How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else

«If taken as real (by which I simply mean, “they happen”), such experiences and events (and they are both) would transform the» — la frase cruza el corte y termina en la p. 8; es la apuesta del prólogo sobre la precognición.

«entire order of knowledge upon which our present culture depends, the sciences included» — cierre de esa misma frase, ya en la página siguiente.

«time goes both ways» — primera de las cuatro consecuencias que enumera, esta para la práctica de la historia.

«because it is based on an actual, if unreliable, human ability» — con eso explica que la adivinación esté distribuida por todo el globo.

«agency can act from the future» — cuarta consecuencia, sobre la causalidad misma.

«Secrecy here is no social stratagem or political gambit. It is a necessary function of the nature of the impossible itself.» — su lectura del secreto en el caso de Hurston.

«if we are going to think impossibly, we should not assume that this thought will be widely accepted. In fact, it will not be. It cannot be.» — la consecuencia social que saca de ahí.

«Reality only appears to be divided into mind and matter, into consciousness and cosmos, or into a past, present, and future because you experience it as such. You are the splitter of the real and the creator of linear time.» — el secreto del libro, enunciado en segunda persona.

«the impossible is a function not of reality but of our own present social constructions and subsequent perceptions and cognitions» — traslada lo imposible del mundo a la construcción social.

«the deconstruction of deconstruction. That is the snake biting its own tail.» — así nombra esa maniobra.

«there is a kind of global renaissance going on around the impossible» — su diagnóstico de época; adjudica a Hussein Ali Agrama la «anthropology of the impossible».

«mystical experiences of cosmic unity, clairvoyant visions, near-death experiences, and UFO encounters that are not supposed to happen but do all the time» — así enumera el objeto del libro, tras los sueños precognitivos.

«not because I understand them, nor because I believe them in the terms in which they appear, but because they show every sign of issuing from another order of knowledge and reality outside what we currently think of as “the human.”» — por qué le importan, con la creencia expresamente descartada.

«the adjective mystical works especially well here, as it literally translates from the Greek as secret» — Sigue: indecible, indescriptible, incognoscible.

«if quantum physics and comparative mystical literature are really pointing to or emerging from the same deeper reality, they must correspond. And that is why they do.» — su tesis de correspondencia.

«all turned to comparative mystical literature to make human sense of what the quantum mechanics implied» — lo adjudica a Heisenberg, Bohr, Schrödinger y Pauli.

«the Swiss-German quantum theorist Harald Atmanspacher, whose dual-aspect monism I adopted some time ago as my own working ontology» — declara de quién toma su ontología y que es de trabajo.

«I am not doing quantum physics here. I am thinking-with quantum physicists» — el límite que se pone a sí mismo.

«we have evolved to win the game of life not to perceive reality as it really is» — adjudica el argumento a Donald Hoffman («fitness beats truth»).

«In some sense, we “caused” the big bang.» — así resume la retrocausalidad cosmológica de John Wheeler.

«Wheeler himself would have adamantly opposed much that follows.» — consigna que su fuente se habría opuesto a lo que construye sobre ella.

«at least since Authors of the Impossible (2010), I have insisted that myth or story sometimes results in very real and otherwise completely anomalous physical effects» — reclama continuidad con su obra de 2010, no giro.

«and insist that these models are relative to a particular form of consciousness» — así sostiene a la vez las lecturas reductivas del mito y los efectos físicos del mito: aquellas valen para «the atomized rational academic ego».

«This is a book about why the humanities must stop ceding reality to the sciences.» — la consigna del libro.

«I am long experienced in intellectuals confidently expressing utter certainties concerning matters they know nothing about.» — su queja gremial, en primera persona.

«Anything to not think impossibly» — cierra ahí su objeción a los humanistas que vuelven a los tropos posmoderno, poscolonial, feminista y sociohistórico; en la misma página aclara «it is not that I disagree, at all, with these models».

«Suddenly, I feel like a ghost, a spectral presence haunting the academic certainties» — la escena con que describe su posición en la academia.

«prophetic social spirit and a heavy accent on the altered states of consciousness and knowledge that produced so many of the central ideas of the humanities» — así define las superhumanidades; la frase arranca al pie de la p. 31 y cierra aquí.

«the modern abduction visions replicate, in precise detail, the imaginal of Myers» — enlaza el imaginal victoriano con la morfología insectoide actual.

«The paranormal is insectoid.» — la formulación breve de esa tesis.

«it is well known among seasoned researchers that the UFO is very much connected to the near-death experience (NDE)—the heavenly saucer and the transcendent soul» — adjudica a Joshua Cutchin (*Ecology of Souls*) el estudio más completo del vínculo.

«now sit in our Archives of the Impossible at Rice University» — sobre las «Communion Letters» reunidas por Anne Strieber; en la p. 93 consigna que fueron cerca de 250 000 cartas y que ella depuró una cuarta parte.

«only one of the 144 events» — del informe del ODNI del 25 de junio de 2021, nueve páginas, 144 eventos entre 2004 y 2021, de los que solo uno pudo explicarse.

«Politicians and military officials (and the media) continued to focus almost exclusively on the physical aspects of the phenomenon and continued to ignore their paranormal or impossible effects.» — su objeción a las audiencias del Congreso de mayo de 2022.

«there is definitely something being covered up or lied about» — Sigue: «no one knows what that something is or what it means».

«our culture has grown incredibly stupid around the nature of the soul, or what we would today call “consciousness”» — su diagnóstico cultural, junto al multinaturalismo.

«my own position is very close to that of the astronomer, computer scientist, and medical research investor Jacques Vallee and his “forbidden science,”» — declara alineación, con la mezcla de astronomía, informática, teoría de la información, práctica esotérica y escepticismo ante todo sistema de creencia ovni.

«I am extremely dubious of any and all talk of the “extraterrestrial.” I don’t believe in gods, deities, demons, or aliens. It’s my job.» — su negativa doctrinal más nítida.

«we need to flip from a spatial register (it is not where they are from) to a temporal register (it is when they are from)» — el giro de espacio a tiempo.

«I would say that the UFO often appears to be a time machine and that the so-called aliens look more than a little like human beings from the future» — Añade: o una forma sofisticada de inteligencia artificial futura.

«How to think impossibly : about souls, UFOs, time, belief, and everything else» — título completo según el asiento catalográfico, con autoría única de «Kripal, Jeffrey J. (Jeffrey John), 1962- author» y sello The University of Chicago Press, 2024.

«That systematization of pseudo-data is approximation to realness or final awakening.» — primer epígrafe del libro, de Charles Fort, *The Book of the Damned*. Los otros dos son de Barbara Newman (*The Permeable Self*) y de Carlos Eire (*They Flew: A History of the Impossible*).

«I saw twelve scenes flash before me» — Zora Neale Hurston en *Dust Tracks on a Road*, citada en bloque como caso inaugural; sigue «I knew that they were all true, a preview of things to come» y «I had knowledge before its time». Voz de Hurston.

«This has something to do with what we call death.» — frase de Anne Strieber, que llega a esta obra por vía de Whitley Strieber. No es formulación de Kripal.

«Remember who you work for.» — de lo que Stuart Davis relata haber oído de una mantis de dos metros y medio con túnica púrpura, la nochevieja de 2010; caso tomado de su pódcast *Aliens & Artists*. Voz de Davis.

«It seems certain to me that shamans and mystics throughout the ages probably had Asperger’s syndrome or something of that nature» — «Kevin», seudónimo, como epígrafe del capítulo 3. Voz de Kevin, no posición de Kripal.

«Most people are digital computers, haunted by flashes of analog Mind.» — Kevin, citado; y en la misma página «Humans are analog/digital processing units for the Cosmic Unconscious of Platonic Surrealism.»

«Eros, Gnosis, Hermes» — rótulo de sección sobre Elliot Wolfson; es la única aparición de «Hermes» en toda la obra.

«absolute reality, intrinsic rightness, and ultimate perfection» — el neurólogo James Austin sobre lo que experimentó en el metro de Londres, citado en bloque; sigue «There was no viewer… there is absolutely nothing whatsoever to fear.» Voz de Austin.

«I hope this revelation serves as an ontological shock sociologically» — David Grusch, verano de 2023, citado como último eslabón de la genealogía del término. Voz de Grusch.

El aparato editorial son los agradecimientos, titulados *A Sociology of the Impossible* (EPUB pp. 290–292), las notas (EPUB pp. 293–345) y el índice (EPUB pp. 346–362): 70 de las 360 páginas indexadas.

«Ultimate redemption would consist of attaining the state of consciousness—or perhaps metaconsciousness—that entails incorporation of all differentiation in indifferent oneness that is ascribed to Ein Sof or to Keter, the divine nothingness marked by the paradoxical coincidence of opposites such that night is day, left is right, white is black, Jew is non-Jew, male is female, and so on. . . . What is required is . . . an apophasis of the apophasis, a venturing beyond to the precipice, the chasm of the excluded middle, where opposites are identical in the opposition of their identity. . . . While it is not at all clear to me that such an ideal can be implemented sociologically without dispelling the very path that leads to it, this may very well be the most daring implication of the messianic potential of the kabbalah» — Elliot Wolfson sobre Ein Sof y Keter, en cita de bloque: la coincidencia de opuestos como redención, y la reserva sociológica con que él mismo la acota.

«Hence Wolfson’s consistent embrace of Nicholas of Cusa’s coincidentia oppositorum, or “coincidence of opposites,” as a model of kabbalistic thought and as a forerunner and fulfillment of postmodern theory today. This coincidence or identity of opposites, which violates and transcends the Aristotelian logic that currently defines pretty much the entire academy, is perhaps the deepest structure of all Wolfson’s cognitive structures. Here is how Wolfson describes this deepest of structures early on in Language, Eros, Being: To savor the mystical intuition of the divine as the coincidence of being and nothing—what may be considered for the kabbalist, as his counterpart in medieval Islamic and Christian mystical speculation, the primary ontological binary that comprises other binary constructions, the binary of binaries, we might say—one must reclaim the middle excluded by the logic of the excluded middle, for it is only by positioning oneself in that middle between extremes that one can appreciate the identity of opposites in the opposition of their identity: that a thing is not only both itself and its opposite, but neither itself nor its opposite.39 In the same paradoxical logic, Wolfson will call the Ein Sof, or Infinite, of the kabbalistic traditions the “negation of all negation,” a phrase rich in implications for Wolfson’s use of Continental philosophy and its general failure to negate its own negations and so arrive at something deeper and more real.40 Perhaps it goes without saying, but I will say it anyway as I move into my own modeling of the impossible in the next chapter: the psychophysical ground of dual-aspect monism is similarly conceived. It is “neutral”—which is to say that it is neither mental nor material, which means that it is fundamentally paradoxical to» — y su noción de corporeidad divina en la tradición cabalística.

«Nights and days, hours and minutes, are simply means of determining the measure of time; but these measurements are not time itself. In itself, time is the limit of the persistence of the eternal Form ‘on the surface’ of the accidental matter of this world» — Henry Corbin sobre el tiempo, citado por Wolfson y reproducido por Kripal: cita de tercera mano, así consignada en el propio texto.

«He clearly wants to separate, like so many other religious thinkers, mystical experience as vertical givenness from “everything that is nonrational, weird, exotic, occult, or paranormal» — la lista de lo que Anthony Steinbock excluye de la experiencia mística; Kripal le objeta que así incumple su propia regla.

«since Satan was a ‘natural Magician’ he could ‘perform many acts in ways above our knowledge, though not transcending our natural powers» — Satán como «mago natural» según Thomas Browne (1646), citado por Carlos Eire y reproducido por Kripal: tres voces encajadas.

«may be argued to constitute a domain where the truth claims of African wisdom are not just valid within the local African space of culturally created self-evidence, but may deserve to be globally mediated as a statement of a transcultural truth, and hence superior to current collective representations in the West» — Wim van Binsbergen, antropólogo y adivino iniciado, sobre el estatuto de la sabiduría africana; Kripal añade que le parece plausible.

«the Black Panther (with a superhero origin story lodged in root work—that sacred herb seems a lot like the root Frederick Douglass was given» — Biko Gray adjudicando al root work el linaje del superhéroe negro.

«Davis is thinking especially of the psychedelic visionaries and activists Terence and Dennis McKenna, the occult writer Robert Anton Wilson, and the science-fiction author Philip K. Dick» — el elenco de la «alta rareza» según Erik Davis, con Robert Anton Wilson nombrado escritor ocultista.

«Think of it as a kind of visionary skepticism, or critical gnosis» — y su fórmula, que es de Davis.

«All manner of psi phenomena started happening to me: telepathic communications with people and the beings, out-of-body experiences, the sudden ability to ‘hear’ dead people, channeling and automatic writing about a coming earth emergency, an almost religious concern about the wellbeing of all life on the planet, art that I created compulsively» — Karin Austin declarando en primera persona prácticas de tradición espiritista: canalización y escritura automática.

«One claimed that he was an alchemist from the medieval world» — y «Kevin», seudónimo, sobre las entidades que se le ofrecieron.

«Any phenomenon that is widely and deeply studied becomes central to its field, while puzzling “fringe” phenomena may be ignored for so long that their very existence is forgotten. Yet it is often those same phenomena, when someone finally takes note of them, that force a paradigm shift.» — segundo epígrafe del libro, de Barbara Newman, *The Permeable Self: Five Medieval Relationships*: los fenómenos de borde se ignoran hasta que alguien repara en ellos y fuerzan el cambio de paradigma. Voz de Newman.

«To say that a whole new dimension opened up for me on the spot at that instant, is to understate the magnitude of the experience. . . . It’s hard to explain what actually happened, really, but somehow, that very rational moment of clarity immediately sparked some kind of cognitive firestorm that I can’t describe in precise terms» — tercer epígrafe, de Carlos Eire, *They Flew: A History of the Impossible*, sobre el instante en que se le abrió una dimensión nueva. Voz de Eire.

«I had been trained to never, ever take the supernatural or miraculous as facts in any way, under any circumstances.» — cierre de ese mismo epígrafe de Eire: el adiestramiento profesional que le impedía tomar por hecho lo sobrenatural. Voz de Eire.

«So there must be something wrong with a child that questions the gods of the pigeon-holes. I was always asking and making myself a crow in a pigeon’s nest. It was hard on my family and surroundings, and they in turn were hard on me. I did not know then, as I know now, that people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person that it pleases them to be. And few people want to be forced to ask themselves, “What if there is no me like my statue?”» — epígrafe del prólogo, de Zora Neale Hurston, *Dust Tracks on a Road*. Voz de Hurston.

«told anyone around me about these strange things. It was too different. . . . I had a feeling of difference from my fellow men, and I did not want it to be found out. . . . I was told inside myself that there was no one. . . . A cosmic loneliness was my shadow. Nothing and nobody around me really touched me. It is one of the blessings of this world that few people see visions and dream dreams.» — Hurston sobre el secreto y la soledad cósmica que le dejaron las visiones, citada en bloque; la frase abre en la plana anterior con las palabras *I never*. Voz de Hurston.

«Time was to prove the truth of my visions, for one by one they came to pass. As soon as one was fulfilled, it ceased to come.» — Hurston sobre el cumplimiento una a una de sus doce visiones y su desaparición al cumplirse. Voz de Hurston.

«It was decreed in the beginning of things that I should meet Mrs. R. Osgood Mason. She had been in the last of my prophetic visions from the first coming of them. I could not know that until I met her. But the moment I walked in the room I knew that was the end.» — Hurston sobre el encuentro con su mecenas Charlotte Osgood Mason como cierre del ciclo profético. Voz de Hurston.

«My soul was with the gods and my body in the village.» — Hurston sobre su propia disyunción, citada por Kripal como la fórmula de su diferencia. Voz de Hurston.

«What if you slept, and what if in your sleep you dreamed, and what if in your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower, and what if when you awoke you had the flower in your hand? Ah, what then?» — epígrafe de la introducción, atribuido a Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Kripal declara que el libro entero es una respuesta a esa pregunta. Voz de Coleridge.

«And the third rose? he heard himself thinking. Where do you want me to put it? Lay the album down, and show me where you want the rose put. The third rose. . . . Very carefully and with much excitement he opened the album. A freshly picked rose, maybe such as he had seen but once before, was there in the middle of the page. Happily, he picked it up.» — segundo epígrafe de la introducción, de *Youth without Youth* de Mircea Eliade: la rosa que se materializa en la página. Voz de Eliade novelista.

«I remember well the event. I had invited a group of colleagues to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.1 I asked them to come with two things: a story about the most unusual thing that ever happened to them and a theory of the imagination that could explain or at least make sense of this story. Every one of them came with a whopper of a story. No one came with a theory of the imagination.» — Kripal narra el origen del libro en un encuentro de colegas en Esalen: todos traían relato, ninguno teoría.

«This book constitutes my theory of the imagination, particularly as this theory is intuited and foretold in the furthest reaches of the imagination» — Kripal declara qué es este libro; la frase sigue nombrando las historias de quijada caída que oyó en Big Sur, con un compuesto que la extracción por programa une mal y por eso queda fuera de la cita.

«I was happy to rediscover in Eliade’s short-story the key concepts I want to understand better: time, consciousness, and the fantastic foundations of reality.» — Francis Ford Coppola sobre el relato de Eliade que llevó al cine; de esa frase saca Kripal el título de su introducción. Voz de Coppola.

«His mental activity anticipated somewhat the condition men will attain some tens of thousands of years hence. The principal characteristic of the new humanity will be the structure of its psycho-mental life: all that has ever been thought or done by men, expressed orally or in writing, will be recoverable through a certain exercise of concentration. In fact, education then will consist in the learning of this method under the direction of instructors. In short, I’m a “mutant,” he said to himself on awakening. I anticipate the post-historic existence of man. Like in a science-fiction novel, he added, smiling with amusement.» — Dominic Matei, personaje de Eliade, autodescribiéndose como mutante tras el rayo; bloque citado del que Kripal toma el término. Voz del personaje.

«What kind of nonsense is this? Who is this liar? Human beings can’t fly, or kneel on slender tree limbs like little birds, and they have never, ever done so. Such a feat is absolutely impossible, and everyone can agree on this, for sure. Or at least everyone nowadays who doesn’t want to be taken for a fool or an unhinged eccentric. So, how is it that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—the very era that gave birth to aggressive skepticism and empirical science—countless people could swear that they had witnessed some such event? And how is it that some of these sworn testimonies are legal records, archived alongside lawsuits and murder trials, and that the testimonies come from all sorts of people, not just illiterate mud-caked peasants, but also some elites at the apex of the social, intellectual, and political hierarchy? What sense are we to make of this? How does any historian deal with such accounts? How does one write a history of what could never have happened, a history of the impossible?» — Carlos Eire, historiador de la Europa moderna temprana, citado en bloque a propósito de los vuelos de José de Cupertino ante miles de testigos. Voz de Eire.

«The history of the impossible is all about questioning, about being evenhandedly skeptical—that is, being as skeptical about strictly materialist interpretations of seemingly impossible events as about the actual occurrence of the event itself. Counterintuitive as this might seem—given that the impossibility of certain events is deemed unquestionable in our dominant culture» — Eire definiendo su escepticismo parejo, que aplica igual al hecho y a su explicación materialista; el bloque continúa en la plana siguiente. Voz de Eire.

«This book is a plea: “Please stop doing that.”» — Kripal declara qué pide su libro: que se deje de confundir los materiales culturales con la inteligencia que los ordena.

«In any case, you picked up this book. Prepare to be abolished.» — la advertencia con que Kripal cierra el planteamiento de su introducción y describe lo que el libro pretende hacerle al lector.