Jeffrey Kripal: When Spirituality and Science are the Same
Jeffrey Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. Jeff is the author of many, many, many books that span a massive academic career—books on Kali, books on Gnosticism, and books on supernatural phenomena. He’s also the author of a short and immensely readable book called The Flip: Who You Really Are and Why it Matters, which is the focus of our conversation today. As an academic and historian of comparative religion, Jeff writes and speaks beautifulyl about the way that we’re losing our collective stories, and the way that we’re splitting ourselves apart, divided between the sciences and the humanities. In The Flip, Jeff recounts how both science and spirituality are using different languages to explain and explore the same experiences, and what emerges when “The Flip” happens, those often mystical moments when the minds of scientists across time have cracked open to see the world in a different way. I loved this book and I love Jeff’s wide-ranging and yet imminently approachable and kind mind—I hope you enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it.
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: I would love to interview physicists, but so much of it goes over my head. And I think you had a funny joke in the flip where you say, if you profess to understand physics than you don't understand
JEFFREY KRIPAL: It's quantum I don't think they understand it either. I think they're just Bullshitting.
ELISE: I mean, the overall point is the whole system breaks down or there's a new system that's emergent on a quantum level. That's my best summary.
JEFFREY: I think the deeper point is we may not be equipped to understand it, you know, reason and our cognitive abilities simply did not evolve for this, you know.
ELISE: Do you think it's supposed to be a mystery?
JEFFREY: I think it, I think it's a mystery to us as human beings, but I don't know if there's a supposed to in there. Different species evolve different cognitive and sensorial abilities for different reasons. And they're completely closed to other realities because of those ways of perceiving the world. And I think we're a lot like that.
ELISE: Yeah. I know you mentioned David Eagleman in your book and I have an episode with him and I love listening to him and he's fascinating. And just this idea that, which you write about as well, that we've likely lost, right, as we've changed and our culture has evolved, we've certainly lost certain sensorial capacities and replaced them with others, right? Like we have a certain amount of capacity and we are wired to use what's most useful, right?
JEFFREY: Yeah, do you know Don Hoffman, Elise, by any chance?
ELISE: I've never interviewed him. I read, what was his last...
JEFFREY: It's called something like the end of reality or the challenge of reality, I never can think of the title. But his basic argument is what the one I'm trying to make is that the senses evolved for fitness, evolutionary fitness to survive, we did not evolve to perceive reality as it really is because we would probably get eaten, or it wouldn't go so well. And the metaphor he always uses is sort of like a video game or a gamer that if the gamer has to know all about how the game is coded and written the gamers going to lose every time.
Um, But if you could ignore all the code and just deal with what's on the screen as it were, you can actually win the game. And that's his metaphor for us. And a lot of us presume, I certainly am guilty that what we see is what we get, right? I mean, what we see is what's really there. And that doesn't seem to be the case at all.
ELISE: No. Particularly when our entire history, right, is proving that that's not the case. That as our science develops and we have new levels of perception and understanding the world, our perception of the world keeps changing. And Hoffman, I do want to interview him and I've heard him interviewed again, it's so heady, but he argues that essentially that time's not fundamental. I mean, it's wild.
JEFFREY: Yeah. I do believe that actually. I mean one of the things that I try to do is listen to experiencers, people who have extreme or anomalous experiences. Something like precognitive dreaming and precognition is extremely common. I mean, to me, it's the most convincing part of the whole shebang. And what it means, of course, is that the future already exists. Because There's no way to precognize three years out. There's too many variables. It's too iffy, but if somebody precognizes three years out, well, then those events already exist, you know, three years out. And, so I think we just assume that time is linear and that the future is malleable and the past is not. And I just think those are assumptions. I don't think those are true.
ELISE: Well, to back up for a minute, one of the things that I love when I've heard you be interviewed and love in your books is the fact that you are a bridge, right? I mean, you're, a religion professor and on the humanity side of this equation who is in conversation with science and wants to be in conversation with science, that these are two essential schools of thought that are explaining the same phenomena in different Language, different systems, but that the instinct to negate or not eradicate, that's too strong, but to belittle or demean these different ways of thought-- I think you have a great line, which maybe you can say, but essentially you're like anything that's not explicable suddenly is off the table. It's like it doesn't exist if it doesn't conform.
JEFFREY: Yeah. I mean, that's my criterion for taking a model or a finger seriously is if it puts more things on the table, if you have to take things off the table so you can pretend that you can now explain the things that are on the table, then I'm like, well, you can only explain those things because you took everything off the table. You can't explain. I mean, come on, you're cheating. You're cheating. And You know, when you put things back on the table that you can't explain, then the world gets really complicated and messy, but I think it is, I just think that's the case. And I think our tables are usually way too small.
ELISE: Yeah. We've already talked about how you're coming on again to talk about other components of your work. But today, for The Flip, which is so accessible, I mean, you sort of say that in the at the outset, like, you can read this book in a day, and...
JEFFREY: I hope so. I hope so.
ELISE: Yeah, I'm a fast reader, but I did. But it's this conversation or this excavation of people, primarily scientists, Nobel Prize winners, etc, who have experienced what you call the flip. I've experienced the flip, although it wasn't so dramatic for me. But can you tell us what the flip is.
JEFFREY: Yeah, and also, let's talk about why I wrote that book, because I wrote it for a very clear pedagogical reason, but also very public reasons, too. But the flip is essentially when a scientist or an engineer or a medical professional is trained to think of the world as composed Entirely of matter and energy and forces that can be mathematically modeled, and they have some kind of life experience, it might be a near death experience, it might be a psychedelic trip, it might be some kind of mystical experience, and they realize that actually consciousness or mind or subjectivities primary and this material world that they were trained to think of as all there is, it certainly exists, but it's secondary. So they flip from this worldview of objectivity where there's only matter to this new world where mind or consciousness or subjectivity is primary and the material world is secondary to that in some way. So that's the flip. And the reason I focused on. Science scientists and engineers and medical people is that's what higher education is like today. My students are mostly STEM students and they're going to grow up to be scientists or engineers or medical professionals. And when I use classical religious sources, I think what they're thinking inside their heads is, oh, this person didn't know their science. You know, if they would have known their science, they wouldn't say these ridiculous things. So what I do is I say, okay, here's your Nobel laureate in your area He's saying the same things that these other people are saying, what's the difference? And so, you know, it essentially backs them in into a corner and they have to acknowledge that these experiences happen to everyone and not just weird pre modern religious people.
ELISE: Yeah. And that somehow we need our systems, I mean, to quote Ken Wilber, but to transcend and include this all belongs, right? This is all existent. All of these experiences are real or valid in some ways. And we just don't yet have the language or the models or the understanding to explain what's present.
JEFFREY: You know, I'm not a fan of religion, I mean, I'm a professor of religion, but I'm not proposing a religious solution to any of this. But the truth is that A lot of the historical religions did have models to incorporate and keep on the table a lot of these experiences, but what happened for a lot of reasons, both good reasons and bad reasons, we have rejected those religious worldviews over the last couple hundred years and essentially thrown the baby out with the bathwater to use, you know, an older metaphor. I just want to say, look, this is part of the human experience too, it's not all two dimensional flatland. There's this vertical or transcendent dimension and people have these experiences and you can say they don't, but they do. And we don't have a model today to make those experiences genuine or meaningful. We fall back into a series of sort of pre-modern worldviews or in idiosyncratic worldviews. And it never really creates a culture and that's what concerns me.
ELISE: I want to go back to this idea that you don't like religion or you're not a fan. But first, what I thought was so deft about your book too, is that, you're not corralling the reader toward any specific belief system or was it a Nobel Prize winner who had the experience, the abduction experience that his...
JEFFREY: yeah. Carrie Mullis.
ELISE: Will you tell us that story? Because of course, like, I want to hear both him and you say, well, this is clearly what happened, but you don't.
JEFFREY: So Carrie's no longer with us.
ELISE: Oh.
JEFFREY: We can't talk to him. But I did talk to him while he was alive. And of course I read that chapter. The book's called Dancing Naked in the Minefield. And he won the Nobel prize in chemistry or genetics 1993 or so for creating something called the, well, it helped create human genomics is what it helped create. And He had an experience on his cabin property, basically an abduction experience that he writes about in this book in a chapter called No Aliens Allowed, and it's crazy. It's a typical kind of abduction story. He drives up to Mendocino County. It's late at night. He gets to his cabin around midnight. He has to pee like we all do after a long car ride, and he gets a flashlight out and he Goes down to his outhouse and his flashlight hits a raccoon that's unfortunately glowing and the raccoon says, good evening, you know, good evening, doctor. And that's the last thing Kerry remembers until about six in the morning. And he's walking down a road toward his cabin and he's basically freaking out because you know, his clothes aren't wet. Like they should be if he was outside all night and he's not where he's supposed to be. And he's terrified. And it turns out that his daughter had a similar experience unknown to him on the same cabin property. And the experience also involved another scientific colleague from Japan who was also part of this whole thing. And so Kerry just tells this story, you know, and says, look, I know you can't do science with this. I know this, this isn't replicable, but it actually happened and it means something and I don't know what it means, but there it is. And so I tell that story again in the flip and it's just it's a really good example because it's a world class scientist talking about an experience that shouldn't happen, but does and also happened to his daughter. And so you kind of have this third party corroboration of a similar kind of event, and she was gone too, by the way, for a number of hours, and her husband was looking for her and couldn't find her, and then she was back, and walking down the same road to the same cabin, so something was happening there, and it happened to more than one person in the same family at different times.
ELISE: Well, let's go. Let's go and see what happens. Let's find the cabin.
JEFFREY: Yeah, well, or not. I mean, I'm not sure I want to be at that cabin, particularly at night. Yeah.
ELISE: Yeah, I mean, it reminds me, I don't know if you know Jeffrey Redinger, he doesn't write about aliens, but he's a professor at Harvard Medical School, and he's a psychiatrist at McLean, and he has an M. Div. And he wrote this book called Cured, which is about spontaneous remission and healing, and the fact that this is a quite frequent occurrence, that because it's not replicable and nobody understands the factors, it's typically dismissed instead of taken sort of at wholesale value or quickly people go to, well, like you must not really have had that diagnosed, like something happened that was wrong in the diagnostic process. So how would we begin to study these Events?
JEFFREY: Well, okay. So, you mentioned aliens there again. I don't believe in aliens either. I mean, it's like religion. It's like, how do we understand the human imagination, I think, is really at the key or the core of all of this. And I think the gut response of a lot of people is that what is imagined is imaginary.
ELISE: Mm.
JEFFREY: the imagination is strictly a spinner of fantasies or hallucinations to use A category that a lot of people fall back on. But actually the imagination could just as well be a mediator or a translator of something that's actually there but is being imagined or pictured in whatever the culture is telling whatever the culture determines it's going to Be pictured as and I think that's a much more adequate model for me than positing aliens or positing the Virgin Mary curing some incurable disease or whatever deity or whatever spectral being of the week is, I don't know what it is. it's like, no, but what if these people who are having these experiences are being healed, what if they actually are seeing the Virgin or they're seeing an alien or whatever they're seeing but that's actually not what's there? You know, it's like a movie going off in the head and there's somebody writing the script and projecting the images, but it's not the projector. You're seeing a movie, you're inside a movie. You are a movie. So that's kind of where this takes me , is towards some kind of, I don't want to say universal, but some kind of global model of the imagination that, that is not culturally dependent.
ELISE: Where we're all sort of a collective unconscious that we're all downloading from or...?
JEFFREY: I don't know.
ELISE: We want certainty. We all want certainty. That's the promise of the sciences [laughs].
JEFFREY: Well, then go be a scientist or go be a religious person. If you want certainty, you know, go believe something but if you go down this rabbit hole, you just go, you just get in another rabbit hole and another one and another one. And, you're falling. And to me, that's exciting. And that's, you know, delicious, but to some people it's terrifying and I think to most people it's terrifying and most people want certainty and they want to live in a pretty clear box or room or house. That's just not what, that's just not what's there when you look at things comparatively across cultures.
ELISE: So you don't think that there's life outside of this planet?
JEFFREY: Well, there might be, I mean, again, I don't know. I think you're asking about abduction experiences. I think we go to the extraterrestrial hypothesis, as we call it, because that's what our science fiction and our culture tells us to do. But there's actually a lot about these abduction experiences that makes absolutely no sense within an extraterrestrial hypothesis. And that's what gets taken off the table. And that's what people don't talk about. And so I'm very much of the school that abduction experiences are like near death experiences, or they're like Marian apparitions, or they're like spontaneous healings, they're these extreme or anomalous events that require some kind of belief in what's going on for sure, but they have an independence to them, they're not being generated by the person, the person finds himself or herself or themselves inside the experience, And so it's very convincing to them, but that doesn't mean that's what's actually there, that's what's actually happening. And I know that's confusing, but part of it is just human honesty and respect, Elise. Like, for example, I talked to a lot of people who've had near death experiences, but they all saw something different. Right? And so I can't say to one of them, look, what you saw is what's really there because then I'm dismissing everybody else. And so I have to back up and I have to say, okay, what are all these people experiencing? And how is it being mediated through their psyches or their bodies or their cultures That it can explain all the differences, But we also need to explain the similarities in some way and I think it's that balance That's the really the challenge here.
ELISE: Yeah. So, in your mind, going back to this idea that consciousness is what's fundamental, that's the flip, and that's what, you know, Donald Hoffman writes about as well, and I know you write about even Alexander and his experience, but is what you imagine happening because, you know, his story for people who haven't read his work or Proof of Heaven or his more academic stuff, In the year since, is that, you know, he was brain dead, right? So the way that we imagine the brain as the creator of consciousness, so you imagine that he's existent in some big, some more fundamental way that maybe we are all part of some larger consciousness that's then filtered through our bodies and this material
JEFFREY: so, I don't know if that was a question or a statement.
ELISE: I don't know, is that accurate? Is that right?
JEFFREY: I mean, that's sort of, I think, where this stuff takes us is, you know, what you're trying to articulate there is some form of idealism that the mind or consciousness is primary, and we are sort of biological filters or nodes of this greater mind. And to me, that's actually quite plausible, given all of these anomalous or impossible experiences. Do I know that? No, at least I don't know that. I don't have direct experience that, but some people do actually, and some people claim, or they claim they do, and I have every reason to believe them, but I also think the people who say I experienced a god of unconditional love, I think they're telling the truth, and the people who Saw a flying saucer also telling the truth and the people who were talking about spontaneous healings, you know, in a hospital from advanced cancer, they're also telling the truth. I think all of these people are telling us their experience as best they have it. What I'm trying to suggest is something else is going on inside or behind all of those experiences. And that's the model that we're pushing toward here. And what the other thing you are articulating, I think you know, when you're talking to a neuroscientist, or you're talking to a secular person, the idea is that the brain, the neurons somehow fire in such a coordinated way, and the brain creates or produces consciousness. And therefore, when someone dies, and the brain stops working, blood stops flowing, and the brain stops working, consciousness is just gone.
It just goes out like a light bulb. It's just, that's it. The other model, however, which is actually just as plausible is that the body and the brain are filters or reducers or translators of some kind of mind that exists throughout the universe. And that When it filters or translates through a body brain named Elise or Jeff, it of course, appears on this personal screen in very personal and very cultural and very languaged ways. So you experience it as, you know, as you and I experience it as me, but in fact, it's coming from somewhere else, it's something else other than our bodies and brains. And therefore, when we die, when Jeff drops dead or Elise drops dead, it actually doesn't matter. I mean, because the mind or the consciousness, it just is. It's like a cell phone, you know, you can hold this cell phone up to your ear. You can pretend that all those people in your cell phone are actually in your cell phone. But you can also throw the cell phone against the wall. And guess what? None of those people even care about that, they're actually not in your phone. Sorry, they're just not there. So which is it? Is the brain a producer of mind or is it a filter or translator of mind? And the reason I like the filter thesis, it's not because I know again, it's because it keeps more things on the table, that's what I'm trying to say. It helps me to understand the people who have the near death experience or see the Virgin Mary or whatever happens. It gives me a way Of saying yes to those people and not saying you're crazy or you're hallucinating. Again, it's human. It's a way of embracing and accepting more human beings, I think, at the end of the day.
ELISE: Yeah. I think that that's beautiful. I don't like the word belief either, but that makes sense to me as well, as a bigger model for what's happening and that the world's religions or spiritual movements in many ways are an attempt to translate that experience of some larger source, but talk to us as a long enduring professor of religion and a humanities professor, why do you not like religion?
JEFFREY: okay. I knew you were going to ask that. I could tell we were going there.
ELISE: I mean, that was spicy. I need to
JEFFREY: Here's why. The answer is really simple. The answer is religions are exclusive of one another and They're constantly claiming that they have the truth and that other cultures and religions don't. And they're all guilty, Elise. My condemnation is, is global. It's not selective. And the other reason I am critical of religion is this notion of belief that you mentioned earlier. Belief is essentially looking backwards. And it's basically arguing that the full truth was revealed at some point in the past, and our job is to believe whatever that full truth is and to approximate it as best we can. What I think is so hopeful about our modern world and about science in particular is it turns around and it says, No, actually, there's a fuller truth in the future. We had part of the truth in the past, but obviously we had some things wrong. And it's not that we have everything right now either, but we're moving towards a future truth that is fuller and fuller, maybe never truly full, but at least it's in the future, it's not in the past.
I'm a professor of religion. I mean, I spend my days talking about religion because they generally have this transcendent dimension. They think of the human as more than the body and the brain and the culture or the society. So in that sense, I think the religions are very powerful and very prophetic, but I don't like religions to the extent that they exclude one another in this sort of horizontal or social plane. And I think they create a lot of suffering. And they create a lot of violence, and I don't mean that in just, you know, simple violence terms. They create a lot of guilt. And you just, you wrote a book about this. I mean, you know, the seven deadly sins, I mean, come on, we integrate, we, we internalize whatever our religions are telling us, and we suffer because of that. And, and I just I don't want us to suffer like that. I want us to be more reflective of who we are, what we can be, not what we were.
ELISE: Yeah. I love that. And that's why I sort of remain, I guess I would call myself an unaffiliated person of faith of Jewish and tribe and, you know, there's so much, there's a lot that I love and particularly in the wisdom traditions.
JEFFREY: It's a mixed bag.
ELISE: yeah, and the people who are truly interfaith and, I know that there's a lot of concern about people cherry picking from different traditions, but when you can find the thread, there's so much
JEFFREY: beauty there.
So, Elise, I'm not one of those people who's concerned about cherry picking. Because I think everybody cherry picks.
ELISE: Yeah.
JEFFREY: there's no such thing as a religion that isn't a mishmash of everything that came before it and everything it encountered. It's a mishmash all the way down, trust me. Historically, there's no such thing as a pure tradition. And I also think as human beings, we transcend These religions and we transcend these cultures. And so the cherry picking is an affirmation of our transcendence. It's like, no, you are more than your religious tradition. You are more than your culture. You are more than your body. And you are also your body and your religion and your culture. Yes, yes, yes, all that. But you are also more. So I think again, the power of the modern period is that we're all so super connected and in communication with everything that we know that, we know that in a way that we didn't know that, you know, four or five-hundred years ago.
ELISE: Yeah. When you sort of imagine an idea, a better academic future, obviously we're at a strange moment in time, culturally in academia and everything that's happening. You're talking about the binary that's been created between liberal humanities and science, right? but there are obviously other versions of this. But when I think about being in college, you know, I was an idiot, I mean, I don't want to disparage younger generations, but I was full of idealism, big words, superiority, et cetera. And then, you know, as you go through life, it gets sort of kicked out of you, or you get maybe right sized. But I also feel like, and we don't have to go into a whole tangent about social media and propaganda and all of that, but I feel like what's happening too is that we're losing the discourse, like the role of the university, like, was to be challenged was to have many divergent views on a campus, to have those views in conversation with each other, and for there to be a healthy combustive environment where you needed to take coursework across different categories on campus and that you were supposed to have dissent discourse debate that was held or there was a big enough container amongst the faculty to keep you there, right? To keep you in the fire. Do you think this is a broader trend or do you think this is sort of a gradual? Does it concern you, I guess? Or do you feel like universities are more or less functioning in that way and in the way they need to?
JEFFREY: No, of course it concerns me. I mean, I share all of your observations there and more so, I live and breathe and work in the university. So I know higher education better than I know any aspect. There's a lot of wonderful, good things about it, particularly in the humanities, it has a very strong, critical, or what I call a prophetic dimension that it calls people to task along all kinds of lines. And I think rightfully so, but I think what we've lost, not just in higher education, but also in the broader culture is a way of connecting people. We're very good at emphasizing difference. We're very bad at emphasizing sameness. Or to put it differently, we're very good at deconstructing. We're very bad at affirming. And creating a worldview in which, our children and grandchildren can live and prosper. And so that, that to me is really, really troubling. And this book I wrote called The Superhumanities, I mean, essentially its argument is, look, we're very good at the horizontal. We can talk about how things are social representations or how they privilege some groups and deprivilege others. But what we can't talk about is this vertical dimension, that human beings actually do have experiences of transcendence and they do have experiences of unity, not just with the species, but with the universe.
And we have to find a way of talking about that superhuman as well as the human, which is the social or the horizontal. And the example I give is, you know, it's partly a joke, but it's partly true, no kid grows up saying, I want to be a professor of the humanities, right? If your kid says that you are worried and you should be concerned, if we called them the superhumanities, whoa, Suddenly it's really cool and like we just, you know, we just had Halloween and I don't know about what it's like in your part of the world, but in my part of the world, I would say two out of every three kids was dressed up as a superhuman.
ELISE: hmm.
JEFFREY: kids really want to be superhuman. And the truth is. We are superhuman. We do have these experiences. We do have these anomalous events. So why aren't we talking about that along with all the social criticism and all the reflexivity that I think is absolutely vital to, to a higher education as well. And so I think that denial of the superhuman is part of the denial of what joins us or the sameness or the kind of collective unity that I think we're referring to. And that does worry me. It worries me as not just as an educator, but as a father and a grandfather, I'm like, what are we doing?
ELISE: Yeah. Thinking of the Trinity or, you know, I'm reading, The Wisdom Pattern right now by Father Richard Rohr, and he's at the very beginning, in lieu of an introduction, he's like, here's the trinity in different structures across, I think even does sort of scientific structures, the order, disorder, reorder. This is how it shows up in different traditions. And I agree with you, we're in this postmodern, deconstructing, like the Mean Green meme, the, all of it, right? If we tear it all apart, what are we left with? If we deconstruct truth and and all truth is contextual, then we end up with alternative facts, right?
JEFFREY: I think it's our fault.
ELISE: I do too. It's...
JEFFREY: I think, yeah, I think intellectuals should take responsibility for what has happened. I don't think it's disconnected at all.
ELISE: No, it's definitely our fault. We set the stage for this to happen by saying Jeffrey, your truth is your truth. My truth is my truth and we can't agree on a single narration of history clearly. And therefore, everything's off the table. It's predictable that we would end up in this sort of Nihilism and despair. But do you have hope? How do you think, I mean, I love this idea of the vertical being an organizing principle. Do you think there are going to be enough events, let's call them supernatural in the sense of COVID or storm, typically it's crisis, right? Like complete disrepair that pulls us together. Are we breaking so that we can reconstitute ourselves?
JEFFREY: Well, I hope so. I don't know, of course. So the flip came out right before COVID, by the way, and actually Penguin in London published the book in the spring of 2020, which was when COVID hit. And I did this interview for the BBC and the woman's name was Shaheeda Bari, who has a PhD in philosophy. And Shaheeda asked me point blank what the flip has to do with COVID. And the first thing I said was, okay, that's an unfair question, Shaheeda. I came out of the blue, but then, you know, the second thing I said was, Look, here's what's going to happen, millions of people are going to go on ventilators, and they're going to have near death experiences of all kinds, and they're going to come out of those states. And we are not going to hear them.
ELISE: Mm.
JEFFREY: We're gonna mess this thing up because we have all these really reductive models of what a human being is, and that is exactly what happened, you know, these people came out of these comas and their statements were called COVID mania, you know, among other things, I mean the medical profession, the media, I think just totally Ruin this one. And so I think we had this sort of global encounter with death and transcendence and we just didn't listen And I think there's a lot of things like that in our world. I personally think we're swimming in an ocean of paranormality all the time. I think if you really talk to your friends or your family members they're going to start telling you about precognitive dreams and Encounters with entities and all kinds of really bizarre stuff, but they're not going to tell you those things If you don't ask them in a secure situation and maybe a little alcohol or something is useful too here. So there's really strong social pressures is what I'm trying to say that keeps things to a norm. And it's an illusion is what I'm trying to say. It's an illusion, but it is policed heavily. By all kinds of social norms and the media and by the academy and frankly by the sciences too. And I just think, stop it, just stop doing this. Let people tell their stories and let's deal with the actual situation and not this pretend that you have.
ELISE: Yes.
JEFFREY: and sometimes by the way, sometimes Elise, the pretend is religious. You know, and this is another reason I don't like religion is someone will have an extraordinary experience and they'll come back and they'll talk about it and the religious person will say, well, that didn't happen because of X, Y, and Z, you know, that's not what God's like, or that's not what heaven's like, or whatever it is. And I'm just like, Oh, don't do that. You know, just stop it. Of course, that's what this person experienced. That's what she just said.
ELISE: Mm hmm.
JEFFREY: Again, it's a kind of siding with people and with experiencers very much often against their own cultures and religions. And sometimes it's their very religion that does this. You know, I wrote a book with a near death experience. It was very Jewish, Elizabeth Crone, And she was struck by lightning in the parking lot of her synagogue in 1988, and she had this extraordinary near death experience, and a whole series of paranormal abilities kicked in afterwards, and she couldn't get anybody in her synagogue, any rabbi, to take it seriously. You know, they just wanted to pat her on the head and put her on her way. And yet the Orthodox or the Chabad elements of her Jewish tradition did take it seriously, but she had tremendous, she has tremendous trouble with their kosher and kosher laws and their beliefs around gender and sexuality. And so poor Elizabeth is like kind of suspended in this place where she loves her religious tradition, but it doesn't take her experiences as they were, you know, it tries to put her in a box. And that's where I get really frustrated with religious tradition across the board.
ELISE: Yeah. I loved the section, speaking of sort of the development of new skills, or paranormal or extra perceptive ability, you write about a man who becomes a mathematician after like brutal force to the, like head trauma. one of my friends-- I know a lot of intuitive mediums, her name's Laura Day.
JEFFREY: I know, Laura.
ELISE: You know Laura. So Laura is always like I have a lot of brain damage. I have a traumatized brain. That is 100 percent why my functioned or capable of other perceptions and yet fumble at so many parts of life, and then it also in some ways, like this idea of, I certainly, I don't know if you feel this way, but when I'm really in flow, I feel like I'm channeling something. I don't take pure responsibility for my work. But, I had never heard of this mathematician who died when he was 32, this Indian...
JEFFREY: oh, yeah. Ramanujan. Yeah.
ELISE: Yeah. So, and that we're still proving his theories, however many decades later. But that extra perceptive, like, downloading, even in the sciences, exists, right? It's just not seen
JEFFREY: Of course it does. Of course it does. And then, you know, I think mathematics is actually the hinge of a lot of this, like, you know, if you talk to mathematicians, like people who are really mathematicians about half of them are going to be Platonists, by which I mean, they don't believe that We make mathematics up in the head. They believe we discover it. It's actually there. So there are these two different models of mathematics. One is that it's there, that the mathematical structures are what's actually there. And we're tuning into this when we do the math. And the other is that, no, we're making the math up for pragmatic or practical reasons. And it just happens to work. But the truth is, Mathematics is a purely abstract kind of symbolic activity in the human mind. And it corresponds virtually perfectly to whatever is out there. I mean, we send people to the moon and back with just math, basically.
ELISE: were you writing about this, how it's just symbolic language, essentially?
JEFFREY: It Is symbolic, it's totally symbolic language. but it's symbolic language that actually corresponds to physical reality and that actually really works. And, but, you know, mathematics has this really strong spiritual or mystical element to it For millennia, and modern mathematics, you know, may not or does not, but it still has this background that I think is really worth talking about.
ELISE: Well, it's like sacred geometry. I mean, was it, was it Jung or was it a Jungian who said the world can be explained in math, music, and mythology. That those are like the three primary languages of existence.
JEFFREY: What I'm trying to do in the flip is just show that, you know, take trauma-- I think trauma is a key, by the way, trauma suggests the filter thesis, Elise, right? Because what trauma essentially does is it punctures a hole or compromises brain function or bodily function and let some other capacity or some other ability in, essentially. I think a healthy person with a healthy ego is pretty boring. You know, doesn't have a lot of these experiences. I'm speaking from experience here. You know, the space suits pretty tight. I'm not getting out into space really, but if you puncture a hole in my space suit and you traumatize me, well, maybe, maybe I'll just die. Maybe I'll just die in space. And unfortunately, a lot of trauma is just it's destructive. And it results in mental and physical malfunction.
But some trauma for reasons we don't understand, I think does result in spiritual or cognitive or mystical capacities, particularly later in life. You know, there's a kind of switch that happens, something happens where the trauma is also an opening. And so when I sit down with an experiencer, you know, I've said this many times, there are two things I listen for. I don't tell the experiencer, by the way, and I hope no experiencer is listening to this. And of course they are. But the two things I listen for, one is trauma and the other is sexuality. And virtually every single time there'll be some super traumatic element of their story and it'll often produce some kind of sexuality or gender that's anomalous or marginal in some ways.
And it's never the first time, by the way, either. You know, the first story I hear, it's just the first story. It's just the first. They're testing me, essentially. And as trust develops and the story gets richer and more honest, it gets weirder and weirder and weirder. So I think trauma is key, actually. You know, I even wrote an essay called The Traumatic Secret, and it was very much about what we're talking about.
ELISE: And is that Just to, so is it that they've experienced trauma in their life or that there's a traumatic inciting event that generates experience?
JEFFREY: Often it's a traumatic experience in life, so it might be war, it might be, you know, physical violence on the battlefield, it might be a sexual abuse or a sexual trauma, it might be mental anguish, it might be a physical trauma, a head injury, you know, someone jumps into a pool and strikes their head or something, it might be an illness, it might be a psychedelic trip. Psychedelics, by the way, are extremely traumatizing to ordinary brain function. It might be, I think, meditation. I think a lot of, I think a lot of meditative techniques are essentially a suppression of brain function and are allowing other states of consciousness or mind online, those may not be traumatic. I'm not suggesting they're traumatic, but the same principles at work here, you have to essentially suppress cognitive function to get these other states online as it were.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, it certainly is one way of shaking up certainty, right? Or certitude. Yeah. I mean, this idea that you can predict and maintain an experience based on how you think it should go.
JEFFREY: And it's not just that, it's that, look, we're generally locked into our egos and our reasonable, irrational minds. And these other states are not reasonable and They're not part of the ego, but, so you have to somehow find a way to, to bring them online. This is why sexuality is so important because sexual arousal and sexual activity is one way, one common way that we take ourselves offline, I think, either consciously or unconsciously.
ELISE: So say more about what that means, that someone experiences themselves as like transgender or above gender or multiple gender or that they experience like pansexuality, or?
JEFFREY: We're entirely within a social model of sexuality and gender. I mean, I once gave the inaugural lecture at a new center to study the sexuality studies at Columbia. And what I talked about was that you can actually talk about almost anything today in sexuality studies, except transcendent experiences in and around human sexuality. And the truth is that people often have experiences of God or experiences of the other world or they see entities or they become telepathic or all kinds of stuff happens in and around sexual activity. And they don't talk about these things, you know, generally, because they're usually embarrassed by them and they know that they'll be, they'll sound crazy if they start talking about them. Enough people do talk about them and even write about them. And, and it's fairly easy to gather these experiences together and to start to think about them. So I'm not suggesting there's some link between a particular sexuality or a particular gender and transcendent experiences. I'm just saying that human beings have all kinds of ways of altering their state of mind and body. And sexuality is one of them. It's not the only one. There are lots of others, you know, eating, not eating violence, meditation. I mean, there's all kinds of ways where you can alter your mind and body, but you need, we need to do that to get to these other states generally.
ELISE: Yeah. I mean, one of the things which I feel like the trans movement is pointing us toward when you think of it as instead of cross, but sort of above, or holding a lot of different capacities is one like the gender bending in early Christianity and, or the fact that, you know, Jesus had a male body, a female soul. I wonder often if the soul even is gendered. And then I think, and within the sort of consciousness filter model, I'm convinced that this is not my first rodeo on this planet. And I'm sure I've been a man. I'm certain of it, you know?
JEFFREY: I mean, a lot of religious cultures, you know, have a reincarnation model of the human. And if you have a reincarnation model, you clearly are not the body, you know, and to me, that just throws a lot of this theory into question about embodiment and gender and sexuality. But again, we operate with a kind of flatland model that we are just our bodies. We are just our societies and we have one life, by the way, not many. I mean, that's how theory works in the academy, at least, I happen to think what you think.
ELISE: You must be friends with Brian Weiss. I've never gotten him to agree to an interview, but I've tried for a decade. But, I mean, That book's amazing.
JEFFREY: Yeah, and you know, the children who remember previous lives, the court cases that are at the University of Virginia, I mean, even a lot of very, very skeptical writers point to that as some of the best evidence that we have, actually, of a lot of these unusual states. So, I think it's really serious. It doesn't necessarily prove reincarnation, but it suggests it. And it certainly suggests that memory and identity. I think identity is the other real thing here is not what we think it is. You know, if if a three year old is remembering himself as a fighter pilot in Japan, I mean, clearly, identity is not what it looks like. There are many selves, as it were, inside a person and not just the one that's showing us.
ELISE: And all the more reason to focus on that superhumanity or the vertical and transcendent rather than continuing to cut ourselves into parts.
JEFFREY: Yeah. Yeah. And again, I'm not suggesting an answer here. I'm not suggesting, oh, let's just live in a reincarnational worldview. I'm not saying that, I'm saying let's take this evidence seriously. Let's look at all these cases that, you know, are in the archives at UVA. And let's make this part of our social theory. Let's make this part of our anthropology. Let's make this part of an education, you know, do people even know those cases exist to people? Are you and they aware that Children have memories of previous lives all the time in cultures where there's actually no reincarnation, by the way, either? So what do we do with that?
ELISE: So just, you mentioned Marie Curie studying in her physics research, going into seances, obviously Einstein was interested in this paranormal, supernatural, supernormal, whatever, however you want to define it. And you write really beautifully about how the shaming and sort of jeering shuts this conversation down. Is that what you want to see? That we actually take this seriously?
JEFFREY: Yeah, I do. I mean, so I wrote a history of the paranormal called authors of the impossible. And essentially what it shows is that in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, it was intellectuals and scientists who were doing this. All these words we use, psychical and paranormal, for example, they were invented by academics and intellectuals and scientists. And they were super involved in all of this. Then over the course of the 20th century, it gets shamed essentially, and it gets dismissed, and it's actually not replicable. It doesn't behave like scientific data is supposed to behave. And so there are reasons it gets shamed but my argument is that, look, it's still part of what's happening. And if we're going to develop a model of what The world is, this has to be part of that model. We can't just pretend it doesn't happen, or say it doesn't happen, because it clearly does. And, so yes, I am definitely arguing for a return to these older 19th century and early 20th century models, where the universities and the professions take these things seriously, but that does not mean uncritically, Elise. Again, I'm not suggesting we believe everything even the seances and the spiritualism, I doubt very much those are what they seem to be. you know, I think deception and camouflage is essentially part of the phenomenon and is not tangential to it. And so what does that mean? What does that mean? What does it mean that the spirit that's appearing in the seance or in the bedroom is not actually the spirit that it claims to be? What is going on? What's deceiving us? How is that even possible? These are all questions that we don't ask. And so we don't have any answers for.
ELISE: Well, thank you for your time. I can't wait to have you back.
People like Jeffrey Kripal make me want to go back to school. It’s funny as we were signing off I was saying “Oh, I wanna come do a PhD with you” and he told me that would make me a much worse writer—where I’d be writing for fewer people—who knows? But, I will certainly have him back to discuss The Super Humanities, which I haven’t read but I think may be an antidote for this time that we find ourselves in, where we seem to be falling apart. And then he has anew book coming this summer that looks equally as fascinating. The Flip, you can read it in a day or two, it really is accessible and also quite fascinating and a bid for all of us to stay open, stay uncertain, and stay present with everything that’s here. That everything somehow belongs and we might not yet understand or have a model in which we can easily or clearly articulate that. Maybe we won’t. But the fact that we don’t have that model doesn't mean that these things don’t exist. After we were done we were just chatting and I was saying how there’s such a hunger for these conversations even though they are below the surface for so many people, but that’s what people come to me for the most, is recommendations for intuitives, psychics, astrologers, whatever it may be, typically because someone is yearning for something or they had an experience that they are having difficulty to understand or metabolize or contextualize and we recognize that it’s present and yet it’s often shamed. So this is him writing about what he’s trying to bridge in The Flip, He writes: “The materialist interpretation of the world and of science itself is protected not by the facts or by the state of our honest experiences, but by what is essentially social and professional peer pressure, something more akin to the grade-school playground or high school prom. The world is preserved through eyes rolling back, snide remarks, arrogant smirks and subtle, or not so subtle, social cues, and a kind of professional (or conjugal) shaming.” Alright, I’ll see you next time.
