Jeffrey Kripal
If we could just admit to ourselves that reality is not what we think it is, I think we’d be in a far better situation.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah.
Jeffrey Kripal
My own feeling as a teacher is that certainty is a big problem.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah.
Jeffrey Kripal
And when people believe their worldviews, you’re going to have problems. And when people have a worldview but they’re kind of playful with it and they can laugh about it and kind of poke holes in it, you’re in a much healthier space. Yeah. People who can’t laugh at their beliefs worry me.
Elizabeth Rovere
The paranormal is trying to get our attention. Reality is not what we think it is. Those are the words of my guest, Jeffrey Kripal, Rice University professor and Esalen board member. Jeff joins me on today’s episode to discuss the extraordinary experiences that challenge our everyday worldview. From UFOs to near death phenomena, we explore grief, humor and the impossible and how they can transform how we see ourselves and the world. I’m your host, Elizabeth Rovere, a clinical psychologist, yoga teacher, and graduate of Harvard Divinity School. I am forever curious about experiences of wonder and awe and how they transform us. With Wonderstruck, we invite you to explore these ideas through conversations with experts and experiencers across various disciplines and perspectives. I’m just gonna say a few things. I’m sitting here with my wonderful guest, Jeff Kripal, and I have to just say there’s just things that, well, there’s so many things that stand out about you, Jeff, and you’re just such a wonderful, unique person. You’ve had an incredible life story and trajectory to get to where you are. So Jeff talks about and studies things that stand outside of how we currently view or understand ourselves and the world. He’s a pioneer in putting the impossible on the table of academia, but just on the table in general. He’s kind of a curtain-puller-backer, or he’s an archiver of the anomalous, which seems contradictory but possible. And I, as a psychotherapist, I can’t help but see you a little bit as a psychotherapist in validating and valuing human trauma and revelation and tracing it into deeper meanings and more expansive meanings for self and for humanity, in a way. He talks about things like decolonizing reality, which is an incredibly cool thing to ponder. And I think one of the things that really strikes me about your work is that you take these things that are impossible or anomalous or seemingly extraordinary that people are afraid to talk about or feel a sense of shame even, and you take the shame out of the secrets, as we like to say. And your work has liberated a lot of people to share stories that they might disavow or dissociate or even ignore. So we’ll really appreciate that. So my first question is that I would love to hear a little bit about your backstory. I know you’re from Nebraska. I know you grew up go kart racing, is that right?
Jeffrey Kripal
I did, yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
And you were asking a lot of questions that no one could really answer. You went to potentially start studying or being a Benedictine monk and then becoming a professor at a predominantly STEM university, Rice University in the South. There’s a lot going on there. You’re kind of like a living embodiment of comparativism.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, thank you. Thank you for all that. My background’s actually very therapeutic. It’s psychoanalytic. I had a lot of anomalous experiences, I think, like everybody did as a kid growing up. I mean, I grew up in the 60s and early 70s and cartoons were, were weird, and I remember all of that. But my spiritual or intellectual journey began when I was an adolescent, and I became extremely anorexic. And we didn’t even have a word for it. Karen Carpenter died in 1984 or so. And so this was about 1977, 78, somewhere there. And I just, you know, I was very athletic. I come from a very athletic family. And it’s hard to play American football if you don’t eat. And so it destroyed my athletic career, but it also destroyed my social career. And I was doing it for religious reasons. I mean, if you would have asked 14 year old Jeff, Jeff, why aren’t you eating? He would have said, well, I’m fasting. I’m trying to be a saint. And so I was reading the lives of the saints and I was doing what I thought a young person needed to do. But of course, it was a weird young person. And when I entered the seminary, thinking about the monastic life, I was there four years and the monks became very concerned about my eating behavior or lack thereof, and asked me to go into psychoanalysis.
Elizabeth Rovere
Wow.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah. So I was psychoanalyzed by an actual psychoanalyst. And at the same time, we were engaging in different kinds of therapies. There was someone who we called a spiritual director who addressed sort of spiritual issues. There was someone we called a chaplain who addressed what I call psychological issues. And then I was one of the tough cases that they also sent to the psychoanalyst. And as a kid, you know, as a kid growing up in the Midwest, this idea of the unconscious was mind blowing. Yeah, but it made so much sense.
Elizabeth Rovere
So the psychoanalysis helped you with the anorexia?
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, and it was a physical thing. It was life and death. It was not abstract. We’re not talking about an abstract process. We’re talking about he’s going to die or he’s going to live, and he’s got to figure out what do his dreams mean and why is he dreaming that and what’s going on. And, wow, that’s embarrassing. But that’s also true. So the secrecy meant what I’m trying to get at. Secrecy meant something very, very practical and very transformative. Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
Was it an incremental process?
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, of course. I mean, they put me into psychoanalysis after I’d had years of different forms of counseling and spiritual direction. So I was ready. I was ready for it. It was fairly quick in terms of psychoanalysis, but there was a lot of prep and, you know, one of the premises of psychoanalysis, which I’m sure you know better than I do, is that we censor ourselves. We are secrets to ourselves. So when we meet secrecy or censorship in the public, we should not be surprised because we’re doing that in our dream life and we’re doing it every night. And maybe there’s a reason. There’s certainly a reason behind it. And paranormal phenomena, they’re often also secret phenomena. In other words, people don’t talk about them. And I think that hurts us. That’s a psychoanalytic conviction that secrets need to be spoken. If you keep a secret, it’s just continuing the trauma or the problem, and that if you speak it, it’s healing. And so I guess I do. I still think with Freud there in psychoanalysis, that it’s a good thing to speak secrets, and it’s a good thing to talk about these things.
Elizabeth Rovere
Well, it’s part of our experience with being human. Right. In this way. And, you know, when I think about it from that perspective, it’s like you’re gonna be carrying it one way or another, whether you put it into words. Right. It’ll manifest itself in the body or somehow. Or you’ll feel like you can’t commute, you know, it’s present. And putting it, you know, out into the public in that way, I think is a way to help, as you were saying. Well, it normalizes it and makes the abnormal or the paranormal normal or more expansive reality. And it gives us a place to go. It generates experience.
Jeffrey Kripal
And I also think the phenomena themselves want to be spoken. It wants to be communicated. And I don’t mean that… I don’t mean that in a weird or mysterious way, but I think when an experiencer tells me a story, the experience happened to be told. And so there’s something relational or there’s something social about the experience at the beginning that’s really a part of it. And if it’s kept inside and not spoken, then I think that’s often a problem. And, you know, experiencers tell me this. I mean, what I try to do as an academic is I go into university settings and… and I just talk about strange shit. But I do it in the language that they’re familiar with. So I talk about all the theorists that they know and how we do this, and then they start to be comfortable with it. But they’re comfortable with it because I’m talking about it in their own terms. So they need to be assured. And then they’ll start telling me stories.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes.
Jeffrey Kripal
And I’m like, but you need to develop that comfort level first before you’ll hear those stories, I guess, is what I’m trying to say.
Elizabeth Rovere
Well, and that you’re feeling comfortable and knowing that that other person can validate your experience, that they know what you’re talking, they understand you, or they just.
Jeffrey Kripal
They believe you. It really happened. Like, I honestly don’t know what it means. I don’t know why you had this experience or that experience, but I know you had it. I believe you, and thank you for telling me.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right.
Jeffrey Kripal
And I will. If you’re comfortable with it, I will think with it, I will write about it. And some of them are comfortable with that, and some of them aren’t, and I honor them. It’s up to them. So they become theory, essentially. They become scholarship, if that’s what they want. And. And if that’s not what they want, that’s fine, too.
Elizabeth Rovere
I think about that in the context of UFOs and aliens and abduction experience. And in the mid-90s, when John Mack had written his abduction book and there was a lot of chatter about, oh, he’s out there, what’s he talking about? But he never said, oh, I believe in this concretism of aliens and all these things. I was like, but I know having talked to the people, people’s experience is very real. Yeah, it’s very real. I don’t know how to explain it.
Jeffrey Kripal
It’s also very similar. He heard a lot of stories, and he heard the same patterns over and over again. And so he started to realize. And, well, he knew they weren’t mentally ill. He was a psychiatrist and so he knew what the memes were in the culture. Oh, these people are mentally ill, or, oh, they’re making this up, or, oh, they want money or fame or whatever. And he knew from talking to hundreds or dozens and dozens, if hundreds of experiencers that none of that was simply the case, and that there was a reality behind or within their experiences, but it couldn’t be explained in scientific or Western terms. And so he was pushing towards what he called a third worldview, that it wasn’t a religious worldview. He didn’t want to go back to a religious paradign, but he also didn’t want to go to the scientific or the psychiatric paradigm because he knew it wouldn’t work. He didn’t know what that third worldview was, but he knew it required a different reality to make sense of what these people were telling him. He knew that. And that was John’s genius, but it was also his offense, and it’s what he was punished for, really. So. But. But. But he was. He was at the core of this in the 1990s. Yeah, for sure. And he was the Harvard psychiatrist. He had, you know, won a Pulitzer Prize for an earlier biography. And he was everything. He was the academic’s academic. And here he was talking about abductions. Yeah, that’s like. That’s, like, crazy.
Elizabeth Rovere
Because he saw it in his patients, right?
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah. He was actually opened up at Esalen, believe it or not.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh, I didn’t know that.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah. It was Stan Grof and Esalen. One of the funny things in Ralph Blumenthal’s biography is it goes something like, Stan Grof put a hole in my psyche and the UFOs flew in.
Elizabeth Rovere
That’s great.
Jeffrey Kripal
So you’ve got to be, like, open. You got to be opened up, and then you can listen. And it’s not that you’re naive about what you’re listening to. He wasn’t naive at all, but he could hear. He was a trained listener. He was a trained therapist, so he could listen to people, and he began to realize that they were telling the truth of their experience.
Elizabeth Rovere
And you’re telling these stories to a certain extent now about the UFOs and sharing these stories.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
So you’re listening in the same way that he was.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
Not as a therapist.
Jeffrey Kripal
I’m not a Harvard psychiatrist, but yeah, people have compared that. Yeah, people have said that, and I think that’s true, actually. I think people perceive a professor as an authority. Yeah, I’m not sure I believe that, but I understand that. I understand the social contract. And I think that’s true. And so, again, I use that, and I use it to do what I think John Mack was doing. Go into a space, authorize people to tell their stories, and let the chips fall. Let’s just see where they fall. And he not only did that in the US with experiential. I mean, he went to Zimbabwe and worked with the parents and the children, you know, 60 some children who had an encounter experience together. And again, his genius was not to say, we need to believe in the extraterrestrial hypothesis. You know, check the boxes. But we need to listen to these children and know they’re not making this up. And no, this really happened. And please, please listen to them and sit with them and take this into your worldview. And it. It may not. It doesn’t fit into your worldview. Okay, well, then change your worldview. Change it. Yeah, that’s really what he was saying. And I think most people are not willing to change their worldview, you know, at least in the 90s. But these kids at this school, it’s called the aerial school, they knew something really strange had happened. It wasn’t like Spiderman or Superman or something. I mean, something landed, you know, near the playground, and they saw it and they encountered these beings, and it was difficult, you know, for them as well. So this is why I always. I get triggered a little bit when someone says something like. And I’m not accusing you, Elizabeth, anything. Someone says the paranormal is normal. Always. My response is, no, it’s not. And it’s not supposed to be. It’s trying to get your attention. And if it was normal, it wouldn’t get your attention. You wouldn’t see it. But if it’s really weird and it’s really outside your paradigm, it’s hitting you in the face and it’s saying, look, look, this is happening. And so one of the phrases John developed at Harvard actually comes from Paul Tillich, of all people. Ontological shock.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes, yes, right. Read that.
Jeffrey Kripal
And if you talk to experiencers, this is what they most want to tell you. They don’t use the phrase ontological shock, but what that phrase means is, I cannot fit this into my reality. It makes no sense. I am in shock. I’m traumatized by what happened. This is not. I can’t explain this, but here’s what happened. And so that’s what they want to say. They want to talk about how real it was. They don’t want to talk about it as a symptom or as a metaphor or as a hallucination. They want to tell you how it doesn’t fit into what they were told reality is. And of course, what they were told reality is, is what we were all told reality is.
Elizabeth Rovere
When I think about these kinds of things, I think they’re also hidden in plain view. I feel like we just have walking around with blinders on in the sense of our reality. And obviously, if we took them off, we’d probably go nuts. It’d be overwhelming. So there’s gotta be some kind of a navigation system. But. Yeah, but, like, you know, I feel like there is a place for it to be a part of our reality. Our reality is what’s limited.
Jeffrey Kripal
Right.
Elizabeth Rovere
Like, that’s what feels constricting, and that’s why we experience ontological shock.
Jeffrey Kripal
And that’s what I mean by the impossible. It’s impossible by virtue of the reality where we assume to be the case. It’s not impossible to reality. Reality does what it does, and it’s always doing things that are impossible. But that’s our. We consider them impossible. They’re not actually impossible.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, okay.
Jeffrey Kripal
And every. I think every culture does this. Every culture puts blinders on. You know, everybody has blinders on, and maybe we need blinders. You know, I’m not questioning. Well, I guess I am questioning the blinders, but again, maybe they’re useful.
Elizabeth Rovere
You know, it’s funny. Like, I have this. There’s a quote that I wrote down, literally, like, 20 years ago. It’s Lao Tzu. It’s a frog in a well. May not be told about. May not cannot be told about the sea. And I like it because it’s like. First I was like, what is he talking about? I didn’t understand it. And I was like. I wrote it down because I felt something about it right then. I was like. When I finally got it, I was like, oh, now I see. Now I see the sea. But it’s like, so he can be talked about. He’s not gonna understand it. But can he climb out of the well? What happens when you’re. Can you. What if he ends up being able to jump out of the well? Like, how do we. But then if you do, are you gonna be. Will it kill you? Is it too much? And what is the practice of being able to talk about it or experience it, but still be anchored in, like you said, reality? Where I have to get a job and, you know, I’m making dinner tonight and not constantly be seeing visions or I have to.
Jeffrey Kripal
I have to raise the children or I have to go teach a class or whatever. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a real conflict, and I don’t have an answer to that. I don’t. I think it’s a compromise. But my point is, is that the. Actually, the frog does get out of the well a lot. It does see the ocean, and. And then the frog comes back and talks about the ocean, and we say, you’re crazy. That’s not a good response. That’s not a healthy, healing response. And if we could just admit to ourselves that reality is not what we think it is, I think we’d be in a far better situation. My own feeling as a teacher is that certainty is a big problem. And when people believe their worldviews, you’re gonna have problems. And when people have a worldview, but they’re kind of playful with it and they can laugh about it and kind of poke holes in it, you’re in a much healthier space. People who can’t laugh at their beliefs worry me. People who. I actually think comedy is like a really important… serves a really important metaphysical function as well as a social function. Comedians, I think, are often some of our best metaphysicians, even though they would never say that. Some of them will, though. So there’s something about stepping out of. What I try to do as an educator is get people to step out of their worldview and just look at it. And it’s not to abandon their worldview. It’s not. Not to say you don’t need. Of course you need a worldview, but how do you hold that worldview and how do you live in it? I think is another question.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, well, it’s funny, right? There’s a paradox in there because you can’t know it until you step out of it. You have to be able to step out of it to really see it. And then you can see, oh, it needs to be a bit more flexible and fluid rather than the rigidity of just, I am my worldview, because there’s nowhere to go. There’s nowhere to go from there. And that’s when I think, when you talk about the deadness of the Academy, it’s like. It’s flat. It’s like, what?
Jeffrey Kripal
There’s nowhere to go, but we go.
Elizabeth Rovere
There to ask questions and to learn.
Jeffrey Kripal
I would think so. I mean, you know, when I look back, just on my own little life, you know, my joke about scholars of religion is they’re all weird. But they all backed into the Academy because it was the only institution that would have them. Oh, and that’s a good thing, you know, good for them, good for the Academy. Doesn’t mean it’s a perfect institute. No. Does it mean it’s the only. No, it doesn’t mean any of that. But at least it’s a place where you can ask questions that you actually can’t ask in your religious or your cultural tradition or your family or whatever the case might be. And so I don’t think it’s. I think my own journey has been largely accidental, but just really honest. It’s just like backing up and saying, okay, I can’t ask this here, but I still have the question.
Elizabeth Rovere
But asking these questions, I mean, when you ask questions, I mean, a lot of what you do is exploration and asking questions. I read somewhere it’s like, we know what you know, we know what matter is. I mean, sorry, we know matter does, but we don’t know what matter is. For example, we know kind of what. We kind of know what consciousness does, kind of, but we don’t know what the hell that is. And, you know, asking those kinds of questions, like you’re saying, putting these kinds of things on the table, like, why can’t we just say we don’t know? Why can’t we just say we don’t know? And let’s talk about it, let’s think about it, let’s tell me what it feels like if you think about it, contemplate it. So I wanted have in my notes, I would love for you to share the understanding or perspective of consciousness with the perception model versus the brain model, because I think that’s very real and alive. I think a lot of people are actually talking about it. They’re not talking about it as much in neuroscience.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah. So one of the things I say a lot about impossible phenomena is the big question is what does the world have to look like to make this happen? Because it clearly happens. So what does the world look like? And more to the point, what is a human being? And more to the point of the point is what is the relationship to the brain and what we call mind? And the standard production model is what you get in contemporary neuroscience generally. And it’s that brain produces mind full stop. And so mind is essentially a very complicated series of neurons firing in a very synchronized way and producing this illusion of consciousness that you and I are in at the moment, or I presume you’re in at the moment. If that’s the case, then a lot of these paranormal phenomena make no sense at all because you can’t explain. Well, how do I know that my grandmother died instantly 300 miles away. How do I possibly know that if the mind is just a function of the brain and a body, and I’m here and she’s 300 miles, there’s no way that can’t happen. Or there’s hundreds of those cases. If, however, the brain and the body are receivers or mediators or translators of consciousness, like your cell phone, say on the Internet or the Wi-Fi, then if something happens to the brain or the body and it dies, you throw your cell phone against the wall. Nothing happens to the Wi-Fi. It still goes on. And if that’s your model of consciousness, then consciousness is not restricted to the brain and the body. And then you can suddenly make sense of things like telepathy and precognition and all of these paranormal. All this, not all of it, but a lot of the paranormal phenomena immediately make sense. And by making sense, I mean you can fit them into your reality in a new way. So it’s not that I know that the filter thesis or the reception thesis is correct, but it certainly makes better sense of the data I have.
Elizabeth Rovere
Well, it helps explain things and put it into a certain perspective that it.
Jeffrey Kripal
Also allows you to talk about it.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, it allows you to talk about it and feel like, you know, you’re not unhinged, that you had this experience, that this is a theory that’s out there. People are having this and as you say, happening all the time. And it’s like, you know, the irony is, like, if we were just going into the. The current model of how we see reality that just doesn’t exist. It’s like, but I have all this stuff. What do you want to do with it?
Jeffrey Kripal
Right. That’s what I mean. It’s like, come on. Of course it’s real. Of course it’s part of reality. So let’s change our view of reality or let’s change our view of the human being.
Elizabeth Rovere
We have to. In some ways.
Jeffrey Kripal
I would hope so. I mean, that’s the whole. I think that’s the whole point of education.
Elizabeth Rovere
You know, I think of when you talk about the deadness of reality and people feeling current state. And I’m sure there’s been waves of this throughout history, but where we are in a way now with people being more depressed or anxious and kind of feeling like, what do I even believe in? What matters? And everything is depressing and that it’s sort of been flattened. Like there’s not reality, doesn’t seem so great. And yet there’s, I feel, a pathway when we’re talking about these kinds of things that it sort of enlivens reality. Reality becomes awake, alive. We’re participating in this. It’s cool. It’s joyful, right? Not like, blissfully like.
Jeffrey Kripal
It’s funny.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s funny.
Jeffrey Kripal
It’s a lot. Yeah. It’s making fun of itself. It’s transcending itself. It’s.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s transcending itself.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah. And it’s cool. It’s really cool, actually. People look at me sometimes and they’re like, you have the coolest job. I’m like, yeah, I know I do, but I made it cool. You kind of create an ecosystem around oneself by looking at the things you look at and by talking to the people you talk to and just trying to isolate what you think the problems are and what you think maybe some of the responses to those problems are. The notion that the future feeds back into the present or that I can know what a loved one is thinking or emoting or feeling. Many miles. That’s just cool. I mean, that means essentially, superpowers are real.
Elizabeth Rovere
And then I can feel connected to my loved one. They’re not just gone and it’s over. It could be a new way of looking at grief.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah. Well, this was Jessica Waite’s point I was talking about, and this is exactly her point. You know, this woman who lost her husband and wrote this book, A Widow’s Guide to Dead Bastards. I mean, this is exactly her point, is that grief opens one up to impossible experiences, and then you try to talk about those impossible experiences, and people want to shut you down again, and they want to call you crazy or they want to call you just, oh, you’re just in grief. You’re just making shit up. And. No, actually, I’m not.
Elizabeth Rovere
Okay, well, I still want to come back to your authors of the Impossible, but now you’re getting me somewhere else, which is good, too, when I think about grief. So there’s two things. I went to a wake of someone, and the wife was sitting there, and the priest, in his sort of presentation looked at her and said, don’t let anyone take away your grief. Usually people are like, no, it’s okay. You’re gonna be okay. You know, like, yeah, what you’re thinking, it’s, you know, just let it go. Just move on. He’s like, don’t let anyone take it away. It’s very painful, but it’s something that you will go through, that’s a gift, that it will open things up for you. And it could be more of an emotional processing of opening. It could be something like you’re describing that it’s acknowledging these kinds of experiences that she’s communicating or having these messages with her departed husband in a very meaningful way that you want to keep open because you’re looking at this process. And that takes me to the part where, you know, in. At least in some worlds of psychoanalysis, we look at complaining as the language of grief and that it’s like, you know, what are you complaining about? You’re complaining about something that’s been lost. And, you know, there’s definitely a lot to complain about. Right. And there’s also a humor in complaining.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
And I wonder about that.
Jeffrey Kripal
I complain a lot. That’s why I’m laughing or I’m smiling. The other thing your comments made me think of is, you know, so I had a. He actually wasn’t my professor, but I got to know him later. Peter Homans, who wrote a book called the Ability to Mourn. I don’t know if you know this book.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah.
Jeffrey Kripal
But Peter looked at. This is a broader. It’s a broader application. But Peter looked at pretty much all of social science and certainly the study of religion as a long process of mourning a lost religious object. And that was very powerful, you know, to me personally, because I think when you study religion, it is a kind of mourning. You’re losing a kind of. Well, you’re losing your family or you’re losing your faith in some way, but you’re also gaining. It also opens you up to other experiences in a way that I think are not dissimilar to the widow, you know, who was honest in talking about these things. So, I mean, that’s another kind of. In other words, the study of religion is a broad cultural therapy about addressing this process and this loss of a worldview that once was, but is no longer. And, you know, where do you go from here? Well, I don’t know. We don’t know. But that’s part of grief, right?
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah.
Jeffrey Kripal
You don’t really know what’s going to happen or what life is going to be, but.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, as long as we stay in that question.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
It makes me think of, like, though, when people study religion, they don’t exactly study religious experience. Academia doesn’t really quite study religious experience. Maybe they walk around it.
Jeffrey Kripal
It once did, but it doesn’t anymore. I mean, I’m trying to.
Elizabeth Rovere
Right, right. Of course, absolutely. But I think about that, like, the, like, taking the sacred out of religion. It’s like, how could you possibly do it? It seems like quite a betrayal.
Jeffrey Kripal
People do it.
Elizabeth Rovere
I know, but it seems kind of ironic. But that’s exactly the thing that you are talking about, I would think when you’re talking about religion, otherwise you might as well be talking about just a institution of a social institution.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, that’s what people talk about. They talk about the social institution and they’ll say things like, well, there’s nothing really religious about religion. I’m like, yeah, that’s because you took it all off the table. That’s because you eliminated all of it. And then what’s left? Well, this social tradition, this historical tradition, this set of rituals, this set of myths, this set of texts that have histories, but none of that’s really what people are talking about when they talk about religious experience. They won’t even, you know, generally the category of experience isn’t even allowed.
Elizabeth Rovere
I know, isn’t that strange?
Jeffrey Kripal
I mean, that’s, it’s not strange at all. It’s just part of their ideology. I think it just confirms this view that it’s all flat.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah, but it’s like it goes back to William James and probably way before him anyway.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, well, James, I think, is a hero here. Yeah, but he was pushing up against, he called it medical materialism. So he was pushing up against this already in the early 1900s.
Elizabeth Rovere
But it’s like it’s doing us our own disservice when we talk about how we experience or how we define reality, define, you know, rigidity in a way. It’s like, but we’re having these human experiences, or we’re human beings having these experiences and we have to have a place for it. It’s like to not be able to talk about it in psychology, in department of religion is kind of. There’s a. There’s quite an absurdity, I think, which is then where the humor comes in. You have to laugh about it.
Jeffrey Kripal
You do have to laugh. I laugh about it because it’s ridiculous, but it’s exactly where. So when I tell these jokes to academ, they always laugh. But the reason they laugh is because it’s true and they know it’s true and they know how. I think they also know on some level how ridiculous it is. But it’s how like one of my jokes is. If you want, if you go to the department of psychology to have your soul die, that’s where you go, I know, I know. And you know, the old fashioned. And by old fashioned, I mean the effective modes of therapy are just not practiced anymore. They’re just, they’re off the table for a variety of financial and academic reasons. But it’s hard to talk about psychoanalysis now. It’s hard to talk about the unconscious or the soul or any. Anything. Anything with depth is. Is off the table.
Elizabeth Rovere
And it’s encoded in a different language. It’s kind of. They. They talk about it in different.
Jeffrey Kripal
But does anybody understand it if they talk about it?
Elizabeth Rovere
No. No. That’s why they don’t want to talk about it.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
But we are talking about it. I mean, it’s out there, and there’s threads to it. And there’s two things I wanted to talk to you about in regard to the whole UFO thing in science.
Jeffrey Kripal
I love talking about UFOs.
Elizabeth Rovere
Oh, good.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
Well, it’s now a part, I guess you would say, of the scientific world because it’s been. Been put. You know, they’ve released this documentation for the last however many years. You probably know more than I do about that. That, like, hey, we’ve seen these things. People have seen these things. We don’t know what they are, that they’re out there. We acknowledge it, that it exists, but we don’t know what it is. And, you know, so. And then they’re actually. People are contacting you about UFOs and levitation and how do we understand the stuff that we don’t understand? And we’re scientists asking you, Jeff. Yeah, that’s pretty cool.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, it is cool.
Elizabeth Rovere
And it’s also crazy and funny and wild. I mean, like, how do you. I mean, that’s really hopeful, and that’s really something.
Jeffrey Kripal
So the reason I love to talk about UFOs is because other people will talk about UFOs. It’s a wedge. It’s a wedge issue. And it gets it even into Congress and the New York Times and Stanford and places you wouldn’t imagine that it. It gets into, but it really gets into it. And so, you know, like one of our collections at Rice, in the Archives of the Impossible is Richard Haynes. And it’s all aviation reports. It’s all pilots who are encountering huge craft in the sky and reporting this. And you realize reading through these reports that it’s not minor at all, nor is it rare, by the way. It’s rarely reported because the pilots were worried about their jobs and worried about their military service. They actually couldn’t report it. They were not allowed to. And that policy was only changed in the US very recently. And so pilots are much more. They’re much more comfortable talking about it than they used to be. So I get asked the question a lot. Is the phenomena increasing? And my answer is always, I actually don’t think the phenomenon is increasing. I think people are responding to it and talking about it more. I think the cultural sensors are coming down, but I don’t think the phenomenon has changed a bit. I think it’s as present and as common as it’s always been. But the UFO thing is also really rich because it includes a lot of paranormal phenomena, which gets sliced off, by the way, in Congress and in the military reports. They just want to talk about the craft and they want to talk about radar and they want to talk about threats and they want to talk things about whether to invest more money in the military or something to shoot these things down. What it is to them is a threat. It’s a potential threat. Full stop. Full stop. And if you start talking about the hitchhiker effect or the poltergeist effects around them, or people becoming precognitive or clairvoyant after they have a UFO encounter, they don’t want to hear that that’s just nutty people. That’s people who are whatever. But that’s definitely part of the phenomenon. The people who really research the phenomenon, who really know. Including scientists, by the way.
Elizabeth Rovere
Exactly.
Jeffrey Kripal
They know. They know darn well that this is a very rich spectrum of events and that what’s being reported in the media or that the military is talking about is one little tiny slice of what’s actually happening. And they’re really good at admitting that whole spectrum. And that’s why I like it. That’s why I like the topic, is because it’s a way for me to talk to scientists and military people, including, I know a lot of most. They’re all retired, by the way, because you can’t talk about it if you’re active duty, by the way, even now. Not to people like me. Okay, so the people I talk to in the military, they’re all retired and they’re really stand up, amazing people. But I like interacting with them because it allows me to talk to them about something that’s close to my field but is also close to their own disciplines, whether it’s oceanography or radar or aviation or NASA or astronomy or whatever it is. And they, I want to say this right, I think they trust me as one of the go-to people to challenge them, you know, on issues that they want to be challenged on. But also somebody who really wants to think about the physical effects as well as the mental and spiritual effects. It’s both the whole picture, the whole picture and they need somebody. They need somebody in the humanities or history to speak to this.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yes.
Jeffrey Kripal
And so that’s what I do.
Elizabeth Rovere
Because you don’t get the whole picture unless you’re talking to the humanities.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah. And it’s not that. I know it’s not that I can do the genetics or the astronomy or the physics of it, but they can’t do the history or the literature either. And so we need each other. And I guess that’s why I find it so productive because it’s so transdisciplinary.
Elizabeth Rovere
Well, the whole thing too, that they’re not talking about it and yet they employ it. I mean, I think about. You have in your archive the remote viewing. Right. There’s a whole declassified or secret space stamp, unclassified documentation of this remote viewing that I know, of course, or I don’t know if people know this. Right. That was happening and it’s probably happening now, but it was happening during The Cold War.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah. 72 to 94.
Elizabeth Rovere
The dates of what you have.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
So there’s the employing of that. It’s like, well, you know, if it works for me, I’m going to acknowledge its reality because I need that help, but I don’t want to, you know, but so there’s. So that exists. And then if they’re asking you, as a professor of someone that studies saints who levitate, how do you think this UFO moves, is moving and hovering? They’re asking you, and no one’s saying, like, oh, the dude that’s asking you is a nut. He wants to know because he wants to use it.
Jeffrey Kripal
He’s not a nut at all. They’re not a nuts at all.
Elizabeth Rovere
No.
Jeffrey Kripal
They have honest questions, but that’s cool.
Elizabeth Rovere
But that’s expanding and connecting, even though maybe it’s not. Well, I don’t know. I hope it’s not for a negative outcome, but.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, I. Yeah, I like that aspect of it. And again, that’s why I say the UFO’s a wedge issue, because it gets into people who do propulsion, people who do radar, people who do oceanography, people who do astronomy, physics, genetics, you name it. And one of my jokes is to study the UFO is actually to study everything you need everything. You can’t restrict it to one little department on campus. It’s pretty much everything.
Elizabeth Rovere
When you talk about UFOs, this is something that was curious to me. The historic orb of like in the ancient religious history, or not ancient, but what is it? Medieval.
Jeffrey Kripal
It’s ancient too.
Elizabeth Rovere
Is it.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
That people were seeing these kinds of things, but thought they were spiritual entities.
Jeffrey Kripal
Or not, or dead people or. I mean, Ezekiel thought it was God. You know, I mean, people generally give religious interpretations to these things before the modern era, and in the modern era, they generally give kind of science fiction reasons or extraterrestrial reasons or military reasons now. So I think they’re all connected. There’s essentially two camps in the study of UFOs. There’s the people who think the UFO is a post World War II issue. It really is about the bomb, and it’s really about the Cold War.
Elizabeth Rovere
Yeah.
Jeffrey Kripal
And then there’s people who think it just goes way back, and it’s always been with us, and it’s always been essentially messing with us, but also guiding us. And I’m much in that latter camp. I think what we call the UFO is what our ancient ancestors, you know, would have experienced as an orb or a shield or a light in the sky or the vehicle of Yahweh, or however they wanted to talk about it, or however their cultures encouraged them to talk about it or to see it. We had a philosopher who spoke at Rice during the pandemic, and he had been on one of these ventilators, and he had had such an experience, and if you read him, it was really about the ancestors. It was an encounter with the dead, and it was, like, really profound. But if you listen to him talk about it in a public setting, he would talk about. He would psychoanalyze it, essentially. And I was like, why are you doing that? Why can’t you just let the ancestors speak? Why do we have to medicalize everything? And I’m not accusing him of. He was just being two different people in two different social settings. He was doing the right thing. But to me, it just spoke more to the social setting and what’s wrong with it, and why not to be more honest about our encounters and our experiences.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s a big question. Why can’t we be more honest in a social setting?
Jeffrey Kripal
Because we’re social creatures, and we’re informed by those social settings, and so we experience shame and all the things that we’re coded and trained to feel. You know, and so when someone rolls their eyes or says something dismissive or talks about tinfoil hats or little green men or something, we naturally hear that and we shut down. We shut down.
Elizabeth Rovere
But that’s what I think, though, when you’re talking about it or you’re writing a book about it, or you’re a professor at a university talking about it, like others that are doing this it makes. Doesn’t sound crazy.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, it’s not. And that’s the point. The point is to authorize that kind of conversation and that kind of sharing on a broad cultural level. I mean, and I understand that we’re not doing that in a university or in a book, but it’s starting. It. It’s part of it. It’s. I think it’s a start.
Elizabeth Rovere
I mean, I think as humans, we’re curious, and people today, I think, are deeply curious and wanting something that’s a little bit more awake and alive than in some ways, what we’ve been getting.
Jeffrey Kripal
Again, I think it’s cool. And I think that’s what people. And by people, I mean, so there’s really a kind of religious believer who’s deeply offended by this, and there’s a secular kind of scientific ideologue who’s also offended. But most people are not either of those. They’re like this third kind of space, and they’re hungry for smart talk about anomalous things because they know they happen.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s acknowledged.
Jeffrey Kripal
They know that. And they also know they don’t want to listen to people on the tabloids or, you know, talk about them. They want meat. I guess that’s not a right term. They want substance. Substance, you know, and so that, I think, is what we Can provide.
Elizabeth Rovere
You know, but I can’t. What about, like, though that person that’s deeply in their religious religion or deeply entrenched in their particular science that you’re saying don’t want to hear about this?
Jeffrey Kripal
No, they don’t.
Elizabeth Rovere
Don’t they have their own version of it? Like, doesn’t that the person that’s a profound, very fundamental Christian type of person, for example, that has their prayers answered, in some moment a miracle happens?
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, sure, but it’s in the context of their religious worldview, it’s okay to have weird things happen as long as they confirm your worldview. It’s not okay to have weird things happen that don’t confirm your worldview. And this is why I tell people most of the resistance you’re going to get is going to be religious, by the way. And some of it’s going to be scientific or secular, but it’s going to be one of those two. You know, that’s where the resistance comes from.
Elizabeth Rovere
There’s just. And do you feel like there’s just not a bridge? I mean, can we try to build one? Or is.
Jeffrey Kripal
No, there’s definitely a bridge. And that’s what I think we can provide is that bridge. Because I think religious traditions in particular, they’re very. You know, there’s this conversation in the UFO world too, about can the religions handle full disclosure. That’s how it’s voiced. And one position is, sure, it’ll be easy, and the other position is no way. And I’m sort of more on the latter. But the good news about religion is that it has this vertical dimension, and it does try to talk about anomalous things. Or impossible things. The bad news is it’s very exclusive. You can talk about impossible or anomalous things as long as they fit into your system. If they don’t fit into your belief system, they’re bad. Sometimes they’re demons or they’re something else. So there’s a kind of a good. There’s a good part and a bad part of religion. The secular, scientific thing is just flat. It’s just everything’s a material, physical process, and anything that doesn’t fit into that is not possible. And these people are just making stuff up or hallucinating or crazy or whatever they are, because it just doesn’t happen.
Elizabeth Rovere
Except when they need the information for something.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, then, even then, it doesn’t happen. It’s just. It’s not. If it’s not possible, it doesn’t happen. That’s really the logic.
Elizabeth Rovere
But then it’s a matter of what we define as possible.
Jeffrey Kripal
Of course, that’s why I call the impossible. That’s why I. I talk a lot about the impossible. Again, it’s not impossible because it’s impossible. It’s impossible because of the systems we bring to reality.
Elizabeth Rovere
You know, I was thinking about this. Well, I was trying to, like, so what does that word even mean, impossible or possible? Like, what’s the etymology of possibility? And it comes from P O T I S potis or it’s like a power. Yeah, power.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah.
Elizabeth Rovere
You know, I think wonder is a beautiful experience and a great word, and it opens the doors, expands horizons. And I think you’re constantly knocking on doors and opening them, and perhaps you would share your own experience of wondering and how that’s taken you places.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah. So, I mean, every time I’ve said the word cool, you could just replace it with wonder. And is. The other thing I’ll say is I want wonder to be weirder. Yeah. I think wonder is sometimes a way that we secularize and flatten really spectacular things. And that’s why I like talking about the impossible, because it’s weirder than wonder. And I think wonder has a kind of aesthetic tone to it. And it lets people off the hook. There’s not enough ontological shock in it.
Elizabeth Rovere
Okay.
Jeffrey Kripal
I want people to be shocked. I want them to be weirded out. I want them to like, wow, that was. That’s amazing. I don’t even know what to do with that.
Elizabeth Rovere
Do you think it’s more of awe?
Jeffrey Kripal
Even awe is not strong enough for me personally. I know this is, you know, I know you know this person, but a German theologian named Rudolf Otto, you know, the sacred was the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. I think that’s closer to it. Tremendum doesn’t. I mean, he used awe. But awe in the sense of awful and sense of terror, I think that’s much closer.
Elizabeth Rovere
It’s both.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah. I think that’s closer to what we’re talking about. And this comes up again in the abduction materials. People ask me all the time, well, why is this abduction experience so negative? And why is it so terrifying? Well, that’s sacred, too. I mean, the demons, as sacred as the angel. It’s just two sides of the same coin. And they’ve never heard that they think of. I don’t know what they think, that it’s rainbows and kittens or something. I don’t know what they think. So that’s what I would say about wonder is. Yes, wonder. Let’s reinstate wonder, but let’s emphasize the struck part too. Yes, yes. But let’s make it even weirder. What’s after Wonderstruck?
Elizabeth Rovere
Well, maybe it’s a way of looking at it, of looking at these kinds of things. Like, I wonder what the hell that is.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, yeah. You’re Wonderstruck in such a way that you’re willing to change the basic parameters of what you think is real and unreal. That, to me is true wonder.
Elizabeth Rovere
Thank you so very much, Professor Jeffrey Kripal. And thank you listeners for spending time with us. If you enjoyed this episode and think someone else might too, please rate the show and consider sending a link to a friend. Leave us a comment. We look forward to hearing from you. Wonderstruck is produced by Striking Wonder Productions with the teams at Baillie Newman and Creator Aligned Projects. Special thanks to Brian O’Kelley, Eliana Eleftheriou and Travis Reece. You know, when I told my husband Brian about my conversation with Jeff, he noticed a glitch in the matrix a few days later… what seemed maybe to be a UFO hovering in the distance past the Brooklyn Bridge. When he looked again, it was gone. Maybe reality isn’t what we think it is. Huge thanks to Jeff Kripal for sharing his work with us, and thank you so much for listening. And remember, stay open to the wonder in life.
