Mar 7, 2025 01:48 AM
(This post was last modified: Mar 7, 2025 01:50 AM by C C.)
Has Jeffrey Kripal gone mad, or normal?
https://arcmag.org/has-jeffrey-kripal-go...or-normal/
EXCERPTS: . . . That period of controversy, though, pales in comparison to the most recent phase of Jeffrey Kripal’s work, in which he has “come out” as a believer, sort of, in the paranormal. His most recent book, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (University of Chicago Press, 2024), is the summation of this work, which now spans ten years, four scholarly volumes, and three popular books.
As Mark Oppenheimer noted in his 2010 essay on an earlier Kripal volume, the academy tolerates metaphysical commitments when it comes to mainstream religionists. After all, I’m now a rabbi/Ph.D. Yet when it comes to non-ordinary experiences, many in the academy think that Kripal has drunk the paranormal Kool-Aid. The headline of Oppenheimer’s piece said it all: “Burning Bush They’ll Buy, but Not ESP or U.F.O.’s.”
This bias is bullshit, Kripal says. It’s loaded with colonialism and racism, it has no basis in anything other than pre-existing (and flimsy) metaphysical commitments, and, if you consider what the overwhelming majority of human beings have believed and experienced across history, it’s disbelief in magic or the occult, not belief, that’s anomalous.
On one level, Kripal insists that he is simply following the evidence. [...] the data, Kripal says, suggest that “people really do dream the future, leave their bodies in disaster or illness, see hairy creatures or gigantic insectoids, and encounter craft flying over cities or conscious balls of light in their living rooms and werewolves in their backyards.”
“Impossible” is meant literally. “If conventional materialism is true,” Kripal writes, “these things cannot be.” And yet, the materialist explanations of these phenomena—delusion, dream, deception—are so inconsistent with the data that they seem more like desperate attempts to preserve a certain metaphysics than any real account. Says Kripal, “the problem is the lame rhetoric and unquestioned assumptions, not the phenomena themselves.”
Still, Kripal would also be the first to agree that his last few books have ventured well into what Robert Anton Wilson called Chapel Perilous, that epistemically uneasy space between imagination, paranoia, and total metaphysical weirdness. If the paranormal is real, then what isn’t real? ...
[...] Though hedged by the verb “suspect,” Kripal is saying we’re living in The Matrix. Weird stuff, right? But then again, one of the most powerful men in the world, Elon Musk, believes in it also. Two thirds of Americans believe in some form of supernatural or paranormal phenomena. Sixty-three percent believe in hell.
So maybe the real weirdos are people who don’t believe in spooks. Not only weird, but also WEIRD, the acronym coined in 2010 by Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich, which stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. WEIRD isn’t bad—Henrich attributes many of the successes of modernity to these qualities—but it is psychologically and culturally unusual. Even anomalous.
Kripal also challenges scholars to be honest about our own experiences... (MORE - missing details)
https://arcmag.org/has-jeffrey-kripal-go...or-normal/
EXCERPTS: . . . That period of controversy, though, pales in comparison to the most recent phase of Jeffrey Kripal’s work, in which he has “come out” as a believer, sort of, in the paranormal. His most recent book, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (University of Chicago Press, 2024), is the summation of this work, which now spans ten years, four scholarly volumes, and three popular books.
As Mark Oppenheimer noted in his 2010 essay on an earlier Kripal volume, the academy tolerates metaphysical commitments when it comes to mainstream religionists. After all, I’m now a rabbi/Ph.D. Yet when it comes to non-ordinary experiences, many in the academy think that Kripal has drunk the paranormal Kool-Aid. The headline of Oppenheimer’s piece said it all: “Burning Bush They’ll Buy, but Not ESP or U.F.O.’s.”
This bias is bullshit, Kripal says. It’s loaded with colonialism and racism, it has no basis in anything other than pre-existing (and flimsy) metaphysical commitments, and, if you consider what the overwhelming majority of human beings have believed and experienced across history, it’s disbelief in magic or the occult, not belief, that’s anomalous.
On one level, Kripal insists that he is simply following the evidence. [...] the data, Kripal says, suggest that “people really do dream the future, leave their bodies in disaster or illness, see hairy creatures or gigantic insectoids, and encounter craft flying over cities or conscious balls of light in their living rooms and werewolves in their backyards.”
“Impossible” is meant literally. “If conventional materialism is true,” Kripal writes, “these things cannot be.” And yet, the materialist explanations of these phenomena—delusion, dream, deception—are so inconsistent with the data that they seem more like desperate attempts to preserve a certain metaphysics than any real account. Says Kripal, “the problem is the lame rhetoric and unquestioned assumptions, not the phenomena themselves.”
Still, Kripal would also be the first to agree that his last few books have ventured well into what Robert Anton Wilson called Chapel Perilous, that epistemically uneasy space between imagination, paranoia, and total metaphysical weirdness. If the paranormal is real, then what isn’t real? ...
[...] Though hedged by the verb “suspect,” Kripal is saying we’re living in The Matrix. Weird stuff, right? But then again, one of the most powerful men in the world, Elon Musk, believes in it also. Two thirds of Americans believe in some form of supernatural or paranormal phenomena. Sixty-three percent believe in hell.
So maybe the real weirdos are people who don’t believe in spooks. Not only weird, but also WEIRD, the acronym coined in 2010 by Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich, which stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. WEIRD isn’t bad—Henrich attributes many of the successes of modernity to these qualities—but it is psychologically and culturally unusual. Even anomalous.
Kripal also challenges scholars to be honest about our own experiences... (MORE - missing details)
