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

Now in paperback, a mind-bending invitation to experience the impossible as fundamentally human.
 
From precognitive dreams and telepathic visions to near-death experiences, UFO encounters, and beyond, so-called impossible phenomena are not supposed to happen. But they do happenall the time. Jeffrey J. Kripal asserts that the impossible is a function not of reality but of our everchanging assumptions about what is real.How to Think Impossiblyinvites us to think about these fantastic (yet commonplace) experiences as an essential part of being human, expressive of a deeply shared reality that is neither mental nor material but gives rise to both. Thinking with specific individuals and their extraordinary experiences in vulnerable, open, and often humorous ways, Kripal interweaves humanistic and scientific inquiry to foster an awareness that the fantastic is real, the supernatural is supernatural, and the impossible is possible.

Jeffrey J. Kripalholds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He is the author of several books, including, most recently,The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Prologue. Knowledge before Its Time

Introduction. The Fantastic Foundations of Reality

Part One. When the Impossible Happens
1. Words Are Experiences: Evolutionary Origins and the World of the Dead
2. Why They Don’t Land: Mantis, Mystical Theology, and Social Criticism
3. “That They Are Not Human”: Thinking on the Autistic Spectrum

Part Two. Making the Impossible Possible
4. The Timeswerve: Theorizing in a Block Universe
5. The World Is One, and the Human Is Two: Some Tentative Conclusions
6. We Are God (and the Devil): Further Thoughts and Moral Objections

Conclusion. How to Think Impossibly
Epil: