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

death. On one level at least, the human personality for Frederic Myers is an evolving story written into and read out of the cosmos over and over again within what he calls a “progressive immortality.” Read and written thus, we are all occult novels composed by forces both entirely beyond us and well within us. As a One that is also Two, we author ourselves,
and
we are authored. We live in the possible, but we are lived by the Impossible.
    As the reference to Plato makes clear, there is something very old about such convictions. There is also something radically new. Committed to the very new perspective of evolution, Myers at least believed that, “[w]e are still in the first moment of man’s awakening intelligence; we are merely opening our eyes upon the universe around us.” 4 As for the cultural wars over religion and science of his time, whose long-burning embers Darwin had fanned into a mighty flame, Myers was quick to point out that the argument against the survival of the soul was barely a generation old when he was writing, and that the evidence for survival a mere decade. 5 Clearly, it was the newness of it all that impressed Frederic Myers.
    When Myers penned “Fragments of Inner Life,” then, he chose to emphasize the same radical break with the past that we have come to see as one of the essential features of modernity. There could be no turning back now. A threshold was crossed. We were living in aNew World. Accordingly, he turned to the discovery of America as an especially apt metaphor for the discovery of new psychical and spiritual truths. And this was no innocent metaphor. It came with an edge. He thus diplomatically confessed his admiration for Christ, but he also noted that Christ’s pioneering work, like the Norsemen’s discovery of America, grows more and more distant with each passing year and is, in the end, simply impossible to trace accurately in the waves of the ever-shifting sea of time. “A new discovery is needed,” he noted, not by any single Columbus this time, but by “the whole set and strain of humanity.” Such a systematic inquiry, Myers insisted, “must be in the first instance a scientific, and only in the second instance a religious one.” 6 It is precisely here, in this transit of the sacred out of a traditional religious register and into a new scientific one, in this bold claim of a genuinely new spiritual discovery that can only be had by disciplined research and study, that “the psychical” rises on the horizon of Western thought.
    The psychical rose into prominence at a particular moment in Western intellectual history, a moment when Darwinism, materialism, and agnosticism (a word newly coined by “Darwin’s bulldog,” Thomas Huxley, to capture and advance the spirit of the new era) were becoming increasingly dominant, when the universe was looking more and more indifferent to human concerns with each new discovery and every passing year. Science was conquering all, and it did not look good for the believer. Nor had it for quite some time. Ruskin put it well when, already in 1851, he expressed his own waning faith: “If only the geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses.” 7 By 1877, W. H. Mallock was even more sanguine: “It is said that in tropical forests one can almost hear the vegetation growing,” he wrote. “One may almost say that with us one can hear faith decaying.” 8
    There were, of course, different responses to such mournful sounds in the air. Some individuals embraced reason’s science and rejected completely the now defunct and unbelievable claims of faith. Others embraced the claims of faith and chose to reject the science, or at least those parts of it that could not be reconciled with their particular belief system. There was a third option,