How to Think Impossibly: Freeing the Mind from it's Cultural Constraints with Dr. Jeffrey Kripal

Podcast
Written By Geneva Tolentino

SHOW NOTES | TRANSCRIPT

Ever wondered what happens when we stop trying to explain away the mysterious and start truly listening to the extraordinary? Join us for a mind-expanding conversation with Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal, a pioneering scholar who's not afraid to explore the weird, wonderful, and unexplainable.


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 the Board from 2015 to 2020.


Jeff is the author or co-author of thirteen books, nine with The University of Chicago Press. He has also served as the Editor in Chief of the Macmillan Handbook Series on Religion (ten volumes, 2015-2016). He specializes in studying extreme religious states and re-visioning a New Comparativism, particularly as both involve putting “the impossible” back on the academic table again. He is currently working on a three-volume study of paranormal currents in the history of religions and the sciences for The University of Chicago Press, collectively entitled The Super Story.



From precognitive dreams, levitation, and the presence of presumed demons to near-death experiences, UFO encounters, gigantic telepathic praying mantises, and beyond, so-called impossible phenomena are not supposed to happen. But they do happen—all the time. How to Think Impossibly asserts that the impossible is a function not of reality but of our ever-changing assumptions about what is real. It invites us to think about these fantastic (yet commonplace) experiences as an essential part of being human (or superhuman), expressive of a deeply shared reality that is neither mental nor material but gives rise to both. Thinking with specific individuals and their extraordinary experiences in vulnerable, open, and often humorous ways, Kripal interweaves humanistic and scientific inquiry to develop an awareness that the fantastic is real, the supernatural is super natural, and the impossible is possible. At the end of the day, thinking impossibly is thinking-with experiencers, not dismissing them, not calling them names, not reducing them to someone else’s boxes or categories (be these social, scientific, or religious). Thinking impossibly is altering one’s entire sense of what is real around the actual historical human experience of what is real, which is not at all what we have been told or generally believe to be the case.


In this Episode, we cover:

  • Personal Background and Early Experiences

  • The Role of Suffering and Religious Narratives

  • The Concept of Superhuman Experiences and Erotic Experience

  • The Importance of Experiences as Entry Points

  • The Varying Degrees of Mystical Experiences

  • The Role of Trauma and Suffering in Accessing the Extraordinary

  • The Challenge of Integrating Extraordinary Experiences of the Impossible

  • The Role of Imagination in Mediating Extraordinary Experiences

  • The Sacred is Not Necessarily Good

  • How to Think Impossibly: Get Weird

  • The Importance of Visual and Symbolic Representations

  • The Human Potential Movement at Esalen

  • The X-Men and Evolutionary Potential

  • The Importance of Reading and Storytelling




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TRANSCRIPT

Jeffrey Kripal  0:01  

I'm not against what we're calling integration, but I want it to be integrated in a bigger story. And I think that the stories we're in, frankly, suck. They cause suffering.


Christine Mason  0:13  

Hello, hello. It's Christine Marie Mason, your host for The Rose Woman Podcast today, we're diving into this sacred strangeness with one of the most visionary religious scholars of our time, Dr Jeffrey Kripal, a master of nuance. He invites us to stop flattening the mystical. He invites us to stop reducing the extraordinary to what we already understand. It's kind of hard to do that actually. We'll get into that today. Instead, he encourages us to get weird and to let the imaginal, the anomalous, the ecstatic and the terrifying be part of our lived reality. In this episode, we explore why the sacred isn't always good and why so many of us hide our most profound experiences. We also talk about how our culture might be ready, finally, to tell a new story that includes the sacred, the mystical, the vertical and the horizontal, the ordinary, along with the impossible, into one full, reunified story. You'll hear about comic books and Catholic saints, near death experiences and psychedelics, the mediating power of stained glass and spiral visions, and why being uncomfortable in the weirdness is actually the edge of our evolution. If you've ever had an experience you couldn't explain and were told to keep quiet. This one's for you. Let's begin.


Jeffrey Kripal  1:31  

I used to live in India, and everybody thought I was a Punjabi Christian, by the way, because I had this weird Christian first name and I had this Punjabi last name. It's not Punjabi, of course. My father's from Czechoslovakia, originally, my grandfather, it's a Czech name. But one of the stories is the family were Roma way back, which we know is from North India, which would explain the Indian name, but we don't know. I don't know that. I don't even know if that story is true. Like, you're like, Roma, is


Christine Mason  2:00  

that what would be called gypsy? Yeah, you feel that you have that in your bones. Well,


Jeffrey Kripal  2:06  

I feel, I think that's part of the larger story we're getting. I mean, the family is uncomfortable with that. I think, I that's one story. The gypsies were not held in great esteem, as you know, in Europe by by a lot of people.


Christine Mason  2:20  

Well, there's a question of being itinerant, which in general, is not well regarded and contemporaries in agricultural society, like, if you don't make a home in a place, you become an untrusted entity, an unknown entity, right?


Jeffrey Kripal  2:34  

I'm well aware. Anyway, so that's the that's the origin of the last name, by the way, or one of the


Christine Mason  2:42  

origin stories. Thank you. So in this new book, both in the introduction to the book, where you share Zora Neale Thurston story and your own childhood, and I will say from my own childhood, like these early mystical experiences and our ex our sort of exposure through theology or through nature to like, what is magical and wondrous and weird and unconventional, that sort of like seeps in, doesn't it? Like, How so, how does, how did your early experiences sort of direct you on this path of both religious scholar, but also like a religious scholar of the unusual.


Jeffrey Kripal  3:18  

So I realized in 2014 or so that no one would read all the books, and I needed to write a memoir, or a book, what I call the book of all the books and so that in secret body. And I talk about my childhood a lot in that book. I do think, you know, I grew up in the 60s and 70s, and I grew up in the American Midwest and comic books and Saturday morning cartoons and science fiction, these were the places where you could be weird and where, you know, you things could be said that were otherwise not said. And I was drawn to those as a kid. I wasn't sure why. I mean, I was just a kid, but I do think that was the entry point into a lot of the extraordinary and the strange and the anomalous was, was the comic books and the cartoons and the film and the television and all the things that was. And frankly, Catholicism. I mean, I Catholicism was filled with saints and extraordinary powers, miracles, as they're called, in the, in the in the Catholic tradition. And, you know, I wanted to be a saint. I wanted to be I wanted to be holy. So I went, I wanted to be a superhero. And I, I remember my brother, my brother and I, we used to, we used to lift weights in the basement. And, you know, order, order. You know, how to have big muscles, and how to where the death touch was, and all these things you could find back at comic books that were like, kind of crazy and but basically, were men selling crap to 10 year olds.


Christine Mason  4:58  

I remember those. Line drawings with like the skinny guy who becomes the big bulky guy, or or those things where you complete the face and you draw it in to test your drawing skill, you send it in. Do you remember


Jeffrey Kripal  5:10  

those? Let's not remember all those. I mean, I ordered, I ordered pretty much everything. Christine, i Oh, my God, that was my childhood, and that was certainly the entry point into a lot of this, I think, to be a


Christine Mason  5:21  

superhero or a saint. Did you have sort of a sense of the mythology of becoming superhuman and how that, I guess, not pretty young, but there's a question in there, as an adult man, like reflecting back on that, how that early model of what it means to be an effective human is to be sort of self perfecting and isolating in a way, and how that is implicated somewhat in a modern loneliness.


Jeffrey Kripal  5:47  

Well, it was, it was definitely connected to suffering in my in my youth. I mean, I was deeply anorexic when I was an adolescent, and we didn't even have a word for it. Christy, I've written a lot about this, but, but Karen Carpenter didn't die until 1984 of anorexia, and I certainly had something like anorexia in the 70s and but it was all manifesting through religion and through fasting behavior. But it was all about perfection, but also about suffering. It was intense human suffering. I don't want to underestimate that.


Christine Mason  6:22  

There's a lot in your work around, even in religious scholarship, around the narrative of suffering, and also the dryness of suffering. So it's very it's, I'm trying to like, frame this a little bit like, like, if you look at the way religion studies religion, it seems to miss. Religion. It seems to miss it's used in this like the magical, ineffable, ephemeral CONTACT WITH THE GREAT DIVINE that's in every crease. Like, it's like, rah, rah, rah rah, here's religious history. But it doesn't get at that, like that joy that that is at the heart of what brings a lot of people back. But it does get up the power over the dominance hierarchy


Jeffrey Kripal  7:03  

piece. You know, John Cleese jokes sometimes that religion is 1% divine union and 99% crowd control. This is essentially what you're saying, right? That there's this horizontal crowd control, social, political element of religion, but then there's this vertical kind of divine union, this astonishment, this marvel. I think human beings in general identify with that crowd control and the the community or the tribe, as it were, and they forget about that verticality. But all human beings have that verticality. Christine, that that's, that's what breaks down. I think this horizontal crowd control is, is the the realization that all human beings have access to something beyond, beyond the human. And that's what I mean by the super humanities, right? I mean, I, I basically mean we got to focus on on those issues of class and gender and sexuality and race and crowd control, as it were, but we also have to, have to acknowledge that people have these superhuman experiences, that they're really at the source of a lot a lot of these systems. What are these religions, as we call them now? So it's a kind of both, and it's a both and approach to the issue. I really believe that I mean when I wrote, When I wrote my memoir, you know, the subtitle is erotic and esoteric currents in the history of religions. And I really meant both of those. I didn't mean one or the other. Well,


Christine Mason  8:33  

this, this inquiry into the body, erotic experience, sensuality, altered states as part of a larger cosmic or fantastical human possibility seems to be the core of a lot of this inquiry, that we're much more than material realism would have us believe.


Jeffrey Kripal  8:50  

I think so, and that's kind of the point. So you you


Christine Mason  8:54  

say like the fantastic is real, the supernatural is natural, the impossible is possible. So how do you in the context that you're working in, invite scholars and ordinary seekers into this conversation or this dialog? What are the what are we? What have you found to be the entry points,


Jeffrey Kripal  9:11  

people, human beings? I mean, that's a silly way of responding to but my gut feeling, or it's not just a gut feeling, it's a long experience is that these sorts of extraordinary experiences are not at all uncommon or unusual, and that if you just scratch the surface of people, they'll tell you one of these stories, and they'll have some unbelievable experience or event that makes absolutely no sense in the materialist or flat worldview, but actually makes a lot of sense once you affirm this verticality. So the access point is, is experience I would to be to speak more directly, it's, it's people's experiences that are the access point. And sometimes those experiences are not you. They're not normal or common in the life of the person, but they're often the most one of the most important things that ever happened to that person. And my long, long experience in the academy is that most people are in the closet on this one. They're not resistant. They don't think this claim is wrong, they just don't want to say it. Christine, there's so there's so many taboos, and there's so much social punishment around affirming this in the academy, but also in the religions, for different reasons, people just shut up. They don't, they don't speak about their most intimate truths.


Christine Mason  10:40  

You mean, for fear of being considered fringe or irrational.


Jeffrey Kripal  10:45  

Correct? Yeah, correct. And there are different reasons. So the fear in the academy is that you know you're not science, you're not sufficiently scientific, or you're not sufficiently historical, or whatever the language is. I think the fear in the the public and the religions is you're you're being heretical, or you're not speaking about whatever the tradition or the community you happen to belong to, and that's not about any particular community. I think all communities do this. They create boundaries, and those boundaries are false, but they work. People like to feel like they're inside a building with high wall, high and thick walls, but in truth, those, those high and thick walls aren't really there, because people have these experiences everywhere and always.


Christine Mason  11:31  

It's a really interesting idea that, like, if everyone's got a little bit of the mystic in them, then that, but that that you find in most structural religions, like there are a few special people who are the mystics masters, but the rest of y'all should sit in the pews well,


Jeffrey Kripal  11:47  

so this is where. So I'm not actually an egalitarian on this level. Okay, firmly believe in democracy and egalitarianism on a social level, but it just isn't true that human beings are the same just not true. There are some people who have these gifts and these experiences in abundance, and there are some people who have none of them, by the way. So there actually is not a mystical germ in some people. I want to affirm that I get that, but there is a mystical German others, and there's a full blown mystical life in still others, and it is tied to suffering, by the way, often and trauma and and this is where it gets. It gets dicey and difficult and moral and ethical to talk about. But any model of the extraordinary or the impossible has to explain why it doesn't happen as well as why it does. I


Christine Mason  12:44  

could find myself arguing either side of this, by the way, that a highly traumatized situation could lead to no mystical experiences or to a great deal of them. So where does it come out?


Jeffrey Kripal  12:56  

Well, it does lead to both. By the way, I don't want to, I don't want to romanticize or say that trauma and suffering are are important or special or to be sought after. I don't live my life that way, and I hope others don't. On the other hand, I do work with a model of the human as a kind of container, and you have to break open that container to get to larger environment or the large, larger ecosystem, or to what our ancestors call God. And there are different ways to break open that container, and some of them involve, you know, meditation or prayer or ritual. Others involve things like psychedelics. Others still involve things like suffering or near death experiences, and those require real danger and suffering and and, but the truth is that sometimes this, this religious in rush, this verticality, happens during extreme trauma or suffering or or erotic arousal, by the way, or psychedelic trip, or, you know, something has to happen to that container, Christine, something, because in our ordinary life, I mean, look, I get up in the morning and I drink coffee and nothing mystical is happening to me. But I don't want it to I want to be, I want to just have the caffeine and then have a regular morning, you know? And that's what I mean by the humanist too, is we exist on these different levels, and we want to affirm the ordinariness and the banality for of our existence, but we also want to acknowledge when these inrushes happen.


Christine Mason  14:38  

I think this is an interesting question, the intersection, or the interplay, between what you're calling the inrush and the banal like, if I have the inrush and I know that to be true when, if I touch that mystery and I and I don't pull it into my cup of coffee, then I might treat that as like a isolated, anomalous. This thing rather than sort of the truth that I keep hidden to get through my to do list. And so I guess there's a there's a question in there is like, if you do touch that mystery and you don't share it, what are sort of the best ways that you found for people to integrate that into daily living?


Jeffrey Kripal  15:16  

So first of all, I'm not sure it can be integrated. Oh, I mean, this is where Jeff, the skeptic, or the the intellectual comes in. It's like, why do we affirm integration? You know, maybe, maybe those experiences are meant to be extraordinary and are meant to be unusual. They're also temporary, by the way, people who live in those experiences permanently, we can't exist in society or have relationships or a family, people who exist outside them can. The question for me is, why do those experiences happen? Can we listen to them? This is, I think, getting to your question of integration. I think we do need to listen to them, because I think they're trying to speak to us, certainly trying to heal the person. But this is a broad cultural thing. This isn't a and I think that's why people tell their stories, is they want those stories to be heard by others, and they want to integrate them into the broader culture. And I think that's a good thing, yeah,


Christine Mason  16:21  

because it does change the understanding of how we frame the world. Like if you think that that's an anomalous thing, and you try to explain it through some brain mechanism or something, then that doesn't really change the foundational way you see us as being related or not related to the rest of creation. And


Jeffrey Kripal  16:37  

that's what I mean by thinking impossibly. What what human beings do a lot is they reduce the anomalous to their scientific materialism, in this case, the brain, or they reduce it to some belief system that they have with with religion. They call that a demon or an angel, or something like, Well, don't do that. Don't, don't, don't. Reduce it to your worldview. Just let it, let it stand, let it speak. Let's see what happens.


Christine Mason  17:07  

Wow, that's very exciting. Invitation like to not contextualize it in the things you already know.


Jeffrey Kripal  17:12  

Don't, don't do that, don't do that. I mean, that's just, that's Jeff speaking. Now, okay, and I could be wrong. Christine, I this is the the part of of in the intellectual life I love, is that this kind of reflexivity, it is kind of, well, I could be wrong about this, but here's what I think, you know, here's here's what I want to


Christine Mason  17:32  

say. All right, so let's talk about the book. So aside from ecstatic experience, which we're now all going to try to just let it be what it is, and not contextualize it as angels or demons or brain function only, like just be in it. Okay, cool, but there's a whole bunch of other things that are make us positively question the frame of mind, like you write about things like precognition and UFOs in this new book, and all kinds of other things. And so how did you How do you understand that it as you, as you move through and you wrote this particular book, which is a really, a big invitation to allow the odd or the out of the normal to be part of reality in some way. Yeah. How did that come about, and what do you hope to accomplish by really speaking to that?


Jeffrey Kripal  18:23  

I'm not against what we're calling integration, but I want it to be integrated in a bigger story. And I think that the stories we're in, frankly, suck. They cause suffering. And I'll give you a simple example here, I once taught a course called Sex and spirituality, and I made the mistake of asking people to tell their stories about their their spiritual lives and their sexual lives. And we went around the room, and I thought, Oh, this will take, you know, a couple days. We'll be done. You know, there were 2530 people in the room. It took two weeks, and people were bawling crying, and there was one good story in the whole room. Everybody had suffered tremendously from their religious background and their sexual orientation or their gender, and I realized that, okay, the stories were in around that particular topic are not good ones, and they cause people to suffer. So I think what's happening in these paranormal experiences is we're in a story, and something is breaking through, and it's saying to us in so many words, realize that the story you're in, you're telling yourself, or your ancestors told it, and you need a new story now. You need a new way of thinking about the world and thinking about yourself, and so that's what how to think impossibly is. It's not, it's not a set of answers about. Okay, here's what this means. You know, the giant bugs mean this, or the UFOs being this, or the pre cognitive dreams being I don't, that's not my role. And I, honestly, I don't know Christine, but I do think we need to talk about these things and in your own words, integrate them into a new story, and I don't That's what I mean by. Don't reduce them to an old story. Tell a new story.


Christine Mason  20:27  

First of all, brave you for asking people to tell those stories, and what a little research laboratory to ask people to speak of that foundational experience of union in the body, and then to be able to witness up close in that small of a container what was alive, and to be able to interpolate that for the whole culture. Wow, that's a huge topic. That's a huge topic for me personally, and we work on that a lot. That's


Jeffrey Kripal  20:50  

what I did for the first 15 years of my professional life, is I talked just about sexual orientation and gender and ecstatic religious experience. And that was the goal, and I but I realized doing that work, that none of these stories that we're in are really working for everyone. They're not even working for a lot of most people. They're just and they they used to work. I don't want to question the intentions of our ancestors, you know, or the people that preceded us, but we're in a movie, and we don't, it's not even a good movie. So change it, and that implies that we can change it, of course, and that we're not the story. You know, there's a kind of, there's a kind of verticality there, or a transcendence. But the reason, let me, let me answer your question. The way this book came about was I wrote this earlier book called The Super humanities, which was this inner, this attempted integration of the horizontal or the social and the political and the vertical or the transcendent. And my editor said to me, Okay, Jeff, how do we do that? How do we how do we do both at the same time and and it was Kyle, really, who came up with the title, how to think impossibly. Says, Okay, tell us how to do this. I was like, wow, that's a good title. And, and so I wrote, of course, I had written about the impossible extensively before that, so it was easy for me to write around that notion. And by the impossible, I simply mean something that makes no sense in a contemporary or present story, but it still happens. So clearly it's recalling us to tell a different story. So let's tell a different story, and this scientific materialism or this historicism is doesn't work to to to affirm these stories, but this belief, these belief systems which affirm the verticality, but, but we can no longer. A lot of us can no longer believe the horizontal or community nature of those stories.


Christine Mason  22:53  

I do that the edges are that, that it is happening. The edges are opening in our culture, like, there seems to be a lot more tolerance for popular thinking on things like autism or and what's happening, or what's happening at elders zero transcendence, or what's happening with with aliens, like, it's, it's a or extraterrestrial life, like, there's just seems to be all of that stuff. Seems to be opening in a way that people are open to the inquiry. So the timing of this book is amazing.


Jeffrey Kripal  23:23  

So I think so, you know, I've been doing this for almost 20 years. I mean, so it's good to see that it's happening now. I mean, I do think the public culture. I think they, they, they jump to conclusions too quickly. My they. I mean, some people, including on these topics you've all named but, but I think the conversation is good. I want to affirm we should be talking about all of these topics. And like the you take the UFO, which I know the most about, I like the idea that it's in the New York Times and Congress. I think that's a really good thing. I think it's raised the stakes of the conversation, and it's much harder today to dismiss the topic. On the other hand, people are always falling into what I call, call a threat narrative. You know, it's, it's always this Cold War invasion mythology that they're stuck in. And I'm like, Come on, get out of that. It's like, that's not really what's happening if, if you talk to experiencers, or you talk to people who have actually encountered these entities, it's not about threat and badness, you know, it's about transformation of one's soul and one's one sense of reality. It's a new story. That's, that's, that's a boring as it were, that's what, I think is what this is really about, on some deeper


Christine Mason  24:45  

level. That's what I hear from a lot of the psychedelic community as well. Yeah, well, the


Jeffrey Kripal  24:49  

psychedelic community is a perfect example of this. Yeah, they'll, you'll,


Christine Mason  24:53  

you'll have an experience. You know, I had a friend who came back from Peru, and they talked about a night of. Uh, dreaming of the Great Mother as this gigantic figure, like a 90 story building compared to their body size, utterly loving and embracing and um, and then came back and that, that new story that they were contained and held, and that was the way they lived from that moment on.


Jeffrey Kripal  25:20  

But, and of course, what happens with psychedelic stories too, but also abduction stories, there is a negative element. It begins in fear and a kind of terror, but then it morphs into some kind of transformation or some kind of more positive message. And those two are not exclusive. You know, as my friend Jay says, it's just a high five. It's a cosmic high five. It's like it's really powerful and positive, but not always. Sometimes it's terrifying and negative, but it also contains, sometimes, these transformations. Well,


Christine Mason  25:52  

I reminded of Wes, you're talking about the angel appearing to Mary, you know, or like those moments in the in the Bible where they talk about the terrifying as the which seems to be an overwhelming thing, like it's so much to take in. That's the terror like I get so awash.


Jeffrey Kripal  26:13  

If you go back to the idea that the human being is a container, if you're going to split open that container, that human being can experience that as terror or as ecstasy or as both at the same time. And you know, one of the first lessons in the study of religion is that the sacred is not the good. The good is comes later. It's an ethical or moral transformation of the sacred, but the human experience of the other or otherness is both powerfully negative. It's, it's tremendous, it's, it's terrifying, but it's also incredibly ecstatic. And it can be positive, it can be Fauci non, so it can be, it can be alluring, you know? And it's that both and that I'm trying to get at it in these these moments,


Christine Mason  27:03  

the sacred is not the good. Just gotta double click on that for a second. I don't think I know what that means. I have always equated those with the being the same thing.


Jeffrey Kripal  27:16  

I know, but they're not and if, if you make that equation, Christine, if you


Christine Mason  27:22  

think they're not, that's just the way it is. Okay.


Jeffrey Kripal  27:26  

Sorry, if you think the sacred is the good, then you're going to dismiss people's experiences that are not good. I see you're going to say those are not really religious, but the people are saying yes, they were Yes, it was true. Or you're going to, you're going to condemn anybody who who does things that you don't agree with for religious reasons, which is another, another whole realm of complexities. I mean, to take this back to the topic, so I talk to experiencers all the time, and their encounters with entities are then immediately framed as demons by people who equate the sacred and the good. And I just No, that's not right. Don't, don't. Again, don't do that because you want to. You want to listen to the experience and affirm the terror in it, but also affirm the transformation in it. And that's what I mean when I say the sacred is not the good. The good is a moral or ethical category, and ethics is about how we relate to one another in a horizontal social network. But it's not about the human encounter with with this verticality.


Christine Mason  28:40  

Yeah, I'm noticing there's a piece of the included all in the sacred that's coming up. Like, yes, it's not just the good, which is, like, morally good, kind, nice, sweet, but that good in the broader sense of, like, everything's included in creation.


Jeffrey Kripal  28:57  

That may be, that may be. So that's a different use of the of the phrase that's much more platonic, as we say in the academy, but it's, it's a much more, it's a much broader sense of the good than than simply the moral.


Christine Mason  29:11  

I love that in your book, you advise, like, if you want to think impossibly, you say, get weird. Yeah. So what does that mean to you? It


Jeffrey Kripal  29:22  

means that when human beings encounter, let's call it the sacred or this otherness or this verticality, encounter is often mediated by the human imagination. And it gets really weird. I mean, we're talking about gigantic, eight foot insects, and we're talking about flying, you know, saucers, and we're talking about precognitive dreams. So clearly, the Dreaming is mediating the precognition. Clearly, this is a function of the imagination, but it's also mediating something about reality. So there's a kind of there's a kind of. Both hand there, and I'm I just want us to be much more comfortable with the weirdness of it all, because I want us to be comfortable with that imaginal mediation of what's what's appearing. Let me speak. I'll speak metaphorically here. So the church I grew up in has all these stained glass windows. There's, it's the life of Jesus on the right and the life of the Virgin Mary on the left. And the sun comes through that window and illuminates those stories and illuminates that community. Okay, so what I want to say is, look, the sun is the sun. Light is light. It's actually everywhere. It's, it's it's in all cultures, but it's mediated through particular stories that our ancestors have put together with lead and glass in this case, or through through scriptural texts. And let's affirm both of those things. Let's not do one or the other, you know. But when we move cultures or when we move localities, we're going to have a different set of stories. The you know, like near death experiences, they're actually not the same. If you talk to someone who grew up in the Jewish tradition, she or he is going to have one set of Near Death Experiences. If you talk to somebody who grew up in an evangelical household, they're likely going to have a different one. Or if you talk to do or a Buddhist or a Muslim, they're going to have a different one still. So how do we acknowledge the imaginal mediation of the light, essentially, is what I'm trying and how do we affirm the sameness, but also, how do we affirm the difference that that's that's what the and when I say, get weird, I mean, be comfortable with the mediation. You know, just speak. I'll tell you another funny story from my childhood. I remember the first day I walked into a Protestant church, and I was like, This is so boring. It's it's like, no, there are no people, there are no statues. There's no There's no dead guy on the cross. There's no stained glass windows. It's just with so tasteful, though, but it's a white building. It's like, like, you have removed the weird. Yeah. And so essentially, what I'm trying to say, when I say get weird, I suppose, is, is get more Catholic. I guess I don't know what I'm trying, but that's the origin again. And it goes back to these comic books or these Saturday, Saturday morning cartoons. It's like because this is how the phenomenon appears to people. It really does. If you listen to people talk, or you listen to them, or you sit down with them, they'll tell you extraordinary, absurd stories. Christine, absurd.


Christine Mason  32:41  

I what I notice as you speak about that in my body is a softening Uh huh, like the invitation to be weird or to let things be as they are, and not contract them into a narrative or make them fit into some worldview. I have that that is very relaxing feeling like, Oh, if I don't have to control it, make sense of it, rigidify it, fit it into some sort of theological framework that I didn't even want, that I inherited. If I don't have to do any of that, I can just let it be. It's a it's a totally soft and gentle way of being in for me, that's what I'm experiencing right now as you're speaking,


Jeffrey Kripal  33:21  

well, good, you're you're in a new story.


Christine Mason  33:24  

I also want to ask this question around verticality, because it's come up as a word a couple of times. I had an experience once, of like the experience of the cross, but that the cross started spinning around 360 and it created a toroid, you know, like you're standing at the middle of this Taurus, and that the the sense of vertical energy, like going up and down the spine, connecting earth and heaven, sort of shifted into the much more of a spiral surrounding energy. And I'm just wondering if the verticality or the ascension is, is part of the split?


Jeffrey Kripal  34:03  

Well, of course it is. And your vision of the Taurus or the spiral, I mean, it combines the horizontal and the vertical in a geometrical way, right? I mean, I think that vision, and I don't need to know why you had that vision, but if we were in private, I would ask you, okay, what's the context and What? What? What are you? What are you saying here? But the vision itself, the narrative itself, the story you're telling certainly is trying to integrate, or combine the vertical and the horizontal. You know, I'm thinking of Bernardo Castro, by the way, who an author in in the Netherlands, an idealist and analytic, Idealist philosopher, but he talks about the cross and and a German church where he recognizes that the cross is this, this meeting place of the transcendent and the imminent. You know, it's it's this place where the the verticality. And the horizontal, horizontal nature of things come together. And I think this is essentially what you're trying to articulate as well.


Christine Mason  35:07  

I was sober when that happened. Okay,


Jeffrey Kripal  35:10  

you don't have to be, by the way, I know, but


Christine Mason  35:15  

I caster's an interesting cat, because he's a computer engineering person and like a, like a real research like a CERN kind of scientist, right? And then he's got all this quantum and metaphysics kind of stuff woven in there. Would you mind telling a little bit about your Esalen experience? When I first moved to California, I was in the Midwest for a long time, in Germany, and then in the Midwest for a long time, and when I first moved to California, my husband took me to Esalen. It was like a mind blowing, a Mind Blow experience. And it wasn't just the intersection of these three sacred waters, and it wasn't just the workshop we were in. There was a sensation there of again opening to considering things, invited to be considered in the world that I'd come from. The Midwest, effluent as a place, is one of those, if you don't know about it, feels to me like it's sort of almost a pre cognitive situation for America, for the West, like they've been looking at near death experiences for decades, and inviting people to speak of the paranormal or the imminent. So it feels to me like it's a very unique location, cognitively and physically. I mean,


Jeffrey Kripal  36:33  

Esalen, the Institute, is the home of what we call the human potential movement. And the human potential movement is this attempt to combine science and spirituality. You know, one of the things that are, it's often said there, is, we try to do things that can't be done in the academy and the churches, and what what they mean by that, or what Asli means by that, is, how do we speak about this third realm that affirms people's extraordinary experiences but doesn't reduce them to to some previous religious belief that acknowledges and engages the science of whatever's happening, but also doesn't, doesn't buy into the reductionism of the science. How can we? How can we affirm the spirit, the spiritual, but not religious, as an expression, is very much what esslyn has always been about, even though that expression didn't exist when the place was founded in 1962 my own experience of it. I mean, this will help Chris Christine, I think this will help a lot, you know. So I started, I wrote that book. I wrote the history of the place in the early 2000s and was finishing up in around 2006 and I became obsessed at the same time with, of all things, the X Men. And I was like, okay, that's an adolescent fantasy. I wasn't even a reader of the the X Men, by the way, was a failed comic book series in my youth, in the 60s and 70s, it was kind of a B level narrative. I was like, Well, why am I so obsessed with the X Men suddenly, and I realized that the basic idea of the human potential movement is that we have these extraordinary abilities or powers, and they're latent evolutionary buds. They're they're signs of our future body, our future evolution. And I realized that, oh, my goodness, the movement of vessel, it is the X Men, the the notion of mutation and our evolutionary future is this fantasy on the East Coast that was, was created in the 60s. But this movement, this social and spiritual movement, that was coming out of California, was created in the 60s as well. Same time, by the way, takes these experiences much more seriously and runs with them. As it were, I wrote that book, and I it's very much a commitment to the place is a spiritual center, but also as this place that combines a kind of evolutionary worldview with us with a spiritual worldview. And I think the your experience of the place of the land of the institute is very familiar to those who go there, because they go there often wanting to have some kind of extraordinary experience. It's a place of pilgrimage. It really, it really is hard to get to. As you know, when people arrive, they're ready for this experience. And there's something about the place that encourages those experiences. I mean, I've had many of them myself there. And there is, there is a mojo that that is, is present there in a way that's not present elsewhere. So I think that's essentially true, and that's that's why I wrote the book, by the way, it was because of that Mojo and that, that vision and fleet of things


Christine Mason  39:57  

I saw Michael Murphy last week at a. It's a parlor in Mill Valley. You You saw him? Christine, yeah, just last week. I'm I have a house Mill Valley where he lives. So he's always, always hanging around. You know, he's a very omnipresent fixture in town. I want to say, want to honor the little boy who had carried that comic book narrative from his childhood all the way up till now, and managed to frame that like the myth of the latent superhuman as a cultural intuition, just like it's such a beautiful idea that the superhero narratives carry a point or two. So I


Jeffrey Kripal  40:36  

think the superhero narratives Christine are a much later expression of the religious narratives. I think religion is essentially legitimate science fiction, and I think the later fantasy, the superhero fantasies that we tell ourselves is religious to the core, but it's based on these, these much more ancient religious and spiritual themes.


Christine Mason  40:58  

I hope everyone gets a chance to explore your larger as you call it, your body of work, because there is a lot in there. And I know this idea that people don't read is popular right now, and this data says they don't read as much they're watching, watching or listening. But I think there's a return to deeper inquiry, to depth of inquiry, that's coming as a counter movement to what is a very shallow and unsatisfying way of engaging with information. And I think the body of what you've offered super humanities this book, and some of the older ones on on embodiment are are really strong and important pointers to how we might live with more magic and wonder and more joy, I think, yes, terror. Maybe I'm not going to discount that, but that to allow that there's more going on and to let it teach us is really beautiful.


Jeffrey Kripal  41:52  

Thank you. You know, I was trained by a woman named Wendy Doniger, who really tells stories and orbits around a planet. Doesn't necessarily land, but orbits around and takes different pictures and tells different stories. And you get a real feel for the entire planet that way. And I think the body of work, as you're calling it, and as I call it, I mean my memoir is called Secret body, so it's the whole picture that I most want to tell it's not it's not just the individual parts. And I do think that reading is coming back. I have a reverence for reading, by which I don't mean a pious feeling. I mean I think paranormal events, by the way, are often reading events. There's something literally magical about reading that we don't understand, but this does encoded right in the text, or right in the act of writing and reading. I don't just have reverence for I mean, I think this is true. I mean this, this is part of my training in what we call Lectio Divina in the seminary, or divine reading, but it's also very much a part of the academy and part of why we write books. Because I can, I can affect you, Christine, even when I'm not there. I mean, I've never met you in person. I could be dead, right? And those books will still impact you. So there's the technology there that's really special. You know, there's a kind of getting into one's soul, or getting one into one's heart and getting into the reader that I really value. And of course, I then learn from readers and students and colleagues and people, and I write about them. So there's a kind of, there's a kind of back and forth, is what I'm trying to say. Someone said to


Christine Mason  43:43  

me, like, if you looking at marks, it's like you're looking at little marks on a page and inventing an entire world in your head. That that's what reading is. Yeah, the idea of reading as a sacred act, that there's vibration on the page, that it outlasts your life, that it's it's a transmittal across time space. There's a poem in there. I'm gonna find it okay if you, if you have anything else you'd like to say about people learning to or being in the practice of thinking impossibly. And then, of course, if you're going to be teaching any public courses or things that the public can participate in outside book


Jeffrey Kripal  44:25  

again, tell tell the story differently. That's what thinking impossibly is all about, is. And we do this together. We don't do this alone. We don't do this individually. So I think film and television and religion and philosophy and, you know, letters to the editor, it's all part of this story that's that's being refashioned and retold. These experiences themselves are not entirely trustworthy. So it's not that I necessarily want to trust the experience, but I think it's communicating with us in the best way it can and and so I want to listen to. Of that and but I also want us to keep our our skepticism and our questions in mind in terms of teaching. You know, I do, I do teach at Esalen, regular, pretty regularly now. Teach workshops so people can look for workshops at Esalen and and engage the these ideas there. I also teach online teaching a course with morbid anatomy, which is an online school with Peter skatefish this summer. So that's another way to to access these these issues and these questions. Oh, well,


Christine Mason  45:32  

thank you for your subtlety and nuance and all of the beautiful work you've done, and we'll see you online this summer.


Jeffrey Kripal  45:39  

Thanks for reading, thanks for reading me and for talking. I much appreciate it.


Christine Mason  45:45  

All right. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. Here are some of my takeaways from this episode. First, weirdness is a portal, not a problem. When things get strange, don't shut down. Instead, try to open up the weird, the wondrous and the anomalous are often the cracks in the surface where deeper truths are trying to break through two don't reduce the sacred. Don't rush to explain the unexplainable, whether it's angels, aliens, dreams or in rushes of light, let the experience be what it is. Not everything is meant to be integrated into the current worldview. Verticality is in all of us, but not equally. Dr Kripal reminds us that while not everyone is a mystic, those who are often carry their gift through multiple modalities like trauma or ecstasy or some kind of radical rupture, and that mystical experience may not be universal, but it is real, and we need language and space for it. Number four, stories shape our reality. The myths we inherit about sex and spirit and suffering or sanity might no longer be serving so our task is to listen to the impossible and begin telling new stories that honor both the vertical divine and the horizontal human and actually merged them completely, as we talked about in the episode with Patrick appealing, the split between the material and the spiritual is one of the great tasks, if not the greatest tasks of our time. Five thinking impossibly is a collective practice. We don't get there alone. New stories arise through conversation, through art, through media and public imagination, talking about your strange encounter might just be someone else's permission to tell the truth. So if you haven't gotten the book yet, you know what I always say, let this be a teaser for you to go out and go deeper with this particular author, Dr Jeffrey Kripal, and his book How to think impossibly. I also encourage you to visit his back catalog of work. He's just covered so much material over the course of his career, even the book Esalen, if you have any interest in the birth of the human potential movement, that is a fat, magnificent tome that for anybody who's been exploring spiritual development, particularly how Western traditions integrate Eastern thought, and how that came to be in the West. This is a must read. Okay, I'm Christine Marie Mason. This is the rose woman podcast. Rose for a gentler form of woke, for coming into and blooming fully in your life, for creating more spaciousness around the ideas that we hold so precious, around our identities, and to rediscover ourselves as unconditional love, as one among in a universal field of energy and light, utterly free and utterly in choice. You can find my work and writings at christinemariemason.com I am starting a new course in the fall. My Living Tantra class that runs twice a year starts on September 16. Please come and join the course. It's only done live. I don't offer it as a recorded thing, because it's so much about what we discover in the field together. And I have two annual retreats. The next one is going to be in April of 2026 in Asheville, North Carolina. Can also come and join me for day longs, visit me in Hawaii, or go back and find my deeper work in my books. One that just came out in April is called the Nine Lives of woman, sensual, sexual and reproductive stages from birth to 100 and I'm very happy to say that Kirkus gave it a Kirkus star, as well as naming it one of the best indie books for the month of August. So thank you for being part of the rosewoman community. Please check out rosewoman.com for beautiful body products, and I will see you out there exploring what it means to be alive in a human body. All love all the time. You.




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