When I was 12 I was talking with my mom at the dining table. Suddenly she looked up, stood up and said, “Mother?” She asked me, “Did you hear that?” I’d heard nothing.
“I hear my mother calling my name!” she said. She walked around the house, upstairs, out front. My maternal grandparents lived about 300 miles away in Ohio. We didn’t think they were coming to see us. Mom called Ohio. There was no answer.
A couple hours later we got a call: My grandmother had been in a car accident, knocked out but okay. When the ambulance came for her, she was whispering my mother’s name, over and over.
Years later, I was studying martial arts, and we got a visit from a slender, slightly stooped Chinese man. He was 35 years old, but was introduced to us as a master. He was asked to demonstrate his skills and did three things. First, he asked a sword-wielding student to attack him, which the student did in a great leap. To me, it looked like the master just raised one hand; the student went flying straight back.
The master then invited two of the burlier students to lift him off the ground. They had to be about 225-250 pounds each. The master looked like he weighed maybe 135 pounds. They could not raise his feet from the floor. He just kind of slumped there, smiling.
Then he said he was going to direct his chi — his internal spirit or energy — to flow between his hands. He asked for a volunteer to pass their head between his palms, held about two feet apart. I stepped up. And I couldn’t do it. When my forehead would approach his hands, it was like leaning in between two buzzsaws.
Now in the first case, we might say it was telepathy. But that’s a description, not an explanation. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that there is a link between mother and daughter. But how it works, whether it’s genetic or energetic, is unknown.
As for the tai chi master, maybe it was some kind of hypnosis or skilled sleight of hand. But that’s not quite an explanation either.
We all have moments like that, stories like that. We can’t quite figure out how to talk about them.
I’m thinking about all this because I heard a fascinating lecture at the Frontiers of Knowledge Symposium at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen. Jeff Kripal, a professor at Rice University, talked about donations to his school of what he called “the archives of the impossible.” Many of them were reports of alien abduction experiences.
What stays with me is this: When you asked the “experiencers” what happened, they could describe crisp memories of what they insist actually took place. Something descended from the sky, took them up, probed them, sometimes talked to them. Often, the experience began with something like terror. Not all of them ended on a positive note.
But when they were asked what it meant, whether the experience had been some kind of extraterrestrial contact or spiritual crisis or drug reaction (the experiences were similar to those of people exposed to the hallucinogen DMT) they said something you just don’t hear much these days.
They said they didn’t know.
They said they couldn’t deny what they went through, and believed it really happened. But they had no idea how to explain it.
Later, several of the speakers talked about something they called “ontological shock.” Sometimes something happens that knocks people right out of their worldview, their fundamental understanding about how things work. These experiences, for some, can lead to transformation. Magic.
It happens that I’m a big fan of the scientific method. But I think we have to admit that surprisingly often we have no idea what’s going on.
The world and our place in it is sometimes way bigger and weirder than we imagine. The answer is not to deny the data. The answer is to grow our imaginations.
This column was first published in the September 17, 2025 online edition of the Sopris Sun.
“I hear my mother calling my name!” she said. She walked around the house, upstairs, out front. My maternal grandparents lived about 300 miles away in Ohio. We didn’t think they were coming to see us. Mom called Ohio. There was no answer.
A couple hours later we got a call: My grandmother had been in a car accident, knocked out but okay. When the ambulance came for her, she was whispering my mother’s name, over and over.
Years later, I was studying martial arts, and we got a visit from a slender, slightly stooped Chinese man. He was 35 years old, but was introduced to us as a master. He was asked to demonstrate his skills and did three things. First, he asked a sword-wielding student to attack him, which the student did in a great leap. To me, it looked like the master just raised one hand; the student went flying straight back.
The master then invited two of the burlier students to lift him off the ground. They had to be about 225-250 pounds each. The master looked like he weighed maybe 135 pounds. They could not raise his feet from the floor. He just kind of slumped there, smiling.
Then he said he was going to direct his chi — his internal spirit or energy — to flow between his hands. He asked for a volunteer to pass their head between his palms, held about two feet apart. I stepped up. And I couldn’t do it. When my forehead would approach his hands, it was like leaning in between two buzzsaws.
Now in the first case, we might say it was telepathy. But that’s a description, not an explanation. It’s not unreasonable to suppose that there is a link between mother and daughter. But how it works, whether it’s genetic or energetic, is unknown.
As for the tai chi master, maybe it was some kind of hypnosis or skilled sleight of hand. But that’s not quite an explanation either.
We all have moments like that, stories like that. We can’t quite figure out how to talk about them.
I’m thinking about all this because I heard a fascinating lecture at the Frontiers of Knowledge Symposium at the Wheeler Opera House in Aspen. Jeff Kripal, a professor at Rice University, talked about donations to his school of what he called “the archives of the impossible.” Many of them were reports of alien abduction experiences.
What stays with me is this: When you asked the “experiencers” what happened, they could describe crisp memories of what they insist actually took place. Something descended from the sky, took them up, probed them, sometimes talked to them. Often, the experience began with something like terror. Not all of them ended on a positive note.
But when they were asked what it meant, whether the experience had been some kind of extraterrestrial contact or spiritual crisis or drug reaction (the experiences were similar to those of people exposed to the hallucinogen DMT) they said something you just don’t hear much these days.
They said they didn’t know.
They said they couldn’t deny what they went through, and believed it really happened. But they had no idea how to explain it.
Later, several of the speakers talked about something they called “ontological shock.” Sometimes something happens that knocks people right out of their worldview, their fundamental understanding about how things work. These experiences, for some, can lead to transformation. Magic.
It happens that I’m a big fan of the scientific method. But I think we have to admit that surprisingly often we have no idea what’s going on.
The world and our place in it is sometimes way bigger and weirder than we imagine. The answer is not to deny the data. The answer is to grow our imaginations.
This column was first published in the September 17, 2025 online edition of the Sopris Sun.
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