Back when Tumblr still existed in a form that was both usable, pleasurable, and well-peopled with engaged brains I enjoyed, I would post commentaries on things I was reading. I am going to see if I can restart this, though of course this lonely isolated blog is no Tumblr. But I find there is a pleasure to writing (full stop), and writing in ‘public’ is different than adding this in to the masses of notebooks that sit on my shelves. I suppose there is a secret hope that one day I will again find myself in social and conversational environments that are rich with broad and rich discussions on all manners of things.
Specific Inputs for these ponderings
- Sean Carroll and Adam Bulley on How Mental Time Travel Makes Us Human (podcast)
- Jeffrey Kripal, How to Think Impossibly (Part I only, still reading)
- Carlo Ginzberg, Threads and Traces | True False Fictive
- Personal study with Darkhad shamans in Mongolia
- Patrick McMillen & Michael Levin, Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates in Communications Biology
My reading these past few days has a breadth of scale and scope, in a sense of worldviews, that seems unlikely to weft together for any type of sense making. I am not suggesting that all things need to find some cohesive structure or unified world view, but there is something to the above that does in fact seem related, but without a final form or clarity at this time.
Kripal’s book on thinking impossibly follows on all his work to date (almost all of which I have read), and links to the other speakers of the four Archives of the Impossible conferences he has hosted. In a very superficial summary (I continuously intend to write more deeply on this, but then I find myself reading and thinking more, and haven’t made it to output yet), he brings into question what reality is for humans, how we experience it, what it means to experience ‘impossible’ phenomena such as precognition or UFO encounters, and what is possible. Part I of the book describes these impossible occurrences by those who have experienced them. Impossible is not the word I usually use for these non-standard reality based experiences, but I also will say that it is incredibly difficult to chose a word that suffices as well as one that does not come with predisposed ideas and contexts. Part of the difficulty in this topic is the shared lexicon of what is, what is real, what is believed, and each of this words as well as their worldviews, bring a lot to the table, perhaps iceberg like, where most is unseen and below the surface. And perhaps not only unseen, unbelieved.
My experiences of studying with a traditional Mongolian shaman in northern Mongolia led me to see and experiences things that definitely wouldn’t fit a standard view of reality in the worlds that I live in on a daily basis. I do not question that what I experience is real, but even that is a difficult word to define. As one of Kripal’s interlocutors notes, and a topic Kripal and other scholars of the phenomena surface, real, illusion (in the Sanskrit sense of Maya), mind projection (a common term with my Mongolian and Vajrayana teachers), are nearly unfathomable as they overlap with a set of experiences, embodied or otherwise, that occur.
In the worlds above, time is not fixed and linear, and the future, whether precognitiion, divinatory, or experienced through shamanic performances. Bulley’s discussion of the brain architectures that allow for a human to experience the future as a thought process of foresight suggests that we use the past to imagine the future, to explore scenarios to choose futures. In one example, if asked to imagine an apple, one imagines an apple that comes from the past, is in the mind but perhaps not the present, and may or may not manifest in the future. This implies, as he does not directly state, that the future has not yet happened and also that one could not imagine a future that is not built on some past understanding of the world.
I am always skeptical of anything that declares ‘this makes us human’ and then explains the inability of all other beings to do the same thing. In Bulley’s case and this title, mental time travel. In earlier writings, language, empathy, a whole host of ways in which humans are the exception, as though we cannot exist in a world in which humans are not the best of all possible species.
Kripal curiously notes that the UFO experiencers of today, in their descriptions, show significant overlap to the descriptions the tantric experiencers of millennia-past South Asia. Are anomalous experiences of today culturally situated and the breadth of the possible imaginations come from inside our heads or are there experiences that are unfathomable until experienced? There is a differentiation between the imaginal and the imaginary. Imagination and the imaginary are spaces of the mind, the imaginal is a hybrid world where the myth and symbols of the imagination are true, though “not to be taken literally or exclusively” (Kripal, 33). Somewhere this internal conversation seems like it spits out a consideration on consciousness, but I actually that is not what is relevant here. What is real, I suspect, does not have to do with any of the ways that we can scientifically or philosophically understand what consciousness is. And my personal experiences in Mongolia make me suspect that the current definitions cannot extend to some of the things I have seen and experienced.
My friend Richard shared with me the McKillen & Levin article, loosely about collective intelligence as seen at the cellular level, shifting me from a macro to a micro view, but of something that feels similar. Collective intelligence has a multi-scale nature, competency architecture, and shows adaptive behavior to address new problem spaces and engage with higher level of organization. (McMillan & Patrick, p1). They cite William James as the source of their definition of intelligence, “a degree of ability to reach the same goal by different means” and stress that this plus the collective decision-making found in their work on the cellular level allows for the discovery of a ‘vast spectrum of problem-solving capacities in novel substrates and at unconventional spatiotemporal scales” (McMillen & Patrick, 11).
Which, taken differently, could be seen as the substrates of the impossible at the spatiotemporal scales of Mongolian shamanic skills. I would suggest that neither Kripal’s ‘Impossibles’ nor the skills and abilities of the Mongolian shamans are unique. These are not one offs in experiences, geography or time.
Last years ISARs conference — the International Society for Academic Research on Shamans, resurfaced Ginzburg’s concept of Traces, which had been many years buried in some dusty corner of my mind. His notion of traces explores what is left from the past as we entered modernity (a topic of another day), and what these elusive and slippery elements bring to narratives of the present, to remembering and imaging. What is persistence, what is fact, what is fiction? What are the dynamics that entangle the past and the present.
And I would ask, what are the dynamics that entangle cellular collective intelligence with something so large I do not know what world to apply to it. I shy away from ‘collective consciousness’ both for its historical meanings and because it doesn’t feel right. Collective spatiotemporal anomalies? I doubt, however, that these are anomalies. As Kripal and the original Invisible College as well as centuries of anthropologists and religious studies scholars note, these are not unusual events, we have just opted to not explore, theorize, study, or explicate them as data.
One of the things I enjoy in Kripal’s writing and in of many of his predecessors and collaborators is the ability to say yes, this is real, and no, I have no idea what or why it is. The ability to not know, to not decide, to accept even that we may not ever know, keeps the expansiveness of inquiry flowing for me. I have no idea if what I ponder means anything at all, or if it ‘gets somewhere’ but this is not the point. In that sense, I end in the middle, where is where I started.