Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (48 page)

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.

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. More specifically, I would like to return to an old Western stream of thought that we have already encountered—the filter or transmission thesis—and put it into dialogue with the much older mystical doctrine of the
homo duplex
or the Human as Two, my own dialectical model of consciousness and culture, and contemporary neuroscience.

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.

The
Eclipse of the Sacred and the Psyche in Modern Oblivion

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, immortality, and transmigration of the soul; through the felt presence of deities, demons, spirits, and ghosts; to the fearful fascinations of mythology and the efficacy of magical thinking and practice. But if the paranormal lies at the origin point of so much religious experience and expression, it should also lie at the center of any adequate theory of religion. Once, after all, we recognize that these experiences are often genuine and real in the simplest sense that they are experienced as such by those undergoing them, that they are not faked (and that even the intentionally faked tricks are mimicking the spontaneously generated experiences), then we immediately find ourselves at a very interesting and fruitful fork in the road—a fork that, as far as I can tell, is a win-win situation for the open-minded student of religion.

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. We will have a genuine and genuinely powerful theory of religion that we should pursue with all of our resources and courage, absolute cultural relativisms and historical contextualisms be damned (in a Fortean sense, of course). If, however, such a new approach, like every other promising method of the past, cannot finally deliver the goods, if, for example, cognitive science can provide us with all sorts of evolutionary reasons and neurological correlations for the normal workings of the brain and the usual forms of religious ideation but few, if any, genuine causal mechanisms for the really wild stuff, then we are just as clearly onto something big and important here. After and beyond our A and B, we have found our X (not that we know what to
do
with the damn thing, but at least we have found it).

Either way, it seems to me, the study of religion wins, and wins big. So why look away? Why continue to tolerate a kind of armchair skepticism that has everything to do with scientistic propaganda and nothing at all to do with honest, rigorously open-minded collection, classification, and theory building, that is, with real science and real humanistic inquiry? True enough, anomalies may be just anomalies—meaningless glitches in the statistical field of possibility. But anomalies may also be the signals of the impossible, that is, signs of the end of one paradigm and the beginning of another.

In
my own mind at least, I have written these four chapters as serious engagements with the anomalous if not toward the next big thing, then certainly toward a more adequate theory of religion. The bald truth is that it is still very difficult to advance a truly adequate theory of religion. As I explained in
chapter 4
, we have theories
about
religion that attempt, and more or less succeed, to explain the encounter with the sacred, which lies almost entirely outside our rational grasp, in terms of something else, which is relatively within our rational grasp: society, psyche, body, politics, brain, and so on. The last forty years of theory have in many ways been very much about a quick retreat from any real encounter with the sacred
as sacred
.

Indeed, the sacred as sacred—or what we have encountered here as the psychical and the paranormal as the experiential core of comparative folklore, mysticism, and mythology—is
precisely
what has been eclipsed in the contemporary study of religion. 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, and that, moreover, it can only be misunderstood if reduced, without remainder, to our physics, our psychology, our cultures, our ethnicities, our materialism, our politics, our ethics, or whatever.

One of many features I find confusing about this categorical rejection of the sacred as a “thing to itself” (other than the assumed omniscience of Immanuel Kant and the almost total erasure of Buddhist and Hindu epistemologies, many of which hold that one really can know reality-in-itself directly and immediately) is the odd conflation of the
sui generis
nature of the sacred and the believer's perspective, as if they were somehow the same thing, as if taking the sacred seriously is equivalent to surrendering one's intellect and critical faculties to the faith-claims of the religious traditions. This is simply not true. The sacred
is
a critical category that can seldom be fit into the categories of faith and piety. It offends the epistemology of faith as commonly as it offends the epistemology of reason. Very much like the paranormal, it is a
third thing
. Hence my historical and theoretical reflections on the sacred as the paranormal in the present book. But it is just this kind of reductive materialism, usually joined to some retooled form of Marxism (it's all economics and oppression) or Foucauldianism (it's all discourse and power), that now defines so much of the study of religion. By so doing, the field has, in effect, denied its own subject matter, much as the fields of psychology and neuroscience have done with respect to the psyche and the mind, which they now more or less (mostly more) deny even exist.

We
can trace the latter eclipses back to two different points in the twentieth century. 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. The second historical point, the decade of the 1950s, was when functionalism, the logical theories of Turing machines, and early digital computer modeling began to take over experimental psychology, leading the field to the useful but dubious conclusion that computation is the same thing as consciousness. 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.”
¹

I would suggest that these two eclipses within contemporary intellectual life, of the sacred and of the psyche, are fundamentally related, for whatever the sacred is or is not, it is intimately tied to the deepest structures of the human psyche. To erase one is to erase the other. Mircea Eliade, then, had it exactly right when he wrote that, “the ‘sacred' is an element in the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of consciousness.”
²
Put more bluntly in the form of my own paraphrase: “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.” This is why the comparative study of religion really does belong in the research university and at the very heart of any truly serious humanistic, philosophical, or scientific inquiry into the nature of human being. The sacred and the human are two sides of the same coin.

Obviously, there are real problems with such a position. For one thing, the religious nature of the human being and its universe are inherently ambiguous. It is indeed true that our world can be lived and understood, extremely well, it turns out, without any reference to the sacred at all. The coin, then, need not be flipped. It also works lying on one or the other side.

Until, of course, it “flips” again.

Consciousness,
Culture, and Cognition: The Fantastic Structure of the Mind-Brain

It turns out that there is a good neuroanatomical reason why we have no theory of religion, but only theories about religion. It is the same reason, moreover, why the universe can be experienced in purely materialist terms or in deeply religious terms. It goes something like this . . .

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. Accordingly, in order to begin to understand all of this, we need to propose methodologies that can integrate the humanities and the sciences, that is, that can integrate what I have earlier called the dialectic of consciousness and culture with what the neuroscientists now call cognition. What would such a method look like?

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. I would also propose putting both neuroscience and psychical research in turn in deep dialogue with the history of religions and literary theory, that is, with the textual or hermeneutical components of paranormal experience—in short, with the fantastic, or what I have called the impossible.
³

We have already had many occasions to consider what has come down to us as the filter or transmission thesis. Although it appears in different forms, this bimodal psychology or rationalized form of the old mystical doctrine of the Human as Two was first proposed, as we saw in
chapter 1
, in the nineteenth century by individuals like Frederic Myers and William James in order to explain the supernormal data of psychical research. 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. We encountered it again in
chapter
3
with Jacques Vallee's stained-glass windows filtering an ever-shifting cosmic light. And again in
chapter 4
with Bertrand Méheust, who underestimated, in his own words, “the work of the successive filters through which the real passes before it appears to us.”

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. Mind is not the brain, but Mind is indeed filtered through the brain with all its mindboggling evolutionary, neurological, cultural, linguistic, emotional, and historical complexities.
⁴
We are
both
. The Human is Two.

Obviously, we need a new metaphor here. Unfortunately, there are problems in every direction we turn. The analogies of the filter or a transmission, for example, are clearly crude ones, and they almost certainly mislead with all of their dualistic assumptions. 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. In the mystical terms of Méheust, the real possesses two faces: a public face involving cause and matter, and an esoteric face involving meaning and mind. I also suspect, with thinkers like Vallee, that the common absurdities of paranormal phenomena are functions of this same nonduality and, as such, are designed to pop us out of our dualistic, either-or ways of thinking about the world (or just really, really confuse us). This is yet another reason why the paranormal and the mystical should not be separated, why we cannot study the one without the other: both forms of experience are pointing to or expressing this nondual or both- and level of the real.
⁵

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. This is certainly not what Myers had in mind, or James, or Huxley. 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. For these reasons, Kelly prefers the metaphor of “permission” over that of “transmission.”
⁶
I could not agree more. And I would take Kelly's metaphorical re-visioning one step further and suggest a complimentary metaphor that is already implied in the literature but not, in my opinion, emphasized nearly enough: the metaphor of “translation.” What is permitted to cross the threshold, after all, is not only filtered, selected, and narrowed. It also comes through
in a different form
, whether this is a dream, a vision, a symbol, a text, or a drawing. In a word, it is
translated
. But this implies that, if we wish to understand something about the communication's source, we must translate it back, that is, we must interpret it. This, of course, has been my basic point throughout these chapters, and it remains my final point here at the end. Psychical and paranormal phenomena are hermeneutical realities. They work like texts and stories. They are about meaning as much as they are about matter. There is always a gap. The fisherman cannot talk to the fish without using symbols and signs (or just a hook).