Delving In The Impossible
I've started this new sub-blog as a place to put things that are too far from my usual writings so that I don't feel like I'm abusing the attention of my readers who are looking for a specific topic like Tarot or Dreaming. Here, I want to go into things that are beyond rationality and which can easily be mistaken for confused ideas that do not rise to the level of rationality, but which I believe are actually beyond the ability of the rational to grapple with in any useful way.
In a way you might think of rationality as being surrounded by both the irrational and the transrational, something that goes beyond rationality. Some view history as a long era of irrationality that predates the so-called Enlightenment, an era of logic and science, and posit a steady march to complete knowledge and rational decision making. But this doesn't seem to be the case to me. I think that the post-rational era we now inhabit is is a place where we use rational tools when we can, but extend reasoning in new ways that does not exclude our experience because it is not easily bottled up in fact containers. Discernment is required to distinguish the pre-rational from the post-rational, and many otherwise thoughtful observers seem to miss this difference, and it is a pity since we don't seem to be able to stop the process.
For the last few months I've been delving into the latest aspects of the culture around UFOs. This has been a perennial topic of interest to me since I was a child. And although I don't think of myself as a UFO fanatic, the fact that we have these phenomena that violate our scientific materialistic understanding of reality, and that it keeps coming in waves, and gets stranger and stranger, is a powerful aspect of our reality and suggests that things beyond our understanding are just next door. I keep wondering if someone can kick the door open, or pick the lock, assuming it is locked. Or is it even closed if so many millions experience this strangeness?
I grew up in a part of Pennsylvania where strange UFO sightings and events happened when I was a child. Kecksburg and the Mothman phenomena were not too far away from my borthpalce, and I heard people talking about them when I was a child. Back in the 60s there was a certain earthy quality to the UFO stories, very matter-of-a-fact and spoken as if the truth of it would come out soon. I used to read books on the topic along with sports and racing and science books I got from the library. It all had a very materialistic orientation that expressed certainty that answers would be forthcoming, and soon. Or so thought the child I was.
Over time the topic got kinda weirder and weirder, and after the X-Files era, certainly very, very paranoid. I’d occasionally watch a documentary, but the TV shows were mostly garbage, a mishmash of reports and wild speculation based on nothing, so I just ignored a lot of it. Back in the 90s I read a few Jacques Vallée books on the topic, and that changed my thinking a lot. He certainly studied things in a much more thorough and detailed way, and his reasoning about it was clearer that most others, basically that there is much strangeness that people were ignoring. This was not a nuts and bolts materialistic story about strange craft, that was all just window dressing or a cat's paw that was toying with our sense of what is real.
Later, I listened to a lecture by Terrence McKenna where he compared UFO anomalies to religious and shamanic experience, a topic I know plenty about as someone who has studied and experienced many things in those areas. It made the topic more compelling, but the media was still full of the old stories about spaceships and government coverups. The paranoia about it is not appealing to me at all. The utter strangeness interests me, but the rest of it doesn’t get my attention.
However, over the last decade I ran into books Jeffrey Kripal about what he terms “the impossible” and that led me to books by Diana Walsh Pasulka, both of them scholars of religion and philosophy. They have great skill in mixing their academic bona fides with popular culture topics, and one thing they have discussed and written about frequently are UFO encounter stories and the high strangeness that surrounds them. This, after all, is what seems to be essence of it all, that very strange and fantastic things happen which contradict the structured social framework that defines what is permissible to think and experience as a citizen in the modern word. We all “know” that everything is matter, and that everything else is built upon that, right? Right?!
But Vallée, and others, are quite good at explaining how this phenomenon has punctured that Ship of Certainty in various places below the water line, and that it is sinking. The complexity of the entities we encounter in life are so beyond that cartoon of Matter Rules All that I think we have to examine the people who live comfortably in it. We are trained to sweep so much under the rug, most especially our own experience. The most important lesson I learned when I was young was not to talk about strangeness, it makes people uncomfortable that you are violating the unspoken rules about what is “real” and what isn't. That kept me safe for many years but at some point I was too settled and had too much conventionality as cover to be harmed very much. So, I don't guard my speech as closely as I once did.
But so much of the world's illusions about these kinds of things are failing. We no longer have a reliable authoritative set of experts and priests who dictate the truth. Each edifice of the old palace has crumbled or is well on the way already. Are the governments, churches, scientists, and journalists still reliable? Do you believe them any longer without finding some other supporting evidence for what they say? So many statements are made in public that claim to be grounded in “truth” but which often turn out to be transitory states or attempts to assert authority where none exists. Or lies, plenty of lies these days.
Vallée points out so clearly that the phenomena have been working for decades (or longer?) to undermine those certainties. To what end? Is it control, or revelation, or is it that the edges of our understanding are always full of trickster energies that spring out from inside us, or the bigger field of the reality that actually surrounds and supports us?
I like contemplating these anomalous and strange events as it suggests that the boundaries of our knowledge are not as great as we like to think, and the possibility of truly spectacular happenings is very appealing. So finding that they were both involved with this new documentary, titled “Cosmosis” made me go searching for it.
It was so good that I watched all three episodes back-to-back, something I normally don’t do. If you like challenging ideas and don’t care for the prosaic “space aliens” story about these strange events, you might like this one. It seems to be available on many of the streaming sites.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUPTffIaRz8
The first and last episodes are very strong but the middle episode seems to contain a large section of people talking to mainly present certain concepts. That's fine, but connecting the ideas with actual events in the rest of the series is what makes it work, I think. I suspect that I will watch the whole series again very soon and I may change my mind on this, but I'll watch all three episodes again, for certain.
Two of the most important ideas being put across are Vallée's “six layer” model of UFO events, which reveals how much stranger these events are than as presented in the media. And the other idea is that of Hyperobjects, objects that exist, but which extend beyond our simple notions of objects. And example of this is the economy, a thing people talk about, have ideas about, and which has real world presence, yet no individual is able to grasp it completely as it exists in time and space. It is a real object, but seems to exist at a different level beyond our ken. The idea of the series is that the UFO phenomena is a hyperobject, it is real but extends beyond us. It might be that we just cannot ever understand it, despite it being real and showing up in the lives of millions of people over time. So watch the series, it is a new way of treating UFO topics in media.
The series led me to Kelly Chase's podcast, The UFO Rabbit Hole, recently renamed to Cosmosis, to match the series. I ended up listening to every episode because of her careful delving into each and every aspect of The Phenomena worth looking at. It exposed me to a few new ways of thinking about this that have been fruitful as I examine my own experiences and development over the years.
This is, I think, a worthwhile collection of media to examine. I am still not a UFO fanatic, but this exploration has expanded my toolbox of useful ideas and approaches. If you have had any “strange experiences” you might find them useful as well. After spending time going through them, I've consolidated some vague thinking into related philosophical concepts, and have once again questioned what is the basis of some of the more profound experiences that I've experienced.
Thanks for reading. I'll be posting irregularly as I delve into things at the edge of my experience and understanding. Cheers!
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