Thaumanoia 2

William James proposed a thought-experiment whose resultant state, if attained, is plainly angstoid:

“Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it as it exists , purely by itself, without your favorable or unfavorable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realize such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of things and series of its events would be without significance, character, expression, or perspective.” ²

I.e., the ‘ineluctable modality of the meaningful' would be elucted . On this basis James contends that “Whatever of value, interest, or meaning our respective worlds may appear endued with are thus pure gifts of the spectator's mind.” ‘Gift' is a keyword in The Varieties of Religious Experience. The happy state of mind that is religion's enchantment, “coming as a gift when it does come—a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians say—is either there or not there for us . . .” ³ Updating from the physiology of 1902, a gift of reaction norm.⁴

Barbara Ehrenreich came to see her adolescent spells of derealization as a sort of springing gift: “And here [in May, 1959], no doubt, my many experiences of dissociation finally made themselves useful; a world drained of references and connotations—the world as it is—held no terrors for me.”⁵ That is, by the time of her Encounter at Lone Pine, age 17, she could take the hit, or hint. Her first episode occurred shortly before she turned fourteen (circa menarche?), “about a year before the first journal entry” (dated July 4, 1956). She describes the occasion as an otherwise uneventful family day-trip to the horse country around Hamilton, Massachusetts. “And then it happened.”

“Something peeled off the visible world, taking with it all meaning, inference [sic, ‘reference'?], association, labels, and words. I was looking at a tree, and if anyone had asked, that's what I would have said I was doing, but the word ‘tree' was gone, along with all the notions of tree-ness that had accumulated in the last dozen or so years since I had acquired language. Was it a place that was suddenly revealed [my emphasis] to me? Or was it a substance—the indivisible, elemental material [my emphasis] out of which the entire known agreed-upon world arises as a fantastic elaboration? I don't know, because this substance, this residue, was stolidly, imperturbably mute. The interesting thing, some might say alarming, was that when you take away all human attributions—the words, the names of species, the wisps of remembered tree-related poetry, the fables of photosynthesis and capillary action—that when you take all this away, there is still something left [her emphasis].”⁶

She calls the residue “a world without meaning,” the “occasional meaning-free patches” that she kept stumbling onto:

“I might be in school, concentrating on Latin conjugations or logarithmic tables, and suddenly notice my fingers holding the pencil and realize I was looking at a combination of yellow and pink, of straight and curved, that had never been seen before and never would be seen again by anyone in the universe, not in this precise configuration anyway, and with that realization, all that was familiar would drain out of the world around me.”⁷

She quotes a contemporaneous journal-entry: “It is as if I am only consciousness and not an individual, both a part of and apart from my environment. Strange. Everything looks strange as if I'd never seen it before.”⁸

She explained these experiences to herself, at first, as a breakdown in processing; as if “every now and then I simply stopped doing the work of perception and refused to transform the hail of incoming photons into named and familiar objects. There was plenty of input still pouring in in the form of sounds and colors and lights, but it wasn't getting sorted and categorized. This was my theory anyway.”⁹ She was unable, however, to embrace this theory of processing-break insofar as it required abandoning “the idea that I had gained a privileged glimpse into some alternative realm or dimension.” “Rationality favored the perceptual breakdown theory,” nevertheless, “I had seen what I had seen—whatever it is that lies under [my emphasis] the named world—and I was not going to deny its existence.”¹⁰

She characterizes these experiences as “fugue states where the agreed-upon and shared reality of world evaporates” and notes “the stark beauty of the place that lay beyond words.”¹¹ Some months after the experience was well established she took up Hinduism to gain “access, a way to get to the ‘other side' when I wanted, not just when it chose to make itself available, which was not often enough in the long, dark winters” of Lowell, Mass.¹² Didn't work. Within a couple of months of first onset it became clear that a threshold intensity of sunlight was a necessary condition for the experience: “Nothing untoward was going to happen at night or if it was raining or the sky was overcast, which meant that for about nine months of the year I was insulated or, as I was coming to see it, locked out.”¹³

It's remarkable that Ehrenreich nowhere explicitly connects her adolescent dissociations with the adversities of her childhood.¹⁴ She recounts her mother's rages and curses and violence toward her, her parents' car-wreck alcoholism, their habitual coldness toward her and one another, etc., the ugly truth of her family life. By my count she scores at least a 4 on the ACE test, 4 and above predicting marked increase in likelihood of bad outcomes in later life.¹⁵

In 1958 the family moved to Los Angeles. Ehrenreich does not mention any uptick in frequency of dissociations, but one day in the following May came the big one, “a shattering climax, which I would spend the rest of my life, or large chunks of it anyway, straining to understand.”¹⁶ Ehrenreich did not publicly recount her May, 1959 experience, ‘Encounter at Lone Pine,' until fifty-five years after the fact . She sums up in these words:

“Since we have long since outgrown the easy answer—God—along with theism of any kind, we have to look for our who within what actually exists. No one is saying [she is not saying] that the universe, as an entity, is alive, and certainly not that it has motives or desires. But the closer and more carefully we probe, the more it seethes with what looks like life—runaway processes driven by positive feedback loops, emergent patterns, violent attractions, quantum leaps, and always, as far ahead as we can see, more surprises. There may be no invisible creaturely ‘beings' afoot, either symbionts, parasites, or predators. But there are uncountable algorithms at work in the physical world, writhing and reaching, pulling matter and energy into their schemes, acting out of what almost seems to be an unquenchable playfulness. Sometimes, out of all this static and confusion, the Other assembles itself and takes form before our very eyes.”¹⁷

Her trope of a self-assembling Other derives from nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory. Ehrenreich's encounter with a chaotic phenomenon in the physics lab was a baffling, frustrating, and finally haunting experience. Her senior thesis project at Reed College in 1963 was to measure semiconductor effects related to corrosion of silicon. The expectation of her faculty advisor and therefore also her own was that “at any level of current there should be a single value of voltage to record. No freakish surprises, such as might occur while observing aggressive behavior with a troop of wild baboons, were expected.” Things went wrong from the start, the measured voltage never settling to a single value, instead “the oscillations kept recurring—sometimes neat and sinusoidal, sometimes spiky and irregular.” Her advisor suspected “‘noise,' the electronic equivalent of dirt,” but replacement of potentiometer and substitution of fresh electrodes did not eliminate the effect. Her advisor ran the experiment himself with the new equipment and Ehernreich saw “his shoulders slump when he generated the same bizarrely lifelike [my emphasis] results” as she had. She reported in her thesis “The electrode potential of 0.2 ohm-cm. p-type Si never attained a steady value . . . attempts to eliminate the disturbing influence failed.” ¹⁸ She discovered only many years later that there very likely had been no disturbing influence; that, instead, silicon corrosion precipitates a determined yet unpredictable effect; “microscopic pores that form on the eroding silicon surface . . . generate ‘bursts' of current that somehow manage to synchronize with each other to create a macroscopically observable ‘self-organized process'.”¹⁹

As Ehrenreich worked on her thesis project in the Spring of 1963, four years after the Encounter at Lone Pine, she “had to suppress the dangerously heretical thought that I was not alone in my lab. . . . Of course nothing in my little circuit ‘wanted' anything, but the persistent oscillations invited a kind of anthropomorphism: Something was mocking me. . . . Or maybe

“I had encountered something higher up in the chain of command than an ordinary demiurge, something that was attempting to communicate with me through the voltage tracings, if only I could make out the message. What if it was the same Other, or at least the same category of entity, that I had encountered in the mountains and the desert almost four years earlier? But that would be crazy—worse than crazy, it would be paranoid. What was I imagining—that I was being pursued? I had decided shortly after Lone Pine that there was no Other to encounter, that what had happened in the mountains was a process occurring entirely in my own mind, meaning brain, and eventually explainable in observable activities at the cellular level, such as the synchronization of neuronal firing patterns and sudden ‘avalanches' of neural activity. So too the much simpler silicon electrode could be forced to give up its secrets, because it is the business of science to crush all forms of alien intention [my emphasis] and replace them with predictable mechanisms.”²⁰

“Where there is dirt there is system,”²¹ and all forms of alien intention are the dirt to be cast out from the system that is science. Human beings have/are Intentionalität, other organisms less so, but intentionality is an emergent characteristic of life and of nothing else; i.e, exceedingly local. To a practical exactness nothing in the universe purposes, intends, or means anything.²² So, in Kripal's terms, ‘Think Impossibly,' think some mode of alien intentionality, “begins with the realization that impossibility itself is a function of a particular cultural or cognitive system and, most of all, of what is excluded from that system. . . . our conclusions are a function of our exclusions.”²³ But what are our exclusions a function of? “We have plastische Kraft lest we drop dead of truth,” and that power evidently employs the mechanisms of exclusion, denial, and repression.²⁴

As she tells it Ehrenreich likely did experience a form of alien intentionality at Lone Pine, yet afterward denied it to herself for many years:

“nonbelievers have mystical experiences too, and mine seemed to locate me squarely in the realm of animism.²⁵ That was more or less the state of things as I encountered them in May 1959—a world that glowed and pulsed with life through all its countless manifestations, where God or gods or at least a living Presence flamed out from every object [my emphasis]. For most of my adult life I had denied or repressed what I had seen in the mountains and desert as unverifiable and possibly psychotic. But thanks to my years of research into history, prehistory, and theology I was intellectually prepared, maybe as recently as a decade ago, to acknowledge the possible existence of conscious [sc. intentional] beings—'gods,' spirits, extraterrestrials—that normally elude our senses, making themselves known to us only on their own whims and schedules, in the service of their own agendas. In fact, I began to think, edging to this conclusion bit by bit and with great trepidation, that I had seen one.”²⁶

“Ah, you say, this is all in your mind. And you are right to be skeptical; I expect no less. It is in my mind, which I have acknowledged from the beginning is a less than perfect instrument. But this is what appears to be the purpose [my emphasis] of my mind, and no doubt yours as well, its designated function beyond all the mundane calculations: to condense all the chaos and mystery of the world into a palpable Other or Others, not necessarily because we love it, and certainly not out of any intention to ‘worship' it. But because ultimately we may have no choice in the matter. I have the impression, growing out of the experiences chronicled here, that it may be seeking us out.”²⁷

One can readily agree that a capacity distinctive of the human mind converts ‘all the chaos and mystery of the world' into intelligible forms (in Baruch Fischhoff's formulation we have “an uncommonly good ability to find a signal even in total noise” ²⁸ ), and that this conversion to intelligibles (to the phantasm) is obligate, ‘we have no choice in the matter' (in Thomas Sheehan's phrase “I cannot not make sense of everything I meet”²⁹). And because we are socio-intentional primates our default assessment is of something intending, or portending, something—for H. sapiens Others other everywhere.³⁰

In an early work (1874) Nietzsche catalogs two phenotypes of human being in adversity (under stress), the feeble and the robust; the former with too little, the latter with an abundance of plastische Kraft.³¹ In his last year of lucidity he memorialized the (rare) phenotype capable of thaumaleptic insight (his word is Inspiration). He writes,

“With the slightest scrap of superstition [Aberglaube ] in you, you would indeed scarcely be able to dismiss the sense of being just an incarnation, just a mouthpiece, just a medium for overpowering forces. The notion of revelation [ Offenbarung ]—in the sense that suddenly, with ineffable assurance and subtlety, something becomes visible , audible, something that shakes you to the core and bowls you over—provides a simple description of the facts of the matter. . . . Everything happens to the highest degree involuntarily, but as if in a rush of feeling free, of unconditionality, of power, of divinity [Göttlichkeit]. . . . It really seems—to recall a phrase of Zarathustra's—as though the things themselves were stepping forward and offering themselves for allegorical purposes [als ob die Dinge selber herankämen und sich zum Gleichnisse anböten].”³²

I say ‘rare' because, as he writes in the final sentence of the passage, “This is my experience of inspiration; I have no doubt that you need to go back millennia in order to find someone who can say to me ‘it is mine, too'.—”³³ With a characterization echoing Nietzsche's experience Ehrenreich captioned the account of her dissociations ‘The Trees Step Out of the Forest.' And, as quoted above, her Encounter at Lone Pine led her to acknowledge the possibility of Others making themselves known to us, maybe even seeking us out.

“that some of the most canonical authors of the humanities derived their ideas from the inspirations of altered states of consciousness and energy. The core ideas of the humanities are superhuman ideas in the sense that they emerged from ‘above' or ‘beyond' the ordinary human and historical condition. They arose from ecstatic epiphanies of mind. They were not the result of simple cognitive processes, logical syllogisms, or social processes and practices. They just appeared.”³⁴

What's going on here? What are these special people channeling that I and my fellows of ‘dust and ashes' are not? To account for what's going on Kripal articulates a form of dual-aspect monism, “the position that reality is ontologically One but epistemologically Two.” I.e., “the mental (psychological) and the material (physical) are aspects of one underlying reality which itself is psychophysically neutral.” Kripal invokes the ‘decompositional' form of dual-aspect monism, so-called because it posits that “the mental and the material domains have ‘split off,' or decomposed, from a previous holistic state, in this case the psychophysically neutral ground, which is an undivided whole or nondual in nature,” or ‘supernature' as Kripal would have it.³⁵

In this schema meaning can “work vertically between the two surface domains of the mental and the material dimensions of experience and the deeper One World from which they have emerged or split off.” Can work such that special humans

“are being spoken to, but they cannot always understand the language. Such correspondences between the mental and material domains of ordinary human experience and the One World ‘below' them are the actual experiential source of the religious sense of the numinous, the uncanny, and the eerie. Beyond or below that still is the mystical sense of the unity or identity in the psychophysically neutral ground of all being [my emphasis]. In short, we are talking about the very sources of religion before religion. We are also talking about physics—that is, about the behavior of the material world. We are talking about everything. We are also talking about a realm in which space-time is void, there is no place for ordinary causation, and there is no distinction between mental and material. That is not physics. That is metaphysics.”³⁶

Maybe we're talking about das Nichts.³⁷ But it strikes me as performative contradiction to assert the fact of impossibles and also to seek a ground of the impossible, to adduce conditions for the possibility of impossibility. If the trouble here lies in the principle of non-contradiction then dialetheism may help. “Dialetheism is a metaphysical view: that some contradictions are true.”³⁸ Yet the underlying trouble may be the notion of “ground of all being.” Might not ‘think impossibly' be more effectively approached by “embracing the groundlessness of things” which Priest urges, drawing on the Madhyamaka and Huayan insight and “the resources of contemporary non-well-founded mathematics” (bad form to derive groundlessness from anything well-founded) even as he also notes “Heidegger was here before us”?³⁹

Anyway, how comes it that the ontological vision feels to some seers, or on some occasions, thermofuzzy (and attractive), while to others, or on other occasions, psychroprickly (and repulsive)? In yet another avatar of the figure characteristic of his thought Heidegger points the way:

“This disposition (Befindlichkeit), expressed through ἡδονή, has a dual possibility: (1) insofar as this finding-itself (Sichbefinden) has the character of αἵρεσις, (2) insofar as it is φυγή. The disposition is characterized, at the same time, as ‘going toward,' ‘seizing,' going forward toward being-there itself; or a disposition whose character ‘recoils from' being-there, ‘flees' from it in a certain respect. This is given in ἡδονή vis-à-vis λύπη. Αἵρεσις and φυγή are the basic motivations of being-there.”⁴⁰

A physiologer emends ‘motivations' to ‘ontological reaction norms.' ORNs are ‘us' in the following: “There is pathos that makes me lose myself and a pathos that makes me conquer myself. In itself, pathos is neither positive nor negative. It simply is. But what we want to do with it depends on us.”⁴¹ I.e., depends on one's ORN. And one's ORN is a matter of ‘constitutive luck' in Bernard Williams's phrase.⁴² Jansenism without the Jesus. Which brings us back around to William James and ‘gift.'

2 The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature ([1902] 1936) 147. Cf. “That in the face of which one is anxious is completely indefinite. [Das Wovor der Angst ist völlig unbestimmt.] Not only does this indefiniteness leave factically undecided which entity within-the-world is threatening us, but it also tells us that entities within-the-world are not ‘relevant' at all. Nothing which is ready-to-hand or present-at-hand within the world functions as that in the face of which anxiety is anxious. Here the totality of involvements of the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand discovered within-the-world, is, as such, of no consequence [ohne Belang]; it collapses into itself [Sie sinkt in sich zusammen]; the world has the character of completely lacking significance [völliger Unbedeutsamkeit].” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (tr. Macquarrie and Robinson 1962) 231; Sein und Zeit 186.

4 “There are certain human capacities, like precognition, which most people will never know— can never know—not because this is a piece of data that they haven't been told but because they would not believe such a thing even if they were told. Why? Because they do not have this ability. Accordingly, they cannot know this truth. It is simply not them. . . . Thinking impossibly is not possible for everyone—and not for superficial or accidental reasons but for neurodiverse or spiritual reasons. . . . it is a way of thinking that requires either the personal experience of actual gnosis (of the fundamental unity of the human and the cosmos) or a deep hermeneutical sympathy for the gnostic realization of others.” Jeffrey J. Kripal, How to Think Impossibly About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (2024) xii, 217. (italics in original) For the record my ontological reaction norm (the range of phenotypes projectible by this here Geworfenheit), inveterate non-experiencer of the impossible, ‘walks in the dust' with the rest of the horde . If “yuh got tuh go there tuh know there” (Zora Neale Hurston) then “I never been to Heaven,” as it were, “but I been to Oklahoma” (Hoyt Axton).

5 Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything (2014) 114-115. “the abyss is the obliteration of the sign; it is reality without disguise, without appearance, without remainder. . . . it is the utter absence of significance; it is the world as unread and unreadable.” William H. Gass, The Tunnel ([1995] 1999) 184-185.

8 Id. 49-50. “Compared with déjà vu, jamais vu is less common in normal populations and much more prevalent in some neuropsychiatric conditions; this difference in prevalence suggests that novelty and familiarity may be signaled by different brain pathways.” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6101242/ .

14 “My upbringing may have been harsh,” she writes, “but it was also instructive. The idea of a cosmic loving-kindness perfusing the universe is a serious, even potentially dangerous error, and I can thank my mother, however ruefully, for having made that clear long before it was my turn to brush her off.” Id. 173.

15 The test: https://www.acesaware.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/ACE-Questionnaire-for-Adults-Identified-English-rev.7.26.22.pdf . The bad news: https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(98)00017-8/fulltext . “There is too much to say here,” says Kripal, “around what I have called the traumatic secret. Trauma, after all, is a strong correlation of so much extreme religious experience. . . . The negative paranormal, in short, is a clear witness to the social suffering that spawns it (and the social justice for which it cries and haunts).” How to Think Impossibly 112. Same goes for the positive, as Simon Critchley shows in Mysticism (2024): Christian mysticism is ‘for' relief of suffering.

16 Living with a Wild God 104. “Julian's [of Norwich, the fourteenth century mystic] showings took place over the course of eleven or twelve hours. But she spent decades—a lifetime—working out the theological implications of those experiences.” Mysticism 56-57.

19 Id. 163. I.e., ‘determined' does not entail ‘predictable.' While Ehrenreich worked on her thesis project Edward Lorenz published one of the founding texts of the new field, “Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow”: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/20/2/1520-0469_1963_020_0130_dnf_2_0_co_2.xml .

22 “You cannot make sense of the absurd—trying to do so would itself be absurd—but you can make sense of everything else as you stand there with your back pressed up against your death. You now see [in eigentliche Angst, dreadful wonder] that, against the encompassing dark, you sustain a fragile bit of space within which things appear as meaningful.” Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger: A Paradigm Shift (2015) 164. And Nietzsche: after humankind goes extinct “it will have been as if nothing had happened,” wird sich nichts begeben haben. On Truth and Lie in an Abnormative Sense, http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/WL .

24 Nietzsche wrote ‘ Kunst.' Die Wahrheit ist häßlich: wir haben die Kunst, damit wir nicht an der Wahrheit zu Grunde gehn. http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1888,16 . “We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.” The Varieties of Religious Experience 89. See also “The Elements of a Scientific Theory of Self-Deception” in Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers (2002) 271-293.

25 Die Welt des Daseins ist Mitwelt. Das In-Sein ist Mitsein mit Anderen. Sein und Zeit 118. And the range of Others can extend to ‘everything,' “The promiscuous attribution of personhood.” Alan Strathern, Unearthly Powers: Religious and Political Change in World History (2019) 27.

30 Intentionalität früher Alles. See Jane Goodall, Chimpanzees of Gombe: Patterns of Behavior (1986) Ch. 19, “Social Awareness” and pp. 36-38, “Social Problem Solving.” Cf. “In highly social organisms social competition screens access to virtually all crucial resources (food, space, protection, and mates). Humans engage in fine-tuned assessment of relatedness, status, and reciprocity in alliances and exchange, where they make precise quantitative assessments and remember them for long periods of time. For these reasons, hypotheses for the evolutionary increase in the size of the human brain seem to me most convincing when they deal with social aspects of judgment and intelligence, such as use of language or the expansion and assessment of social alliances, and least convincing when they address ecological aspects, such as tool making or throwing ability of hunters. Throwing ability of warriors would be more credible, but not as convincing as assessment of alliances and tactics on the battlefield, where an unending, runaway process of evolution under social selection would apply.” Mary Jane West-Eberhard, Developmental Plasticity and Evolution (2003) 464, references omitted. Agon- is-Father-of-all type of thing. As in “we primates specialize in psychological stress,” Robert Sapolsky, “The Biology and Psychology of Depression” (2023): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzUXcBTQXKM at 1:45:35 and following.

33 Hyperbole, but a sound point. If we could model a large random sample of insights under a suitable skew distribution function (say, the hyperbolic, the impact of insights varying as the inverse of their frequency raised to some positive power: 𝑰∝1/𝑓α) the bulk of the distribution would be populated by empirical insights of the everyday Aha kind (“insights are a dime a dozen,” Bernard Lonergan), whereas ontological insights, Inspirationen, thaumalepsies, and paradigm-shifters would be found only in the long tail of rarity ( »Eigentliche« Angst ist . . . selten, Martin Heidegger).

35 Id. 162-163. Cf. The characteristic figure in Heidegger's work: “What is originary and primary is, and constantly remains, the full undifferentiated manifold out of which . . .” Das Ursprüngliche und Erste und bleibt ständing die volle ungeschiedene Mannigfaltigkeit, aus der heraus . . . Gesamtausgabe Band 29/30: 483. Heidegger's Grundbewegen is, in the face of distinction between this and that, to go epekeina to their ursprünglich thot. Examples here: Topology of being and its limit theorem and here: A self-similar figure in Hesiod and Heidegger.

37 “That is, for the later Heidegger, ‘the Nothing' is no longer anything ‘negative' at all, but rather the overflowing fullness from out of which all things arise, including ourselves.” Richard Capobianco, Heidegger's Being: The Shimmering Unfolding (2022) 4. Like, say, the vacuum at the moment of inflation? Or more like πρώτιστα Χάος γένετο (Hesiod, Theogony 116)? er oft nicht weiß, wem er seine Sage nachsagt . GA 13: 54.

40 Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy (tr. Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer 2009) 166 (GA 18: 247), as quoted in Annalisa Caputo, “‘Befindlichkeit' and ‘Pathe of Authenticity' in Heidegger's 1924 Course on Aristotle ” here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1khjpfL1ifz4Z3ZohzwMWRJdtTnKDYv4L/view at 55.