Jeffrey J. Kripal

Jeffrey Kripal (B. 1962) is a Professor of Religion at Rice University (Houston, TX). Kripal was a pious Roman Catholic in his youth and entered seminary to become a monk. While there, he underwent a course of psychoanalytic therapy that cured him of his anorexia (he was 6’2”, 115 pounds at the age of 18). He became fascinated by the relationship between sex, gender, and religion and decided to devote his life to the academic study of religion. He enrolled in the University of Chicago Divinity School to study comparative religion. While there, He obtained a PhD in the History of Religions, focusing on the study of mystical and tantric religions in India. At the time of the event recorded below, Kripal was in Calcutta researching his dissertation on the Hindu Saint Sri Ramakrishna. Kripal had attended Kali puja earlier in the day.

Kripal is adamant that all of his later books were somehow “transmitted” or “downloaded” in this event. Most immediately, the event changed the tone and argument of his dissertation. Rather than offer a Freudian reading of Sri Ramakrishna as merely a repressed homosexual, Kripal came to argue that the erotic and the mystical, the sexual and the spiritual, are conjoined. The resulting book, Kali’s Child, won the Best First Book award in the AAR History of Religions category for 1995.

“That night,” as Kripal has come to call it, inspired all of his later work. He went on to become a leading specialist in the study of mystical and esoteric currents and has centered the study of ecstatic experiences and transformative knowledge in each of his eleven monographs. Over time, Kripal has read the experience behind “that night” from different angles. He first understood it to be a spiritual-erotic vision. Later, he thought that it resembled an alien abduction scenario. Most recently, Kripal has confessed that what happens is in line with the near-death episodes that surround cardiac arrest. Whatever the cause (and Kripal remains open here), he is clear that “that night” inspired his corpus, one of the most massive, popular, and influential in the contemporary study of religion.

Source

Kripal, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom, 201-202

Kripal has written about this event several times over the course of his career. The following source is the earliest version that Kripal has offered. It comes from an unpublished preface to his dissertation and, therefore, would have been completed before 1993. He published the following section of the preface in his second book.

But Kali's child is not just a research project. It is also an integral part of my biography. Looking back, I can clearly see that my methods were not simply linguistic or theoretical but also experiential. At one point in my Calcutta research, shortly after the autumn festival of Kalī-pūjā, that which I studied even entered a waking dream state in a strange and striking way. The safe, comfortable lines between the researcher and the researched dissolved in an encounter that looked – and, so I imagined, felt – much like the mystico-erotic states I was then uncovering in the Bengali texts. Although my body was asleep, resting almost anesthetized on its back, not unlike a corpse, consciousness was lucid and clear, fully awake. Suddenly, without warning, a powerful electric-like energy flooded the body with wave after wave of an unusually deep and uniform arousal. I tried to hold the energies in as lingams spontaneously emerged and disappeared in a fluid dream space. At some point, the energies gathered together, as if they themselves were conscious, and erupted “in” in a kind of psychic implosion. As I felt my “I” being sucked up into an ecstasy that felt entirely too much like death, I watched my legs and torso float uncontrollably towards the ceiling. Quite unaccustomed to death or weightlessness (be they physical or symbolic), I desperately grabbed the bed frame and, in a scene that seemed as bizarre then as it sounds now, instinctively tried to embody the energies in order to bring them “back down” into my physical frame. After much gymnastic twisting and turning and holding on, I finally awoke. Actually, it wasn’t a waking up at all, for the “I” had never been asleep, but it was at least a “sitting up,” and this with a buzzing body that, thank goodness, was no longer an anesthetized corpse or a floating balloon.

Bibliography

Gregg, Carl. “Religious Mystic & Rational Humanist: The Mystical Humanism Of Jeffrey Kripal.” Carl Gregg (blog), March 31, 2014. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/carlgregg/2014/03/religious-mystic-rational-humanist-the-mystical-humanism-of-jeffrey-kripal/.

Kripal, Jeffrey J. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. 1 edition. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2007.

———. How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2024.

Kripal, Jeffrey J. Kālī’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

———. Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Kripal, Jeffrey John. Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

———. The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Kripal, Jeffrey J. Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism. 1st edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.