Extraordinary, Mysterious, and Impossible Experiences, with Jeffrey Kriple

Summary

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Podcast Summary: "Extraordinary, Mysterious, and Impossible Experiences"

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Pierce Salguero
Guest: Jeffrey J. Kripal
Date: May 8, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Pierce Salguero sits down with Professor Jeffrey J. Kripal, renowned scholar of religion at Rice University, to discuss the landscape of "impossible" and extraordinary human experiences—psychedelic visions, mystical apparitions, near-death revelations, and other events that disrupt conventional frameworks of knowledge. The conversation delves into the limitations and ideologies of the humanities, the risks and rewards of breaking disciplinary norms, and Jeffrey Kripal’s impassioned call for a more honest, pluralist, and open exploration of the “weird” in academic life.

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Key Discussion Points

1. Jeffrey Kripal’s Academic Journey (04:22–08:18)

• Introduction by Host: Pierce introduces Kripal as possibly the "first academic celebrity" on the podcast, touching on his broad career—ranging from Indian studies to studying American counterculture.
• Kripal’s Self-introduction:
  • Early ambitions to be a Benedictine monk.
  • Shifted from studying Indian religions to investigating “impossible” experiences in the American counterculture.
  • His influential works include: "Kali's Child", "Authors of the Impossible", and "Mutants and Mystics".
  • Emphasis on how the academic humanities lack vocabulary for truly extraordinary experiences.
  • “I realized that academics don't really have a way of talking about these things… They reduce everything to society and history and sociology or psychology, but they don't actually make sense to the people who have the experiences.” (07:36)

2. Types of "Impossible Experiences" (08:18–10:44)

• Kripal’s List:
  • Psychedelic states, abduction experiences, channeling, precognitive dreams—especially when spontaneous.
• Salguero’s Perspective:
  • Adds spirit apparitions and cultivated states through meditation or yoga.
• Kripal’s Focus:
  • Prefers spontaneous over cultivated experiences, as these are paradigm-breaking for individuals.

3. The Humanities, Ideology, and Epistemology (12:09–17:15)

• Naming as Ideology:
  • Kripal: “All forms of naming are ideologies… The beauty of the humanities is it's very much opposed to any particular ideology.” (12:09)
• Hidden Ideologies:
  • Both agree the humanities often critique others while ignoring their own biases.
• Ontological Pluralism:
  • Kripal: “I consider myself to be a pluralist… Ontologies are not wrong, but they're generally inadequate to these experiences.” (15:24)
  • The crux: Experiences that overflow any single conceptual framework.

4. Realism vs. Scholarly Hedging (17:15–19:43)

• Scholars’ Reluctance:
  • Scholars often explain mystical phenomena as social constructs to avoid ontological claims—a product of religion’s divorce from theology.
• Kripal’s Critique:
  • “That’s cowardice… I think it’s precisely why the humanities are being ignored and defunded, because we stop talking about reality.” (18:28)
  • Urges for realism: Experiences are real, even if their ontological underpinnings are contested.
• Pierce’s Question:
  • Are you arguing for a return to theological certainty, or something new?
• Kripal: Advocates for a new “third way”—not theology, not materialist reductionism, but a more open, creative, and pluralistic humanities.

5. Risks & Consequences for the Humanities (29:09–33:45)

• Personal & Professional Risks:
  • Kripal contends it’s a myth that opening up about extraordinary experiences is “career suicide.”
    • “The stakes are higher for scientists. For humanists, the stakes are much lower… Just do what you want to do.” (29:33)
• Humanities’ Marginalization:
  • “There’s a broad cultural rejection… We’ve reduced what we do to something that isn’t really what we do.” (31:05)
  • Memorable metaphor: “Last Halloween… half [the kids] were dressed up as superhumans. None were dressed up as professors… Why are we saying we’re somebody that nobody, no kid wants to grow up being?” (31:05)

6. Personal Experience and Academic Honesty (24:30–29:19)

• Salguero’s Survey:
  • 2/3 of Buddhist Studies scholars have had a profound religious or mystical experience, but almost none feel permitted to discuss it in academic settings.
• Kripal’s Rebuttal: “That is the norm. Of course, you’re correct… but I’m like, fuck it. Just say it. Just do it. Don't shut up. Speak out.” (26:05)

7. The “Superhumanities” and The Conversation Model (21:30–24:13, 35:30–38:37)

• Chessboard Metaphor:
  • Kripal resists academic frameworks as “games” and suggests a refusal to play—creating space for new, richer conversations: “What if you just want to stand up from the chessboard and say, ‘Nope, not going to do it?’” (21:30)
• Plurality and Mystery:
  • Both advocate for ontological “shapeshifting” and humility in the face of the unknown.
  • “It’s not only pluralistic, but also appreciation of the mystery… It can’t possibly be reduced to one ontological framework.” (38:01, Salguero)

8. Humanities vs. Conspiracy Theories (41:50–43:19)

• Contrasts:
  • Conspiracy theories offer easy certainty; humanists mine for questions.
  • Salguero: “There's something unsatisfying about that for an average person… we never arrive at certainty.” (43:19)
• Humor and Reflexivity:
  • Kripal equates humanistic inquiry with an ability to laugh and reflect—a trait lacking in conspiracy subcultures.

9. A Call to Action (44:41–58:21)

• Practical Advice for Humanists:
  • “Just talking about this, or writing about it, or teaching about it—I think is a really powerful way.” (44:41)
  • “Our secrecy is an illusion. These weird, wonderful experiences are everywhere; you just scratch the surface.”
• Kripal on Institutional Change:
  • Funding is historically attached to religious studies; the future demands new forms of investment and institutional innovation.
• Role of Theory:
  • “People who have experiences don’t integrate them because they lack a theory… Theory has a profoundly moral impulse.” (56:41)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Disciplinary Cowardice (18:28):

  “To be blunt about it, I think that's cowardice… We stop talking about reality and we start talking about society or history… It was the wrong move. We blew it.” — Jeffrey Kripal

• On Reality of Experiences (19:03):

  “I'm a realist, so I think the people who experience Qi are really experiencing something, but I think the people who have other experiences are also really experiencing. So there's a realism that I want to push here.” — Kripal

• On the Pluralism of Human Experience (37:19):

  “The humanist would be the one who would have the conceptual, intellectual and linguistic skills and cultural skills to… flexibly pivot to share the worldview of person A, B, C, D, E, even if those people are radically opposed… Just having the ability to shapeshift in that way.” — Salguero

• On Children’s Aspiration (31:05):

  “Last Halloween, half the kids were dressed up as superhumans, and none were dressed up as professors of the humanities. Not a single kid… Why is that?” — Kripal

• On Living Honestly (64:14):

  “It’s just honesty. It’s just like, come on. We're just talking about what happened. This is humanity. This is who we are.” — Kripal

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Important Timestamps

• [04:22] — Kripal’s academic background
• [08:29] — Defining “impossible experiences”
• [12:09] — Humanities, naming, and ideology
• [15:24] — Pluralism & epistemological overflow
• [18:20] — Critique of scholarly hedging
• [21:30] — The chessboard metaphor and beyond-theological frameworks
• [24:30] — Survey: Scholars’ own mystical experiences
• [29:33] — Career safety and courage in the humanities
• [31:05] — The “superhuman/professor” Halloween anecdote
• [35:30] — Ontological agnosticism vs. pluralism
• [38:37] — Marketing, funding, and the fate of the humanities
• [44:41] — Practical advice for scholars
• [51:24] — Psychedelic and mystical experiences: what are they “saying”?
• [58:01] — The need to do and say “more” in the humanities
• [59:41] — Kripal’s recommended starting point: “Secret Body”
• [62:50] — On transmission and reception of Asian religions in the West

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Recommended Further Reading & Resources

• Jeffrey J. Kripal’s website: jeffreyjkripal.com (Comprehensive index of books, interviews, and media appearances)

• Recommended Books:

  • Secret Body: Kripal’s memoir—a “book of all the books”
  • The Flip: On STEM scholars experiencing the impossible
  • How to Think Impossibly: Reflections on imagination and experiencers
  • Esalen: Asian religions and the counterculture in America
  • The Superhumanities: Latest work on human possibility

• Events:

  • “Archives of the Impossible” Conference (Rice University; videos online)

• Other Figures Mentioned:

  • Peter Szostedt-Hughes (philosopher of psychedelics and metaphysics)

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Takeaways & Conclusion

• The Imperative: Both Kripal and Salguero call for scholars—especially in religion and the humanities—to stop hiding their interest or personal experiences of the extraordinary.
• The Invitation: “Full permission” (or imperative) to be honest, to open up the conversation to mystery, pluralism, and the truly weird.
• The Vision: Humanists shouldn’t be institutional gatekeepers, but conversation hosts, translators, and explorers of the world’s deepest mysteries.

“We have to do this… for the benefit of the humanities. We have to talk in this way.” — Salguero (64:07)

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This episode serves as both critique and rallying cry: Embrace the plurality of experience, speak honestly about the mysterious, and help reinvigorate the humanities by making space for the impossible—both in scholarship and in life.

Transcript

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[Pierce Salguero]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Lan Lee]

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[Pierce Salguero]

Welcome to the Black Barrel, a podcast with intelligent conversations about Buddhism, Asian medicine and embodied spirituality. I'm your host, Dr. Pierce Salguero, a professor of Asian history and health humanities at Penn State's Abington College outside of Philadelphia. Today, I sit down with Professor Jeff Kripal, noted scholar of religion at Rice University, to talk about extraordinary, mysterious and impossible experiences. This is a conversation I've been waiting a few years to have. Together, we explore what you can or can't talk about in the humanities and what we risk when we break the rules. Along the way, we touch on paranormal phenomena, epistemological pluralism, conspiracy theories, Plato's Cave, and why no one dresses up as a humanities professor for Halloween. If you want to hear scholars and practitioners engaging in intellectual conversations about the mysteries of Asian religions and medicines, then subscribe to Black Barrel, wherever you get your podcasts. Also, check out our members only benefits on substack.com to see what our guests have shared with you. Enjoy the show.

You're probably our first academic celebrity on the podcast and maybe need no introduction, but I still would like you to introduce yourself because I think you have such a wide range of things that you done and that you've been involved in, from administration at universities to your original career as a South Asianist and, you know, a controversial book author, and now your work in, I don't know how we're going to wind up calling it, but the superhumanities, the impossible. So there's so many things that you've done over the years that why don't you crystallize that in a couple of sentences to tell our audience who you are if they've never heard of you, rather than me trying to pack all that into my interpretation.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Yeah, no, I'll try. I get asked that question a lot, so I have a lot of practice. So my name is Jeff Kripal and I'm the Jay Newton Raiser professor of Religion and Philosophy at Rice University. I've been here since 02, going on 24 years. I taught at a small liberal arts college before that, and I wanted to be a monk when I was a young man, Benedictine monk, and my early training was actually with Benedictines and thinking about religion and philosophy and all kinds of matters like that. I started out in the study of 19th century kind of colonial Hinduism, really. I worked in a field called history of religions, comparative religion for most people, and I did a PhD in that field from between 1985 and 1993. And then I wrote a book or wrote a dissertation called Kali's Child, which became a book. And it was celebrated in the academy but eviscerated in the fundamentalist early blogosphere. This was in the 90s, and I was banned, basically, practically banned and censored and harassed for that work. I end up leaving the field of Indian studies right around 2002, 2003, shortly after I came to Rice, and I got involved in basically the study of the American counterculture in California. Pretty much to save my soul. I wanted to redefine myself as an intellectual. And I felt that studying Asian religions in the counterculture was something that I could do. And it was something that was really very much needed at the time. And so I became very interested in the counterculture and wrote a history of an institute out in Big Sur called Esalen and got involved, really, in what I do now through there, through people. Actually, as I say, I talked to lots of people and they told me stories that I knew couldn't have possibly happened, but I knew happened. And I realized that academics don't really have a way of talking about these things that make any sense, really. They make sense to academics. They reduce everything to society and history and sociology or psychology, but they don't actually make sense to the people who have the experiences. So I set about 07 or 08 to think about that problem and wrote a book on the paranormal called Authors of the Impossible. Came out in 2010. And it really offers a kind of humanistic, semiotic take on the paranormal. And then I worked on comic books and science fiction and wrote a book called Mutants and Mystics and kind of went from there. And I'm trying to poke, basically poke the bear, as it were, trying to get humanists in particular, to think about extraordinary events and experiences that don't fit into our models and how we can rethink our categories with those experiences, but also how we actually have a lot to offer in terms of critical theory and history and marginality and have a lot to say, actually. And so that's what I do today. I look at what I call impossible experiences, which are not technically impossible, but certainly impossible by the categories of our thinking or established views.

[Pierce Salguero]

I feel like we might benefit from you giving us just a list of what kinds of experiences we're talking about here.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

So, like, psychedelic experiences are often really, really key here. They often flip people in really dramatic ways. Abduction experiences happen to a lot of people, Contact experiences, channeling experiences, precognitive dreams. These are the main ones that. That people report a lot, actually.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah. Our interests are kind of like a overlapping Venn diagram. I'm interested in more spirit apparitions, you know, angels and deities and so forth, but then also either spontaneous or cultivated. Through meditation and yoga and so forth, you can cultivate various kinds of realizations of emptiness or of oneness or of other kinds of spiritual states and realities and so forth.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

So that. That's another. I get asked that question a lot. I don't work on states that are cultivated. I don't work on meditation traditions. I'm really much more interested in the quote unquote, spontaneous ones that happen to people out of the blue, often or seemingly out of the blue, and rock their world in a really dramatic way.

[Pierce Salguero]

I know a lot of people in spiritual communities who come to the spirituality because they've had that kind of spontaneous experience, and they. They realize something or they see something, taste something, and then want.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Yeah, they're not exclusive any mean. Yeah, by any means. They're not. The spontaneous experiences in the cultivation experience are by no means hoes.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah, in my view, and it sounds like you probably have a similar view, but I don't want to put words in your mouth, so I'll just say it explicitly. There's sort of like a whole palette of different kinds of experiences that people can have. Whether those happen spontaneously, they happen through cultivation, through some kind of contemplative practice, or they happen through psychedelics, or they happen through mental illness, or they happen through traumatic brain injury or whatever the cause may be. There's a whole spectrum is maybe too limiting of a word, a whole, you know, millions and millions and millions of different types of altered states of experience that people can have. And some of them have important lessons. Some of them are horrific, some of them are. Are glorious. Some of them pass quickly, some of them linger for a long time. Some of them are very meaningful to people for long periods of time.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

And how they're all connected is, I think, the question, because they end up lifting each other up. And what you realize when you get it, when you get into this long enough, is that people experience these sacred realms in terrifying and destructive ways, and they experience them in redemptive and positive ways. Both are true.

[Pierce Salguero]

Fantastic. So that's a great starting point for exactly what we want to dig into here. So this podcast is now kind of on a meandering journey through Asian religions and medicines. And we've gone from looking at more of the social and cultural dynamics. We've gone through a lot of the ontological and epistemological questions that arise, we have then done a deep dive into, we could say, the dark side of all of these things with spirits and demons, demonology and weird side effects and so forth. And now we are pivoting into mystical experiences, religious experiences, spiritual experiences, awakening experiences, enlightenment experiences, on and so forth. So, in a way, I think we're on this podcast very well at home with the exact kinds of things that you are talking about. So for the purpose of this conversation, should we define the range of things that we're talking about here? Should we try to explain the category that we're gesturing towards for the rest of the time that we're talking?

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

I mean, my. My first impression is, no, we shouldn't do that. I mean, to kind of back up and be more serious about it. I think all forms of naming are ideologies. I think we. We call some things religious, we call other things philosophical, we call other things scientific, we call other things paranormal or supernatural, depending on our ideologies and what we want to propose. And I think the beauty of a lot of what goes on in the humanities is it's very much opposed to any particular ideology. You know, it's really good at exposing ideology. And so that's really what I like.

[Pierce Salguero]

I want to dig back into that because I. Maybe we're using ideology differently, but I think you would argue humanities has a particular agenda in categorizing things one way or another.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Yeah. In itself is an ideology, for sure. Yeah.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yes. The hidden ideology of the humanities, while it goes around exposing all the other ideologies and critiquing them and so on and so forth, there is an underlying sort of bias or unspoken ideology that.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Yeah.

[Pierce Salguero]

That informs.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

There is.

[Pierce Salguero]

I mean, there's a big can of worms. So we'll get into all of that. So am I right in my understanding? Just so that we're on the same page, what primarily fascinates you is that people are reporting experiences that don't fit into an existing epistemological or ontological framework that person has. And so for them, the experience seems impossible, breaks reality. I know it really happened, but I cannot explain it. And that tension or that paradox or that cognitive dissonance or whatever you want to call it is the thing that fascinates you. Is that a fair way of characterizing the problem?

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

That's not only fair, that's very accurate.

[Pierce Salguero]

I mean, this is something I think we've danced around on this podcast. We've talked about something like Qi, let's say, in the Chinese world or whether it's something like a demon or spirit or something in a different world. We've talked about the kind of available epistemologies that. That are out there to explain that kind of experience. And we've talked to both scholars and practitioners, and so we always start off sort of understanding where people land, what tools people are using in order to explain and understand these kinds of experiences. So we've had a lot of different kinds of shifting epistemologies or shifting of ontologies on. On this podcast throughout the previous seasons. I think I'm more of an ontological agnostic or an ontological pluralist or maybe an ontological explorer, personally. So I'm comfortable switching into different modes depending on who comes on the show and how they're talking about things. So a personal question from, like, from where you stand, not as a scholar, but as a. As an individual, is there a true reality, a true ontology, a true epistemology that is the right one? And people are confused about their experiences, thinking they're impossible because they are adhering to the wrong one or a different one. Is there an ultimate explanation for the impossible, or is it just a feature of reality that the impossible is impossible? Do you know what I mean? Like. Like. Put your. Put your cards on the table, Jeff.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

I know. I know exactly what you mean. I get asked this a lot. Basically, what people want to know is what the answer is. They want certainty. They want. They want to know what reality is. And I think I disappoint people because I tell them I don't know. And I don't mean that in a dissuading or clever way. I'm not trying to be the humanist in the room or the historian or the agnostic. I'm really not. But I think that these experiences exceed or overflow any conceptual framework we bring to them. And I think that's their point. But I also think that if you look at these experiences closely, they're trying to communicate with us and they're trying to say things, but they're speaking in ways that are symbolic or mythical or visionary. They're not speaking in terms of philosophy or physics or mathematics. So that. That's not really an answer to your question, Pierce. But it is. I consider myself to be a pluralist as well, ontologically, because I think ontologies in particular or epistemologies are. They're not wrong, but they're generally inadequate to these experiences. And I do think that human beings live in the same world. I think that people in California live in the same world as people in medieval China, but I don't think they experience the world the same way. And I think we need to explain that. We need to somehow deal with the differences, and we need to somehow deal with the sameness as well. And I think something like Qi is a conceptual category that Chinese people use to explain these energies or these subtle bodies. But other communities and cultures used other conceptual categories, and other things were probably possible or likely in other cultural frameworks and other historical frameworks.

[Pierce Salguero]

So it strikes me that the typical practitioner of, whether it's Christian mysticism or Chinese medicine or any other framework that works with these quote, unquote impossible concepts or realities or experiences, the typical practitioner will subscribe to and defend the ontology or the epistemology of that system. She is real, God is real, Jesus is real. Whatever the system prescribes, the scholar typically does something different. Now, we probably have our own. I think we do have our own epistemological commitments may or may not be scientific materialism. We may or may not put them on the table necessarily, but usually the scholar is hedging rather than make an ontological statement or commitment. In writing myself, what I'm going to do is explain and describe how the ontologies of other people are socially.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Yeah, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that. I think that's a mistake, by the way. I think that's why we're. We're ignored.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah. So that's what I want to talk to you about, because I feel like that hedge is the object of your critique.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

To be blunt about, I think that's cowardice. And I. I think it. It makes sense. I understand why people do that, but I think it's precisely why the humanities are being ignored and defunded, because we. We stop talking about reality and we start talking about society or history or context or whatever we're talking about. I just think it's a. It's been a terrible mistake. It was the wrong move. We blew it.

[Pierce Salguero]

So that's why I want to have you on the show, because I agree with that, and I think we're coming at it from different angles, but I think we very much have a lot to talk about here.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Pierce. I'm a realist, so I think the people who experience Qi are really experiencing something, but I think the people who have other experiences are also really experienced. So there's a realism that I want to push here, but I also want to emphasize these differences, which I don't think are just cultural or historical. I think they're really dramatic. Take something like the subtle body. I think there are different subtle bodies, and I think people experience the subtle body in radically different ways. But that doesn't mean that there's not a there there. I think there is a there there. And I think we stopped talking about that about 50 years ago. And again, I think that's been a huge issue.

[Pierce Salguero]

So let's switch the example, because here we've been talking about chi, we've been talking about subtle body and so forth. Let's switch the example because, I mean, your work, a lot of it has to do with mystical revelations of sacred or divine realities, and you know more of this history than I do, so please fill in the blanks. But it strikes me that the reason that we are in this hedge as scholars, is, as scholars of religion in particular, is because of the history of the divorce between religious studies or history of religions or comparative religion on the one hand and theology on the other. Right? So we in the mid 20th century had to extract the scientific study of religion from theology. And the clearest dividing line to be able to do that was to say we are not talking about ontology. We are not talking about God as a reality. We are talking about a social, cultural, intellectual, discourse, et cetera, et cetera. So are you. Are you advocating for a pendulum swing, or is it. Are you advocating for something completely different? Is it a return to sort of like being able to take your personal commitment to whatever ontology into your scholarship and working from within that framework? So that's like a return back to maybe a type of theological thinking? Or are you advocating sort of like a next step beyond kind of synthesis or transcendence where we.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

I mean, your question's rhetorical, right?

[Pierce Salguero]

I'm teeing you up, so you can.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

I hope it's the latter. I hope it's the latter. I'm not advocating a return to Christian theology, if that's what you're asking. I'm. I'm. But I am.

[Pierce Salguero]

Theologies, theologies may be pluralistic. Theologies, like the academy, could be a place where Christian theologians and Hindu theologians and Buddhist theologians.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Yeah, let me put it this way. I like to orbit around a topic, so stories I tell, they. They won't always hit the question. But I'll. I'll orbit the planet and. And eventually I think you'll figure out what the planet is. I don't. Again, I don't mean to be opaque. It's just how I think. There was this wonderful conference. It was called when heaven's doors are shut. And it was basically a bunch of evangelical intellectuals, and the question was about religious exclusivism, how religions create these boundaries and they exclude certain people. And she was taking evangelical Christianity as a case. And I was responding to evangelicals. And I gave this talk called the Chess Game. And my basic argument was that these options of exclusivism or inclusivism or pluralism are all playing the chess game. There's a winner and there's a loser, and you're moving your pieces around, you're affirming a particular religious identity. You're moving the chess pieces around the board. Board. And my response was, well, what if. What if you don't want to play that game anymore? What if you just want to stand up from the chess game and the chessboard and say, nope, not going to do it? And I think that's what the humanities could be if they could essentially refuse to play this. This game of identities. And in this case, it's religious identity over this religious identity. But it's also very much reflexive and critical of a kind of secular, materialistic identity as well. And I think we need to have that conversation. And I'm not about some kind of certainty or some kind of conclusion. It's really the conversation that I'm trying to generate here and trying to host. But I don't think it's about playing the chess game, to answer your question. I think it's about a different kind of game or a different kind of orientation towards culture, towards history and towards each other that we don't actually have. So that's what I'm interested in. That's what I think we should be doing. We should be doing that. And it's not that we have to just do that. I'm not saying that there can't be historians or people who do political history or people who study a particular time period. I'm just saying that's not adequate to what the humanities are. That's not adequate to whatever this inquiry is. And we don't need to do this inquiry the way we were trained to do it in graduate school. We do not need to worship the people we read in graduate school. They're not omniscient. They're not. And neither are we. And the quicker we realize that, I think the healthier and the better off we'll be.

[Pierce Salguero]

Fantastic. One more thing, just about the nature of the problem that I want to push forward. No, no, just keep pushing.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Again, the conversation is what it's about. And I want to be pushed. But it's not that I always know the answer either. It's like, oh, that's a great question. That's where we need to go. Let's do that.

[Pierce Salguero]

That's exactly what this podcast is about, too. So it's exploring this exact arena, hopefully getting clearer, hopefully getting deeper. But I wanted to share. So I did a an unofficial survey on social media of religious studies scholars a couple years ago, and I published a little blog post about this. A lot of different types of religious studies scholars responded, but in the end there was about 100 Buddhist studies scholars in particular. So I'm narrowing the scope. You were talking about the humanities broadly. I'm now just talking about Buddhist studies, which is a very small subsection of the humanities. I'll link to the blog post that I wrote about it so people can find more about the demographics and so forth. But 2/3 of the Buddhist studies scholars who responded to this survey said that they had experienced some kind of religious, spiritual, mystical, or awakening experience. So 2/3 of them said that. And then when I asked them about what role that experience played in their decision to become a religious study scholars or Buddhist studies scholars, 55% of them said it was either instrumental or somewhat influential. So about half of the 2/3 of Buddhist studies scholars have had some kind of impossible experience, and this is the reason that they do what they do. But yet that kind of experience is the last thing that you can talk about in Buddhist studies proper, right? You cannot discuss your own personal mystical experiences, awakening experiences.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

I mean, who says. I mean, again, the disciplinary norms.

[Pierce Salguero]

The disciplinary norms, that.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

That is the norm. Of course, you're correct to say that. But I'm like it. Just fuck it, just say it. Just do it. Don't shut up. Speak out.

[Pierce Salguero]

Okay, as you were, as you were saying right this moment, but also just a minute ago, you want to foster a conversation. You have fostered a conversation. You've held conferences, you're writing books, you are attracting some amount of a community around, talking about these things more openly. A little bit of the kind of maverick vibe. I would say maybe that we're just going to throw the middle finger at the, at the humanities, and maybe that's sort of like where it needs to start, a little bit of guerrilla action. But what's the vision here? Like, where are we going? Okay, with this larger.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Let me say a couple things. First of all, questionnaires are the worst. Don't believe questionnaires.

[Pierce Salguero]

That's why I don't blog. Not an academic study yet.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Yeah, because there's way more people who have had those experiences than they're going to admit on a questionnaire. Okay, that's the first thing I want to say. The second thing I'll say is, I love intellectuals. I love humanists. I think they're really, really cool. And I think we do ourselves a great disservice because we pretend we're not cool. We keep pretending that we're boring, and we say boring stuff all the time. And so my role is not. It's not being the maverick, it's not hating the humanities. It's like, come on, live up to why you're doing this and what the spirit of this inquiry is. Why do we keep replicating this system in which people do not speak out? And Buddhist Studies is an example of this. I mean, I. I've had conversations with Buddhist scholars, I mean, around the word paranormal and whether to use it in a subtitle or in a book. And, you know, there's tremendous pressure not to use it. I'm like, so what? Just use it. Talk about reincarnation, memories, talk about people floating. Talk about precognition, talk about all these things that actually happen. Let's move the ball forward and make this tradition as interesting as it really is. Let's not turn it into some kind of political or social. Social form alone. What I'm trying to say is it's not about just being a maverick. It's not about just poking the bear. It's. No, you humanists in particular have something to say here. And my second book, by the way, was all about scholars of mysticism who had myst experiences. I don't know why we're doing this if there isn't an experience behind it or there isn't some kind of existential commitment to it. I have no idea why people are doing this. If they're doing it for the money. They're in it for the wrong reason, by the way. So I don't think we're just really

[Pierce Salguero]

fascinated with the social nature of.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

No, I don't. I don't believe. I don't believe that for a second.

[Pierce Salguero]

It's our cover story, right? It's what allows us to work.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Doesn't fool me.

[Pierce Salguero]

The weird shit that we actually really want to be reading about and thinking about is it. And we get to hide it behind this veneer of, like, scientific objectivity.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

And what I'm trying to say is that veneer is killing us.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Let's not nail the nails in our own coffin.

[Pierce Salguero]

So wait a minute. Because you use the death metaphor. But maybe you can metaphorically be committing career suicide by putting yourself out there in a way that doesn't conform to the disciplinary norms.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

I don't. I don't actually think so.

[Pierce Salguero]

By the way, speaking as a dean and a vice provost, you give all of us permission to talk about our. Our weirdness in public.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

I. I think it's. I think that the stakes are higher for scientists, natural scientists and social scientists. Frankly, I think they're much lower for humanists who don't generally have any money, who. The stakes are very low. I did work in a dean's office. I did work on. I know exactly what it's about. And it's not about suppressing people's speech. It's about affirming what intellectuals really want to do. So that's kind of the anger or the frustration you're picking up in my voice is like, come on, just do what you want to do. Stop this social ideology that is at play. And I get why it's there, but it's not real. We made it up so we can unmake it up.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah. And then use death to also talk about it's killing us to be imprisoned within this materialist paradigm that we. It is either either we subscribe to or else we pretend to subscribe to, and it's killing us, meaning it's killing the humanities. You've mentioned it's what's causing the defunding of the humanities. But you also mentioned. Maybe I'm imagining you mentioned this, but I think you said that it's also killing us like it's killing our soul, like there's something deeper than just the funding that's happening to us. So, yeah, talk a little bit about the dangers are of being in prison like this.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

So, again, I worked for four years in the dean's office as an associate dean. I was very concerned. I still am very concerned. The job market, by the way, in the study of religion is devastated. It's eviscerated. And so I think there's a broad cultural rejection of humanist discourse. And I think it's partly our fault. I don't think it's entirely our fault, of course, but I think it's partly a function that we've reduced what we do to something that isn't really what we do. And the joke I always tell this is, of course a joke, is last Halloween, there were 50 kids who showed up on my door, and half of them were dressed up as superhumans, and none were dressed up as professors. Of the humanities. Not a single kid. And okay, why is that? Okay, Obviously the superhuman has this tremendous attraction in the culture, but nobody wants to be us growing up. Nobody. So what are we doing? Why are we saying we're somebody that nobody, no kid wants to grow up being? And the very things that kids do want to grow up being, we are rejecting. Why is that? I don't want to be even banal about it, but it's a marketing problem. It's not just an intellectual or an existential issue, which is what you were speaking about earlier with the killing our souls thing, but it's also a severe marketing problem.

[Pierce Salguero]

So let's get into the. The marketing problem in a minute. But before we do that, let me double down on the killing your soul part of. Yeah, part of the equation. Yeah, I feel like graduate school training at elite institution where this kind of disciplinarity is drilled into you and you're formed as a scholar in that kind of environment requires people to compartmentalize a huge amount of their life off to the side. And also you spend so much time, so many hours drilling on a certain way of thinking that it's entirely possible, I think, that people have actually trained out their soul in a way that makes it hard as a humanist to engage with ordinary people, engage with family, engage with, like, ordinary life in some way, and certainly to engage with a real spirituality or a real depth of mysticism or anything like that, if you're. If you're constantly exercise that kind of critical apparatus and you just lose touch with it, in a sense. So I feel like there's not only kind of. You're not allowed to talk about it disciplinarily, but. But there is also the danger of just like imposing this kind of alienation on your. On those aspects of your own life.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

This is where people say, I believe too much. Oh, you believe too much. But there's also this other side of it where you don't believe anything. And so I. Again, I think the challenge is trying to balance this radical criticism that is entirely appropriate and just with this affirmation of something that's actually going on. And I think that's the tension here that we're dancing around. And I. I don't know if you can do anything but dance around it, because I think it's really a problem, and I'll make this come home. So near death experiencers, for example, I think often are very upset with me because I won't sign my name to their specific afterlife. They usually have very extreme and specific experiences of the afterlife. And I'm like, okay, but I won't sign my name, because if I sign my name to this, then I can't listen to that experience. I can't listen to that experience. And so it locks one down into a kind of an exclusive worldview that I think is really problematic. And so that is where I think we are in a new zone. We're in a kind of future spirituality that doesn't have a name yet. And I don't want to pretend it does. And that's why I don't also want to rehabilitate, say, Christian theological discourse. But I also don't want to rehabilitate Japanese or Chinese or South Asian. I don't want to rehabilitate any of the discourses. I think they're all local languages, and they all give us something, and they all provide some kind of meaning to human life. But human life is bigger than that. And I think this is where we can really contribute and where I'm just. Speak. I'm just blabbing now, but this is kind of the tension that I feel.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah, these are things I think about, too. This is kind of what I was getting at earlier when I was talking about epistemological or ontological agnosticism. So for me personally, in the same way that you can separate out atheism from agnosticism, I think we need to move from keeping these alternative epistemologies, let's say, keeping them at an arm's length and only describing them objectively, scientifically, historically, socioeconomic, culturally, etc. Linguistically. You know, if we're doing that, it's sitting in the atheist mindset and instead moving into an agnostic mindset, which is not to affiliate or like you said, sign on the dotted line on any one of these.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

I think we need a new word. I think agnostic is a bad word, by the way.

[Pierce Salguero]

Okay, okay. Give me a. I don't know. Give me a better word.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

I don't know. What is a better word?

[Pierce Salguero]

I don't know. I called it ontological fruit salad at one point. Point in our conversations, because it's like. It's not a smoothie. You're not whipping it all up into a fully integrated thing. It's just a chunky fruit salad mixed together.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Yeah.

[Pierce Salguero]

So I. I kind of have a vision of the humanist as the host, the navigator, and the translator across different kinds of epistemologies. Like, if there was a gathering and we imagine that there's people coming from all sorts of different epistemological ontological frameworks, that the humanist is the one person in the room with the same skills to be able to sit everybody down at the table and be able to flexibly pivot to share the worldview of person A, B, C, D, E, even if those people are radically opposed and diametrically opposed and in conflict with one another. That the humanist is the one. This is my vision, that the humanist would be the one who would have the conceptual, intellectual and linguistic skills and cultural skills to be able to navigate that situation.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

That's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Pierce Salguero]

Without needing to frame the humanist. Not needing to frame themselves or protect themselves behind a materialist wall or a scientific wall or behind a Christian wall or behind a Hindu wall or anything else. Or a Buddhist or a Buddhist or a Buddhist wall. Yeah, Just having the. Having the ability to shapeshift in that way.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

I couldn't agree more. I guess that's what I'm trying to articulate. Is that that manyness or that plurality, it gets into this question of what experience is and why the social ego doesn't actually know. The plurality or the manyness really is a function of, I think, not knowing is what I'm trying to say.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah. Not only pluralistic, but also appreciation of the mystery. Appreciation that this can't. This capital T can't possibly be reduced to an ontological framework that a human being could capture in their mind.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

This is why I love the history of religions, is it has this verticality, it has this otherness or this thing that exceeds any kind of conceptual grammar or cultural framework. And I think it's that verticality or that excess that really, that should be the topic, I think, of a lot of humanist inquiry. And I think that's what you're trying to say too.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah, yeah. I think we're on the same page here. So I wanted to go back to your comment about marketing. There is an economic dimension or also a political dimension to these kinds of things. And what strikes me is that what we have attempted to do, let's say, charitably, as the humanities, what we've attempted to do is to attach ourselves to a prevalent, let's say even maybe hegemonic, ontological, epistemological viewpoint of scientific materialism, we've seen our colleagues at the other end of the. The campus receiving millions and billions of dollars of funding to do research in X, Y and Z, and we have thrown our chips in with this modernist, scientific, materialist project. Let's say we have discovered lately, or the writing's been on the wall for Decades. But we have now clearly seen that this is not a winning strategy from the humanities. We have become relegated, like you said, to irrelevance. But this is a radical shift in kind of our understanding, our also as a society, as a culture, how we see the role of the humanities. Right. If we're going to advocate unhitching ourselves from objective scientific, materialist kind of viewpoints, coming maybe into opposition, coming into position of alterity, coming into a position of perhaps conflict with scientific materialism, perhaps critique, turning the critical lens against scientific materialism, which we've, which we have done. But where does this lead us in terms of the marketing, in terms of the relationship with the university as a whole and within society and culture more generally, Particularly at a time. Sorry, it's a long question, but I'm also thinking, particularly at a time where there is rampant kind of anti science, anti intellectual currents running within Western culture. How do we do that without feeding into right wing agendas that we might not feel aligned with?

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

I think it's messy.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

What am I saying? When I say marketing, I don't just mean economics, I don't mean it Banali. I think that humanist scholars, particularly of religion or of religious topics, are fascinating and I think they sell themselves way short in the public. And I think it's because we adopt very technical languages to essentially hide ourselves. I think we're afraid that what we think will be rejected. And I get that. And so I think there's a way of celebrating the sciences without thinking that the scientific method is the only way to know something. And there is a kind of stem orientation of the humanities that I think is essentially devastating to us because it's not humanist knowledge. It's not knowledge that reflects back on the form of consciousness and thinks about itself historically and thinks about itself culturally and flexibly. It assumes a kind of objectivity that doesn't actually work very well. And I think that something like conspiracy, which you alluded to or referred to, I think we have to struggle with that in the humanities. And I don't think we should be afraid of that. I think we should embrace that conversation and go with it.

[Pierce Salguero]

I mean, it strikes me that one of the major differences, I don't mean to oversimplify because I take what your invitation is for us to do is to think more, talk more, explore more. But one of the things that strikes me just immediately as being quite different between conspiracy theories or anti intellectualism, anti scientism and the humanities is conspiracy theories are really nothing if not easy answers. Right. It's about getting an alternative answer on that.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

It's about certainty.

[Pierce Salguero]

It's about certainty. It's about replacing one kind of certainty with another kind of alternative form of certainty. That, that still I think speaks to humans natural inclination to feel like the question is settled and feel safe when questions are settled or even if the truth is some mysterious dark cabal is running the world. I know that. So therefore I feel very secure in my knowledge of that. Whereas a humanity is. We never. Do we ever arrive. I wrote a blog about the fractal of the humanities. It's like we never arrive at certainty about anything. We. We apply some tools, we dig into a question, we get deeper into it, it opens up more questions. We pick one of those, we get deeper into that, it opens up even more questions. We never arrive at a place of certitude about anything. If we're proper humanists, we just uncover more and more questions. So there's something unsatisfying about that for an average person that we're not ever gonna land somewhere.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Okay, a couple things. First of all, you're right, but that's the conversation, right? That's how the humanities are very different than what we call conspiracy theory. And I think that's very much worth saying. The other issue though, that it raises for me is humor. If you can't laugh at something, you're probably still in it. And I don't think conspiracy theories are very funny. But humanists are often very funny. And there is a kind of reflexivity or a kind of stepping outside that I think is really powerful to both humanities and to humor. So I think they're somehow connected and I'm not really sure how.

[Pierce Salguero]

So what are the practical next steps, practical approaches that you are advocating for humanists to take? And I know what you're saying is, let's just talk more about this. Let's think more about this. I know that that's the real advice that you're giving, but you've also, I think, implied some more immediately practical things to do. And one of them would be, if I'm hearing you correctly, is just start speaking up about your own personal weirdness, your own personal mystical experiences or impossible experiences. Start not hiding parts of yourself in public or in disciplinary venues. Become a more whole person. Do that vocally, do that publicly.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

My experience of university presses, but also trade presses, is that they're really good people and they want to publish fascinating things. And I get frustrated with academics who keep writing stuff that's not fascinating. And my conviction in like my studying Experiencers is that these weird, wonderful experiences are everywhere. You just scratch the surface and they'll come out, but that there's so much social pressure to keep them down. And so we. We think that they're rare. We think that they don't happen a lot, but we're wrong about that. They're actually extremely common, and they're pretty much in everyone. Not in everyone, but pretty much. And so I think that that notion of rarity or being unusual is an illusion. And I think, again, we have the tools to show why or how it's an illusion and show how to remove that barrier and how to remove that censorship and speak these truths. And it's not that speaking these truths will solve everything, but practically speaking, just talking about this, I think, or writing about it or teaching about it, I think is a really powerful way, because academics. I mean, first of all, there are tens of thousands of us, and we have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of students every year in our classrooms. We can impact people on a very broad level, and I think we need to do that, but we need to do more of that, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. So, yes, it's. It sounds banal. It sounds. The practicality does. Sounds too practical. But I think that's where we start, and we just see where it goes. We've dug our hole for, you know, many decades. Let's dig another hole. Let's dig us out, or let's dig our way out of this one. And, Pierce, I might be wrong. I could be totally wrong about this, but then somebody else can say that, right? Jeff's crazy. That's wrong. Here's why. Blah, blah, blah. I'm like, oh, okay. But that, again, is the conversation to have.

[Pierce Salguero]

I'm sure there are people listening right now that think both Jeff and Pierce are. But maybe they haven't. Maybe they quit listening to our podcast a couple days ago if they thought that. But for sure, this is a countercultural kind of position that you and I are staking out here. But there is some amount of movement in this direction somewhat, maybe like in anthropology, maybe in certain corners of literary studies, cultural studies, maybe in certain corners of history where people are really thinking about ontologies and epistemology and alternatives to the prevalent modernist viewpoint, people that are taking seriously alternative ontologies and so forth. What do you think the interesting corners of the academy are where this sort of thing is starting to take place?

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Yeah, I see it happening everywhere, by the way. I couldn't agree more with you. I mean, we Host these Archives of the Impossible conferences. And there are too many people who want to be involved. And by the way, the last film we held in April, I had to shut the registration down 24 hours. Even then we had over 300 people who showed up. There was so much interest that it was overwhelming. And I think you get this interest. Well, I know you get this interest as well from academics, and not just humanities, but also the social sciences and the sciences. It's really across the board. So it's really a matter of just how do we provide a context for this? And how do we get psychologists and sociologists and anthropologists and philosophers and historians. Historians and astronomers. How do we get them to speak? How do we give them context? So I think it is about funding and it is about authorizing a particular kind of conversation. That's what I'm trying to say.

[Pierce Salguero]

Maybe I should ask you as a sidebar about funding, because I would be interested in knowing who's out there that's funding this kind of stuff. I would say, personally, in the last two years, three years or so, I have pivoted away from religious studies per se, Buddhist studies per se, and have been more interested in kind of reframing myself in the field of contemplative studies. Because this is a place where I'm interested in the paranormal. I'm interested in spirits and energies and stuff like that. But I'm more interested in mystical experiences, religious, spiritual awakening type experiences. And contemplative studies is a place where you actually can take those seriously as objects of study, whether it's historical, anthropological, or even like scientific study. Were interested in putting those experiences on the table as the. As the thing to study from different disciplinary standpoints. So I've kind of found myself breaking up with religious studies in a way and pivoting in that direction. It sounds like very much this a similar path to what you did much before me. But yeah. So where do you think there's funding or institutional momentum for this kind of.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

I think we're playing the long game here. At least I'm going to propose we are. And when I again sat in the dean's office, I can tell you about half of our faculty and the humanities and those endowments came the two most endowed departments, by the way, God and Oil, Religion and geology at Rice. And so there's a historical. There's a historical financial commitment to a particular kind of religion, but also to a particular kind of discipline around energy and oil. And I think what we're going to see in the future is a different kind of investment. And we'll see, we'll see where that comes from. But when we endow chairs or when we endow departments or when we create disciplines, that money has to come from somewhere. And I'm very practical about that. I think that's to be seen. Whether people step up and they don't always step up, by the way. I can also tell you that some cultures have no, no culture of philanthropy and other cultures have really profound cultures of philanthropy. And so it depends on what a culture invests in and what it propels forward. The two highly endowed disciplines in religious studies are Jain studies and Jewish studies, by the way, but also Christian theology and New Testament. But that's again for historical reasons that, that we can talk about. And so I think we need to see more investment and we need to see some real money.

[Pierce Salguero]

I'm hoping those tech bros full of bitcoin who are currently like really into psychedelics will, will find some affinity with

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

our psychedelic studies, by the way. Is, is, is. It's, it. There's a lot of money in psychedelic studies right now too.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're not that far off. Right. We're talking about weird stuff too.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

So I, I guess just to back up a bit, the reason I'm interested in these altered states, including psychedelic states, by the way, is I think that they're talking to us. I think that these states are communicating with us as social egos and they're trying to push us out of a particular cultural narrative of particular story. And I think we should listen. But it doesn't mean obeying, it doesn't mean believing everything that is said. I'm not proposing that you don't believe or obey every piece of channeled wisdom system.

[Pierce Salguero]

So let me drill down on that for just a sec because I think the vast majority of people who have a religious experience, a mystical experience, take a near death experience for example. If they have a near death experience and they see some kind of world, right? Then they come back from that and they're like, that's the truth. The truth is that after you die you go to such and such a place and there's seven angels and they're wearing this color robes and so forth.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

That's why they, that's why they need us. That's why they need us.

[Pierce Salguero]

But, and there's something, I mean, even William James talked about this over a hundred years ago, that there is a certain quality to these kinds of experiences that makes them seem more real than real. Right? So that reaction to having one of these types of experiences is predictable. It's almost by definition if it doesn't feel realer than real. It wasn't a mystical experience. It has to have that sort of quality to it. We as humanists are free to be interested in this topic and talk about it and investigate it and so on and so forth, without necessarily jumping to create a new ontology out of every experience. So what you're saying is these experiences are speaking to us. They're trying to break us out of our social consensus. Right. So what are they hinting towards? What are they pointing towards? I mean, is it really just like the mystery of the whole thing or what?

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Again, I think. I think, first of all, what we've done in the secular west is we've denied that middle realm entirely, so it doesn't exist, and so there's nothing to listen to. And what we've done in the Christian west is we've moralized it, We've turned it into demons and angels. It's either demons or it's angels. And there are all these other cultural contexts, though, that are way more sophisticated about the moral ambiguity of this middle realm. And I think that's a far more interesting response to these experiences. Then it doesn't happen. Which is the secular, scientific west answer. Or it's all about demons, which is. I don't think it is. Yeah, that's a realist response. That's a normative response to your question, Piers.

[Pierce Salguero]

Let's turn towards these voices and listen and find out what they might have to say.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

And let's not believe necessarily the person who's possessed or the person who had the abduction. They could be relating their experience in perfectly accurate ways. But so what? You know, that experience is likely not ultimate either.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah. What I'm hearing here is like a marriage or an integration of a scholarly critical perspective with a kind of suspension of ontological certainty that we were talking about earlier. It's. Let's use our scholarly tools not. Not to arrive at a position of certainty, but to forward a certain kind of conversation. Maybe other people bring other tools that they use to engage in this conversation with us, but the thing that we bring as humanists is our postmodernist toolkit. Right.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Somebody I keep thinking of is Peter Szostedt Hughes. Have you had Peter on here yet? You should. He's a philosopher, and he works on psychedelic experiences. And his argument is that you need a metaphysical toolkit before you have a psychedelic experience. And the reason, of course, you need it is you need to know where to put that experience. You know what? You need a language to integrate the experience. Otherwise it's just going to be weird and odd and you're not going to know how to even talk about it. But once you've studied metaphysics, you actually know how to talk about it. You can do it.

[Pierce Salguero]

That's very cool. I very much agree with that. I think my interests are a little more like rubber hit the road, practical in nature. So I'm interested in using humanistic tools to give people more resources to navigate this territory and understand this territory. I feel like a lot of what we explored last season was the overlap between spiritual experiences and mental health conditions, because I think a lot of times these are. They are adjacent, and a lot of times they can be mistaken for one another. So I'm interested in what humanistic tools can we use in order to find things that are helpful for people so that if they're experiencing negative versions of some of these experiences, sometimes a reframe, sometimes, you know, an idea that, oh, in this or that culture, this would be called blah, blah, blah, and it would be worked with, like, so and so forth and so on. So, yeah. So I think I'm a little more kind of practically oriented than it sounds like you are. But I think, yeah, we're both. I speak in the same language.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

I think the issue of practice and theory, I think. I think it's really. First of all, I think people who have experiences don't integrate them because they lack a theory.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah. So I think outlier experience that just kind of like they never made sense of and it always bothered them.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

So I think theory has a profoundly moral impulse to it, and it's not this abstract thing.

[Pierce Salguero]

I very much agree with that. That's what. That's what I. What I do on the side. Helping people who are actually having trouble navigating this stuff, giving them alternative frameworks, but it is to figure out what's going on with them. But that's my. That's not my day job. My day job is as a humanities scholar. So that's just for a little side gig.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

That's all right. Yeah.

[Pierce Salguero]

But I'm gonna check. I'm gonna check him out for sure because I think that's. I think that's.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

He's great, by the way. You'll really dig Peter. And he's had many psychedelic experiences himself that he relates to things like Spinoza and Bergson, and he's really good at relating the philosophical classic canonical text to states.

[Pierce Salguero]

So it sounds like he's providing people with not a meta. Prescribed metaphysics, but sort of a set of tools with which to think and navigate stuff. And it sounds like you're doing something similar just with a different set of tools. Yeah, a spectrum of different kinds of approaches and so forth that people might use a little bit more critical, a little more kind of, of, you know, humanities oriented kind of tools for deconstruction, tools for reconstruction that people may bring to bear on these kinds of experiences.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Yeah, I think the humanities are not wrong, they're just inadequate. But I think they're absolutely right about what they say and how they work. So I again, I love humanists, but I think they need to do we need to do more. Say more? I don't think we need to do more. I think we already are more, but we certainly need to say more.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah, and your books are doing that. I mean, your books are. I think some of them are primarily targeted towards readers who are academics. But I think a number of them, like the flip in particular, can be read by general readers and they can. We can see your prescription actually enacted in these books.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

The flip is the shortest.

[Pierce Salguero]

Isn't that primarily about scientists, like people who are working in the STEM field having a kind of what, a breakthrough experience, what you call the flip, where they start to question their realities?

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

They don't start to. They totally do. And the thing about these experiences is that the scientist or the engineer or the medical, it's really about the medical profession, engineers and scientists. So it's really about three different fields. What's extraordinary about their flips is that they don't come to the conclusion that the medicine or the physics or the engineering is wrong. They just see it in a completely different light. And that's really what the flip is about, is this worldview that starts out as a very materialist, very third person scientific worldview and then flips over into this consciousness or mind primary kind of view that sees the medicine or the science with the engineering as an expression of this, this minded world.

[Pierce Salguero]

If somebody's listening to this podcast and they want to dig into this a little bit more, which one of your books would be the best to start with?

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

The book I always suggest is Secret Body, which is a memoir. And the reason I suggest it is about 2015 or so, I thought to myself, nobody's going to read all these books. This is nutty. And so I wrote the. I call it the book of all the books. Secret Body is really a memoir on why I wrote all the other books. And so it goes through every single book, and it talks about why I wrote it. And then it gives a little snippet from that period of my life. And so the reader of it gets a good sense of the whole corpus. And I also foreground stuff that I'm working on. So it's after. It relates to books that come after as well.

[Pierce Salguero]

Some other time we can have a long conversation about your. Your practice of writing, because you are extremely prolific and write not only a lot, but very well and very interestingly so. I mean, you. You have a lot of books. You've got tons of podcasts. You've got these conferences that are up on YouTube. You have a lot of materials that we'll link to in the show notes. Yeah, we're gonna link to in the show notes to everything that we've mentioned along the way, but also potentially other things that you might think are relevant to the conversation. So far, we've got the flip. We've got the Secret Body.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

You know, the most recent one is how to Think Impossibly. And it's very much about. It's a reflection on the imagination and how to think with experiencers. And that's where I'm at the moment. And then the book before that was called the Super Humanities. But what I think I should do is you can just go to the website. It's called jeffreyjcripel.com and it goes through all the books and describes them and lists them, and people can then decide what, if anything, they want to. They want to go to.

[Pierce Salguero]

There's so many. So many interests that you have and so many things, so many directions we could have taken the conversation in. Is there something that, like, I should have asked you that I didn't, or that is kind of.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

I mean, there's so many conversations. Right, that we could have had.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

About writing about dual aspect. Monism is another one that I get asked a lot about.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah, so that's something you've been. You've talked about elsewhere. You've also shared your own mystical, spiritual experiences elsewhere. You've shared a lot about your upbringing, your childhood, your sort of formation in Christian monasticism, how that influenced your career. You've shared that elsewhere. Some other podcast episodes. I mean, what's your favorite couple of interviews that you've done? Is that something worth mentioning in the show notes?

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

That's on my website, by the way, the one to talk about Michael Lerner and Commonwealth, he's going through all the books, and we've had multiple conversations, maybe six or seven conversations. And we'll have more. That's probably where to go. In terms of the latest stuff, I literally have this section on the website. It's called the Public Humanities, and it lists all these podcasts that I'm recommending people look at.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah, we'll link to that, too, then, to just point people in that direction. One of the goals here was to connect you and your work with scholars and practitioners and people who are interested in primarily Asian religions and medicines and may not follow the podcast that you've been interviewed on and hopefully hook people up with your work.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

The book where I talk most about Asian religions is the Esalen Book, by the way. It's called Esalen America and the Religion of No Religion. It's all about Asian religion. It's all about Buddhism and Hinduism and the counterculture.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah. And how they've been taken up by this spiritual, not religious, North American.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Yeah. How they were received and transmitted and how that's faithful to some aspects of the tradition and is very much pioneering in other ways, you know?

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah. So that'll be. I think that'll be interesting. Well, Jeff, I. I think it's been a great conversation. I really appreciate the time that you spent with us yet again, retreading trodden ground that you've probably talked about a million times in a million other places. But really fun to dive into this and think about it all with you. And I think you've definitely cleared some underbrush out of the way for us to drive this. This podcast into season four. So what I'm taking from the conversation is full permission to talk about all of the weirdness and the full range of mysticism, mystical experiences, spiritual experiences, weird imposs. Possible experiences that we have the blessing of Jeffrey Kripal to be able to talk about basically anything we want to.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

It's a dubious blessing. But you. Absolutely. That's the authorization that I think would be about not.

[Pierce Salguero]

Not even an invitation. It's more of like, an imperative. Like, we have to do this to, you know, for the benefit of the humanities. We have to talk in this way.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

It's just honesty. It's just like, come on. We're just talking about what happened. It's like, this is humanity. This is who we are.

[Pierce Salguero]

Yeah. Fantastic. So we're going to take you up on that offer. We're going to get. We're going to get super weird here. Super impossible. Super, super humanities. Yeah. Thank you very much. This was a great conversation. Great to get to know you.

[Jeffrey J. Kripal]

Thanks for having me.

[Lan Lee]

That's it for today. From us at the Black Barrel Podcast. If you're listening to us amongst of our partner podcasts, you can subscribe directly to us for ad free episodes or look us up on substack to check out members only benefits. This episode is hosted by Pierce Algaro and produced and edited by Me Lan Le. Our music is by Jonathan Pettit. Until next time, be happy, be safe and be well.

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