Look at a photo of Jeffrey Kripal, and you’ll see a pleasant, teddy-bear- looking fellow (or the winner of a Karl Rove look-alike contest). He looks pleasant and friendly, and I suspect he is both. But behind this pleasant facade and seemingly easy-going demeanor is an intellectual daredevil. Let me provide a little background of what I know about this Clark Kent of scholars.
Kripal was raised in a small town in southeast Nebraska and raised a Catholic. As he reached his teen years, instead of pursuing a the common family pursuit of athleticism, he marked himself off by becoming very thin via religiously-motivated--or so he thought--fasting. And after graduation from high school, he went off to a monastery in Missouri. There, his fellow monks worried about his appearance (thin), and they put him in psychoanalysis with a Benedictine monk. Kripal gained a great deal from this, not the least of which was weight. What he discovered in this process was that he has issues with sexuality that he was suppressing and that he was suffering (as he describes it) from anorexia. With this life-altering and intriguing knowledge, Kripal left that seminary and went to pursue a degree in comparative religion at the University of Chicago. Apparently not one to take the easy course, he concentrated in the Hindu tradition, studying under an acclaimed expert in that tradition, Wendy Doniger. (Surely he learned some Latin and Greek during his time in the Church and in a monastery.) But like Doniger, Kripal’s writings about Hindusim--especially about the sexuality of some Hindu gods and adepts--drew the wrath of militant Hindus, and this eventually drove him from the field. (It seems that writing about the sexuality of religious figures in an established tradition can yield death threats for such perceived transgressions. The same thing happened to Doniger while we lived in India, and her book, The Hindus: An Alternative History, was supposed to be pulled from shelves in India by her publishers--although I found it in Trivandrum, I’m happy to report.) (Most of this information comes from a Youtube interview of Kripal conducted by science journalist John Horgan, which is well worth watching to get an overview of where Kripal is coming from and what he's up to.)
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| Karl Rove? No? Well, different thoughts, I'm sure, the likeness notwithstanding |
So Kripal took his professional life in a new and no less provocative direction by inquiring into the “paranormal”--all the weird, seemingly impossible things that people report have happened both within and outside of established religions. What’s going on with reports of telepathy, precognition, near-death experiences, levitation, UFO abductions, conversing with spirits, and so on? Needless to say, this broad topic is fraught with challenges and skeptics from both religious and secular perspectives. Nevertheless, he persists, and happily so.
Flip is Kripal’s most recent venture into this field, and I think it serves as a summary of where he’s gone and what (often tentative) conclusions he’s reached so far. (In this, I’m speculating, because I’ve read only one of his earlier works in full, The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (2006), but Flip certainly seems like a weigh station on his journey). In any event, Kripal provides a useful summary of his conclusions to date and how his thinking along these lines might continue. In the book, he addresses individuals and their “flip” experiences, and ideas about how weird reality might be made more comprehensible through contemporary thinking based on quantum physics and scientifically-informed philosophy. I should note that philosophy is called on in part because it is one the humanities (as opposed to a field in the natural sciences). In short, the humanities deal with the mind or consciousness. As Kripal notes, “Consciousness is the fundamental ground of all we know, or ever will know” (46) and the humanities involve “the study of consciousness coded in culture” (45). Later in the book Kripal reminds us again of the importance of the mind (consciousness) to scientific as endeavors as well as those of the humanities:
Mind or consciousness is the locus of all scientific practice and knowledge; that science, at the end of the day, is a function of human subjectivity and consciousness and not, as often assumed, a simple photographic record of the world of things and objects "out there." (15).
Kripal buttresses his arguments via quantum theory, drawing upon, for instance, international relations theorist-turned-quantum social science proponent, Alexander Wendt, along with others. He also draws upon contemporary philosophers such as Philip Goff and Bernardo Kastrup. But the most compelling aspect of the book isn’t the theory (interesting as it is), but in his choice of witnesses to the paranormal. For his testimonials, he draws upon scientists, physicians, a philosopher, and a rationalist--not a “religious” figure among them. A couple of his exemplars I found especially surprising: A.J. Ayer, the famed logical positivist philosopher and Barbara Ehrenreich, a cell biologist and journalist concerned about women’s issues and poverty. But she’s also the author of Living With a Wild God: An Unbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything (2014) that details a “flip” experience of her own that occurred in her youth. Another witness (as it were) is Eben Alexander III, a physician who suffered a near-death experience and an extended coma that flipped his perspective on "reality." I trust you get Kripal’s point: this isn’t the group of loonies that you might expect. (For a parody of those whom many would associate with paranormal events, see the SNL skits with Kate McKinnon as the renegade UFO subject whose reports aren’t sweetness and light but instead hilarious sexual shenanigans.)
This book and Kripal’s project as a whole to inspect what’s under the hood of the paranormal or “super natural” is a careful and thoughtful--and needed--investigation into these undeniable phenomena. He’s fun to read and can hold the reader's attention much as we’d be held in thrall by a . . . well, a ghost story.
