And Jesus said, “Whoever finds the meaning of these words will not taste death.”
—Gospel of Thomas, logion 1
In the previous two chapters, we looked briefly at the nature of “science” and “religion” and what they have to do with Elizabeth’s experiences. In this chapter, I want to return to the “imagination,” which we have already engaged through the metaphor of the film being projected from the back of the movie theater. I want to return in an attempt to dislodge from the reader’s mind any notion that what is imagined is always imaginary. I want to take what I consider to be Elizabeth’s instinctive understanding of the religious imagination and turn it into something more akin to a fully conscious and discussable model. Put a bit differently, I want to take up Elizabeth’s precognitions and revelations and try to transform them into something the rest of us can think about and use—take a little lightning from the bottle/book, as it were, and put it to good use. I want to get a little sizzle and spark on the page.
In truth, the imagination is the secret of everything we are discussing in these pages. If we do not have an adequate understanding of the imagination, then we will not have an adequate understanding of the near-death experience, of ourselves, or of the afterlives we ourselves are dying into and constantly changing. The imagination is the ultimate framework that makes any event plausible or implausible, possible or impossible. It all hinges on this.
As a first attempt to think about the religious imagination, let us think of it as that organ or dimension of consciousness that gives us access to communications that can only reach us in symbolic or mythical form, that is, in fantastic images and strange stories akin to science fiction. The religious imagination is what acts as a medium or diplomat between us and that which is attempting to communicate with us (which may be some alienated part of us).
As a way of getting a handle on this, we might think of the source of these communications as the form of life and consciousness that, say, a dolphin, a whale, or an octopus possesses. How exactly would such alien forms of life communicate what they know, what they experience in the ocean, to us violent hairless monkeys up on that thing floating on top of the world? They certainly cannot use any human language, and we certainly cannot understand whatever languages or forms of communication they no doubt routinely use. What can they do, then? What can we do? Maybe most seriously of all, why would they want to communicate with us at all?
I am uncomfortably reminded of a bumper sticker I saw on the highways of Florida once: “If animals could talk, we would all be vegetarians.” That is no doubt closer to the truth than most of us are willing to admit. My brother, otherwise an omnivore, will not eat octopi—they are just too intelligent, too damn smart, too, well, human. They are squishy humanoids that live in the sea. He first told me this as I shamefully cut my steak knife into an octopus’s tentacle on a seafood platter. I do not eat octopus anymore. Jerry ruined that one for me.
But octopi are certainly not alone in their intelligence and humanoid awareness. So maybe we don’t want to communicate with the alien forms of life we eat every day either. But what if we did? Or what if they reached out?
What we would need, of course, is translation. Their language or form of communication would need to be translated into ours, and vice versa. Perhaps we should distinguish here between contact and communication. Contact is fairly easy and extremely common (if often violent—consider the poor octopus on my plate). Communication, adequate communication anyway, is really difficult and very rare. We could have contact without such translation, but we could not have effective communication. There must be some kind of interface or translation process from one species to another for true communication to occur.
The way this works in the history of religions—which, true to our understanding of religion as practiced science fiction, we might imagine as one long history of “contact” and attempted “communication” between human and nonhuman or superhuman forms of mind and presence—is through revelation, symbol, and myth, that is, through overwhelmingly powerful irruptions into ordinary life that communicate in indirect and imperfect forms. Such divine invasions usually work through some altered state of consciousness in the recipient—say a meditative or trance state or a possession—and attempt communication with us through poetry, picture, and, above all, through story.
This is how these forms of mind attempt to get around our rational forms of thinking, how they try to “get in.” Apparently, they cannot get in through our normal defenses, our everyday bounded sense of self, or our linear “sensible” logic. The container of the ego or body-brain (for the ego is modeled on the body) is just too thick and dense. But sometimes, when this bounded container is violated or compromised (as in sexual trauma or a lightning strike), these communications come rushing in, often, alas, to the great confusion of the recipient. They are confusing because such forms of mind and knowledge have to speak to the recipient in translated ways, and what they are translating makes little or no sense to the ordinary forms of knowledge that the ego knows and assumes to be true in its particular social surround and partial, sense-based movie world. The octopi are talking to the fisherman, and they make absolutely no sense—no sense to the fisherman, of course.
To make sense to the fisherman, such deep, watery truths must be translated into dry, landlocked terms that the fisherman can understand and process. The result is translation, yes, but also distortion. This double translation-distortion is essentially what one finds in the history of religious revelation. Such remembered events often likely encode actual anomalous events or extraordinary experiences, which are then subsequently expressed in elaborate mythical narratives and ritual reenactments that have been worked over and inevitably concretized or literalized over generations and then centuries.
Such mythical and ritual expressions (basically what we mean by “religion” today) need not be considered false, but it is quite dangerous to accept them as literally (and exclusively) true. Put differently, such revelations may well encode truths that are so complex and so subtle that they cannot be spoken or understood with ordinary language and reason. They are forms of octopi truth that the landlocked thinking of the crazy monkeys floating on top of the water cannot process and understand. They are forms of true science fiction.
If you ask how the ancients, or the moderns, came to their own stories, how they heard and saw them, I would say, “Well, often probably a lot like Elizabeth Krohn did, in extreme conditions and anomalous psychic states, like near-death and out-of-body experiences, which is to say: they heard them ‘in the heavens.’” In the ancient world, by the way, the term “in the heavens” meant “among the stars.” And here the ancients were being quite literal. They meant “up there.” They meant something close to what we mean by “extraterrestrial” or “alien.”
I wrote the bit above about octopi well before I saw the science fiction film Arrival (2016), which features octopi-like aliens communicating symbolically through inky language-circles, which, to the historian of religions anyway, look a lot like the calligraphy of Japanese Zen artists expressing the Buddhist teaching of emptiness. Elizabeth saw the film shortly after it was released in Houston the week after we returned from Esalen. She was so moved by it that she insisted I go see it, and that we meet immediately.
It would take me almost a week to get away from my duties, but I would finally see it as well. I too was deeply moved by the film, if for somewhat different reasons. In a previous book, Authors of the Impossible, I had been critical of the fact that the only culturally relevant framework for extraterrestrial contact was a Cold War one, that is, the alien invasion trope. This, of course, implies that what an alien presence is about, what it can only be about, is a threat to national security or an invasion from outer space. Just whose violence and invasions are we really talking about here?
I begged my readers to reconsider this and to imagine contact from the perspective of an anthropologist or a historian of religions, that is, as a contact between different cultures, mind forms, and languages and all that this might mean for both cultures. I also invoked mystical literature, religious symbolism, and, above all, literary forms of interpretation as the proper modes of intercultural translation between such radically different forms of consciousness. In short, I begged for translation and communication, not more bombs and fighter jets and macho military bravado.
Really? You really think that will work?
What so delighted me about Arrival is that Hollywood finally got it right. This was no silly shoot-’em-up space western, with Will Smith punching out an alien or the Marines rescuing Los Angeles from ugly extraterrestrial monsters. The military was present in Arrival, of course, but it worked only by not working, that is, by holding back. The military, for once in such a movie, practiced wise restraint. And when the haters of our fake propaganda news (you know who I mean) inspired some soldiers to carry a bomb onto the floating alien craft, the result was not an open war, but once again restraint, this time on the part of the wise aliens.
Even more telling, it was not the physicist Ian Donnelly (played by Jeremy Renner) who provided the goods to save the day. Rather, it was Louise Banks (played by Amy Adams), the expert linguist, the academic who specialized in human language and the subtleties of interpretation. The (male) physicist-mathematician was there for support and occasional insight, yes, but his forms of knowledge were minor and more or less useless. Pretty much everything relied on the intuitions of the (female) linguist and her willingness to be vulnerable and physically exposed to the alien presence. She took a stance that was anything but aggressive, military, and male. She literally took her protective suit off to stand before the tentacled aliens and communicate with them visually, physically, and even, we imagine, spiritually. She took a stance of communion.
Once such a stance is established and operationalized, the narrative plays out through a series of communications that are at first misinterpreted but eventually read correctly. It is not guns and bombs that save the world, but communion, communication, and, above all, paranormal interpretation. The octopi-like aliens, for example, spin an inky circle that apparently means, “There is no time.” At first, the human team thinks that this means, “You are out of time. It is too late.” But this is not what the aliens are communicating. They mean something like, “There is no such thing as time. Time is an illusion.” Or as they put it, “All is one.”
If there is any unifying message of the world’s mystical traditions, by the way, that is it.
They also communicated the messages, “Louise has the weapon” and “Use the weapon.” Yikes. That is what they seemed to say, anyway. But what Louise Banks possesses is not a “weapon.” Again, that is the wrong interpretation. Rather, what she has is a “gift.” And misinterpreting this single word—“gift” as “weapon”—could spell disaster for the entire planet, since the phrase “Use the weapon” seems to imply: “Use your nuclear arsenal. We are threatening you.” But this violent military reading is all wrong. This is not what the aliens are communicating with their Zen-like circles of emptiness and enlightenment. The gift, it turns out, is Louise’s paranormal ability to see outside of time, and in particular to see the future. Louise is learning to think and cognize outside of linear time. She is learning to accept as a precious gift what feels like a terrible curse. It feels like a terrible curse because throughout the movie she is in fact precognizing the early death of her own precious daughter, not yet born, from a rare and incurable disease. Significantly, we as viewers, caught in our own (false) assumptions about linear time, assume that these scenes are flashbacks to the past. But she is remembering the future, not the past. We don’t get it, until we do.
Another kind of circle.
And this, it turns out, is the reason the aliens have landed, to teach us about the illusion of time. This is the goal of their global “invasion.” In three thousand years, they will need our help, so they are giving us help now.
It is not difficult to see why Elizabeth was so moved, really deeply shaken, by the film. The fictional aliens are teaching us what she can already factually do—perceive forward along the timeline. In this sense, the aliens are correct: “There is no time.” Like Louise Banks, Elizabeth Krohn too was learning to accept as a gift what she thought was a curse. This was essentially Whitley’s message to her at Esalen the week before: “You are precognizing the plane crashes to help the dying transition. Use your gift.” Eerily, Elizabeth’s gift is the same gift that the aliens of Arrival brought to earth—the gift of the knowledge that at least some of us, as embodied forms of consciousness united with the cosmos (“All is one”), are perfectly capable of knowing something of the future (“There is no time”) and using this knowledge for the good.
Such films raise the question of what exactly these alien forms of mind are communicating and how they are communicating it. A number of writers have noted how modern science fiction film has been playing with the themes of illusion and reality and how we might recognize the illusion and move toward the real. Such modern commentators have also observed how the modern movie theater is an especially apt ritual space with which to do this. Indeed, this modern space replicates in nearly every detail the layout and potential purpose of Plato’s cave discussed earlier (okay, except for the chains). My Rice University colleague April DeConick has been particularly eloquent about this in her book The Gnostic New Age: How a Countercultural Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today (2016).
As the title signals, April is most concerned with “gnostic” forms of knowing and seeing. Gnosis is an ancient Greek word whose verbal root gno- is related to our own English root kno-, as in “knowing.” The word refers to immediate or direct knowledge, usually of heavenly or extraterrestrial truths or—and this is really important—of the innate and natural divinity of the human soul. These are truths of ultimate or cosmic import that, being direct or immediate (rather than external or indirect), cannot be expressed in typical sensory or objective terms.
Gnosis is simply not the kind of knowledge that one can derive from the senses mediating a physical environment. It is not information. It is not data. You cannot Google it and “get” it. It is not about knowing that there is a tree over there, or that so-and-so was born on such-and-such a date. It is not a knowing about something. It is a kind of knowing by becoming that which one knows. As with the paranormal, the normal division between the subject of knowing and the object of knowing breaks down or dissolves, but in an even more radical way. Finally, gnosis is a kind of knowledge that releases one from the common consensus reality and ushers one into a fantastically new sense of reality. This is why it is so often connected to what we think of as religion (though it need not be).
If such a gnosis or direct knowing cannot be communicated by the senses and does not involve the knowledge of some object or event “out there,” then how exactly can it be communicated? How can it be shown? Significantly, gnostic forms of knowledge have most often been expressed in two different genres: in nuanced philosophical discussion, and in elaborate visionary, mythical, or symbolic frameworks, which is to say: through images and stories communicating ultimate truths or profound meanings. Plato’s cave, of course, is just such a story illustrating a profound philosophical idea. But if you read the ancient gnostic scriptures, composed in the first few centuries of the Common Era and now widely available in many translations, you will see that they do much the same. You will also see that they read very much like ancient science fiction stories. Read literally, they are kind of crazy. Read mythically or philosophically, they are sublime.
This is one reason why an author like April DeConick has argued that the stories and truths of the ancient gnostic Christians are best expressed today in two related forms of popular cultural expression: New Age revelation and science fiction film. She plays out this idea through careful readings of classic sci-fi films (The Matrix, The Truman Show, Pleasantville, Pi, Avatar, and so on) and careful comparisons with ancient gnostic material, demonstrating in the process how both genres—one modern, one ancient—attempt to communicate very similar truths about the fiction of the world we think we live in and the beauty and power of the world we actually live in but cannot normally know.
As social robots, we live in a virtual reality display coded by those dark archons who wish to feed on us and so would keep us trapped and ignorant of our own unlimited powers (The Matrix). The carefully ordered and conservative world of a 1950s sitcom might seem to be all “black and white,” but if we tapped into our deepest sources of artistic creativity, reading, and sexual arousal, we could turn it all into a brilliant, colorful world of creative freedom and productive disorder (Pleasantville). And so on. It is in this way that DeConick explains what gnosis is, not by giving it to us directly (she cannot), but by showing us what it looks like, thinks like, feels like in different sci-fi films.
All of this is directly relevant here. Much of Elizabeth’s account of her near-death experience and its effects on her life fits very comfortably in such a gnostic framework. As she repeatedly says and now writes here, she “just knew.” And the things she “just knew” included the cosmic truths of immortality and reincarnation, which are classical, ancient gnostic motifs. Her understanding of the soul as being a “spark” of the eternal light of God is also perfectly gnostic (and kabbalistic). Also especially relevant here is the dramatic ways that her gnosis showed her how illusory and mistaken her former assumptions about the world were: “How could I be so wrong? I was so wrong!” She had stepped out of the cave of the skull and seen the sun.
Even her precognitive nightmares express a deep resonance with the ancient gnostics and their communities. Those communities, after all, were fascinated by astrology and divination, that is, in the star maps for understanding their place and purpose in the cosmos and the rituals for predicting or shaping their own futures. Our own modern model of what the cosmos is and how it operates may have changed dramatically since then, but individuals continue to be concerned about their futures and continue to receive uncannily accurate signals from the same. The gnostics continue to live among us, like the magicians and mutants.
There are some very big questions wrapped up in such thoughts, such as: How did Elizabeth know what she “just knew” in the near-death state and in the subsequent paranormal cognitions? And, more complexly, how are we to think about and coordinate the obvious symbolic or imaginal components of what she knew (that is, her visions of the Garden, the mountains, the bench, and so on) and the empirical, objective, or historical nature of her subsequent precognitions (that is, the precise visual details of the actual plane crashes), which were also clearly mediated by some form of the imagination in her dreams? In what sense was she in a 3-D synesthetic movie of her (and our) own making? And in what sense was she also stepping out of that movie into some kind of transcendent hyperspace or superplace?
Two observations seem worth making here. The first is that Elizabeth’s near-death experience and subsequent paranormal cognitions appear to employ the same sensory and cognitive capacities of the human brain and body that our normal everyday experience does. We are clearly talking about a spectrum of sensory capacities here, not an absolute break with the senses. Hence she “sees,” “smells,” and “hears” in the other world. The landscape itself, although clearly alien, is also recognizably earthly.
The second observation is that, although such states appear to draw on the same sensory and cognitive capacities, they are clearly playing by different rules than our ordinary perceptions and cognitions. They appear less bound, more free, and, above all, much more vast in their reach and capacity. It is as if the human organism and its ordinary faculties have been suddenly empowered by some unknown force or energy. It is as if Clark Kent has flicked off his glasses and suddenly turned into Superman. He looks the same (except for that red and blue suit), but he’s not.
We know that our ordinary capacities are mediated and modulated by the immediate external environment, our senses, and, of course, the computer-like, on-off firing of the brain’s neurons. Our ordinary perceptions and cognitions are also, I hasten to add, limited by that same neurological hardware, which, as we have seen, has evolved to pick up only a very thin slice of the electromagnetic environment, what we call visible “light,” “heat,” and “sound.” That same hardware is also always insisting on some kind of either-or framework. Either something like a near-death experience is all literally true. Or it is all imagined, imaginary bullshit. It is all “objective,” out there. Or it is all “subjective,” in here.
That sort of thing.
Maybe we think like this because that is how the brain works: with on-off switches. But this, of course, does not mean that reality works that way. It only means our (left) brains normally do. If those brains have evolved to survive and reproduce, and they have, it also means that they are put together to pick up only what is necessary for such survival and reproduction, which means that they are also put together to be blind, deaf, and dumb to everything else.
It is difficult to avoid the obvious next step here: the brain is more of a filter or reducer of reality than a total perceiver. It keeps out far more than it lets in. But what would happen if this filtering mechanism were temporarily shut down? What would happen if a person were somehow to perceive reality without the normal cognitive functioning of such a brain, say, in the moment of a potential death? What then? Would the on-off switches and the either-or thinking still be active and in control? And if something did get through this temporary fissure or gap, how would such knowledge be communicated to the person in that experience and afterward in memory?
Again, whatever Elizabeth was seeing, smelling, and hearing in the Garden was deeply informed by the human sensory system, since “seeing,” “smelling,” and “hearing” are all sensory capacities. And yet these events also went well beyond the ordinary limits of these particular sensory capacities. Hence the colors she “sees” were like none she had ever seen, and she “hears” the voice not as an external set of sound waves but “telepathically,” within herself. She also finds herself with capacities that she did not have in her normal life. For one thing, she can float in the parking lot and synagogue, and she “flies” to another realm, apparently by mere thought or desire. She also finds herself in a place that does not exist on Earth. It looks like another planet altogether, with multiple moons or orbiting planets. (Or, as my colleague Brian Ogren suggested after reading her descriptions of these spheres, these look more than a little like the three uppermost sefirot or spherical “emanations” of the Ein-Sof or “Infinite” of Kabbalah.) It is as if all of her senses and capacities were working, but in a supercharged way. She is still human, but she has also become superhuman. Everything behaves exactly as if it were taking place in a science fiction film.
We cannot know the precise neurological state of Elizabeth’s brain during the few seconds she lay unconscious on the wet pavement in the rain. We cannot even say if she was clinically dead. But we can certainly observe that, in her own experience at least, she had indeed died. She went. We can also reasonably suggest that Elizabeth’s time in the Garden was modulated by some other order of perception and contact. For one thing, although she was unconscious “here” for only a few minutes, in her experience “there” the event lasted two weeks! The temporal stream had expanded exponentially, as if “now” had exploded and opened out into some kind of pre-eternal Now. For another, her multiple experiences and conversations in the Garden were filled with content and claims that could not have possibly been a function of her eyes and ears soaking in the rain in the grease puddle for a few brief seconds.
So how did she do this? More precisely, with what organs of perception and cognition was she perceiving and knowing? Elizabeth herself does not answer these questions. Why should she? These are my questions, not hers. But her natural language and her memories give us clues about how we might answer those questions now, standing well after and outside her story. Consider, for example, Elizabeth’s reflections on how “heaven” will appear differently to different people, and that this is why the near-death state appeared to her as a Garden (because she loves manicured gardens). Or consider her reflections on the absence of her wedding ring in the Garden (that it signaled or symbolized her future divorce). Or consider her conviction that, although the voice she conversed with sounded exactly like her grandfather’s, it was probably no such thing. It was probably God speaking to her through her grandfather’s voice. Or consider the magical bench in the Garden that takes the shape of whomever sits on it (just as the afterlife does, as it were).
Such lines strongly suggest that Elizabeth was perceiving and thinking through what we call the imagination, that is, through that organ of perception that uses images and symbols to communicate truths to us that cannot be captured in typical or ordinary ways. For example, Elizabeth’s observation that the voice sounded like her grandfather’s but probably was not carries a remarkable human-but-more-than-human sensibility: something, or someone, is communicating with her, but not in its own voice or appearance. Rather, this presence is translating itself into terms and images that Elizabeth is prepared to process and understand, but the presence itself remains behind the scenes, as it were, just off stage.33 Actually, since this presence also knew information that only her grandfather would have known, it must have also “been” her grandfather in some sense. What this scene seems to imply is some kind of superpersonality that takes on different personas but is in fact “above” or “behind” all of our personal masks. “It” has access to us, but we do not have access to “It.” We are the masks that It wears.
In any case, the conclusion seems obvious: whatever we finally make of the near-death experience and subsequent paranormal cognitions, they were clearly mediated by the human imagination, that is, by the same organ that gives us things like dream, science fiction, and oh, by the way, religion.
Everything, of course, depends upon what we mean by that word: imagination. Most people use it without having the slightest idea what they actually mean. Or they think that the expression always means the same thing to everyone, when in fact different people mean very different things by it. To speak bluntly, colloquial English and, with it, conventional secular society, are pretty dumb here, as they recognize no such distinctions and collapse all imagined things into imaginary things, that is, into the realm of the nonreal. This is simply wrong.
To take the most obvious example, Elizabeth is perfectly aware that she has ordinary dreams, and that these are mediated by her imagination. She has no trouble classifying these as “imaginary.” She is also perfectly aware that she has nightmarish precog dreams, and that these too are mediated, like all dreams, by the imagination. But these are anything but “imaginary.” She insists that these two experiences of the imagination are fundamentally different: that the former is “just a dream,” whereas the latter is hyperreal, that is, literally seeing into the near future. Clearly, we need a better language or way of expressing ourselves here.34
Allow me to suggest a way forward. I see three basic options, to which we might assign the following three descriptive names: literalist, hallucinatory, and translational. I am pretending no neutrality here. I think the first two models, when taken alone, are deeply problematic, and that the third, always in conversation with the first two, pushes closer to the truth without ever quite getting there. Let me reemphasize that I am speaking here as a scholar of comparative religion. This is not a traditional religious model of the imagination, and it is not fully compatible with traditional Jewish modes of interpretation, including kabbalistic ones.
Here, then, are the three proposed models:
Simple fair comparison can easily reveal this position to be what it is: deeply problematic. The basic problem here is that different people see different things, even those raised in the same general religious environment or community.
Many people in the death process, moreover, see (or at least remember seeing) absolutely nothing, regardless of the intensity and sincerity of their beliefs. Again, there does not appear to be any reliable, clear, or stable relationship between the presence of belief and the likelihood of having a near-death experience. I know that is difficult for some to hear, but that is what the evidence suggests at this stage.
If we still want to insist on an exclusive literal reading of the religious imagination, we are forced into one of two options: (1) either we conclude that there are many objective and perfectly real afterlives that different people experience differently; or (2) we revert to the deeply dubious practice of declaring some near-death experiences “genuine” and others “not real,” or, worse yet, “false” or “demonic” (as Raymond Moody’s colleague did) so that we can preserve whatever exclusive literalist view of the afterlife we ourselves happen to hold (usually, because we were born into it). And there is where the religious intolerance begins. To press the point further, there are social, moral, and even political consequences of this exclusive literalist model of the religious imagination, and none of them are good.
There are ways to preserve the experienced literalness or hyperreality of revelation or extreme religious experiences like the near-death experience, however. I have offered one earlier (at the end of Chapter Nine) and will offer a few more thoughts below.
This second reading gives us a great deal, including an easy ability to explain why every near-death experience is different: because people bring different life experiences and shaping influences to the events. Its gifts should not be underestimated or set aside lightly. It can include and understand all forms of religious visionary experience but, please note, only at a great cost: it must declare them to be culturally relative hallucinations with no bearing on the afterlife or our place in the cosmos.
Cost or no cost, the basic problem with this model is that it contradicts the honest experiences of those who have known such a near-death event. Such people know quite well what a subjective hallucination feels and looks like. They have all dreamed. They also know that what they have experienced in and around death is not at all like such a dream. They may be wrong, of course, about this. Near-death experiences may be superrealistic dreams. Therein lies the crunch.
The same model, of course, also fails us completely in providing a model of how one can accurately dream the future, that is, how the imagination might actually perceive something down the timeline. The only response here is that such dreams do not happen or are pure coincidences. That seems altogether too convenient. It feels like a cop-out or a failure of nerve.
Here, the image or story is neither entirely objective and exclusively true (as in the literalist model) nor entirely subjective and exclusively false (as in the hallucinatory model)—rather, the visionary experience is what erupts “in between” the subject and the object to effect contact, communication, or communion. In some profound sense, it creates or brings about that of which it speaks. It is “literally true” in the sense that it is actually communicating or transmitting something profoundly real to the experiencer.
We have seen this model at work already, of course, in my discussion of the science fiction movie analogy—the light might be very real, even if the show itself is not literally true. We might also add here now: and there might be real and important messages coming through the story on the screen. The movie might actually mean something.
In this third model, a near-death event is a very special moment in a human life when the imagination functions in very different ways, when it becomes supercharged and functions as a special organ of knowing that no on-off neuron can handle. The imagination here is not a literal sensory organ seeing something perfectly objective, but neither is it simply a projector of subjective fantasy. Words like “objective” and “subjective” or “true” and “false” cease to have much meaning here. The empowered imagination collapses or fuses these two realms in the “in-between,” a both-and realm that can only appear to the subjective ego as a series of fantastic images and strange narratives or stories that is nevertheless somehow ultimately real.
And the bizarreness of the imagery and narratives is itself significant. Such strangeness cannot be reasoned or explained away, since the strangeness is part of the message. Put another way, what the imagination as alien translator is communicating can only be bizarre and paradoxical to the subjective ego “seeing” into this both-and realm, an ego that assumes that the world is about simple subjects interacting with simple objects that never mix or really meet, that an event like a near-death experience must be either “literally true” or “literally false.”
The situation appears to be fundamentally different with phenomena like precognitive dreams, where there is a close one-to-one correspondence between what is seen and what will really happen in the external, physical, historical world. Here there is very little translation going on. It is more of a direct seeing into the future along the temporal stream. Even here, though, if one looks closely, one will often recognize mistakes and translations. One will see the imagination at work behind the literal scenes.
Although it is hardly perfect, and although it will offend both the exclusive literalist religious believer and the dogmatic materialist, I personally see few problems with this third “in-between” option. It preserves the felt “literally true” sense of the experience (since the light in and through which the visionary is experiencing is indeed real, and since the message might in fact be true in some sense), but it also recognizes the constructed or imagined nature of the visions (since what the visionary is seeing is indeed being constructed and imagined in the moment and relies on vast, unimaginable amounts of human labor and creativity in the historical past).
It is very important to note in this context that one need not treat these three models as mutually exclusive of one another, that is, as if only one was applicable to a particular religious experience or event. A translational model of the imagination, for example, would feel no need to declare everything about every near-death or religious experience “translational.” Maybe some of it, or a great deal of it, is hallucinatory and simply a subjective projection of the person seeing it. As the ancient rabbinic saying had it: “Just as wheat cannot be without straw, so there can be no dream without nonsense.”35 The second model, in other words, remains perfectly active.
There might even be something “literalist” about a particular near-death or visionary experience. Experiencers do observe and report empirical or factual details in their out-of-body states, from conversations going on at the time in other rooms of the hospital to the presence of a loved one in the afterlife who was not known to have died recently but in fact had. Perhaps there is even something “literally true” or “really real” about the visionary landscapes that are seen and cocreated by the visionary consciousness, even if the shapes and sense of these landscapes are not universally applicable to all human beings and all times. Again, the Light may be really real, even if the particular shapes it projects and becomes for a moment are temporary and unnecessary.
From a historical and comparative perspective, however, there is no good reason to accept any exclusively literalist interpretation of a religious experience (as a literal and absolute truth for all human beings in all cultures and times), that is, the first model of the imagination taken alone. This is where my model definitely breaks with most religious models of revelation, including the kabbalistic ones that preserve a firm sense of the exclusive literal truth of scripture that the comparative study of religion would firmly reject.36 Such claims are rejected because these exclusive literalist readings simply fall apart as implausible when they are compared fairly and humanely to other similar religious visions and scriptures in other climes and times. I do not know how else to say this: comparison spells the end of any and all religious exclusive literalisms.
What comparison does not negate is the very real possibility that some religious truths may be closer to the cosmic truth of things than others.37 Religious beliefs can be philosophically assessed. For what it is worth, my own sense of things here is that mystical systems that emphasize unity or communion between humanity (all of it), the cosmos, and the divine are generally much closer to the truth of things than public belief systems that emphasize ethnic, religious, or cultural differences and their attending egos and conflicts. In the end, I believe that all of our differences are expressions of a deeper and more fundamental sameness, that it does not even make sense to speak of differences without assuming some sort of shared sameness. Of course, we are a long way from seeing that, much less realizing it in our social and political lives.
So, clearly, not everyone is going to see Jesus. Or Krishna. Or a Buddha. Or a Jewish panel of judges. Or anything else in particular. And all of these beliefs that we will or must see so-and-so or such-and-such are functions of an insufficiently nuanced understanding of the religious imagination and how it actually works.
So how does it actually work?
Allow me to dwell for a moment on an extremely sophisticated model of the religious imagination as it has been explored and explained by a contemporary Jewish intellectual. Elliot Wolfson has been an especially close conversation partner for decades now. His recent work on dreams and prophecy in the Jewish mystical tradition, A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream (2011), is particularly relevant here.
I have briefly referenced Elliot’s work earlier in my discussion of the paranormal. Let me return to his thought here in more depth, as it speaks directly to what I am trying to say in my own way. I am also doing this, I confess, because I want the reader to know that none of my emphases on religion as “true fiction” and on the religious imagination as a translational medium are unique to me. I want the reader to know that these ideas are quite common positions in the study of religion (I am not speaking for or about the religions themselves), particularly in their more esoteric or “secret” forms that are virtually unknown outside the academy.
In the poetic language of Elliot Wolfson (who is also a poet and a painter), every image of the divine, every religious symbol or sign is a “veil” that reveals only by concealing that which is behind the veil, and conceals that which is behind the veil only to reveal it. This is the inescapable paradox of “seeing” a God who cannot be seen: “My face cannot be seen” (Exodus 33:23). In the words of Wolfson now, when it comes to religious revelation, “there is no access to truth but through the guise of untruth.”38 Here is what he calls “the paradoxical notion of fictional truth.”39 This is what I was trying to get at above when I wrote of “translation-distortion.”
All of this might strike the reader as confusing. I hope so. If you think you understand religious experience, much less “God,” you most certainly do not. And how, please tell me, could it be any other way in a tradition that holds that God is beyond any and all images and in which human beings need images to think of and relate to this same unspeakable “God”? How could such human beings not use images that cannot be literally true?
Nowhere is this paradox more obvious than in the realm of the dream-space, a psychic hyperspace that in the Jewish tradition is explicitly linked to the experiences of vision, scriptural interpretation, and prophecy. The latter notion of “prophecy” certainly entails seeing the future, but it is also much more than that, as the category of prophecy also names the highest form of consciousness a human being can attain, an altered state of consciousness or “state of prophecy” through which God communicates to human beings in divine speech and enigmatic symbols. “Prophecy” in the Jewish mystical tradition, in other words, encompasses both what we today call precognition and what we think of as religious revelation or scripture, and all of this is understood to be possible because of a fundamental transformation of human consciousness via trance, channeled speech, or mystical ecstasy. Or, we might add, near-death experience.
The most common and humble experience of such altered states is the dream, a kind of nocturnal visionary event that everyone knows well. The linkages between dream and prophecy are acknowledged everywhere in the biblical, rabbinic, and medieval mystical texts. The Torah itself recognizes these linkages, even if, taken as a whole now, it is also deeply ambivalent about which dreams and visions to trust. The texts of the Torah, after all, both repeatedly warn the Israelites against “false” prophets and dreamers but also unambiguously describe God appearing to his own prophets in dreams and visions.40 Joseph is the paradigmatic interpreter of dreams, both in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, and in later Jewish lore. And Joseph foresees the future as much as he interprets dreams. Indeed, the famous biblical story makes no sense unless we assume the possibility of precognition through dream images.
And then, of course, there is the famous scene in Genesis in which Jacob dreams of a ladder reaching from the earth to the heavens with angels of God ascending and descending on it (Gen. 28:12). Note that there is no real distinction made in the latter story between a dream and a revelation. The same positive assessment of dreams and visions is also apparent in the coming age foretold by the prophet Joel, when “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh; your sons and daughters will prophesy; your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions” (Joel 3:1). And on and on we could go, citing both scriptural anxieties about and affirmations of “dreams and visions.”
The Torah uses different strategies to affirm and deny the content of such altered states, particularly when they claim to be about God. One of the more common strategies is to affirm their auditory dimension and to deny their visual components, that is, to affirm what can be heard as opposed to what can be seen. “The blessed holy One said, Even though I have concealed my countenance from them, ‘I will speak to him in a dream’” (Num. 12:6). Or again: “The Lord spoke to you out of the fire; you heard the sound of words but perceived no shape—nothing but a voice” (Deut. 4:12).41 This, of course, is also what we note in Elizabeth’s near-death experience. She never “sees” God, but she does “hear” him. This is a very Jewish, and very biblical, feature of her near-death experience.
The rabbis who interpreted the Torah for the Jewish communities over the centuries recognized the fundamental ambivalence of the biblical texts around dreams and visions. Sometimes they resolved these apparent tensions by suggesting that dreams share in the same ultimate source of knowledge and revelation that prophecy does but do so on a much “lower” level. They alternately framed the dream as “one-sixtieth of prophecy,” as a “minor kind of prophecy,” or as “the unripe fruit of prophecy.”42
When the rabbis spoke of dream as “one-sixtieth of prophecy,” they were thinking of dream as a kind of radiation of God six gradations “below” or “after” the highest level of prophecy.43 We need not get into all of the nuances of these systems. The important point is that this model both distinguishes dreams from prophecy but also links them as sharing in the same ultimate source. Again, exactly as we see in Elizabeth’s precognitive “prophecies” that occurred in very special dreams that were not dreams.
The rabbis had other reasons for considering dreams as minor forms of prophecy, including the fact that they often thought of sleep as a kind of mini out-of-body or near-death experience, since the soul was believed to leave the body during sleep. This was, in fact, an extremely common notion in the ancient and medieval worlds. In numerous mystical traditions, for example, sleep is “a partial simulation of the separation of body and soul” that takes place at death. In the rabbinic tradition, this same cultural understanding is expressed in the teaching that “sleep is one-sixtieth of death.”44
You get the point by now.
Dreams were also sometimes prophetic in the popular sense of foretelling the future. The rabbis were hardly alone here. It is a very ancient understanding that dream messages often function as forms of prognostication, that is, telling the future. This conviction (and no doubt this experience) appears to be universal and very, very old. To stick to what we think of as Western culture, we can see this notion as far back as we can see in Western literature, for example, in the Greek epic writer known as Homer (eighth to seventh centuries BCE), whose writings recognized that most dreams have no purpose, but that some are different, that some do in fact see the future and indeed accomplish that which they foresee.45
The rabbis had a particular theory about why dreams are special forms of consciousness that can do things we cannot otherwise do in our waking life. Theirs was a model that sits well with our present neuroanatomical understanding of the brain as “lateralized” or split into a right and left hemisphere, with the right dominated by our intuitive and image-based abilities and the left by our rational, logical, and mechanistic thinking. When a person sleeps, they observed, the intellect that makes distinctions, that is, the rational mind, “is removed, and all that remains is the imaginative faculty.”46 In the modern framework, the intuitive and image-making powers of the right brain take over when the linear logic and mechanistic thinking of the left brain fall asleep. In a more modern metaphor, the former comes online as the latter goes offline.
And what of Elliot Wolfson himself? His thought and work clearly participate in these same medieval and modern mystical streams of Jewish thought, even as they also push well beyond them. Wolfson’s corpus is immense and nuanced beyond measure. I cannot possibly even begin to summarize it here. What I can do is observe one deep current that runs throughout those three decades of writing, namely, the conviction that in the Jewish esoteric sources there is no final difference or distinction between the revealed scriptural text, the Torah, and the interpretations of that Torah advanced by the medieval mystics who activated the Torah in their writing, rituals, visionary experiences, and even in their conjugal beds (since they connected the secrets of scriptural interpretation and the secrets of sexuality). In the world of Judaism and Kabbalah, interpretation is revelation. Revelation is interpretation.
A single example might help here. The Gospel of Thomas passage with which I began this chapter is a perfect case in point, since Jesus, after all, was a charismatic Jewish rabbi (and not a Christian, as so many falsely assume). The stakes of “interpretation” could not be higher with such a passage. Here the correct interpretation of the secret gospel results in immortality: “Whoever finds the meaning of these words will not taste death.” Interpretation here, of course, has nothing to do with “thinking” or manipulating data in a computer-like brain. Such a revelatory meaning depends upon the reader sharing in the same mystical state from which the secret sayings were first uttered. Their uncovered meaning is that state of consciousness. That state of consciousness is their uncovered meaning.
I can hear Elizabeth saying something similar about this book and these passages. She would say that she knows that we do not die, and that she knows this because she has experienced it. Her conviction about our immortality flows from her state of consciousness, which she is now trying to share with us in her story and this book: “Whoever finds the meaning of these words will not taste death.”
Part of this Jewish reverence for interpretation stems back to the traditional Jewish teaching that there are in fact two Torahs: the written Torah revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai, and the oral Torah spoken by the rabbinic sages and commentators that continues down into the present. Text and interpretation constitute a single whole in this vision—one cannot be artificially separated from the other. Revelation is interpretation. Interpretation is revelation. The same conviction is also carried by the remarkable histories of Jewish learning, which orbit around textual interpretation or Torah study. Such learning does not see the sacred scripture as possessing one meaning or one message, much less a single literal one. Rather, the Torah is seen to be infinitely meaningful and always capable of revealing new meanings for new readers and generations. The kabbalistic teacher Moshe Cordovero taught, in the words of the historian of Jewish mysticism Jonathan Garb now, that “each soul has its aspect in the Torah that cannot be revealed by another, that enable it to reveal secrets known only to God.”47 In one expression of this conviction, it is even said that there are as many Torahs as there are Jewish souls.
The implications of all this for our subject at hand are vast and deep. But we have been exploring them all along. This intimate connection between interpretation and revelation is what I was trying to get at earlier when I wrote about the paranormal potentials of reading and writing, that is, how deep reading can bring about in one’s life, even in the physical world, what one is reading about—a kind of conjuring or, more simply, “magic.” I intended to whisper something of the same soul-making secret again when I wrote about how we are changing the afterlife through our decades-long engagement with the near-death literature, or when I wrote that near-death visions are like 3-D movies that morph and mutate as we engage them.
I am employing metaphors, yet I intend none of this as mere metaphor. I mean to suggest that, on some profound, hidden, largely unconscious level, this is how the world actually works—the social world, the religious world, the physical world, all of it. I cannot speak for Wolfson, but he seems to suggest something similar when he invokes quantum physics as an apt analogy for what he is trying to get at. Listen: “We may assume that … the ‘hyperspace’ of the dream … changes with each effort to interpret it, whether to oneself or to another—in line with the part accorded in quantum physics to the observer in determining the properties of an observable object.”48
What Wolfson is referring to here is a particularly bizarre but well-known phenomenon within one standard interpretation of quantum physics whereby the “wave function” of a quantum particle is said to “collapse” and takes on a material certainty as a particle only when it is measured or observed.49 Before that measurement or observation, the wave function is a smear of possibilities. It is an entirely invisible probability wave. It remains “physical” in some sense (since it follows the mathematical principles of physics), but it is not “material” in any way that we think of that expression. For example, one cannot say where the quantum “particle” is. One can only say where it might be with differing degrees of certainty. It is, in effect, many places all at once. At the moment of the measurement or observation, however, the quantum particle finally “appears” and takes on a specific material concreteness in space and time. There are no longer possibilities. There is a single actuality now.
And so Wolfson can write: “In the quantum world, if you interact with a quantum system, inevitably, you are also changing it.”50 If dream phenomena are quantum phenomena (and many writers have speculated as much), the implication follows logically: “the very supposition that the dream can be separated … from its interpretation must be jettisoned.”51 Here the interpretation is standing in for the measurement or observation that, in effect, collapses the wave function of the dream.
Wolfson then goes further still and suggests that the quantum analogy is not just an analogy; that the dream (and, by extension, the religious vision) may well be a quantum process itself. He turns to the psychedelic bard Terence McKenna, who wrote that, “the major quantum mechanical phenomena that we all experience, aside from waking consciousness itself, are dreams and hallucinations.” Still within the same quantum register, Wolfson also writes of “nonlocality” in the dream (very roughly, the notion that quantum processes are not determined by their location in space and time) and a full chapter on the “undoing of time.” The latter poetic expression refers to the ways that in the dream, time can swerve or even bend back on itself. Such phenomena recall for Wolfson “the reversibility of time affirmed by some quantum physicists and the related notion of a retrocausative causality,” that is, the notion that on the quantum level the future might actually influence the past.52
It is very difficult to read such lines and not think of the empirical precognitive nightmares of Elizabeth Krohn. If these are not expressions of time swerving and looping from the future back into the present that is past, what exactly are they? We can debate, of course, whether or not they are quantum processes. That is another question, and I certainly cannot answer it. What I do know is this. I know that the quantum theories render plausible and even understandable what was previously unthinkable, even outrageous. They make the impossible possible.
And then it gets weirder (if that is possible). Wolfson quotes another scholar, Philip Alexander, describing how in one ancient rabbinic understanding, “the outcome of a dream is determined by the interpretation that is put upon it: its fulfillment—whether for good or for ill—is somehow activated by interpretation.”53 In other words, a dream does not have one meaning or possible outcome. Its meaning will be determined by how it is interpreted by the intentions and skill of a human being in the future. Meaning arrives from the future (as we shall see in another chapter with another author). Like the Torah, a dream or vision is many things at once, and what it comes to mean in a particular mind at a particular place and time will depend on that soul “reading” it. To switch to a more secular metaphor, the interpreter holds the cards, not the dream, and these cards can be played in any number of ways.
Wolfson puts his own cards on the table here: “Interpretation is an apparatus through which events in time can be molded.”54 Put more simply (and impossibly), how we interpret a dream or a vision (or a near-death experience) in the present might well determine how it appeared in the past and, of course, how it plays out and what it comes to mean in the future. We can actually influence the past and the future and so “undo time” by engaging our own secret powers of interpretation. We can shape our own lives, and deaths, from the future.
Sound like science fiction?
My point exactly.