Nov 3, 2021 07:17 AM
I read Kripal's book called "Super-Natural" and enjoy his nuanced and profound thinking on this issue. Here is some of his thoughts on UFO's and what they may mean for modern humanity..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSnHybj9FJw
"To study the UFO phenomenon adequately is, in actual fact, to study pretty much everything. It is also to come up against, hard, the realization that the institutional or university order of knowledge within which we work and think today, an order that effectively splits the sciences off from the humanities, is simply not helpful, and certainly not reflective of the reality we are trying to understand. The difficult truth is that the UFO phenomenon has both an objective “hard" aspect (think fighter jet videos, photographs, alleged metamaterials, apparent advanced propulsion methods, and landing marks) and a subjective “human” aspect (think close encounters, multiple and coordinated visual sightings, altered states of consciousness, visionary displays, often of a most baroque or sci-fi sort, and experienced traumatic or transcendent abductions). And both sides — both the material and the mental dimensions — are incredibly important to get a sense of the full picture.
Of course, one can slice up the UFO phenomenon into the “scientific” and the “humanistic,” but one will never understand it by doing so. That, in the end, is why I think the subject is so incredibly important: it bears a particular power to challenge, or just obliterate, our present order of knowledge and its arbitrary divisions. Whatever “it” is, it simply does not behave according to our rules and assumptions. Period."
https://news.rice.edu/news/2021/jeffrey-...phenomenon
Jeff Kripal Ted Talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX7WDqZuyvQ&t=58s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSnHybj9FJw
"To study the UFO phenomenon adequately is, in actual fact, to study pretty much everything. It is also to come up against, hard, the realization that the institutional or university order of knowledge within which we work and think today, an order that effectively splits the sciences off from the humanities, is simply not helpful, and certainly not reflective of the reality we are trying to understand. The difficult truth is that the UFO phenomenon has both an objective “hard" aspect (think fighter jet videos, photographs, alleged metamaterials, apparent advanced propulsion methods, and landing marks) and a subjective “human” aspect (think close encounters, multiple and coordinated visual sightings, altered states of consciousness, visionary displays, often of a most baroque or sci-fi sort, and experienced traumatic or transcendent abductions). And both sides — both the material and the mental dimensions — are incredibly important to get a sense of the full picture.
Of course, one can slice up the UFO phenomenon into the “scientific” and the “humanistic,” but one will never understand it by doing so. That, in the end, is why I think the subject is so incredibly important: it bears a particular power to challenge, or just obliterate, our present order of knowledge and its arbitrary divisions. Whatever “it” is, it simply does not behave according to our rules and assumptions. Period."
https://news.rice.edu/news/2021/jeffrey-...phenomenon
Jeff Kripal Ted Talk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX7WDqZuyvQ&t=58s