Reenchantment of the World & The Romance of Transcendence: Archives of the Impossible II. Part Two.

The great (perhaps under-read but notoriously difficult) philosopher Gilles Deleuze once remarked that all truly great thinkers have really only one thought, which becomes a kind of pathological obsession throughout their lives, to which they return again and again. Because I am too close to these issues, I cannot judge the greatness or not of Jeff Kripal; I’ll leave that assessment to others (which in any case is not something appropriate on which for me to opine). But there is an idea to which Jeff returns time and again. Or it is an intellectual-spiritual movement from which his thinking has emerged, and to which it constantly returns, like a comet entering and leaving the firmament? I mean the human potential movement, yet one more subcurrent of the 1960s Great Reaction against the conservativisms of modernity.

The 20^th century grew up under the specter of oppression, as it became clear in what ways “Progress” (that fateful moniker of the age) was purchased, at what cost advancement was gained as humankind was lifted from its thrownness in nature – an infant incapable of extricating itself from its given conditions – to a position of self-reliance, self-determination, and self-creation. Indeed, Nietzsche, the great celebrant of human potential (as Wille zur Macht) dies in August of 1900, the year we see Freud’s publication of Traumdeutung, The Interpretation of Dreams. Had the ironworks, and the factories that were their home, producing from the raw materials of the earth new materials for building the Modern World of steam, speed, and smoke … had they pressed down upon Man and stifled his spirit? Was his being thereby lost, forgotten, displaced, exorcised from the material world to the airy world of the immaterial (what was that late 19^th century fascination with the spirit world, with its vain attempts to materialize it?) What was ‘spirit’ after all – not the abstraction of religion or theology (itself already a kind of obscuration, according to Nietzsche, as body was forsaken for the smoke of an immaterial ‘soul’), but that which is the temple of the body (to invert Christ’s formula)? Both Nietzsche and Freud – and many others: Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, … the grandchildren of the somewhat anxious post-Enlightenment – looked askance at what was eventually called ‘modernity’ to see a high cost in this newfound ‘progress’. For Nietzsche, what replaces the necessity for self-building in the (then-nascent) modern world is the blinking a-hedonic indifference of die letzte Mensch (the “last men”), whose needs are taken care of and who do not therefore have to build themselves into something of solid, self-reliant standing (his thinking here quite dependent on the American “transcendentalist” Emerson). For Freud the displaced, arrested erotic fulfilment that comes from the imposition of the socially necessary demands of the super-ego, curtailing pleasure in favor of what is practically required by the modern system in order that it function (a kind of rational irrationality): the erotic gets restrained, sublimated, leaving man frustrated, anxious, neurotic. “We’ll get to that later, after work” is perhaps the death rattle of eros…

Of late Kripal has taken to Nietzsche, a thinker who, he once told me, he had sort of overlooked, able to see the radical philosopher only through the distorting lens of academic summary or outline. It is to Nietzsche that his concept of the super-humanities (perhaps somewhat obliquely) is ultimately indebted: Übermensch could be translated (poorly) as super-man. But then there’s Hollywood. And before that the Nazis, in their once-successful appropriation of the Nietzschean philosophy of Wille zur Macht.

Nietzsche surely believed in some kind of potency of which human beings were capable but had not expressed (because of social, cultural and conceptual repressions from without). But what are the conditions of its realization? Does it require a metaphysical transcendence? What is metaphysics (the greatest of the philosophical questions)? Does this require a movement from materialism to something else, and in which case is the transformation merely conceptual or intellectual – is it just about ‘paradigms’? Surely that wasn’t what Nietzsche meant at all. All this is second-order; Nietzsche was first- or even zero-order: it was an unrealized potency of the human body as a “body-spirit” – and that has nothing to do with materialism or idealism, or any ‘ism’ the mind (as a “believer”) might adopt. So perhaps we cannot appreciate the import of Nietzsche’s thought without the kind of deflationary metaphysic of the so-called Existentialists, who tried to refocus on doing and creating, rather than “thinking” per se (and yes, this sets up a dichotomy about which we ought to be very cautious—if not outright skeptical).

If there is anything to what I like to call (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) “mystical atheism” or “spiritual materialistic irreligion” then it’s found here, in what Nietzsche called the “reevaluation” and later “transvaluation” of all values: a spiritually treacherous but fruitful movement from ‘mind’ into the body (but not ‘body’ as opposed to the mind). If there is any ‘transcendence’ in Nietzsche’s concept of Übermensch, then it is one that is well within this world. It is therefore anti-Platonic, anti-theological, non-metaphysical (in the sense of isms like materialism, idealism, etc.). It is a kind of “nomadology”, horizontal as opposed to vertical, “rhizomatic” as opposed to “arborescent” if we want to borrow the terminology of Deleuze & Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus. It seeks surfaces, and never sees depths under them (an exuberance of the surface!). If there is an ‘unconscious’ then it is precisely that which lives upon the surface(s) of the body (was this not the basic critique of Deleuze and Guattari’s first text, Anti-Oedipus?). This is non-transcendence. Nietzsche refers to “überwindung” or overcoming of something in the world, in the body but never outside or “beyond” it. We can imagine an echo of the Confucian admonition here: leave the dead beyond to take care of themselves. What is beyond the body is death, so leave death to death; take care of the body! This is more zen than tantra or lama. It is the quietude of the morning doves with their squeaking wings in the breeze, than the rapture of the yogi (Rajneesh-style).

What, then, were we witness to during the Archives of the Impossible, which cut no dissimulation by adding “transcendence” to one of its trans-es? Surely, it was an example of this trend, slowing growing since the dawn of the previous century, of – and what should it be called? – the “Reenchantment of the World”, the self-conscious reversal of a structural (perhaps sociological) fact discovered by Weber, which he called die Entzauberung der Welt – the disenchantment of the world.

But it was curious and remarkable that Archives II began with two talks on the UFO phenomenon: an “outside” (historical) and “inside” (religious-cultural) view of it. Because it is clear that the UFO phenomenon itself (at least from an historical perspective) is caught up in a larger socio-cultural and historical phenomenon; the Europeanist and Historian Alexander Geppert calls it “astroculture”. And it is very much concerned with transcendence – but of the off-worldly, rather than this- or other-worldly kind. As such it makes striking contact with what Bruno Latour has noted is the emergence of a new coordinate space of sociopolitical possibilities: the Earth-bound (Gaia-centered) v. the off-world-bound (though we should note that the gospel of transcendence, starting with the “space brothers” of Adamski – gospel we find repeated frequently in contactee or abductee narratives – is very much concerned to admonish human beings in their this-worldly stupidities).

As I try to bring my reflections on these Archives talks to a close, I am embedded in Europe, the Old World that gave us so much transcendence, which only yielded to the inner dynamical forces of expansion, the will-to-power of human desire, conquest: the New World was a lateral freedom, a migration of peoples in search of new land – which they happened to then take from those human beings who already had found their place on the surface of the world. Every now and then, the historical weight of the past bears down upon you, and you become inward-focused, closed up upon yourself and culturally you get buried within an onion of increasingly burdensome layers of demand, tradition, the reality principle of necessary civilizational duty, expectation, the “must” of daily life. You can’t breathe. But the surface of the world, the lateral movement that is possible because of it, affords one the possibility of what we might call nomadic emancipation, a spirituality (and attendant politics) of movement; with this lateral movement, which entails a change of place, is expiation, dissipation, rather than that coil of oppression that emerges in the sedentism of civilizational life, when a people puts down “roots” only to have a dense choking forest grow up which occludes the sunlight and obscures the way out. The civilization thing is a logic of placement, permanence, and therefore of the static (and circularly repetitious) dynamics of cultivation. The Neolithic Revolution was not just a sociopolitical one, but also a psycho-somatic (mind-body) one, fostering an attachment to the land and geography, to borders and divisions that became political, cultural, and finally psychological. Was this the moment of identity? Of the formation of the reality principle in relation to the physical and then psychological demands of place? A pragmatic demand that gets transmogrified and ramified into the theological – the eventual search for upwards (vertical) transcendence, the outward escape of the gods, the sky?

At our late stage of civilizational development, in which the world is no longer the infinite expanse of possible nomadic, lateral wandering, in which nowhere is enough of an escape, this logic of permanence of place necessarily takes the whole world as that towards which nomadic liberation moves in search of the freedom of the human spirit. Hence the logic of the off-worlders Latour worries about: there’s no where to go except outer space (or inner space—and we’ve had enough inner, haven’t we?). Is, then, the more profound confrontation at work in the phenomenon of the “things seen in the sky” which presently is caught up in the dynamics of an emergent religion of skyward transcendence (is this finally the Pasulka thesis?), the incipient religion of the “space brothers” (and sisters?) that form a significant sociocultural layer to the historical phenomenon of our fascination with the UFO, … is this complicating the attempt to reach into the empirical (non-mythic) core—the “real” that fascinates even as its frightens, or deludes? Are we confronted, that is, by a nomadic phenomenon intersecting our civilizations of place and permanence just at the moment when the surface of our world becomes inhospitable, increasingly uninhabitable—necessitating a Planet B?

Our only option, if we confront the reality of Gaia head-on would seem to be total structural change (induced by a serious alteration in our relationship with energy and matter, leaving behind our Promethean impulses), or escape (leaving the miseries of our poor, desolating surface behind). But why not a third option, the excluded middle: A return to the oceans? Why not a submergence, descending into the world rather than seeking an escape from it (off-world)? Is there more intimacy in the ocean, in water, where light is lost and the body is afforded perhaps more development of the somatosensory architecture of a diffuse, distributed “mind”? (The octopi are creatures of extended mind, each portion of their bodies a kind of brain, or a brain distributed over the surface of their bodies, the eye being perhaps subservient to touch, smell, taste—or perhaps their senses are configured without the rigid dominance of the visual which burdens many of the larger creatures of the land.)

Returning back to the mundane machinations of the UFO, we wonder. With no framework for dealing with the uncanny, it is easy to get lost in a sea of empirically unconstrained speculations. It’s this, I believe—the lack of empirically constrained frameworks for capturing the uncanny—that constitutes the foundational problem in UAP Studies, and in “ufology” more specifically. And it is this that forms the major division in that subject—not the vulgar distinction between “nuts-and-bolts” v. the “woo”. The former simply tries to force the uncanny remainder of the UAP into existing but problematic frameworks (or drops it entirely—falsifying much of the UFO experience in the process), whereas the latter exit them all together. But Archives II offered some academics the chance to try to bring the speculations to some kind of more definite articulation, to situate the uncanny, the paranormal in something that offers inner conceptual coherence, as strange (to us) as the core phenomena might remain. But what are these phenomena of the uncanny—Kripal’s “impossible”? I am suggesting that a mere framework is not enough until it is empirically constrained, situated within the realm of nature. Or what Spinoza would have called, perhaps, Deus sive Natura (i.e., “God, or Nature”). The “divine” for him was an “infinite substance” which had an infinite array of expressions, a plurality that would only be more consistently thought by William James centuries later but which still yet remains external to the empirical disciplines, and whose formal implications have yet to be rigorously developed and deployed for the purposes of surpassing (and finally overcoming) the matter/mind break complicating and debilitating the sciences (at least in their function of providing explanation and understanding. I say this, but of course there is a rich tradition of making an attempt to elevate these reflections beyond mere critique, to achieve a new (empirical) logic of the specific that is neutral with respect to the persistent division of matter and mind. We might refer here to the rigorous work of Harald Atmanspacher, for one example with which I am familiar. It is this kind of work that can obviate the slide towards idealism that could be detected amongst many of the academics (and other speakers) at Archives II. (I will have occasion later in this review to revisit this issue, and to submit my own response which was prompted by some of my colleagues’ interventions in a discussion I had recently with them.)

I am writing these reflections in the wake of the increasingly confusing, titillating, frustrating and ultimately epistemically indeterminate “disclosures” of the apparently high-level whistleblower, David Grusch. As the world already knows, Grusch ostensibly spilled the disclosure beans in a bombshell article for the Debrief, penned by the Kean/Blumenthal team that had exploded the subject (of government investigating UFOs) in 2017 in a well-known article for the New York Times. Overnight, we were thrust into a miasma of hearsay, the he-said, she-said of the typical Elizondo-style insider who insists on (and in this case purports to disclose, in detail only to Congress and its Inspector General) the existence of highly secretive, ultimately classified (and compartmented) data and information indicating the U.S. government’s possession of “nonhuman technology” (fragments or “intact craft”), even (it would seem) bodies of nonhuman creatures who piloted some of these technologies. We’re told of long-standing “reverse engineering” programs, intentional downing of some UAP, and even malevolent interactions between human military officers and nonhuman intelligence in which the officers were either harmed or killed in the process. And as with much of these insiders, the drift towards speculative hypotheses is irresistible, as if these “disclosures” are not enough on their own. In his interview with Ross Coulthart, and as recounted in a recent article for the French news website Le Parisien, Grusch, who admits he has no first-hand knowledge of the material evidence he says exists (he claims access to reports and the testimony of others), opines that the objects/craft “could be extraterrestrial” or “something else, from other dimensions as described by quantum mechanics”—quite despite the fact that quantum mechanics neither requires nor deals with “other dimensions”. Maybe he’s thinking of a particularly controversial interpretation of the theory which posits the existence of parallel and constantly-forking branches of the wavefunction describing the evolution of the whole universe? (But in this case, descriptions of processes in space and time—with three spatial dimensions, plus the one for time—evolve in a higher-dimensional state space which must be projected into our ordinary spacetime. But these higher dimensions are just facts about the representation space, not about the world itself, which does just fine with four dimensions.) He claims to have “graduated in physics” but offers only a stilted articulation of quantum theory (which in any case is somewhat interpretationally confused), so it’s hard to form of judgment here. (The landscape of interpretation of quantum theory requires a much longer discussion to be sure as there’s lots of controversy and disagreement among scholars—so it’s best tabled for the moment.) What I suppose this demonstrates is that the uncanny is an occasion for the derailment of thought, and in the current context of “disclosure” is just radically unhelpful. Even if we could accept the disclosures of Grusch, given that our understanding of the best physical theories we have—the gravitational/spacetime theory of Einstein, and the quantum theory of matter—is at best tenuous, especially if we try to coherently relate the former to the latter, whatever the government does possess is likely to be strikingly incomprehensible. Surely not understood to the point where it makes much contact with physics (or science) as we know it. If even the known physics we have is either incomplete or inadequately understood, then surely our understanding will be even worse if, as Grusch alleges is the case, we were to come into the possession of nonhuman technology capable of engaging in the kinds of kinematic acrobatics we have evidence for in some of the more well-documented UAP cases on record. We therefore must leave these allegations, as arresting as they are, alone. At least for the moment…

If I struggle with the kinds of allegations Grusch wants the public to accept about what the government does (and likely doesn’t) know about UFOs (which in any case are far from new, as many who know ufological history well know—just read Thomas Bullard’s The Myth and Mystery of UFOs, pp. 83ff for example) then I find it harder to deal with the range of the “impossible” that had been spread before the audience during the final two days of Archives II. I mean, advanced nonhuman tech, downed craft (meaning, pilotable vehicular somethings), fragments of UAP, biological forms, bodies—it all easily crashes into a known which we can immediately confront with the resources of current scientific understanding. And if any of this is real (without complicating ‘real’ as might well try to—but why might we?), then a simple principle of modal logic would guide us in our researches: actuality implies possibility, meaning simply (and perhaps quite naively—but then, mustn’t science start with the naïve?) that whatever the objects (and beings) are capable of doing, if we interact with them and they are part of our lebenswelt, then there exists some suitably expanded set of natural principles by which these (technological) objects and these beings who created them have come to be. Unless the entire thought of the ‘technological’ and of the story of ‘coming into being’ in the explanatory sense of science, drawing on the concept of a principle of nature, is entirely mistaken. But if it is, then we can only begin to exit our mistaken frameworks through a determinate confrontation with a specific structure of nature which teaches us otherwise. We must therefore listen to what the phenomena could teach us. But what are the phenomena? Allegations do not a truth make.

In contrast, the range of the impossible under consideration at Archives II, from Day 2 to 3, draws on conceptual (and experiential) worlds that would seem to be incompatible with modern science. Seem—but wherefore the incompatibility? The stock answer to this simple question (I mean, does vocalization enable the crystallization of material forms, as we considered in Prof. Biernacki’s walk through the philosophical intricacies of Indian mantra soteriology?) is something about the “materialism” of science, about its exclusion of mind from the material world. But what if we imposed, out of democratic concern for cognitive balance, a principle of critical symmetry: if science might not grasp the non-materialistic possibilities of reality because of its materialistic biases, then shouldn’t we say that (equally) the Vedic or Buddhist philosophies of India might not grasp the detailed structure of (material) nature because of its bias towards the concerns of spiritual salvation (these traditions are, after all, structured by a logic of soteriology)? And if these non-scientific soteriological traditions have approached nature through only the lens of “moksha” (or nirvana—the soteriological or salvific end goal, the structuring telos of these traditions, which we might call liberation), then haven’t they in effect distorted or even complicated the structure of nature (which we might seek to free of such narrow concerns). We might say (that is) that because science has inadequately incorporated the dimension of mind into its conceptual architecture, then matter is also distorted in the process. Yet, by our principle of critical symmetry, we say that because of the soteriological orientation of these traditions, mind has itself been distorted because matter is inadequately grasped and assimilated by them. If “materialistic” science doesn’t have the complete picture, well then neither do the “idealistic” (soteriological) systems of the Indian traditions. If matter, then, is only partially grasped well by science (with mind awkwardly dangling as an outlier), mind is, too, only partially grasped well by these philosophically sophisticated soteriologies of India (with matter dangling as an outlier, an adjunct to something “higher”). As we criticize science for its materialism, we risk failing to perceive the shortcomings of those idealistic traditions which seem to provide a more subtle accounting of mind, but which (perhaps because of this) fail to perceive the factual structure of matter itself.

Biernacki spoke of a “sun” science, defined in terms of a capacity to materialize an object from the vocalization of sounds (mantra is the art of, as it were, spiritually efficacious vocalizations—that is, those with a liberating power). Apparently, it has something to do with one’s “will”. But the secret to this power rests with a more general principle which (like in the Western Hermetic and alchemical traditions) has it that “everything is of the nature of everything else”. Mantric sounds are the drawing forth, then, of what is already implicitly present in anything. Not a creation so much as a transformation of one form into another—because the latter is already found in the former. This calls to mind the (perhaps obscure) debate in the ancient Samkya-Yoga tradition (considered one of the orthodox Vedic “darshana” or philosophical-visionary schools) of whether, when something comes into being, it was already preexistent in the cause(s) implicated in the process—or if it is new (i.e., not itself found already there in the cause(s)). A little paradox ensues, it would seem, if something is truly new; so, we seem to have to fall back on the view that anything new is just a kind of modification of what already exists (if something is absolutely new, how could it have come into being at all—from nothing?). So, we end up with a kind of holographic principle where, at least theoretically, everything has the nature of anything else—from one thing to another is just a series of modifications from the one to the (different) other.

From one point of view, this seems too cheap: if this principle articulates a fundamental fact about reality, then of course sound can materialize into anything and the “sun” science is possible: just because, whatever else sound is, it will have the nature of whatever the “will” behind it wants to call forth: “everything is of the nature of everything else”). But from another point of view, which is too restrictive, getting from sound to solid forms seems, well, formidable. And in any case, it wouldn’t be a material process of derivation of the one from the other, in any sense that science would recognize. What is interesting, of course, is that there appears to be an empirical basis for this kind of a view: phenomena like the lingam and other other manifestational “siddhi” accepted in many yoga traditions are visible, tangible—in principle. Like so-called “physical mediumship” it is something one can see, feel, hear and even touch. Again, in principle. Is science not able to perceive these because of its materialist biases? That seems a silly position to take. So why hasn’t or can’t science access it—why aren’t these phenomena accepted aspects of the experiential world which science engages? If these are phenomena allowable by nature (somehow), it should be at least present as a seemingly “impossible” occurrence able to be witnessed—and that’s what’s claimed in both the historical literature (the philosophical and spiritual texts) and in current practices. But witnessing, as we know especially in ufology, is not nearly enough. It must be reproducible in some way. The yoga traditions do propose to offer a kind of program for the production of these things—so there’s a method. Then what? It’s a simple question of intersubjective accessibility: If such extraordinary siddhi are available, even under certain conditions, what are those conditions such that it can be made manifest even to “Western” science? Surely physical manifestations or extraordinary transformations ought to be—if nothing else—phenomenologically accessible to anyone, including scientists. And that’s what I want to see.

As the reader no doubt can detect, the above reflections in connection with yogic siddhi are a real struggle for me. And I don’t propose to make pronouncements here as if I’m an expert. I just am genuinely wanting to know, to experience, to see, and to think these phenomena properly. If the are “secrets” of the “inner tradition” or somesuch, then it’s not clear to me that “materialism” is the real problem, for the deeper structural logic of “Western materialist science” is democratic openness and replicable transparency of experimental demonstration: nature isn’t so greedy as to keep her secrets locked behind all-too-human systems of esotericism. Science is fundamentally exoteric—and to repeat this has nothing to do with “materialism”. So, the ball’s in the court of the impossibles…

The danger now is that I’ve gotten distracted, and the review is falling by the wayside. But let’s press on.

Somehow, I really liked the talk by Dale Allison, entitled “Comparing Like With Like: The Impossible Jesus and Impossible Others”. He offered what appeared to be a kind of empiricism of the uncanny, attempting to suspend judgment about what was gotten through testimony regarding the miraculous acts of Jesus, as if trying to perceive a moment prior to the historical accretions of the subsequent metaphysical-theological shroud put over the face of Christ. But the next talk was another story.

We come to the Rey Hernandez phenomenon, a cognitive-intellectual disaster zone all unto itself. Talk about a holographic principle at work: he embodies every fraught aspect of ufology. I mean, it’s all there: narcissistic egoism; self-selling; the “experiencer” and “contactee” thing; dubious “studies” that prove this or that; hob-nobbing and name-dropping the greats. Oh, and then there’s the song-and-dance we’re given about why he doesn’t have his Ph.D. but almost did. And so, he actually went through the trouble of listing himself as an almost-doctor-of-something on his first slide, before, in the talk itself, we were bombarded with a hundreds-of-pages-long text he’s written (or produced, or whatever it was that caused it to exist). This is the person who typifies exactly the kind of person you never, ever want to invite to an actual conference. I just don’t know why this guy was given the podium—especially with so many actual scholars and intellectuals who graced us with their presence (Kripal himself, Eghigian, Finley, Biernacki, the medievalist Barbara Newman, Classical Chinese scholar Michael Lackner, Sharon Rawlette, and so on).

Best I could tell, Hernandez was there to essentially sell the audience first on his own importance and books, second on the brilliance and significance of this “FREE” study of which he was a part, the one that boasts a few thousand respondents claiming experiencer status of some sort or other and purporting to reveal something significant about the character of their experiences. In other words, all we have is a survey, and a dubious generalization to some relevant population—CE3- & CE4-ers. The study as far as I know was published in the JSE. It’s trying to provide some seemingly empirical basis for this claim that drifts around the ufological community that the UFO experience is positively transformative—something like what we might call the Mack thesis. But since we have to independent access to these phenomena which are supposed to be the object-cause of the experiences the “experiencers” are having, we really cannot tell if these purported transformations are intrinsically related to the UAP supposedly associated with them, or whether we can attribute the transformations to the experiencers themselves—or just to the general psychology of shock. Yes, UAP can be shocking—and John E. Mack wanted to impute to it something more: “ontological shock”, a disturbance to your fundamental orientation in the world as a whole. The idea, I guess, is that closer contact with UAP (and then with beings in association with them) rips open one’s seemingly narrow ontological-epistemic field of understanding, and discloses a kind of reality that upends everything one knows—or thought they knew. That, at any rate, seems to be the narrative. Again, there’s lots to be dubious about and as I’ve said again and again, this doubt has nothing to do with “materialism”. It’s just basic critical thinking: if we have no independent access to or understanding of UAP (or any beings associated with them), then how can we really understand the significance of what a certain segment of “experiencers” of these phenomena report to us? (And to add to the difficulty, which doesn’t begin with Mack but is certainly extended by him: are we also being told that no “materialist” scientists will be able to access these phenomena? Or that their failure to see or grasp is a function of their incompatible worldview? That these phenomena are not even susceptible to conventional scientific detection? Are these phenomena not detectable because the scientists have a certain worldview, or do the scientists have a certain worldview because these phenomena aren’t detectable? It’s a thorny problem, but let’s not forget that the sciences are starting to bring their frameworks to bear on the problems here, and we must wait and see the extent to which they will or won’t fall, change or modulate in the process…)

For the rest of Friday, we were privy to talks by Colm Kelleher, of Skinwalkers at the Pentagon fame doing his “from werewolves and poltergeist hitchhikers to UAP” thing (hey, maybe it’s all there in all those NIDS/AAWSAP docs, but there’s a simple question, as with the Grusch allegations: where’s the beef?); German professor of Classical Chinese Thought Michal Lackner talking about “Divination: An Alternative Rationality”; and longtime adjunct professor Kenny Paul Smith presenting on his enacting of the ground-level duty of actually trying to teach undergraduates about all of this uncanniness that’s out there. The absolute highlight of the day, of course, was twofold—both presentations of which ended up being rather intensely personal and emotional.

First, we had the recollections of famed medievalist Barbara Newman, who for some years was a kind of spiritual companion to a working mystic, a woman who had this strangely torturous living synchronicity with a man who’d died but with whom she’d had some kind of relationship. The talk was made all the more profound because of the earnestness and eloquence of Newman’s telling of her encounters, which ended with the mystic’s suicide. Very much present, authentic. The talk was called “‘To Slip Between Dimensions’: A Tale of Glory and Tragedy”.

Newman’s emotional portrait of her spiritual companionship took the afternoon plenary slot of the day. It was an immensely eloquent, sensitive, and learned exploration of a companionship with someone, whom she describes as a ‘mystic’, operating within a rather different intellectual-emotional-spiritual landscape. One populated with seemingly impossible, or at any rate uncanny, nonlocal connections. As Newman recounts, it was as if the two were acting as “one in another”, bound across space (and time). Explicating this more exactly, Newman invoked the theological-philosophical concept of “coinherence”, an idea usually associated with the particular ontological situation of the Christian “Trinity”. That’s the “three gods in one” idea that emerged at some point a few hundred years after Christianity arises as a major religion in the Greco-Roman world. (Scholarship is, if I recall correctly, fairly clear that in the earliest days, Christ wasn’t really seen as (a) god, but perhaps as a special appointee of the divine (hence “christos” or the anointed one) … but eventually so special that, given the ministry and “signs and wonders” disclosed during and within Jesus’ life, acquired the interpretation of being the “son” of God, now a “Father” … and hence, we have a metaphysical procession: out of God the Father follows the Son (Jesus), and between them the Holy Spirit is manifest as their completeness, this triune totality manifesting a relation of coinherence with respect to each of the parts: they exist together with each other, never fully separate or distinct such that their identities are maintained without erasure, but nonetheless still maintaining some identity. Perhaps we have a case of identity in difference. And what’s interesting is that in Christian Theology, it’s the differences that are stressed, at least in terms of its strong devotionalism (which, from a comparative perspective, isn’t unlike the popular bhakti yoga tradition found in the Indian religious landscape—a yoga that has a corresponding sophisticated philosophical expression). In many ways, this wasn’t a talk just about one mystic, bearing a relation of coinherence to her spiritual second. “The human is two,” as Jeff Kripal himself recently explained in a piece for the journal Mind and Matter, at one point Newman invokes the African concept of “Obuntu” which expresses the thought that the individual, the “I”, is really always produced out of the many: “we are,” Newman paraphrased, “therefore I am”—thus inverting the Cartesian analysis. So, this talk seemed to suggest an impossible direction in the very concept, and performance of, human identity. Was this, again, pointed in the direction of Kripal’s “super-human”? That would seem to be thematically consistent, as this is the central theme of his current trilogy on the subject—and he is the conference organizer after all…

A kind of secondary plenary for the later afternoon session was given in the form of a panel during which we found an equally emotional presentation by the John E. Mack Institute’s current (and longtime) Executive Director, Karin Austin (whom I know very well. Indeed, I consider a Karin a friend—one who knows and respects where I stand vis-a-vie abductions, ontological transformations, colliding worldviews and the like). It was partly the story of Karin’s deep personal connection with Mack, where at some point in the ‘90s she became Mack’s personal assistant, co-residing with him until his sudden and tragic death in 2004. Karin tells the heart-wrenching story of driving John (as she of course called him) to the Boston airport, being the last person he would see from the U.S. It was a bit of a rushed goodbye, she tells us, struggling to hold back the tears. She leaves us with the image of the back of John’s tweed coat as he rushes off to catch his flight to London, where, in the suburbs, his life would tragically come to an end: a drunk driver strikes him as he crosses a darkened street one evening (Mack’s family would later plead clemency for the man).

The other part of the story, immediately relevant to the very raison d’être of the whole of Archive, was Karin and Co.’s monumental effort to convert Mack’s voluminous personal archives of client case-files (the bulk of which are from his working with abductees and other “experiencers”), notes, manuscripts (some left abandoned as Mack unexpectedly departed for Elysian fields), and other sundry written or collected materials into digital form (where possible—some material is physical, not informational or documentary). There were a few hundred banker boxes filled to bursting. The original project began, Karin notes, with team members somewhat naively thinking it could be dispatched in a few short months. That was a LOL moment. After the first few days, we’re told in wonderfully humorous, affable turns of phrase, Karin realized that there was one important physical reality that had been overlooked in the way that all novices forget the mundane tedium of the master’s actual craft (as opposed to the magical final product that mysteriously obscures the nitty-gritty of material production—how exactly did Marx put it in Kapital?). Oh, no shit: the staples! Each one has to be carefully dislocated from the paper which it greedily clasps, originally for practical organizational purposes but which now, decades later, is a nuisance to the process of digital conversion. Each metal fastener, sometimes perhaps rusted slightly with age, is a mortal threat to the integrity of the paper into which it was long ago set in a brief but violent act of practical necessity. And the staple considerably slows the process down. A few short months expands to, perhaps, years of careful, tedious effort. Karin and her team managed to do a few dozen boxes before it was negotiated that the whole lot would be packed in Boston into a large U-Haul, whereupon through the ice and cold of New England it would be driven to the balmy hot environs of the Gulf of Mexico, to Houston Texas, unloaded and delivered to the careful curatorship of Rice University’s Woodson Research Center.

From Karin’s beautiful essay on the joys of digitization, we’re delivered to the staid eloquence of the Center’s master director, Amanda Focke, joined by Anna L. Shparberg, the earnest-seeming and very devoted Humanities Librarian at Rice. It is under their care that the extensive Mack Archives will remain for the next few years as this digitization project (Digital Humanities, anyone?) is brought to completion. So, it seems that there will be some time before the general scholarly community will have access to these rich and likely rewarding archives (which, Greg Eghigian tells me, he’ll be making use of as he turns his attention towards the whole contactee phenomenon that has paralleled the UFO story).

I seemed to have become fuzzy on whether I attended the final (!) plenary talk of the day, delivered by Charles M. Stang—oh now I recall what happened: after the emotional intensity of Austin’s account of her professional and personal relationship with Mack, and the process of getting his archival material over to Rice’s Woodson Center (Harvard was of course approached about it, but they first actually declined, then later agreed but with heavy conditions wanting to be placed on it—to which JEMI said, “ah, peace out”), I was wiped. I headed over to the great old tobacco shop there near the Uni campus, and I enjoyed a pipe in anticipation of the dinner hour. That night we gathered in a nice restaurant for libations and a nice meal. Profs. Finley, Eghigian, Knuth, and I met up with other speakers and guests, including Karin and some of the Mack Archives Team. It was great fun, and great intellectual camaraderie—despite some of our differences in approach and epistemic disposition towards the phenomena under discussion at Archives. But that’s the point, right? We should have no misgivings, no fear of reputational demise or reproach because of our intellectual curiosity or (gasp!) engagement with the “impossible”. To the intellectual, if not to the authentic academic, absolutely nothing is off limits—or (of course) beyond reproach. But critique must be done from a place of loving concern for truth (was this not the sentiment of Deleuze?). What is radical is our commitment to exploration, to the deeper roots of the very educative act itself: the holding open of the mind to truth, to what Nature can disclose to the mind quieted of both judgmental dogmas or fanciful speculation. If only we can listen to Nature, beyond the “possible”—which just reflects what we conceive to be actual within the constraints of a faculty of reason governed by the forces of tradition and intuitive expectation. Can we not see that, from another standpoint altogether—that of experience of Nature, an encounter with Nature as always already “alien” to our transitory conceptual designs—we are called to freedom, from our condition of perpetual “tutelage”? Can we not make room for another articulation of that mighty event of rational autonomy which Kant would understand as the ground of the Aufklärung flowing from the new vigor of the experimentalism which joined with that natural philosophy of the mathematical scientists?

With this I will delay to a separate, final post what of the last day of Archives II I was able to attend and therefore review. I do this also because I have no doubt tired the reader beyond what is reasonable (if to tire the reader is reasonable), possibly myself having gotten lost in a thick field, laden with weeds, of the possible and the impossible, the dense forest of ideas, facts, of minds and bodies. Let us therefore rest for a moment, and take up these reflections again soon.