Changed in a Flash by Elizabeth G. Krohn & Jeffrey J. Kripal

Author:Elizabeth G. Krohn & Jeffrey J. Kripal
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623173012
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2018-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

From Contact to Communication

What we would need, of course, is translation. Their language or form of communication would need to be translated into ours, and vice versa. Perhaps we should distinguish here between contact and communication. Contact is fairly easy and extremely common (if often violent—consider the poor octopus on my plate). Communication, adequate communication anyway, is really difficult and very rare. We could have contact without such translation, but we could not have effective communication. There must be some kind of interface or translation process from one species to another for true communication to occur.

The way this works in the history of religions—which, true to our understanding of religion as practiced science fiction, we might imagine as one long history of “contact” and attempted “communication” between human and nonhuman or superhuman forms of mind and presence—is through revelation, symbol, and myth, that is, through overwhelmingly powerful irruptions into ordinary life that communicate in indirect and imperfect forms. Such divine invasions usually work through some altered state of consciousness in the recipient—say a meditative or trance state or a possession—and attempt communication with us through poetry, picture, and, above all, through story.

This is how these forms of mind attempt to get around our rational forms of thinking, how they try to “get in.” Apparently, they cannot get in through our normal defenses, our everyday bounded sense of self, or our linear “sensible” logic. The container of the ego or body-brain (for the ego is modeled on the body) is just too thick and dense. But sometimes, when this bounded container is violated or compromised (as in sexual trauma or a lightning strike), these communications come rushing in, often, alas, to the great confusion of the recipient. They are confusing because such forms of mind and knowledge have to speak to the recipient in translated ways, and what they are translating makes little or no sense to the ordinary forms of knowledge that the ego knows and assumes to be true in its particular social surround and partial, sense-based movie world. The octopi are talking to the fisherman, and they make absolutely no sense—no sense to the fisherman, of course.

To make sense to the fisherman, such deep, watery truths must be translated into dry, landlocked terms that the fisherman can understand and process. The result is translation, yes, but also distortion. This double translation-distortion is essentially what one finds in the history of religious revelation. Such remembered events often likely encode actual anomalous events or extraordinary experiences, which are then subsequently expressed in elaborate mythical narratives and ritual reenactments that have been worked over and inevitably concretized or literalized over generations and then centuries.

Such mythical and ritual expressions (basically what we mean by “religion” today) need not be considered false, but it is quite dangerous to accept them as literally (and exclusively) true. Put differently, such revelations may well encode truths that are so complex and so subtle that they cannot be spoken or understood with ordinary language and reason. They

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