Pre-Read for The Secret Body Series

From Host Michael Lerner

I regard Jeffrey Kripal as among the most important thinkers on the nature of consciousness of our time.  I have undertaken a series of conversations with Kripal on all 13 of his books. The purpose of this essay is to introduce you to his work, drawing heavily on his website, and to suggest several approaches to reading him.

Reading Jeffrey Kripal is a movable feast. His website is exceptionally useful. Let’s start with his website bio:

Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, where he served as the Associate Dean of the School of Humanities (2019-2023), chaired the Department of Religion for eight years, and also helped create the GEM Program, a doctoral concentration in the study of Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism that is the largest program of its kind in the world. He presently helps direct the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where he served as Chair of Board from 2015 to 2020. He is also the founder of the Center for the Impossible at Rice University.

Now’s let’s explore his core purpose in his words:

The purpose of this website is to present my work as a whole rather than as a collection of disconnected parts. As I have thought about this “whole,” I have become increasingly conscious of how deeply my thought is indebted to ancient Greek philosophy, particularly Plato’s two erotic dialogues, the Symposium and the Phaedrus, and Plotinus’s doctrine of the cosmic Mind or nous. This is true on both a substantive and a descriptive or historical level. Substantively, I now hold a philosophy of mind very similar to that which Plotinus apparently held, one that sees the body-brain as a “filter” or “transmitter” of consciousness instead of its producer. Descriptively and historically, I have been especially interested in how these same noetic currents were picked up and transformed by various early Jewish and Christian communities, with their emphasis on an innate and immediate gnosis or “mystical knowledge,” and transmitted to us today through the long and complex histories of Hermeticism, Western esotericism, Christian heresy, Mesmerism, Spiritualism, modern occultism, the mystical and countercultural receptions of Asian religions, and, most recently, metaphysical movements and paranormal currents like the human potential movement, New Age literature, and the psi-fi literature of figures like Philip K. Dick, Whitley Strieber, and Grant Morrison.

Here is where my own transhumanism appears. Or superhumanism. The French philosopher and ufologist Aimé Michel (well before Foucault or the transhumanists) called these other future mentalities “la pensée surhumaine ou non-humaine” (“superhuman or non-human thought”). And he compared the abyss that yawns between these other mentalities and our present humanities to the situation of a man trying to communicate with his pet dog. Michel also compared our situation to modern humans trying to communicate with chimpazees. The latter image is the closer analogy, he believed, since what appears to separate la pensée surhumaine from la pensée humaine of the present is an evolutionary leap. This, of course, was precisely Nietzsche’s point with his famous enigmatic line about the present human condition suspended, as a taut rope, between the ape of the past and the future Superman (Übermensch). Certainly it is no accident that Nietzsche, too, was deeply informed by ancient Greek culture, where gods become humans and humans become gods, and wrote openly about his own precognitive, mystical, and paranormal experiences that transcended space and time as we (falsely) assume them to be. The Superman was no mere metaphor for him. It was a constant possibility and reality.

Some might think that such thoughts are best left for the future, since they take us well beyond the imaginative possibilities and present institutional structures of the humanities in the university. I beg to differ. This is precisely what we should be doing—thinking of and practicing the humanities as the superhumanities, recognizing in the process that humans have long been striving to become superhumans. Boringly, we call this fantastic striving ‘religion.’

This is how he divides his work:

My writing can be divided into three basic parts, the first two of which we might capture under the Latin expressions Corpus and Mysticum, that is, “Body” and “Secret.” The first involved the history and analysis of the relationship of spirit and sex, or what I called the mystical and the erotic. The second involved the history and analysis of the relationship of mind and matter, particularly as this relationship is made manifest in “paranormal” events and experiences, such as mystical experiences, parapsychological phenomena, near-death experiences, abduction events, ufological encounters, and psychedelic states. The third and present stage of my writing might be captured under the rubric of the Super Story. It is discussed in the next section on the Super Story.

This is where he is going:

My present and future work is focused on the conception and writing of the Super Story Trilogy, itself deeply dependent on the Archives of the Impossible. Both are worth describing here. There are three basic components to the trilogy project: (1) cosmology and quantum physics; (2) evolutionary biology; and (3) technology and eschatology, particularly as these are expressed through the UFO phenomenon and the entheogenic molecules. The trilogy as a whole is entitled The Super Story: Science (Fiction) and Some Emergent Mythologies.

At the moment, the three volumes are entitled:

1. 1. The Physics of Mystics: Thinking Impossibly after Religion and Science
   2. Biological Gods: Evolution and the Coming Superhumans
   3. The Soul Is a UFO: The Bomb, Technology, and the End of All Things

The Super Story is a poetic device designed to embrace all of those emergent mythologies and mystical currents that have been developing over the last two centuries in deep conversation with the sciences, particularly (1) cosmology, mathematics, and quantum physics, (2) evolutionary biology and (3) technology. Apocalypse as Disclosure (the two words literally mean the same thing) is as much about the “end of the world” as it is about the “revelation of the real.” Both are emphasized here. The Super Story trilogy will move through these scientific complexes (physics, biology, and technology) and explore the various ways that such sciences are radically altering our understanding of human nature and the cosmos itself and, alternatively, how they themselves are often secretly informed by the anomalous or paranormal experiences of the scientists themselves. Wolfgang Pauli, for example, was a major architect of quantum physics. He was also a walking poltergeist and the man who helped C. G. Jung forge “synchronicity.” This is the idea that meaning is not reducible to social or historical context but is sometimes woven into physical reality itself and is particularly apparent in altered states of consciousness and energy.

Such a trilogy is “super” in this sense: it foregrounds or emphasizes those moments of “transcendence,” in this case a kind of vertical dimension that cannot be slotted into the two-dimensional flatlands of society and science.

All of this work is grounded in Kripal’s astonishing archive at Rice:

The Super Story will engage in a very significant way the historical materials of the Center for the Impossible, the physical archives at Woodson Research Center in Fondren Library of Rice University that emerged out of the conference series and my own intellectual project, Archives of the Impossible, itself dependent on the ideas and theories originally expressed in Authors of the Impossible (2010)…

The impossible, as an idea now, encodes a particular approach to phenomena that are not supposed to happen within our present scientific, materialistic, and secular worldviews but nevertheless do all the time. These events are “impossible,” then, only within particular frameworks, not in and of themselves. “They happen,” as I often say.

And they happen to get our attention, to call out our interpretations and make them real: to make the impossible possible. Accordingly, the impossible can be interpreted in very different ways in the history of religions, in science fiction, film, and television, and by the sciences, military communities, and governments.

The idea of the impossible encouraged here is a both-and nondual approach that insists on both the material or physical and the spiritual or intellectual nature of what is occurring, thereby forcing us out of our either-or habits of thought that too quickly separate the mental and the material. As an expression of the superhumanities, the impossible also encourages conversation and an open-ended inquiry that involves the experiencer along with the physicist, philosopher, historian, or anthropologist. There is no singular conviction or conclusion, but that very conversation is based on the conviction that the impossible is very real and cannot be reduced to or explained by any religious or scientific system. That is the idea.

In more than three decades of professional life, I have never seen anything like this. We have had around 400,000 views of our conference proceedings, and we had to shut registration down in 24 hours for the last one, so overwhelming was the immediate response. Amanda Focke speaks directly to this. Indeed, she tells me that, now, over half of the researchers who call, email, and engage in research at the Woodson Research Center are inquiring about the Center for the Impossible. Please sit with that: over half of the research attention is for a single archival collection that represents only about 1% of the university’s total holdings. That is how “big” this thing has become.

The best counsel for reading Kripal, other than starting with his website, is to start with whichever of his books draws you In.

For skeptical beginners, the best starting place is The Flip—Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge. It is the shortest of his books. Kripal calls a “flip“ a “reversal of perspective“ or “a new real“ that often comes from trauma or other life-changing experiences.

His most recent book, How to Think Impossibly—about Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief and Everything Else is also a superb starting place.

His favorite book, Authors of the Impossible—the Paranormal and the Sacred, was, in his view, the breakout book where he put his core thesis on the table.

His memoir which he calls his “book of books,” is Secret Body—Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions. This book is especially notable for his 20 “gnomons” or maxins that summarize his conclusions—in a critical appendix at the end.

For those enchanted by pop culture, Mutant and Mystics is a good starting place. The subtitle is Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal.

If you learn best from stories, you might start with “changed in a flash, one woman’s near death experience, and why a scholar thinks it empowers us all.“  A nice Jewish mother gets hit by lightning in front of her synagogue and is completely transformed.

If you want to start with cultural history, Esalen—America and the Religion of No Religion, is an astonishing place to begin. Kripal is very close to Michael Murphy, founder of Esalen, and has long been in leadership there.

I could go through all his books in this fashion. Fortunately, his website does this for you.

But if you want to go to the heart of his work as directly as possible, I would start with The Flip, then read Authors of the Impossible, then read Secret Body, and then read How to Think Impossibly.