On the Fairy-Faith

Part 5, How to Think Impossibly

I recently finished Jeffrey Kripal's book How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief and Everything Else. I found the book a bit uneven, but the parts I liked are relevant for this series about the Celtic fairy-faith. Believing in fairies is impossible for many people, so it might be helpful to provide some recommendations about how to think impossibly.

Related to Part 3 of this series, Kripal deploys a dual approach in the book. Part One of his book, "When the Impossible Happens," leans into the testimonial approach I've described, the sharing of first hand experiences. Similar to Evans-Wentz's method in The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, Kripal is convinced that the sheer volume of stories he recounts, like UFO encounters, settles the argument about the impossible. Simply put, the impossible happens. It just does. So instead of denying the impossible we have to shift to the next question: If the impossible happens then how are we do think about the impossible without denying the impossible? Because if you deny the impossible you aren't thinking about the impossible.

So, how to think impossibly?

That's the question of Part Two of the book, entitled "Making the Impossible Possible." In this part, Kripal turns to my preferred strategy for re-enchantment, as I described in Part 3 of this series, attending to cognitive and attentional biases. When it comes to the impossible, how do you move, as I described it, from a "No" to a "Maybe?"

Kripal describes this transition from "No" to "Maybe?" as cultivating a capacity for "ontological shock." To think impossibly is to allow yourself to be interrupted and surprised by reality. This entails a posture of epistemological openness. How to do this? Kripal recommends the following:

1. "Think Impossibly"

By this Kripal means being aware of your "priors," the cognitive biases that reject the impossible on the front end. As Kripal puts it, "our conclusions are the function of our exclusions." That is to say, what you claim to be the truth, as a logical or empirical "conclusion," isn't really a conclusion at all. It's just an expression of what you already believe to be possible at the level of your prior assumptions. To illustrate this, and to provide a metaphor about how to think impossibly, Kripal uses a table metaphor:

[T]he conclusions one reaches about a set of phenomena will be largely a function of what one places on one's table and so also of what one takes off that table. Take things off the table and you will eventually be able to explain what is left (because you just took everything off the table that you cannot explain). Put more things on the table, however, and things will begin to look considerably stranger. The pieces on the table, moreover, will mean very different things--and likely things that we simply cannot understand with our present concepts and their implicit exclusions. In so many ways, impossible thinking is simply what happens when we do not take things off the table.

Back to the experiences of the Celts and the impossibility of the fairy-faith. One way to move from "No" to "Maybe?" is simply to leave the Celtic experiences of fairies on the table. That is to say, you don't have to believe in fairies, you can simply leave these experiences on the table as something to consider, think about, and ponder. For what you conclude about fairies is mainly due to what you exclude. Thinking impossibly involves simply refraining from letting your priors bias a conversation before it even starts. Just leave everything on the table.

2. "Get Weird"

In Part 3 of my series I described how stories and narratives don't generally work for skeptics. But Kripal's recommendation is that we take the widespread phenomena of the stories as evidence that something is going on. Kripal asks us to adopt a phenomenological posture toward these experiences. You don't have to believe the stories, but the stories themselves are empirical data worthy of critical attention. This method, says Kripal, "involves taking people's experiences, no matter how unbelievable they become, with the utmost care and seriousness." Kripal describes this posture as being open to what Erik Davis calls "high weirdness." Thinking impossibly, says Kripal, means welcoming high weirdness "onto our phenomenological table."

Back to the fairy-faith. Yes, the stories of fairies told by the Celtic people are highly weird. But being open to these stories, as phenomenological experiences worthy of serious attention, is a start on thinking impossibly. It's a simple posture of openness and generosity. Just listen with attention and care.

3. "Look Up"

This is David Bentley Hart's point from Part 2 of this series. As Kripal describes it, "Once one attempts a genuine phenomenology of the weird, it becomes clear that there is a 'vertical' dimension to some such experiences that has traditionally been framed as 'transcendent'..."

Regarding the fairy-faith, in Part 4 I described how, whatever is going on in the fairy-experiences of the Celtic peoples, it seems clear those experiences are pointing to mysteries, mysteries that, in various cultural guises, humanity has experienced from the dawning of consciousness. The impossible happens and "looking up" means taking the supranatural seriously.

4. "More Real than Real"

Here Kripal asks us to take the imagination seriously. A skeptical approach toward the imagination considers it to be fancy, delusion, or wish-fulfillment. In contrast to this deflationary view, Kripal asks us to consider "imaginal appearances as potential mediated revelations of the real." Perhaps dreams and visionary experiences are intimations of reality. Throughout history, dreams and visions have been true or have come true in anticipating or communicating events in ways that seem to violate our theories of space and time. Perhaps something real is coming through the imagination in signs, symbols, archetypes, and visionary experiences.

Recall how, in our tour of the fairy-faith, special attention was given to the Celtic seers and visionaries, those blessed with "the second sight." Thinking impossibly means entertaining the Celtic second sight as mediating revelations of the real. The Celts were seeing something.

5. "It's about Time"

Kripal admits that this last point is the most speculative, and it overlaps some with the point above about dreams and visions. Specifically, time might not function in the linear fashion we assume. Many impossible things, like pre-cognition, seem to suggest that time loops back upon itself. And given the weirdness of quantum phenomena, with its non-local action at a distance, it seems clear that our current theories of space and time do not adequately describe the universe. The cosmos is a lot weirder than we tend to assume. And if the cosmos is weird we should be open to the weird in our search for a more comprehensive theory of the real.

Finally, Kripal would suggest that thinking impossibly simply means being a humanist, radically open to the fullness of human experience in all its oddity, peculiarity, and weirdness. This is exactly the posture William James described, as I noted in Part 4, as "radical empiricism." Being radically empirical means setting a capacious and hospitable table for the diversity of human experience.

So if the Celts reported experiences of fairies, well, as a posture of humanistic openness, that stays on the table. As impossible as that might be.

And Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!