Tuning In to the Impossible: The Telepathy of BFF-dom (Kripal and Authors of the Impossible)

 Tuning In to the Impossible: The Telepathy of BFF-dom (Kripal and Authors of the Impossible)

By Calliope Mills

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Have you ever had a friend so in sync with you that you start finishing each other’s sentences—not occasionally, but all the time? You think of calling them, and they text you first. You’re about to share a thought, and they say it out loud. It’s like you’re operating on the same wavelength, as if an invisible thread connects your minds.

To most people, this is just a funny coincidence or a sign of compatibility. But what if it’s more than that?

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In his groundbreaking book Authors of the Impossible, Jeffrey J. Kripal explores the boundary between the known and the unknown—the rational and the mystical. He examines how certain thinkers (like Jacques Vallée, Charles Fort, and others) have dared to take extraordinary experiences seriously: UFO encounters, psychic phenomena, and moments of synchronicity that challenge the materialist worldview. For Kripal, these events aren’t just fringe oddities—they’re part of what it means to be human, “Such inner hidden faculties are like the stars in the day sky—they are always there, shining, but they are completely invisible until the sun sets…We are all secretly, nocturnally gifted. We just live in the day, oblivious to our own secret stars.” (Kripal 226).

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Now, imagine applying that lens not to UFOs or apparitions, but to something as familiar and intimate as friendship.

In a deep, emotionally resonant friendship, something extraordinary can occur. You and your friend begin to “know” things about each other without explanation. You sense their feelings from miles away. You speak in unison. You say, “I was just thinking that,” a little too often for comfort. This isn’t magic in the Harry Potter sense—it’s something subtler and stranger. Kripal might call it “the impossible”—a kind of metaphysical co-authorship of reality.

My friend and I showing up dressed the same to practice without planning

According to Kripal, the paranormal often disrupts our sense of time, space, and self. It suggests that the mind isn’t locked inside the skull, but somehow entangled with the world, “...a reality is constructed through elaborate social processes…” (Kripal 241). In a close friendship, that entanglement becomes personal. The sense of self begins to blur—not in a codependent way, but in a mysteriously shared rhythm. Your thoughts don’t just run parallel—they interweave.

Kripal argues that our culture tends to ignore or rationalize these experiences because they don’t fit into
our dominant materialist worldview. But ignoring them doesn’t make them less real. It just makes us less honest about what it means to be human, “...a tragic denial of our own potential nature” (Kripa 233). And what could be more human than the strange intimacy of truly being seen and known by another mind?

The Coke to my Diet, another telepathically connected friend

So what if we stopped brushing off these moments in friendship as “just coincidence”? What if we took them seriously—not in a rigid, scientific way, but in the spirit Kripal invites: curious, open, willing to embrace the mysterious? These moments of mental resonance, emotional synchronicity, and unspoken understanding could be clues that something deeper is at play—something that breaks down the illusion of separation and hints at a more connected, participatory reality.

Maybe your best friend isn’t just your confidant or companion. Maybe they’re your co-author. Together, you’re not just sharing life—you’re helping to write a chapter of the impossible.