How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else

What appears to the experiencer, after all, is a part of culture. Indeed, one of my deepest intuitions that I will play out in these pages is that the paranormal is culture working in heretofore unimagined ways—expressing itself, yes, but also overcoming,

Consider precognitive phenomena. I have long thought of these as the most well-documented and philosophically important of all impossible events. As such, they carry immense potential for influencing everything intellectuals and scientists do. If taken as

To think impossibly is, first and foremost, to think-with individuals and their experiences, however fantastic these experiences become or, better, precisely because they become so fantastic.

we are forever limiting ourselves to this or that identity, culture, or religion, exclusively believing our belief systems and mythologies (including our scientific ones) and not looking “behind” them to know the presence that is creating or projecting th

By the fantastic, I mean something that is often very physical, empirical, and sometimes even witnessed by many people. I mean something that possesses its own agency and purpose and often changes history, be it of a single person or an entire civilizatio

paranormal phenomena are essentially pieces or parts of ourselves that we have projected outward, usually in a traumatic situation or because of a previous trauma and its dissociative nature. These things are projected outward so that we can read them and

it is not any local mythology or religious ideation that appears to produce the globally distributed phenomena that is the UFO. It is the spine, the brain, and the body and—lest I be heard reductively—whatever in turn might shine or transmit through these

we can seriously entertain the experience-source hypothesis—that is, the hypothesis that basic religious convictions around the world are cultural reworkings of a recurring set of direct experiences and not (only) reworkings of indirect historical context

By the fantastic, I mean something that is exotic, outlandish, or shocking (apparently, it is trying to get our attention), something that actually happened in both the material and menal domains, which are in turn being mediated by the imagination.