Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (36 page)

Still, he continued to insist that the phenomenon is a real one, that it possesses a physical as well as a psychical component, that it has been with us for a very long time, and that it operates through a multidimensional universe of which our own familiar space-time is a subset (FS 1:420–21). This is an insight Vallee comes back to constantly, even as he walks through his beloved Paris: “A few hours in these narrow streets are enough to convince me that the true meaning of existence lies in parallel worlds for which this city provides a secret metaphor” (FS 2:488). It was French author Jacques Bergier (whom we will meet below, in
chapter 4
, as the coauthor of the immensely influential 1960s Fortean classic
The Morning of the Magicians
), who pushed Vallee in the 1970s to see that the main lesson to learn from the UFO phenomenon was that the universe we live in is not single, not one (
uni-
). It was Bergier who gave Vallee the word
multiverse
. He also encouraged him to think about how such a multiverse might become a stage for elaborate control systems.

In turn, Vallee suggested to Hal Puthoff in 1978 that both UFOs and Puthoff's continuing remote-viewing work at SRI may be related to the manipulation of other dimensions. He also thought that Western esoteric
traditions
“flow from the same idea” (FS 2:422). It is certainly true enough that, at least since Giordano Bruno, speculation about multiple worlds has been entertained in this broad tradition.
⁹³
It is probably not until Edwin A. Abbot's delightful
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
(1894), however, that the model of multidimensionality has been this explicit.

In another fascinating move, Vallee connected this insight to the superior cosmic being American science-fiction writer and literary gnostic Philip K. Dick experienced and wrote about in his novel
Valis
. With Dick's Valis (or Fort's mysterious X), we could hardly be any closer to the impossible vision of Jacques Vallee, with all those shape-shifting aliens and their intentional reprogramming of our religious software: “It is at the level of multiple universes and control systems of consciousness that the UFO phenomenon becomes scientifically interesting, not at the simplistic level of a search for the ‘propulsion system' of unidentified flying objects” (FS 1:431). Jacques Vallee was thinking of Philip K. Dick, and of Valis.
⁹⁴

Sub
Rosa: The Three Secrets

It should be patently obvious by now that the models of reading and writing the history of religions that Jacques Vallee ascribes to are fundamentally esoteric ones. For the sake of summary and some semblance of a conclusion, I would like to isolate—perhaps artificially but I hope also helpfully—three secrets within this thought. Two of them are structural. We have encountered them before, many times in fact, but never quite named them. The third is biographical. I have kept it here, like some precious buried treasure, for the end.

The first Vallean secret constitutes what we might call
the gnosis of the future
. This involves a particular hermeneutic that privileges the imagination, and more especially the imaginaire of modern science fiction, in order to interpret the past and the present from the perspective of the future. In many ways, this is simply an “impossible” extension of standard historiography, which involves a thinking about the past from the perspective of the present. Here that structure of historical consciousness is radicalized further to the extent that it is projected into the future and imaginatively applied back to the present. In essence, it renders the present past. Put a bit differently, Jacques Vallee
thinks backwards
, from the future to the present and then, like the rest of us, to the past.

Thus, even when he entertains a very traditional idea like that of reincarnation, he finds himself asking a very untraditional question, namely:
Why
must reincarnation move from the past to the present? Why not from the future to the present? Why, that is, might not reincarnation also work “backwards”? “I've always wondered why people have always reincarnated from the past,” he muses in a 1993 interview. “Those few times when I've had feelings of remembering another life, it was from the future.”
⁹⁵
Whether understood as a specific memory of a real future life, as a tapping into some larger cosmic Memory Matrix, or as an active fantasy become hermeneutic, such a feeling from the future expresses perfectly what I want to call Vallee's gnosis of the future.

The second Vallean secret is very much related to the first. We might call it
the gnosis of multidimensionality
. This, of course, is the idea with which we began this book, namely, the idea of multiple dimensions of space-time and its implications for thinking about the history of religions. But such an idea is hardly restricted to the hyperabstract categories of space and time. The idea defines Vallee's understanding of mysticism as “a direction of thought away from ordinary space-time.” It also, potentially at least, might inform and expand our most basic models of mind and text, of consciousness and culture. It might morph, that is, into a new paranormal hermeneutics. Within such a new way of reading, we might perhaps better understand how multiple dimensions of consciousness become crystallized into the multiple meanings of a cultural system, or how a vast Mind becomes a vast text with multiple levels of meaning, each, as it were, an altered state of the Mind that projected it. Nothing is simple. Nothing is one. Everything is multiple. Everything is many. This is the mind-blowing secret that both the believer and the skeptic miss, as each tries to collapse the many dimensions of reality into a fundamentalist Flatland of simple faith or pure reason. In the end, neither move can possibly get us to where we want to go for the simple, but fantastically complex, reason that
this is not what is
.

This second secret is crystallized in Vallee's central symbol of Magonia. Within such a multiverse, historical events of a profound religious nature cannot be read as strictly causal or materialistic processes. They cannot be exhausted by reason or context. How could they be? Time is not structured like a one-way arrow, despite what we naively assume in our “behind the times” pre-Einsteinian imaginations. Rather, the structure of time, like that of space, is multidimensional. It can be bent, manipulated, transcended. There are alternative worlds, even whole parallel universes, beyond the ken of our little Flatland and the pathetic little strip of the electromagnetic spectrum that we are able to detect and record with our itty-bitty senses. We are so many “electromagnetic chauvinists,” as Michael Murphy likes to put it.
⁹⁶
That is to say, we assume that what we see and
hear
is all there is. But it's not. Not even close. Trained in astrophysics and the immensities of space revealed to him through the super-vision of the modern telescope, Vallee never makes this gross epistemological mistake. He is not an electromagnetic chauvinist. He is keenly aware of the smallness of our sensory perceptions and the normal intellectual capacities that they shape, control, and limit.

But he is also personally familiar with other modes of intuitive knowledge, what I have called gnostic modes, that do not rely on these senses. His journals, for example, are peppered with examples of tantalizing precognitive dreams and remarkable synchronicities or what he calls “intersigns,” the latter which he takes as evidence that reality itself—very much like a Freudian dream—is “overdetermined.”
⁹⁷
One does not explain or “prove” such thinking to others. One
recognizes
it in another as something of one's own impossible truth. One has either been resynthesized by Valis, or one has not. “Whoever possesses this ‘other kind' of thought,” Vallee wrote as a young man, “recognizes it at once. It comes with the feeling that we do not really ‘exist' any more in this world than a single note in a symphony exists, or a single spark in the fireplace. We are both creators and tributaries of the universe we perceive” (FS 1:20).

It is this same gnostic or reflexive sensibility, this same notion of writing and being written, that inspired Vallee to write in his journals about an “esoteric history,” of a mysterious attraction he feels “of an unseen presence that seems to be speaking to us across the centuries of darkness” (FS 1:76). It is this same esoteric attitude again that teaches him that texts, and particularly mystical texts, are not rational objects with simple literal meanings. Each is a multidimensional universe of meaning designed, rather like a UFO, to shatter one's inherited categories and so offer a potential passport into another, richer dimension of existence—a passport to Magonia. “For those who have pierced the barrier,” Vallee writes, “words have never represented more than the emerging part of thought. Beyond words are the second meaning, the third meaning, the true ones” (FS 1:41). One, two, and beyond both, a third: this again, at the risk of overemphasizing the point, is a classic mystical or gnostic structure of reading and thinking.

It is important to point out that none of this is an abstract, strictly intellectual project for Vallee. His entire alien corpus is based on intuitive glimpses, flashes of insight, and other planes of consciousness that he has experienced since his youth (FS 1:19). “Perhaps it is true that I have been here, inside this particular body, for nineteen years,” he wrote as a young man. “But in reality I feel that I have always existed” (FS 1:18). Indeed, even then he experienced his historical persona and body as something other: “I was
created
in the form of a man. This is supposed to be obvious: ‘I am a man.' Yet there is an infinite distance between ‘me' and ‘the man I am'
” (FS 1:34).

Such an alien-ated gnosis is even more apparent in Vallee's understanding of the God of the Bible, a rather disturbing deity whom some of the early gnostic Christians considered a demiurge, that is, a half-wit creator god who was not worth their worship or respect. This, of course, is Fort's “bland and shining Stupidity.” It is also why Fort's editor wanted to call his third book
God Is an Idiot
. The true Godhead of the ancient gnostics, of course, was none of this. The true God, the Father, the One, was something completely beyond the god of the Bible, a God beyond god. With Fort, Vallee shares an almost identical sensibility. He told me quite simply that he does not believe in “the God of the Bible.” He had put the same in print, though, and much more, over a decade ago: “The notion of the ‘good yet frightful God' of the Bible and the Gospels seems like a swindle to me: It is the biggest, most cruel confidence game in history. . . . Simple human dignity should make us reject all that with indignation” (FS 1:113). Hence the “groveling plea” of the Catholic Requiem, the “religious malady” that gives us endless conflicts “from Ireland to Palestine,” and the utterly bizarre phenomenon of “good” Christians, “good” Muslims, and “good” Hindus building atom bombs (FS 2:124, 110).

Which is not to say that he rejects the various scriptural accounts as groundless. He accepts the ambiguous and always fallible historical record that something happened, that is, that a series of profound religious events occurred, which were then recorded in scriptures by way of human memory and community. But he sees no reason to assume that such paranormal events were authored by an ultimate deity. Quite the contrary. “The correct conclusion, in my opinion, would be to acknowledge that an unrecognized form of life and consciousness exists close to our earth” (FS 1:75). What we have, then, is a lower deity, a devilish demiurge, as the early gnostic Christians would have put it. “Other forces manifest,” Vallee wrote as late as 1996. “We call them ghosts, spirits, extraterrestrials. When all else fails we abjectly turn them into gods, the better to worship what we fail to grasp, the better to idolize what we are too lazy to analyze. I am in search of a different truth” (FS 1:434–35).

This is radical stuff, but it is radical stuff that many are likely to miss or too quickly dismiss. What,
really
, is going on in an author like Jacques Vallee? It is one thing to sneer at the ufological reading of the Marian apparitions at Fátima, which, as we shall see soon enough, were not originally Marian, or Ezekiel's vision of the chariot, which even by internal textual standards was clearly no chariot. It is quite another to come up with an
explanation
for all those spinning disks, or to realize the theological implications of what is being suggested, symbolically, through such an alien hermeneutics. Just
who
is being more suspicious here? An author who frames the world religions in categories derived largely from Christian or at least Western philosophical assumptions about the nature of human being? An author who reduces the metaphysical to the present materialism of orthodox science or to the reigning contextualism of this or that social science? Or an author who denies
all
the traditional religions
as well as
the materialisms and contextualisms of modern theory for an imaginative leap into an impossible new world?

We need not believe in the literal existence of aliens—do not misread me here—in order to recognize and admire the boldness of such a move. Nor need we be surprised that such thinking occurs well outside academic respectability. Where else
could
it occur? Authors like Fort, Vallee, and Michel write entirely outside of the typical professional boundaries of the field. This leaves them open to the usual charges of inadequate linguistic preparation, a lack of appreciation for local context and historical detail, and so on. But it also empowers them, enables them to think things that no one within those safe, respectable boundaries would dare think, much less write about. As a consequence, they come up with impossible ideas that, if taken seriously, “could bring Theory to its knees” (FS 1:128).