– Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (2011)
Vallee’s method here is quite interesting. He begins with the hypothesis that the absurd is meaningful, that the dilemma signals new thought, that we should be looking for the cracks or glitches in the stories in order to begin divining their latent messages. Much like dreams, UFO accounts do not mean what they seem to mean. They point to something else, or to somewhere and somewhen else. They often have the quality of dreams, but they are also physical events. They look a lot like physical dreams. In my own terms, they are hermeneutical events, meaning events that share in both the mythical and the physical.
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It is this same gnostic or reflexive sensibility, this same notion of writing and being written, that inspired Vallee to write in his journals about an “esoteric history,” of a mysterious attraction he feels “of an unseen presence that seems to be speaking to us across the centuries of darkness”. It is this same esoteric attitude again that teaches him that texts, and particularly mystical texts, are not rational objects with simple literal meanings. Each is a multidimensional universe of meaning designed, rather like a UFO, to shatter one’s inherited categories and so offer a potential passport into another, richer dimension of existence—a passport to Magonia. “For those who have pierced the barrier,” Vallee writes, “words have never represented more than the emerging part of thought. Beyond words are the second meaning, the third meaning, the true ones”. One, two, and beyond both, a third: this again, at the risk of overemphasizing the point, is a classic mystical or gnostic structure of reading and thinking.
[…]
Such an alien-ated gnosis is even more apparent in Vallee’s understanding of the God of the Bible, a rather disturbing deity whom some of the early gnostic Christians considered a demiurge, that is, a half-wit creator god who was not worth their worship or respect. This, of course, is Fort’s “bland and shining Stupidity.” It is also why Fort’s editor wanted to call his third book God Is an Idiot. The true Godhead of the ancient gnostics, of course, was none of this. The true God, the Father, the One, was something completely beyond the god of the Bible, a God beyond god. With Fort, Vallee shares an almost identical sensibility. He told me quite simply that he does not believe in “the God of the Bible.” He had put the same in print, though, and much more, over a decade ago: “The notion of the ‘good yet frightful God’ of the Bible and the Gospels seems like a swindle to me: It is the biggest, most cruel confidence game in history. . . . Simple human dignity should make us reject all that with indignation”. Hence the “groveling plea” of the Catholic Requiem, the “religious malady” that gives us endless conflicts “from Ireland to Palestine,” and the utterly bizarre phenomenon of “good” Christians, “good” Muslims, and “good” Hindus building atom bombs.
Which is not to say that he rejects the various scriptural accounts as groundless. He accepts the ambiguous and always fallible historical record that something happened, that is, that a series of profound religious events occurred, which were then recorded in scriptures by way of human memory and community. But he sees no reason to assume that such paranormal events were authored by an ultimate deity. Quite the contrary. “The correct conclusion, in my opinion, would be to acknowledge that an unrecognized form of life and consciousness exists close to our earth”. What we have, then, is a lower deity, a devilish demiurge, as the early gnostic Christians would have put it. “Other forces manifest,” Vallee wrote as late as 1996. “We call them ghosts, spirits, extraterrestrials. When all else fails we abjectly turn them into gods, the better to worship what we fail to grasp, the better to idolize what we are too lazy to analyze. I am in search of a different truth”.
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