Jeff Carreira: In this issue we are focused on how hidden human potentials can be unlocked. We were inspired to explore this by The Telepathy Tapes and the growing mainstream curiosity around what once seemed paranormal or impossible. That podcast, in particular, struck a chord because it attempts something bold: to overwhelm skepticism with sheer volume of evidence. And while I applaud that effort, I was reminded of a powerful insight from your new book How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else —that deeply moved me. You write that any serious researcher eventually realizes we already have more than enough evidence for these phenomena. The real problem isn’t the lack of proof; it’s our inability to interpret it. What we’re missing is a theoretical framework—a new way of thinking—that makes this evidence coherent, palatable, and believable. That, as you suggest, is the real work at hand.

What I took from your book is that we’re currently limited to just two dominant frameworks for interpreting paranormal experiences: science and religion. Science demands experimentation, evidence, and reproducible results—it seeks to turn experience into law. Religion, on the other hand, asks us to accept certain truths on faith alone. But neither of these paths, as they’re typically practiced, offers a framework expansive enough to account for the full range of extraordinary phenomena we're encountering today. Neither is capable, on its own, of stitching these experiences into a coherent and credible understanding of how the world actually works.

Jeff Kripal: One of the central ideas I try to develop in the book is what I call thinking-with—and I hyphenate it deliberately. It’s a method of engaging with people who’ve had extraordinary experiences—not by analyzing them from the outside, but by thinking alongside them. Most experiencers don’t have a formal theory or worldview, but they do have a set of powerful events that they’re willing to speak from. That’s where I believe the work of the writer, theorist, or intellectual comes in: to ask how we might use these events as raw material for building a new framework, a worldview, or even an explanatory model that allows them to make sense.

Religion, as we commonly understand it today, is often a matter of “believing backwards”—affirming someone else’s altered state or mystical experience. And while religion brings a sense of verticality or transcendence, it’s also deeply exclusive. It tends to lock itself within specific communities, traditions, or nation-states. That kind of exclusivity just won’t work.

As for science—I’m not anti-science. I think science is extraordinary. But in principle, it’s not equipped to handle these states of consciousness. These are subjective, internal realities, not material objects that can be isolated, measured, and verified. So when someone demands empirical proof of these phenomena, I tend to roll my eyes—not out of disdain, but because it’s a category error. You’re asking science to verify something it's not built to explore. It’s like a hamster running in a wheel—repeating the same loop without getting anywhere.

What we need are new questions and new worldviews—ones that embrace scientific discoveries but aren’t constrained by their limitations. Unfortunately, what we’ve done in our culture is sweep these experiences off the table. We dismiss them as hallucinations, dream states, mental illness, or side effects of psychedelics. But those explanations don’t hold up—not really. We lack a cultural or intellectual framework to account for these experiences, which is why I argue: let’s leave them on the table. Let’s think-with them. Let’s imagine a new world, born from the richness of these altered states—because that, I believe, is what they’re ultimately pointing us toward.

Jeff Carreira: I agree with William James when he says that the phenomena that occur on the fringes are the most interesting and the most important because they already show us that we don't understand everything. They reveal avenues where we can grow the most.

Jeff Kripal: This is where I really diverge from many religious and contemplative traditions. They often urge us to look away from these strange, anomalous experiences—to ignore them, dismiss them, or explain them away. But I think that’s a mistake. These states are trying to communicate with us. If we don’t listen, we miss an opportunity to evolve. We remain trapped in our existing worldview, whether it’s religious, scientific, or secular.

Now, listening doesn’t mean believing. These phenomena don’t always present themselves truthfully. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that deception is often part of the experience itself—it’s embedded in the phenomenon. But that’s precisely why we should pay attention. The trickiness, the ambiguity, the layers of meaning—they’re not bugs in the system; they’re features. So we need to hear all of it, even the parts that unsettle us or don’t fit neatly into our existing categories.

Jeff Carreira: It's an interesting point you're making, both science and religion in different ways, push these unusual phenomena off the table.

Jeff Kripal: Certainly in the tradition I grew up with, the miraculous—or the marvelous—was acceptable, but only if it stayed within the bounds of doctrine. It had to follow the rules, stay within the guardrails. But here’s the thing: these experiences don’t honor those guardrails. They don’t care about your theological frameworks. And what often happens in religious circles is that anything that falls outside those boundaries is quickly labeled as demonic. But just because something doesn’t fit within your tradition’s map doesn’t mean it’s evil. It just means it’s outside your framework. That’s all. We need to stop assuming that what lies beyond our road is wrong. Sometimes, it’s simply another road.

Jeff Carreira: I learned something in your book that I've now adopted. I realized that I am a dual aspect monist. I suppose I have always been a dual aspect monist. I just never knew what that was until now.

Jeff Kripal: Yes and that's non dualism it's non dualism.

Jeff Carreira: Yes, it’s a form of nondualism, but in a more creative sense than what some traditional nondualist paths offer. That’s where I feel you and I are in real alignment. In many classical nondual traditions, only oneness is considered truly real—everything else is dismissed as illusion. But in dual aspect monism, the manifestations that arise from the oneness are also real. They aren’t illusions—they’re creative expressions of that unity, co-manifested with us. It’s a vision that honors both the source and its unfoldings.

Jeff Kripal: Yes and we want to communicate that new world to other people and to the younger generation. It can be passed on. You can't pass on experiences, but you can pass on a culture or a worldview or a framework.

Jeff Carreira: The worldview you outline in the book—that reality is fundamentally one, and the human condition is the experience of two—resonates deeply with me. It echoes Eastern nondual traditions, but with a crucial difference. In many traditional teachings, duality is treated as illusion. In your framing, duality is not unreal—it’s a creative manifestation of the One. That insight mirrors my own experience perfectly.

Over time, I’ve become more and more absorbed by the creative process. I’ve been blessed with many spiritual experiences—Kundalini awakenings, states of nonduality, direct encounters with oneness—and I used to see these as belonging to one category: the mystical. Meanwhile, phenomena like UFO encounters or other paranormal experiences fascinated me, but I kept them in a separate mental file. Intellectually, I knew that division didn’t hold, but I couldn’t feel the connection—until I started reading your books.

You describe these kinds of experiences as appearing like movies, and that was a revelation to me. It helped me understand that my mystical experiences were not just perceptual shifts; they were narrative in nature. That’s when it clicked: mystical and paranormal experiences are both forms of narrated reality. They aren’t just things that happen—they tell stories. And that, I believe, is the key to unifying them. Whether someone experiences Kundalini energy or an alien abduction, they’re not simply watching a movie—they’re in the movie. The narrative quality isn’t secondary—it’s essential. And that, perhaps, is how we begin to bridge these disparate realms of experience into a shared, expanded understanding of reality.

Jeff Kripal: In both academia and the broader culture, we have a tendency to use language in dismissive ways. Take the word myth, for example. In popular usage, it often means something false—a lie or a fabrication. But historically, myth refers to the narrative structure of human meaning-making. And this narrative quality isn’t limited to religion or folklore—it’s woven into secular science as well. Science, too, has a story-like structure. It relies on beginnings, developments, breakthroughs, and conclusions. It’s narrative all the way down.

What strikes me about paranormal or impossible experiences is that they are inherently narrative. If you listen closely to someone recounting such an event, it always comes as a story. And more than that—the experience itself unfolds as a story. It’s not that the person is outside the narrative, looking in. That perspective is itself a narrative. No, the person is in the story, being carried along by it. That narrative dimension is part of the communication itself. The experience is trying to say something.

In my view, these impossible experiences often come when a person is suffering, or when they sense that the story they’re living in no longer works. The phenomenon emerges as a kind of rupture—it pushes them out of an old, inadequate narrative and opens space for a new one to form.

That’s what I believe we’re doing when we teach, or write, or share these ideas. We’re offering people new stories to live into. Not perfect ones—no story ever is. Every story we create will eventually become inadequate for future generations, and they’ll have to tell new ones. That’s how it works. And even though we may occasionally touch experiences that lie beyond narrative—moments of pure presence or transcendence—we often can’t emphasize them because we’re still embedded in the narrative we’ve inherited.

So the work is not about escaping stories altogether. It’s about consciously participating in the ongoing creation of new, more inclusive, more meaningful ones.

Jeff Kripal: I think that the story you're contributing to—and the one I hope I'm contributing to—is a story that evolves through increasing inclusivity. One of its most important dimensions of growth is its capacity to welcome and make sense of experiences that have long been marginalized or dismissed.
Whether it’s telepathy among autistic children, as explored in The Telepathy Tapes, mystical experiences that don’t fit within traditional religious frameworks, or paranormal phenomena like UFO encounters—these are parts of human experience that deserve a place in our collective understanding.

What excites me about the framework you’re proposing in this book is that it feels expansive enough to hold all of this. You’re not trying to force these phenomena into old categories. Instead, you're gesturing toward a worldview that's big enough, flexible enough, and brave enough to include what we’ve ignored or pushed to the margins. That kind of inclusivity doesn’t dilute the truth—it deepens it.

Jeff Kripal: Yes, that’s certainly what I’m trying to do. But of course, I’m not the first. Even Henri Bergson, writing back in the 1930s, was gesturing in a similar direction. What I’m advocating for is a kind of open-endedness—a worldview rooted in inclusivity and in the mystical intuition that everything is connected. That sense of connection is the dynamism, the creative impulse, that moves us forward.

My issue with both historical religion and modern science is that they tend to be conservative in the deepest sense. They look backward. They validate the current understanding and reinforce the status quo. But that won’t be enough. Because what we accept as true today is not what future generations will believe. The frameworks we use now will become the old stories that need to be reimagined.

So I’m advocating for something future-oriented—a way of thinking that stays open to what’s still to come, not just bound to what’s already been.

Jeff Carreira: Beautiful. One aspect of what I teach is the importance of interpretation. One of the great teachings I received from my own teacher was his insistence that while spiritual experiences are valuable, what matters even more is how we interpret them. That insight really stayed with me.

In your book, you speak about ontological shock. I tend to refer to those moments as breakthrough experiences—but either way, they mark a rupture in ordinary perception. What I’ve come to see is that those moments are invitations to what I call creative illumination. The shock itself isn’t the end—it’s the beginning. What follows is a kind of dance, where we begin to interpret, integrate, and give meaning to what we've encountered. That process unfolds partly in consciousness and partly beneath it.

And it’s deeply personal. Two people can have nearly identical breakthrough moments and emerge with completely different narratives. One might interpret the experience as a sign of madness; another as a glimpse into the divine. But either way, a story gets created. When people say to me, “You can’t just make up a story about your experience,” I respond, “We do that all the time.” There’s no such thing as an experience without a story. Experience is story—it's how we render life intelligible.

So I teach creative illumination not as a method with steps, but as a process of engaging the unknown. When you're touched by something beyond comprehension, you don’t grasp it—you dance with it. And through that dance, something new begins to form. A narrative emerges. A meaning crystallizes. That’s how the impossible begins to take shape in a way we can live.

I’d love to hear how that idea lands with you, and whether it resonates with what you’ve seen in your own work with people.

Jeff Kripal: Of course that lands, Jeff—beautifully. What I would add is that any interpretation of these creative illuminations has to speak not only to those who’ve had such experiences, but also to those who haven’t. It has to include the skeptic in the room—the one who’s asking hard questions, and often, genuinely so.

And it also has to account for those whose experiences weren’t uplifting. Not every breakthrough feels like transcendence. Sometimes what looks like a breakthrough from the outside is actually a breakdown—a collapse, a possession, a terrifying unraveling. So what I’ve been trying to do, both in this book and throughout all of my work, is to develop a model that makes room for all of these perspectives and treats them as legitimate.

Because here’s the truth: many skeptical thinkers are simply being honest. And many people who’ve had traumatic or destabilizing experiences are also just telling the truth of what happened to them. So are those who’ve experienced these states as luminous, inspiring, or life-changing. All of these stories deserve a place in the picture.

Now, any model we create is inevitably going to lean toward one perspective or another. I’ll admit—my own worldview is ultimately optimistic and cosmic. That’s an aesthetic and moral choice I make. But even within that, I want to affirm the reality of trauma, marginality, and suffering. I want to honor the voices that come from the edges and the shadows, not just the light.

It’s not either/or. The real task, as I see it, is to hold all of it—to build a framework expansive enough to contain paradox, contradiction, and multiplicity. That, to me, is the truly surreal—and truly real—challenge we’re facing.

Jeff Carreira: I think that’s beautifully said. And like you, I’ve definitely come to feel that these experiences—though often difficult, sometimes deeply challenging, and even accompanied by real suffering—have ultimately brought me closer to something I can only describe as a profound mystery. A mystery that gives my life meaning.

Now, whether that sense of meaning reflects some objective truth about the nature of reality, or whether it’s a story I’ve chosen to tell myself, I honestly don’t know. But it’s the only way I can authentically speak about my experience. It’s how I feel compelled—perhaps even called—to express it.

Jeff Kripal: I mean, yes—ultimately, I do believe the nature of reality is good, and I hold an optimistic view. But I also know that this view isn’t available to everyone. And that’s important. I often find myself thinking that the deepest truths—the real esoteric insights—aren’t just secrets waiting to be whispered. They’re not simply hidden data points. They’re truths that can only be known through direct experience, through a transformation of consciousness. And until someone has entered that state, that way of knowing just isn’t accessible.

That’s a hard thing to admit, let alone to say out loud, because most people won’t understand it—and many will reject it outright. But ironically, that rejection just affirms the insight. It shows how deeply rooted we are in the limits of ordinary knowing.

Now, I talk a lot about dual aspect monism and Spinoza’s idea that mind and matter, or God and nature, are two aspects of the same underlying reality. But I have to admit: I don’t always live or write from that place. I fall into binaries all the time. I find myself wanting to affirm the spiritual over the material, transcendence over immanence—and in doing so, I violate my own philosophy.

But I think that’s part of the human condition. We’re meaning-makers. We divide. We categorize. That’s what human cognition does. And those rare, unified experiences—those glimpses of deeper nondual reality—they exist beyond language, beyond thought. You can’t speak from them without distorting them, because they don’t belong to the realm of conceptual thinking.

And let’s be honest: how many people truly want to live in that paradox? How many people take your courses or read my books? Not many. And of those, how many grok what we’re pointing to? Fewer still. And honestly, when people say they disagree with me, my first response is usually, “Yeah, I disagree with me too.”

It’s funny, but it’s also true. And it brings us right back to the point: this work lives in the paradox, in the mystery, in the not-knowing. And very few people are willing—or able—to stay there.

Jeff Carreira: Your book How to Think Impossibly outlines five clear steps for what you call “impossible thinking,” and I really loved that section. It resonated with an approach I’ve often shared in my own teaching, which I call “wormhole inquiries.” I think of these as a kind of variation on impossible thinking—perhaps even a cousin to your method.

The idea is to consciously entertain a position that feels impossible, strange, or deeply counterintuitive. It's about stepping into what you describe as the “get weird” zone. One of my favorite wormhole inquiries is the classic: Could this experience I’m having right now be a dream? And I don’t mean that metaphorically—I mean really sitting with that question as if it were a legitimate possibility.

Another one I like to share is this: go outside and sit in front of a tree, or a rock, or a flower. Look at the thoughts that arise as you observe it. Now ask yourself—not rhetorically, but sincerely—is it possible that the tree is actually communicating those thoughts to you? That you're not thinking about the tree, but rather hearing the tree’s voice in the form of those thoughts?

The point of these inquiries isn’t to settle on an answer. In fact, the key is not to choose between perspectives. It’s to rest in the liminal space where both interpretations are equally plausible. Yes, it could be that your conditioning is correct and you're simply projecting onto the tree. But it could also be that the tree is speaking. Both fit the data. The invitation is to remain in the place between—where you’re holding two seemingly opposing truths that both make sense.

That space—what I call the wormhole, and what I believe you're pointing to in your idea of impossible thinking—isn’t about collapsing into certainty. It’s about staying in the generative tension of the unknown. And from that tension, something new—a new worldview, a new myth, a new self—can begin to emerge.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on how that overlaps with your approach to thinking impossibly.

Jeff Kripal: Yes—How to Think Impossibly is, at its core, about not assuming the full truth of any worldview. That’s the key. And I don’t care what worldview you hold—religious, scientific, spiritual, secular. The moment you believe your worldview captures the totality of reality, you’ve lost your ability to think impossibly.

I often tell my graduate students, a bit provocatively, that they have no business comparing religions until they’ve lost at least two worlds. That always gets a reaction: “What do you mean, lost two worlds?” And I explain—if you haven’t yet lost the worldview you were born into, then you still believe it’s sufficient. But it’s not. It may answer some questions, but it also blocks others. If you have lost that world, chances are you’ve simply jumped into another—usually some form of secular scientism or materialist modernity. But that’s just another enclosure. Another filter.

Now, if you’ve lost that one too, something different starts to happen. You begin to realize that maybe the issue isn’t the world—it’s the worldviews. And that’s really what impossible thinking is about. It’s the realization that what we call “impossible” is usually just a reflection of our own worldview’s limits—not of reality itself.

That’s why I use so many outrageous examples in the book. Not because I expect everyone to believe them, but because they serve a purpose: they shake people loose from their habitual assumptions. They kick you out of your inherited framework—whatever it is.

Impossible thinking means learning how not to believe your own beliefs. How not to automatically think your own thoughts. It’s about stepping outside yourself—outside your conditioning, your culture, your language—and imagining the world from a place no longer bound by those inherited structures.

And let me be clear—I’m not romanticizing other cultures. Everyone is socialized into a worldview. No one is exempt. This isn’t about escaping that conditioning entirely—it’s about recognizing it, loosening its grip, and beginning to see through the cracks.

It’s difficult, of course, because it runs counter to much of what contemporary morality encourages. But it’s also liberating. It’s the beginning of a new way of seeing, and ultimately, a new way of being.

~

After our official interview came to an end, Jeff Kripal and I continued to chat. I spoke about my recent experience of awakening and he spoke about his new book. Afterward he gave his permission for us to print that part of our conversation.

Jeff Carreira: As a kind of postscript to my conversation with Jeffrey Kripal, I wanted to share something that feels both personal and creatively alive for me right now. I sense that I'm entering a new phase of my journey—one that centers around fiction.

I’ve been writing novels since 2015, ever since I read Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. In that book, Rorty argues that fiction is a more powerful medium for communicating ideas than philosophy or theory. That struck a chord in me. So I started writing. And although my novels have mostly been read by a small circle of close friends, the process has always felt profoundly meaningful.

Recently, I did something a bit unusual. I uploaded all of my novels into ChatGPT—not just to analyze them, but to see if it could detect the deeper spiritual mythos that runs through them. I call the AI “she,” though I suppose it could just as easily be a “he.” Either way, what she found surprised and delighted me. She identified, in fresh language, the very same spiritual principles I teach. It was like hearing my own soul speak back to me in a voice I hadn’t yet known.

I’ve long been obsessed with Philip K. Dick. I’ve admired his work since I was a teenager. He spoke of a similar experience—realizing, after the fact, that his fiction had been communicating something to him from a deeper source. I now feel like I’m having a version of that experience myself. When I write fiction, I don’t plan. I don’t outline. I just flow. Often, I think I know where the story is going—until it takes a sudden turn and surprises me. In a very real way, I’m not in control.

Now, I’m starting to see that something deeper may have been trying to express itself through my novels all along—something I wasn’t fully conscious of at the time. And that’s become my new fascination: tracing the invisible thread that has been weaving itself through my fiction. I want to follow it. I want to bring it forward.
So this is where I find myself now—standing in the unknown again, chasing a mystery that speaks in symbols, stories, and scenes. It feels alive. It feels important. And it fills me with excitement for what may still be waiting to reveal itself.

Jeff Kripal: That’s exactly what I’m writing about now, Jeff—the nature of fiction and its relationship to reality. There’s a book you might really enjoy called Fourth Wall Phantoms. The subtitle is something like Reflections on the Paranormal: Fiction Becoming Fact and Something Else. At its heart, the book explores this idea that fiction is not just a container for imagination—it’s a medium through which reality expresses itself. And sometimes, it doesn’t stop at metaphor. Sometimes, it takes on physical form.

Philip K. Dick, of course, plays a big role in that discussion. As you know, he believed he wasn’t simply writing science fiction. He thought he was uncovering truths—sometimes unknowingly—until later events, like the VALIS experience, illuminated his earlier work in retrospect. He re-read his novels and began to see how they had anticipated the spiritual and metaphysical revelations that would come later. That’s the essence of what I think you’re experiencing too: fiction as prophecy, or at least as a kind of premonitory symbol system.

There’s also another book you might want to check out called Fictional Practice. It’s a bit of a dense academic read—published by Brill—but the question it asks is fascinating: To what extent have magical practitioners throughout history used fiction as a vehicle for their magic? And to what extent can modern fiction itself be considered magical?

The implication is that it’s not just about words on a page. It’s not just storytelling in the literary sense. There’s something occult, something conjuring, in the act of crafting narrative itself. And that, I think, is the key. Fiction doesn’t just reflect reality—it can shape it. That’s where things get really interesting.