Writer Jay Michaelson asks if Rice University religious studies scholar Jeffrey Kripal has gone mad, or normal?” Kripal’s recent book is How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else.
Here is a taste of Michaelson’s review of How to Think Impossibly:
As Mark Oppenheimer noted in his 2010 essay on an earlier Kripal volume, the academy tolerates metaphysical commitments when it comes to mainstream religionists. After all, I’m now a rabbi/Ph.D. Yet when it comes to non-ordinary experiences, many in the academy think that Kripal has drunk the paranormal Kool-Aid. The headline of Oppenheimer’s piece said it all: “Burning Bush They’ll Buy, but Not ESP or U.F.O.’s.”
This bias is bullshit, Kripal says. It’s loaded with colonialism and racism, it has no basis in anything other than pre-existing (and flimsy) metaphysical commitments, and, if you consider what the overwhelming majority of human beings have believed and experienced across history, it’s disbelief in magic or the occult, not belief, that’s anomalous.
On one level, Kripal insists that he is simply following the evidence. At Rice University, he has assembled the “Archives of the Impossible,” a massive library of accounts of all manner of paranormal activity: pre-cognition, UFOs, NDEs, ESP, demons, angels, aliens. The evidence—testimonies, scientific evidence, even physical artifacts—is overwhelming. “Comparison is about data, yes,” he insists in How to Think, “but it is also about theory or modeling what the data taken as a whole suggest.”
And the data, Kripal says, suggest that “people really do dream the future, leave their bodies in disaster or illness, see hairy creatures or gigantic insectoids, and encounter craft flying over cities or conscious balls of light in their living rooms and werewolves in their backyards.”
“Impossible” is meant literally. “If conventional materialism is true,” Kripal writes, “these things cannot be.” And yet, the materialist explanations of these phenomena—delusion, dream, deception—are so inconsistent with the data that they seem more like desperate attempts to preserve a certain metaphysics than any real account. Says Kripal, “the problem is the lame rhetoric and unquestioned assumptions, not the phenomena themselves.”
And this:
Thus, Kripal insists, religionists need to do more than teach comparatively, critically, and historically. “That is not enough,” he writes. “I have long insisted on something special or something left over that none of these ways and days can quite capture or explain … the strange, the fantastic, the misbehaving or rogue aspects of religious experience…. And so I also teach people to think about religion experientially and, perhaps most controversially, empirically.” Religion, mysticism, and the paranormal, he says, may in fact be about “actual human encounters with consciousness and the cosmos.”
Why, Kripal asks, did we study religion in the first place? Probably because we were drawn to something inexplicable. (I admit that is true for me, and that my own life experience has a lot of materialistically inexplicable phenomena in it.) And yet both conservative rationalists and progressive theorists, Kripal says, reduce religion, magic, and the paranormal to something else: psychology, race and gender, social organization, power. “[T]he secular scientisms, nihilistic materialisms, and unbelievable fundamentalisms of contemporary American culture are truly saddening…. We are depressed because we are, deep down, perfectly sane…. We are disgusted because we know better and more than this.” Kripal says scholars must be both Clark Kent and Superman, both attentive to the critical apparatus of scholarship and open to something more. “The secret of this kind of higher education is not about being one or the other. The secret is in the phone booth.”
How to Think Impossibly is about how to build, and pass through, the epistemic phone booth. How to perform “the flip,” as Kripal called it in his 2019 general-audience book of the same name: the flip from materialist metaphysics to something stranger, yet pervasive across humanity.
Perhaps a first step is to accept that the right brain, not just the left, can be the bearer of truth. “The imagination, particularly within altered states, can become a revelatory translator of paranormal perception and not simply a spinner of daytime fantasies and banal nocturnal dreams.” Supernatural experiences are all pointing at something, but are also all interpretations of that something that are not quite that thing. “The phenomenon reflects to us what we will, what we fear, who we think we are.”
Read the entire piece here.
I am currently reading Carlos Eire’s book about the history of levitation called They Flew: A History of the Impossible. I hope to get to Kripal next. I also hope to read his The Superhumanities. Stay tuned.
