Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (60 page)

42
. Chauncey Hare Townshend, “Recent Clairvoyance of Alexis Didier,”
Zoist
9 (1851): 402–14. All citations from this scene are from the original
Zoist
letter.

43
. See Jeffrey J. Kripal,
The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), especially chapter 2, “Restoring the Adam of Light.”

44
. Peter L. Berger,
A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural
(New York: Doubleday, 1969), 59. This is a red thread in Berger's early corpus. He makes a similar case at the end of his classic study,
The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion
(Garden City: Doubleday, 1967); and he makes a related argument again in
The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation
(New York: Anchor Books, 1980).

45
. Alison Winter,
Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

46
. Henri Delaage,
Le Sommeil magnétique expliqué par le somnambule Alexis en état de lucidité
(Paris, 1857), 16, quoted in SF 244, my translation. Didier's articulation here is faithful to the Catholic tradition of relic use, which distinguishes between first-, second-, and third-class relics. First-class relics are body parts. Second-class relics are objects that the saint owned or used in his or her own life. Third-class relics are objects, cloth for example, ritually brought into contact with first-class relics and then distributed among the faithful. Didier is basically addressing second-class relics here.

47
. For a balanced and fair summary of this phenomenon, see Arthur Lyons and Marcello Truzzi,
The Blue Sense: Psychic Detectives and Crime
(New York: The Mysterious Press, 1991).

48
. This story was summarized in a newspaper,
Le Pays
, and then reprinted in the
Zoist
essay cited in note 42. Méheust cites another at VP 247.

49
. Méheust discusses Vallee, and particularly his
Passport to Magonia
, at SF 266–70.

50
. Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck,
Wonders in the Sky: Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times and Their Impact on Human Culture, History, and Beliefs
(New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2010).

51
. See Gregory Bateson,
Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity
(New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979); and
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

52
. Ernesto De Martino,
The World of Magic
(New York: Pyramid Communications, 1972), 77.

53
. These texts are available in the
Collected Works
(in volumes 10 and 18), but a helpful collection of them with attending material, commentary, and historical contextualization is available in C. G. Jung,
Flying Saucers: Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky
, trans. R. F. C. Hull (New York: MJF, 1978). The present quote occurs on page 135 of this text.

54
. Bullard, “Lost in the Myths,” 165.

55
. Ibid., 6.

56
. Méheust cites this text at SF 269 in French. The English can be found in C. G. Jung,
Memories, Dreams, Reflections
, ed. Aniela Jaffé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Vintage, 1989), 323. Other comments on UFOs can be found in
C. G. Jung Speaking: Interviews and Encounters
, ed. William McGuire and R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977).

57
. This again is the same dialectical move that lies at the core of my own “gnostic” methodology, cited above in note 43.

CONCLUSION

1
. Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Alan Gauld, Michael Grosso, and Bruce Greyson,
Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century
(Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), xix.

2
. Mircea Eliade,
A History of Religious Ideas
, trans. Willard R. Trask (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 1:xiii.

3
. On one level, my metamethod here with respect to cognitive science is
interactionist
in the sense that E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. NcCauley define the term, that is, I seek to put explanatory or reductive and interpretive or hermeneutical methods in a dynamic complementary relationship (“Interpretation and Explanation: Problems and Promise in the Study of Religion,” in
Religion and Cognition: A Reader
, ed. D. Jason Slone [London: Equinox, 2006]). On another level, my approach in this book has been more
inclusivistic
in the sense that I have privileged the semiotic nature of paranormal events over their presumed causal structure (but primarily to redress a perceived imbalance). On still another level, I am not so sure either term fits, as my interactionist and inclusivistic moves are reflections of a deeper conviction about how
neither
the humanities
nor
the sciences can explain this stuff, about how the paranormal event is simultaneously subjective
and
objective and so falls somewhere between (or, more likely, beyond) both epistemological Dominants. In this two-way skepticism toward religious literalism
and
scientific materialism, my method is deeply Fortean.

4
. For two impressive contemporary statements of the thesis, see: Paul Marshall,
Mystical Encounters with the Natural World: Experiences and Explanations
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), especially chapter 8, “Mind Beyond the Brain: Reducing Valves and Metaphysics”; and Kelly et al.,
Irreducible Mind
.

5
. A personal note. Looking back, I am struck by how this ontological thread runs throughout all my books, from the first pages of
Kali's Child
, where it was expressed mythically through the mystico-erotic union of Kali (as occult energy or maternal matter) on top of Siva (as pure consciousness), through my various comparative studies of sex and spirit (read: matter and mind) in the history of religions in
Roads of Excess
and
The Serpent's Gift
, to the last pages of
Esalen
, where it was rearticulated as the modal metaphysics (the unity of Consciousness and Energy) realized in the human potential movement and expressed in the American counterculture's selective turn to Tantric Asia. Apparently, whether I am aware of it or not, this is what I think. In the terms of professional philosophy, I am probably closest to David Ray Griffin's “nondualist interactionism” (see especially his
Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration
[Albany: SUNY, 1997], chapter 3), or, better still, the “dual aspect monism” proposed by quantum theorist Harald Atmanspacher out of his extensive work on the Jung-Pauli dialogue that posits an
unus mundus
or One World of Now beneath the complimentary domains of the mental and material that “split off” this deeper reality or Ground within our own brain-mediated temporal experience (Harald Atmanspacher and Hans Primas, “Pauli's Idea on Mind and Matter in the Context of Contemporary Science,”
Journal of Consciousness Studies
13[3], 5–50 [2006]). I certainly do not think that the cognitive, binary, computational structure of the human brain is up to understanding the nondual nature of the One World, although of course human beings experience, intuit, and know such states of being all the time. That is, after all, what they
are
. For more on these ontological questions, see my “Mind Matters: Esalen's Sursem Group and the Ethnography of Consciousness,” in
What Matters: Ethnographies of Value in a (Not So) Secular Age
, eds. Ann Taves and Courtney Bender (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming).

6
. Kelly, “Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century,” 606–7.

7
. I am thinking here of works like Steven Pinker's
How the Mind Works
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1997) and Pascal Boyer's
Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
(New York: Basic Books, 2001). An interesting exception is Sam Harris, whose otherwise
famous
ideological reductionism generously leaves open the possibility that psychical phenomena may have something to teach contemporary neuroscience. He even writes of “some credible evidence for reincarnation,” citing Ian Stevenson's work (
The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
[New York: Norton, 2005], 232n18).

8
. D. E. Harding, “On Having No Head,” in
The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul
, ed. Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 23. Or did Hofstadter and Dennet understand Harding's essay under the “Fantasies” of their subtitle?

9
. Ibid., 24, 25.

10
. Ibid., 28–29. Hence the symbolic importance of decapitation and severed heads in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist and Hindu Tantra. Harding, after all, was hiking in the Himalayas.

11
. Jill Bolte Taylor,
My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey
(New York: Viking, 2008), cover flap.

12
. Ibid., 3.

13
. Ibid., 66.

14
. Ibid., 38.

15
. Ibid., 41.

16
. Ibid., 45–46.

17
. Ibid., 45.

18
. Ibid., 13.

19
. Ibid., 42.

20
. Ibid., 30.

21
. Ibid., 31.

22
. Ibid., 43.

23
. Ibid., 70

24
. Taylor even gives us a bit of historical context for one of my central terms. She identifies the first person to suggest that each hemisphere possesses its own form of mind: Meinard Simon Du Pui. “In 1780,” she tells us, “Du Pui claimed that mankind was
Homo Duplex
—meaning that he had a double brain with a double mind” (ibid., 27).

25
. Ibid., 71. I recognize that, as a brain anatomist, Taylor often presents her case as a physicalist or materialist thinker. That makes good sense, at least to the extent that she wishes to stay within the good graces of professional science as it is presently configured. But I can only observe that her constant invocation of mystical language works strongly against this very materialism and physicalism. In the end, in my reading now, her text is a “fantastic” one capable of being read either way.

26
. Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary,
The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul
(New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 150. Although I am in broad and deep agreement with this work, I am troubled that its use of the scholarly literature on mysticism, spirituality, and religious experience is a
half century
behind the times, that is, the authors rely heavily on authors like William James, Richard Maurice Bucke, Evelyn Underhill, and William Stace (fair enough), but show little or no awareness of the vast literature that historians and philosophers of religion have been working on since the 1960s. I mention this not so much to criticize as to call for some truly reciprocal collaboration between the sciences and the humanities, a collaboration that mirrors the very subjective/objective or mind/matter dialectic that authors like Beauregard propose. I would suggest that such a collaboration is possible only if the historical and hermeneutical complexities are engaged at the same depth and at the same level as the neuroscience.

27
. Ibid., 152.

28
. Ibid., 293. I am supplying the year 1987 after Beauregard's description of the event as occurring “twenty years ago.”

29
. Ibid., 294.

30
. Ibid., 295.

31
. A case can be made for the confluence of psychoanalytic and neuroscientific models of the unconscious. See especially Frank Tallis,
Hidden Minds: A History of the Unconscious
(New York: Arcade, 2002).

32
. Beauregard and O'Leary,
Spiritual Brain
, 132.

33
. Victoria Nelson,
The Secret Life of Puppets
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 16.

34
. Kelly et al.,
Irreducible Mind
.

35
. Tzvetan Todorov,
The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 25.

36
. I am indebted here to Jorge N. Ferrer and Jacob H. Sherman, eds.,
The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies
(Albany: SUNY, 2008).

IMPOSSIBLE (DIS)CLOSINGS

1
. There are numerous sources for what follows, ranging from the orthodox Catholic devotional accounts to the highly heterodox ufological revisionings. I pretend no exhaustive study here, much less a definitive position, but I am relating the story in a way that is reflective of my present subjects, hence my privileging of the Portuguese trilogy discussed below in “Required Reading (That Is Never Read)”: Joaquim Fernandes and Fina D'Armada,
Heavenly Lights: The Apparitions of Fátima and the UFO Phenomenon
; Joaquim Fernandes and Fina D'Armada,
Celestial Secrets: The Hidden History of the Fátima Incident
; and Fernando Fernandes, Joaquim Fernandes, and Raul Berenguel,
Fátima Revisited: The Apparition Phenomenon in Ufology, Psychology, and Science
(San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2005, 2006, 2008).

2
. Fernandes and D'Armada,
Heavenly Lights
, 8–9; and
Celestial Secrets
, 148–49.

3
. This is actually not the beginning. There were a number of preapparitions around 1916, including some very confused accounts of an unidentified figure dressed in a white sheet hovering over a holm oak tree that becomes a crystalline, white, angelic being in the later interpretations, a being that, in one account, has no head, in others switches genders, and in still another is accompanied by a shower of rocks from nowhere (
Celestial Secrets
, 44–72). During the months of the visions, a “fourth witness,” Carolina Carreira, also saw a luminous, childlike humanoid with blonde hair in the same vicinity (ibid., 73–84). Fernandes and D'Armada further point out that on March 10, 1917, a group of spiritualists published a mathematical cipher (135197) in a Lisbon newspaper that can be read as a prediction of a coming event on 13-5-19[1]7. More convincingly, and truly impossibly, they discuss another group of psychics in Porto who claimed to be receiving a prediction that “something transcendental” was about to happen on May 13, 1917. So certain were they that they published their (correct) prediction in the
Journal de Noticías
that same day, thus effectively describing an event in a newspaper as it happened. For the relevant historical documents and a full discussion, see
Celestial Secrets
, 3–28.