is not writing about an alien being from Mars controlling us like puppets or projected movie-screen characters. He is much closer to Andrew Lang’s psychofolklore and its anthropology of “region X” (SM 2:276, 293). He is speculatively postulating an irreducible form of mind or consciousness that may (or may not) lie behind the rich historical dossier of magnetic, psychical, and paranormal phenomena.» — qué significa y qué no la X de Méheust, con su *may (or may not)* dentro.
«He is certainly no true believer. He too is “reducing,” but to a form of collective Mind that is finally irreducible.» — la posición de Méheust: reduce, pero a algo irreductible.
«ignorance of what lies behind the mythology of the flying saucer, and he labels this ignorance, like a buried treasure (or a dangerous ray that makes the invisible visible), with the sign of “X.”» — la X como nombre de la ignorancia, no de una entidad.
«The same ambiguous sign could be placed over the entire history of animal magnetism and psychical research, indeed over the entire history of religions.» — la extensión del signo a la historia de las religiones entera.
«There is every reason to believe that something is indeed appearing there, but, much like Jung’s flying saucers in the American sky, “something is seen, but one doesn’t know what.”» — cierra el capítulo con la fórmula de Jung.
«That, it must be said, is not a terribly satisfying conclusion.» — reconoce la insatisfacción de su propia conclusión.
«Obviously, we have not yet come into full consciousness.» — el saldo del capítulo cuarto.
«We are still evolving, to what or whom remains unidentified.» — la última línea del capítulo, con el juego sobre *unidentified*.
«We have climbed up Scholem’s mountain of revelation (or was it Spielberg’s Devil’s Tower?) through the mists and myths of history and ventured off the two-dimensional page of our Flatland materialisms into multidimensional realms and bizarre ideas that are impossible.» — abre la conclusión enlazando el epígrafe de Scholem con la Torre del Diablo de Spielberg.
«There are at least three dimensions of this future thought that I would like to explore here.» — anuncia las tres líneas del cierre, con un *at least* que las deja abiertas.
«First, there is what is perhaps the most basic issue of all for the student of religion: the sacred. Such a word, which encodes both the positive and negative aspects of religious experience (the divine and the demonic), has a long history in the field, as I explained in the introduction. But it has fallen out of favor recently. Something needs to be said about this eclipse and how it might be linked to the eclipse of the psychical and the paranormal in the same field.» — primera línea: la recuperación de lo sagrado y su eclipse paralelo al de lo psíquico.
«Second, I would like to pick up my thesis about the paranormal as the fantastic one last time and suggest a future theorization of this model via the history of religions, psychical research, and contemporary neuroscience.» — segunda línea: filtro, *homo duplex* y neurociencia.
«Third, I would like to suggest how we might finally become our own authors of the impossible, how we might wake up from our own cultural and religious projections and realize, with a start, that the real is not any of these fictions, but that it is indeed really and truly this fantastic.» — tercera línea: el lector como autor de lo imposible.
«Fact or fraud, trick or truth, whatever paranormal phenomena are, they clearly vibrate at the origin point of many popular religious beliefs, practices, and images—from beliefs in the existence» — sitúa lo paranormal en el origen de la creencia religiosa popular, sin decidir su naturaleza.
«If something, for example, like modern neuroscience can reduce all of this impossible material to neurological processes, frontal lobe microseizures, cognitive grids, and evolutionary needs, then so much the better.» — la primera rama de su apuesta bilateral, aceptada sin reservas.
«True enough, anomalies may be just anomalies—meaningless glitches in the statistical field of possibility.» — la concesión al escéptico.
«But anomalies may also be the signals of the impossible, that is, signs of the end of one paradigm and the beginning of another.» — la otra posibilidad, dejada abierta.
«The field has denied, in principle, what Jacques Vallee so clearly saw with respect to the impossible within mathematical theory and the ufological material, namely, that the phenomenon can only be understood on its own level and on its own terms,» — el reproche al estudio de la religión, formulado con Vallee.
«It offends the epistemology of faith as commonly as it offends the epistemology of reason.» — lo sagrado ofende por igual a las dos epistemologías.
«The first, 1913, was the year J. B. Watson proclaimed a new behaviorism, a completely natural science that focused only on observable objective behaviors and from which subjective words like “consciousness” and “mind” were quite literally banned.» — el primero de los dos eclipses históricos que fecha.
«Edward Kelly has described the latter developments as “the continuing failure of scientific psychology to come fully to grips with the inescapably dual nature of its subject matter—in short, with the mind-brain problem that lies at the heart of our discipline.”» — el diagnóstico de Edward F. Kelly sobre la psicología científica.
«We cannot, as a species, ‘outgrow’ the sense of the sacred and become purely secular, and this for one simple reason; we are that sense of the sacred.» — lo sagrado como estructura y no como etapa, con la puntuación del libro.
«The sacred and the human are two sides of the same coin.» — la fórmula corta de esa tesis.
«It turns out that there is a good neuroanatomical reason why we have no theory of religion, but only theories about religion.» — la explicación hemisférica que dará al final del capítulo.
«If the nature of the sacred is intimately tied to the nature of human consciousness, it follows that the sacred is in turn intimately involved with the human brain.» — el paso que autoriza la neurociencia dentro de su programa.
«As a thought experiment, I would propose a dual approach through contemporary neuroscience and psychical research, that is, a double-method that can embrace both brain and Mind without naively conflating the two.» — la propuesta metodológica, declarada como experimento mental.
«It was then taken up in the twentieth century and developed further by thinkers like Henri Bergson, C. D. Broad, Aldous Huxley, and Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, who felt it was the only adequate explanation for the astonishing phenomenology of altered states of consciousness triggered by his new chemical catalyst.» — la genealogía de la tesis del filtro en el siglo XX.
«For anyone who attempts to take seriously the data of both the natural sciences and the history of religions, such a conclusion, it seems to me, is nearly inescapable.» — la fuerza que le concede a la tesis del filtro, acotada con *nearly* y con *it seems to me*.
«Obviously, we need a new metaphor here. Unfortunately, there are problems in every direction we turn.» — reconoce que ninguna de las metáforas disponibles sirve del todo.
«My own intuitive sense is that paranormal phenomena are expressions of a deeper nondual reality that possesses both “mental” and “material” qualities that manifest according to the subjective or objective structure of an experience or experiment.» — su propia hipótesis no-dual, marcada como intuición.
«Edward Kelly has highlighted another problem inherent in the transmission metaphor: it can imply a more or less perfect one-to-one communication, as in a television reception.» — la objeción de Kelly a *transmission*.
«Here the metaphors of the filter or reducing valve are much more appropriate, as they imply a selection, a narrowing, and a loss of an original More.» — por qué *filtro* y *válvula reductora* funcionan mejor.
«Psychical and paranormal phenomena are hermeneutical realities. They work like texts and stories.» — la razón de añadir *translation* a la cadena.
«But I find these models virtually useless when it comes to admitting, much less understanding and explaining, the wilder data of comparative mystical literature with which I am the most familiar.» — el juicio sobre los modelos cognitivo-computacionales, dicho desde su propio campo.
«Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, for example, anthologized portions of a beautiful little book entitled On Having No Head by D. E. Harding in their classic volume The Mind’s I.» — el dato con que muestra que el material místico entró en la antología cognitivista.
«On the morning of December 10, 1996, Taylor experienced a massive stroke that shut down the left hemisphere of her brain.» — el caso de la neuroanatomista Jill Bolte Taylor, con su fecha.
«She watched her linguistic, memory, and identity processing disappear like cotton candy on a tongue.» — lo que Taylor observó perderse, en el orden en que se perdió.
«In my own terms now, she knew consciousness as consciousness instead of as culture.» — la traducción del caso al vocabulario del libro, declarada como propia.
«Taylor found herself alternating “between two distinct and opposite realities: the euphoric nirvana of the intuitive and kinesthetic right brain, in which she felt a sense of complete well-being and peace, and the logical, sequential left brain.”» — la dualidad hemisférica vivida, en palabras de Taylor.
«Obviously, her language is very careful here: “a perception,” “relative to our brain anatomy,” and those scare quotes around “mystical” and “metaphysical” are guarded and ambiguous.» — anota la cautela del lenguaje de Taylor en vez de forzarlo.
«She entered the space of the fantastic, that is, she felt “bizarre, as if my conscious mind was suspended somewhere between my normal reality and some esoteric space.”» — lee la experiencia de Taylor como caso de la vacilación fantástica.
«The body now revealed itself for what it is, “a marvelous temporary home.”» — la fórmula de Taylor para el cuerpo, que Kripal recoge.
«None of this, however, is really real. Thus, in one of Taylor’s most striking passages, she marvels at how she finally realized that, “I really had been a figment of my own imagination!”» — el giro final del caso, que enlaza con la escritura como acto del libro.
«Promissory materialism is the notion that, even though there are gaps in our knowledge now, eventually materialistic science promises to explain everything, including human intention, imagination, and that mystery of all mysteries—consciousness itself.» — define el materialismo prometedor que Beauregard combate.
«Not so, no way, Beauregard argues. Science may indeed eventually throw some light on the nature of consciousness, but only if it is willing to abandon its unquestioned, uncritical commitment to the metaphysics of monistic materialism.» — la condición que Beauregard pone a la ciencia.
«Thus anything that cannot be explained within its Flatland philosophy—like paranormal phenomena, or the notion that evolution might display intelligent dimensions—is relegated to the tired tropes of “irrationalism,” “anecdote,” or “pseudoscience.”» — el mecanismo de descarte del materialismo, nombrado con sus etiquetas.
«They are “damned,” Fort would say. But scientific rationalism is not at all the same thing as scientific materialism, and there are very good, perfectly rational reasons to advance a nonmaterialist science that posits the Mind as distinct from the brain, that understands brain as a kind of supersensitive receptor or reducing valve that the Mind uses to interact with the material world.» — la distinción que Kripal atribuye a Hufford, aplicada aquí como argumento.
«He begins by quoting Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist Charles Sherrington on the futility of looking for Mind in the brain: “If it is for mind that we are searching the brain, then we are supposing the brain to be much more than a telephone» — Sherrington citado por Beauregard, y por Kripal en cadena.
«Beauregard then offers his own “psychoneural translation hypothesis,” or PTH for short.» — la hipótesis de traducción psiconeuronal, con su sigla.
«The PTH “posits that the mind (the psychological world, the first-person perspective) and the brain (which is part of the so-called ‘material’ world, the third-person perspective) represent two epistemologically different domains that can interact because they are complementary aspects of the same transcendent reality.”» — la formulación entera de la PTH.
«Rather, it begins with mind, intention, and human freedom, and then shows how this consciousness communicates its messages through our shared neurobiology, that is, through the body and brain.» — la inversión del orden explicativo en la ciencia no materialista.
«This “informational transduction mechanism,” as he puts it, is described as “a paramount achievement of evolution that allows mental processes to causally influence the functioning and plasticity of the brain. It is somewhat like writing our spoken words down in a symbol system that can be read by others at a distance.”» — la transducción informativa, explicada con una analogía de escritura.
«A teleologically oriented (i.e., purposeful rather than random) biological evolution has enabled humans to consciously and voluntarily shape the functioning of our brains.» — la evolución teleológica que Beauregard propone.
«In this model, at least, consciousness was implicated in biological evolution before it came into its own, became conscious of itself, and took up the task of cultural evolution.» — la conciencia participando en la evolución antes de su manifestación cultural, acotado con *at least*.
«He reveals his own direct knowledge, even gnosis, of the psychoneural translation hypothesis, that is, he describes his own mystical experiences, which he classifies under what Richard Maurice Bucke called “Cosmic Consciousness.”» — la experiencia propia que Beauregard declara, con la etiqueta de Bucke.
«If the brain, after all, is a receiver or a reducing valve and not the producer of consciousness, then the destruction of the filter or reducing valve hardly implies the end of consciousness.» — la consecuencia sobre la muerte, enunciada como condicional.
«The TV can go on the blitz, even be demolished, but the television program, like the Truth in The X-Files, continues to be “out there.”» — la analogía televisiva con que cierra ese punto.
«Beauregard insists again that psyche and physis, or mind and matter, “represent complementary aspects of the same underlying principle,” that neither can be reduced to the other.» — la complementariedad irreductible entre mente y materia en Beauregard.
«In his own terms, mind or consciousness represents “a fundamental and irreducible property of the Ground of Being,” and “mind, consciousness, and self profoundly affect the physical world,” including the evolutionary processes themselves.» — la mente como propiedad del Fundamento del Ser, con efecto causal declarado.
«It is this fundamental unity and interconnectedness that allows the human mind to causally affect physical reality and permits psi interaction between humans and with physical or biological systems.» — la unidad de fondo como condición del psi.
«Beauregard concludes his book by writing of “a trend in human evolution toward the spiritualization of consciousness.”» — la evolución espiritual de la conciencia como conclusión de Beauregard.
«He suggests that a non-materialist science may even “accelerate our understanding of this process of spiritualization and significantly contribute to the emergence of a planetary type of consciousness.» — la función que Beauregard asigna a una ciencia no materialista.
«Taylor shows us definitively that the Human as Two is not just an ancient mystical doctrine.» — el caso de Taylor como apoyo empírico del *homo duplex*.
«It is a universal neuroanatomical fact.» — la formulación más fuerte de ese punto, sin acotación.
«In Victoria Nelson’s terms, they thrive on our Aristotleanism and try their best to ignore our Platonism.» — el diagnóstico sobre los métodos de hemisferio izquierdo, dicho con Nelson; el libro imprime *Aristotleanism*.
«They thus represent, literally, only half the picture, and, with respect to the phenomenology of revelation and religious experience, probably the least important half at that.» — el alcance de esos métodos, con su *probably*.
«Recall my earlier point that what we have in the academy are theories about religion that attempt to explain the encounter with the sacred in terms of something else, that we have no real theories of religion.» — la distinción entre teorías *sobre* la religión y teorías *de* la religión.
«The field, then, is like a two-engine prop plane that is running on only one engine.» — la imagen del avión con un solo motor, que anticipa su llamada.
«Hence we have a really good view of the pavement, but almost no understanding of the sky and the principles of flight.» — la consecuencia de esa imagen.
«Which is not to demean or deny the analytic and linguistic capacities of the left brain.» — la reserva que impide leer lo anterior como rechazo del análisis.
«He did not “believe” everything that was happening to him, but neither did he conflate Mind with brain.» — la posición doble de Philip K. Dick, que Kripal toma como modelo.
«Materialism, Fort’s “way of a belly,” is the dominant model in neuroscience now.» — el diagnóstico del estado del campo, dicho con la frase de Fort.
«The filter or transmission thesis explains this “duration of uncertainty” by pointing out that a paranormal event can be both real and unreal, both fiction and fact.» — la tesis del filtro puesta a explicar la vacilación de Todorov.
«It can be real and factual to the extent that it is a genuine expression of Mind beyond brain.» — la mitad real del suceso.
«It can be unreal and fictional to the extent that it is a filtered, translated, or imagined expression of Mind in and through the linguistic, identity, and cultural capacities of the (left) brain.» — la mitad ficticia, con la cadena filtro–traducción completa.
«Hence my dialectic of consciousness and culture, which can now be seen as an ideal theoretical reflection of the dialectical neuroanatomy of the human brain itself.» — cierra el círculo entre su modelo dialéctico y la neuroanatomía.
«Our four authors of the impossible realized through their radical reading and writing practices that they were caught in a world they did not write, that they were being written, literally, as they spoke, and especially when they spoke, language being what it is—the ultimate magical spell, the most powerful hypnotic inducer of the consensual trance of social reality.» — el lenguaje como hechizo que induce el trance consensual.
«What finally makes them authors of the impossible, however, is their metadecision to stop reading the paranormal writing us, step back “on the page,” and begin writing the paranormal writing us.» — la metadecisión que define a los cuatro autores.
«Realization is finally achieved when one comes to understand that such events are not only real, but also inherently participatory, that is, paranormal events often behave very much like texts:» — la primera etapa de la práctica escrita, la Realización.
«If Realization involves the act of reading the paranormal writing us, Authorization involves the act of writing the paranormal writing us.» — la segunda etapa, la Autorización, en su formulación simétrica.
«To author one’s world, however, whether literally or metaphorically, implies the use of language, which is a left» — por qué la Autorización exige también el hemisferio izquierdo.
«The simple truth is that I have no idea how a table floats off the floor and taps out messages for a young philosophy graduate student, or how dying loved ones appear in dreams and rooms at the precise time of their passing.» — la abstención final, con los casos concretos del libro nombrados.
«I haven’t the slightest clue how curtains and tablecloths burst into flames around pubescent girls and boys, or how authors encounter in “real life” scenes that they have imagined in their fiction or dreams.» — la continuación de esa misma abstención.
«I was simply trying to understand this mythical material as a responsible historian of religions.» — declara su posición al abordar el material ufológico.
«Turns out I was wrong about that.» — la corrección inmediata: su interés no era solo profesional.
«It was not shaped like a plane of any sort.» — el avistamiento familiar en Nebraska hacia 1969, en el relato de su madre.
«Only that we all saw it, that it was real.» — lo único que la madre afirma del episodio.
«The simple truth is that nothing is really very clear here, that nothing is either really simple or clearly true.» — el saldo de ese recuerdo, que él mismo no tiene.
«It would do us well now to return to it here at the very end, not to reach any final closure of meaning, much less to give the “correct” reading, but to perform and finalize our own fantastic uncertainty.» — declara la función del apéndice sobre Fátima: actuar la incertidumbre, no resolverla.
«I am now going to read it, with some justification, within the mythological system of the ufological literature.» — anuncia la relectura ufológica de Fátima, con su *with some justification*.
«Lucia’s father, António, asked with some reason. But his ten-year-old daughter was not so sure.» — la duda de Lucía frente a la identificación mariana de su padre.
«More skeptical by nature, she asked Lucia to specify exactly what she had seen.» — la reacción de la madre, María Rosa.
«In The Official Interrogations of 1923, she is recorded as testifying that her daughter had “said that she saw a small, pretty lady; that her dress was completely white; and that to the question, ‘Where are you from?’ she had pointed to the sky, saying she was from there.”» — el testimonio de la madre en los interrogatorios oficiales de 1923.
«Later, in the convent and under the watchful eyes of the bishop and her ecclesial superiors now, Lucia would adopt, no doubt sincerely, the orthodox interpretations and write about the events accordingly.» — la ortodoxia posterior de Lucía, atribuida a su contexto y sin acusarla de mentir.
«But, really, who could count them all now?» — sobre las cifras crecientes de espectadores en las apariciones sucesivas.
«There were also “rains of flowers” in September of that year, and then again on May 13 of 1918,» — los fenómenos acompañantes, fechados.
«As it turned out, the little lady had something far more dramatic than a landing pad on top of an oak tree in mind.» — el paso del árbol al Milagro del Sol, en el vocabulario ufológico que Kripal aplica.
«It did a good deal more than shine, however. It spun. And then it fell to the earth with a terrifying zigzag motion. People were screaming in horror and praying in sheer terror.» — el Milagro del Sol del 13 de octubre de 1917, descrito por su movimiento.
«And then it went back up, with the same weird zigzag motion, until it was its old stable self again.» — el regreso del sol a su posición, que cierra el episodio.
«As Paul Misraki, one of the inspirations for Vallee’s work, pointed out some time ago, such parallels are not simply imaginative or general.» — el antecedente de Misraki en la lectura ufológica de Fátima.
«We are not dealing with a vague analogy here; we are dealing with an identity.» — la formulación más fuerte del paralelo, sin acotación.
«I don’t know about the Prince of Darkness, but just how many Madonna statues have you seen showing leg?» — la réplica irónica al oficial eclesiástico que atribuyó la falda corta al demonio.
«On the tragic side, Michael Persinger points out that whereas little Francisco died during the influenza epidemic of 1918, Jacinta’s premature death displayed symptoms strongly suggestive of lung cancer, which he relates to radiation emitted around the tree before, during, and after the visions.» — la lectura de Persinger sobre las muertes de los pastorcitos.
«The seismic activity could have created immense geomagnetic fields, which would then collect and discharge on tall structures, like the tree» — el mecanismo tectónico y geomagnético que Persinger propone.
«As for the regular periodic nature of the six monthly events, Persinger relates these to a lunar phase, that is, another supermagnetic phenomenon with a strong, predictable, periodic nature.» — cómo explica Persinger la periodicidad mensual de las apariciones.
«The same magnetic discharges, he speculates, would have powerfully stimulated the children’s temporal lobes, resulting in the visions.» — la parte neurológica de la hipótesis, marcada como especulación.
«The specifics and, of course, the later interpretation of the apparitions were shaped “by their obsession with religious themes, their lack of education [all three children were illiterate], and their behavior at the time of the experience . . . If they had grown up in a world of Star Wars, they would have seen and heard some variant of Luke Skywalker.”» — la parte cultural de la explicación de Persinger, con corchetes y elipsis del libro.
«There is more than a little justification for such a literally radioactive reading.» — el apoyo que Kripal da a esa lectura, sin adoptarla del todo.
«Numerous individuals reported intense heat and the almost instant drying of both their clothes and the previously soaked soil during “the Miracle of the Sun,” features entirely consistent with immense bursts of electromagnetic radiation.» — los datos testimoniales que encajan con la hipótesis electromagnética.
«The “buzzing” noises can be fit in here as well, as individuals exposed to microwave radiation between 200 and 3,000 MHz commonly experience buzzing noises inside their heads.» — los zumbidos leídos por la vía de las microondas, con su rango de frecuencia.
«Raul Berenguel goes even further, pointing out that hearing voices in the interior of the cranium and the phenomenon of buzzing “is identical to what is felt by individuals subjected to mind control technologies that use microwaves.”» — el paso siguiente, atribuido a Berenguel y no suscrito.
«We are back to an eerie and potentially troubling scene reminiscent of Vallee’s alien» — el enlace con la hipótesis del sistema de control de Vallee.
«They speculate that we are dealing here with an ancient pagan symbolism rendered Christian by local context and elaborate processes of interpretation, devotion, and official spinning spread out over centuries.» — la hipótesis de Fernandes y D’Armada sobre el símbolo del rosario, consignada como especulación suya.
«By the sixth visitation in October, everyone “knew” who the little lady was.» — con las comillas de Kripal sobre el saber.
«In this way, “[t]he paranormal became the supernatural, and the supernatural became the religious.”» — la fórmula con que cierra la relectura de Fátima.
«Most discussions of psychical and paranormal phenomena take place in a near total ignorance of the nature, extent, and quality of the ethnographic and empirical data collected over the last two centuries.» — la premisa de su bibliografía anotada: se discute sin haber leído.
«The same is true, I fear, of the paranormal and the modern study of religion. We simply have not done our homework.» — el reproche aplicado a su propio campo, en primera persona del plural.
«Bullard is widely cited in the ufological literature as one of the most respected and gifted writers, and for good reason.» — la valoración de Thomas E. Bullard dentro de su canon declarado.
«This is an absolutely massive comparative study of abduction reports by a trained intellectual, who comes to the careful conclusion that whereas many such experiences are probably psychological in origin, some also contain objective, physical evidence whose overall coherency suggests that they cannot be reduced either to the individual psyche or to the oral traditions of folklore.» — la conclusión de Bullard, con sus dos acotaciones.
«In the end, Stevenson resists identifying the causal or acausal mechanisms of such phenomena, choosing instead to concentrate on documenting the impossible evidence.» — la abstención de Ian Stevenson, que Kripal destaca como virtud.
«Although highly uneven in places, this trilogy—based on over one hundred firsthand testimonies and the original records of the children’s interrogations held at the Sanctuary of Fátima—constitutes the premiere ufological reading of the events of Fátima, Portugal, from May 13 to October 13, 1917.» — la trilogía de Fernandes y D’Armada, con su reserva de calidad declarada.
«The second volume is particularly insightful, devastating really, in its exploration of the way the church manipulated the paranormal events for its own pious control of the people through the famous “three secrets” and its institutional support of the right-wing, dictator-style politics in Portugal from 1926 to 1974.» — el uso político de Fátima, consignado con fechas.
«This does not mean, in any way, that I think this data is inconsequential.» — la aclaración que acompaña su reserva sobre la parapsicología cuantitativa.
«This very recent work, based on almost four hundred contemporary accounts, comes out of the Religious Experience Research Centre founded by Sir Alister Hardy at the University of Wales, Lampeter.» — la procedencia del estudio de Mark Fox sobre las *lightforms*.
«Now numbering up to six thousand case studies, this archive represents one of our richest, and virtually untapped, sources of real-world data on mystical experience.» — el archivo de Alister Hardy como fuente sin explotar.
«Fox demonstrates any number of strong comparative patterns that go directly against the present contextualist dogmas of the field, namely, that paranormal encounters with lightforms are cross-cultural, transhistorical, and manifest a certain “core” phenomenology around their crisis-timing, their benign or loving aspects, and their creative impact on the visionary.» — los patrones transhistóricos de Fox, que Kripal opone al dogma contextualista.
«From former White House Chief of Staff John Podesta’s foreword on, this is a game-changer. UFOs clearly exist, Kean observes, although we do not know what they are.» — la valoración del libro de Leslie Kean, con la fórmula de existencia sin identidad.
«Kean, an investigative journalist, presents the no-nonsense sightings of professionals from 1976 to 2007, from nine different countries no less; recounts the history that has produced the intellectual blindness, disinformation campaigns, and shaming techniques of the American government, media, and debunkers; describes the much more professional efforts of the Europeans;» — el contenido del libro de Kean, con sus fechas y su alcance.
«includes a powerful essay by two political scientists on the political roots of the UFO taboo, “akin to denial in psychoanalysis,” that protects the sovereign nation-state and the “anthropocentric structure of rule” from the threat of colonization, impotence, and “something analogous to the materialization of God” (276» — la lectura política del tabú ovni recogida en el volumen de Kean.
«and finally calls on government officials, scientists, and concerned citizens to organize major research programs around this potentially world-changing topic.» — la llamada final de Kean, que Kripal reporta.
«The sightings over Nuremburg (April 14, 1561) and Basel (August 7, 1566) are particularly impressive. They were so obvious and dramatic that popular drawings were made and preserved.» — los dos pliegos con sus fechas; el libro escribe *Nuremburg* aquí y *Nuremberg* dos líneas después.
«Jung reproduced these drawings in his classic study Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (1958), a pioneering analysis that clearly influenced later French authors like Paul Misraki, Aimé Michel, and Vallee himself.» — el linaje que traza de Jung a la ufología francesa, con los tres nombres.
Sobre la obra
254 entradas — lo que el aparato y la investigación dicen de ella«Parapsychology—History» — encabezados de materia asignados por la Library of Congress, que además nombran a Myers, la S.P.R. y Fort: catalogó la obra sin mencionar a Vallee ni a Méheust, dos de sus cuatro autores.
«for David» — la dedicatoria.
«I believe that we live after earthly death; and that some of those who read these posthumous confidences» — voz de Frederic Myers en sus *Fragments of Inner Life*, publicados póstumamente por decisión propia.
«at sixteen effected upon me a kind of conversion» — voz de Myers sobre el estudio de la *anamnesis* del *Fedón*.
«something is gained if, having started with the preconception that» — voz de Myers formulando su *tertium quid*: ni A ni B, sino X.
«Such a systematic inquiry» — voz de Myers: debe ser en primera instancia científica y solo en segunda, religiosa.
«It is not true, a thousand times it is not true, that a bottle of water from a spring» — voz de Myers sobre Lourdes, citada de *Human Personality* 1:215.
«the Interpenetration of Worlds» — término de Myers, glosado por Edward F. Kelly como interacción entre el mundo físico y lo *metetherial*.
«a rubbish-heap as well as a treasure-house» — voz de Myers sobre lo subliminal (HP 1:73).
«Love is the energy of integration which makes a Cosmos of the Sum of Things» — voz de Myers (HP 1:112).
«Phantasms of the Living» — de Gurney, Myers y Podmore (1886), 702 casos, con la tesis de las apariciones de crisis como mensajes telepáticos del agonizante.
«I cannot say that truth is stranger than fiction, because I have never had acquaintance with either» — voz de Charles Fort; solo hay «the hyphenated state of truth-fiction» (WT 864).
«The science of physics,» — «Fort concluded, is occultism» (WT 974), y la teoría cuántica «a doctrine of magic». Voz de Fort dentro de una frase partida por Kripal.
«We are property» — línea de Fort que Vallee cita como antecedente propio y que Kripal reporta: la cadena tiene tres eslabones y se consigna entera.
«the way of a brain is only the way of a belly» — voz de Fort (LO 560); nunca confundió la Mente alienígena (X) con el cerebro.
«whatever else these old hermeticists were doing, they should be credited as the real founders of modern thought» — voz de Vallee, citada de *Forbidden Science* 1:76.
«unidentified flying objects are neither objects nor flying» — voz de Vallee, primera de las cinco tesis de *The Invisible College*.
«real progress lies between the two equally close-minded attitudes of the believer and the skeptic» — voz de Vallee, glosada por Kripal: los símbolos no son la verdad, pero la verdad brilla a través de ellos.
«Ufology is not a science but a process of initiation» — voz de Aimé Michel a Vallee: se empieza por investigaciones de campo y se termina estudiando místicos árabes (FS 2:68).
«considered everything and believed nothing» — consigna de método de Aimé Michel, con la que Kripal abre su conclusión.
«these experiences clearly possess both physical and psychical components» — voz de Méheust (SF 237).
«the notion of a UFO independent from its human observer is nonsensical» — voz de Méheust (SF 302).
«the 'sacred' is an element in the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of consciousness» — voz de Eliade, citada en apoyo.
«I hesitate to answer that» — voz de Eliade ante Claude-Henri Roquet, preguntado a bocajarro si las «transhuman experiences» le habían ocurrido a él.
«There has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts» — voz de Jacques Derrida, citada para ser objetada.
«By it you would be throwing a bomb into the psychoanalytical house» — voz de Freud aconsejando a Ferenczi no presentar sus investigaciones telepáticas al Congreso de Hamburgo de 1925.
«I never said that it was Our Lady» — voz de Lucía, «rather, a small, pretty lady», en la relectura de Fátima.
«there exists a Force exercised by intelligence differing from the ordinary intelligence common to mortals» — voz de William Crookes, que nunca se retractó.
Los epígrafes, que son voz de terceros elegida por el autor: Fort (*Wild Talents*), Eliade y Einstein, Bulwer-Lytton y Myers, Fort (*New Lands*), Vallee (*Passport to Magonia*) y Arthur C. Clarke, Méheust y Lévi-Strauss, Gershom Scholem (carta a Zalman Schocken del 29 de octubre de 1937) y Rosenzweig, Blake, y Dean Radin.
El frontispicio es *Ailleurs* (c. 1960), de Arthur-Maria Rener (1912–91), de la colección privada de Vallee, colgado «over the Vallee-Hynek parapsychological library».
La bibliografía anotada, «Required Reading (That Is Never Read)», está escrita por Kripal en primera persona y es su canon declarado del campo: Gurney/Myers/Podmore, Devereux, Broad, Eisenbud, Bullard, Stevenson, Fernandes/D'Armada, Freixedo, Radin, Fox y Kean.
«Some More Damned Anecnotes» — así se titulan las notas: es juego de Kripal sobre *anecdote*, no errata de OCR. Ocupan las EPUB pp. 334–365 y el epígrafe cae en la 335; el índice va en las pp. 366–391, sin firma de indexador.
«for taking many chances on an aspiring author of the impossible who has tried his best not to become an impossible author» — el resto de la dedicatoria a David: Kripal se describe a sí mismo con el juego que da título al libro.
«Read a book, or look at a picture. The composer has taken a wild talent that nobody else in the world believed in; a thing that came and went and flouted and deceived him; maybe starved him; almost ruined him—and has put that damn thing to» — epígrafe de apertura, voz de Charles Fort en *Wild Talents*; el libro lo retoma en la p. 165 para leer la escritura misma como talento salvaje puesto a trabajar.
«One of the main goals of the present work is to help create a safe, or at least a safer, intellectual space within the humanities and the arts so that such writers working “off the page” can come back “on the page” and enlighten us about the deeper dialectics of consciousness and culture.» — así declara Kripal en los agradecimientos el propósito del libro: abrir sitio institucional, no probar el fenómeno.
«I must also mention Victoria Nelson, whose work in The Secret Life of Puppets (Harvard, 2001) played a special role in the inspiration—it is really more of an uncanny haunting—for this book.» — la deuda que declara con Nelson.
«David Hufford, who taught me that materialism and rationalism are not the same thing, at all;» — de quien dice haber aprendido la distinción que sostiene toda la reconstrucción de Myers.
«Fort is a veritable ocean in which one can easily get lost and drown.» — dicho al agradecer a Jim Steinmeyer su biografía de Fort.
«Jacques went out of his way to welcome me into the inner sanctum of his home and library, shared with me many unpublished materials and secret stories, and responded to my thoughts about his work with helpful criticism and further insight.» — declara acceso directo y crítica de Vallee, uno de los cuatro autores que estudia.
«Bertrand was gracious and patient with an American English speaker struggling through thousands of pages of his erudite French.» — declara igual trato de Méheust, y con él el límite de lengua desde el que lo lee.
«We are back to Plato’s Cave and those shadows of social, historical, and religious truth projected on the cave wall now called a theater screen.» — cierra los agradecimientos, a propósito de la adaptación documental del libro por XL Films.
«An opening is a beginning, but it is also a hole.» — primera línea del capítulo de apertura: el juego con que Kripal nombra la función de su propio comienzo.
«Even if, as some might believe, a telepathic communication could have awakened me in that strange way, the telepathic explanation could not account for the physical state of things that was needed for the event to occur as it did, nor could it account for the crucial timing of my movements over those first few minutes after awakening.» — voz de Adam en el relato escrito que Kripal le pidió: descarta la telepatía por insuficiente, no por increíble.
«In his exposition of this fascinating doctrine, Max Freedom Long described the Huna belief that when people have some kind of meaningful contact with each other, a “sticky thread” comes into existence that connects the two and continues to connect them wherever they go for the whole of their lives.» — voz de Adam explicando su propio caso por la doctrina hawaiana del Huna: había estrechado la mano de Kennedy el otoño anterior en Toronto.
«But the greatest accomplishment to record is the approximate demonstration that, under circumstances still mostly unknown, men may gain knowledge by other than the usual means, perhaps by direct communication between brains (telepathy) at practically any earthly distance from each other.» — voz de James Leuba cerrando su entrada de 1918 sobre la S.P.R. en la enciclopedia de Hastings, citada por Kripal como prueba del olvido posterior.
«What happened that afternoon scared the hell out of me. For three hours I observed my own table tilt up and down, without visible assistance.» — voz de Stephen E. Braude sobre la sesión que presenció siendo estudiante y materialista declarado.
«In describing Zerlendi’s Yoga exercises in The Secret of Doctor Honigberger, I included certain pieces of information, drawn from my own experiences, that I omitted from my books on Yoga.» — voz de Eliade sobre su propia novela.
«At the same time, however, I added other, inaccurate touches, precisely in order to camouflage the true data.» — voz de Eliade declarando el camuflaje deliberado.
«the reader has no means to decide whether the ‘reality’ is hidden in the ‘fiction,’ or the other way around, because both processes are intermingled.» — voz de Eliade sobre el resultado buscado, que Kripal usa como figura de su propio género.
«Freud substantiated the gnoseologic values of the products of fantasy, which until then were considered meaningless or opaque.» — voz de Eliade en su conferencia sobre Freud, citada por Kripal como modelo interpretativo de su propio proyecto.
«or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality—but then his reality is controlled by laws unknown to us.» — voz de Todorov, segunda de las dos salidas de su definición, en el bloque citado que el libro repite luego en la p. 315.
«The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty.» — voz de Todorov cerrando ese mismo bloque.
«My God, my life— which is to say my 2-74/3-74 experience—is exactly like the plot of any one of ten of my novels or stories. Even down to the fake memories & identity.» — voz de Philip K. Dick sobre su propia experiencia, citada por Kripal.
«Now, my theory is that the Supernatural is the Impossible, and that what is called supernatural is only a something in the laws of nature of which we have been hitherto ignorant.» — epígrafe del capítulo primero, voz de Edward Bulwer-Lytton.
«My history has been that of a soul struggling into the conviction of its own existence.» — el segundo epígrafe del mismo capítulo, voz de Frederic Myers.
«Myers put it, “I wish to debate the matter on the ground of experiments and observations such as are appealed to in other inquiries for definite objective proof.”» — voz de Myers exigiendo prueba objetiva, dentro de la frase de Kripal.
«May death, I dimly thought, be such a transit, terrifying but easy, and leading to nothing new?”» — voz de Myers tras cruzar a nado el Niágara en 1865, en la etapa agnóstica.
«Much later, he would look back: “That faith looks to me now like a mistaken shortcut in the course of a toilsome way.”» — voz de Myers sobre su propia conversión cristiana, ya perdida.
«I have been mocked with many a mirage, caught in many a Sargasso Sea,» — voz de Myers sobre lo que le costó llegar a la Fe Final; Kripal anota que el mar de los Sargazos era el Triángulo de las Bermudas de su folklore.
«Myers himself describes the work in a letter from 1900 as “a big book of some 1200 octavo pages, which I don’t expect anybody to read.”» — voz de Myers sobre *Human Personality* un año antes de morir.
«Myers the hybrid wrote to Oliver Lodge of his upcoming visit to Lodge and his daughters: “possibly I shall meet my dear young female friends on my return as a cross between an old goat and a guardian angel.”» — voz de Myers a semanas de morir, sobre el suero de cabra.
«James also insisted that in our own immediate experience, “nature is everywhere Gothic, not classic.» — voz de William James, citada por Kripal en apoyo del gótico de Myers.
«There seems no reason to assume that our active consciousness is necessarily altogether superior to the consciousnesses which are at present secondary, or potential only.» — voz de Myers rechazando la jerarquía entre la conciencia despierta y las demás.
«I find it permissible and convenient to speak of subliminal Selves, or more briefly of a subliminal Self . . . and I conceive that there may be,— not only co-operations between these quasi-independent trains of thought, —but also upheavals and alternations of personality of many kinds, so that what was once below the surface may for a time, or permanently, rise above it.» — voz de Myers sobre la pluralidad de Yoes subliminales.
«And I conceive also that no Self of which we can here have cognisance is in reality more than a fragment of a larger Self,—revealed in a fashion at once shifting and limited through an organism not so framed as to afford its full manifestation.» — voz de Myers sobre el Yo mayor del que todo yo conocido es fragmento.
«The limits of our spectrum do not inhere in the sun that shines, but in the eye that marks his shining.» — voz de Myers: el límite está en el ojo, no en la fuente.
«It is for the modern psychologist to discover artifices which may extend in each direction the conscious spectrum as known to Plato or to Kant.» — voz de Myers encargando al psicólogo una tecnología de ampliación del espectro.
«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.» — voz de Myers definiendo lo *supernormal* por leyes superiores, no por violación de ley.
«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.» — voz de Myers explicando por qué acuñó *supernormal*.
«In either case they are above the norm of man rather than outside his nature.» — voz de Myers fijando el sentido exacto del término.
«Consciousness and its sensory capacities, he claimed, are “doubtless still modifiable in directions as unthinkable to me as my eyesight would have been unthinkable to the oyster,”» — voz de Myers dentro de la frase de Kripal, con la ostra como término de comparación.
«And he asked his scientific colleagues to pursue “those grand mysterious phenomena of the mind, the investigation of which can alone conduct us to a knowledge of what we really are.”» — voz de Wallace pidiendo a sus colegas que investiguen lo psíquico.
«Schelling could thus write that “[h]istory is an epic composed in the mind of God,”» — voz de Schelling en la genealogía romántica que Kripal traza.
«and Coleridge could declare that “the nurture and evolution of humanity is the final aim.”» — voz de Coleridge en la misma serie.
«is used when there is some degree of coincidence in time of occurrence between a supernormal incident and an event at a distance, which makes it seem probable that some causal connection exists between the two” (HP 1:xvi).» — voz de Myers definiendo *coincidental* en las primeras páginas de *Human Personality*.
«In proof, neither my father nor any of our family had detected it, and positively were unaware of the incident, yet I saw the scratch as bright as if it [were] just made.» — voz del testigo de Misuri sobre el rasguño que solo la madre conocía, con el corchete editorial del libro.
«I would suggest that telepathy and cognate faculties . . . may be the results of an evolution other than that terrene or physical evolution.”» — voz de Myers, con la elipsis del libro, situando la telepatía fuera de la evolución terrestre.
«so soon as I began to have hope of a future life I began to conceive earth’s culminant passion sub specie aeternitatis [under the perspective of eternity].» — voz de Myers, con el corchete traductor del libro.
«I felt that if anything still recognizable in me had preceded earth-life, it was this one profound affinity; if anything was destined to survive, it must be into the maintenance of this one affinity that my central effort must be thrown.» — voz de Myers sobre la afinidad única que hizo centro de su trabajo.
«Sometimes I am a collector of data, and only a collector, and am likely to be gross and miserly, piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to my store.» — voz de Fort sobre su propio método de acumulación.
«But always there is present a feeling of unexplained relations of events that I note; and it is this far-away, haunting, or often taunting, awareness, or suspicion, that keeps me piling on.» — voz de Fort sobre lo que sostiene esa acumulación: la sospecha de una relación.
«According to some viewpoints,” he wrote, “I might as well try to think of a villain, in a moving picture, suddenly jumping from the screen, and attacking people in the audience. I haven’t tried that, yet”» — voz de Fort sobre la frontera entre lo imaginado y lo físico.
«In ‘X,’” he mused, “I have pointed out that, though there’s nothing wrong with me personally, I am a delusion in super-imagination, and inconsistency must therefore be expected from me—but if I’m so rational as to be aware of my irrationality?» — voz de Fort describiéndose a sí mismo como delirio en la super-imaginación.
«When a small boy,” Fort explained, “we puzzled over inconsistencies in the Bible, and asked questions that could not be answered satisfactorily.» — voz de Fort sobre su propia infancia, en primera persona del plural.
«I can’t quite define my motive, because to this day it has not been decided whether I am a humorist or a scientist.» — voz de Fort sobre la indecisión de género que Kripal hace central.
«When I incline to think that there is telepathy, the experiments are convincing that there is. When I think over the same experiments, and incline against them, they indicate that there isn’t» — voz de Fort sobre la reversibilidad de la evidencia.
«In the genuine fantastic,” Solovyov suggested, “there is always the external and formal possibility of a simple explanation of phenomena, but at the same time this explanation is completely stripped of internal probability.”» — voz de Vladimir Solovyov, citada por Kripal para precisar a Todorov.
«I do not know how to find out anything new,” he pointed out with faultless logic, “without being offensive” (LO 547).» — voz de Fort sobre el costo de lo nuevo.
«We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.» — voz de Fort abriendo *The Book of the Damned*.
«But by the excluded I mean that which will some day be the excluding.» — voz de Fort: los condenados de hoy son los censores de mañana.
«It is our expression that the flux between that which isn’t and that which won’t be, or the state that is commonly and absurdly called “existence,” is a rhythm of heavens and hells: that the damned won’t stay damned; that salvation only precedes perdition.» — voz de Fort sobre la existencia como flujo entre dos absolutos.
«But it is our expression that there are no positive differences: that all things are like a mouse and a bug in the heart of a cheese.» — voz de Fort con la imagen del queso que Kripal usa como emblema de su monismo.
«I’d suggest, to start with, that we’d put ourselves in the place of deep-sea fishes: How would they account for the fall of animal-matter from above?» — voz de Fort proponiendo la metáfora de los peces abisales.
«There is no intelligence except era-intelligence” (LO 428).» — voz de Fort: toda inteligencia es de su época.
«He even hinted that this infinite Truth (which, yes, he capitalized) could be experienced—or, more accurately, identified with: “A seeker of Truth. He will never find it. But the dimmest of possibilities—he may himself become Truth” (BD 14).» — voz de Fort sobre el buscador que puede volverse Verdad, dentro de la frase de Kripal.
«Or my own acceptance that we do not really think at all; that we correlate around super-magnets that I call Dominants—a Spiritual Dominant in one age, and responsibly to it up spring monasteries, and the stake and the cross are its symbols; a Materialist Dominant, and up spring laboratories, and microscopes and telescopes and crucibles are its ikons—that we’re nothing but iron filings relatively to a succession of magnets that displace preceding magnets. (BD 241)» — voz de Fort con la imagen de las limaduras de hierro y los imanes que se relevan.
«It is my expression that the two outstanding blessings, benefits, or “gifts of God” to humanity, are Science and Religion. I deduce this—or that the annals of both are such trails of slaughter, deception, exploitation, and hypocrisy that they must be of enormous good to balance with their appalling evils. (LO 762)» — voz de Fort, en el registro irónico que Kripal llama su humor.
«The function of God is the focus. An intense mental state is impossible,» — voz de Fort: la función de Dios es dar foco mental.
«No statement that I shall make, as a monist, will be set aside by my pluralism,” he writes.» — voz de Fort declarando que su monismo y su pluralismo no se anulan.
«There is a Oneness that both submerges and individualizes” (LO 552).» — voz de Fort sobre esa unidad de doble efecto.
«Our general expression has two aspects: Conventional monism, or that all “things” that seem to have identity of their own are only islands that are projections from something underlying, and have no real outlines of their own.» — voz de Fort, primer aspecto de su expresión general.
«But that all “things,” though only projections, are projections that are striving to break away from the underlying that denies them identity of their own.» — voz de Fort, segundo aspecto: la proyección que pugna por separarse.
«The notion that other worlds are attempting to communicate with this world is widespread: my own notion is that it is not attempt at all—that it was achievement centuries ago.» — voz de Fort: el contacto ya ocurrió hace siglos.
«Fort will admit that, “I think that we’re fished for” (BD 264).» — voz de Fort en la frase que Vallee y otros retomarán.
«So “why not diplomatic relations established between the United States and Cyclorea—which, in our advanced astronomy, is the name of a remarkable wheel-shaped world or super-construction? Why not missionaries sent here openly to convert us from our barbarous prohibitions and other taboos, and to prepare the way for a good trade in ultra-bibles and super-whiskeys» — voz de Fort proponiendo relaciones diplomáticas con el mundo-rueda Cyclorea.
«I think that there are, out in inter-planetary space, Super Tamerlanes at the head of hosts of celestial ravagers . . . I should say that we’re now under cultivation: that we’re conscious of it, but have the impertinence to attribute it all to our own nobler and higher instincts.» — voz de Fort sobre los Super Tamerlanes y el cultivo de la humanidad, con la elipsis del libro.
«There is a fortune teller in every womb,” he asserted in another one of those striking one-liners (LO 732).» — voz de Fort sobre los talentos innatos.
«Ours is an expression upon Design underlying and manifesting in all things within this one system, with a Final Designer left out, because we know of no designing force that is not itself the product of remoter design.» — voz de Fort: diseño sin Diseñador final.
«it is not altogether anti-Darwinian: the concept of Development replaces the concept of Evolution, but we accept the process of Selection, not to anything loosely known as Environment, but relatively to underlying Schedule and Design, predetermined and supervised, as it were, but by nothing that we conceive in anthropomorphic terms.» — voz de Fort acotando su distancia con Darwin: conserva la selección, cambia el criterio.
«All around are wild talents, and it occurs to nobody to try to cultivate them, except as expressions of personal feelings, or as freaks for which to charge admission. I conceive of powers and the uses of human powers that will some day transcend the stunts of music halls and séances and» — voz de Fort proponiendo que los talentos salvajes se vuelvan servicio público.
«Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.» — epígrafe del capítulo tercero, voz de Arthur C. Clarke.
«A bundle of lies,” Vallee comments in his journals, “but the French public swallows it”» — voz de Vallee sobre la desmentida televisada del astrónomo Muller.
«The legend of the flying disks has existed throughout history,” Vallee asserts.» — voz de Vallee: los discos preceden al siglo XX.
«A super-race (unless they occur frequently) would not be likely to stumble over Planet III of Sol, a fifth-magnitude star in the rarefied outskirts of the Galaxy,” Lipp cleverly wrote.» — voz de J. E. Lipp en su informe de 1949, citado por Vallee y reportado por Kripal.
«This book is an attempt to build a bridge—a tenuous and fragile one— between a fancy and a myth. It is not a scientific book. It could be called a philosophical book, if there were a philosophy of nonfacts. It is not a documentary, unless the dreams of children at play and the cries of women burned alive can be documented. Yet many lives have changed (secretly, unnoticeably sometimes), and, indeed, many innocents have been burned alive because of that fancy. This book is a tribute to all the people who dared preserve a dream. (PM vii)» — voz de Vallee abriendo *Passport to Magonia*, citada entera por Kripal.
«We have, however, seen and heard many men plunged in such great stupidity, sunk in such depths of folly, as to believe that there is a certain region, which they call Magonia, whence ships sail in the clouds, in order to carry back to that region those fruits of the earth which are destroyed by hail and tempests; the sailors paying rewards to the storm wizards and themselves receiving corn» — voz del arzobispo Agobardo de Lyon (779–840) en el pasaje del que Vallee toma el nombre de Magonia.
«When the phone rings in Wright-Paterson Air Force Base, and a local intelligence officer transmits the observation of a motorist who has just been “buzzed” by what he describes as a flying saucer, we are really witnessing the unique conjunction of the modern world—with its technology—and ancient terrors—with all the power of their sudden, fugitive, irrational nature.» — voz de Vallee sobre la conjunción de tecnología moderna y terror antiguo.
«We are in a very privileged position. . . . We feel . . . that we can almost reach out into the night and grab those lurking entities.» — voz de Vallee, con las elipsis del libro.
«There exists a natural phenomenon whose manifestations border on both the physical and the mental.» — voz de Vallee en la primera de sus proposiciones sobre la naturaleza del fenómeno.
«Everything works, in my opinion, as if the phenomenon were the product of a technology that followed well-defined rules and patterns, though fantastic by ordinary human standards.» — voz de Vallee, con el *as if* que sostiene toda su formulación.
«The phenomenon has so far posed no apparent threat to national defense and seems to be indifferent to the welfare of individual witnesses.» — voz de Vallee sobre el carácter no militar y la indiferencia del fenómeno.
«We are faced with a technology that transcends the physical and is capable of manipulating our reality, generating a variety of altered states of consciousness and of emotional perceptions.» — voz de Vallee definiendo la tecnología psíquica.
«They didn’t know whether to shoot us or congratulate us,” Puthoff told Vallee» — voz de Harold Puthoff sobre la reacción oficial al programa.
«had been absorbed by a Being of Light, with unimaginable qualities and quantities of power, goodness, strength, and beauty.” Then a voice in the Light commanded him to “Go back. You are not going to die.”» — voz de Joseph McMoneagle sobre su experiencia de 1970, citada de *Mind Trek*.
«Those few times when I’ve had feelings of remembering another life, it was from the future.”» — voz de Vallee invirtiendo la dirección de la reencarnación.
«Whoever possesses this ‘other kind’ of thought,” Vallee wrote as a young man, “recognizes it at once.» — voz del joven Vallee sobre el reconocimiento entre iniciados.
«The correct conclusion, in my opinion, would be to acknowledge that an unrecognized form of life and consciousness exists close to our earth» — voz de Vallee sobre formas de vida y conciencia no reconocidas.
«I always admired the old traditions which state that there is no such thing as a physical Rosicrucian organization.» — voz de J. Allen Hynek en el coche entre Denver y Boulder, según los diarios de Vallee.
«And they insist that the true initiation, the only illumination of the spirit that counts, cannot come from any human master, but only from nature herself.» — voz de Hynek, continuación del mismo pasaje; tras leerlo dejó la rama de San José.
«There is a strange urge in my mind: I would like to stop behaving as a rat pressing levers—even if I have to go hungry for a while.» — voz del joven Vallee contra el condicionamiento conductual.
«Let me remind you again that the phenomenon is indeed a real manifestation in a physical sense.» — voz de Vallee insistiendo en el componente físico.
«No culture is able to achieve the integral fullness of the real, nor can any develop all the potentialities of the human being» — epígrafe del capítulo cuarto, voz de Bertrand Méheust.
«We call our point of view fantastic realism.» — voz de Pauwels y Bergier nombrando su posición.
«We were not interested in the “outer suburbs” of reality: on the contrary we have tried to take up a position at its very hub.» — voz de los mismos autores situando su método en el centro de lo real, no en su margen.
«The fantastic is usually thought of as a violation of natural law, as a rising up of the impossible.» — voz de Pauwels y Bergier enunciando la concepción que rechazan.
«It is rather a manifestation of natural law, an effect produced by contact with reality—reality perceived directly and not through a filter of habit, prejudice, conformism.» — voz de los mismos, con su definición propia de lo fantástico.
«He would write two years later of encountering in Victor “a being I do not know how to name”» — voz del marqués de Puységur sobre su propio sujeto magnético.
«The fact is,” Townshend explains, “the name of Raphael is written dimly in gold letters on the hem of the Virgin’s garment.”» — voz de Chauncey Hare Townshend en la sesión con Alexis Didier.
«In any case, he confesses that he cannot make her or her family’s name known in print and that the case would be much stronger if he could indeed be more specific.» — la reserva de Townshend sobre su propio testimonio.
«Dieu seul le sait,” Alexis made clear. “Only God knows that.”» — voz de Alexis Didier ante lo que no sabía.
«It is true,” he went on, “many somnambulists pretend to make revelations about a future state. But the proof they are all wrong is, that no two of them agree: all give different accounts.”» — voz de Didier contra los sonámbulos que dicen revelar el más allá.
«He had no doubt that, had he been impatient or distrustful, “Alexis would have lost his clairvoyance, and perhaps attempted to supply it by guessing.» — voz de Townshend sobre la confianza como condición del fenómeno.
«But a thousand negations,” he goes on, “are nothing before one affirmative proof.”» — voz de Townshend con la lógica del cuervo blanco.
«The past, for me, is not dead, but living.» — voz de Méheust sobre su propia relación con la historia.
«He certainly began humbly enough: “The conclusion is: something is seen, but one doesn’t know what.”» — voz de Jung en su declaración a United Press International de 1958.
«True, history may at bottom be an illusion, but an illusion without which no perception of the essence is possible in time.» — primer epígrafe de la conclusión, voz de Gershom Scholem en su carta a Zalman Schocken del 29 de octubre de 1937.
«Miracle is essentially “sign.”» — segundo epígrafe, voz de Franz Rosenzweig.
«I had been blind to the one thing that is always present, and without which I am blind indeed—to this marvelous substitute-for-a-head, this unbounded clarity, this luminous and absolutely pure void, which nevertheless is—rather than contains—all things.» — voz de D. E. Harding en *On Having No Head*.
«I have never been anything but this ageless, adamantine, measureless, lucid, and altogether immaculate Void: it is unthinkable that I could ever have confused that staring wraith over there with what I plainly perceive myself to be here» — voz de Harding sobre el hombre del espejo y el Yo real.
«All that we saw was owing to your metaphysics.» — epígrafe del apéndice, voz de William Blake.
«We want you to believe in us, but not too much.» — segundo epígrafe del mismo apéndice, voz atribuida a un ocupante en la literatura ufológica.
«If the kids saw a woman dressed in white, who else could she be but Our Lady?”» — voz del padre de Lucía, António, en la primera identificación del caso.
«The girl made herself quite clear: “I never said that it was Our Lady—rather, a small, pretty lady. . . . She told me that we should continue to go there for six consecutive months, on the 13th of each month, and that at the end of that time, she would tell us who she was and what she wanted of us.”» — voz de Lucía en el testimonio temprano, con la elipsis del libro.
«The ground was divided into squares, each one a different color.”» — voz de un testigo sobre el aspecto del suelo bajo la aparición.
«In the midst of all the nonsense and excessive silliness proclaimed in the name of psychic phenomena, the misinformed use of the term “parapsychology” by self-proclaimed “paranormal investigators,” the perennial laughingstock of magicians and conjurers . . . this is for real? The short answer is, Yes.» — epígrafe de la bibliografía anotada, voz de Dean Radin en *The Conscious Universe*.
«I never liked to get into debates with the skeptics, because if you didn’t believe that remote viewing was real, you hadn’t done your homework.”» — voz del general Edmund R. Thompson, jefe de inteligencia del Ejército de EE. UU. entre 1977 y 1981.
«We now “realize that whoever dictates the messages, whoever gives the demurrage [demiurge] his power, whoever breaks the natural laws, is not God but energy entities, intelligent and evolved to a greater or lesser degree, who interfere with human lives.» — voz de Salvador Freixedo citada en la bibliografía; el corchete y la grafía *demurrage* son del libro.
«There is a debate about whether there was ever a live broadcast of the events immediately surrounding RFK’s assassination, as opposed to a report aired soon after the event from a previous audio recording.» — en las notas, Kripal abre la duda histórica sobre el caso con que abre el libro.
«If Adam in fact awoke at 3:00 a.m., this strongly suggests that he heard a live broadcast, hence Adam’s memory of waking up at 3:00 a.m. may be incorrect.» — la nota razona contra su propio testigo: si hubo transmisión en vivo, la hora recordada falla.
«In any case, whereas the apparent precognitive element of Adam’s experience hinges on the historical questions of whether there was a live broadcast and when he awoke, its otherwise “impossible” nature does not.» — separa lo que la duda histórica afecta de lo que no.
«Whether read as an example of precognition or some kind of occult connection, Adam’s mind was interacting with history as it was presenting itself on the radio, be it live or recorded.» — lo que la nota conserva del caso en cualquiera de las dos lecturas.
«He was not the least bit defensive, and he was entirely open about the reason: no one on his editorial board expressed any concerted interest in the subject.» — la explicación editorial que Kripal recibió sobre la ausencia del tema en las publicaciones del campo.
«Braude’s work easily constitutes one of the most reliable and philosophically astute oeuvres on psychical phenomena we possess.» — la valoración de Stephen E. Braude en las notas.
«Cross-cultural surveys have shown that “about half of all spontaneous psi experiences occur in the dream state” (Radin, Conscious Universe, 68).» — el dato que toma de Radin sobre el sueño como sede del psi espontáneo.
«Hansen’s work stands virtually alone among parapsychological writings for its deep engagement with the humanities and social sciences.» — la valoración de George Hansen en las notas.
«To my limited knowledge, other than Couliano, the only other scholar of religion who has recognized the mind-blowing implications of Einstein’s physics for the practice of historiography is Elliot R. Wolfson.» — la única compañía que Kripal reconoce a Couliano, con su límite declarado.
«I am adopting this expression from Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). I am using it, however, in a different way.» — declara en nota la procedencia de *meaning event* y su desvío respecto de Sells.
«A “meaning event” for Sells is the moment in a piece of mystical literature in which “the meaning has become identical or fused with the act of predication” (9), that is to say, a meaning event is a literary mode that attempts to replicate in human language the structure of the original state of consciousness that inspired it.» — la definición original de Sells, contra la que Kripal mide la suya.
«Paranormal events, as we shall see, often function in remarkably similar ways. They appear to be designed to confuse.» — en nota, la comparación entre el suceso paranormal y el sermón de Eckhart o el koan zen.
«Reality really is almost entirely “occult” to our normal sensory capacities.» — la nota apoya el término *oculto* en el espectro electromagnético que no percibimos.
«Sutin, however, although he finds such diagnoses possible enough, is not finally impressed with either the adequacy or the wisdom of such easy labels.» — la posición del biógrafo de Dick sobre los diagnósticos psiquiátricos.
«I am simply pointing out how little it explains with respect to Dick’s place in the general history of religions.» — la acotación de Kripal sobre su propio uso del caso Dick.
«I recognize that Todorov tilts away from the metaphysical, but I am using him for my own purposes here.» — declara en nota que fuerza a Todorov en una dirección que el propio Todorov no toma.
«That Night, in fact, constitutes the impossible, paranormal subtext of all my books, including this one.» — la experiencia propia que Kripal declara subtexto de toda su obra, dicha solo en nota.
«I have written extensively about the magnetic-plasmic energies of “that Night” and their reprogramming of my writing practices in Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom and Mutants and Mystics.» — remite a sus otros libros para el relato de esa noche.
«Thus Myers describes death as the “complete dissociation from the brain itself” (HP 1:xliii).» — la definición de muerte en Myers, recogida en nota.
«It may be dubious indeed to make evolutionary comparisons between contemporary cultures and religions, generations, or even centuries, but it seems difficult to deny that the species and its forms of consciousness have evolved over the last few hundred thousand years, much less the last few million.» — en nota, Kripal concede la sospecha humanista hacia las teologías evolutivas y a la vez la limita.
«It also remains true that innumerable expressions of metaphysical religion are simply incomprehensible outside an evolutionary frame.» — el argumento con que sostiene la utilidad del marco evolutivo pese a sus usos políticos.
«As we shall see, the Sargasso Sea was central to Charles Fort’s metaphorical armory as well.» — la nota enlaza el mar de los Sargazos de Myers con el de Fort.
«Swann is a remarkable figure whose books, a few of them, like this one, already collector’s items, deserve a careful study of their own.» — la valoración de Ingo Swann en nota, con la deuda de estudio declarada.
«The exact scenario was never conclusive, since Gurney was known to suffer from headaches and could have easily been administering a painkiller, but even close friends suspected suicide.» — la muerte de Edmund Gurney, consignada con las dos lecturas.
«Carrington, by the way, was an expert on stage magic, so he was hardly one to be easily fooled.» — el dato con que Kripal pondera el testimonio de Hereward Carrington sobre Palladino.
«Reichenbach’s work is an unmistakable forerunner of the radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and his “orgone.”» — la línea que traza de la fuerza ódica al orgón.
«The phrase “cosmic consciousness” James almost certainly borrowed from Richard Maurice Bucke, Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind (Innes & Sons, 1901).» — la procedencia del término *conciencia cósmica*.
«Indeed, he was the first to publish Freud in English.» — dicho de William James, en la nota sobre su papel de puente.
«More recently, Christopher I. Lehrich has argued for a similar “magical” structure of critical theory, this time in conversation with modern forms of occultism (The Occult Mind: Magic in Theory and Practice [Syracuse: Cornell University Press, 2007]).» — la nota sitúa a Lehrich junto a Jonathan Z. Smith en la lectura mágica de la comparación.
«As a trained scientist who became a historian of religions, Smith wants us to move away from the magical to the scientific.» — la dirección que J. Z. Smith imprime a esa idea.
«But it seems to me that comparative insights can also sometimes participate in the magical and mystical structures of consciousness, with which we also must deal.» — el desacuerdo de Kripal con Smith, nombrado y acotado.
«In other words, there really is a magic in comparison.» — la conclusión de esa nota.
«I cannot help pondering the potential connections between Myers’s metaphor of the imaginal as an adult insect and the imaginal realm of later UFO encounters, which often involve psychical, evolutionary, and insectoid themes, from the beelike “buzzing” of the craft, through the evolutionary intentions of the interventions, to the insectlike appearance of the telepathic aliens.» — la correspondencia insecto-imaginal y encuentro ovni, planteada en nota.
«I don’t know what to make of this, but there it is.» — la abstención con que cierra esa correspondencia.
«Myers, however, recognized that telaesthesia merges into telepathy, since it is always possible that a perception at a distance is being picked up from another mind there (HP 1:xv).» — la nota matiza la distinción que el cuerpo del libro traza entre los dos términos.
«Freud, after all, turned to the exact same Greek classic in order to gloss his own understanding of sexuality as an omnipresent force capable of genital, cultural, literary, and philosophical expression, that is, Plato’s Symposium and its fundamentally mystical notion of eros.» — el *Symposium* como fuente común de Myers y de Freud.
«The phrase “intellectually promiscuous” is mine, but it is entirely faithful to Fort’s sexual-intellectual sense of his comparative sins.» — declara en nota qué frase es suya y no de Fort.
«The parapsychological use of the metaphor of the white crow originates with William James, who used it to point out that only one genuine psychical case, only one white crow, is sufficient to conclude that the easy assumptions of scientific materialism are false, that not all crows are black.» — el origen del cuervo blanco, fijado en nota.
«Fort’s constant use of “hypnotics” and “somnambulists” to describe those duped by religion or science is a case in point. He employs these terms not to affirm the data of psychical research, but to explain the psychology of plausibility within these two Dominants (NL 424).» — la nota acota el uso que Fort da a un vocabulario magnético que no suscribe.
«The quantum mystical movement, I see now, did not begin in 1975, with the appearance of Capra’s The Tao of Physics. It began in 1932, with the appearance of Fort’s Wild Talents, a book that in turn draws inspiration» — la corrección cronológica del misticismo cuántico, marcada como algo que Kripal ve ahora.
«No doubt, to the horror of Wells, who hated The Book of the Damned and its author, calling the latter in a review “one of the most damnable bores who ever cut scraps from out-of-the-way newspapers” (cited in Steinmeyer, Charles Fort, 11).» — el juicio de H. G. Wells sobre Fort, recogido en nota.
«Both stories even feature what Fort calls an “occult police force” (Keel’s “men in black”) whose job it is to “kill off mysteries with bogus explanations,” “to divert suspicion from themselves, because they, too, may be exploiting life upon this earth” (LO 661).» — la policía oculta de Fort emparejada con los hombres de negro de John A. Keel.
«The title finally chosen is a jab at the astronomers, who were good at calculating where a new planet should be and, effectively, declaring “Lo!” that is, “Look there!” only to find nothing at all in the sky.» — el origen del título *Lo!* en la burla a los astrónomos.
«Fort was not very fond of astronomy—one of his real mistakes.» — el juicio de Kripal, que separa el error de Fort de sus aciertos.
«Ford wrote a letter to the Armed Services Committee of the House of Representatives and demanded immediate hearings.» — el caso de Ann Arbor de 1966 y la reacción del entonces congresista Gerald Ford.
«Hynek famously suggested at a press conference a few days later that it may have been “swamp gas,” a response that was ridiculed by the press and infuriated Ford, who, as Vallee describes him, was outraged “at the suggestion that his constituents couldn’t tell marsh gas from spaceships” (FS 1:182).» — el episodio del gas de pantano, con la reacción política que provocó.
«Ezekiel himself never refers to the vision as a chariot.» — la precisión textual que la nota introduce sobre la tradición de la *merkabah*.
«Like so many other assumed impossibilities, such alien-human contact remains a very real possibility for those in the know.» — la valoración de Kripal sobre los expertos en contacto.
«And unlike so many other writers, he understands well that many of the deepest challenges here are philosophical, symbolic, and religious, that is, the problems of translation, communication, and worldview that such contact would inevitably involve.» — lo que Kripal reconoce a Michael A. G. Michaud.
«He understands, in my own terms now, that any contact team would have to include more anthropologists than rocket scientists.» — la traducción de esa idea al vocabulario del libro.
«By 1992, there were twenty major categories in Vallee’s mature classification system.» — la escala final de la tipología de Vallee.
«Both the Tibetan and Mormon traditions emphasize “treasure-books” hidden in the ground, waiting for the proper time to be revealed.» — la comparación que la nota abre entre dos tradiciones de libro-tesoro.
«The culture of NASA, for example, is informed by science fiction, particularly that of Star Trek and of Robert A. Heinlein.» — la nota sobre la cultura de la NASA y su matriz de ciencia ficción.
«Hynek had originally, in early 1965, proposed “the Little Society,” a playful spin on Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” (FS 1:134).» — el nombre que Hynek propuso antes del que quedó.
«By the spring of 1967, he had switched the name to “the Invisible College” (FS 1:270).» — la fecha exacta del cambio de nombre, según los diarios de Vallee.
«We are not dealing with spiritual transformation here, but with social trance-formations» — el juego de palabras con que Kripal resume la posición de Vallee sobre los avistamientos.
«Vallee, however, had proposed to Hynek as early as 1963 that the saucer question “plunges deep into mystical and psychic theories” (FS 1:88).» — la fecha temprana en que Vallee ya planteaba la vía psíquica.
«Vallee, although certainly suspicious of government intelligence and official manipulation and their grossly distorting effects on the scientific study of UFOs, generally resists radical forms of conspiracy thinking, as Barkun himself notes» — la nota separa la sospecha de Vallee del conspiracionismo, con Michael Barkun como testigo.
«Later, scholars of new religious movements will expand on this list, adding observations about the clear historical links that exist between the early contactee literature and esoteric movements like Theosophy and the I AM movement, the use of channeling practices to contact various alien entities, and the different ways this material challenges the dominant scientific and religious paradigms.» — el enlace histórico entre literatura de contacto y esoterismo teosófico.
«Partridge identifies the later abduction spiritualities as developments of an earlier theosophical esotericism within a New Age matrix, tracing, for example, the transformation of the “ascended masters” of Theosophy into the “descended masters” of the UFO religions.» — la lectura de Partridge sobre el paso de los maestros ascendidos a los descendidos.
«The Arpanet was named after its funding source, ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Pentagon, now called DARPA (the D is for Defense).» — la procedencia del nombre, aclarada en nota.
«Targ and Puthoff describe this same event, I gather, in Mind-Reach, 47–48. It appears that it was Price, not Swann, who performed this particular remote viewing.» — una corrección de atribución que Kripal introduce solo en nota, y con un *I gather*.
«Later researchers will pick up on this comparative phenomenology and add near-death experiences (NDE) to the mix.» — la ampliación posterior de la fenomenología comparada.
«Vallee likes to quote Churchill on this key point: “In wartime, truth is so precious that she must always be protected by a bodyguard of lies.”» — la cita de Churchill que Vallee usa sobre el secreto oficial, recogida en nota.
«According to Vallee, Hynek was also especially fond of Aldous Huxley’s The Perennial Philosophy.» — otra lectura hermética de Hynek, según los diarios de Vallee.
«There are clear allusions here to the science-fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, whose fictional universe is structured along similar lines.» — la nota señala el eco lovecraftiano en el material.
«The counterculture was counter to culture to the extent that it insisted on the primacy of consciousness as metaphysically prior to culture and, subsequently, as the most effective creator of new culture.» — la definición de contracultura por la primacía de la conciencia.
«I am indebted here to Richard Shweder, who has written eloquently of a certain “ontological polytheism,” of “reality posits,” and of a cultural psychology whose goal is to show how psyche and culture “make each other up.”» — la deuda con Shweder, declarada solo en nota.
«The text is written in his voice, with the clear acknowledgment that the ideas were the product of a five-year study and friendship with Bergier.» — la nota precisa la autoría real de *Le Matin des Magiciens*.
«The physicist John Wheeler wrote of reality as “it” and “bit,” that is, as composed of both matter and information, and the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley thought that there is “one world stuff” that manifests both material and mental properties depending upon whether it is viewed from the outside (matter) or from the inside (mind).» — el monismo neutral de Wheeler y Huxley, recogido en nota.
«I am not sure, however, what either author would have thought about reality manifesting itself as physical-mythical.» — el límite que Kripal se pone al usar a esos dos autores.
«What we have here is the return of the marvelous, but now coded in terms of the scientific discovery.» — la fórmula del sagrado tecnologizado, en nota.
«This is also why Méheust rejects the ever-popular ancient astronaut theory, whereby the evolution of human beings and their cultures are seen to have been guided for millennia by space-faring aliens (SF» — el rechazo de Méheust a la tesis del astronauta antiguo, con su motivo.
«It is also worth mentioning here that Méheust’s work on UFOs became the basis of at least two sci-fi novels: former Oxford linguist Ian Watson’s Miracle Visitors and Michel Jeury’s Les yeux geants.» — la obra de Méheust convertida a su vez en ciencia ficción.
«This is not quite true, as the biological function of sex is present in and indeed often central to the encounter stories, as Méheust himself notes.» — una corrección que Kripal introduce contra su propia formulación anterior.
«I am indebted to David Hufford for reminding me here of this particular feature of Berger’s thought (personal communication, April 20, 2008).» — la deuda declarada con fecha de comunicación personal.
«Consider the case of CSICOPS, the organization ideologically dedicated to criticizing, humiliating, or otherwise shouting down all paranormal claims, and its dubious handling of the alleged findings of Michel Gauquelin that the position of Mars at an individual’s birth is correlated with athletic ability (George» — la objeción a CSICOPS, con el caso Gauquelin como ejemplo.
«This “fear of psi” theme is a very strong one in the literature.» — el peso que Kripal da al *fear of psi* dentro de la bibliografía.
«I will address some of these issues below, but I hope it goes without saying that I have been problematizing this term all along through my criticisms of subjectivist and objectivist epistemologies.» — la carga que Kripal reconoce en la palabra *real* y cómo dice haberla tratado.
«Didier’s articulation here is faithful to the Catholic tradition of relic use, which distinguishes between first-, second-, and third» — la nota enlaza la psicometría de Didier con la doctrina católica de las reliquias.
«On one level, my metamethod here with respect to cognitive science is interactionist in the sense that E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. NcCauley define the term, that is, I seek to put explanatory or reductive and interpretive or hermeneutical methods in a dynamic complementary relationship (“Interpretation» — Kripal declara su metamétodo en nota; el libro imprime *NcCauley*.
«On another level, my approach in this book has been more inclusivistic in the sense that I have privileged the semiotic nature of paranormal events over their presumed causal structure (but primarily to redress a perceived imbalance» — el sesgo semiótico declarado, con su motivo correctivo.
«In this two-way skepticism toward religious literalism and scientific materialism, my method is deeply Fortean.» — se declara forteano en la doble sospecha.
«In the terms of professional philosophy, I am probably closest to David Ray Griffin’s “nondualist interactionism” (see especially his Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration [Albany: SUNY, 1997], chapter 3), or, better still, the “dual aspect monism” proposed by quantum theorist Harald Atmanspacher» — su filiación filosófica, dicha con un *probably* y solo en nota.
«Apparently, whether I am aware of it or not, this is what I think.» — el reconocimiento del hilo ontológico que atraviesa su obra sin haberlo planeado.
«I certainly do not think that the cognitive, binary, computational structure of the human brain is up to understanding the nondual nature of the One World, although of course human beings experience, intuit, and know such states of being all the time.» — el límite cognitivo que fija, con su concesión inmediata.
«An interesting exception is Sam Harris, whose otherwise famous ideological reductionism generously leaves open the possibility that psychical phenomena may have something to teach contemporary neuroscience.» — la excepción que concede a Harris entre los reduccionistas.
«I recognize that, as a brain anatomist, Taylor often presents her case as a physicalist or materialist thinker.» — la concesión de Kripal sobre la posición declarada de Taylor.
«But I can only observe that her constant invocation of mystical language works strongly against this very materialism and physicalism.» — su lectura contra esa autodescripción, marcada como observación.
«In the end, in my reading now, her text is a “fantastic” one capable of being read either way.» — el veredicto: el texto de Taylor admite las dos lecturas.
«Although I am in broad and deep agreement with this work, I am troubled that its use of the scholarly literature on mysticism, spirituality, and religious experience is a half century behind the times, that is, the authors rely heavily on authors like William James, Richard Maurice Bucke, Evelyn Underhill, and William Stace (fair enough), but show little or no awareness of the vast literature that historians and philosophers of religion have been working on since the 1960s.» — el desacuerdo con Beauregard y O’Leary, con el acuerdo declarado antes.
«I would suggest that such a collaboration is possible only if the historical and hermeneutical complexities are engaged at the same depth and at the same level as the neuroscience.» — la condición que pone a la colaboración entre neurociencia y humanidades.
«The authors sum up their thesis thus: “that the secret gateway to alien worlds may be hidden inside our own minds and that humans already have been traveling in space and time and making contact with alien species,” via the chemical triggers or brain-filter suppressors of nature’s psychotropic plants (3).» — la tesis psicodélica del contacto, recogida en nota.
«Persinger’s readings also bear obvious parallels to the earlier work of John E. Keel, a Fortean writer who advanced a very similar set of electromagnetic or “superspectrum” readings of occult phenomena in his many books, including and especially The Eighth Tower: The Cosmic Force Behind All Religious, Occult and UFO Phenomena (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1975).» — la nota enlaza a Persinger con el *superspectrum* de Keel.
«Indeed, there is other research to suggest that exposure to high levels of electromagnetic radiation can produce many of the classical UFO (and Marian) phenomena: paralysis, loss of consciousness, visual impairment, and amnesia among them (Celestial Secrets, 89).» — el cuadro de síntomas que la nota atribuye a la exposición electromagnética.
«Similarly, Vallee notes that the Arabic astrological sign for Venus was seen on the unidentified flying object witnessed at Socorro, New Mexico, on April 24, 1964 (IC 134» — el signo astrológico árabe de Venus en el caso Socorro, con su fecha.
«The witness, a patrolman named Lonnie Zamora, insisted on seeing a priest before he spoke of what he saw, “because he thought he might have seen something diabolical” (FS 1:110).» — la reacción religiosa del testigo del caso Socorro.
Conceptos tratados
Imaginación (phantasia) — Lo *imaginal* no lo inventó Corbin: lo acuñó Henry More en 1642 como «the imaginall», y Myers fue el primer teórico consistente del término en el estudio de la religión
Gnosis (conocimiento salvífico) — Categoría operativa, no ornamento: Vallee habita «a modern form of gnosis or forbidden knowledge well beyond reason and completely beyond belief», y son tres las gnosis que dan forma a sus textos —la del futuro, la de la multidimensionalidad y la de la rosacruz
Ocultismo (occultisme) — La *occulture* de Partridge es dialéctica —«a confluence of secularization and sacralization»—, no victoria de la secularización; y lo popular escapa a los censores por no ser tomado en serio
Magonia (la región de donde vienen las naves de las nubes) — Vallee toma el nombre de la región «a certain region, which they call Magonia,» del pasaje del arzobispo Agobardo de Lyon (779–840), y Kripal lo lee como universo paralelo coexistente y como archivo de casos, no como lugar
Iniciación (recepción por grados / metamorfosis del ser) — Aimé Michel escribe a Vallee que «Ufology is not a science but a process of initiation.»; Vallee, por su parte, intuye semejanzas profundas entre las abducciones y «the initiation rituals of secret societies»
Secreto (lo que se jura no fijar por escrito) — Tres formas de conocimiento secreto —del futuro, de la multidimensionalidad y de la rosacruz— dan forma a los textos de Vallee, y el estudio donde escribe está, por sus vitrales, «truly and literally sub rosa»
Anima mundi (alma del mundo) — El Alma del Mundo aparece tres veces y en tres bocas: Hegel escribiendo «appreciatively on animal magnetism, extrasensory perception, and a kind of World Soul», Myers con «the ancient doctrine of the World-Soul», y Victoria Nelson leyendo el Valis de Philip K. Dick como «a meta-organism identical in all its features to Plotinus’s World Soul.»
Crítica de fuentes (criterios de inclusión y descarte) — El método se aplica en las dos direcciones: el estudio histórico-crítico de la religión le enseña a Myers que no había «no way to rescue his faith through historical studies», y en sus propias notas Kripal abre la duda sobre si hubo transmisión en vivo del atentado con que abre el libro