My present and future work is focused on the conception and writing of the Super Story Trilogy, itself deeply dependent on the Archives of the Impossible. Both are worth describing here. There are three basic components to the trilogy project: (1) cosmology and quantum physics; (2) evolutionary biology; and (3) technology and eschatology, particularly as these are expressed through the UFO phenomenon and the entheogenic molecules. The trilogy as a whole is entitled The Super Story: Science (Fiction) and Some Emergent Mythologies.
At the moment the three volumes are entitled:
- The Physics of Mystics: Super Natural Experiences of the Cosmos and their Special Effects, 1884-2025
- Biological Gods: Evolution and the Coming Superhumans, 1766-2027
- The Technology of Eschatology: The UFO, the Entheogen, Ecology, and the End of All Things, 1945-2030
I teach, lecture, and write on these ideas regularly now both in the U.S. and Europe. Such ideas include religion as a “legitimate form of science fiction,” precognition and the “block” nature of space-time, 20th century mysticisms of
energy and matter, and paranormal phenomena as actual cinematic-like “special effects” in the physical environment (vol. 1); the related topics of the history of human deification and the modern rise of the superhuman in figures as diverse as Alfred Russel Wallace, Friedrich Nietzsche, and G.I. Gurdjieff (vol. 2); and, finally, the history of the UFO phenomenon and related abduction phenomena, the UFO and the NDE (ufology as eschatology), occult military technologies (particularly remote viewing), the present renaissance of psychedelic or entheogenic research, and the dark apocalyptic ecologies of environmental crisis, species extinction, and climate change (vol. 3). What this breathless list of fantastic phenomena has in common is a certain specificity or granularity, an apparently random collection of colorful “pixels” that, seen from afar and with just the right squint now, take on the specific shapes, figures, and stories about who and what we might (yet) be and—just as importantly—what we have lost and destroyed. I do not claim any conclusion or single story, of course, about what we might see in all of this, about what this all means. I rather seek to show how modern mystical experience as gnostic unity (with the cosmos, space, time, matter, mind, and species) and mythical science as totalizing narrative are two deeply related expressions of the same human, and fundamentally religious, impulse: to live in a meaningful world that is whole, alive, and really, really big.
THE SUPER STORY TRILOGY PROJECT
The Super Story is a poetic device designed to capture all of those emergent mythologies and mystical currents that have been developing over the last two centuries in conversation with the sciences, particularly (1) cosmology and quantum physics, (2) evolutionary biology, and (3) technology and eschatology. The trilogy will move through these three scientific complexes and explore the various ways that such sciences are radically altering our understanding of human nature and the cosmos and, alternatively, how they themselves are often secretly informed by the anomalous or paranormal experiences of the scientists themselves. The story is “super” in at least two ways. First, it will emphasize those moments of transcendence, of a kind of vertical dimension that cannot be slotted into the two-dimensional worlds of society and science. Second, it is “super” in the sense that it will emphasize precognitive creativity and continuously entertain the possibility that the Super Story writes itself from the future. This writing, as noted above, will engage in a very significant way the Archives of the Impossible, that is, the physical archives themselves will constitute much of the historical material that I will analyze and write about in the trilogy. These two present and future projects are very much apiece. I discuss this Super Story trilogy project at more length below, in the next section.
ARCHIVES OF THE IMPOSSIBLE
The Super Story trilogy finds its material, historical, and biographical base in an archival project that the Department of Religion and the Woodson Research Center of Rice University have undertaken together. Such a collection is in process now, including its eventual digitization and, soon enough, some kind of AI or digital humanities project (pending financial resources). It is focused on original, often one-of-a-kind historical material–private papers, letters, pamphlets, rare books, and so on. We announced the archive and officially opened it to researchers with a major conference at Rice University in early March of 2022. The conference was entitled “Opening the Archives of the Impossible: Writing the History of Religion and Science After the Normal.” This international event attracted over 1,700 registrants, about 200 people who arrived in person from all over the world (Argentina, Canada, France, Sweden, and the U.S.), and over 150,000 views in the first few weeks of its posting. We held a second conference the following year entitled ‘Archives of the Impossible: Transnationalism, Transdisciplinarity, Transcendence’ (2023). Both conferences’ full schedules, including videos of the plenaries and the panels, can be watched and listened to here: https://impossiblearchives.rice.edu/
