Some of the best and most popular science fiction writers of all time had jaw-dropping paranormal experiences, and that’s why they wrote the stories they wrote. It’s the paranormal that produces the science fiction, and then the science fiction loops back and influences the paranormal.… The whole history of religions is essentially about weird beings coming from the sky and doing strange things to human beings … historically, those events or encounters have been framed as angels, or demons, or gods, or goddesses, or what have you. But in the modern secular world we live in they get framed as science fiction.
—Jeff in Brad Abrahams’s Love and Saucers (2017)
There is another way to frame our reading practice here. We could say that the interpretations that follow are all designed to do one thing: make the impossible possible. By this I mean to suggest that we are after a set of new perspectives, a new way of looking, that can change, instantly, the meaning of a set of otherwise unbelievable events and so render them not only possible but plausible. What makes certain kinds of human experiences impossible, after all, is not those experiences (they happen all the time), but our assumptions that they cannot happen. Put simply, the problem is not the events themselves. The problem is us.
To make the impossible possible, then, you first have to figure out what makes the impossible so impossible in the first place. You have to figure out what we are (falsely) assuming to be the case. If you can do this, you can also figure out why we keep ignoring people like Elizabeth Krohn, and why even she long wondered if she might be “crazy.” As it turns out, there is a rather blunt reason for this ignoring and for this self-shaming in the modern world, and that reason is the conventional materialist interpretations of the otherwise wonderful discoveries of modern science.
Here is the gorilla (and bully) in the living room of our conversation: classical materialism, that is, the belief that there is only matter, and that this matter, deep down, is lifeless and devoid of mentality or mind. “Up here,” where our forms of awareness work, there appear to be life and mind, but these are all surface illusions that disappear as soon as we go “deeper down” and discover the “real” nature of reality, which is entirely material, completely dead, and utterly mindless. In this model, human minds are nothing more than extremely complex illusions of brains, which are themselves purely material and entirely restricted to bodies and skulls and their most immediate physical surroundings, which are accessible only through the physical channels of the senses. No leaving your body here (you don’t really have a soul). No precognition (you are stuck in time). No clairvoyance (you are stuck in space). All of that is, by definition and in principle, meaningless and impossible. It can’t happen.
If you want to take Elizabeth’s experiences seriously, then, the first thing you must do is address this classical materialist interpretation of science. There is no way around the gorilla. There is only a way through him. So let us stand up and address the bully directly.
Here is how I stand up. First, I take Elizabeth’s experiences to be real in the simple sense that they happened, and that she and others experienced them as such, directly and indirectly. That seems patently obvious, and I see no reason to deny this or sweep it under the proverbial rug with magical spells like “anecdotal” and “coincidence.” Second, I make it very clear that I am not especially interested in proving or disproving these events. I am more interested in something more basic and, frankly, more to the point: querying and questioning the assumptions that are made but seldom examined as such in this call for “proving” or “disproving” these events that happen all the time.
After all, what any such “proof” or “disproof” amounts to is forcing a human being’s experiences into the protocols of a very specific way of knowing, that is, into the youthful methods and models of modern science, which are barely a few hundred years old at the moment (the word “scientist” was not even invented until the early 1830s). The assumption being made (but seldom acknowledged as such) is that anything that cannot be measured, controlled, and replicated in a laboratory or formalized in a mathematical formula must not be real, must not be true, must not be important. The simple truth is that Elizabeth’s experiences do not, and cannot, meet these protocols. They cannot be measured. (What exactly would you measure?) They cannot be controlled. (What are you going to do? Electrocute her and see what happens?) They cannot be replicated. (The nightmares come unbidden and unwanted.) But this does not mean that they don’t happen, or that they are not real. It simply means that they do not play by the rules of the scientific method.
So what?
The gorilla is confused now.
There is something more basic still to say here. As shocking as it sounds to our present cultural instincts, it needs to be said that science is simply not the best method to engage and understand paranormal experiences, since these experiences are all about precisely what conventional science presently denies—the fundamental reality of consciousness itself and its presence and role in the physical world. “Objectivity” is the goal of science, and to get to that objectivity one has to erase any and all “subjectivity.” One has to deny the reality and centrality of the subject, of consciousness itself, in all that one knows. But paranormal events do the opposite: they reintroduce the subject back into the object; they are elaborate displays of the mind’s power over or within matter or “objects.” That is why they are so vehemently denied by conventional science. That is why they are, supposedly, impossible.
The conclusion is obvious. If you are going to use a method designed to study only objects to study phenomena that are about subjects, things are not going to go very well. You are going to end up studying something that you have no real way of studying. You are going to deny what is staring you right in the face, or behind your face.
The gorilla is mad now.
I often use an old analogy here. It goes back a few centuries to the early nineteenth century and maybe further still. Writers have long noted that shoving extraordinary phenomena into a conventional scientific box is rather like insisting that one can only study stars at noon, and then telling us that, obviously, no stars exist since none can be seen at midday. I would add one little twist to this parable. I would add that, all the while we are told that there are no stars in the sky because we cannot see them at midday, we are also forgetting that the sun (in this analogy, our waking forms of consciousness, including the form of consciousness that does the science) is actually a star. We are denying that there are stars, ironically enough, because such stars are completely outshined and temporarily rendered invisible by such a star.
So it needs to be said bluntly and up front: the assumption that the only way to know the truth or the world is through the present scientific method is not an established fact and, as such, cannot itself be proven. It can only be assumed. It is a belief, and a rather naive one at that. My own position is that this same belief is not only naive but flat-out wrong, and that most anyone who works long enough and honestly enough with people like Elizabeth Krohn will eventually begin to see this. I did.
I go further still, though. I actually think that the future of human knowledge will pivot on how seriously, and how creatively, we will be able to study and understand such forms of human consciousness as part and parcel of reality itself, as real and as important as a photon or a tiger. These experiences are anything but tangential fluff or pseudoscientific nonsense. They are signs of or echoes from the future of knowledge itself.
This, anyway, is the perspective from which I write below. As a historian of religions, that is, as someone whose job it is to think historically and comparatively about religious experiences, however, wherever, and whenever they appear, it is not my job to prove or disprove anything to you with the scientific method. Rather, it is my job (1) to locate and contextualize a set of religious experiences (in this case, those of Elizabeth Krohn) in a broad and specific historical framework; (2) to compare these experiences across space and time to others like, and not like, them; and (3) to reflect on these comparative acts in order to arrive at some better model of what they might tell us about “religion” and, ultimately, what they might express or signal about the human condition and our actual place in the cosmos.
Put differently, my job is not to force-fit Elizabeth’s experiences into our present scientific frameworks or, for that matter, into any particular religious system, be it hers or anyone else’s. My job is to take her experiences as serious signs that these frameworks are much too limited, and then to work out, way out, from there to something grander. Alas, we will never quite get there. But we can point. We can guess. We can listen.
If, then, “belief” is about assenting to some past truth or religious worldview, and “proof” is about assenting to our present truth and scientistic worldview, neither is the point here. The point is to “imagine” the human from the future, much like, I can only observe, Elizabeth’s near-death experience and precognitive dreams model for us.
Part of this imagining the future involves thinking about writing and reading in new ways. Actually, reading and writing are our main methods in these pages. There is no laboratory, no multimillion-dollar machines or equipment here. There are no statistics or numbers. But there are words to read and stories to imagine. As outrageous as it might seem, reading and writing are the primary ways that we are changing the afterlife.
I know how counterintuitive that sounds. I know that many people think that reading is always a banal mechanical act and that writing a book is about sitting down and recording some already established piece of experience or knowledge—a bundle of reliable memories, a stable set of data, a collection of hard facts. You know what you are going to say, so you sit down and say it. In this model, the author is like a tape recorder or video camera. She has recorded something objective with the senses, and now she is going to inscribe it into a document. It is that simple.
Except that it’s not. That is not how it actually works, at all, not at least with books like this. It is much stranger than that. It is more that the book comes to be while and because of writing it, as if the book writes itself and the author in the process. One writes. One works. Yes. But one is also written. One is also worked on.
And it gets stranger still. It is also the case that the very acts of writing and reading about paranormal events often conjure the appearance of more paranormal events. Strange things happen when one writes and reads about strange things. Such practices somehow make the impossible possible. This is why I have often described writing and reading about the paranormal as paranormal practices in their own right. That’s because they are, or at least can be.
Scholars of comparative religion are very familiar with these feedback loops and the mysterious, largely unconscious manner in which texts, particularly religious texts, routinely interact with their writers and readers to empower them, to change them in a flash. They are well aware that the act of an interpreter interpreting a text will also involve the act of the text interpreting the interpreter. It is seldom a simple, straightforward, or “objective” thing, which is another reason that the scientific method and the ideal of pure objectivity will not get us very far here—that is simply not how things work in this domain. Sorry. Get over it, gorilla.
This circularity is even more extreme, more twisting, when the “text” one is reading and interpreting is about an extreme or anomalous experience, like a near-death experience that wants to be interpreted, wants to be engaged, wants to mean something new and be spoken in the public arena, wants—there is no other way to say this—to change the afterlife for all those who will read and consider it. It hardly surprised me, then, when the writing of this book had all sorts of effects in the lives of its two authors. On the simplest of levels, this was quite obvious during our conversations in the ways that my questions and comments affected Elizabeth’s answers and own self-understanding. Her interpretations of her own experiences sharpened and shifted as we talked and as I explained to her this or that idea from the study of religion. My understanding of those same ideas sharpened and shifted as well, of course, as I now saw them anew through the prism of Elizabeth’s experiences. I saw new things. At the very end, all of these mutual effects took on an explicit paranormal form when Elizabeth essentially dreamed my ideas and, in the process, cognized a number of historical details about my hometown and the deaths of my maternal grandparents. You will see.
I have seen this human mirroring and self-creation work its magic so many times that I have taken up the role of facilitating it. In the fall of 2016, I invited Elizabeth and her husband Matt to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where I often teach and work. There I introduced them to a collective of scholars and scientists who work on anomalous experiences. As codirector of the institute’s Center for Theory and Research, I regularly help plan and host these private symposia.
As part of these five-day events, we organize a Wednesday evening event for the Esalen community, during which the group in session shares what they are addressing and exploring in their conversations that week. I asked two of our participants to represent the collective for the evening: Elizabeth and Whitley Strieber, the science fiction writer who has written explicitly about his own abduction experiences and with whom I have also written a book.15 Whitley and Elizabeth both told pieces of their remarkable stories to about 100 people in the room that night.
Whitley seemed at peace with his gifts and experiences, although they have been exceedingly bizarre (go read his books, if you don’t believe me). He seems to routinely interact with another plane of reality or hidden dimension that is different from the one most of us know and experience. Elizabeth does as well, of course, but she seemed more uncertain, more anxious about what it all meant. She seemed more, well, conflicted.
Esalen being Esalen, the audience responded in kind during the question-and-answer session that followed. They focused in on Elizabeth, with many of those in attendance offering their specific advice about how she could learn to better accept and integrate her gifts into her life. Whitley would also offer his own advice after the event. He explained to Elizabeth why he thought she only dreams of plane crashes and natural disasters: because she is being called to help those people move on to the other world from this one.
The takeaway, for Elizabeth anyway, was this. Before this week at Esalen, she had only seen her abilities and dreams as a curse, as a form of pointless suffering. One can well sympathize with this conclusion. I mean, really, what is the purpose of dreaming of people dying in a plane crash, and then hearing about their deaths the next day in the news? But now she was beginning to hear and think otherwise. She was beginning to see, or at least consider, these capacities as gifts, as a set of charged skills to be used for the benefit and welfare of others.
As a bit of context, I should add that this was hardly the first time that such stories and advice were offered at Esalen. The institute was founded in 1962 to intellectually explore and nurture through practice and community what it calls the “human potential,” which one could easily gloss for our own purposes here as “paranormal powers like those of Elizabeth Krohn and Whitley Strieber.” Esalen, then, is not just a place one goes to talk about such things, although that is very much a part of the nurturance, support, and development, too. One also goes there to practice the powers, and to learn from others how to integrate these human potentials into daily life on various related personal, social, and political levels. Esalen leaders, for example, have been deeply involved in Russian-American relations for more than four decades now (they sponsored Boris Yeltsin’s trip to the United States in 1989), and much of the early work was explicitly focused on parapsychological themes.16
Similar fusions of intellectual understanding and paranormal practice spilled over into the symposium itself. During the conversations, which got very academic and technical at times, Elizabeth kept talking about seeing everyone’s auras in the room, including the aura of Jeremy Stolow, an academic colleague who was writing a book on the history of media, photography, and auras! Jeremy was very generous about Elizabeth’s observations and took all of this in humorous stride. He had encountered aura seers before, for sure, but never while delivering an academic talk on the history of auras. This fusion of the academic and the visionary in the same room was clearly a first for him, and for many of us.
The same was true of Whitley’s participation in the symposium. During one of the presentations by a physics colleague, Harald Atmanspacher of Zurich, he appeared to be asleep. We all assumed as much, as did Harald, who tried to rouse him into a conversation.
“I am not asleep,” Whitley replied firmly. “I am trying to leave my body.” The comedic timing was perfect.
But he was also being perfectly serious. In a previous Esalen symposium that Whitley attended with me, he in fact did experience leaving his body, during the night this time. As he reported to us in great detail the next morning, he flew across the country toward the dawn, which was just rising on the East Coast, and visited a university campus there. As he described specific details of the campus (the buildings and what was hanging on the wall of one of the faculty offices), two of the attending scholars recognized it as their own campus and department through some bizarrely specific details. Whitley later visited the same campus at the invitation of these colleagues and confirmed a number of details of his out-of-body flight. I should add that before he left for the East Coast in his out-of-body trip, Whitley tried to visit me in my room, which was just across the hall from his. But I could not be woken from my slumber. Typical. I am dull like that.
Because of moments like these (of which there have been too many to recall or recount), I often refer to Esalen as a real-world Hogwarts, of Harry Potter fame. I am indeed a “Muggle” in relationship to the fantastic beasts and magical world in which individuals like Whitley and Elizabeth routinely live and act. If you have not read the books or seen the movies, a Muggle is an ordinary human being who does not have access to the magical world and abilities that the students of Hogwarts take as second nature, despite the fact that it is all “next door” in another dimension of the same super natural world in which we all live. My deep slumber and inability to see Whitley in his second body was Muggle-like in this mythical sense.
In other moods, I sometimes describe Esalen as a real-world School for the Gifted, that is, a school for mutants, as in the X-Men films, where psychically gifted individuals can come for support, guidance, and human community in a world that only shuns and rejects them, or worse. Given the fact that Esalen and the X-Men were created at the same time (1962–63), and given the long history of evolutionary spiritualities at Esalen, that is, ideas and practices that explicitly link supernormal abilities to evolutionary processes, this particular mythical reference is eerily precise. I am only half joking when I invoke such references, then. The mythical language actually comes closest to the actual truth of things. Mutants exist. So do magicians. If you don’t believe me, well, that’s because you’re a Muggle. That’s because you are not a mutant.
I am speaking mythically, of course, but also perfectly seriously. This same deep resonance between science fiction and the paranormal was the main theme of my book Mutants and Mystics.17 There I argued that much of science fiction is based on the actual paranormal experiences of the psychically gifted writers and artists who have helped create this particular genre (hence my opening epigraph). In other words, there is an invisible experiential foundation to what we now call science fiction, and this invisible baseline is spiritual in nature, if in a nontraditional or very modern way.
Because of the specific talents of the individuals in whom such extraordinary events erupt (that is, professional writers and artists), these paranormal events are not “believed”; that is, they are not treated as a confirmation of some past religious worldview. But neither do such artists seek to “prove” them; that is, they do not try to reproduce them in controlled, reliable, and measurable ways. They are not professional scientists. Rather, these writers and artists do what they do. They create future worlds. More practically speaking, they transform their paranormal experiences into fiction and film, which is to say: into mystical art and modern myth. This process is so well known that some writers have invoked a playful pun and referred to sci-fi as psi-fi, “psi” being the word (drawn from the first Greek letter of the word psyche for “soul” or “mind”) used by parapsychologists to posit some shared force or presence behind all psychical phenomena.
Once this metamorphosis from private paranormal experience to public work of art is accomplished, these works of film and fiction then enter the public mainstream, where they powerfully inform the imaginations and intuitions of countless individuals on both conscious and unconscious levels. From there, they then shape the subsequent paranormal experiences of others, some of whom speak or write of them in public, and the process starts all over again. Around and around it goes, and where it stops (or begins) nobody knows.
It is simply naive, then, to say, as the dogmatic debunkers often do, something like, “Well, these visions and encounters are clearly based on the science fiction stories of the time.” True enough, but the reverse is also true, namely, “Well, the science fiction stories of the time are clearly based on the visions and encounters of those who wrote them.” The arrow flies both ways. The snake swallows its own tail.
Science fiction, of course, is hardly the first genre about strange beings coming from the sky to do strange things to human beings. Human beings have been experiencing such things and telling such stories as far back as we can see, and these stories are, yes, always framed in the cultural narratives and natural science of the place and time. This is the history of religions.
Elizabeth’s near-death experience and subsequent life events are no exception to this general pattern. They clearly have something profound to do with what we have come to call “religion.” But what is religion? And how are we to think about it in ways that are sensitive to a particular person’s relationship to a particular religious tradition? Elizabeth, recall, loves her Jewish community but has serious problems with much Jewish belief and practice, even as she displays in abundance all kinds of special powers that have long, long histories in the religions, including and especially Judaism and its mystical traditions. Any definition of religion we want to take up has to be supple and sophisticated enough to embrace both the big picture and all the little pictures. Moreover, it cannot paper over anything. It cannot just cheerlead for religion. It also has to say, “Now wait a minute.…”
I want to suggest one such definition here. It is not mine. It was conceived by the late sociologist of religion Martin Riesebrodt, who described religion as a “legitimate form of science fiction.” What he meant by this is that religion is “a complex of practices that are based on the premise of the existence of superhuman powers, whether personal or impersonal, that are generally invisible.” In Riesebrodt’s model, a practice or belief is religious precisely to the extent that it enables human beings to “make contact” with a source of superhuman power. Elizabeth and the lightning strike (not to mention Esalen and the human potential movement) resonate perfectly with Riesebrodt’s description of one form of such religious contact: “activating superhuman potential that slumbers within a person.”18
I want to take up Riesebrodt’s definition here and reread religion, and especially modern forms of spirituality, as “practiced science fiction” aimed at just this actualization of the “superhuman potentials” that slumber in each of us, with some of us, like myself, alas, slumbering deeper. I propose this definition with the understanding that (a) this “practiced science fiction” might well express something very real and very important about the world we live in, including the actual presence and power of these superhuman potentials, and (b) just because something is expressed fictionally does not mean that it is not real or true. Fiction in fact might be the only way available to us at the moment to express future truths that have not yet taken on any stable cultural or conceptual forms in our religions and sciences, that is, in our respectable public institutions. Science fiction, in essence, allows the paranormal to slip through our censors and thought police, be they religious or scientistic.
I also recognize, of course, that using a word like “fiction” might offend, as individual believers do not understand their beliefs as “fictional.” I do not want to blunt this edge, however, as I think that that edge is important. This is my “Now wait a minute.…”
I see no honest way around this. After all, if we are going to respect and take seriously all forms of religious belief and experience (and that is precisely my calling and job as a historian of religions), then we must treat each and every specific religious belief system as fictional in the simple sense that no particular religious system can be literally or absolutely true (since this would render nonsensical and false every other religious system, which would make it impossible for us to take them seriously). We must also recognize that every specific religious belief system is fictitious for anyone living outside of it. It simply is not true for such a person. We may be polite and not say this, but this is the actual case of things: every religion is fictitious for anyone living and thinking outside of it.
I understand, of course, that nearly all traditional religious systems want to insist on their own absolute and literal truths and dismiss or demonize every other religious tradition. But that is not my goal or perspective here. Like Riesebrodt, I compare religions. I do not pick one over all the others. And comparison thrives not in a literalist approach to religion but in a symbolic approach, that is, an interpretation that understands the religions as mythical and ritual systems that claim to communicate transcendent truths through images and stories that express cosmic truths without themselves being literally true. Religion, here at least, is a kind of fiction that communicates truth, not a fiction that is nothing but fiction. Please hold onto that paradox. Please sit with its inherent ambiguity. Do not try to resolve it; that is, do not erase the fiction for the truth or the truth for the fiction. Hold onto both at the same time. As Elizabeth learned in her near-death experience, nothing is black and white. Everything is gray. So be gray.
Such a both-and approach is perhaps best captured by something Elizabeth once said to me after I had loaned her a copy of Mircea Eliade’s paranormal novel Youth Without Youth. Eliade was one of the most celebrated scholars of comparative religion of the twentieth century. He towered above the field. He was also a well-known literary figure in his own Romanian culture. This particular novel, his last, is about an aging Romanian intellectual named Dominic Matei (Eliade was quite old and suffering from severe arthritis when he wrote this novel). Dominic is decrepit and depressed, and he is on his way to commit suicide on the evening of Easter when he is struck by lightning in a sudden rainstorm behind a church while holding an umbrella. A “fiery cyclone” appears above his head and lifts him off the street in a spectacular display of power and light. But the strange strike does not kill him. The lightning in fact initiates a whole series of profound transformations in Dominic while he recovers in a hospital.
Many of these mysterious transformations are paranormal in nature. He can hear people’s thoughts. He has dreams of the near future, of the next day, for example. He experiences a spiritual double or guardian angel that appears throughout the novel at key points and who informs him that the extraordinary events of his life are not accidental. His eventual love interest, also struck by lightning, also possesses paranormal powers. She had been traumatized, almost killed, in a terrible storm that involved heavy lightning and falling boulders. She remembers her previous lives, one of them as a Buddhist in ancient India.
When Elizabeth returned the book to me, I asked her what she thought of it. She was immediate and blunt: “That’s not fiction.”
But, of course, it is.
And yet it is not, since Eliade was convinced of the reality and fundamental importance of paranormal powers.
And therein lies the irreducible paradox of religion as practiced science fiction.
There are other modern ways of getting at the same spiritual paradox. Riesebrodt’s definition of religion as a legitimate form of science fiction, for example, comes with a number of further gifts of insight and new direction, some of them no doubt unintended. One of the most important of these is how it provides us with a very powerful metaphor through which we might balance both the fictional components and the potential reality of the near-death experience through a single image: the image of projected light in a movie theater.
This is a very subtle point that requires the reader to hold in tension the fundamental ambiguity of the near-death experience (and, really, almost any extreme religious experience): the simultaneous presence of fiction and fact, of illusion and reality, of trick and truth. I have, of course, just introduced this paradoxical structure of religious experience above, and I will return to it below, when I treat the key role of the religious imagination, but an initial thought experiment and set of images are more than apt at this juncture, again around our psi-fi theme.
It is really quite striking how often modern near-death experiences, or modern visionary experiences in general for that matter, invoke the imagery of film or television to describe their details. Elizabeth once said to me: “I am the screen to a movie when the visions occur.” In a similar technological metaphor, another near-death experiencer speaks of the common “tunnel of light” that pulled him inside and out of which emerged “a man made of light that I think was Jesus.” The human lightform showed him his entire life, whose scenes emerged from a “wall of light that looked like a television that I could actually step into if I wanted.”19 One could go on here for pages and pages recounting other modern religious experiences coded in film or television frameworks. Such film and television metaphors are so common, of course, because of the centrality of those mediums in modern life.
But they are also commonly used because the analogies work so well, perhaps, we might speculate, because the visions themselves are biotechnological projections of some sort, intensified and activated by the innate but rarely expressed biochemistry presumably released by the traumatic moment and its life-or-death needs. The latter possibility is suggested by the fact that the hyperrealistic visions catalyzed by the sacred plant cultures of Latin America are highly reminiscent of near-death experiences. Many of these visions are induced or catalyzed by a particular psychoactive plant molecule called DMT or dimethyltriptamine, an entirely natural molecule occurring in many plants and animals, and probably in our own bodies and brains. Indeed, some psychopharmacologists and botanists have speculated that in moments of trauma and death our body-brains release DMT to induce vision and allow us to leave the body. The same sorts of visions can be had in the ayahuasca rituals with a specifically brewed tea. Interestingly enough, the visionaries sometimes call the result “vegetable television.”
Let us take up this oft-used analogy of the living television or movie and think with it. Consider in particular a movie theater and its projection technology. What is a movie here? It is an elaborate display of colorful and carefully refracted light that is being projected onto a blank screen from up above and behind the audience. The viewing audience quickly forgets this, of course, and interacts with the personalities and events on the screen as if they were real, when in fact—forgive me—they are reel (or at least were: they are mostly digital now).
Please also note that a great deal of human work has gone into each and every second of each and every scene, but the audience forgets all of that as well, that is, until the credits roll and it becomes obvious that the last hour and a half took the labor of thousands of individuals spread out over tens of thousands of hours. What looked spontaneous and effortless on the screen was no such thing; it had, in fact, been constructed by so many intentional acts, skill sets, and physical and economic resources that we as individuals cannot process it all. The credits continue to speed by. The mind is boggled.
I once explained this model of the religious imagination to a fellow academic, Luis Eduardo Luna, an anthropologist and scholar of comparative religion who grew up in Colombia and who has worked with psychoactive plants and Amazonian shamanism for decades now. He laughed when I explained the metaphors of the 3-D movie and its long cultural credits running at the end. He laughed because his visions on ayahuasca are often 3-D in this precise sense (he can move around in them in a three-dimensional visionary space). He also laughed because he has often asked during his visions who or what is behind it all and how he is supposed to understand what he is viewing in three-dimensional space.
Luis has been given two different answers, in visionary form. In one, he saw a movie screen being held up by strange little creatures. He giggled as he described it to me. In another, he actually saw credits rolling by after the visionary experience was over! Obviously, the vision itself knows that it is a culturally written and directed movie, and it wanted Luis to know, too. Now we all know. For the historian of Western philosophy and mystical literature, such movie metaphors are not entirely new, and the particular arrangement of the modern movie theater is strangely familiar. Indeed, it eerily reproduces the setup of one of the most famous of all philosophical parables, often simply called “The Parable of Plato’s Cave,” since this story has come down to us through the ancient Greek philosopher Plato and involves a cave. The recorded or written story dates back to the early fourth century before the Common Era, that is, around 2,400 years ago. Plato’s The Republic, the text from which we take the tale, is usually dated around 380 BCE. But the parable itself and the mystical and philosophical sensibilities it encodes are no doubt much older.
Plato uses the story to get across the profound difference between how the philosopher or visionary sees reality and how the common person sees it, or really does not see it. He wants to help us understand how we routinely mistake our sensory perceptions and commonsense assumptions for the luminous nature of reality as it really and truly is. We have opinions. The enlightened philosopher knows.
To demonstrate what he means, Plato describes a group of hapless individuals chained to a cave floor. Their chains are such that they cannot look back. Imprisoned in this position, they are made to watch simple shadow shows on the cave wall. These shows are created by the prison-keepers passing objects in front of a fire in the very back of the cave. Essentially, what we have here is a crude, ancient movie theater. Since this is all they ever see, the prisoners assume that reality is such a shadow show. That is all there is. Plato then describes one of the prisoners breaking free and climbing up out of the cave into the open air and brilliant sun outside. At first blinded and bedazzled, he nevertheless eventually adjusts his vision and sees, for the first time, the true nature of reality as beautiful and shining. He returns to the cave in order to tell his fellow prisoners about what shines just outside their dull, dark perceptions, but they reject him as crazy, as a dreamer, as a threat to their own stable and obvious sense of things.
But the truth is the truth, and the visionary can never be tricked again by the banal, boring shadows on the cave wall. He is different now, and he will never fit in again to the dark, dank cave. He does not just think or see what someone else wants him to think and wants him to see. He now knows the world as it is, not as it seems. And he is free.
The most important places in Elizabeth’s story where I think the sci-fi or psi-fi reading works best are those moments in which she reflects on how her extraordinary experiences were both revelations of the way things really are and yet are also visionary projections of her imagination. Here is the paradox of religious experience again, that confusing mix of fiction and truth. And here again is where the metaphor of the movie theater and the projector works so well. This metaphor, after all, can help us to understand much more easily how and why a near-death experience feels “more real than real,” and probably is, even if it is being expressed through a fictional, film-like narrative. There are at least three separate issues here: one a matter of neurobiology; one that we might gather under the rubric of intensity; and one that we can refer to as the invisible projector.
First, a note on neurobiology. It is absolutely crucial that we understand that we are always living in a virtual reality display: we are always projecting our own personal 3-D movies. There is no light inside our skulls. It is entirely dark “in there.” And there is no color or sound or pleasure or pain “out there.” The lit-up world you see and move through is an elaborate neurological display that is being constantly corrected and modulated by sensory input from the electromagnetic environment around you. (When we fall asleep and dream, these sensory inputs from the physical world cease, and so our internal displays get wild and fantastic, but the neurological processes are shared.) The colors you see, the sounds you hear, the warmth and cold and pleasure and pain you feel, the meanings you attach to different objects, including the different biological organisms interacting with you called “people”—all of this is constructed and then projected by your neurobiology.
You have probably heard the philosophical riddle: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?” There is actually a straightforward answer to this: “No.” It does not make a sound. A sound, after all, is a relationship between an eardrum and an electromagnetic event or sound wave. We can speak of a wave here, but we cannot speak of a sound. No eardrum, no sound.
A little side note about the paranormal practice of writing and reading. Humorously, a half hour or so after I wrote those last lines, a tree fell just outside my window, not more than 200 feet away in a cemetery next to which we live. I distinctly heard the crash. Then a few hours later, a second tree crashed to the ground, not thirty feet away, just on the other side of our fence. The falling trees were getting closer, as if to catch my attention and underline a point. But which point? Then I took a walk in the cemetery. Five trees were now down. This was getting a bit ridiculous.
It was unclear when each of these trees fell, and in which order. I really have no idea. I never saw any of the trees fall (a fence on our lot line prevents such a view into the cemetery from the first floor where my home study is). But I distinctly heard one just after I wrote the lines above about hearing a tree fall in a forest. And I knew that all five trees had fallen very recently, as I walk our dog, Delilah, in that cemetery nearly every day. Of course, there were natural reasons why a tree might fall, like a rain-soaked ground, a subsequent freeze, and a strong wind that day, but still, the wind wasn’t that strong, and five? But really, it was the timing that was so eerie (and so funny). That and the fact that never in my entire life had I heard a single tree fall naturally.
Maybe I am not a Muggle after all. Maybe I am some kind of unconscious psychokinetic marvel, a sleeping superwizard.
Okay, probably not.
Back to the neurobiology. We do not yet understand how this all works (including the falling trees answering to my line about the falling tree), but we do know that what you see is not what is there. We know that our senses, evolved to adapt, survive, and procreate, in fact pick up the smallest fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum of energy that is out there and that constitutes the physical world. The rest, even of the physical world, is entirely outside and beyond the reach of the evolved sensory system. Accordingly, the movie you are seeing and living in right now is a constructed fraction of the real. It is not the real.
Second, a note on intensity. It is impossible to read very far into the near-death literature and not encounter, again and again, the claim or description of what was seen as “unlike anything I have seen before.” But, inevitably, the visionary has seen such things, here on earth actually, even if those things are put together in a new and striking way in the visionary afterlife, much as we do every night in our dreams with the stuff of our waking lives.
It is also the case in a typical near-death experience that the “colors are so much brighter,” or that “everything just seemed so much more real.” To return to our metaphor, it is as if the light of the projector has suddenly amped up, way up, and the movie screen has become psychedelic. Or, better, it is as if the visionary has moved from the simple technology of the movie theater into the 3-D world of virtual reality goggles. One can now move around inside the vision, inside the movie. Whatever visionary technologies are being activated by the trauma and extremity of the near-death experience, the show is way better.
The analogy is breaking down. Let us return to the movie theater. There is a reason that the near-death visionary display might feel so real, and this has to do with the invisible projector at the “back” of the visionary theater. Think of it this way. The characters and events on the movie screen are not real, but the light is. Moreover, the real source of the light will remain entirely unknown, since, to stick to our metaphor, the projector projecting the light remains “up” and “behind” the viewers. What happens in a near-death experience, I suspect, is that the dying viewer loses interest in the drama on the screen and turns around. What he or she “sees” (or becomes), of course, is the projected light itself. Hence the famous “tunnel of light” into which one is sucked or toward which one flies. The tunnel might well be the projector.
The 3-D display into which one nearly dies, then, is superrealistic, unlike anything a human being can experience with the ordinary senses. Still, it is not literally true. It is also actually not what is being encountered and intuited through the motifs of immortality, infinity, eternity, and unconditional love. What I think is happening is that the light of consciousness itself, now being increasingly released from its ordinary bodily restrictions and neurobiological reductions, is trying to reveal itself as it really is. The projector is attempting to reverse its projections. Still, it cannot yet do this. It cannot yet express itself as itself, since the person has not yet really died and so still exists as a movie screen, which is to say, as a projection. And so the light expresses itself to the visionary or human screen in the only way that it can: through more projections, that is, through symbolic and mythical terms within a kind of sci-fi virtual world.
This double truth (a very real light shining through a very fictional display) is why every near-death experience is different: because every human projection/screen is different. It is also why near-death experiences also seem so similar: because the light is the light before it is refracted through and “becomes” a person on the screen. Finally, it is also why the visionaries have a profound sense that they are encountering something superreal and superintelligent in, through, and behind the visionary display. They probably are.