Authors of the Impossible

Part 0. Introduction : Off the Page

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Cap.

PP.

0.1

Definitions & Broken Lineages

7 to 17

0.2

Restoring a Lineage

17 to 23

0.3

The Paranormal as Meaning

23 to 26

0.4

The Paranormal as Story

26 to 35

Parts 1-5

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Part

PP.

1

The Book as Se'ance

36 to 91

2

Scattering the Seeds of a Super-story

92 to 141

3

The Future Technology of Folklore

142 to 197

4

Returning the Sciences to Consciousness

198 to 250

5

Conclusion : Back on the Page

251 to 271

6

Impossible (Dis)closings

273 to 282

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0.1

Definitions & Broken Lineages

7 to 17

pp. 8-9 /psychical/; /psi/; /parapsychology/; /paranormal/

p. 8

"the London Society for Psychical Research ... was founded in the winter of 1882 ... at Cambridge University. An American branch was founded three years later, in 1885".


"the terminology of psi was introducted by British psychologist Robert Thouless in 1942 ... . ... J. B. Rhine ... adopted parapsychology as the preferred term for the field. Rhine operationalized psychical research at Duke in the late 1930s, '40s, '50s, and '60s".

p. 9

"I am defining the paranormal as the sacred in transit ... into a parascientific or "scientific mysticism" register."

pp. 10-2 historians in classical antiquity; philosophers in Sweden & Germany & the U.S.A.

p. 10

"the pages of nearly all ancient historians, from Herodotus to Ammianus Marcellinus, are full of omens, oracles, or precognitive dreams or visions."

p. 11

"In his Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Immanuel Kant grappled ...with Emanuel Swedenborg's ... noumenal powers".


"Hegel wrote appreciatively on animal magnetism, extrasensory perception, and a kind of World Soul, all key components of this ... cosmic Mind or absolute Spirit (Geist)".


"Schopenhauer engaged reports of the incredible powers of intention and mind-over-matter to fashion his own philosophy of Will. Throughout his The World as Will and Representation (1818), the philosopher invokes Hindu, Buddhist, and Christian mystical sources in order to explain how all things are ... in the occult force of a cosmic Will out of which all things ineluctably arise and into which they ineluctably disappear. Later, in The Will in Nature (1836), he turned to ... magic to find further support for his metaphysical doctrines. ... Accordingly, the common transcendence ... one encounters in clairvoyance and precognition ( the latter [of] which

p. 12

Schopenhauer himself experienced) ... witness to the world as it really is. What is in fact illusory are our common everyday perceptions".


"Such philosophical streams have recently been revived and renewed by the the analytic philosopher Stephen E. Baude". (IR; E&P; FPP)

IR = Stephen E. Baude : Immortal Remains : the evidence for life after death. Lanham (MD) : Rowman & Littlefield, 2003.

E&P = Stephen E. Baude : ESP and Psychokinesis : a philosophical examination. Philadelphia : Temple U Pr, 1979.

FPP = Stephen E. Baude : First Person Plural : multiple personality and the philosophy of mind. Lanham (MD) : Rowman & Littlefield, 1995.

pp. 12-3 anthropologists in Scotland & in Italy

p. 12

"In The Making of Religion (1899), Andrew Lang put early anthropology into dialogue with ... psychical research to plumb ... various phenomena within the history of religions (magical influence, [spirit-]possession, and divinatory practices ...) ... . He also studied scrying (crystal gazing) among Scottish female seers and was especially fond of collecting ghost stories from around the world. It was this kind of field research and comparative collecting that led him finally to conclude that ... "Man may have faculties which savages recognize, and which physical science does not recognize. Man may be surrounded by agencies ... which science disregards altogether ... ." ... In essence, Lang was advancing a theory of

p. 13

the origins of religion in which those origins were grounded in empirical psychical phenomena ... .


The idea of soul, for example, he reasoned, did not come about through ... interpretations of dreams (which is what his mentor, Edward Tylor, had famously argued),

{What one witnesseth in dreams are not usually the souls of other mortals, but rather primarily (as testified by Amerindian shamans) deities. So, it is the idea of deity (rather than of soul) that is derived largely from dreaming.}


but from real-world {read : "waking-world"} veridical {though many dreams are likewise just as "veridical"} experiences ... of "telepathy." Of the latter phenomenon, he confessed in his 1911 presidential address to the same society [the Soc.Ps.R.], "I am wholly convinced."" (IT, pp. 160-7)


"A half century later, the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino went so far as to ... suggest "the paradox of a culturally conditioned nature ... ." ...

{This is possible simply because the deities politely cater to whatever praedilections their worshippers may have, re-arranging "the material world" howsoever those worshippers may praefer, following whatsoever whims those worshippers may temporarily be immersed into.}


Magic, the mind's ability to affect the material world through acts of attention and intention, he went on to suggest, really and truly plays "a role in history."" (WM, p. 63)

{That mind which hath the "ability to affect the material world through acts of attention and intention" is not the mind of puny mortals, but is rather the [omniscient collective] mind of [vast categories of universal] immortal deities.}

IT = Roger Luckhurst : The Invention of Telepathy. Oxord U Pr, 2002.

WM = Ernesto de Martino : The World of Magic. NY : Pyramid Communications, 1972.

p. 14 a telekinetic physicist

"quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli ... was well known among his physicist colleagues for a rather unique mind-to-matter effect. In the words of George Gamow, the "Pauli Effect" [produced] the strange fact that an "apparatus would fall, break, shatter or burn when he merely walked into a laboratory."" (CU, p. 131)

CU = Dean Radin : The Conscious Universe : scientific evidence for Psi phenomena. HarperSanFrancisco, 1997.

p. 14 telepathy in psycho-analysis

"Freud's close colleague Wilhelm Stekel published an entire book on telepathic dreams in 1921. ... Freud ... wrote six essays in all on the subject of telepathy or "thought transference" (Gedankenu:bertragung), which he considered to be the "rational core" of occultism. ...

For his part, Freud ... counseled Sandor Ferenczi not to relate his telepathic researches to the Hamburg Congress of 1925 with these telling words : "By it you would be throwing a bomb into the psychoanalytic house which would be certain to explode."" (L&WSF 3:394)

{By the explosion of this metaphorical "bomb", Freud meant that the ruling-class would not only withdraw its support from, but also act to suppress, psycho-analysis; for the ruling-class could readily perceive that telepathy could publicly expose the dastardly crimes against humanity being routinely secretly plotted and perpetrated by that ruling-class.}

L&WSF = Ernest Jones : The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. New York : Basic Bks, 1957.

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0.2

Restoring a Lineage

17 to 23

p. 18 Mircea Eliade's faith in levitation & in "contagious magic"

"Eliade thus explores the critical literature on such things as levitation in Catholic hagiography and Indian yoga and

{It is, of course, the actions of deities (angels) invisibly praesent that actually perform the levitations of saints which are witnessed in such cases.}

the "fluid" link said to exist between an object and its previous owner assumed in various magical rites and psychical practices (hence "contagious magic," the magical use of relics, and "psychometry" or the psychical perception of persons via their possessions)."

{The relics or other praeviously-owned objects are employed to convey to the assisting divinity praesent (who may not be able to understand nor translate instructions composed in any human language) the identity of just what person is being alluded to. Then that assisting divinity will convey to the human "psychic" the appropriate "psychical perception", or will produce the desired "magical" effect.}

{Magicians, relic-conjurers, and even writers on this topic may assiduously evade mentioning that divinities/angels are involved, lest any stooges of the ruling-class report this fact, and the ruling-class become alarmed at the implication that, with divinities involved, those divinities might readily be incited to eliminate that ruling-class. (In case such a report were filed with the ruling-class, a prae-emptive action by that ruling could occur against such a potentiality, a repressive action in the form of suppressing such magical practices and perhaps of exiling or even massacring the magicians.)}

p. 18 camouflaging occult secrets by praesenting them only in purportedly-fictional novels

""as a student, I went to study Yoga and Tantra with S. N. Dasgupta at CalcuttaUniversity," he tells us in an essay on "The Occult and the Modern World." (OW&OF, p. 55) As he once explained in another context, these dissertation researches and early experiments with yoga taught him ... to ... "camouflage" them in his literary writings, and particularly in the novella The Secret of Doctor Honigberger ... . Eliade explains ... :

[quoted from OL, p. 49 :] In describing Zerlendi's Yoga exercises in The Secret of Doctor Honigberger, I included certain pieces of information, drawn from my own experiences, that I omitted from my books on Yoga. ... [The reader] would then be led to conclude that all ... is invented -- imaginary -- ... which isn't the case."

OW&OF = Mircea Eliade : Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions. U of Chicago Pr, 1976.

OL = Mircea Eliade : Ordeal by Labyrinth. U of Chicago Pr, 1982.

p. 20 intellectual lineage from Mircea Eliade

"I was trained in the 1989s and early '90s under his successor, Wendy Doniger, herself more than adept at negotiating mind-boggling metaphysical terrain." [p. 292, n. 0:41 : "See especially Wendy Doniger, O'Flaherty, Dreams, Illusions and Other Realities (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1984)."]

"Eliade's fellow Romanian and Chicago colleague Ioan ... Couliano's lifelong interest in magical and gnostic matters was reflected in a rich personal occult life." [p. 292, n. 0:42 : "Ted Anton, Eros, Magic, and ... Professor Culianu (Evanston : Northwestern University Press, 1996)."]

"Such ... is particularly apparent in Couliano's study of gnosticism, that strange ... book, The Tree of Gnosis." [p. 292, n. 0:47 : "other than Couliano, the only other ... is Elliot R. Wolfson ... Language, Eros, Being : ... Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York : Fordham University Press, 2005)".]

Ioan P. Couliano : The Tree of Gnosis. HarperSanFrancisco, 1992.

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0.3

The Paranormal as Meaning

23 to 26

p. 23 phainomena which originate in the "unseen realm" [<arabic /Gayb/]

"Wolfgang is in town and the laboratory instruments fizzle and fry :

Such events are thus not just casually, occasionally, or anecdotally anomalous. They are structurally and cognitively anomalous.

the physical location of Elizabeth's harp is pegged by a mind over a thousand miles away;

my analyst colleague feels a sharp stabbing physical pain in relationship to an emotional story she has not yet heard ... .

[John E. Mack, as quoted in "UUR&AS", pp. 35-6 :] What we seem to have no place for -- or we have lost the place for -- are phenomena that begin in the unseen realm, and cross over and manifest and show up in our literal physical world."

{Of course, only an arrantly dogmatic atheist would deny that events can commence in the divine world. Mack's "we" are the fanatically atheistical.}

"UUR&AS" = Christopher Partridge : "Understanding UFO Religions and Abduction Spiritualities". In :- Partridge (ed.) : UFO Religions. London : Routledge, 2003.

p. 25 how to make the impossible possible

"I am not asking us to know more.

I am asking us to imagine more."

{"Imagination is more important than knowledge." (Einstein)}

"authors who write about ... telepathy, teleportation, precognition, and UFOs ... make these things possible through their writing practices. ... They thus both author and author-ize it. In truth, they are authors of the (im)possible. ...

This is why "automatic writing" played such an important role in the history of psychical phenomena and why we still speak of "psychical readings.""

{Particularly, it would help to expound how the god of writing (Nabu/DH.WTY/Hermes) could become so significant in Rosicrucian/Theosophic contexts.}

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0.4

The Paranormal as Story

26 to 35

p. 28 fusion of the rational and the mystical

"It is precisely this doubleness, at once rational and mystical, logical and mythical, that defines the occult for Owen. In her own words [PE, p. 53] : "it is the crucial alignment of rational consciousness with

the apparently irrational

{Any branch of erudition which is extremely difficult to understand is liable to be mislabeled "irrational" by ignorami who fail to compraehend it.}

world of the myth-creating unconscious

{Neither are the deities who reveal the myths to the sage-seers "unconscious", nor are the sage-seers so when they receive that revelation. It is the materialists who act as irrationally as if they were actually unconscious all the time.}

that produces the powerful experience of the occult 'real.'"

PE = Alexa Owen : The Place of Enchantment : British occultism and the culture of the modern. U of Chicago Pr, 2004.

p. 30 the repressiveness of Aristotelianism

"The provocative work of Owen ... can be fruitfully read alongside Victoria Nelson's The Secret Life of Puppets, a beautiful study of the Neoplatonic, gnostic, or Hermetic "soul" of Western culture as temporarily repressed and demonized. Here Nelson gives us a brilliant study of the modern demonization of the soul as puppet, robot, or cyborg and the bracketing (really repressing) of the deeper questions of human culture within contemporary intellectual culture. ... For Nelson, this demonization and subsequent alienation is born of an exaggerated and unbalanced scientism, a one-sided Aristotelianism".

p. 31 an impending redinstatement of the Renaissance

"Such a Platonic ... mystical revival ... is fundamentally ... Hermetic for Nelson, which is to say that it is very much about a cosmic form of consciousness that ... transcends and overflows the world. The Hermetic ... soul, then, is someone who seeks a liberation from the limitations of an illusory {/maya/, viz. material} world".

pp. 31-2 instance of a science-fiction writer's becoming shamanically transmuted

p. 31

"consider the iconic figure of Philip K. Dick, the American sci-fi writer ...

p. 32

"resynthesized" by a pink laser beam emanating from a vast supercosmic consciousness he called VALIS, for "Vast Active Living Intelligence System."

"Dick, in Victoria Nelson's words [SLP, p. 174] now, "had the overpowering sensation of being 'resynthesized' by an entity he called 'the Programmer.'"


He also called this entity Zebra,

{The Zebra Stallion, when the women were being hindred from fetching water, protected them from the Baboons; just as Mos^eh, when the women were being hindred from fetching water, protected them from the Shepherds (S^mo^t 2:16-7).}


for its ability to hide in the world ... .

{The zebra is so camouflaged as to be able to hide itself in a canebreak. A canebreak of vertical cane-stalks is slightly similar in appearence to a marsh of vertical bulrushes; and Mos^eh was hidden by his mother amid the bulrushes. Furthermore, the cane is yet more similar to a rod; and the rod of Mos^eh was acquired by him at the advice of one of women whom he protected while they were fetching the water (LB, p. 305).}


Here is how Dick himself described it :


[quoted from ShRPhKD, p. 251 :] At the moment in which I was resynthesized,


I was aware perceptually ... of ... plasmic energy. It had colors. It moved fast, collecting and dispersing.

{According to Rudolph Steiner, the astral world is in dreams of "flowing colors and radiant light beings."" (INM, p. 14)}


But what it was, ... simulated normal objects and their processes ... invisible within them."

SLP = Victoria Nelson : The Secret Life of Puppets. Harvard U Pr, 2001.

"ZS" = "Zebra Stallion", in :- James A. Honeÿ : South-African Folk-Tales. 1910. http://www.sacred-texts.com/afr/saft/sft36.htm

LB = Louis Ginzberg : Legends of the Bible. Konecky & Konecky, Old Saybrook (CT).

ShRPhKD = Lawrence Sutin (ed.) : The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick : selected literary and philosophical writings. NY : Harmony, 1995.

INM = Rudolph Steiner (transl. by Alice Wulsin) : The Inner Nature of Music. Spring Valley (NY) : Anthroposophic Pr, 1983.

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1.4

The Supernormal and Evolution

pp. 66 to 75

p. 71 Abrams' exposition of Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit

[quoted from NS, p. 231 :] "The spirit, the protagonist of the story, mantains no one phenomenal identity, but passes through the bewildering metamorphoses inthe form of ... "shapes of consciousness" [Gestalten des Bewusstseins], as well as multiple human personae, or particular "spirits.""

NS = M. H Abrams : Natural Supernaturalism. NY : W. W. Norton, 1971.

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2.5

Science Mysticism and Dark Mythology

pp. 122 to 131

pp. 131, 300 shining things over Northumbria; cf. West Virginia

p. 131

"In the winter of 1904-5, a religious ... swept through Northumbria, England (LO 650-65). So too did a series of bizarre occult events, as if they were somehow linked to the devotional fervor ... of the people ... . Terrifying objects appeared in the sky. ... Something was slaughtering sheep in the fields (one is reminded here of the cattle mutilations of contemporary ... lore)."

p. 300, n. 2:40

"This series of events ...bear an uncanny resemblance to the 1967-68 winter events of Point Pleasantville, West Virginia, ... in The Mothman Prophecies."

LO = Charles Fort : Lo! 1931.

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3.4

Remote Viewing in the Psychic Underground

pp. 175 to 181

p. 179 near-death experience by McMoneagle

"After being pulled {out of his material body by supernatural entities} up and out of the emergency room, backward, "as if I were falling upward through a tunnel," he felt a warm sensation at the back of his neck, which then spread to the rest of his subtle body and intensified ... . until it approached a state of being ... "exceedingly-outrageous-fantastic." ... Then a voice in the Light commanded him to "Go back. You are not going to die."" (MT, pp. 27-34)

MT = Joseph McMoneagle : Mind Trek : exploring consciousness ... . Charlottesville : Hampton Roads, 1997.

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4.7

Projection Theory Turned Back On Itself

pp. 247 to 249

p. 247 Carl Jung's dream

"Jung ... published an account of a dream ... he had in 1958 (SF 269). ... This dream involved a number of lens-shaped metallic disks flying around his house and above the lake that spread out nearby. One such flying lens ... possessed "a metallic extension which led to a box -- a magic lantern." At sixty or seventy yards out, the flying disk pointed the thing straight at him. Jung awoke ... and ... thought ... :

"... I am projected by the magic lantern as C. G. Jung. ...""

{This was, however, a mere conjecture (and an unlikely one) as to an implication of the dream.}

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5.2

Consciousness, Culture, and Cognition

p. 255 to 269

p. 264 bodily tingling as a sign of impending cosmic-consciousness

"The experience began with a sensation of heat and tingling in the spine and the chest areas. Suddenly, I merged with the infinitely loving Cosmic Intelligence ... and became united with everything else in the cosmos. ... In this state, I experienced the basic interconnectedness of all things in the cosmos, the infinite ocean of life. I also realized that everything arises from and is part of this Cosmic Intelligence." (SB, p. 293)

SB = Mario Beauregard & Denyse O'Leary : The Spiritual ... Case for the Existence of the Soul. NY : Harper Collins, 2007.

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6.2

The Miracle at Fat.ima

275 to 282

pp. 276-7, 280 goddess Fat.ima

p. 276

""Our Lady of Fa`tima" from Heaven ... was ... a little over one meter tall and ... was enveloped in a kind of light that was more beautiful than the sun and very bright. Her dress ...

{Inasmuch as /Fat.imah/ is the name of the supreme goddess of the Yarsani who preach the glorious jihad against the Christian infidel, it is manifest that the advent at the site named for her in Portugal is divinely intended as an incitement for all Muslims everywhere to praepare a final assault a to destroy all Christendom.} {Her sun-bright garment would indicate that she is the "woman clothed with the sun" (AITh 12:1); that this woman "fled into the wilderness" (AITh 12:6) would indicate that she is intended as identical with Hagar the mother of Yis^ma<->el; and her "crown of twelve stars" (AITh 12:1) would indicate the 12 tribes (listed in B-Re>s^it 25:13-5 -- vide "12TI" for the location of each of the 12 tribes) of Yis^ma<->el, who are hereby being summoned to participate in the glorious jihad against every Christian in Europe. (The "red dragon" of AITh 12:3 may be intended as Yis.h.aq.)}

p. 277

emitted a similar white light. ... Her mouth did not move when she spoke. She did not use her feet when she moved. Rather, she glided or floated."

p. 280

"the Lady's ... stopped at her knees, ... proof that the vision was "prepared by the Prince of Darkness" himself." (CS, p. 153)

CS = Joaquim Fernandes & Fina d'Armada : Celestial Secrets. San Antonio : Anomalist Bks, 2006.

AITh = Apokalupsis of Ioannes ho Theologos

"12TI" = http://nabataea.net/12tribes.html

p. 277 located in the sky : ramp of light; colored clouds; globe; "doors"

There was seen "a "ramp of light," ... in the sky." (CS, p. 76)

"They also saw colored clouds in the sky moving in strange, unusual ways. At least one man ... saw "a type of luminous globe gyrating within the clouds."" (CS, p. 63)

"as the Being departed, ... It ... entered the sky and the doors have closed." (CS, p. 47)

{In the Kemetic Book of the Dead, "the deceased, entering "in His name of 'Ladder' ... the ceiling of the heavens {like a ladder through the ceiling of a kiva} unbolteth its gates"" (DS, p. 20).} {In Morocco, "Doors in the sky" may be seen in a dream ("D&IM", p. 20).}

DS = Ananda K. Coomaraswamy : The Door in the Sky. Princeton U Pr, 1977.

http://books.google.com/books/p/princeton?id=dqmnnLe17gkC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ViewAPI&hl=en#v=onepage&q=door&f=false

"D&IM" = "Dreams and Identity in Morocco" http://digitalcollections.sit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1406&context=isp_collection

pp. 279-80 flying-saucer-contactee effects at Fat.ima

p. 279

"many of the details of the story are ... phenomenology of UFO encounters ... . As Paul Misraki ... pointed out ... such parallels ... are precise and exact." (E)


"UFO encounters have often been accompanied

by the sound of "buzzing bees,"

by small humanoid figures approximately one meter tall, and

by a classic zigzag descent pattern ... .

UFO encounters are also often associated with

lightning and/or thunder,

strange cloud formations,

bizarre chromatic effects,

cooling and heating effects,

perfume-like odors, and

spontaneous healings and cures."

p. 280

"classic in the ufological ... are the ramps of light and the angel hair (known as "fibralvina" in ufology and already reported by Fort in The Book of the Damned in 1919)."

E = Paul Misraki : Les Extraterrestres. Paris : Plon, 1962.

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Jeffrey J. Kripal : Authors of the Impossible : the Paranormal and the Sacred. U of Chicago Pr, 2010.