Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (38 page)

And so we spend our days in a cramped Cave of Consensus, watching so many fake movies on a foggy screen or dark wall, pretending that it's all real, all “out there.” Sometimes, however, just sometimes, our cave wall becomes a stained glass window and we see another kind of light shining through reality. What was once a hard “object” now becomes a translucent “window.” Most, of course, even now continue to mistake the colored glass for the light itself. Most replace the cosmic with the earthly, the universal with the local, the symbol with the truth. Unable to distinguish between the two, they do not know. They experience and believe. Or they do not believe. They reason and deny the literal truth of the symbols. Both the believer and the skeptic capture an important part of the situation, but both are wrong about the other part.

Others, however, somehow manage to shake loose from both their religious and rational chains, turn around, and look back at the projector and its brilliant beam of light. Then everything changes, instantly and forever. They have been granted a passport to Magonia. They leave the cave. Now the problem is not the movie. It is the people watching the movie, who do not yet know that they are watching a movie.

four

RETURNING THE HUMAN SCIENCES TO CONSCIOUSNESS

Bertrand Méheust and the Sociology of the Impossible

No culture is able to achieve the integral fullness of the real, nor can any develop all the potentialities of the human being, for the latter is always in excess of itself. . . . Each culture explores certain sectors of the real, privileges and develops certain dimensions of experience, and, because of this fact, sacrifices other dimensions, other possibilities, which return to haunt it (the return of the repressed!), against which the culture protects itself through a number of mechanisms.

—BERTRAND MÉHEUST
,
Le défi du magnetisme

Les mythes se pensent dans l'homme.

Myths think themselves in man.

—CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS
,
The Raw and the Cooked

Unlike Jacques Vallee and despite his own intense interest in the subject, our fourth and final author of the impossible, Bertrand Méheust, has never
seen
a UFO. Nor again, despite his voluminous writings on the history and interpretation of psychical capacities, has he been the recipient of unusual telepathic gifts or precognitive or imaginal visions. He does, however, often experience very strange and striking coincidences.

One such event happened in the spring of 2008, around and indeed apparently mirroring a symposium to which I had invited him at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, on the nature of consciousness and postmortem survival. It began on the plane to San Francisco from France. Méheust was reading my
Esalen
, and more particularly the opening pages where I discuss the hermeneutical nature of synchronicity, that is, the phenomenon of striking coincidences involving texts whose reading and interpretation coincide precisely with the world revealing itself as a text to be similarly read and interpreted. As he read and interpreted my words on the synchronicity of reading and interpretation, the man seated next to him broke in. He was a Buddhist meditation teacher who had taught at Esalen. He had also been involved with the Indian philosopher of consciousness Krishnamurti. They chatted for hours, much of it about Krishnamurti and his ideas about the unconditioned nature of consciousness. When the two got off the plane, the public address system in the airport synchronized with their conversation and called them to return to consciousness: “Calling Mr. Krishnamurti. Mr. Krishnamurti. Will Mr. Krishnamurti please come to . . . ”
¹

“I am known for that,” Bertrand explained to me with a grin as he finished telling me this story soon after he landed. “My friends know it happens often. Some of them think that this is because I think in connections, making connections between things that no one else has thought to combine. Maybe that's it. Maybe I am a Connector.”

I would put it this way. Bertrand Méheust is a super-comparativist who sees connections where others do not and cannot. Until, that is, he writes about them. But he does more than write about such invisible connections. He also attracts them to himself through his existential openness to a universe in which everything is really and truly connected. His, then, are not simply comparative patterns. They are also comparative events.
²

A
Double Premise

I begin with this story related to Méheust's reading of my own written work not to prove anything purely and simply objective, but to acknowledge a certain synergy between our writings and to take it yet further. I
take
it as a
sign with which to think
. And why not? Bertrand Méheust practices what I have called a hermeneutical mysticism, which is to say that he experiences the world as a series of signs or meaning events to read, interpret, and then write out again in his own written work. And as he reads and writes, he is read and written. This is how he lives, how he comes to be.

It is in this spirit anyway that I would like to suggest that Bertrand Méheust's written corpus can be read as flowing from a double premise, which the reader is free to read as Méheust's or my own. I end my chapter reflections with Bertrand Méheust, then, not simply because most of his books appear after those of our first three authors of the impossible (although he and Jacques Vallee are really contemporaries), but also because his intellectual training and hermeneutical—really Hermetic—sensibilities are extremely close to my own. In essence, then, these are also my conclusions.

The first part of our double premise involves the claim that the humanities have something important to offer the study of psychical and paranormal phenomena. By the humanities, I mean all those fields of study within the modern university that focus on the nature and construction of meaning, value, beauty, and narrative in the history of human experience as the latter has been crystallized in such activities as philosophy, religion, art, literature, and language. By the humanities, I mean all those forms of thought that intuit that reality is not just made up of matter and numbers and causality (which is what the natural sciences assert), but also of meaning and words and stories. By the humanities, I mean
the study of consciousness encoded in culture
.

The second part of our double premise involves the claim that psychical and paranormal phenomena have something important to offer the humanities, that such phenomena can help bring the humanities back to consciousness, if you will. The simple truth is that we have quite a few ideas and some general consensus about what culture is, but no real idea, no real consensus about what consciousness is. When, then, intellectuals try to create comparative systems that can relate consciousness to culture and culture to consciousness, they naturally falter and fall back into cultural systems, that is, into things we know something about, like discursive practices, histories, social systems, power, and politics. Basically, they reduce consciousness to culture.

Accordingly, intellectuals are generally quite resistant to the possibility that consciousness can effectively reveal itself as fundamentally beyond or against culture (although the ideal notion of a “counterculture” certainly hinted at this possibility
³
). And the vast majority of intellectuals would positively deny that consciousness can exist without culture. Psychical and
paranormal
phenomena, on the other hand, strongly suggest that certain, very special forms of human consciousness are in actual fact not reducible to local cultures, even if they must finally express themselves in the terms and languages of those very cultures. They provide us with some of the most suggestive evidence that
consciousness and culture cannot be collapsed into one another but work together, in incredibly complex ways, to actualize different human potentialities, different forms of reality, different (im)possibilities
.

The encoding of consciousness in culture, then, is no simple material process, as if consciousness and culture are “things” that can be objectified, quantified, and measured separately. There are no such things. Nor is there any Archimedean point for the humanist, no perspective from which everything can be definitively measured and judged once and for all as a stable object. Quite the contrary, the humanist study of consciousness is practiced
by consciousness
. Which is to say that this is an inherently reflexive practice, a meditation in the mirror, with all the mindboggling paradoxes of subjectivity and objectivity that such an image suggests. “The eye with which I see God,” Meister Eckhart wrote, “is the same eye with which God sees me.” The exact same thing is true of the mystical humanities and the study of consciousness by consciousness.

This encoding of consciousness in culture, moreover, is a radical dialectical process between two forms of human experience (one internalized as consciousness, one externalized as culture) that is as much about repression as expression, as much about the suppression or wilting of potentialities as their education and actualization. And no conscious culture can do it all. To develop one set of human skills is inevitably to ignore, and probably discourage or even demonize, another. What is possible and impossible within a particular temporal and spatial frame, then, is to a very large extent psychoculturally loaded, constructed, or even determined (take your pick).

At first glance, this may sound reductive and relativistic, and to some extent it is (depending on what you pick), but only if one's perspective is restricted to that of a single psyche or culture. This is where the most radical act of all comes in:
comparison
. Radically conceived (as I am conceiving it here), comparison respects no cultural or religious system as representing
the
truth of things. From the perspective of the larger, indeed universal, psychocultural processes captured under the comparative rubrics of “anthropology,” “history of religions,” or “cultural psychology,” however, such a method can point to collective forms of consciousness, levels of metaphysical freedom, and degrees of imaginal power virtually unthinkable in contemporary theory.
⁴
In culture, any culture, we are bound to that which is deemed possible. In the comparative imagination that can relate
consciousness
to culture and culture to consciousness, we begin to free ourselves for the impossible. We begin, with Fort, to step out of the movie screen and, with Vallee, to leave the rat maze.

What an author of the impossible like Bertrand Méheust finally teaches us, then, is that we really do shape our worlds, even if we do not fully determine them. We are magicians all. But as whole cultures extended through centuries of time, we are much more than a collection of knowing and unknowing magicians stumbling about with their consensual spells called Language, Belief, and Custom. We are veritable wizards endowed with almost unbelievable powers to shape new worlds of experience and realize different aspects of the real. We are authors of the impossible.

Méheust
and the Master

Bertrand Méhuest was born on July 12, 1947. His only complaint to his mother was that he was not born three weeks earlier, on June 24, the day Kenneth Arnold spotted those nine skipping, shining discs over Washington State and so initiated a new era in the mythology of the West. Arnold was a wealthy businessman flying his own private plane. Méheust was born into a poor family with few financial resources and even fewer social connections.

As his birth-wish might suggest, Méheust's early work and first book, in 1978, were on ufology. He would go on to complete an M.A. in 1981, for which he wrote a thesis on William James. Between 1985 and 2003, he worked almost exclusively on the history of animal magnetism and psychical research. He would be awarded a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Sorbonne for this work in 1997. He would also produce two major works of historical scholarship, a two-volume history of this same material (his Ph.D. thesis) and a study of the nineteenth-century superpsychic Alexis Didier (1826–86).
⁵

One of the major influences on Méheust's thought was the enigmatic spiritual teacher, ufologist, and mystical writer Aimé Michel, the same man who had such a powerful influence on the young Jacques Vallee. It was Michel, in fact, who helped Méheust find a publisher for his first book on flying saucers and science fiction, which appeared in March of 1978, after which both men engaged in a long and fruitful correspondence.
⁶
Since Michel was a key figure in the early lives of both Vallee and Méheust and played a central role in a kind of Fortean renaissance in France, it is time now to meet him more fully and introduce the French metaphysical movement that he helped inspire: fantastic realism.