Jeffrey J Kripal is a professor of philosophy and religious thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He is the author of 10 books on the history of mysticism, psychology and the paranormal. His latest, How to Think Impossibly, draws on a range of sources including gnosticism, quantum physics and English romantic philosophy, to attempt a new theory of mind and the imagination.
At the root of some of your understanding of imagination, and your argument that current theories of mind leave too much “off the table”, seems to be an experience that happened to you in Kolkata in November 1989. Can you describe what that involved?
I was working on my first book, Kali’s Child, and I was very sick; I had some kind of flu or food poisoning. I went to bed and I woke up, but my body didn’t wake up. And some kind of strange energy came out of the room or more probably came out of my body. I thought that the electrical circuits in the walls had somehow malfunctioned and I was being electrocuted. I had a classic out-of-body experience, and when I eventually got back into my body and woke up it felt like something had been downloaded into me. Massive amounts of information, and I had no context for any of it.
You were studying the experience of this kind of phenomenon. Do you think that made you more open to it?
Absolutely. This is what they would have called shakti in this Tantric worldview. But I mean, I’m the white guy from the US, and it was not part of my agency, as we say.
Do you look back on it as a kind of before and after moment?
It made me very suspicious of my suspicions. So when people later told me about their out-of-body experiences, or their near-death experiences, or even their abduction experiences, I was like, “Yeah, that can happen.”
You were more cynical before?
I had started adult life in a Benedictine seminary. So no, this didn’t come out of the blue. I grew up in a German farming community in Nebraska. I was the weird kid; I really wanted to know, what the fuck are we doing here? In the seminary, I thought: this is not sufficient.
Throughout history, as you write, all cultures have tried to explain individuals who have had these experiences of what you call “impossible thinking”. I suppose, for example, Lives of the Saints is one record of them?
You need impossible things to happen to become a saint, but they have got to be the right [Roman Catholic] things. But why take things off the table that don’t fit into your worldview?
Has that belief made you a heretic in academic circles?
I would say that most intellectuals are sympathetic [to mystery], but they’re in the closet. In other words, they don’t want to talk about “impossible thinking” because they’ll lose prestige or authority.
How much have you experimented with hallucinogens?
My only real encounter with psychedelics was at a full-blown retreat in Brazil. It was ayahuasca. I didn’t have the experiences that some people report. I didn’t meet God. But I had a lot of the physiological effects that they talk about: dissolving of consciousness and so on.
I’m probably being dumb, but I didn’t get the relation between your updating of Coleridge’s model of the imagination – what you call dual-aspect monism, the sense that imagination can take us beyond the false division of mental and material realities – and these experiences like the sighting of ghosts or of giant praying mantises appearing at the end of people’s beds. How do those relate?
What I’m trying to say in the book is that a lot of people have these strange experiences, but nobody really has a model of the imagination that can explain them. I’m trying to develop one. I’m pushing back against this idea that the imagination is just about imaginary mental states. The example I give a lot is precognitive states: dream-like states, where people see the future as a set of physical events.
You have recorded and collected many examples in your Archives of the Impossible at Rice University.
Yes. To me they’re the most stunning because sometimes they’re precise down to very banal details.
Is it your argument that there are elements of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, particularly challenges to ideas of strictly linear time, that support these possibilities?
I’m not a physicist, but one of the science writers I read is Philip Ball, and what Phil says is, look, we need to create a culture and a way of thinking that is quantum. We still insist on living in a Newtonian world.
By which you mean, in simple terms, a kind of measurable cause-and-effect universe?
We still want to believe that space and time are dead environments in which things happen. We know that is not true. Quantum physics requires new metaphors. The relationship between Newtonian physics and quantum physics is very similar to, say, that between critical theory and impossible thinking. The Newtonian physics works fine up to a point, but we know it’s not all that’s going on.
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Let me ask about, for example, your thoughts on UFO sightings. You suggest they happen more frequently to people who’ve had near-death experiences, because, I think you argue, those people’s hold on “normal” reality is weaker?
I think the normal way of thinking about a UFO as some kind of extraterrestrial spaceship is naive. I think something’s going on that is much more related to our spiritual histories in ways that we don’t understand. We interpret it in this technological way: it’s a spaceship. It can’t be, you know, the world of the dead. God forbid.
Why do you think trauma or grief allows us this kind of information?
The standard neuroscientific or materialist model is that the mind is produced by the brain, full stop. I don’t think that’s correct. I think that the brain and the body translate or mediate mind in really complicated ways. It makes total sense to me that it’s really moments of trauma where the mediation is compromised, and other forms of mind are apparent.
You’re quite down on the word hallucination. Why do you feel that’s a reductive term?
I just think people pull that word out of the air when they want to dismiss these things. One [alternative] explanation is that sometimes we [experience] mind that is somehow cosmic and not local.
Do you think scientific method should be used to investigate these experiences?
I love science! We’re on a laptop, we’re looking at each other across the ocean! But let’s let science be science, and let’s not pretend it’s the only way to know the world.
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How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief and Everything Else by Jeffrey J Kripal is published by the University of Chicago Press (£28). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply