Looking at the Impossible

A few months ago I sat down with Jeffrey J. Kripal, the chair of the Department of Religion at Rice University, to discuss a wide range of “impossible” phenomena—experiences that don’t gel with a strict materialist view of the universe. That conversation appears in our October issue, alongside an essay by Sun founder and editor emeritus, Sy Safransky, where he relays what can only be described as a spiritual experience with his deceased cat, Cirrus.

It’s one of the many things I love about the magazine: its longstanding willingness to invite readers down some pretty unusual avenues, and to treat those explorations with the seriousness they deserve. Below are some The Sun’s most memorable looks at the “impossible.”

Take care and read well,
Derek Askey, Associate Editor

The Sun Interview

Living Medicine

By Akshay Ahuja December 2014

Akshay Ahuja’s conversation with Stephen Harrod Buhner—author of, among many books, Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth—has been one of those Sun interviews I find myself revisiting every few years, intrigued not just by Buhner’s thoughts on plant-based intelligence but by his worldview in general. “All of us have experiences in which we encounter something that feels extraordinary,” he says: “a great tree we come upon in a forest; a person we encounter by chance; a book we find lying on a park bench. Most of us discount such experiences and go on with our lives. I, instead, followed those feelings, and as a consequence my life has been one adventure after another.”

Readers Write

Miracles

By Our Readers June 1984

I’m often a bit jealous when I think about the people who were lucky enough to be a part of The Sun in its earliest years—especially so as I read the Readers Write on “Miracles.” What’s in the section is so intriguing, I would love to have read all of the submissions. (Unfortunately I was just three months old when this was published.) “We probe, divide, and name the aspects of reality, hoping to discern patterns and consistencies which will lead us to uncover the ‘natural laws,’ ” one contributor, Brian Knave writes. “But . . . those laws often tell us more about our minds than about the world.”

Fiction

On Becoming A Cat

By Emily Mitchell December 2018

Well, I suppose the title speaks for itself, clearly showing it’s part of The Sun’s interest in publishing fiction that flirts with the surreal. “There are five distinct steps to the process of felinization,” Mitchell writes in this surprising, indelible short story. “First you have to teach yourself to hear the celestial harmonies. This is what the ancients called the Music of the Spheres.” I love the way Mitchell plays it straight, and of course the way in which the reader can see parallels between her narrative and many other types of more-mundane personal transformation.

Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Searls Speaks

By David Searls May 1976

Recently David “Doc” Searls wrote us a letter to the editor in which he mentioned that The Sun’s founder used to have a job editing Theta: at the time the official journal of the Psychical Research Foundation, which investigates things like out-of-body experiences and life after death. Searls himself has written extensively for The Sun, and this piece—in which he writes about Sy’s growing interest in Jane Roberts and her communion with the entity known simply as Seth—is full of Searls’s lively prose and sardonic tone. “With trust in Safransky’s good sense, I went down to Fowlers and picked up the copy of Seth Speaks that had stared for what seemed years from the top row of the paperback rack there. This took some effort, because the cover is about as off-putting as any Troo UFO! or Van Daniken Space Teacher book from a 7-11 paperback carousel.” It just gets better from there.