Pinchbeck hosts Jeffrey Kripal, professor of religion at Rice University and author of The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, in an event also featuring Neil Theise. Kripal recounts writing the 2018 book after an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Visions of the Impossible, and explains that he built it around scientists, engineers and physicians because his STEM students dismiss classical religious texts. He then reads a short paper setting out what he calls wagers rather than certainties, chief among them a dual-aspect monism in which consciousness and cosmos are two expressions of one reality that we split into mental and material by becoming socialized subjects. He treats paranormal experience as a temporary collapse of the subject-object structure.
Guest: Jeffrey Kripal
In brief
- Kripal defines the flip as the moment a materially trained scientist, engineer or physician has an anomalous experience and reverses the relation, taking consciousness as primary and matter as derivative.
- He argues that this reversal costs such people nothing scientifically, because the practice of science is not the same thing as the philosophy of materialism.
- Kripal's central wager is a dual-aspect monism: reality is one, and its mental and material aspects appear only because socialized human subjects split it in the act of knowing.
- He says this leads him to be suspicious of personal immortality, since the person is itself a product of that splitting.
- Kripal recounts the case of Elizabeth Krohn, struck by lightning in 1988, whose dead grandfather phoned her, with a witness confirming the phone physically rang while she heard only telepathic content.
- He argues that trickery and truth are entangled, calling the placebo effect the model case of human beings needing to be tricked into their own truth, a point Pinchbeck links to Michael Taussig's work on shamanism.
Full text
Uh very excited today to be here with uh Jeffrey Propal and Neil Tiss uh both thinkers who I really admire and respect. And um yeah, I'm going to turn it over to Jeffrey now. And um let's uh let's let's go for it. I love your shirt, Jeffrey. Oh, thanks. Thanks. I wear I I wear shirts because I'm a boring person. I mean, people can just look at the shirts. Um so, thank you, Daniel. Um, thank you for inviting me um to this event. I I'm here um to speak about a book called The Flip um which in the American edition is subtitled Epiphies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge.
And and that's really what I want to talk about. It came out in 2018. Um I wrote the book because of a of an editor named Erica Goldman. Just to kind of give you some background, I think I think the background of the book is very significant. I wrote an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education called Visions of the Impossible. And it really dealt with what I think most people think of as paranormal phenomena, precognitive dreams and telepathic experiences and near-death experiences, this kind of thing. And I wrote it in what's essentially the New York Times or the higher educational world. And Erica described herself as a um as skeptical of of all of these materials, but she couldn't find anything in the essay she could disagree with.
And so she she pushed me to write this book, which I wrote I wrote for her. It has five chapters and it kind of goes through where I think the philosophy of mind or what lots of people are saying now about consciousness where where it's at at the moment and how how paranormal experiences are really relevant to this this area. Um, and so that's why I wrote the book and I also wrote the book because it's about scientists and engineers and medical professionals. By the way, my my students at Rice University are primarily STEM. They're not they're not studying history or philosophy. They're studying science or technology or engineering or mathematics.
And it took me a while. I've been here since O2. So, I've been here 22 years. It took me a while to realize that if I use a lot of classical religious texts, these young people immediately dismiss them because they say in their head something like, "Well, so and so didn't know their science or their evolutionary biology or their physics." And so they had they say these ridiculous things. And so what I did in the flip is I called on computer scientists and engineers and physicists and I showed that they have the same kinds of experiences. It it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether you live in the 14th century or the 21st or or now the 21st.
I guess you still people still have these sorts of experiences and people still can think with them. And what I mean by the flip is that someone like an engineer or a medical doctor is trained in a materialist physicalist mode of thinking that everything is essentially dead matter that works through mathematical relations and can be measured and quantified and manipulated. And they have some kind of experience. It might be on a psychedelic. It might be a near-death experience. It might be that their sister just telepathically knew instantly when they were in an accident, but something in their lives flips them and they then take this position that consciousness or subjectivity is primary and the material world is actually somehow emanated from that that subjective or or mental or conscious imbued reality.
and they realize that their science and engineering doesn't suffer at all. In fact, it might get better. Um, so they realize that the the science or the engineering is not the same thing as the philosophy of materialism to to kind of put it in a nutshell. They realize that there's different metaphysical interpretations of reality and that they really matter. Um, and and that they depend on one's states of consciousness. And if you've had the virtue or the the unverirtue of entering an altered state, you know that reality is not maybe what the rest of people think it is. And that that's really the basis of the flip.
Um what I want to do today is I want to read you a very short paper. Um, and as I think some of you heard me say earlier, I I learned early on in my career, you know, like 30 years ago to read papers and not to talk like this because I want to put some certain ideas on the table. Um, and so I'm going to just read you these four or five pages and then we can open it up uh and have a conversation with with Daniel and and everyone who's online here. Okay. So let let me let me put these ideas on the table and then we could talk about them.
These are essentially bets or wagers that I learn to call them. In other words, they're hypothesis. I do not have certainties. There is one very general ontological or metaphysical wager about what reality is like and then there are four more specific ones that are more speculative and perhaps for some of you a bit more wild. My most general intellectual wager is that the total reality or gestalt gleaned or intuited from comparative mystical literature, which is my own specialty, strongly suggests that consciousness and the cosmos are two modes or expressions of the same fundamental reality manifesting in us as knowing and experiencing subjects. The world is one with a capital O.
Although it becomes two in our experiences when we split up that reality in our knowing and sensing that is when we become human subjects and are socialized into various reigning worldviews and identities. And so what I'm trying to say here is that reality appears to be have both a mental and a material dimension to it because we are who we are. We're we're the ones splitting up reality and reality that interiority and that that exteriority are the same are the same basic basic reality. We don't do this consciously or intentionally much less do we do this as individuals. We do this by virtue of being born into a specific body, language, family and community and becoming socialized subjects or persons who know physical objects.
That is who split the world up into two basic dimensions of experience. Again, the mental and the material, the cultural and the natural. Maybe this is why I'm so I guess so suspicious of personal immortality. I think the person is is part of this this splitting up. Reality always remains something other or more and it's ground but it also becomes all of the things egos and cultural worlds that we know and believe up here. Reality is one but it is also and really becomes two. In short, I lean strongly to some sort of monistic picture in a dual aspect mode. I have employed this ontology in my published work to understand what I call the impossible as a meaningful collapse of the subject object epistemological structure that is as a temporary revelation of the dual aspect monistic nature of reality.
Let let me explain that I take paranormal experiences very seriously because I think these are moments in a human life where the subject and the object are collapsing. So people are experiencing the environment as reflective of their inner states and their inner states are somehow um affecting or or or emanating the physical reality and I think those are very significant. It is my opinion or my wager that such paradoxical phenomena are anything but philosophical fluff or neurological blips. They're not they're not accidents. They are important signs on the forest floor pointing to a cosmos that is profoundly connected that is one world in which something like precognitive dreams become entirely possible.
This partial or complete collapse of the subject object known partly and darkly and impossible events and more fully and directly and full-blown mystical experiences points to one what I want to call the future of knowledge. So I think this is the future of knowledge that that consciousness and the cosmos are the same thing. If such a future of knowledge strikes you as too friendly to the gorilla of religion in our living room, allow me to remind you that modern science and technology have not somehow eliminated modern people's spiritual sensibilities. Quite the contrary, they have been wildly productive of new spiritual ideas and expressions. Think the near-death or psychedelic literatures or the everinccreasing literature on the philosophy of quantum physics which would not have happened without the advances of biomedical technology, modern chemistry and of course quantum physics itself.
So I think I think modern ways of of being spiritual in fact rely on the sciences and the sciences have not eliminated people's spiritual potentials. Nor would have such modern literatures, the psychedelic and the near-death literature happen without the central role of the scientists themselves. The quantum philosophy literature, for example, was not born in the counterculture in the 1960s or by new age enthusiasts in the 1980s. It was born at the beginning of quantum mechanics in founding figures like Schroinger, Boore and Powley. Each of whom saw the profound philosophical parallels not identities that resonate between these different forms of human experience and expression, the mathematical and the mystical.
So all these all of these uh quantum physicists Schroinger, Bor and Pali turned immediately to mystical and parasychological literature for parallels up here in human experience for the quantum base of reality down here as it were. The religious imagination and its powers then have always been at work behind the secular scenes within a kind of esoteric history of science. a forbidden science as the computer and information scientist Jacqu Valet has named the venture in his published journals. It is time to acknowledge this fuller history of science. Science not as imagined or proclaimed by a few elite dogmatic physicalists but is actually practiced and lived on the ground and in the metaphysical closet.
It is also time for the humanities to adopt much more radical modes of historioggraphy and human being models that are in tune with what we are currently suspecting about the nature of spaceime that it is that it can be bent and curved even turned back on itself that time does not flow in just one direction. Can you imagine what a writing of history that took pre-cognitive phenomena as historical facts might look like? Can you imagine what we might look like? I pretend no pure objectivity here. Indeed, philosophical reasons I have already hinted at. I would deny both the autonomy of a purely objective material realm and consequently the ideal ideal of objectivity as such as an adequate final stance.
I don't actually believe in pure objectivity. Objectivity is a halftruth. So is subjectivity. I speak just below or just above both out of a clear conviction that the future of knowledge will come when we are able to see through both as temporary effects of our own existence. as subjects perceiving an apparently objective world and move out of this splitting into a more fundamental ground that preceded our own existence and will remain long after we as little egos are no more. The face we had before we were born to invoke a Zen riddle. My present thought spins out of this double denial of the subject and the object as it takes up the faceless face of the paradoxical impossible.
Understood now not as some kind of superstitious detrous to leave behind. Much love is much less as the stuff of tabloids and rumor, but as a temporary collapse of the subject object split that we and the physical universe seem to be. Need I add that such a collapse is no small thing. That it is the sign still rejected of the very future of knowledge, which is also to say the future of us. Okay, that's my general bet. That's a that's a big one. Now, let me give you four um smaller wagers, signs on the forest floor again that I intuitit in this literature. First, please stop doing philosophy of mind exclusively around or in only one state of consciousness.
Philosophizing on the uniqueness or what the philosophers call the qualia of mintiness, redness, or ordinary awareness can only get us so far, which is about where we are now. I personally see no good reason why this socialized sense-based state of consciousness should have a monopoly on truth and our true place in the universe. Actually, I see all kinds of good reasons why it should not possess such a monopoly. If comparative mystical literature means anything and and of course I think it does, it means this. Do not believe what you believe. Do not think what you think. Consciousness is not cognition. Consciousness is not culture. Consciousness is not ego.
Such ordinary states of mind hide, camouflage, or distract from a deeper, more fantastic reality. There is another world, a reality that cannot be languaged or cognized in any ordinary way. Okay, so that's kind of the I guess that's the point what I'm trying to say. The history of science suggests the same. Of course, as Eldest Huxley observed many decades ago, one can stare at water for years or centuries and never guess that water is composed of two invisible gases bound to one another by entirely invisible forces. One must expose water to extreme and extraordinary conditions with the proper instruments to establish this fact. Something similar, something similar, Huxley pointed out, is true of human beings and the human spirit.
One can stare at a human being or oneself for years or decades and never imagine that such a being is capable of entirely different states of consciousness until that is such a human being is exposed to extreme or extraordinary condition and splits apart. Okay. Huxley's metaphor is even more relevant today as we spend billions of dollars on the Hadron Collider just a few miles below to inflict the most exquisite, precise, and extreme violence on matter in order to fathom its otherwise completely unknown and unknowable components. This, I want to suggest to you, is more or less what comparative mystical literature gives us. those extreme or traumatic revelations of who and what we really are.
Mystical literature is the hadron collider of human history. Accordingly, we should go there to understand the nature of consciousness as such. Secondly, but we should go there with discernment and appropriate training, which brings me to my second plea, that we work toward a better understanding of the imagination. I continue to think that the imagination is the key to understanding and reading the signs of the impossible. Intellectuals commonly trip over such extreme experiences because they are often coded in baroque or fantastic imagery and entities. Intellectuals reject such experiences because they literalize these visionary codes and cannot see through or beyond them. Let me tell you a quick story here.
I once uh hosted a um a seminar at at the Elon Institute in Big Su California and I asked all the intellectuals to come with two things. I asked them to come with a crazy story, the strangest thing that ever happened to them. And I asked them to come with a theory of the imagination that made that event possible or understandable. They all came with a crazy ass event. Every single one of them had a drop your jaw story. No one came with a theory of the imagination. No one. So I don't I think we just completely lack we we don't have words you know to to to to or categories to understand these things to complicate matters further.
Still sometimes the imagination moves in the opposite direction and functions as a kind of super sense. employs the stuff of dreams and visions. I'm thinking here are pre-cognitive dreams which sometimes tell people what's going to happen 24 hours out or three years out or 30 years out and they often speak in very precise benol details that you know are just mind-blowing. And so here the imagination is somehow sensing historical physical spaceime in a very literal way. Third, I believe the textual and historical evidence for some kind of divinatory capacity of the human mind, in other words, telling the future, is overwhelming for anyone who chooses to spend the years necessary to examine the evidence.
The same evidence, moreover, suggests some kind of block cosmology of space-time unity. In other words, in which the past, present, and future have already happened and are just laid out. And precognition is somehow perceiving something that down down the space-time continuum. Some kind of universe in which the future already exists and can flow backwards in time to signal itself to a human being often again in highly symbolic or indirect ways. I recognize that I've given a number of examples of this block time phenomena in in the in the flip, but the anthropologist Eric Wargo has given us access to hundreds of examples in his three books on what he so elegantly calls the tesseract of the human brain and its creative time loops.
So for Eric, you and I right now are just slices of spaceime. our our our bodies and our brains are actually four-dimensional uh organic entities spread out from the time of your conception to the time of your death. And you can perceive things in the future, not because you're traveling to the future, but because your physical brain in the future is the same physical brain that you have right now and it's communicating with itself. Fourthly, and most speculatively, I would like to suggest that if we are really serious about locating the precise locus in the human body where consciousness is initially received, translated by the imagination and eventually transformed into a person that is that point on the cell phone or the smartphone where the internet becomes the the the personal screen. We should not just be looking in the brain.
We should also be looking at the heart region. I say this because this is what the comparative mystical literature suggests. Not very clearly and certainly not universally but strongly enough to look into the possibility. I really do understand how all four suggestions are speculative if not actually eccentric ones. These are hypotheses. These are not certainties. I understand that these are broken twigs on the forest floor may lead not to our proteinrich elk herd but into a barren valley or over a cliff. I could be wrong, very wrong about any one or all four points. I still think they're worth making. We need to think big and bold.
We need to think otherwise now we need to flip. Okay, thank you very much. So Daniel, that's that's the paper. Um, it's short. Yeah, thank you. Um, yeah, I had a bunch of qu questions and comments and so on. Um, first of all, I thought it'd be kind of fun just to back up a little bit and get a little sense of your kind of um, yeah, your personal journey around all these topics. I mean, how did you initially get interested or even obsessed in these areas? Like, was it some, you know, experience you had or was it just reading? I know you were interested like superhum superhero comics and so on.
Like how did you get interested in these sort of you know range of extraordinary experiences and and mystical possibilities? I mean the short answer to that question Daniel is people uh human beings got me into this. I I wrote a history of the American counterculture in California in 2007 called Eselin, America and the religion of no religion for which I got to know hundreds of human beings who told me stories I knew couldn't have possibly happened. Um but I knew that they happened and I also recognized in these stories the linaments or the the outlines of the history of religions which I was trained in. But I knew that academics would commonly read these as exaggerations or as frauds or hallucinations or something like that.
And I came to realize none of that was actually plausible. um those were fake or faux explanations. Those are rhetorical tricks. And so I got really interested in how my own field dismisses um these experiences. And so that started in about 05 maybe. Um and my own flip was very gradual, but it occurred through listening to these stories and realizing that these things really happened to these people. Uh I myself uh I describe myself as spiritually dull. I I'm I'm not a very um I haven't had a lot of these experiences, but I don't I don't need to have them because other people do. Um so I and I also think these experiences, Daniel, are related to trauma uh and to pain and suffering and and death and illness uh often enough.
And that's not something I seek out. Um, I'm h I'm happy being the the relatively happy guy with the cool shirts. Would you say they're related to trauma? I mean, you're saying that when people people who are more prone to have kind of extraordinary experiences are often people who experience like childhood trauma or have like some kind of dissociative capacity or something. I So, I think I think we're put together to block all of this out. I I I think a a healthy social ego is someone who, you know, has a body and a brain, essentially a space suit to block outer space out of of mind.
And I think what happens in a in a traumatic event is that something happens to the space suit. It's compromised in some way and some of the outer space gets inside. And again, that might be that might be a car accident. That might be a psychedelic trip. That might be uh extended meditation. That might be a lot of things. But you have to do somehow you have to suppress or compromise the cognitive sensory uh ordinariness of of of of our lives. And that's what I mean by trauma. I don't mean that the mystical states can be reduced to trauma, but I mean that trauma somehow opens the person up to these other states.
You think that's just the case for our society? a lot of a lot of societies around the world were were very focused on kind of extraordinary you know sort of psychic capacities and kind of these sort of um uh kind of accessing you know these states even like Indibetan culture or the Egypt or the indigenous cultures where kind of um yeah kind of these realms were kind of more woven into the daily life you know yeah I mean human beings have created culture and civilization around these states I I I I accept that I get that. I like that. I But I also think I mean that you're you're asking me a general question now. I think our ancestors suffered more, Daniel.
I think we have ways of suppressing pain and suppressing these states, you know, medical medical ways, um med medication ways that our ancestors did not have. And I think they suffered more and and generally lived a lot shorter lives and were probably much more open to these things than we are. I think that the modern self, to use the language of a philosopher, is the buffered self. I think we're much more buffered than than other cultures. Um, cool. Let's talk a little bit about the imagination. I was kind of curious. Um yeah like um here will you expand your thoughts on that a little bit and have you found some kind of thinkers who help us to kind of like uh do what you're talking about you know kind of like extend the uh the realm of the imaginal or imaginary understand it differently.
I was thinking of like Henry Corbin, I posted one of his pieces in there or um even Rudolfph Steiner uh talked about higher forms of cognition like intuition, inspiration, imagination as kind of organs that we could uh develop, you know, through through through focused uh meditations and so on. I I think I think it all comes down to how you think of the imagination and and also the brain. And I and I think in a kind of modern neuroscientific way, we think of the brain. And so we think of the imagination as as a as the produce producer of mind or consciousness. And so we think of the imagination as a producer of fantasy or or things that are not real.
And I think if you shift that and you look at the brain as a filter or as a mediator of something, you can then look at the imagination as a form of mediation. and and it becomes a very different thing. Um I think what's so confusing about the imagination is that sometimes it mediates physical events. You know, physical things happen. Um Corban, you mentioned Corban. I mean, he's in my that's my realm. I mean, he's he's a historian of religions. He he studied uh Iranian uh mystical authors and he most people think he coined this word imaginal. He actually didn't. But um by the imaginal he meant some kind of middle world that is not physical but is also not entirely mystical.
It's it it sits in the middle and he wanted to get away from the imaginary. The experiencers I work with, they don't like the the word imaginal. Daniel, they think it's too wishy-washy. Um, what happened to them is is very physical and and and very material, but also very impactful or spiritual as well. And they feel like the imaginal is too much. It places things more in a in a in a in a middle realm. And they they want things to be, I guess, in this realm in a in a certain way. So, I don't know. Corban. I mean, I write about Corban a lot in the new book.
He also sits s he was a hero of both sides of the Islamic Revolution, by the way, in Iran. The the conservative Muslims loved him and the the liberal um or progressive people who were thrown out also loved his work. So, I think and he tried to be very apolitical, but but I think he got kind of got caught in that that that mess. So yeah, I mean how would you see that like what would be our path towards kind of you know kind of investing in the space of the imagination? I mean Terrence Mc Kenna talked about the imagination not as like making up stuff more like a lens in which we can look deeper and more shallow layers of like the you know the psycho cosmos or something like that.
I I don't know. I I think it does tend towards some kind of idealism. I mean I'm always getting pushed towards idealism that where the imagination is the the mediator of not just the mental world but also the material world and I think Mc Kenna is Mc Kenna leans in that way as well. alterance things in that way in terms of you know we're kind of c caught in a work of art that we ourselves have have created and and that's how I really look at a lot of these experiences where we are the ultimate authors of these experiences but we're also caught in that which we create we're characters in a movie that we ourselves are producing so I the imagination is is is c I'm trying I'm not trying to be opaque take Daniel. I don't think we have a language for it because I think we're in it.
Yeah. It's it's hard it's hard to talk about a movie that you're inside that you're a character in. Yeah. Uh I also noted you said there's an other world, a reality that cannot be languaged or cognized in any ordinary way. Um yeah, I wanted to maybe delve into that a little bit more. Um I once again I'm a big Steinarian. Rudolph Steiner had this whole thing around how like um you know it would be kind of like um silly for us to convince ourselves that we couldn't in some way or other uh you know conceptualize reality to its ultimate level. um like we seem like we were you know we have the the capacity to um yeah you know expand our conceptual containers to you know be flexible to go deeper so like um yeah I'm just when when somebody says there's other reality that cannot be language or cogniz ordinary way well I guess you're saying ordinary way that doesn't mean any way at all can be cognized for you through art or uh uh some other types of practices or what does that mean exactly?
Well, first of all, I don't I know, of course, who Rudolph Steiner was. I'm not I'm not a Steinerian. Yeah. My sense is is that it's our senses are the problem. Um, and this is where, you know, I want to be careful what I say here. Um, science is is entirely dependent on the senses and a kind of cognitive reasoning. But what if reality is not sense-based? What if our senses evolved to help us mate and kill things and eat things and reproduce? What if our senses are just part of our evolved sensorium and they're not they don't give us access to the real? And when I look at comparative mystical literature, which is my real area, I see this over and over again.
I mean the the access to the divine or to absolute reality has nothing to do with the senses and anything you can say about it is wrong because you're saying it through this dualistic kind of sensorial mode that is not part of of this experience. So I would say this, Daniel. I would say human beings can experience and know reality as such, but when they speak about that experience, they're going to sound paradoxical or or poetic or or you know, outrageous. Um because they're speaking in ways to try to get us the speaking with language to try to get us out of langu language is the problem. Language is a social phenomenon that we use to communicate with each other.
But that doesn't mean that it's adequate to to understanding reality. If you know if I can here I can I quote a neuroscientist friend of mine Don Hoffman. Um fitness beats truth. In other words, we have evolved to be evolutionary fit, not to know reality as such. Yeah. No, totally. Totally. Um, but that doesn't mean we that doesn't mean certain people don't know reality as such. It just means they can't once they speak about it, they're going to speak in a particular cultural code and they're going to debase it. Yeah. Well, that's kind of the history of religions, right? People Yeah, it is the history of religions.
That's kind of why we're stuck in a way because all these people end up believing in an old book and um they're like their their minds the gears of their psyche kind of like stop, you know, or something. Um okay, let's talk about the the time stuff you're talking about here. I don't know anthropologist Eric Wargo or the block the sort of the block time phenomenon. Um yeah, can you can you can you open that up a little bit? Like um yeah, I I mean Okay, so it goes back to people again. I when I talk to people and I've and I by people I mean now I mean hundreds if not thousands of human beings who have written me with their experiences and one of the phenomena that impresses me the most actually is pre-cognition and the reason it impresses me is I think there's the most empirical evidence for it.
think when you talk to people and and read the literature on it, it's sort of it's overwhelming certainly to me and it's not something I ever thought about Dan. It's not I I I wasn't particularly attuned to it and I don't know how to make sense of precognition if you want to hold on to this idea that the future hasn't happened yet. I just don't know how you do that. Yeah. Um, I you know I I know we assume that we're sort of on this cosmic we're on the leading edge of this cosmic wave of all space and time, right? I mean that's what we assume and that the past is the past and that the future hasn't happened yet.
But why why do we think that? And and a lot of physics and a lot of cosmology is a kind of block cosmology in which the p past, present and future have already happened. So I that doesn't mean it's right. That doesn't that doesn't prove it in some in some simplistic sense, but it suggests to me that that's what the world needs to look like for these sorts of things to happen. I guess that's really what I'm after. I want to privilege the human beings who have these experiences, not the worldviews that they come out of which say these things are impossible. Yeah. Yeah. Because for me what is impossible is just a function of your the categories of your worldview.
Okay. So it's impos who cares? I don't care you know and but these things still happen. So clearly they're not impossible. They happen all the time. They just don't fit into your assumptions about how the world works or what a human being is. And I um I want to privilege the experiencers and I want to privilege these pre-cognitive moments. And to me, the world then follows from that. The universe has to look a certain way for those things to be possible. Yeah. Yeah, I mean I had my own direct experience of all this stuff which I wrote about in my book 2012 where I had this uh experience of you know Ketzel Quaddle speaking in my head for a week and then explaining how like my date of birth and my name were kind of woven into this whole thing and that it was always you know sort of the implication mean that it was always going to be the case that um I had that particular experience and actually that really messed me up for years because it was like um you know to have to have this sort of direct realization that maybe everything is um just a scroll that's unfurling which is basically how like the hopey talk about it or something.
It's a very it's a very difficult thing for somebody coming from our kind of you know hyper individual kind of like freedom consciousness kind of perspective you know. So let let me speak to that not you're being messed up Daniel let let me let me speak to the free will thing. This is this is the thing that always comes up when I talk about the block universe and precognition. They're like, "What about free will? What about, you know, and first of all, what they mean is something very recent and very modern and very western." They they're referring to this sort of individualized sense of agency that that is really quite unique historically and culturally.
But I also think they're being contradictory. Um, when we look to the past, for example, we see all these events laid out and nobody says, nobody says, "I didn't have free will then." Even though they're all determined, they're all laid out. But for some reason, when we turn to the future and we see the exact same thing, by the way, then someone says, "Oh, I didn't have any free will. I didn't choose." I'm like, "Why? Why? Why do you say that? That that is that doesn't make any sense at all to me. Uh, and it still makes no sense, Daniel. I don't understand why we look to the past and it's all laid out, we say we have free will, and we look to the future and it's all laid out, we say we don't have free will.
I just don't get it. I think the free will is relative to to the position in space and time that we're at. In other words, I think, you know, as a human being, we we make these choices, but in a block universe, those choices are already all made and all laid out. Yeah. Somebody told me a story about going to this sort of conference of indigenous leaders maybe in like South America and one of the tribal leaders was like or you know community leaders was like what do you guys mean to the westerners when you talk about freedom like we don't even have that idea in our in our language like can you explain it to me we have no idea what you're talking about right to me that's really that's really honest that's really and that's really powerful um so okay so you talked about the importance of this clip for the future of humanity and the future.
Uh yeah, just maybe maybe go in a little bit more just extemporaneously about that like you know from where we are now we feel like um well I mean you know I'm always also very concerned around the you know ecological and geopolitical kind of you know met mega crisis that we seem to be in meta crisis catastrophe. I mean uh sometimes I I have this like you know at least kind of idealistic sense that maybe there's something in this new worldview which which is like almost like um has a transformational power for humanity and uh you know flips us out of the sort of materialist kind of a death spiral somehow. Maybe we gain some new capacities if we could understand that the the psyche has this like legitimacy and the the par normal and the psychic realms are just extensions of our normal consciousness and the imagination is a truly like creative force. Uh but yeah, I'm curious from your perspective how how you see all of that like you know what what what what's your your your your kind of like you know s sense of the of the meaning of this shift in a way. So, the last chapter of the flip is on the politics of the flip.
It's on your question that you just asked. I um I think it depends on us um to to be I guess to be honest about it. I don't think flipping automatically leads to a progressive ecological worldview. I I think it can actually lead to the opposite. Um, but I think it tends that way and I think if human beings talked more about these experiences and talked more about um these flips, I think we would um as a as a as a collection of human cultures and nation states, I think we would learn to transcend our differences because I think our differences are probably minor or superficial in the grand picture of things.
to take to take the paranormal the the paranormal experiences really what they show is that the self is embedded in the in the greater whole. And so what happens to the greater whole actually happens to the self as well. And and in the present world, you know, to use a a metaphor from my Midwestern upbringing, we're in our living room. and we can't do that for very long because we won't be able to stay in our living room. Um, so but but these these these these paranormal experiences, this this sense that we're connected to one another. You know, telepathy is a basically a what I call a sociology the impossible.
It's it's it's kind of a connection between human beings that's deeper than just this social interaction on a on a laptop or a computer screen. Um, if we can take those experiences seriously, we can kind of tend towards this deeper worldview that I think will will transcend these differences. But I think we have to do that, Daniel. I'm not I'm not um I'm not always optimistic about that. Um because I think there's a kind of back influence or back channel where people are backing up into their individualities and into their communities and into their cultures and religions and nation states and seeing the other as as a kind of enemy.
Um when that clearly isn't the case. Um so I don't know that's not that's not a clear answer to your question but I but I think it's I think it's an accurate one that it depends on what we do with it which is already scripted. We just don't know yet. Well, yeah. I mean, in the in this worldview I'm setting out, it it is scripted, but again, that doesn't mean we don't have choices. I get it. I get it. I get it. Yeah. Um, yeah. Uh, yeah. Such fascinating uh and complex uh subject matter to to wrestle with. Uh, and most people don't even have like the, you know, the wherewithal to think through these things.
Yeah. And I don't I I hope it's clear, Daniel. I don't have certainties here. I I have serious suspicions about some things, but based on a lifetime of listening to people and reading reading texts and thinking about, in my case, religions. Um, so I I have suspicions and I have intuitions, but I don't have certainties. And as I tried to say in the paper, I could be very very wrong. But I I I have a lot of faith in the conversation. I had a I have a lot of faith in other people who will you know come to their own conclusions and the conversation will go in a particular way.
I have faith in the future I guess at the end of the day and is that faith well this would be the case for my for my situation. I guess if you do understand that you know consciousness is this underlying reality and we're aspects of that consciousness and we're somehow scripting the whole thing then obviously we would want to create like a great amazing story. Uh we would not want it to be like a crap, you know, oh, it all breaks down and everybody's like eating insects and then dying of starvation. Uh it wouldn't be a very nice story. You know what what strikes me? So if you stream, you know, off off your television like I do, pretty much every science fiction movie about the future is it sucks.
Yeah. It's really bad. It's really really bad. And I'm like, why do we keep telling that story? I mean, why why can't we have a utopian or a good future? Why why is it always bad? So, again, I think it comes back to us and I understand why people tell bad future stories. Maybe that's more entertaining. May maybe you need the drama, but I think it impacts us as well in in some pretty negative ways. And the religions, by the way, I mean, this is where I keep coming back to the religions. they actually have some disturbing uh future stories but also some hopeful aspects as well.
And um so I'm not again proposing a particular religious worldview but I think they're really interesting to look at in terms of how human beings have have perceived the future. Do you want to give us a particular example from from from that? Well, you know, the sense of some kind of messianic consciousness in some forms of Judaism to me is really interesting. Um, but it's a bit disturbing that the Messiah has to be from a particular religion or or if if you're Christian that, you know, Jesus is coming back again, but it's Jesus for God's sake. It's not it's not some somebody else. Um, the Buddhists have a similar kind of thing.
The Hindus have a similar kind of thing. there's there's always some there's some some being on a on a white horse or at the end of all time coming back to to justify the truth of whatever religion it is. So to me that's disturbing. Um but when you look at those things comparatively you can sort of defang the the disturbing aspects and you can you can access the more more positive aspects. I think yeah Islam has a similar figure who comes at the end of time. Yeah. I'm like, and all these religions, trust me, I can this I know for certain, they all started out as persecuted minorities and, you know, they started out as these little bitty things and then they got big and then they started to beat up on other people and now they're somehow, you know, true for everyone.
I mean, no, they're not. They're just not. Uh, have you ever looked at Fred Shuan? Like, he wrote a book called The Transcendent Unity of Religions. That was actually the thing that really helped me understand uh how they're all kind of meshed together in some sense. Um is that a question? Oh yeah. I'm curious if if you know the book. I know the book. I know Shuan. I mean that's what we call perennialism. Yeah. Exactly. Um yeah. What do you think of? So if you believe though that in in I mean do you have a well not believe but do you have a sense that um you know miraculous events have occurred and do occur uh things that violate like sort of the ordinary spaceime?
Well again the word miraculous presumes some kind of theism. Yeah. some kind of uh deity that exists outside of space and time who's inter intervening in space and time to create this event that violates natural law. when you know when the the paranormal was coined in 1903 by a French scientist by the way it did not mean the supernatural you know the supernatural as a category was created in the 13th century by the way to refer to what you're calling the miraculous and the paranormal was coined in 1903 to get away from that and to essentially say that these events don't fit in by the way to our contemporary science but they're still part of the natural world. They don't rely on an external God who who oversees the the universe.
So I don't know I don't know which of those things is true, but I know that our words we use presume these histories. So the word miraculous, the word supernatural presumes this Christian theological history in a way that I think ties our hands and and words like the paranormal, you know, has essentially become conflated with the the category of the supernatural. And I I think that's just a mistake. Uh it's why I use the phrase the impossible, by the way, because it's it gets away from that history uh and and reintroduces this idea that things that happen that can't be explained are really a function of your explanatory terms. They're not a function of what's actually happening.
Um, so it helps it helps me to do to do this work. Um, so yes, to answer your question, yes, I think miraculous things happen all the time, but I don't think they're miraculous. I just I think they're they're the they're the world the natural world behaving in a way that violates our categories but doesn't violate reality as it were. Um I mean then when we extend that back to let's say the original Christian miracle of like um virgin birth and uh resurrection. Yeah. What what what do you think about all that? Do you think that that was possibly something that actually happened or was that a story that uh was woven out of who knows what?
You're putting me on trial here, Daniel. I'm just curious. There's no trial. I So I don't I think the virgin birth I I think the virgin birth was a spin on what was essentially an illegitimate birth. I I think um this rabbi called Yeshua or Jesus was was probably an illegitimate child and and the virgin birth was a spin on that. Um I think the resurrection was a set of altered states or experiences around the death of this this spiritual teacher. Um that probably really happened in some sense but not probably in the way that the traditions remember it or or claim it. You know, widows today have encounter physical encounters with husbands who have died to this very day.
They have those experiences. So why that wouldn't happen in first century Palestine is just beyond me. I I don't why would we say it didn't happen then if it happens in 20 21st century Brooklyn? Why? Why would we say that? So, did you mention Oh, no. Another phenomenon where people get phone calls from the dead. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They do. This happens. Um, I I wrote a book with a woman named Elizabeth Cone, a Jewish woman who had was struck by lightning in 1988. And her her her dead grandfather called her on the phone, by the way. And um, I said, "Elizabeth, um, if I were in that room and I were to pick up the phone, what would I have heard?" And she said, "Nothing.
Just a buzzing, you know." And I said, "Well, okay. So, you were being you were hearing this through the phone somehow telepathically or mind of mine." And she says, "Yes." So, but the phone still rang, Daniel. And there was and and I talked to her husband, Barry. I talked to him. I'm like, "Barry, tell me about the phone." You and he, of course, he heard the phone ring and he saw Elizabeth pick it up and the whole thing. So, there is this physical event, but there's also this this spiritual or paranormal thing going on, and they're they're together. That's what I'm trying that that makes no sense, by the way.
That's that that's impossible, but but but again, it happened. And and that's what I'm trying to get at. Interesting. Reminds me of Mick the anthropologist. You shamanism was the wild man. And his whole thing was that actually shamanism and trickery could not actually be fully separated. No. Yeah. It's what I it's what I call the trick of the truth. And the the example I always raise is the placebo. Yeah. Just a total fraud. It's a total lie. And it works about 25% of the time. And so like why? What is it about human beings that need to be tricked into their into their truth? some somehow we do.
Yeah, there's obviously some deep structural thing there. Kevin, let's let's stop there for now. Let's turn it over to Neil and then we can come back to some of these topics after.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.