Prologue
This book is an experiment: an attempt to use logic to expose the absurd foundations of logic; an attempt to use science to peek beyond the limits of science; an attempt to use rationality to lift the veil off the irrational. Its ways are unconventional: weaving along its path one finds UFOs and fairies, quantum mechanics, analytic philosophy, history, mathematics, and depth psychology. The enterprise of constructing a coherent story out of these incommensurable disciplines is exploratory. Yet, finding ourselves confronted with the undeniable contradictions of our culture’s current worldview, we must test untried waters if we are to escape banality and find our way back to the mysteries of existence. The payoff is handsome: a reason for hope, a boost for the imagination, and the promise of a meaningful future.
But it does not come free: this book will ask you to have an open mind and enough mental flexibility to navigate through seas that will drag you out of your comfort zone, wherever it may lie. If you are at home with the wacky, the weird, and the absurd – but can keep yourself engaged when structured thinking is called for – you may find a new world of insights when we explore quantum entanglement, Gödel’s theorems, intuitionistic logic, and the history of science. If, instead, you are comfortable with science and formal philosophy – but can balance your skepticism and cynicism – you may find a breath of fresh air when we explore the serious aspects of UFOs, the Otherworld, and the inner landscapes of the unconscious. If the experiment works, at the end all these disparate threads will come together to unveil a startling picture of reality and of our condition as minded characters within it.
For me, personally, this book represents a difficult critique of previously unquestioned assumptions and values I had held for most of my life; a departure from ingrained structures of thought I had grown so identified with I could hardly conceive of any other legitimate avenue of thinking. Yet, this is precisely what I now believe this book to embody: a previously unthinkable but legitimate articulation of an uncanny scenario about the nature of reality. If my own experience while researching it is representative, this book may confront some of your dearest notions about truth and reason, just as it confronted mine. Yet, it may do so in a way that you cannot dismiss lightly, because the (laboratory) evidence it compiles and the philosophy it leverages are solid in the traditional, academic sense.
The most exciting discoveries always entail the loss of previously held certainties. So here is my invitation to you. This is a short and sharp book, wasting no space on non-essentials or divagations. Making your way through it will not demand any major investment of time or effort. So give it an honest chance, and it may just help you open up entirely new dimensions for exploring that ultimate of all questions: What is going on?
The elusiveness of the absurd
Investigators of calls of the absurd have systematically sought clear, unambiguous, logical, rational explanations for these phenomena. The underlying assumption was so self-evident and natural that it hardly needed to be made explicit: whatever the phenomena were, their causes had to be rooted in logic and physics. Thus the most elusive evidence and the most absurd testimonies – those that demonstrably required a violation of the established laws of physics to hold true, or which were nonsensical on the face of it – could be nothing but fabrications or delusions and were, therefore, dismissed. Naturally, these were also the most peculiar of the cases.
It was not until the 1970s that Jacques Vallée realized that it was precisely the elusiveness of certain pieces of evidence and the absurdity of certain reports – the violation of physics and common sense they implied – that rendered them most interesting for study.1 He understood that if these reports were not outright lies their significance was considerable. Vallée is the true pioneer of the empirical study of the absurd as something beyond mere psychology; the first to open the door to a whole new way of thinking about strange observations of the world ‘out there.’ Our culture may, in the not-so-distant future, have much to thank Vallée for.
In his book The Invisible College, Vallée noted that many UFO observations entailed a kind of ‘recursive unsolvability:’ the phenomenon negated and contradicted itself, whatever explanation for it one came up with. Not only were the testimonies illogical and misleading, even the physical evidence left behind was ambiguous and elusive. He acknowledged that the lack of logic behind the phenomenon made one feel tempted to place it beyond rationality.2 Yet, the inclination to dismiss the weirdest and most illogical cases seemed unwarranted to Vallée. Referring to previous work done by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Vallée noted that the strangeness of a report did not correlate with a lack of reliability on the part of its witness. In other words, often the weirdest testimonies originated from the most reliable witnesses.3 Something intriguing was going on.
Vallée realized, from the study of the countless cases he had privileged access to, that the reality of the phenomenon appeared to be both physical and psychic at the same time.4 In more recent work, he reaffirmed this conclusion and proceeded to lay out a phenomenological classification scheme encompassing six layers: a physical layer, an anti-physical layer (capturing the aspects of the phenomenon that contradict currently understood physics), a socio-psychological layer, a physiological layer (capturing observed alterations of the witnesses’ bodily functions), a psychic layer (in the parapsychological sense), and a cultural layer.5 In this same work, Vallée suggested that the phenomenon indicates the need for new models of physical reality. Indeed, Vallée is well known for taking the position that the so-called ‘extraterrestrial visitation hypothesis’ is insufficient to explain the scope of strangeness of the calls of the absurd.6Perhaps the most controversial of Vallée’s conclusions is that there is a purpose behind the occurrence of these strange phenomena. Having tried in vain to find a closed, sensible, logical explanation for UFOs for many years, Vallée concluded that the right question to ask was not where the UFOs came from, but what effect they were causing. This latter question could be answered empirically based on relatively straightforward research. His conclusion: the calls of the absurd are leading to a shift in human consciousness and our conception of reality. He empirically observed a seeming schedule of reinforcement that works to cement this shift over time.7 Nonetheless, Vallée then left it open whether such a shift is caused by premeditated action by an intelligent agency, or whether it is simply the result of natural laws yet to be discovered.8However, by the time he wrote Messengers of Deception,9 Vallée’s position had become more influenced by conspiracy-related hypotheses. He took the ambiguity, self-negation, and contradiction always present in the calls of the absurd not as natural, inherent properties of the phenomenon, but as devices designed to influence human culture through confusion and misleading signals. Personally, I find this shift in Vallée’s thinking unfortunate. To me, the explanation that requires the least new assumptions is that ambiguity is an inherent and natural aspect of the calls of the absurd, not the result of a Machiavellian intervention in human culture.
Decades after Vallée began his investigations into UFOs and other related phenomena, Harvard’s Dr. John Mack became interested in the so-called ‘alien abduction’ phenomenon. As a psychiatrist, his original interest likely had psychological motivations. However, having failed to uncover a purely medical explanation for the reports of his patients, Dr. Mack ventured carefully into the territory of speculative ontology. His observations are uncannily consistent with Vallée’s own. He talks of the concurrently psychic and objective nature of the phenomenon, as well as of its elusiveness. He speaks of a ‘third zone’ that violates the boundaries between the subjective world of mind and the objective world of matter ‘out there.’10 He even suggests that the phenomenon is ‘designed’ – not necessarily in a teleological sense, but rather in a compensatory and spontaneous manner – to break down this separation between subjective and objective worlds and to force the experiencers to confront the inadequacy of the worldviews they have hitherto held.11 He speaks of ‘ontological shock’12 as the mechanism by which the phenomenon forces an expansion of people’s conception of reality towards a worldview where notions previously held to be absurd become intelligible. In interviews he conducted with shamans from pre-literary cultures of Africa and South America, Dr. Mack asked whether the alien- or fairy-like entities they claimed to have dealings with were supposed to be literal creatures or simply metaphors. He was then told that, according to the worldviews of these pre-literary cultures, there was no difference between the two;13 certainly a very counterintuitive reply for the Western mind to assimilate. Nonetheless, by the end of this book, it will hopefully become clearer what those shamans might have meant when they spoke of an identity between the literal and the metaphorical.
It is remarkable how, based on an entirely different and more recent set of data, Dr. Mack arrived at very similar speculations to those originally put forward by Vallée. Indeed, yet another investigator of ‘funny things’ has also arrived at similar conclusions. His name is Patrick Harpur.
Just like Vallée and Mack, Harpur sees significance in the very absurdity and ambiguity of the calls of the absurd. Unlike Vallée’s later writings, however, Harpur believes such characteristics to be natural – in fact, the most innate – attributes of these phenomena, not devices of premeditated Machiavellian deception. Harpur goes well beyond UFOs and alien abductions, classifying all kinds of visions and apparitions under what he calls ‘daimonic reality.’ (Here, the word ‘daimonic’ is not to be confused with the term ‘demonic;’ it does not have the same negative connotation.) In another similarity with the works of Vallée and Mack, Harpur discerns a ‘goal’ behind the calls of the absurd: he believes they are a spontaneous, compensatory reaction to the very rationalistic, materialistic view of reality that discredits them to begin with.14 This point of view is reminiscent of Jung’s position on the role of dreams as purposeful, compensatory reactions to unnatural psychic conditions.15 Indeed, we will later see that dreams and the calls of the absurd may have much in common.
To Harpur, the calls of the absurd are protrusions into our consensus reality of phenomena anchored in the daimonic realm: a realm that is both material and immaterial; both fact and fiction. Thus, ‘daimonic reality’ is a kind of intermediate realm between the physical and the spiritual, between reality and imagination, embodying characteristics of both. Harpur identifies this realm with what Jung called the ‘collective unconscious,’ although Harpur – more explicitly than Jung – does not restrict the daimonic to the inside of our heads alone. In the realm of the daimonic, the imagination operates in its most natural form: through analogical – not literal – thinking; through metaphor, not causally closed modeling. Indeed, Jung has suggested that parables and similes are an older, more archaic mode of thought than linear logic and rationality. This archaic mode of thinking currently survives mostly in dreams.16Because of its defiance of any literal explanation and its inability to fit into any well-defined category, the daimonic is fundamentally elusive, ambiguous, shape-shifting.17 It is these characteristics that led Harpur to identify the world of fairies – as captured in the folklore of Celtic traditions – as an archetypical example of daimonic reality. After all, fairies are morally ambiguous; their manifestation absurd, yet consistent across the ages.18 Fairies – like UFOs, aliens, and DMT elves – are daimons. Vallée, as we have seen, had arrived decades earlier at similar conclusions.
Yet, the elusiveness of the daimonic does not imply its lack of physicality. Indeed, Harpur stresses that daimonic phenomena can have very physical effects, suggesting that the manifestation of these effects may be linked to what Jung called ‘synchronistic events,’19 which we briefly discussed earlier. However, the physical traces daimonic events leave behind are themselves just as ambiguous and elusive as the original phenomena. These traces can be construed to lend support to different – and mutually contradictory – attempts at explaining the phenomena. Hence, despite encompassing undeniable physical aspects, the calls of the absurd trick our logic and refuse to be boxed or labeled unambiguously. Whatever we attempt to say they are, they show they are not; whatever we attempt to say they are not, they indicate they might just be.20Harpur stresses that, from the point of view of the daimons, their reality is the true ground of existence, the world of ego-consciousness being merely a kind of dream consisting of projected images of what we conceive the daimonic to be.21 He suggests that dreams and other non-ordinary states of consciousness offer us a door into the daimonic; a door we can use to explore a reality operating under different rules, the experience of which may release us from certain ingrained and rusty patterns of thinking; a door that enables us to see through the literal appearances of the world we experience through ego-consciousness.22 If we do not voluntarily open the door to the daimons, Harpur suggests that the daimons then force themselves into our reality through the calls of the absurd. The daimons strive constantly to escape their exile in the unconscious, continuously challenging the literalism of our worldview.
Harpur is self-consistent in his approach to the calls of the absurd: because he believes them to represent a reality that transcends the explanatory power of logic and physics, he does not offer a direct explanation for them.23 Instead, he takes an indirect approach in his books: by discussing different examples of calls of the absurd under the light of philosophy, esotericism, and even poetry, Harpur attempts to convey a roundabout impression – an intuitive way of seeing – that is conducive to the intellectual acceptance of the calls of the absurd without need for a closed, causal explanation. His work is quite remarkable in that he largely succeeds in this formidable and unusual challenge. Yet, it leaves readers with more rational and less poetic inclinations a little frustrated. I confess to be one such reader, for I asked myself after reading Harpur’s work: Wonderful but, at the end of the day, just what is going on then? Just what are the calls of the absurd after all? No straight answer was to be found.
In this book, I set out to tackle precisely this gap: to suggest a direct and explicit explanation for phenomena that defy the very logic grounding such explanation. I will attempt this in the tradition of Kurt Gödel, who defeated an entire system of logical thought while operating within the very system whose defeat he achieved.24 In the next chapter, we will start on the tricky road towards this elusive explanation. Since we will tackle the absurd initially from within the confines of logic and physics, some structured and disciplined thinking will be required of you. Bear with me, for later we will return to the absurd and place it within the framework of an astonishing, yet well-founded, conception of reality.
From:
Meaning in Absurdity
What Bizarre Phenomena Can Tell Us about the Nature of Reality
Bernardo Kastrup
No comments:
Post a Comment