The impossible happens every day. A woman wakes up in the middle of the night and knows, instantly, that her husband has been killed in a car accident and is dead in a ditch. She even knows which ditch. She calls the police and tells them where to find the body. An artist, in an altered state and during subsequent waking vision, knows in precise and banal detail what is going to happen in an office building three years away on another continent. A grieving widow begins to notice striking communications from her dead husband (a teleporting object in the house and mysteriously focused book spines in a library). Her therapist will not listen. A woman suffering from severe depression enters a clinical trial at Johns Hopkins University and knows the absolute benevolence of the universe, knows God. Psilocybin has cured her of her atheism. She goes to a famous scholar for counsel on this, the most extraordinary experience of her life. Could the revelation of cosmic beneficence and presence beneath everything possibly be so? This scholar will not listen to her, reducing it all to the brain on drugs.

None of this is really new, much less anomalous. This is the history of humanity. For millennia, our ancestors around the planet recounted such experiences in the terms that were given to them. Indeed, they eventually constructed public religions, and entire civilizations, partly out of exactly these kinds of experiences. However, in our culture, increasingly dominated by physicalist narratives—stories in which an object or subject is, in the end, entirely material and so can be measured and manipulated, and everything to the contrary is considered to be “impossible”—we do not generally account for such experiences, much less try to integrate them into our personal lives and public cultures. We suppress and forget them. Or we just make fun of them in subtle or not-so-subtle ways.

But what we consider to be “impossible” within this very recent shift in narrative is a function of our worldviews and assumptions about how the world works, not of the world itself—much less of the further reaches of human nature, or really, human supernature.

What if we flipped our narratives—most all of which move linearly through space and time—on their head? What if we looked to the future as where our deepest meanings were arriving from? We would understand our place in the cosmos differently. Perhaps we might even hear the future telling us: “Turn around! Wake up!”

“All these features of quantum mechanics are well known to the historians of religions, not in their mathematical forms, of course, but in their experiential correspondences.”

Such a possibility is part of what I call the Super Story. In the Super Story, we come to know our bodies as beings made of the same identical light or energy (physics) and ourselves as highly evolved expressions of a vast universe that has been expanding, changing, and coming to know itself for over 14 billion years (cosmology and evolutionary biology). It is a vast cosmic narrative in which some, maybe many, people increasingly live in an “unconscious” or unknowing way, rather like fish swimming in the water who do not know what “water” is. The Super Story is much indebted to the discoveries of the modern sciences but also—and this is the part to which I can speak most authoritatively—to the history of religions, here understood as the long arc not of the staid and often righteous institutions of our pasts and presents, but as the endless glowing stories of altered states and “impossible” events reported every day and everywhere.

Religious experiences are not religions. Or better, impossible experiences can be interpreted in religious ways and integrated (sort of) into existing religious worldviews. But they need not be. Think of the stories with which I began. These can be read as the beginnings of basic religious ideas, like the separable soul or the survival of bodily death, that are not yet public beliefs. They can also be interpreted (sort of) through a secular lens, through which they might be seen as misperceptions or cognitive mistakes. In either case, a worldview is considered to be superior to the honest human, or superhuman, experience.

I want to question, deeply, such reductive moves, be they religious or secular. I also want to further question our one-way temporal thinking. Most of the cultural and personal stories I commonly hear work backward. We are who we are because of what happened in the past to this community, culture, or person. We revere or honor certain past figures or events. Or perhaps we want to live in some past or other historical world, know their altered states as our own. We, in actual fact, believe backward.

Even many of the big science stories generally move from the universe’s beginnings, presently conceived (in what has to be one of the greatest understatements of all time) as the Big Bang, through cosmic and biological evolution to the social and cultural expressions of human civilization. Here is a very (very) short scientific epic that historian David Christian cites in his 2004 book Maps of Time: “Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people.” There are longer ones, of course. Carl Sagan’s famous Cosmos series (1980–81) is probably the best example, although it also got boiled down to a one-liner: “We are made of star stuff.”

Both the hydrogen and stardust stories are fundamentally reductive. They assume that a conscious presence can be explained by reducing it to its smallest material parts. That is a very dubious assumption that philosophers of science call physicalism. It is almost certainly wrong for one simple reason: Such a model cannot explain, even begin to explain, consciousness or subjectivity; that is, you and me. There is no imaginable way to get from little insentient bits of invisible matter to this Technicolor movie that I am in right now. A physicalist will say, “But we will get there.” But what if the basic materialist or physicalist assumption is simply mistaken? Scholars like myself call this situation, after the philosopher David Chalmers, the “hard problem of consciousness.” We can describe to some degree how consciousness works, but we can’t with the tools of physicalism answer the question: Why does consciousness happen at all?

Both stories—hydrogen and stardust—also assume that the truth of things lies in the past. I want to question that, not out of some kind of lucky guessing or pure speculation, but from the further reaches of actual human experience. What if the truth of things actually lies in the future?

Intellectuals, authors, and artists (people like Sigmund Freud and Virginia Woolf) are particularly good places to turn for such suggestive evidence. They are, as the anthropologist and science writer Eric Wargo (to whom I am especially indebted here) humorously puts it, precogs “hooked up to a printer.” That is, they write, a lot. And we can read what they wrote. They tell us what they are dreaming, seeing, and sensing as they create highly influential works of public culture out of these same altered states that we can also see and interpret (psychologies, novels, films, and works of art). Because they write so much, we can watch what they experience and later say and do. We can read the creative process in action.

And it is little like we so dully imagine. As Wargo shows in abundance in his books, such intellectuals, artists, authors, and dreamers are not “guessing.” This is not about some ill-defined or vague “intuition.” This is about actual precognition, mostly, yes, filtered or translated through the dream imagination or cultural “unconscious” that needs to be interpreted and so made “possible,” but it is nevertheless real knowledge, and it produces real theory and stunning works of art and culture. This is a “time loop,” as Wargo has put it. Within such a loop, the author, artist, and visionary create as they work to realize what is already so in the future.

Unsurprisingly, some of our present scientific knowledge suggests this same paradox of an already existent unity of the past, present, and future. The block universe theory advanced by some modern cosmologists points in this direction: In it, all space and time are spread out, already “there,” already so, and we are but neurological sensors moving through it via our perceptions. We are not on the crest of the wave of all cosmic space and time, as we delude ourselves into thinking. We are mere temporary slices of an already existent cosmic cake, and our perception of space and time, including this present, is relative to our perspective or position. In Wargo’s science fiction terms, we are cosmic worms spread out in space-time from our conception to our death, but we only know temporary slices of this worm at any one time and place.

Or consider what the cosmologists like to call the “fine-tuning problem.” Things look set up. The numbers that define the weak and strong forces of the atomic world, even of something like gravity or electromagnetism, are all what they need to be to create life and consciousness. And why, exactly, is this a “problem”? It sounds like a wildly positive promise to me. It sounds like we live in a cosmos that intended us from the future. That is fantastic, not fateful.

Some of the most eye-popping features of modern physics, including those discussed within the literature on the possible implications of quantum mechanics (the unity of matter and energy, the speculative block universe of space-time, wholeness, nonlocality, entanglement, and the collapse of the observer/observed in some interpretations), can be turned into mathematical equations by human beings. That is what we call science—in this case, physics. But such realities can also be experienced and so known quite directly by human beings, particularly in what we generally call (and snarkily dismiss as) “mystical,” “nondual,” or “paranormal” phenomena. Hence my opening stories in this essay.

All these features of quantum mechanics are well known to the historians of religions, not in their mathematical forms, of course, but in their experiential correspondences: as union or oneness with God or the cosmos, as eternity, as the circular nature of time, as mind-reading or “telepathy,” as the participatory nature of interpretation and revelation, and so on. Indeed, they are exceptionally common comparative patterns across cultures and times.

This was certainly shocking to the first quantum physicists when they mathematized and formalized such aspects of the cosmos, but they knew where to turn. Some of the founding quantum physicists were on the right track before their followers abandoned their initial comparisons (to build weapons of mass destruction, among other things).

Early 20th-century physicists like Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, and Wolfgang Pauli looked to comparative mystical literature and parapsychological phenomena for how the weird unities, paradoxes, and participatory logics of quantum physics “down there” in the quantum realm appear “up here” in rare but real human experience.

Bohr put the Taoist Way, or yin-yang, on his Danish coat of arms to get at the basic paradox of quantum mechanics, where the invisible reality can be measured as a wave or a particle, depending on how the experiment is set up. Schrödinger wrote of there being only One Mind, which he identified with God. Pauli was a walking poltergeist. Things would blow up or break in his presence. Everyone knew it. When I gave a sermon on Pauli at a Unitarian church in Houston, an elderly physicist approached me afterwards. He had been at a physics conference in Jerusalem with the scientist. They made Pauli sit in the room on the opposite side of the air-conditioning unit. Hey, it was hot, and they were not taking any chances.

The basic move of the Super Story is to pay close attention to this supernature. And I mean really close. I mean putting these unbelievable accounts into a meaningful comparative framework until the impossible becomes the possible, that is, until they are not only believed but assumed to be obvious in some fashion. Because they are: We experience the inexplicable every day. Then we can tell a new story around these experiential moments, but always with an eye on what we collectively have learned in the sciences. The two sides of the world have to correspond, after all. They are both expressions of that One World, one from “the inside” (the altered states), one from “the outside” (the sciences).

Among the possible implications of modern physics and cosmology is that the future may well be pressing in on the present. This is certainly what the history of our intellectuals, artists, and authors are suggesting. One of the hardest lessons we need to learn is that it would do us well not to be so bound to our past stories, to our “histories,” as we so confidently say, as if our answers lie there. It would do us well to listen to the future and not always believe backward, that is, not commit ourselves to the altered states of our ancestors and the beliefs that ensued from them. Maybe our descendants know more than our ancestors. Maybe our descendants are trying to speak back to us. What then?

The future of the human, of course, can be theorized in different ways: extinction, transhumanism, and posthumanism, to give three (very depressing) answers. But why are these models so often bad with respect to the present? And why are dystopias—dark and foreboding scenarios of the future— the stuff of streaming science fiction today? Who tells a positive, much less an ecstatic, story of the future?

“What if we looked to the future as where our deepest meanings were arriving from? We would understand our place in the cosmos differently. Perhaps we might even hear the future telling us: ‘Turn around! Wake up!’”

I have spent weeks, really months, sitting around a room at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, listening to physicists, neuroscientists, and philosophers talk about psi phenomena—basically, things that happen all the time but that most professional intellectuals ignore or deny because they do not fit into their local worldviews.

What does the universe have to be like to render such events plausible, meaningful, even predictable? The scientists at Esalen kept looking for a “cause” or a “mechanism.” Basically, they wanted a “how.” I much appreciated their open-mindedness (you cannot, after all, study something until you admit that it is real). Being the humanist in the room, however, I kept wondering to myself, and occasionally out loud, “But what if there is no cause? What if the point of the event is not more mechanism but meaning? What if the paranormal is about story?”

I noticed, for example, that paranormal events repeatedly express themselves in language and new forms of expression—voices heard, poems from nowhere, channeled literature, entirely passive or suffered revelations. I eventually theorized this language-soaked impossible as a kind of “writing the paranormal writing us.” Human beings are telling a story in and about their most memorable moments (and these are some of the most important things that ever happened to the experiencers), but they are also in a story being told, and they know it. The story is, in effect, rewriting itself in and as them.

That understanding of the paranormal as “us writing us” changes just about everything. It certainly suggests that the impossible is often about creativity itself, about expressing new meaning precisely because of these same unusual states of body and mind. That those creations are seldom direct but are symbolic, artistic, and literary is meaningful itself, since this is how that other part of us communicates with this part of us—through symbol, art, and story. This is where the Super Story comes in. It listens to such stories seriously (unlike the therapist or scholar above) and takes them in as part of its own always developing narrative. It is also comfortable with the symbol, the artwork, and the narrative. It is not about clean lines and certain explanations.

Such a Super Story is often wildly positive and profoundly affirmative: silence, symptom, and hallucination are no longer sufficient. Such a Super Story also embraces and celebrates sciences like physics, biology, and cosmology. As such, it is a fundamentally new story, and one that is as much from the future as it is from the past. We have believed backwards long enough. Perhaps now it is time to believe forward, maybe even from the future. That would be something.