Meaning in Absurdity Read online

  Meaning in

  Absurdity

  What Bizarre Phenomena Can Tell Us

  about the Nature of Reality

  Meaning in

  Absurdity

  What Bizarre Phenomena Can Tell Us

  about the Nature of Reality

  Bernardo Kastrup

  Winchester, UK

  Washington, USA

  First published by iff Books, 2011

  iff Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,

  Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK

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  Text copyright: Bernardo Kastrup 2010

  ISBN: 978 1 84694 859 6

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

  The rights of Bernardo Kastrup as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 The calls of the absurd

  Chapter 2 The elusiveness of the absurd

  Chapter 3 The demise of realism

  Chapter 4 The desacralization of logic

  Chapter 5 Constructing reason

  Chapter 6 The reality within

  Chapter 7 A cosmology beyond absurdity

  Chapter 8 The Formless speaks

  Chapter 9 The shape of things to come

  Chapter 10 What to make of it all?

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  To the absurd within us all

  ‘The highest truth is one and the same with the absurd.’

  Carl Gustav Jung

  Prologue

  This book is an experiment: an attempt to use logic to expose the absurd foundations of logic; an attempt to use science to peek beyond the limits of science; an attempt to use rationality to lift the veil off the irrational. Its ways are unconventional: weaving along its path one finds UFOs and fairies, quantum mechanics, analytic philosophy, history, mathematics, and depth psychology. The enterprise of constructing a coherent story out of these incommensurable disciplines is exploratory. Yet, finding ourselves confronted with the undeniable contradictions of our culture’s current worldview, we must test untried waters if we are to escape banality and find our way back to the mysteries of existence. The payoff is handsome: a reason for hope, a boost for the imagination, and the promise of a meaningful future.

  But it does not come free: this book will ask you to have an open mind and enough mental flexibility to navigate through seas that will drag you out of your comfort zone, wherever it may lie. If you are at home with the wacky, the weird, and the absurd – but can keep yourself engaged when structured thinking is called for – you may find a new world of insights when we explore quantum entanglement, Gödel’s theorems, intuitionistic logic, and the history of science. If, instead, you are comfortable with science and formal philosophy – but can balance your skepticism and cynicism – you may find a breath of fresh air when we explore the serious aspects of UFOs, the Otherworld, and the inner landscapes of the unconscious. If the experiment works, at the end all these disparate threads will come together to unveil a startling picture of reality and of our condition as minded characters within it.

  For me, personally, this book represents a difficult critique of previously unquestioned assumptions and values I had held for most of my life; a departure from ingrained structures of thought I had grown so identified with I could hardly conceive of any other legitimate avenue of thinking. Yet, this is precisely what I now believe this book to embody: a previously unthinkable but legitimate articulation of an uncanny scenario about the nature of reality. If my own experience while researching it is representative, this book may confront some of your dearest notions about truth and reason, just as it confronted mine. Yet, it may do so in a way that you cannot dismiss lightly, because the (laboratory) evidence it compiles and the philosophy it leverages are solid in the traditional, academic sense.

  The most exciting discoveries always entail the loss of previously held certainties. So here is my invitation to you. This is a short and sharp book, wasting no space on non-essentials or divagations. Making your way through it will not demand any major investment of time or effort. So give it an honest chance, and it may just help you open up entirely new dimensions for exploring that ultimate of all questions: What is going on?

  Chapter 1

  The calls of the absurd

  First call: It is the mid-1980s, in a remote valley in northern Europe. A strange light is seen in the dark night sky. Its observer cannot make sense of what he sees: the light bounces around and performs impossibly tight turns at extremely high speeds. Inertia would prevent any object with significant mass from performing such maneuvers. Yet, the phenomenon is sustained. Even more puzzling, the movements of the light do not appear to serve any purpose: its zigzagging trajectory is absurd. Nonetheless, there is little doubt about the physical reality of the phenomenon: clear footage of its manifestation is captured. Over the years, the lights return to the same valley and are consistently observed by countless witnesses. A wealth of physical evidence is accumulated: pictures, film, radar data, and traces left on the ground directly under where the lights had appeared.

  Second call: North America, also in the mid-1980s, in the suburbs of a large city. This time, more than just a strange light haunts the skies: hundreds of people independently witness, over a period of years, an enormous formation of lights seemingly attached to a large V-shaped craft. Witnesses include scientists, engineers, police officers, and city administration officials. The consistency of the observation reports evokes theories of secret military craft and even extraterrestrial visitation. Yet, a passing comment by a key witness seems to suggest something far more profound than such provincial explanations: ‘From beginning to end, the nineteen to twenty minutes that I have viewed that craft was also a time of self-examination of myself and who I was.’ Some witnesses report a feeling that the strange light formation was somehow attempting to communicate with them.

  Third call: Not all strange objects in the sky appear harmless. In the 1950s, a man stands observing the late afternoon sky. The sun is clearly visible behind a veil of clouds, just above the horizon. Suddenly, the sun becomes uncannily pale and what appears to be a second sun becomes visible at about the same height above the horizon. When the first sun sets, the second sphere of light speeds towards the Earth, as if falling from the sky. The man stands in awe of the spectacle. As the sphere approaches the moment of impact, the man realizes it is a much smaller object than he had initially thought. He also notices what appear to be decorative, symbolic markings on its surface. When the ‘sun’ finally crashes onto the Earth, it does so at a considerable distance from the man. Other similar spheres then appear, falling towards the ground just as the first did. The man fears possible shrapnel and runs away. As he does so, he suddenly finds himself inside a house, where a girl sits in a chair with a large notebook on her lap. He tries to convince her to flee with him, but she will have none of it.

  Fourth call: The theme of suns falling from the sky is a recurrent one. Early in the 20th century, in southern Europe, tens of thousands of people gather in a field. After a downpour, the storm clouds break and the sun becomes visible again. However, it has the uncanny aspect of a spinning disk, looking paler and duller than normal. Without notice, it careers towards the Earth in a kind of absurd, zigzag trajectory, frightening all present. Afterwards, witnesses observe that the muddy puddles of water on the ground, as well as their previously soaked clothes, had all suddenly become dry. The phenomenon, due to its simultaneous physical palpability and absurdity, confuses scientists and commentators for decades thereafter.

  Fifth call: Not all calls of the absurd involve merely strange objects in the sky; some involve living entities. Moreover, some stories go beyond mere non-compliance to the known laws of physics; they defy something much more fundamental: logic itself. A man in North America recounts seeing several weird entities, which he describes as ‘elves,’ at the side of a road he travels regularly. One of them paralyzes him, while others hold up placards displaying beautiful, moving geometric forms, presumably as he whizzes by in his car. He feels that the ‘elves’ want him to look at these abstract images. The entire situation is clearly nonsensical: elves at the side of a road, forcing a driver to watch the unfolding of abstract geometric forms while paralyzed at the wheel of a car? What is the sense of that? Yet the man is unlikely to be lying, for his report was part of a carefully controlled study.

  By now, you may be tempted to recoil from all this nonsense with a dismissive wave of the hand. But bear with me a little more: clearly, these are not literally real events. Still, I will be contending that they may, nonetheless, be exceedingly important to our understanding of what we call reality.

  Sixth call: Springtime in North America, in the 1960s. A man st
eps out of his house and comes face to face with a saucer-shaped object hovering above his yard. A hatch opens and the man sees three entities inside the craft. The supposed aliens are small and dark-skinned, like certain types of fairies. One of the entities holds up a jug to the man, a gesture the man interprets as a request for some water. Space aliens, able to fly undetected across solar systems, needing to stop by and reveal themselves to a man in order to fill up a jug of water? What is the logic of that? Nonetheless, the man obliges, filling the jug with water from inside his house. When he returns, he sees one of the entities inside the craft frying what appears to be food on a kind of grill. Upon taking note of the man’s interest in their food, one of the entities hands the man three pancakes. Thereafter, the entities close the hatch, take off, and disappear. Naturally, it would be easy to dismiss such story as the delusions of a pathological mind, especially given the fact that no physical evidence could be found upon further investigation; that is, except for the pancakes, which were sent by the United States Air Force for analysis at the Food and Drug Laboratory of the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

  Seventh call: A man claims to be abducted by space aliens. These aliens seemingly take people, against their will, into their spaceships. The man is in one such a spaceship when the lights are suddenly dimmed. He looks up to his left and sees a very bright image of a jagged cliff. A magnificent bird is perched on top of this cliff, radiating an intensely bright light. The man is overwhelmed by this image and filled with awe. The aliens on the ship stop all their activities to watch the bird along with the man. All are transfixed. The bird opens its majestic wings and is suddenly gone. All activities in the ship then resume. It seems highly illogical that a very terrestrial symbol, such as a bird, could be so dear to aliens from outer space. Indeed, upon later reflection, the symbolic nature of the entire event was clear to the man, although he was apparently still able to reconcile this realization with his belief in the literal reality of his experience.

  I will close this brief anthology of the absurd with an account that I, personally, consider a unique gem; not so much for the caliber and stature of the man in question, but for the profound, rich, and mesmerizing metaphorical significance of his experience.

  Eighth call: A man stands in a dark, underground cave, whose entrance is guarded by a dwarf. He is afraid, but intuitively feels that he must penetrate deeper into the cave, until he arrives at a kind of inner chamber. There lies a strange, luminous red stone. The man takes the stone in his hands and realizes that it covers an opening in the underlying rock. Peering through the opening, the man sees water flowing at the bottom of another, yet deeper underground chamber. Submerged in the stream he sees a bright red light, which he describes as a sun, radiating through the water, with serpents swimming around it.

  * * *

  The stories above are very different from one another. Yet, I trust you will have noticed some common themes between them: their defiance not only of the known laws of physics but – and much more significantly – those of logic and common sense as well; their highly symbolic, metaphorical, psychological character; strong and unexplained intuitions seizing the subject at a deep emotional level; and the occurrence of common motifs such as fairy-like entities (aliens, dwarfs, elves), aerial phenomena, zigzagging motion, the sun, and other radiating light sources. These commonalities are indeed surprising when one considers the drastically different origins of these stories. I have deliberately veiled their specifics so you could consider them without prejudice at first. But it is now time to lift the veil.

  Each of the eight ‘calls of the absurd’ above relates a different story. The story of the moving light in the first call comes from an observation of an unidentified aerial phenomenon made in 1986, in the Hessdalen valley of central Norway. Tantalizing footage was taken of that observation and later made available on the Internet.1 In the years that followed, repeated observations of the same strange light-phenomenon have been made by a staggering number of witnesses in the very same valley. The consistency and repeatability of the phenomenon in a well-defined geographic location – a rare characteristic among unidentified aerial phenomena – eventually attracted the interest of scientists. Their involvement – and the instruments and methods they brought to bear – has now led to the accumulation of a wealth of physical evidence.

  Indeed, the lights at Hessdalen are, from a scientific stand-point, a veritable jackpot among all unidentified aerial phenomena and, incomprehensibly, one of the least known and written about. Because the phenomenon can be reliably expected to occur at a precise location, scientists have had the chance to mount several expeditions to the locale, bringing in and setting up myriad cameras, sensors, and other scientific instruments. Even an automatic monitoring station, equipped with a video camera, has been set up at the top of a hill overlooking the valley. The idea was to snap footage of the phenomenon even if it occurred while the scientists were not around. Sure enough, perhaps the best and clearest footage ever captured of an unidentified aerial phenomenon has been taken by this camera.

  The justification for investing in the study of the Hessdalen phenomenon has been the possibility that it represents a new and yet unknown form of energy, which could potentially be harvested. Several scientific papers have been published on the lights. Much of the speculation centers on some form of plasma generated by atmospheric ionization of air and dust.2 The cause of the ionization is not understood. An interesting study concluded that ‘analysis of video frames and radar echoes showed that light spheres emerged “out of thin air” like a standing wave that ionizes the air in its maximum points.’3 The origin of the standing wave is unclear. Though plasma theories seem to explain some aspects of the phenomenon, a survey concluded that ‘several obscure aspects still remain and demand more in-depth investigation.’4 To this day, no definitive explanation has been found for the Hessdalen lights, despite its continuing occurrence. A researcher concluded in resignation, after years of investigation, that ‘this light phenomenon is elusive and its behavior most often unpredictable.’5 (my italics) The same researcher had earlier stated, in apparent frustration with the extraterrestrial visitation hypothesis often associated with the phenomenon, that ‘whatever these things are, if some “alien intelligence” is behind the Hessdalen phenomenon, that hypothetical intelligence has shown no interest in searching a direct, continuative and structurally evolved communication with mankind and went on behaving in such a way that the light-phenomenon itself appears to be totally elusive.’6 (my italics) In the next chapter, we will consider the curious elusiveness that calls of the absurd seem to have built into them, as if elusiveness and self-negation were inherent in their manifestation. Whatever the case, the fact of the matter is ‘that the [Hessdalen] phenomenon, whatever it is, can be measured.’7 So its elusiveness certainly does not mean that the phenomenon is not physical in nature.

  The second call of the absurd is actually the well-known ‘Hudson valley UFO sightings,’ a wave of sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena during the 1980s and ’90s, along the Hudson river valley in New York state.8 Thousands of witnesses described seeing similarly shaped flying craft or light formations. An investigation of these sightings was apparently the last UFO-related work of the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek, perhaps the best-known and most respected UFO researcher to date. My motivation for mentioning this story here is not so much the physical evidence the phenomenon may have left behind, but the fact that so many witnesses have independently made consistent observations of it. Something else that I find even more significant is the introspective, psychological aspect of the phenomenon. This last point is substantiated by a segment of an interview given to a television station by Dennis Sant, one of the key witnesses, whom I quoted earlier in this chapter. Indeed, it is intriguing and logically unexpected that the sight of what he supposed to be a craft would have triggered introspective self-reflection about his own identity. If I literally saw a strange craft I guess much would go through my mind, but not questions about my own nature.