Jeffrey Kripal on the Humanities & the Impossible

I am a true fan of Jeffrey Kripal’s work.

I think his invitation to re-think the humanities by seriously engaging with the study of mystical and paranormal experiences is a beautiful thing.

We talk about category creation in the marketing of products. Here, we are talking about the humanities, and the discipline we use to explore and understand the world, and our experiences of it.

I was absolutely thrilled to get a chance to speak with him. I hope you enjoy.

Peter

AI Summary. Scholar Jeffrey Kripal discusses his efforts to "re-enchant" the humanities by taking seriously the extraordinary experiences that have shaped many great thinkers. He explores the distinctly American "spiritual but not religious" movement, its roots in the country's pluralistic approach to spirituality, and the challenges it poses in creating stable communities. Kripal also reflects on the mental health struggles of younger generations, who often feel depressed by the world they have inherited. He suggests that "The Superhumanities," by offering positive visions of human potential and the future, can provide hope in the face of these challenges. The conversation ultimately highlights the importance of integrating extraordinary human experiences into our understanding of ourselves and the world.

Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, where he served as the Associate Dean of the School of Humanities (2019-2023), chaired the Department of Religion for eight years, and also helped create the GEM Program, a doctoral concentration in the study of Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism that is the largest program of its kind in the world. He presently helps direct the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where he served as Chair of Board from 2015 to 2020. Rice is the home of the Archives of the Impossible.

He specializes in the study of extreme religious states and the re-visioning of a New Comparativism, particularly as both involve putting “the impossible” back on the academic table again. He is presently working on a three-volume study of paranormal currents in the history of religions and the sciences for The University of Chicago Press, collectively entitled The Super Story.

Thank you for being here. I start all my conversations with the same question that I borrowed from a friend of mine. She teaches oral history, and it's this beautiful question, so I always use it, but then I over-explain it, because I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?

That's a loaded question. I can tell you where I come from organically or biologically. I'm not sure I can tell you where I come from metaphysically. I come from Nebraska. I grew up in the American Midwest, a little farming community, actually grew up in a hardware store.

Oh, wow.

Metaphysically, I'm not so sure. I don't know. I don't remember, I'll put it that way.

Do you have a recollection of what you wanted to be when you were a kid, when you grew up?

Yeah, I do. I wanted to be a comic book artist. That was my first dream and that didn't happen. Then I wanted to be an NFL quarterback. Then I wanted to be probably a Catholic missionary, and then I wanted to be a medical doctor, and then I became a professor of religion of all things. We fail at certain things, and we succeed at other things.

What was your first comic book? What was your sort of entry into comics?

I was born in '62. And I grew up, of course, in the late '60s, early '70s, and Marvel Comics was still inappropriate at that point, which meant it was good. Marvel Comics was a radical disjunction from what we call the DC universe - Superman and Batman. They were blocky figures in the '60s. They knew right from wrong, and they stood for the American way, and it was all this sort of impenetrable man kind of thing going on. With Marvel, the so-called heroes were always making fun of themselves and their villains, and the Hulk was always battling the U.S. Army. Dr. Strange was on God only knows what. We, as kids, didn't know anything about LSD or psychedelics, but the comics were wild and they were psychedelic in a creative or an inspirational sense. Those were really what inspired me early on as a kid, as a little kid. I couldn't explain why I found these bodies so attractive and so exciting but I did. I was what, 11 or 12 or whatever I was.

So that was my initial fascination. It was actually comic books, and I know they make a lot of money now, and they're all over the screen and the television, but they weren't in the '60s and '70s. They were just basically a kind of junk literature for kids that was sold where your dad bought pornography. It was a drug store. So they were like drugs for 11-year-olds.

Tell me a little bit about where you are now and what you're working on.

I think I'm at the same place. I think I'm stuck into superhumans and comics. I don't do psychedelics, but maybe sometimes I wish I did. I'm still really interested in people's extraordinary experiences. I think the human being is an extraordinary being and is far more than we imagined. So I think I'm still with the superhero comics of my youth. I just call them saints or mystics or something else now. I think it's the same kind of fascination.

I resonated with your work. I really have read everything and just connected on so many levels throughout. I'm excited to talk to you about this stuff and I'm really amazed at what you're doing at Rice. You're formalizing this stuff in a pretty radical way. It seems to me anyway, like you're asking for things that never felt like they were taken seriously to be really considered. I just wonder what that's been like and when did that actually begin? When did you decide that this was what you wanted to be doing?

First of all, I want to hear what you resonated with, because that to me is the real key here. I think with an academic or an intellectual, you either move or you create an environment around you that reflects something of what you're doing. I think I've done the latter. Rice University is a very friendly, very good place to be and to work, and it allows a kind of creativity that a lot of other schools don't allow. I know that because I've taught at other schools. I used to live on the East Coast and I lived in Pennsylvania and I interviewed at a lot of East Coast schools, including Ivy League schools, and they all wanted to tell me what to do. When I came to Rice, they were like, "You can do whatever you want. We'll follow you." I didn't believe them, Peter, because I had been told the opposite for many years, but I believe it now. I think it's essentially true, at least of this institution.

So what I've done is I've created an ecosystem around myself and have tried to authorize and mainstream a lot of the interests I've always had and I've always written about, but didn't seem to have a home or a stable home. What I'm finding is that the academy and my colleagues are very friendly to these interests and that most people have these interests. They just don't admit it. So when I talk about these things or when I write about them or host conferences around them, people are like, "Yeah, we should be doing this." And I'm like, "Yeah, you should."

Of course, I think the reason the humanities are being defunded and ignored is because we don't do this. We don't address the issues that really matter to a lot of people. I think we should. I also think all the critical theory and all the issues around race and gender and class are really important. But I think we also need to do this sort of vertical dimension.

You wrote, "Why do we let the physicists go off and they tell these fabulous stories about string theory and yet we don't allow ourselves to talk about this stuff?" Can you tell me a little bit about what it is, for people who don't know your work, like what are you asking the humanities to do?

I think I said that in "The Secret Body." It’s a memoir I wrote and what I was trying to talk about was that scientists and physicists can get away with the craziest s**t. They can say the most outrageous things, and because they're a physicist, everybody's like, "Oh yeah, that's possible." I'm like, "We've been saying that for thousands of years in the history of religions. Why are we crazy and they're not?" Of course, the answer is they're scientists and you're not. That doesn't really work for me. That's just a kind of invocation of authority.

So what I do is I look at people's anomalous experiences that are not supposed to happen - things like out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, UFO encounters with entities, these sorts of things. I look at them and I realize that they do happen and that the people are actually telling the truth about what happens to them. They don't understand what happened to them. I don't think they're their own authorities. I don't think they understand or can interpret their own experiences. I don't think I can either, but I think we're being invited to try to do that.

So that's what I do. I sit with and I think with people who have had these extraordinary or impossible experiences and I put them on the table with the table and the chairs and history and literature and everything else. I say, "Okay, let's think about all this together. Why do these things happen to people? And why do they happen to people in every culture at every time as far back as we can see?" If there's a universal in human experience, it's definitely the anomalous or the impossible. We've been having these experiences from way, way back.

How did we get separated from these experiences?

I would say by the 18th, 19th century, we start to separate from them, and certainly in the 20th century, we separate from them dramatically, at least in Western culture, Euro-American culture. I wrote an intellectual history of the word "paranormal" called "Authors of the Impossible." One of the takeaways of that little book is that all of the words we use today, like paranormal, psychical, parapsychological, all these terms were all originated or were coined by scientists and intellectuals, mostly in the 19th or early 20th century. During the 20th century, what happens is science and technology arise, and we turn to kind of computer mechanistic models of the mind, and suddenly the mind just becomes a kind of software of the wetware of the brain, and all of these things don't make any sense within that model. So people say they don't happen. They're hallucinations or people are crazy, or they're making this up, or they're looking for money or whatever the rhetoric is. But in fact, that's wrong.

What I mean by the impossible is essentially these things that happen all the time, but aren't supposed to happen because of the parameters of our particular worldview. They're not actually possible within the parameters of what we consider to be real, but they happen anyway. So the big thought experiment for me is, "Okay, what must reality be like if these things happen?" Of course, there's no "if" - they do happen. Okay, so what must reality be? It's not what we're told it is. That's a part of the answer for sure. That can explain certainly my daily life, most of my daily life, but it actually can't explain these extraordinary moments. I'm basically making the wager that reality has to take in these extraordinary moments as well as these ordinary moments.

Your most recent book is "The Superhumanities," which is a proposal to rethink the way comparative religion approaches this stuff. I don’t know enough about academia. What are you teaching today about how to approach these kinds of things?

First of all, the academy is culture. You are a part of the academy and to the extent you're part of culture, of course you are. The academy is really just a bunch of people who are trained to think about culture and to think about the history of it and the contours of what a human being is and what reality is. So I think what academics or professors do is really a reflection of what society thinks.

The argument of "The Superhumanities" is that if you look at the canon, if you will, or the people we read over and over again in the humanities, they all base their ideas on altered states. They had ecstatic experiences, they had precognitions, they had near-death experiences. They don't always write about those in the books, but they're behind the ideas that they write. Or they were taking psychedelics. William James is a good example. He's literally sucking nitrous oxide and eating peyote on the side and studying psychics, by the way. He spent his whole adult life studying mediums and psychics.

So once you realize that the books we read and the ideas we teach are based on these extraordinary states, this modern notion that we can strip out all the extraordinary stuff, all the altered stuff, it's just crazy. Of course, the result is depression and a kind of boredom with what professors and universities do, and I get that. I share that. I think it's flatland, too, and so I want to add this sort of vertical dimension to things.

The other joke I tell is last Halloween all these kids came up to our door looking for candy, and I'd say about two-thirds of them were dressed up as superhumans. No one was dressed up as a professor of religion, by the way. No one. No kid wanted to be an academic or a professor of anything. But about two-thirds of them wanted to be superhuman. So it's also a marketing issue, to be banal about it. It's a marketing crisis. We are not talking about higher education in a way that's attractive and that's actually faithful to the history of what higher education is. I think it's exciting. I think it's incredibly cool and I think we make it not cool or we make it too real or we only talk about the critical aspects which are again important but we don't talk about the positive or the affirmative aspects.

It's beautiful. I really appreciate that, absolutely, that you corrected me by eliminating the division I put between the academy and culture immediately.

I grew up in a hardware store, Peter. I grew up in the Midwest. My family are all farmers and small business people. They're people. I don't imagine for a moment standing outside of that or being somehow special. I think higher education has given me a lot of special ideas, but I think those special ideas again originated in these altered states and in these other people. So it's really human beings that I think are special, not academics. Academics just have the luxury and the benefit or the opportunity to write and to make film and to make art and to be creative in a way and not have to worry about our paycheck or our health insurance. That's extraordinary. And that's, by the way, historically unique as well. I don't take that for granted either.

Do you remember, when did you realize that this is something you could make a living doing?

I didn't. I never did. I was a weird kid, Peter. I was super religious, by the way. I was more religious than you probably would have liked.

What is that? That's rather presumptuous.

Yeah, it is a presumption, but it's a pretty fair presumption because I think I annoyed and offended lots of people with my piety. Why I'm saying that is I was fascinated. I got into religion. I wanted to be a monk, actually. I learned about the unconscious. I learned about Freud. I learned psychoanalysis. I was just a kid again from Nebraska. I didn't know any of this. Wow, that was mind-blowing.

So I just pursued this. I guess this is what I'm trying to say. I just pursued these ideas. Then when the time came to get a job, magically, I got a job, but that didn't have to happen, Peter. A lot of my colleagues didn't get jobs and a lot of my students don't get jobs. Why did I get a job? I don't know. I know somebody made a mistake and hired me.

But then when you back in, as I say, we all back into the academy, particularly the study of religion, you back into it. You don't grow up wanting to be it. You confront some problem or some issue with your community or your tradition or your culture that it cannot answer. It probably can't even ask that question, but you realize that these questions are asked all the time in the university. So you're like, "I can do this." That's why I say you back into the discipline or the field, not because you grew up wanting to be that, but because that was the only institution that will have you essentially, is what I'm trying to say. But that's important. That's really important. That's culture, by the way, again. So I think there's something remarkable about our culture that lifts up higher education, even though that same higher education is very challenging to the broader kind of social structures that lift it up.

You define culture, I think, as "consciousness encoded." Is this phrase that I remember that you use. Can you talk more about - I'm, that just hit me like lightning when I read it. I hadn't encountered that idea exactly that way before.

Yeah, I think the definition is - what is the definition? The humanities. The humanities are consciousness coded in culture. What I mean by that is you think, and I think - I'm saying you think, I don't know what you think, but I know I think what I think because of the society I live in. Even my sense of inwardness, even my sense of what's conscious and unconscious is really a function of this mad social imaginary that has raised me. I'm speaking English now, which is an entirely learned skill that I learned in this social imaginary.

So this social world that we're in literally creates us, and it literally allows certain kinds of forms of consciousness and doesn't allow other forms of consciousness. When I describe society or the humanities as consciousness coded in culture, what I mean is that there's a particular form of awareness that's coded in things like language and ritual and law and politics and all these things that we just take for granted as the way the world really works, but it actually doesn't really work like that. Those are all local ways that we shape consciousness and that we create a person.

You can think about this if you think about your dog or your cat. They have a very different personhood than you do because they've been shaped by different social practices. That's what I mean. I think we underestimate how deep our conditioned or constructed nature goes.

I remember reading - do you know Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm?

Yeah.

So I fed, I'll confess, I fed some of your stuff into the AI and asked it to tell me questions to ask you. And one of it said, I'm going to quote this just for your entertainment: "Kripal's current focus is on renewing and revisioning the comparative method for the study of religion, aiming to re-enchant the field and make it magical and miraculous again."

I just got that off of my bio. I just stole that off my bio. I don't think very much of AI, by the way. It's just stealing crap. That's all it's doing.

So what about this idea of re-enchantment? Does this feel, does this connect with what you're doing or is it - do you want me to talk about Jason?

Yes, I would love to hear that. Yes. He doesn't think we've ever been disenchanted and I think he's right. What he means by that is that the birth of the human sciences or what we now call the humanities and the social sciences, really have all of these moments in them that are literally magical.

So people like Madame Curie are going to seances, for example, and seeing electricity around the heads of mediums. Somehow this is connected to her work on radioactivity and the birth of modern physics. Jason traces hundreds of these moments and shows that actually, if you look at the very individuals who say there was disenchantment, or who we say are responsible for disenchantment, they're actually enchanted. They're doing enchantment as they work. This is very much the argument of "The Superhumanities," which is that yeah, we can talk about a re-enchantment because we have disenchanted the fields to a great extent. But in fact, they've always had this enchantment inside them. This is what draws people to these books and these ideas.

You also identify Esalen, or the Human Potential Movement - and please correct me if I'm wrong - as being a particularly American thing. Is that true? Does that feel fair?

Yeah, I think that's fair. I think that if you talk to scholars of American religion, what they'll often say is what makes America, and by America the U.S., is its experimental, combinative nature. In other words, it's always combining stuff and experimenting with stuff that hasn't been done before. That's why I subtitled the book "America and the Religion of No Religion." It's this notion that all religions and all spiritual practices are attempts to realize this future human nature, but none of them are absolute or speak for all humankind. The religion of no religion - it's not atheism, it's not secularism. It's this idea that whatever we want to call God is just too big for any particular religious system or psychology or science or anything else. All of these are just attempts to approximate this greater whole. That's really what makes it American.

I think at least in the U.S., legally, we have this separation of church and state, and we do not allow any religion to take over, as it were. We haven't so far. That is very Esalen-esque. That's very American. If you don't allow a religion to take over, it means all religions can prosper. It has this sort of paradoxical or ironic feature to it. If you allow one religion to take over, it's going to suppress all the others. If you only have two religions, they're going to kill each other, which is what you saw in Europe with the Protestants and the Catholics. But if you have thousands of religions, guess what? They can coexist in relative peace. That's the American experiment. It's an experiment, Peter. I want to emphasize that it's not a conclusion. It may be that human beings are just too intolerant and stupid and dumb to live together. I think that's entirely possible. But so far, we've managed to live with each other in a way that's not without fault and certainly has nasty histories, but it's also, I think, potentially promising.

What I'm just thinking about - I feel like I read a lot or I see headlines around de-churching, and that the belief and religious practice and the behaviors around belief in America, in the U.S., and I think in the West generally, are really shifting and changing and morphing. I'm wondering what kind of observations do you have on how people are - the phrase that young people use now is "spiritual but not religious."

Or they talk about the "nones" or the refusal to affiliate. My own sense of that - first of all, it's very American. Again, it's also very European. The Europeans are much more secular than the Americans. The Americans are nutty, by the way. They're spiritually nutty in a way that the Europeans are - I'm engaging in stereotypes here, but the Europeans are much more secular and scientific or secular about this. The Americans are like, "Oh, let's just put things together. Let's do yoga and let's meditate. Let's go to church and the synagogue and the temple and let's do it all." That's cool.

But if you put a bunch of things together, what it means is you're not worshiping or honoring any one of those pieces. So there's this irony in that. To the extent we combine things, we also recognize that none of those things are absolute in themselves. This refusal to affiliate, it actually goes way back, certainly as far as American transcendentalism in the 19th century, which was essentially a very literary, very intellectual movement out of Boston that saw the soul as transcendental, and it's not connected, or not uniquely Christian or Jewish or anything else. It's just the soul. It's transcendent.

When I taught at Harvard for a year, my office was two doors down from the chapel where Ralph Waldo Emerson gave a famous address to some graduating students. He said something like, "I call it consciousness, you call it Christianity." So it's this move. This is like 1835 or something. I don't know. I don't know what the date is. He was kicked out of Harvard for 50 years for saying that and for giving that sermon. But that then became, I think, the kind of core of what much later became the "spiritual but not religious" movement.

The other thing I'll say is "spiritual but not religious" is a phrase that is also connected to AA, believe it or not. It's Alcoholics Anonymous that realized that you could be religious without being religious, that you could have some connection to some higher power or higher source without being, without going to a particular building on a particular day or being part of a particular community. They also realized that was really important, particularly if you happen to be an alcoholic. That's really what can save you or create a lifestyle that's not an alcoholic one.

So there's a history, there's a long history here. When I hear young people say "I'm spiritual but not religious," what I hear, Peter, is a kind of moral protest. They don't like the local religious community condemning their friends or themselves for a particular set of desires or orientation. So they're like, "Screw it. I don't need that." But they do need, some human beings need some rootedness in some greater sense of reality or some cosmic scope. Saying "I'm spiritual but not religious" essentially means "I'm not intolerant of people's genders or sexualities or races, but I am rooted in a greater reality that goes well beyond me or my community." I think that's frankly very honest and quite healthy. The problem with it is it doesn't create community very well.

One last question, which is a thread I feel like I heard in what you were - I guess just being a professor and having a relationship with all of these ideas, but also young people. You talked about sort of mental health and I just wonder, what do you - what have you learned about young people and their - how they are doing, do you know what I mean? How are the kids doing in this culture?

Not well. If you're doing well in this culture, there's something wrong with you. I'll put it that way. If we want to define health and well-being as a kind of harmony with one's social environment, then how can you be healthy or happy when your social environment is systematically racist and killing the environment and threatening nuclear war and all kinds of things that are just insane, frankly?

So the young people, at least I work with, they're often depressed, frankly, by their surroundings, by the world that their parents and their grandparents have created. It's not a good world. There are some people who succeed and flourish in that world and become rich, but they're few and far between. Most people do not succeed and suffer tremendously because of that world. So I don't want to paint too grim a picture, but I think it's pretty grim at points. I think a lot of young people are very concerned about the climate in particular. They see that in a way, they feel that in a way that their parents and grandparents do not. They know that they're growing up in that world. So there's more at stake in it than there are for older people.

This seems a little trite, this question, but what does "The Superhumanities" have to offer or bring to that challenge?

I think it can give people hope. One of the things I often say is, "Why, when you turn your streaming service on, is every movie about the future? Why is it always bad? Why are there only dystopias? Why are there no utopias? Why is the future never good?" There are lots of very, as I also say, there are a lot of good reasons to be dystopian, but thought tends to produce itself. In other words, if we think the world's bad, then the world is going to be bad. We're probably going to create a bad future. If, on the other hand, we think the world's good, then the chances are that we're going to act on those thoughts and that we're going to create a good future.

So again, it goes back to this notion of authoring. I really think it's in some ways up to not you or me, but it's certainly up to us as a species about what kind of stories we tell. I think "The Superhumanities" have something to offer here because some of these stories are really quite positive about the future and they're not all negative. Certainly, the religions all have a kind of positive future woven right into them, rightfully or wrongfully, they do. I think that's what "The Superhumanities" can offer - a vision of the human that is future-oriented and not just bad and negative. That's what I would say.

I want to thank you so much. I'm just a huge fan and super grateful that you shared your time. I just - yeah, it's been a real honor and a real pleasure to talk to you. Thank you so much.

I hope it was useful, Peter. I'm humbled by your enthusiasm. I always want to look around. I'm like, "Who is he talking to?" Maybe Iron Man. Maybe you're talking to him. But I, yeah, I hear that. I need to sit with that. I need to hear that more, I think.

Yeah, that's wonderful. So I'm really - I feel, anyway, I know you got to go but thank you so much.

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