Thinking Impossibly (Jeffrey Kripal, PhD)

Listen now (63 mins) | “We need to be open to things that offend or transcend our worldview because they're clearly doing that for a reason..."

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Jeffrey Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. Jeff is back for his second episode on Pulling the Thread, as our first conversation was one of my favorites—and, as turns out, yours too. Jeff’s work and mind is focused on putting the humanities and science back together, arguing that both offer different sets of language to describe the same phenomena. He writes a lot about the metaphor of the table—namely, that you reach certain conclusions when you insist on taking most things off of it, particularly things that you can’t explain but still exist. He maintains, and I agree that our experience and universe become rich when you refuse to take things off the table, and instead of limiting your knowledge set to what’s easily explainable, try to think with—his term—people in other fields to understand what’s present. This was the focus of the last book we discussed, The Flip, which explores the lives of scientists who had otherworldly experiences that only the mystics had language to explain. And it’s the focus of his newest book, too, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else. Yep, we talk about aliens and time travel and everything in between.

MORE FROM JEFFREY KRIPAL:

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

The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and Future of Knowledge

The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities

Jeffrey Kripal’s First Episode on Pulling the Thread: “When Spirituality and Science are the Same”

Jeffrey’s Website

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

ELISE:

Okay. First of all, I still just want to come and sit at your feet and be your PhD student and go through your library and ask you questions. Well, now I want to go, can you talk about the Impossible Library?

JEFFREY:

Yeah. The Archives of the Impossible. Sure. I can talk about it endlessly. You probably don't want me to talk about it in any adequate fashion.

ELISE:

How long have you been working on this?

JEFFREY:

It began actually in 2014 and it began with a man named Jacque fil who's sort of the premier writer on the UFO or UAP problem, and it took us four years to negotiate that one gift, and then when Jacques gave his files and case studies to us, it created a kind of black hole and a number of other people then donated their life work to us. Whitley Strieber, the Stargate Project on remote viewing and most recently the John Mack archives from Harvard. So we have 15 collections now. I mean, we say over a million documents, it might be over 2 million a lease. I mean, nobody's count. Nobody's possibly counted this material, although we've archived it. I mean, the professional archive is, it sits in professional boxes in a professional climate controlled warehouse, and researchers come all the time to look at it. So it's a serious thing, but we don't actually know what's all in it because it's just too big.

ELISE:

Wow. I feel like people know about UVA and the DOPS program and Jim Tucker's work there and all the PhDs who are also looking at past life experiencing and NDEs and whatnot, but there haven't been that many academic or fuels. Maybe there are more than we would imagine academic institutions that take this stuff seriously.

JEFFREY:

Yeah, I think that's fair. I mean, it was Duke University in the early part of the 20th century around JB and Louisa Wine and certainly UVA in the second half of the century. Stanford was actually founded around these psychical interests. By the way, the donors were extremely interested in it, but what happens is universities tend to ignore it or suppress it or until it goes away, and it tends to be active around individual intellectuals like William James or again, Jamie Ryan or Jim Tucker or Ian Stevenson, whoever the figure is. And then when that person retires and eventually passes, then the interest wanes as it were. And so what we're trying to do at Rice is do something more intergenerational and the archives really rely on the researchers who come from really all over the country and the world to look at them and they never go away. Elise. I mean, my joke is that if someone donates material to our archives, it's there to the apocalypse because the chances of Rice University going away are actually very slim. So that's extremely attractive to people who are interested in legacy and who are interested in long range research and impact. And particularly on these topics, I don't think we've even begun looking at these things in any consistent way. Maybe we're a few decades into it or a century or so, but we need a long, long time and

A lot of debate.

ELISE:

Why do you think it's so reliant? I mean, I have ideas about why it's so reliant, these single intellectual figures who are willing in some ways to stake their entire reputation on these areas of inquiry that are dismissed. And I love mean your table metaphor is so resonant and so essential, which is that so much of the way that we think collectively is let's just take everything off the table that we cannot immediately understand. There's that statistic in how to think and possibly that made me laugh where it was not that long ago that scientists said that we were close to being able to

JEFFREY:

Describe everything. The God gap was shrinking, it was getting smaller. Well, suddenly we know basically nothing. We know 5% all of our science, all of our everything. So suddenly that hole got huge. Yeah.

ELISE:

We now acknowledge that we own, we know we can describe 6% of phenomena or something like that, and the rest is dark matter or dark energy,

JEFFREY:

And we don't even know what dark matter or dark energy is. It is just a metaphor. It's a stand in for our ignorance and for our not knowing.

ELISE:

I love it. I wish we could all be like you, Jeff, which is staying firm, and you're not knowing this, right? You're not advancing this particular agenda here. There's no certainty to anything you're presenting. Your whole point is I know enough to know that. I don't know.

JEFFREY:

Right. Well, and the point of the book how to Think impossibly is that the impossible is a function of our assumptions. It's really not a function of reality. I mean, the world is doing things that are impossible all the time. And so we say, oh, that's impossible. That can't happen. Well, that's just your silly worldview. That's not actually what's actually happening. And once you understand that deeply, there is a humility that comes in with it, and it's not a virtue or a moral humility. It's a kind of intellectual humility. It's like, yeah, we don't know. And so we need to be open to things that offend or transcend our worldview because they're clearly doing that for a reason.

ELISE:

Yes, you have this great line. Conventional science works because it gets to set the rules of the game and then pretend that phenomena, it has no way of measuring or manipulating do not exist. But it's true. And so the book is so fun because it sort of goes back into this land of mystics and all of these texts with formidable proof, right? Or at least a huge amount of documentation of things that are impossible, like Joseph of Cupertino who flew up into olive trees and perched on branches, and I had never heard of him.

JEFFREY:

That happens.

ELISE:

So he is flying around like a bird, and this is amply documented. Yeah,

JEFFREY:

It's embarrassingly amply documented. I mean, it's as historical issue can possibly get, that's kind of the point of the book. It's like, Hey, this stuff is part of our history too, and it's extensively documented, so why aren't we talking about it too? Why aren't we integrating it into our worldview? And of course, we're not because we're pushing everything away that we can't explain.

ELISE:

So for anyone who is interested in the feats of the literally impossible, I love the explication of some of these people who are documented throughout time. However, and I think this is where maybe we can spend the bulk of our time talking today about UFOs and UAPs. And I've interviewed over the course of my career people like Leslie Kane, you probably know reporter for the New York Times and the Boston Globe, and her book is fantastic too, about just UFOs. And again, referencing this Franciscan monk who used to fly around in trees, amply, documented by tons of people. These events aren't just a one and done experience. There are themes, et cetera. So can we talk a bit about that? And the other thing that I appreciate is that you don't go deeply into conspiracy theories, but essentially all you're saying is this is the thing. It's documented all the time, all over the place, and yet there's this insistence of this isn't a thing. There's nothing to see here go away, which isn't very compelling. Talk to us about UAP and the evidence and then we can talk about the theories about what they are.

JEFFREY:

Okay. So the subtitle of the book is about soul's, UFOs, time, belief and everything else. So UFOs are an important part of the book. The reason I love that topic, so first of all, I'm very involved in this conversation on a kind of national level. Leslie's a dear friend actually, and I talk to the scientists and I talk to the historians and the military people, and pretty much anybody who's involved in this topic I talk to, and I am sort of the person in the room who's relating the phenomenon to the history of religions who's saying, look spherical or saucer, like things have been coming out of the sky for millennia, not for a few decades. And in the past we called those gods, and today we call them flying saucers or spaceships or something else. So there's always this cultural framework or this mediation going on, but the phenomena itself is remarkably stable, but it tends to appear in the context of whatever the culture happens to be.

And the reason I know that is because I do know a bit about other cultures and in Asia and in Africa, pre-Christian Europe, and I know that there are folklore mythologies around beings that come out of the sky and do things to people. And I know that what we call the UFO or now, the UAP is framed completely differently by other cultures and communities. And so I'm interested in that mediation in that cultural source hypothesis as it were. But I'm also really interested in that experience source hypothesis, this kind of similarity of these encounters. So I do think people experience UFOs or UAPs today, and I do think they have physical components or physical dimensions that can be studied, but I think they're way beyond that. I think they're weirder and stranger than our science or our materialism or our technology can handle if you want to be really impossible about it, I think that they're physical and spiritual at the same time.

ELISE:

So your theory is that these UAPs appear to us with the technology of the time, and so our early ancestors wouldn't have seen orbs with blinking lights. They would've had a different construct that somehow correlated with their worldview.

JEFFREY:

Well, yeah. So to just take an example that is often used actually in the UFO literature, and I know it's speculative, but it's extremely helpful as a thought experiment. If you read the first chapter of Ezekiel, the prophet has this encounter which with these wheels within wheels and these strange animals and this humanoid being, and he's even abducted the prophet's even taken, and wow, that really looks like, that looks like a UFO account. But it's framed and probably experienced in the terms of ancient Israel and what the prophet, who he was and what he thought about the world, and certainly the God that he worshiped as well. That's a kind of religious framing of the phenomena. And I'm not saying that's right, Elise, but I'm also not saying that our framing of it's correct. I think every culture uses its mythology or its unconscious assumptions to not just interpret what is happening, but also these interpretations enter the experiences.

So it's much more complicated than there's this objective thing there, and then different cultures interpret it in different ways. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that different people in different times actually experienced different things. So take Joseph of Cupertino. The paradox of belief in the book is that, look, Joseph, first of all, he wasn't in control of those vly or flights, and they tended to happen in ecstatic or altered states of devotion towards Jesus or Mary. They were very Roman Catholic. And I think if he would've talked to Joseph, he would've told you that he would've interpreted the vly and the screams and the flights and everything in Catholic religious terms. And he would've been perfectly honest to do so. I think that was his experience. But people float or fly in many different contexts, including demonic possessions, including UFO experiences, and they themselves report very different mythological or theological or philosophical meanings to them. And I think they're being sincere and genuine too. I don't give the experiencer authority over their own experiences, but I don't think we know either. And I think any worldview we use to interpret these phenomena is suspiciously local and present.

ELISE:

And it feels too like it's loaded with cultural shadow assumptions, obviously so many UAP sightings from military people, pilots, et cetera. And so what we often get is that aliens are going to colonize. I mean, it's just all a shadow projection. Aliens are coming to colonize earth, they're going to raise us to the ground. It's all Independence Day.

JEFFREY:

It's what I call the Cold War invasion narrative.

And what people need to understand about UFO is it actually was coined by the Air Force for goodness sake, it was coined in 1952. And all of these movies including and especially Independence Day, you use this alien, by the way, as immigrant, by the way, this alien force invading our sacred airspace or our sacred land, and we have to fight it off. And therefore, if you listen or you read about UAPs today, it's a threat narrative. There are always potential threats. And I'm like, why are they threats? I mean, first of all, they're threats. They would've eaten us a long time ago, Elise. We would be lunch. I mean, come on, when you talk to Experiencers, yes, these experiences are often very negative and terrifying, but they morph then into this sort of transformative, existentially transformative and even moral activist phase. So I just think it's really complicated. That's why I love the UFO as a topic, because I think it's very religious, but also very often very physical, and it engages the military and the political system and intelligence. To me. That's fascinating. That's really fascinating.

ELISE:

I want to talk a little bit just in terms of this doubling or the projection idea about trauma, and you write a bit about what you call the traumatic secret, and can you talk a bit about what that is?

JEFFREY:

So first of all, as a historian of religions, you don't just have to explain why people have exotic or extraordinary experiences. You also have to explain why some people don't. I don't have them, Elise, and we're not having them drinking coffee in the morning and sitting around our house. At least I don't think most people are. They tend to have these impossible experiences around death, around illness, sickness, emotional trauma, physical trauma, sexual trauma, war violence. I mean, there's some really nasty things that then provoke these extraordinary experiences. And so the traumatic secret is basically the argument that really what's at the root of a lot of these phenomena is trauma is human suffering. And I don't mean that reductively, I don't mean to say that the near death experience is a function of the car accident, but you need the car accident to get the near death experience.

You need something really potentially deadly in the case of the near death experience to provoke or invoke or make possible a near death experience. And this is why when skeptics tell me that, well, you can't get this in a laboratory and it's not statistically meaningful. And I'm like, well, of course you can't. You're not killing anyone. If you want to see these effects, you go into the real world around suffering and death, and guess what? You're going to see them, but they're not going to be reliable. They're not predictable. You go talk to a critical care nurse, go talk to an EM specialist in an ambulance, go talk to someone on the front lines of a ward. They'll tell you about these experiences. But the sophomore in college, who signs up for the test to get 25 bucks or 50 bucks, no, it's not going to happen. That's silly. That's just silly. It's a complete misunderstanding of what's going on.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, and separately too, in terms of, I don't know if you've ever met Laura Day, she's a

JEFFREY:

Psychic

ELISE:

Medium. Laura, I know Laura. Yeah. So Laura, yeah, I know her.

JEFFREY:

I should back up. I have met Laura. I do not know her. Let's just be clear about that.

ELISE:

Well, Laura always talks about this, her psychic medium abilities are a function of trauma and brain damage, and that she is functionally built differently to filter the universe in a way that's distinct from the average person in a way that's not always so helpful. I think we love to imagine how fun it would be to be a psychic medium, and it's like, well, I don't know that that would be a fun way to live. But speaking of psychic phenomenon, precognition and all of that, let's talk about the movie Arrival. And for those who are listening who haven't watched this movie, it is so beautiful and truly carries everything that I care about, etymology and language and the impossible and psychic phenomena and choosing, not war, but love and overcoming fierce. And as you say, it represents, it sort of wraps up the way that so many of these things simultaneously occur. Can you talk a little bit about that?

JEFFREY:

Yeah. So if you've seen Arrival, or if you haven't seen it, essentially it looks like an alien invasion movie. These, what do they call Heta pods? They're octopi like beings. They land all over the earth in these egg like spaceships. And so you think alien invasion, but the movie actually breaks pretty dramatically with that alien invasion narrative or mythology. And what happens is the woman who really engages the Heta pods is a linguist. She's an expert on human language and communication or connection, and she literally takes her space suit off, and she essentially communes with these heta pods, and she learns their language, which is circular, and it looks like a Zen nothingness sign or symbol. And as she learns their circular language, she starts to experience what you think are memories. You think she's remembering the death of her young daughter, but what you learn in the movie, she's actually remembering the future and she's realizing the time is circular as she learns this language, which is circular.

So if you're a humanist or a social scientist, exactly where this idea comes from and that this idea that language and one's experience of reality are tied together is very much what I was trying to say before, that some things are possible in some linguistic or cultural context, and other things are not possible or impossible. So it's really the language and the culture that renders something possible or impossible. It's not reality. It's not the way the world is. And this whole movie is based on that. As she learns this language, she becomes capable of this precognition. And there's this moment in the film where she mist translates. What the Heta pods are saying is, Luis, use your weapon, which is the old alien invasion narrative, right? Blow us up. That's what it's all about. But then she learns that that's actually a mistake. That's a mistranslation.

And what the Heta pods are actually saying is Use your gift. And her gift is a precognitive understanding that temporality is circular. And the whole premise of the movie is that what you eventually learn is that the aliens have come back because they're going to need us in the far future. They're going to need us in 3000 years as I think as the movie says. So there's this mutuality between human beings and these octopi aliens. But there's also a sense that by learning the ways of the other species, one learns the true nature of time, which is circular. And the military, as you know, is very present in the movie, but it actually doesn't do anything. It stands down. And Luis actually convinces his Chinese general not to engage them at the end. And she does it actually through pre-cognition and through a really human connection with the Chinese general, which I think is really beautifully done in the movie.

ELISE:

It's such a good movie. I'm almost crying recalling it.

JEFFREY:

Well, I was almost crying too, just telling you about it. I mean, it is a beautiful, it's a very contemplative, slow movie, right? And you can see Luis in front of the Heta pods with this language system and trying to figure out the Heta pod language so that you have the humanities or the social sciences that you do, not the physicist, he's like, he doesn't really do anything, right? I mean, it's like the hard sciences or the maleness of it all. The military is precisely what you don't want to engage. You don't want to do that thing. That's a mistake.

And what you really want to know is how to commune or communicate with his beings. And Elise, that's why I say that. I mean, I am not responsible for arrival. I had no function. I wish I did, but I don't. But that's what I was saying, that the flying saucer is a function of the history religions. I mean, human beings have been communicating with their gods or with other entities for millennia. That's not a new thing. And what some people don't know about the history of religions is that the gods are the ones who bestowed technology, agriculture, and writing and metal work. I mean, now those are the stories. I'm not saying that that actually happened, but there is this intimate link between encounters with beings coming out of the sky and human technology and civilization that I think is really worth thinking about.

ELISE:

Yeah, I mean, one of the theories that you explore that you think with, I love that phrase, I am taking that on the road thinking with people, is this idea that, which I think makes so much sense, which is that UAPs or UFOs are time travelers that this might be a future version of ourselves coming back to render assistance or guidance or intervention. And in some ways that maybe down the line we figure out how to move across time.

JEFFREY:

Right? Yeah. So the reason I like that, again, I don't know if that's true, but it keeps on the table these phenomena, doesn't it? And then you begin to see things like, oh, why are the gray? Why do they look so human? How do they communicate with the other human beings, the abductees? I mean, there are all these questions that immediately have answers because, and do UFOs, why do they express such anxiety or concern around nuclear power and climate change? And by the way, they've been doing that for 60, 70 years, not four or five. And you can begin to think, well, if I were a future human, I would be really concerned about basically chimpanzee's, juggling live chainsaws. That's a really bad idea. And I would be really concerned about my own home, about my own planet, about my own ecosystem, and I would want to go back in time and change things where cultures or people made really bad decisions that would impact the future, would impact the future generations.

And so once you make that shift too, things like, oh, it's too far away, the stars are too, the galaxy. I mean, come on, you can't travel that. I'm like, that's a stupid question. If they're coming from another time, and they're us, they're not traveling at all in space, they're traveling in time. And it's a different way of thinking about the phenomena that makes a lot of things suddenly meaningful and keeps them on the table. And again, we don't have a model for time travel, at least we don't know if there are multiple dimensions or whether anything can time travel. But that's part of the science fiction framework I think we're in. And it's part of speculative science or speculative cosmology that I think we're in where those possibilities suddenly become possible because of the physics and the cosmology and the mathematics and the geometry. And our ancestors didn't have that. When Ezekiel's seeing those wheels within wheels and those funky animals, he doesn't have any of that, nothing. And so he's going to perceive and experience something in a particular way. That's really what the book's about.

ELISE:

So speaking of strange creatures, can you talk to us about the praying mantis? This is fascinating to me that mantis is such a frequent image.

JEFFREY:

Yeah, the argument of the book is that, look, when people have experiences that are strange or eerie or impossible, we need to think with them. We need to sit with their experiences and take them seriously, by which I mean take them as they actually did have those experiences. And we have to develop a model of the imagination too that isn't where everything isn't just imaginary. It's not that people are imagining things. Maybe they're actually encountering things, but also maybe they're encountering things that are being mediated through their imaginations, through their neurology in ways that they can understand. I mean, I think that's possible too, with the Mantis or the praying mantis. What I try to show in the book is that, look, there are a lot of mantis beings in abduction narratives. People report seeing entities that look a lot like gigantic praying mantis.

And I tell some of these stories in the book, but there's also a long folklore, a long history of mythology on the Mamma Mantis or the praying mantis as very human-like, and having something to do with death and a kind of trickster figure as well. So there is a long global history of the Praying Mattis. And then I also talk about in context of surreal realism or the Sue realist movement in the early 20th century and into contemporary people who experience entities that or praying manis. So again, not, I don't want to literalize those things. I don't want to say they're not troubling or even absurd to us. I think they are, but so that's what the experiencers say too. They know that, but that's what they saw. That's what they encountered. I mean, there's a whole story, for example, in the book about Karin Austin and this mechanical AI bug that came out of nowhere and crawled up on her bed and sat on top of her.

And Karin's a dear friend, and she's not making that up. She's just describing what happened. And for her, it was completely physical. It wasn't a dream, it wasn't a sleep paralysis, it wasn't any of the easy kind of things we pull out of thin air to explain these things. It's like, no, this was a mechanical bug, and she thinks it's ai. She thinks it was sent there by some other species. And she uses the language of ai, what we use today. 50 years ago, they would've called it a robot in the science fiction. And before that, an automaton or something, this notion of the mantis is what I'm trying to say. I think it's an accurate description of what people are actually experiencing and what we do with it. I don't know. I just want to put that on our table and say, Hey, here it is. And sometimes these mantas, there's all these weird synchronicities or meaningful coincidences with the little insects that sit on a shoulder or sit on a door or interact with the human in really remarkable ways. So there's this interaction with the natural world as well that goes on through these encounters.

ELISE:

Can you talk a bit about this story that you call it a Willing Backward, and this is one of your PhD students who it's such a stunning story, and it happened in 2013, right?

JEFFREY:

Yeah. So John is his name. John is a doctoral student of mine. It's interesting you brought that up, Elise, because it's a very powerful story. And essentially what happens is John visits himself from the future. He's about to go through a very tough few years of his life and he sees his shoes, or he sees the legs through his window. He is living in a basement apartment at the time, and he sees this man walk up to the window and flip flops essentially. And then later in life, he himself walks up and flip flops, flops at that very, very apartment and sends a kind of loving support into the apartment. He just knows to do that. And so there's this notion of oneself visiting oneself from the future to get one through a very rough patch or a particular kind of suffering. I didn't tell that story by the way John told it, right?

That's John telling his own story. And I love that story because it fits in so well with other people who visit themselves from the future. That's not unusual situation, but it also breaks down people's resistances because they think, oh, Jeff's just bullshitting us. He's just going off on another set of weird stories. But when you think with people and you bring those people in and they start to talk on their own, then it disarms the reader or the listener, and suddenly they're encountering another human being. And it's much harder, I think, to deny what's going on. Now, what it means to me, Elise, is that time isn't what we think it is. I think we generally imagine time that the past is set and that who we are is all a set of causal events in the past that lead up to the present self.

And we think that the future is some kind. I don't know what we think it's some kind of potentiality or it hasn't happened yet. But what I actually think is happening is that the past and the present and the future already all exist, and that influences come from the future just as they come from the past. And so our present selves are deeply influenced by future events as well as past events. And I think that's what was happening with John. His future self was influencing or impacting his present self in a really tough moment. And again, there you have the traumatic secret. It wasn't just for reason and it was intense suffering.

ELISE:

I'm on that page and he writes, this is John writing about this experience that he's having friends over September, 2013, as I sit there musing happily over the day’s events, I suddenly notice a pair of flip flopped male feet and legs with red shorts down to the knee, walking towards the basement window to my right. I'm surprised by this, but even more so when a voice in my head materializes and begins repeating the same words over and over again, you're going to be okay. You're going to be okay. You're going to be okay. And that he felt this loving energy moving through his whole body, and he starts crying uncontrollably, and he goes and looks for him, but he's gone. And then he has horrendous three years, and then he goes, it's May, 2017. I'm out on a quiet night walk thinking about nothing in particular. As I am returning home, I unexpectedly get this sense that something important is about to happen, and then I notice that the light is on in my front room, which surprises me because I know I had not left it on.

But in a moment, I'm not just surprised, but stunned as I perceive that there's a man sitting in the basement room, and that man is me, except younger. The hairs on my arms stood up on end. My heart began racing. I felt a surge of adrenaline in my body, and then suddenly a voice in my head said, now is the time. I rushed up to that basement window. I put my forehead against the house, closed my eyes, and just sent this feeling of love and comfort to my younger self with the whole of my being. I don't know how long I stood there doing this, but when I was done sending this message, I looked down and the basement lights were off. And he talks about it as you write as easily one of the most important events of my entire life. I have hardly told anyone about it. Oh, I have just on huge full body chills. But as you write this, isn't that uncommon. I've never spoken to myself. I've never had that experience, but I can imagine that overlap and how in some ways it would not surprise me at all.

JEFFREY:

Yeah, a couple things. First of all, your emotional reaction to John's story is exactly what I'm talking about. That's what I think these thinking with experiences affect us. They're powerful. And the abduction event, by the way, works just like that. The entity telepathically puts something in the head of the abductee, and I'm like, well, of course it does. It's us. You're the same person from two different time periods. And so that to me is the clearest sign of this sort of human or superhuman connection that happens in these telepathic moments, whether it's an abduction with a mantis to go back to our previous conversation or whether it's John visiting himself, they work the same way.

And I think John's experience is in some ways more pure or more telling because it doesn't have that imaginal framework. I mean, there are no praying mantas in it, and that's one of the most important things that ever happened to John, and he never spoke about it. So we have this sense that I think is mistaken that these things are rare or unusual when in fact they're very common. But the social sensor just keeps these things down and prevents people from talking about them, or they don't know how to talk about them. And so we think they're rare or unusual when they're not, and they're part of who we are, and I'm just trying to bring that out and say, Hey, let's make this part of how we think about what a human being is or what the world's looking

ELISE:

At. One point you offer your credo, it's kind of funny, you come out with it, which is you write, I believe that what is symbolically encountered in these fantastic events is the real world manifesting in the body brain of the experiencer in ways that the person can hear and integrate in some fashion, which is to say that these events are mediated by the imagination, which in these moments at least, is no more and no less than a function or dimension of consciousness as such. Can you explain that a bit more? So it was the idea that there's some sort of pneuma, there's some space in between that in a traumatic event or in some sort of other psychedelic experience or other way, somehow some of our filters potentially come down and we're able to meet in this impossible imaginal realm. Is that what it is?

JEFFREY:

Yeah. I mean, so I work with a filter thesis of the mind or the brain mind relationship. In other words, I don't think mind or consciousness is a function have matter or the material world. I don't think brains produce consciousness. I think brains mediate or translate or localize or individuate consciousness. We're like cell phones. Elise is a cell phone, and you can get a certain personality and a certain signal and a certain screen there, but you can throw that cell phone against the wall. You can destroy or kill a body, and it does nothing to the internet or the wifi.

I know you know that, but that's just a metaphor. It's just like no consciousness or mind is something that I think extends throughout the universe. It certainly extends throughout the earth or the natural world or the ecosystem. And then it's then mediated or localized or turned into a person or an ego in a body, in a brain like you or I. And once you adopt that model, actually all this stuff becomes pretty plausible. And what you look for is you look for those moments where that brain body interface is compromised or suppressed, and this other form of mind at large comes online because it's already there. And our primary purpose is to keep it out. By the way, the primary purpose of the human being is to not know that you are just this whirlpool in this greater current or ocean. You trick yourself for good reason into thinking that you're some kind of agent and some kind of individual. And so when these moments like a psychedelic experience or a near death experience, or a UFO experience when they come online, as it were, it's this greater field of mind that starts to interact with the human organism. And what kicks in Elise, I think is the cultural imagination. It has to be mediated. Here's a shocker. The cosmic minded at large does not speak English.

How's that? How's that? Or it doesn't do math by the way, either. It doesn't do technology, it doesn't care about refrigerators or automobiles or planes. It just is, and it's like everywhere. Well, when it interacts with these hairless monkeys that are you and me, guess what? It interacts with us through symbols and story and myth and narrative, because that's all it can say. It can't speak English. And so to me, that's what's happening. And I say that again, as someone as a comparatist or someone who looks at these experiences, tries to look at them in a lot of places and a lot of times, and not just in one place or one time,

ELISE:

Do you think, as I know psychedelics obviously have been part of our culture for millennia as well, but it feels like as the world in some ways, and not to say that we're more traumatized than people been historically, but as it feels like we're sort of heading into this more and more simultaneous crises or cataclysmic events or that we're more aware of all of these things happening simultaneously through climate change, et cetera, and obviously just access to information, misinformation, real information, conspiracy theory, whatever it is, do you think that the incidents of these events will increase as people start to imagine as the filter of our mind saying Impossible, impossible, impossible starts to be turned down? Do you imagine that we'll have more of these events, or do you think it will still in the way that some people will do psychedelics, have some sort of mind bending experience and then don't really need psychedelics in order to incite another psychedelic event, they can do it through breath work, et cetera?

JEFFREY:

It's a complicated question. First of all, I think our ancestors say 500 years ago, suffered more than we

ELISE:

Do. Yes, agree.

JEFFREY:

And I think they also had a religious world that could mediate their experiences and explain them to them. I think in the modern world, we have anesthesia, we have drugs, we have all kinds of things to suppress pain. It's not that people suffer less today, but we do have drugs. I'm not dismissing those, but I do think they suppress having these experiences as well. I think when somebody takes a psychedelic, for example, a really powerful one like psilocybin or something like that, or masculine, they're essentially traumatizing, self-traumatizing. Their brain is what they're doing, but it's also opening them up to this bigger environment, this larger ecosystem, and it's often stunning. The other thing I would say about these experiences is that they have their own intentionality or agency that is not ours, and they often work toward a kind of healing, whether that's a cultural healing or a social healing or a personal healing, I'll put it this way, what I think is actually happening now is that we are more and more aware that we're living in a story, and that story sucks and that it's killing us.

It's really bad. And I think that these events, these impossible events are triggering or happening at a pretty good rate to sort of knock us out of that story and say, come on, tell a different story, be a different human being. And it's not that all of these experiences are positive or healing. Some of them I think are deconstructive or negative as well, but they're deconstructed or negative in a kind of symptomatic sense. They're symptoms, I think of a kind of suffering that I think it does us well to pay attention to. So I would say that I'm not a religious leader. I'm not a psychotherapist. So healing or encouraging a particular religious belief is not my thing. But I think my thing is trying to show people that these events happen for a reason and that it's us, and that we're not just these social egos or embodied selves that we think we are. There's a lot more to us than that, and that it would do us really well to listen to these greater selves or this in greater environment we're in.

ELISE:

Yeah. And I know we're essentially at time, but so much of this world has been co-opted by sort of conspiracy theorists or people with nefarious ideas. How do you work with this world without working with delusion?

JEFFREY:

Yeah, so the reason this is not a conspiracy theory is that I don't have any answers. I mean, conspiracy theories, they're way too certain, Elise, they're way too certain about what's going on, and I don't think we know what's going on. And it's a conversation like we're having now. It's not a declaration. It's not as, I joke men in basements who were doing bad things on the internet. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about having this conversation about John's experience of visiting himself from the future. That's what we should be doing. I also think the general impulse of a conspiracy theory is essentially correct, that the world, as it seems, is not the world as it actually is. And that's essentially the argument of religion, by the way, and of mystical literature in particular, and of actually Plato's Cave, which is often seen as the origin of the humanities in a grove outside of Athens. So my joke is, look, the humanities are the greatest conspiracy theory of all time. I mean, if you study the humanities, you learn to be suspicious of everything. You can never again affirm anything. And however, you're not certain either of anything. And it's that reflexivity that I think is really the key here. So I think there's a real truth in suspicion, but I think conspiracies are way too certain and way too clear. That's how I

ELISE:

Would say and tidy.

JEFFREY:

They just don't, and they're kind of nutty, Elise, come on. I mean, yeah. It's like, nah, that didn't happen.

ELISE:

Oh God, no. It's a fine line between keeping your mind open enough without letting your brains fall out. Right?

JEFFREY:

It's a fine line. So let me give you a secular example. So I know a lot of physicists, I know a lot of quantum physicists, and I talk to them all the time. I love physicists because they know darn well that the world that we sense and think is real is not that there's this deeper kind of reality that we don't sense and we don't even know about. It's actually running the show, and they're not conspiracy theorists, but they're engaged in a science whose basic message is reality is not what you think it is. And I happen to think that's true, and I think it matters. What reality is, I think is human beings, I think we really do want to know, or at least some of us want to know, some people don't want to know, by the way, but I think a lot of human beings really want to know it looks like,

ELISE:

And something I have an allergy to is when people take quantum theorists, we understand that there's something else running the show and we don't know what it is, and use that to say, this is what that is. Quantum theorists say, you hear that a lot sort of in worlds that I love and I'm adjacent to, but as soon as people start talking about quantum theory,

JEFFREY:

Quantum,

ELISE:

I'm this, use the

JEFFREY:

Word quantum and you can explain anything. Yeah,

ELISE:

Explain anything, exactly. I'm like, no, I think the whole point is that all they're saying is we don't know. We don't have the language. We don't have the tools to measure this or understand this, so you can't then say, this is what this is saying.

JEFFREY:

Yeah. I have been really influenced by Philip Ball, who's a science writer, writes about quantum physics among other things. And one of Philip's points, which I really like is that we have not created culture around quantum mechanics, like we've created culture around Newtonian physics. And the reason we haven't done it is it's so bizarre to our ordinary notions, but we still can do it. We still need to do it through poetry and film and storytelling and frankly, spirituality and religion. And this is why I get a bit upset with physicists who want to dismiss quantum language when it gets to spirituality. I'm like, Hey, they're trying to integrate. Okay, tell them why they're wrong. Don't just say they're wrong. Just help them. And that's what I think, again, that's the conversation we should have. It's not be so dismissive of one another.

ELISE:

Well, and I think your work goes to this deeply, which is we have in some ways language, we've had ways of articulating or expressing these things that science has yet to solve or quantify. But if you think about math as one of the languages of existence and that we're not creating the math, we're discovering the math that if science could in some ways abide, instead of being the creation of a system, more the discovery of these underlying principles,

JEFFREY:

It's

ELISE:

A subtle difference.

JEFFREY:

A lot of mathematicians I've known are, I mean, they think it's discovering numbers, not making them up. In other words, we're not making the math up. We're discovering some numerical or mathematical space that pre-exist us. And again, that's a position one can take. I don't know if that's true, and I think the quantum revolution partly is a challenge to that because it begins to look like, actually, we are making up the math. The science is a function of the observer in some fundamental way. And again, I don't want to speak for quantum mechanics, I don't want to speak for the scientists, but to me, those are philosophical questions that really matter, and I think the sciences really have something to say and are the really of the future here in some way.

ELISE:

Well, thank you and thank you for your work. It's really fun. I hope so.

JEFFREY:

I think it's funny too. It's funny, not just fun. I mean, there are literal comedians in that book, and I think they're really funny, and I think you don't laugh at something that you identify with Elise. You laugh at something that you've transcended, and so I think laughter and transcendence go together in some strange way, and so I don't mean to rationalize or philosophize it, but it's important. It's important. It's fun. It's important. It's funny.

ELISE:

That was so profound. It's true.

JEFFREY:

No, no. People who are not funny really worry me. I'm like, okay, that's not good.

ELISE:

But this is also this particular genius of comics in our culture and why we need them to keep going even when it's so uncomfortable.

JEFFREY:

Yeah, that's because we're part of it. It's uncomfortable because we're part of what they're making fun of. I mean.

ELISE:

Exactly. It's like, oh, yeah. Oh yeah. Ouch. All right. I know you have a class to teach. You're the best. I will be back for more of your time soon.

JEFFREY:

Okay. Elise. I talk anytime. Would love that.

ELISE:

Thank you. Jeff has written so many books. In fact, I first encountered him in a book about Collie, but his latest work, including The Flip, which is a very short, very fun read about many of the things that we talked about today is academic in the sense that it is well researched and sturdy, and yet it is really fun and accessible, and if you are interested in questions of UFOs and UAPs and time travel, then how to think Impossibly is the book for you. It has a lot of stories like that story that I read to you about his PhD student, which is just so moving. What I love about Jeff's work is one that he's willing to stake his academic reputation on the line for things that people love to dismiss, but two, that he again, refute certainty. He doesn't do it and not an acute and an evasive way, but simply because he really doesn't know, and I think that anyone who professes to know is maybe someone to be willing to be wary of.

At the beginning, we mentioned that fact about sort of where we've gone scientifically. He writes, and this just made me laugh, but in many ways encapsulates our entire conversation. Scientists once told us that we are quickly closing the gaps in all scientific knowledge. Now they're telling us that it appears that all are science, all that physics, chemistry, biology, you name it, applies to only between two and 6% of the actual universe. We went from knowing almost everything to knowing next to nothing in just a few decades, and then they give fancy names to our ignorance, dark matter and dark energy. But wow, it's kind of amazing to think that 98% of what is left to be known is still in front of us.