Free Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred by Jeffrey J. Kripal

process as an archaeological event through which one discovers and digs up a preexisting story, which he compares to a dinosaur skeleton buried in the ground. More extraordinarily still, he considers the craft of writing as a form of effective telepathy whereby one’s mental state comes to transcend not only space but also time through the magical medium of the published text. A published story, for King, is a narrative state of mind “caught” in a text and waiting to be precisely reactivated—word for word—two, ten, even twenty years later down the space-time continuum. 1 Writing and reading stories for Stephen King, in other words, mimic or replicate paranormal processes.
    King may or may not have been aware that it was the British classicist and psychical researcher Frederic W. H. Myers (1843–1901) who first coined and theorized the term
telepathy
, in 1882, and that Myers opened his autobiographical essay, “Fragments of Inner Life,” with convictions very similar to King’s own. For Myers, however, the book is not so much a telepathically communicated story designed to entertain future generations as a collective séance offered to inspire present readers and guide them toward their individual roles in the evolution of human consciousness. This is how he puts it in his very first sentences, intentionally published only after he died and so quite consciously spoken beyond the grave:
    I believe that we live after earthly death; and that some of those who read these posthumous confidences may be among my companions in an unseen world. It is for this reason that I now address them. I wish to attract their attention and sympathy; I wish to lead men and women of like interests but of higher nature than my own to regard me as a friend whose companionship they will seek when they too have made their journey to the unknown home.
    Myers also happened to believe, as he immediately explains to his readers in his next lines, that there exists a kind of cosmic record or “photograph” of all that is thought and felt, and that therefore his own whole past “will probably lie open to those with whom I have to do.” 2 Here he is drawing on the precognitive and clairvoyant data of early psychical research, which can indeed suggest as much, particularly when it is read through the writings of one of Myers’s most beloved classical authors, Plato.
    As explained in texts like the
Phaedo
—whose study “at sixteen effected upon me a kind of conversion,” 3 Myers explains—Plato taught that when the soul learns some profound truth, it is not creating or constructing this truth but in fact remembering something it already knew in a preexistent life. This is what the Greek philosopher called
anamnesis
, that is, learning-as-remembrance. Similarly, Myers thought that certain forms of knowledge—mathematical, geometric, and poetic knowledge in particular—preexist their human discovery in this other realm, and that such knowledge can be “brought down” into the world through the birth of a particularly gifted soul or genius. We are back to Stephen King’s dinosaur-stories, “buried in the ground” and awaiting a sufficiently sensitive writer to discover and re-express them in a roar.
    These are impossible convictions. But precisely as such, they witness admirably to what I have called a hermeneutical model of the paranormal, that is, they witness to the power of words and texts to encode human memories in some stable personalized form and help effect psychical communications of various sorts. It is difficult to overestimate what these convictions in the book-as-séance meant for Frederic Myers, or for anyone who attempts to read him deeply now, since, as we shall soon see, it is these textlike “chains of memory” that constitute one aspect of the personality and provide some of the most suggestive signs of its survival of bodily