Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (55 page)

48
. John E. Mack, as quoted in Christopher Partridge, “Understanding UFO Religions and Abduction Spiritualities,” in
UFO Religions
, ed. Partridge (London: Routledge, 2003), 35–36.

49
. 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. 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. Sells was writing about Neoplatonic, Christian, and Islamic literature, and his main concern was the nature and structure of something called apophatic theology, that is, ways of “saying away” (
apo-phasis
) our normal ways of speaking and writing about the divine. This was traditionally accomplished through elaborate poetic and philosophical flourishes of affirmation and negation that express the impossibility of understanding “God” as an experience
of
something. Here is one, from the fourteenth-century Dominican priest and heretical theologian Meister Eckhart: “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” Paranormal events, as we shall see, often function in remarkably similar ways. They appear to be designed to confuse. They act like an Eckhartian sermon or a Zen koan. They at once mirror and boggle the human consciousness in which they appear.

50
. Owen,
Place of Enchantment
, 19. This, by the way, is true in a literal scientific sense, as our senses can pick up only a miniscule fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum that buzzes and burns all around us at every moment. Reality really is almost entirely “occult” to our normal sensory capacities.

51
. Ibid., 22.

52
. Ibid., 6.

53
. Ibid., 182.

54
. Gauri Viswanathan, “Secularism in the Framework of Heterodoxy,”
PMLA
123, no. 2 (March 2008), 469.

55
. Owen,
Place of Enchantment
, 237.

56
. Christopher Partridge,
The Re-Enchantment of the West
, vol. 1,
Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture, and Occulture
(London: T & T Clark, 2004),
68.

57
. Ibid., 4.

58
. I am influenced in my thinking here by Richard Shweder,
Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991). For more on this, see
chapter 4
.

59
. Victoria Nelson,
The Secret Life of Puppets
(Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001), 288.

60
. Ibid., vii.

61
. Ibid., 174.

62
. Philip K. Dick, “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” (1977), in
The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings
, ed. Lawrence Sutin (New York: Harmony 1995), 251.

63
. Philip K. Dick, “How to Build a Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later” (1978), in ibid.

64
. Lawrence Sutin,
Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick
(New York: Citadel, 1991), 208–9, 233.

65
. Lawrence Sutin, ed.,
In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis
(Underwood Miller, 1991), 175–76.

66
. Thomas M. Disch suggests the epilepsy diagnosis in his
The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). Sutin, however, although he finds such diagnoses possible enough, is not finally impressed with either the adequacy or the wisdom of such easy labels. Both authors are sensitive and fair to Dick. For my part, I am not questioning the diagnosis qua diagnosis. I am simply pointing out how little it explains with respect to Dick's place in the general history of religions.

67
. Nelson,
Secret Life of Puppets
, 174.

68
. This event occurred on November 5, 1989, in Calcutta, my own 11-89, I suppose. 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
. That Night, in fact, constitutes the impossible, paranormal subtext of all my books, including this one.

69
. This is actually Roger Caillois, approvingly cited by Tzvetan Todorov in
The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 26. I recognize that Todorov tilts away from the metaphysical, but I am using him for my own purposes here.

70
. Ibid., 25.

71
. Ibid., 32; italics mine.

CHAPTER ONE

1
. Stephen King,
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
(New York: Scribner, 2000).

2
. Frederic W. H. Myers,
Fragments of Prose and Poetry
, edited by his wife Eveleen Myers (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904), 1.

3
. Ibid., 17.

4
. Frederic W. H. Myers, “Science and the Future Life,” in
Science and the Future Life with Other Essays
(London: Macmillan and Co., 1901/1893), 16.

5
. Ibid., 18.

6
. Myers,
Fragments
, 46.

7
. Quoted in Alan Gauld,
The Founders of Psychical Research
(New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 45. I have relied heavily on Gauld for my historical understanding of the S.P.R. For my understanding of Myers's psychology and numerous key quotes from his scattered essays, I am deeply indebted to Emily Williams Kelly's definitive essay, “F. W. H. Myers and the Empirical Study of the Mind-Body Problem,” in
Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century
,
by
Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Alan Gauld, Michael Grosso, and Bruce Greyson (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).

8
. Quoted in Gauld,
Founders
, 64.

9
. Hence Edmund Gurney, one of the leading authors of the S.P.R., went so far as to entitle his two-volume study
Tertium Quid: Chapters on Various Disputed Questions
(London, 1887). The Latin appears to be related in turn to the Pythagorean
triton genon
or “third race,” which was a term used “to describe the unique position of Pythagoras and other kings and sages as neither gods nor men” (Jonathan Z. Smith,
Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982], 11).

10
. F. W. H. Myers, correspondence,
Journal of the Society for Psychical Research
4 (1890): 248.

11
. Myers,
Science and a Future Life
, 4.

12
. Ibid., 7.

13
. Frederic W. H. Myers,
Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death
, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1904/1903), 2:307 (compare also 309); henceforth HP, followed by volume and page number.

14
. As such authors as Leigh Eric Schmidt and Michael Robertson have recently demonstrated, the distinction is probably first found in Emerson's early essays, after which it blooms in Whitman's ecstatic poem-prophecy,
Leaves of Grass
(1855). See Leigh Eric Schmidt,
Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality
(New York: Harper Collins, 2005); and Michael Robertson,
Worshipping Walt: The Whitman Disciples
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).

15
. The category of the spiritual was swamped at this point by the related category of the “spiritualistic,” that is, the phenomena of Spiritualism. The category of the mystical was somewhat more fluid. For negative uses, see Myers's reference to “any hollow mysticism, any half-conscious deceit” (Gauld,
Founders
, 143). For neutral uses, consider his rhyming description of the Census of Hallucinations as “not mystical but statistical” (Myers,
Science and a Future Life
, 29) or his use of the phrase “mystic sentiment” as a gloss for “aesthetic emotion” (ibid., 69).

16
. See “Appendix C: Correspondence between Myers and Lord Acton on the Canons of Evidence to be Applied to Reports of ‘Miraculous' Occurrences,” in Gauld,
Founders
, 364–67.

17
. Thus Myers describes death as the “complete dissociation from the brain itself” (HP 1:xliii).

18
. Myers claims his mother's family was among Wordsworth's “most appreciative friends” (Myers,
Fragments
, 4).

19
. Ibid., 6–7.

20
. Ibid., 45.

21
. Ibid., 16.

22
. Gauld,
Founders
, 135.

23
. Myers,
Fragments
, 17–18.

24
. Ibid., 22.

25
. Gauld,
Founders
, 95–96.

26
. Myers,
Fragments
, 28.

27
. Myers,
Science and a Future Life
, 51.

28
. Ibid., 52.

29
. Ibid., 56.

30
. Ibid., 56–57.

31
. Myers,
Fragments
, 41.

32
. Ibid., 45.

33
. Humanists are generally very suspicious of evolutionary theologies like Myers's, mostly because similar philosophies were used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for some truly horrendous political ideologies, including fascist and colonial ones. Much, I suspect, depends upon one's temporal perspective. 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. It also remains true that innumerable expressions of metaphysical religion are simply incomprehensible outside an evolutionary frame. In the end, I would make three simple observations: (1) from a historical perspective, every metaphysical or mystical system employs some version of its era's understanding of the natural world, hence it would be surprising indeed if this were not also the case for modern movements; (2) a badly used idea is not the same thing as a bad idea; and (3) there are in actual fact hundreds of evolutionary spiritualities in the modern world, including multiple examples from India, each with its own nuances and political histories. Basically, I think we need significantly less moral righteousness here and far more historical consciousness, philosophical nuance, moral balance, and, above all, imagination.

34
. Ibid., 40, 46–47.

35
. Ibid., 47–48. As we shall see, the Sargasso Sea was central to Charles Fort's metaphorical armory as well.

36
. F. W. H. Myers,
Essays: Classical
(London: Macmillan and Co., 1883);
Essays: Modern
(London: Macmillan and Co., 1901/1897); and
Science and a Future Life
.

37
. F. W. H. Myers,
Wordsworth
(London: Macmillan and Co., 1881).

38
. Myers, “Fragments of Inner Life,” 6.

39
. Quoted in Gauld,
Founders
, 333.

40
. Quoted in ibid., 54.

41
. Ibid., 53.

42
. Ibid., 234.

43
. Ibid., 239.

44
. Ibid., 318

45
. For Lincoln, I am relying on Marcia Brennan, “Tragic Dreams and Spectral Doubles: The Metaphysical Lincoln,” in
Poetry Nation Review
(Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2009). For Twain's remarkable story about an eerily detailed and deadly accurate precognitive dream about his brother's death in a riverboat accident, see Deborah Blum,
Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death
(New York: Penguin, 2006), 73–74. In another twist in our developing story, it is worth pointing out that Twain went so far as to suggest in an essay for
Harper's
(December 1891) that authors sometimes pick up ideas from one another telepathically. He proposed, Blum explains, “that telepathy could even account for scientists such as Darwin and Wallace developing their insights into evolution during a similar time period” (173).

46
. Quoted in Gauld,
Founders
, 18.

47
. Ibid.

48
. For late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century expressions of the mystical as the erotic, see Wouter J. Hanegraaff and Jeffrey J. Kripal, eds.,
Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Estoericism
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008). For the sexual magic and occult material, see also Hugh B. Urban,
Magia Sexualis: Sex, Magic, and Liberation in Western Esotericism
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), and Alex Owen,
The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), especially chapter 3, “Sexual Politics,” and chapter 6, “Aleister Crowley in the Desert.”

49
. Blum,
Ghost Hunters
, 201.

50
. Ingo Swann,
Psychic Sexuality: The Bio-Psychic “Anatomy” of Sexual Energies
(Rapid City, North Dakota: Ingo Swann Books, 1996), 107–8. 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. We will encounter him again below, in chapter 3.