Audio: Pop Apocalypse: Ecstatic Knowledge and the Study of Religion featuring Jeffrey Kripal

Access video of Episode Five here.

Full Transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

MATTHEW DILLON: So it is our great honor to have on the podcast today, Jeffrey J. Kripal, a.k.a. Spider-man. Or is it Spider-man, a.k.a. Jeffrey Kripal? Which goes on your doorjamb or your name plate now?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Well, it just says Spider-man, but he lets me use his office mat, so I used it. He never complains.

MATTHEW DILLON: I was wondering because on your professor's office, you had Spider-man on the nameplate, but I was wondering if you are now Dean Spider-man.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: No, my name plate just says that's his office. I just--

MATTHEW DILLON: OK.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Yeah.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, that's great. So wonderful. Thank you for coming on. And I'll speak to this in the intro, but you and I have known each other for almost 15 years. So I'll do my best to normal interview, but it'll probably end up in chit chat at some point.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: That's OK.

MATTHEW DILLON: So since we are under the auspices of the Divinity School, I've taken to asking everyone the same question to start, which is what is your background in religion? By which I mean, how were you raised? Were you raised in a particular religious tradition? And so, how did it impact you?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Those were minor questions, right? So, OK. So what I always say here is that when I talk about my ideas in the abstract, people look at me like I'm stupid or crazy or dumb or something. But when I locate them in this life story, then it makes a lot of sense to people.

And so I always tell this life story. I mean, I grew up in Southeastern Nebraska, in a German-Czech Roman Catholic family, and I was uber Catholic as an adult. I mean, uber, uber. I mean, I would put to shame anybody's Catholicism when I was 12 or 13.

I was annoyingly Catholic, like the kid you didn't like because he was a religious jerk. And I also became very anorexic about the same time. And so, I was suffering from, basically, wasting away and being super pious. And we didn't even have a word yet in American English for that.

Karen Carpenter died in '84. This would have been in the late '70s. I went to a Benedictine monastery for my seminary training. I wanted to be a monk. So again, I was uber Catholic. I got turned on at the seminary to the comparative study of religion.

And I also was healed of my anorexia through psychoanalysis and some very wise and very patient monks who guided me through all that and helped me figure out why I was not eating. And so I was really interested in sexuality. I was really interested in sexual orientation.

I was really interested in Catholicism and Christianity. I was really interested in other traditions, and I decided I didn't want to be a monk because I didn't-- well, I wanted to ask the questions and a religious vocation was going to squelch those. So I went to graduate school.

And I trained in something called the history of religions, which is a particular lineage in the comparative study of religion. So to answer your question, religion means everything to me, Matt. I'm the most religious guy you'll ever meet, except, today, I don't have a religion. And that's where I'm at.

MATTHEW DILLON: The religion of no religion, as one might say in a subtitle.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Right.

MATTHEW DILLON: So what's interesting in a number of people would have come to your work, starting with authors of the impossible, right? After the paranormal turn, we'll get there. But not everyone knows that you were trained as an indologist, right? So what was it that drew you to study Hindu, saints, and mystics? And basically, how did that get you started on your trajectory?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Yeah, basically, the short answer-- male sexual orientation. I came to the conclusion that if one was a male, one have had a male body-- this is in the 1980s, by the way, so this is how we spoke. We didn't speak like we do today.

If someone has a male body, and one is Catholic or Christian, and God is male, then there's a strong preference in the Christian mystical traditions for a homoerotic orientation or a same sex union between a male body and a male God. And I got interested in the Hindu Tantric traditions because they provided another model.

They had female goddesses who were at the core of the tradition. And so, I was just really interested in this question of whether, frankly, male heterosexuality could be integrated into a mystical system. And so that's really what drew me to India. I spent the first-- I was not interested in anything paranormal, nothing until probably around '08 or '09.

I was interested in questions of gender and sexuality, and not for academic reasons, for really personal, spiritual, and psychosexual reasons. And that then translated into a scholarly life. But my whole early career was about nothing but what I called the erotic, which was this fusion of human sexuality and divine transcendence.

MATTHEW DILLON: And so, that that's as good a place as any, to speak to-- and you've written about it extensively that night in Kolkata. And everybody's going to ask you about this, but there's something that I want to put together.

On the one hand, you've written-- and even up to your most recent book, that, in a sense, all your books come out of what happened there, right? Come out of that night, in some form or fashion. And it's interesting, at the same time, how your interpretation of that night shifts over time, too, right? So at first, it's electrocution, then it's tied to the erotic.

Then, it starts to go paranormal. And recently, you're talking about cardiac events. So I'm very curious how have you come to-- I guess the easy question would be like, what do you think really happened? But I think the better question is, how has that night served as something that you've thought with over the years to bring out your books.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Yeah. So maybe we should say with that night is first.

MATTHEW DILLON: That might be helpful.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Yeah. So I was seeking what we might call a mystical experience for my entire brief life at that point. I suppose that was 1988. So I was all of 26 at that point. And I went to India, very much seeking a mystical experience. So this was an intentional practice and desire.

The event itself happened during Kali Puja, which is in usually late October, early November, I guess. It's very much like Halloween. I call it Halloween on steroids. I mean, it's not just cut off arms and decapitated heads, but it's actual decapitated heads, like goat heads and things in the rituals.

And the Hindu goddess, Kali, she has this fierce form, with her tongue sticking out, standing on her husband. And then she has this gentle or beneficent form, this blue form of that's much more motherly and gentle. And so, you see both of them during Kali Puja.

And during that Puja, it's about a three or four-day cycle. I woke up one night, and my body wasn't awake, but my mind was. And this energy entered into me or came out of me, and it was doing things to me very intentionally and not have anything to do with my own agency or my own will.

And it ended in an out-of-body experience that was quite dramatic. And I remember getting back into my body and feeling something, some spiritual electrocution, or some Kundalini awakening, as the tradition would say, had happened. And I didn't know what it was, Matt.

There was a visual component, which was very erotic, but there was no goddess or god seen in it. But it fit perfectly into the shakta Tantric tradition I was absorbed in and had been studying for years. I was in Kolkata, trying to perfect my Bengali and working on the [? Katomnata, ?] this five-volume immense piece of literature that comes out of the early 20th century.

So I was completely absorbed in this shakta Tantric tradition and all of its symbols and language. And that was the context in which that night occurred. How did it influence my later work? I think it made me deeply sympathetic to people's ecstatic experiences, to their out-of-body experiences, to their near-death experiences, to their abduction experiences later on.

I mean, all of these things made a lot of intuitive sense to me because of that night. I did the interpretations of what happened, have shifted over the years, and I think that's intentional. I think that's part of the hermeneutical dynamic.

I don't think your naive question, what really happened, I don't think there's an answer to that. Because I think it's designed to be engaged and to mean different things at different points in the life cycle, to answer the question in a, I hope, not too roundabout way.

MATTHEW DILLON: No, that makes a lot of sense and aligns with your work. So, yeah. So you go to grad school, and you learn Bengali. And you get trained as an indologist, and then you leave it behind. People-- why? I mean, I went to grad school. I got a PhD. I couldn't imagine just putting aside all of it, going, new thing now. Here we go.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: It wasn't just Bengali. It was Sanskrit, too. It was 10 years of studying Indian culture. It was the whole shebang. And the short answer of why I left it behind was because I had to. It wasn't something I chose to do. In fact, I chose not to do it. I chose very strongly to stay in indology.

And I was so hated and so dismissed and vilified for my first book called Kali's Child, that it just was unbearable. And I left the field, not because I wanted to, but because I had to, to preserve my emotional and physical health-- to answer your question.

I was essentially targeted, mostly on the internet. The internet was new at that point, but I was also targeted in the Indian parliament and by politicians and computer scientists in Silicon Valley, who basically targeted me and made my life absolutely miserable.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, and so I'm assuming you haven't been back to India for any reason.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: No. No, of course not. No, no, of course not. If I were to land in India, I don't know what would happen. I don't want to see it.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah. So let me bring this back up. So you you're moving away from being an indologist, not by your own choice. But another thing happens right around this same time, which is that you get tagged by Mike Murphy at Esalen. And starting, as I understand it, you start researching your big Esalen book in the late '90s. And then it takes into the mid-2000. Something like that, right?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Yeah, I mean, basically-- see, what happened was I was in a foxhole. There were bombs going off all around me. And it turns out that the very same book that I was being bombed for was the book Mike Murphy loved. It's actually a very loving book, Matt.

If you read Kali's Child, it's hard to set it down and not think that this author really adores this Saint, which would be accurate actually. But it also deals with some really difficult issues around sexual trauma and abuse and all kinds of things. And it doesn't pull any punches as it were, it tries really hard to deal with it and to humanize this individual but also to honor and to explore his ecstasies.

And Mike read the book in '98 and was just basically blown away by it. And called me one night very late. I mean, he didn't realize the three-hour time difference between California and Pennsylvania and called me and invited me out there. And I, of course, knew who he was, and I knew what Esalen was, and I went out there in November of '98. And it was a couple of years, Matt, as the Kali's Child stuff was getting worse and worse. I went to Harvard actually, I taught at Harvard for a year in 2000, 2001, and the attacks on me got really, really bad.

And so about '01 or '02, I just had-- I made the decision after years and years of struggling with it that I couldn't stay in the field and I decided to write the Esalen book really as a mode of survival, of intellectual and spiritual survival. I did not write that book for the hell of it. I did not write that book just as another exercise in history. I wrote that book because I was trying to save myself and I was trying to survive in a very ugly and very hateful world essentially.

MATTHEW DILLON: And I think it's important to point out that in addition to being a very loving book-- and there are much harsher treatments of Ramakrishna that you can read-- it also won History of Religions Best First Book award. Like that's not nothing. That's a pretty big deal. So the scholarship was top-notch.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: The book was embraced by scholars and it was despised by people outside the Academy. But then what happened with the attacks and the targeting, was that then academics got nervous around me and around the book and basically pulled away.

And I was alone. I was the first American scholar really to be so targeted. There were dozens of people after me but I was just a kid. I was just-- I had written a dissertation Matt and it became a book OK. And suddenly I was this international criminal essentially.

So it was very dramatic. I don't know-- I don't think we can overestimate the drama here and the relevance has had on my career. And it also explains, I think, my profound suspicion around culture and religion. I really am deeply suspicious and deeply critical of religion in any culture, in any nation-state, and any society because partly because of that experience.

MATTHEW DILLON: Understandably so. So I want to dig into Esalen just a little bit because it was this safe haven, this foxhole, right? But then you've also been involved at Esalen for 25 years, right? You've played a reasonably significant role I would say. So thought about different ways of parsing this but first, I mean, we should say what Esalen is-- and you know better than I-- but what do you think because Esalen has the Center for Theory and Research, and it does a lot of research into things that are academic and invites academics. What could the academic study of religion learn from Esalen?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Well, there are different Esalens, OK? The Center for Theory and Research is the aspect or the think tank arm, the research arm of Esalen that I'm most associated with. It's also important to say I wasn't associated with the Institute when I wrote the book. The book came out in '07, I think I was asked to join the board in '10 or '11, I said no by the way. And then I was asked to join the board again and I said yes. And so I'm still on the board and very much part of that movement.

What does the Academy have to learn from Esalen? That there are certain questions you can't ask or can't approach or pursue in the Academy but people do anyway. And Esalen is a very good container of those kinds of questions. And so I think Esalen has become a home of sorts for the heterodox or the marginalized intellectual who is trying to ask questions really around metaphysical or parapsychological issues that simply cannot be addressed today in the Academy in any coherent or disciplined way.

MATTHEW DILLON: And just because it's fair, what could Esalen learn from the Academy?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Well, the truth is it does learn from the Academy. I mean these are academics. I mean, these are people who are right in the gut of the Academy, who are coming to Esalen. Esalen has never not learned from the Academy. I mean, the two founders were schooled by a professor of comparative religion at Stanford in the 1950s and the place has been the home of academics and intellectuals from day one. So what can Esalen learn from the Academy? Pretty much everything.

So it's not even symmetrical, it's not even a contest. But I think the Academy can definitely see Esalen as a kind of-- well it's a school of the superhumanities, which I'm sure we'll get to.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, yeah, that's-- we're getting there. That's on the horizon of this interview. But first, so back in-- I keep waffling, I think you guys announced a GEM or Gnosticism, esotericism, and mysticism concentration at Rice. I first saw it online in I think late 2008. The reason why I know this, I started in 2009. And that's when it took off and then there was the Hidden Histories, Hidden God that was really the launch event, that was 2010.

So we're like at 15 years of GEM in the Academy. So what I want to ask is first what was the aim in founding this when it was you, I believe April DeConick would have been advising, here and William Parsons, you guys would have been sort of the three that were there at the time, although you were chair. And it's been 15 years, how has the Academy shifted in ways that are either conducive or not conducive to GEM over the last 15 years?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Well, first of all, so I became-- OK, here's what happened, I've told you this story, so Tony Pinn and I arrived at Rice in '02, '03, somewhere right in there, and what I call mom and dad of the department, the two senior scholars, Edith Wyschogrod and Werner Kelber retired about that same time. And Edith and Werner were really-- Edith worked in essentially Jewish philosophy and Werner worked in New Testament. And they were really the people who could train graduate students and help them get jobs.

And basically what happened is mom and dad left and the house was given over to the kids. And Bill Parsons was chair when I was hired but then I became chair in '04 and was chair mostly till 2013 with a year there in there where I was on leave.

So the GEM program was really founded under-- well, under my leadership or when I was chair. And basically what happened was we got together as a department and we figured out very quickly, it was a no-brainer, there's no way we could compete with the big programs, the Harvards and the Yales and the Chicagos, and the Dukes and the big div schools. There's no way, we had 10 people to their 40 or 50 or whatever, you know, and it was just no way.

So we decided we needed to create what we called an intellectual niche model. And we landed on a number of things but two of the things we landed on was African-American religion and GEM. And once we landed on those two, we started to form programs around them. Tony and Elias really handled the African, African-American religion part of that equation. And then we started to hire into the GEM focus. We didn't have it originally.

So April's hiring April DeConick's hiring was very much a part of that mission, as was the later ones, Claire Fanger and Brian Ogren and so on. So all through from 2004 to 2013, we developed basically this curriculum and basically this faculty. And then when Professor DeConick or April took over the department as chair in 2013, it really solidified. And she really helped give it curricular and structural weight essentially.

Now, it seems to all be there. I mean, I often say it's the largest program of its kind in the world. It really is. There's six or seven of us, depending on how you count us who do nothing but focus on Gnosticism, esotericism, or mysticism, and that spans really from the ancient world to the modern world as you know. So that's really the quick history of it.

I would just emphasize it's not a one-person invention, it's really a collegial enterprise. And it was led early on by myself but it was really April who gave it shape afterwards.

And the future, I don't know what the future is. I remember when Werner Kelber retired Werner was really interesting. And I asked Werner for help with searching for his replacement. He said absolutely not.

MATTHEW DILLON: And why?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Well, he did it for moral reasons. He was like, I shouldn't have any influence over the direction of this department. Werner is a very moral, very prophetic kind of individual and he felt very strongly about that. And I suppose I feel very strongly about it as well. I don't know where the department will go in 10 or 15 years but it's really-- it's also not up to me. It's not up to my colleagues my-- who are my same age either, it's up to the younger faculty and those whom they hire and that's just the nature of the Academy, Matt.

I saw that in the dean's office. I think it's a good thing. I think that renewal and that new energy is a very positive thing to affirm. And to let go, letting go is-- it's as good as taking control and creating something new.

MATTHEW DILLON: I think I'd heard part of that story but I hadn't heard the whole story. So that was fun. I hadn't heard the Werner part. One of the things in this-- we just had AAR, and so this isn't me saying it because that would just be fluffing the department I'm out of but I talked to David Odorisio, and he's like, look at you Rice people, like the GEM, the mega, the mysticism unit, the esoteric. It's just it's infused everything there so there. It does have legs. Very weird legs but very fun legs.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: I get that a lot. I mean, when I travel in Europe in particular, but also when I travel in the States or Canada, the GEM program is internationally seen as the kind of leader in this particular inquiry. And the focus, Matt, is really on what I would-- I mean, you know this, but it's on the marginal or the heterodox forms of these religious traditions. You still need to be trained in the religious traditions. The traditions themselves are really important. But the GEM focus is really looking at those marginalized or heterodox systems that did not become orthodox, that were not embraced by the tradition.

So I think our program is seen in a very international way as a kind of a leader. It's not the only one. There's of course, a great program in Amsterdam, which in some ways is much more focused but ours is certainly larger, and certainly part of that same ecology as it were.

MATTHEW DILLON: And so speaking of heretics, and this sort of tradition, in 2010, while the paranormal had been an element in your work building up to that a little bit, it became sort of like the center, the main dish, with Authors of the Impossible. So what is it that drew you to make the paranormal such a big part of your work then?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Yeah. The short answer is people, human beings did. Essentially what happened was I wrote this very big book on Esalen called Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, and to write that book I talked to and sat with, and spent lots of time with probably hundreds of people. And they told me the craziest damn stories I'd ever heard.

And I knew that A, these things could not have possibly happened, and B, that they happened. And I was really curious about that disconnect, why I thought they couldn't happen but they clearly did.

And I also looked back on my own graduate training, which by the way, I love, I deeply admire my mentors and my school, nothing but gratitude, but I looked back on it I was like, wow, we never once even talked about the miraculous or the anomalous or the strange or the paranormal not once. I'm not talking about a little, not at all, and I was like, wow.

And I don't think there was some committee sitting around saying we're not going to talk about that. I just think it was where the Academy was at in the 1980s and '90s and whenever we ran into a miraculous event or something, an apparition or something, we read it as an exaggeration or as some kind of power game or some kind of social representation. All the things academics do.

And I realized listening to these people in the 2000s that none of that actually worked. That it just-- it's not that it was false, it's just that it was hopelessly inadequate. And that this is not really what drove these people to keep these stories and to tell them. And so I just became really curious about these categories and why they're so verboten.

And so I wrote Authors of the Impossible, it was really just it started out as an introduction to Mutants and Mystics by the way, I thought I was going to capture everything in 20 or 30 pages and that didn't work. So I end up writing a whole book and it's really a kind of intellectual history of the paranormal from the late 19th, early 20th Century to today is really what it is.

But to answer your question, it was people and it was their experiences that I was listening to and that I knew could not be explained or captured by our reigning methods in the humanities.

MATTHEW DILLON: So I want to-- the tail end of what you just said feeds really well into my next question. So you wrote Mutants, and then soon thereafter you co-wrote The Supernatural, with Whitley Strieber who has been on this show recently. And so I want to-- I'm going to give you the question that I'm sure all of us get asked when we say, hey, we're religion scholars, and by the way, I'm really into aliens and stuff. So what is it that bringing Strieber with his life of high strangeness onto the comparative table, what does that add to the study of comparative mystical literature? In putting him there with Ramakrishna and Saint Teresa, like what do we get from that exercise?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Well, before I answer that, let me just observe you're the dude with the alien head, [? behind him, ?] I'm not. So the answer to your question, a lot. I think Whitley is a kind of modern-day shaman without a culture to support him or to make sense of him. That's really how I read Whitley Strieber.

I think Whitley is put together differently than certainly I am, than a lot of us are. Weird things happen around him. I've seen weird things happen around him. He's a walking poltergeist machine.

And so to think with Whitley and to talk to Whitley and to write that book with Whitley is very much also to talk and think about Teresa and Ramakrishna and Rumi and anybody else we want to name here. I don't draw any distinction between Whitley Strieber and historical saints. I think sainthood is a social affirmation or construction of something that a lot of people in fact have. And I think it's the result of a society, it's not the result of human experience or human potentiality, which I think is much broader and much more universal than we imagine.

MATTHEW DILLON: And so to that end, one of the interesting things that you started, what 2017, 2018, started assembling papers for the Archives of the Impossible. So if you could just tell us a little bit about that. And what authors because I know it started with Whitley and--

JEFFREY KRIPAL: No, it actually didn't start with Whitley.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, it was-- OK. Well, I will step back and let the person who runs that tell us what happened.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: So this was a fantastic idea, which means it wasn't my idea. It started in about 2014. Jacques Vallee actually had picked me up. I think he was taking me to the airport. And he asked me for help placing his papers and files in a university archive. Because he was very concerned about the future of his research. And I was like huh, that's a really interesting question.

So I went back and, of course, I went right to our archive, the director of our archive, and said, hey, can we do this? And it turns out we could. And it turns out that our archive here, Woodson Research Center, is very much invested in the research of our faculty, which in this case happened to be me. So they were very supportive.

And it took us about four years by the way to negotiate that gift. And there were a couple of reasons. One was Jacques wanted to put everything on a 10-year moratorium, where no one could see anything except people internal to Rice. And it was quite it was quite valuable. His papers were quite valuable. And so we negotiated that gift. And in 2018, it started to arrive.

And then I started going to my other contacts. I went to Whitley first I said, hey Whitley, Jacques just gave us everything, what about you? And he, of course, was like yeah, great idea. And so he started to send us the letters, the Communion letters that he and Anne had collected after Communion came out in 1987.

And then I called Ed May. And Ed was the director of the Stargate program or project at SRI. And then Leslie Kane got involved and wanted to help. And Diana Pasulka wanted to help. And I mean, it just it was this what I call a black hole. It just started sucking in collections.

And today, we have about 15 collections. Our latest large one again was John Mack from Harvard by the way. And that came to us really through the director of the John E. Mack Institute, a woman named Karin Austin, who was convinced that the Mack papers belonged in the Archive of the Impossible, along with those of the Vallee and Strieber and May, and so forth.

So that's kind of pretty much what I do full time now, is I try-- I work in those archives. I've been working in them on my sabbatical. I write about them. And I host conferences, we've had two big conferences, which completely shattered every IT model we had in the University.

And I'm trying to fundraise for them. If any of your listeners is looking to give a lot of money to a university, we desperately need resources and help to-- we're digitalizing these things now or trying to and--

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, wow. OK.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Run some AI through them eventually.

MATTHEW DILLON: Got it. So just so I get a handle on what is coming in there, with Mack, are you getting his personal papers or are you getting like his write-up of all the abduction accounts and interviews that he would have done?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: We've got pretty much everything from about 1987 on. I mean, there's I think Karin digitalized or oversaw the digitalization of 200 to 300 boxes of material, Matt. And now, there are lots of IRB concerns for some of that. And a lot of that-- a lot of the Mack materials on moratorium as well. Well, it all is on moratorium at the moment but there are some serious IRB concerns there that we want to honor and follow as well.

So it depends. IRB or institutional review board is, of course, our university's internal ethical board, and each of the collections and the archives presents itself very differently to it. Some of the collections like the Strieber letters are probably not even of concern. And some of the files, like those of John Mack are medical, related and they are of high concern because we're trying to protect medical. We are protecting medical records. So it just depends. It depends on the collection, and what the particular process is.

MATTHEW DILLON: And can-- you mentioned the moratorium, I've also seen online a-- it was like a little scholarship to go work in the archives. So can outside scholars come and do research at Rice or is it just Rice students and Rice faculty right now?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: No, anybody can come from anywhere in the world and work in the archives and work with the collections that are available to them, which is most of them, by the way, Matt. The Vallee collection is offline, and the Mack collection is offline but the rest are online and there we haven't fully archived all of them, by the way. I mean, it takes labor and time to do this. But some of the collections are heavily archived and are available to researchers.

So it's a public archive, Matt. I mean, it's available-- it's not online, we have not digitalized it, again for money reasons but that's certainly our intention.

MATTHEW DILLON: So want to move ahead, we're hitting that horizon and so we're hitting the superhumanities, which obviously, grows out in a certain sense from this paranormal turn, and your study of Whitley, et cetera. But what I noticed while reading it, is that it's also very much a response to certain crises and discussions that are happening in the Academy, and not just religious studies, right? I mean, Academy broadly construed. So what inspired you to write The Superhumanities?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: The dean's office. I mean, that's the short answer. I spent four years as an associate Dean of the School of Humanities. And I worked very closely with the dean, a colleague named Professor Kathleen Canning, who's Dean of our School of Humanities, and Professor Fay Yarbrough, who was the other associate dean, she's also a historian.

And I probably helped interview 90 people during those four years. And that was also the years of COVID, I became associate dean in the fall of 2019, I stepped down a few months ago in July. So I was associate deaning all through COVID and just was watching these crises up close and trying to help manage them here at Rice.

I was very concerned about a lot of the things I saw happening in the humanities but I was also deeply impressed by humanists frankly, by my colleagues who when they did learn about what I was doing or what I was interested in, they were deeply sympathetic and very supportive and so I wanted to write about both the problems that our societies are facing and how the humanities can help but I also wanted to write about that enthusiasm and that affirmation that I was feeling.

And the superhumanities really comes out of both of those impulses, both the suspicion around religion and society in general, but also the deep affirmation that I felt from my colleagues but that I also sensed in the historical literature. And I tried to say both that. Both of those are the superhumanities together. The superhumanities are the humanities but they have an emphasis on altered states and the superhuman, and don't want to take that off the table either.

MATTHEW DILLON: So one of the things that struck me, and it's easy to read this book in tandem, both with Roads of Excess, and you make the point that it's you write one book, right in the end of the acknowledgment. But also with Serpent's Gift as well, I see the dialogue there. But one of the things in Serpent's Gift, you said I don't want to write about mystical literature anymore. I want to write mystical literature.

And then this is the first time. I mean, it's been in the background, but there's something like philosophical even kind of theological that's in there, right? So what was-- is this a response to sort of the same things that you saw happening in the humanities, or was the impulse to put more of that theology or philosophy out there, did it come from somewhere else?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Well, yeah, there's a couple answers to that. Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom, I wrote that in 2001, that came out in 2001, a long time ago. And the basic argument, or one of the arguments of that book is that scholars of mysticism have themselves mystical experiences and that their theories of mystical literature are based on altered states. And I looked at five different intellectuals and looked at their altered states and their theories of mystical literature and tried to show that.

The Superhumanities is sort of an update of that same idea only it expands into really all of the humanities and from philosophy, to English literature, to Asian studies, to pretty much everything. And I wanted to show that the great ideas don't come from thinking, they come from being thought. That there's something in external or independent about great ideas that are revealed to humanists and to philosophical thinkers. They don't think their way to them, which I think is a great mistake that people make.

The other thing I was trying to respond to again to go back to the paranormal, is why do intellectuals take things off the table? Why do they not-- why do they reject people when people are telling them honestly that such and such came out of the wall, or they left their body, or they had some kind of amazing coincidence in their lives that changed the direction of their lives? Why do we write those off as social representations or projections or hallucinations or any other easy word we want to invoke, why don't we take those seriously? So I wanted to really dig down to why some intellectuals dismiss human beings who have experiences that don't fit into those intellectuals' worldviews.

And what I concluded is that we don't want to think about metaphysical issues or ontological issues, we want to reduce everything we can to society, or we want to reduce it all to nature if we're trying to follow the sciences but what we don't want to do is try to take it on its own terms and really listen to it, like listen to the people, not reduce them to our own models or theories.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, and it's nice you've been critical of reading all these things as anecdotes for what, 15 years? Which--

JEFFREY KRIPAL: I hate that word.

MATTHEW DILLON: I hate the word so much. Yes, it's grating. It's nails on a chalkboard. And so I'm trying to figure out how to phrase this question because it's such a loaded issue. But one of the things I appreciated both about Superhumanities and what I've read from How to Think Impossibly, your next book, which is currently available for pre-sale, is that this more balanced view, as I'm reading it, of Eranos figures, or somebody like Harold Blum, right? Who have been cast aside in many ways or just shrugged aside.

So how do you sort of respond to the criticisms of these people as ethically or politically they're wrong, while at the same time asserting that they're valuable for understanding certain phenomena? And obviously, the history of religious studies and humanities you can't do without any of those figures. But in any case, I'll give you the mic.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Yeah. No, I get your question. I get that question a lot. And the easy response or the quick response is a badly used idea is not the same as a bad idea. And every idea has been used badly. There's no such thing as an idea that has not been used badly but we can't equate the way those ideas are used with the ideas themselves in every case. Sometimes I suppose we can, but certainly not in most cases.

I also think people are complicated, Matt. I think human beings can do all sorts of nasty things. And to answer your question I think the criticisms of people like Blum are probably spot on but so are the criticisms of Michel Foucault, and Sigmund Freud, and Martin Heidegger, and Friedrich Nietzsche and everybody else. I'm sure the criticisms are just and correct but they're not absolute, and they're not adequate is what I would say.

In other words, I think intellectuals have insights that are not reducible to their social conditions or their ethical or moral positions, which today we can look back on and say we don't agree with those or we want to condemn those, amen but that doesn't mean that everything that person said is wrong or without value.

And I am sure, Matt, I am absolutely positive our descendants are going to look back on us and say what the hell were you thinking? You know, why were you consuming everything, why were you burning all that-- those natural resources? Why were you eating all that meat? Why were you systemic racists? Why were you on and on and on? We are going to be condemned by our descendants and justly so. But again, every generation has something I think that it can offer if we're just willing to listen and take it in. And I think altered states are one way.

I think-- let me put it this way, altered states happen to people regardless of their moral qualities and it's altered states that produce insight and produce new worldviews and new ideas. And sometimes those come from people we don't like. And sometimes they come from people we do like but that's the way it is. That's the nature of altered states.

MATTHEW DILLON: I remember coming across forget which edited volume it was, you've co-authored a few. The one where the mystical is not the ethical. And just having been steeped in spiritual but not religious discourse throughout my teen years and early 20s, I was like that can't be true, right? It's obviously the case that great mystics are also great moral people. I'm like oh, man that's just-- I didn't actually read anything. So once I started going to school and going to grad school, I was like, yep. OK, it's far more complicated than that.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: So Matt, I was trained in the '80s and we were coming out of the counterculture, and coming out of the-- well, coming out of the '70s obviously, and there were a lot of spiritual teachers that were being exposed as people who had engaged in various forms of usually sexual abuse, it wasn't always sexual but it was often sexual abuse. And I saw people split on this. People would either say, well it never happened. The person was pure. It was usually some purity code that was invoked. Or it did happen and there's nothing to any of the spiritual experiences that people had around this person.

And I was like well, both of those clearly are not true. I mean, clearly, it happened. Clearly, this-- usually a guy, it was not always a guy but usually a guy, this guy did some really bad things and these people had these spiritually transformative experiences around him. Both are true. So let's admit the complexity of the situation and not fall into one of these simplicities that I still think are simplicities.

And that's tough. That's tough for people to hear. It's tough to think that way. It's particularly tough today I think, to think that. But I thought that in the 1980s and I think that in the 2020s. I haven't changed a whit on that.

MATTHEW DILLON: But it can make those people tough to study.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: But it hasn't been very popular I'll tell you, I'll say that. That has not been a popular view.

MATTHEW DILLON: At the same time, though, I think there's a certain-- when you think about the recent turn to conspirituality you know, Egil Asprem, et cetera, there are acknowledging this, right? That complexity that people like David Eick can have extraordinary experiences and be terrible people, doing awful things, and believing in lizard Archons, right? But at the same time, like you can't-- he-- I forget David at the beginning of his book says, he's the first prophet he ever saw was David Eick on TV talking prophetically, and I think that's accurate. In any case, that's a whole bucket of worms but.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Well, yeah. But I mean, let's put David Eick aside, I--

MATTHEW DILLON: Let's always put the lizards aside.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Yeah, lizard Archons aside, I mean, Saints are weird people, Matt. I mean, saints are messed up people and they're saints. So I guess in some ways, it goes back to my Catholicism too, it's like these were extraordinary human beings, and their lives were really messed up in a lot of ways. And I think both of those things are absolutely true not in every case but in a lot of cases.

And I'll tell you a story here that that's related. I listen to a lot of experiencers. I mean I sit down and I talk to, sometimes I even write books with experiencers, Whitley's not the only one, Elizabeth Krohn's another one. And when I listen to people I'm waiting for two things, I'm not telling them this. And if you're listening you didn't hear this, but the first thing I'm listening for is trauma. It doesn't have to be sexual trauma, it could be physical trauma, it can be war trauma, it can be emotional trauma, it can be any kind of trauma but I'm really listening hard for some kind of major traumatic event or series of events in their past.

And the other thing I'm listening for is sexuality. Some kind of conflict or complexity around sexuality or gender or gender identity or sexual orientation or something. And usually, the person in about the second or third or fourth rendition of the story will open up a route around both of those things.

And so I've just learned over the decades that people are complicated, and you have to somehow break open a person to access these altered states and some of those ways that the person is broken open are not moral ways, they're not even necessarily good, but they still happen. A car accident is not a good thing but people have out-of-body experiences, transformative religious experiences in car accidents. Does that mean, we should all go drive our Toyotas into the nearest oak tree? No, doesn't mean that. But there's something about that violence and that trauma that induces this spiritual opening in people. So that's the argument I'm trying to make, Matt. It's not-- I think it's a moral argument actually. I think it's ultimately about taking people seriously and listening to them and not dismissing them because of A, B, or C.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, so this brings me to a question I didn't have written down but it's one that's been in the back of my mind for a while. Your early work you are doing very strong psychoanalytic readings, like that's clearly what you were trained in, and doing it well. And you see psychoanalysis pop up in your work later but it's never a psychoanalytic reading, it's the history of psychoanalysis having these romantic origins and these ties to Mesmer. I'm curious where do you-- how do you see the role of psychoanalytic reading when you're talking to people like this? Does it inform you at all anymore or is it--

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Of course. No, of course, it does. I think, of course, it informs. I mean, not maybe not consciously, I'm not thinking about psychoanalysis as I'm listening to people for sure but I am absolutely convinced, for example, that people are not in control of themselves. That things happen to people that a psychoanalyst would say is unconscious. I wouldn't use that language today but I think a lot of things that happen to people are not in their control and happen-- seem to happen from the outside. I'm not sure they are from the outside but they are certainly experienced as such. So that distinction between the conscious and the unconscious is fundamental still to the way I think about things.

I also think that most visions, most apparitions, most dreams are symbolic. And by that I mean they should not be interpreted literally. There's a phenomenon behind the phenomenon. There's a translation process that's going on. And that translation process is necessitated because there's two radically different forms of consciousness that cannot speak to one another in any other way. And that there's censorship going on. There's something not getting through as well. And all of that is basic to psychoanalytic dream interpretation that I learned from Freud, I learned from Wendy Doniger actually back in the 1980s, and that's really stuck with me.

MATTHEW DILLON: So this is a good time to ask my next question talking about these two forms of consciousness trying to meet with one another. I feel as though I have a very high threshold for the weird, like I'm pretty comfortable with most things, I'm OK. Everything we've talked about so far, good with it.

But there's two things that freak me out. One are implants that I just can't, that's too much. And the other is telepathic praying mantises. What the hell, like why are there so many telepathic praying mantises in folklore, and in alien encounters, and in visions? So fortunately, in your new book, you have a chapter on praying mantises. So if you could talk me down from a wall and explain what is going on with all the praying mantis imagery, that would make me very, very happy.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: I'm not sure I can talk you down, Matt.

MATTHEW DILLON: It's the freakiest thing. Oh my goodness.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: I would much rather watch you squirm. I don't claim to know the answer to that I mean, is the quick answer. I mean one response is that there are telepathic praying mantises and they show up to people and they do things to people, and that's why you have so many stories of them. Maybe. People have had experiences of praying mantises with praying mantises with the tiny insects, and people have speculated that well, maybe the insects are somehow doing this or maybe there's some kind of giant telepathic praying mantis that's using the insects to do this.

I mean, there are all kinds of models. And I don't presume to know which one is the case. But I want us to be shocked by that, Matt. I don't want to explain that away. For one thing, I can't but also I think the normal ways of explaining that away are lame and completely unconvincing. And I just, I want this ontological shock because I think it's very useful. But I also think it's what these events are about. I think they're designed to shock us out of our worldviews.

And so I guess I don't want to help you there. I want you on the wall as it were. What was the other one, so you're afraid of telepathic praying mantises--

MATTHEW DILLON: And implants.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Oh, implants.

MATTHEW DILLON: Materializations I've grown around and I'm like, OK I could handle it if something materialized. If there was an apport, I'd be freaked out but I'd be fine with it. But it's when there's a materialization in someone's body, that's I mean, Whitley talking about the implant in his ear that moves around when they try and study it. That's just--

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Well, let me talk about that. So I'm writing a book, right now. You know, I'm always writing a book, and it's called The Physics of Mystics. And it goes after this dual thing, that something can be utterly physical and utterly spiritual at the same time. They're actually not. We separate them in our ordinary understanding because I think we split reality into a mental and a material box just because that's the nature of being a human being. But I don't think reality is actually so split.

And one of the things that you find out eventually when you study the UFO phenomenon enough, is that there's a physical aspect to it that can be studied scientifically and that there's a spiritual or paranormal aspect of it that we have no idea what to do with but it's obviously there.

And you can't separate these two. You can't say, oh, it's just a physical craft, but neither can you say oh, it's just a spiritual or a telepathic or a paranormal event. No, both of these things are true. It just burned the grass or it burned the person, and the person now is telepathic or precognitive or doing strange things.

So I think both of those statements are true again, very much like this earlier discussion we were having around the moral and the mystical. And I think we-- How to Think Impossibly is essentially sitting with that doubleness, and not rationalizing it away not saying, oh, it's just the physical, or it's just hallucinatory, or mental in some way. No, it's both. It's both and just letting that sit.

So the implant-- I mean, why? How is an apport and an implant different? I mean--

MATTHEW DILLON: One's in your body.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Well, OK. So what? I mean, OK, it's in your body, you know shamans get crystals stuck in their bodies too. I mean, we don't call those implants and get freaked out, we just say, oh, well shamans have crystals implanted by a being that came from the sky, OK? That's OK, but no, no, no, nobody can be abducted today and get an implant in their ear, no way, no how. I mean, why? Why do we make that distinction? I just, I'm baffled by that, other than colonialism and materialism I mean, there are a bunch of things that we can invoke here and I think we should invoke but I think they're all wrong. And I think these things do happen today.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah. I think one of the-- and came up in the chapter on what does Jeremy Verrery, Verry, the--

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Oh, Jeremy Vaeni.

MATTHEW DILLON: Vaeni. Thank you. The lack of consent, like and this goes back to the ethics and the paranormal is not the moral. but I mean, it's not like Whitley said, hey, it's cool. Just go ahead and stick that thing in my ear, that tracking device. I'm fine with that. The total lack of consent is a little freaky but body morphs are fine. Still, I'm going to be spooked by telepathic praying mantises.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Well, again I mean, they're not called abductions for nothing. I mean, there is no agency, Matt-- I hate to tell you this, but there's no agency. I mean, people are literally abducted and my African-American colleagues will say, well, that's because these are memories of a time when strange ships really did appear and really did abduct people and it's called the Atlantic slave trade. That's a reading of what's going on. But to say that people have agency in these abductions I think is just fundamentally mistaken. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. So let's be honest about it.

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah, sometimes they'll try and make them happen like Bill Hicks and Kevin Booth on the harmonic convergence, right? Like abduct me, right?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Well, and that's a mixed case, right? I mean, there you want to be-- you want the contact or you want the encounter but in most of these cases in the abduction literature, the person definitely does not want the encounter. And you know, Whitley's implant they held him down and forced him. And his claim is that those were humans who did that. And so that changes how we think of this as well. What's going on there, you know?

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah. So wait, I had a closing question but you spoke of a new book, is this your own, is it a monograph or are you co-writing it with someone on the physics and?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: I just, I'm working on it. It's the first volume in my trilogy by the way.

MATTHEW DILLON: Oh, got it. OK.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: For a trilogy, yeah. The first volume is on physics, and the second volume is on evolutionary biology and the third volume is on cosmology or eschatology.

MATTHEW DILLON: All right, so those will be done what in five months? You'll just bang them out, no, channel them through? So one of the where I wanted to land with this, have you watched the show Hellier perchance?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: No. People ask me about that. And the answer is no.

MATTHEW DILLON: Don't worry. So there's a lot of really mediocre or worse paranormal TV I will say that. This is pretty good. I actually think it's quite good. It's well done and it's just saturated with all the cool stuff like goblins and hollow Earth and Thelema and abductions. I mean, Mothman is a very big part of it. It's pretty wonderful. But the reason why I brought it up is they, one of the things they do on the show a lot is show off what books they read. Like they'll just have the Red Book sitting on their desk, and the camera will be pointed straight at it. It's pretty great.

But I saw on their bookshelf Mutants and Mystics, which has a very sort of striking and distinctive spine. And it sort of clicked for me that in the same way that you've written quite a bit on the paranormal not only writing us, but it being something we can write. And now you're one of those authors right like Mack, Keel, Vallee, people who are interested in the paranormal are reading Kripal, and this is going to have feedback loops. So how do you sit with that? Do you feel does it impact how you write in any way, in any responsibility or are you just like I'm doing my scholarly thing and putting it out there?

JEFFREY KRIPAL: No, no, no, no, no, no. So again, this goes back to that night Matt, to take us back to the beginning. I mean, this is why I really do think that what happened in that night is that all of my future books flowed into me in a kind of unconscious way. I had no context for them. I couldn't have told you that after the event. But certainly, as I write these books, I personally think they already exist in the future. And that I'm just simply working-- I'm in a time loop I'm working towards them.

And when I wrote Mutants and Mystics, that whole book really is about the paranormal experiences of authors and artists. And it makes a lot of arguments but one of the arguments is that look, in contemporary Western culture we can't talk about the paranormal in the sciences, or in the White House or in our churches but we can do it on Netflix. And we can do it in the movies, and so that's where it gravitates.

And the beauty of these screenwriters who are doing this and these filmmakers is they don't have to prove anything. They just turn their experiences and other people's experiences into story. And I personally think that's a very positive and very admirable thing to do.

And you know, Matt, the other thing I'm getting old and so when I like go to the dentist I'm like, why are you a kid? Like how come people, how come doctors and dentists, and everybody's getting younger, they're like becoming kids. And so like when I talk to journalists now too, I used to somehow when I maybe when I was your age or when I was younger, I thought that somebody somewhere in the world knew something and it was just my job to read a bunch of stuff and I'd eventually find the person who knows. That's not true, by the way, just let that one go.

And now so when I talk to a journalist, or a screenwriter, or a musician, or there's a lot of different people we could talk about, I'm like oh, you were my student. And of course, they weren't my student. I didn't have this person in class but I sort of did have that person in class is what I'm trying to say. Is that by virtue of being in your early 60s, you work with a lot of people in their 20s and 30s, and every screenwriter, every journalist, every musician, they all were once college students or not.

And so I just-- what am I trying to say? I'm trying to say there's a kind of humility or a humanity in this that I find really admirable. And I'll tell you, Matt, it's particularly when I watch X-Men movies, I look at their bookshelves, I'm like where's, where is it, where? Come on, come on, show me, show me. So I get a lot of-- I got to watch that scene, you said there's a scene where the book is on the bookshelf?

MATTHEW DILLON: Yeah. Because I was thinking about actually reaching out to them to come on the show, and I was like, I don't know, maybe. I haven't really dug into like goblins aspect of paranormal before. Like this is a whole new terrain for me. And there's a praying mantis in the show, by the way, telepathic praying mantis, freaks me out. But then they showed their bookshelves I'm like oh, that's Mutants, like it was it's so distinct because it's got, I mean, nobody can see this but it has the big green alien head on the spine. And it's the hardcover so like they didn't wait, like they bought it when it came out and went out.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Good. Good for them. Good for them. And so I talked to a lot of screenwriters, they read this stuff and then they turn it into whatever they turn it into. So how do I feel about that? I feel very good about that. I think that's great. I think when your work is turned into art and into public art, that lasts and then is circulated through millions of people, I think that's wonderful.

I don't feel possessive about it. I don't feel academic about it. I feel artistic about it. I think it's wonderful. But art is not just art, this isn't art for art's sake, this is art to transform people and to trigger people.

And one of the things I'm arguing in this new book is that essentially what's happening in a paranormal event is a sci-fi movie is going off in your head but it's also enacting itself in the physical environment. And all these special effects we call miracles are literally physical events that are happening. So we are somehow special effect machines that have incredible power.

And I think what happens in the movies is we're mimicking that or we're approaching that skill set that we seem to have innately in us and I don't claim to understand that. I'm using that as a metaphor obviously but I just think it's true. I think it's very true.

MATTHEW DILLON: Well, that seems like a good place to come to a stop simply because we sort of came full circle back to Calcutta and that night. And yeah, well, this has been fun. If people want to listen to people talk about telepathic insects and ethics and all sorts of stuff they will like this episode. So Jeff, Jeffrey Kripal, pardon me. Thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, it's been an honor.

JEFFREY KRIPAL: Thanks, anytime. This was a lot of fun.

MATTHEW DILLON: All right. Take care.

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