Jeffrey Kripal is one of our most fascinating scholars of religious studies. For thirty years, he has combined rigorous, even obsessive, readings of religious texts with expansive philosophical and theoretical capacity; he works both small and big.
But he has also courted controversy. In the first phase of his career, Kripal’s work on eroticism and mysticism drew bans and even death threats—in particular, his 1995 book Kali’s Child, which unearthed homoerotic themes in the mystical teachings of Ramakrishna, who is revered as a Hindu saint. A subsequent book, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom (2001), showed how some of the most famous scholars of mysticism were likewise animated by homoerotic inclinations (repressed or otherwise), which shaped their understanding of mysticism itself. This book didn’t lead to death threats, but it did elicit some clutching of pearls.
As for myself, well, at that time, I was a queer graduate student and activist pursuing a Ph.D. in religion (more precisely, in “Jewish thought”), studying the sexual-spiritual mysticism of Jewish heretics while moonlighting as an amateur mystic myself. So I was all in.
That period of controversy, though, pales in comparison to the most recent phase of Kripal’s work, in which he has “come out” as a believer, sort of, in the paranormal. His most recent book, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (University of Chicago Press, 2024), is the summation of this work, which now spans ten years, four scholarly volumes, and three popular books.
As Mark Oppenheimer noted in his 2010 essay on an earlier Kripal volume, the academy tolerates metaphysical commitments when it comes to mainstream religionists. After all, I’m now a rabbi/Ph.D. Yet when it comes to non-ordinary experiences, many in the academy think that Kripal has drunk the paranormal Kool-Aid. The headline of Oppenheimer’s piece said it all: “Burning Bush They’ll Buy, but Not ESP or U.F.O.’s.”
This bias is bullshit, Kripal says. It’s loaded with colonialism and racism, it has no basis in anything other than pre-existing (and flimsy) metaphysical commitments, and, if you consider what the overwhelming majority of human beings have believed and experienced across history, it’s disbelief in magic or the occult, not belief, that’s anomalous.
On one level, Kripal insists that he is simply following the evidence. At Rice University, he has assembled the “Archives of the Impossible,” a massive library of accounts of all manner of paranormal activity: pre-cognition, UFOs, NDEs, ESP, demons, angels, aliens. The evidence—testimonies, scientific evidence, even physical artifacts—is overwhelming. “Comparison is about data, yes,” he insists in How to Think, “but it is also about theory or modeling what the data taken as a whole suggest.”
And the data, Kripal says, suggest that “people really do dream the future, leave their bodies in disaster or illness, see hairy creatures or gigantic insectoids, and encounter craft flying over cities or conscious balls of light in their living rooms and werewolves in their backyards.”
“Impossible” is meant literally. “If conventional materialism is true,” Kripal writes, “these things cannot be.” And yet, the materialist explanations of these phenomena—delusion, dream, deception—are so inconsistent with the data that they seem more like desperate attempts to preserve a certain metaphysics than any real account. Says Kripal, “the problem is the lame rhetoric and unquestioned assumptions, not the phenomena themselves.”
Still, Kripal would also be the first to agree that his last few books have ventured well into what Robert Anton Wilson called Chapel Perilous, that epistemically uneasy space between imagination, paranoia, and total metaphysical weirdness. If the paranormal is real, then what isn’t real? In Chapel Perilous, it’s exquisitely hard to know. Maybe I’m receiving messages from space aliens on Sirius, maybe the number 23 has mysterious powers. Or maybe, since this is 2025 after all, COVID was created by Bill Gates, QAnon is real, and raw milk is good for you. You can see where all this goes: Chapel Perilous is a gateway not just to eccentricity, but to the kind of magical (and dangerous) thinking now commonplace among denizens of conspirituality, RFK Jr., and Joe Rogan.
For example, Kripal embraces a “block” theory of time—according to which time is one big chunk, without linear causality. This includes the possibility of reverse temporal causation, which is when events in the present change events in the past (Kripal here discusses Jewish scholar Elliot Wolfson’s embrace of this position, which I clearly remember reading and rereading when he first made it, since I was sure I was misunderstanding him). That is a fascinating, but also pretty weird, position.
Maybe I’m receiving messages from space aliens on Sirius, maybe the number 23 has mysterious powers. Or maybe, since this is 2025 after all, Covid was created by Bill Gates, QAnon is real, and raw milk is good for you.
Or take another suddenly-fashionable weird belief: Simulation Theory, which holds that the true reality of this world is that it is a Matrix-like simulation by some higher intelligence in “root level” reality. In one interview, Kripal discussed the U.S. government’s (real, not tin-hat) investigations of UFOs (now rebranded, by the way, as UAPs, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) in this way:
Dubbed “Project Stargate,” as if we are living in a science fiction movie (I suspect we are), this program was funded by most of the U.S. branches of the military and intelligence communities.
Note that parenthetical. Though hedged by the verb “suspect,” Kripal is saying we’re living in The Matrix. Weird stuff, right? But then again, one of the most powerful men in the world, Elon Musk, believes in it also. Two thirds of Americans believe in some form of supernatural or paranormal phenomena. Sixty-three percent believe in hell. So maybe the real weirdos are people who don’t believe in spooks. Not only weird, but also WEIRD, the acronym coined in 2010 by Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich, which stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. WEIRD isn’t bad—Henrich attributes many of the successes of modernity to these qualities—but it is psychologically and culturally unusual. Even anomalous.
Kripal also challenges scholars to be honest about our own experiences. Kripal’s previous book, The Superhumanities (2022), is about how the “fantastic” and paranormal undergird the work of authors, artists, and activists: “precognitive dreams, evolving superhumans, and doubled selves.” This is based not on whim but on statements by figures like Mark Twain and Zora Neale Hurston, Nietzsche and Kant. Says Kripal, “there is something cosmic or superhuman smoldering in the human.” And, he says, we scholars sort of know it, but don’t admit it, because after all, we want to seem respectable.
Thus, Kripal insists, religionists need to do more than teach comparatively, critically, and historically. “That is not enough,” he writes. “I have long insisted on something special or something left over that none of these ways and days can quite capture or explain … the strange, the fantastic, the misbehaving or rogue aspects of religious experience…. And so I also teach people to think about religion experientially and, perhaps most controversially, empirically.” Religion, mysticism, and the paranormal, he says, may in fact be about “actual human encounters with consciousness and the cosmos.”
Why, Kripal asks, did we study religion in the first place? Probably because we were drawn to something inexplicable. (I admit that is true for me, and that my own life experience has a lot of materialistically inexplicable phenomena in it.) And yet both conservative rationalists and progressive theorists, Kripal says, reduce religion, magic, and the paranormal to something else: psychology, race and gender, social organization, power. “[T]he secular scientisms, nihilistic materialisms, and unbelievable fundamentalisms of contemporary American culture are truly saddening…. We are depressed because we are, deep down, perfectly sane…. We are disgusted because we know better and more than this.” Kripal says scholars must be both Clark Kent and Superman, both attentive to the critical apparatus of scholarship and open to something more. “The secret of this kind of higher education is not about being one or the other. The secret is in the phone booth.”
How to Think Impossibly is about how to build, and pass through, the epistemic phone booth. How to perform “the flip,” as Kripal called it in his 2019 general-audience book of the same name: the flip from materialist metaphysics to something stranger, yet pervasive across humanity.
Perhaps a first step is to accept that the right brain, not just the left, can be the bearer of truth. “The imagination, particularly within altered states, can become a revelatory translator of paranormal perception and not simply a spinner of daytime fantasies and banal nocturnal dreams.” Supernatural experiences are all pointing at something, but are also all interpretations of that something that are not quite that thing. “The phenomenon reflects to us what we will, what we fear, who we think we are.”
But these experiences are also not just in our imagination. “Deep down,” Kripal continues, “I suspect that robust paranormal phenomena are not personal or individual at all but fundamentally nonhuman or superpersonal—in a word, ‘cosmic.’” Put differently, they are real.
This is impossible, right? Yes and no. Because things get even stranger…
Paranormal phenomena happen in the material world, says Kripal, because Consciousness creates them. Events like UFO encounters and pre-cognition involve both “revelation and radar”—consciousness and materiality, imagination and science. There is contact (“revelation”) with something ineffably Other, which the experiencer’s mind interprets according to its own cosmology and beliefs—and that creates the physical phenomenon, e.g., the blips on the radar.
But there’s one last kicker: all of this is happening not in your separate, individual mind, but in one common Consciousness (I’ve long wondered if the recourse to capitalization is itself a sign of madness). The experience “is not about a mind. It is about Mind.”
“There is something cosmic or superhuman smoldering in the human.”
Here is where Kripal arrives, toward the end of How to Think, at a metaphysical conclusion: specifically, “dual-aspect monism,” the view that the entire universe and also consciousness is One—your consciousness reading these words is the same as mine writing them—but that human beings experience it as Two: as mind and matter, spirit and stuff, and so on.
In one recent iteration, dual-aspect monism is the subject of a book by Harald Atmanspacher and Dean Rickles, and is akin to what is known as double-aspect theory. But it is also found in numerous philosophical and religious traditions, including Vedanta Hinduism, “Mind-Only” Buddhism, some forms of Jewish mysticism (including ground covered in a book of mine), and the writings of Jung, Hegel, and Spinoza. Yes, as I once wrote, everything is happening in your head—only it isn’t your head.
And this one cosmic Reality creates both the imaginative experience of revelation and the physical reality of the radar blip. Says Kripal, “reality is ontologically One but epistemologically Two…. The mental (psychological) and the material (physical) are aspects of one underlying reality which itself is psychophysically neutral (that is, neither mental nor material).” Kripal writes elsewhere that “cosmos and consciousness cannot be separated.”
This is heady stuff, no pun intended. Hegel’s Absolute, Spinoza’s scientia intuitiva, the Pauli-Jung conjecture, synchronicity, quantum entanglement—these are the residents of Kripal’s Chapel Perilous, which offers, we are told, “a kind of spirituality that transcends the mind matter split, which we might call post-religious or post-secular…. Both Spinoza’s intellectual intuition and Hegel’s Absolute join in with such most fundamental immanent experiences, which are often described as mystical revelations.”
In sum, Kripal writes, “I believe that what is symbolically encountered in these fantastic events is the real world manifesting in the body-brain of the experiencer in ways that the person can hear and integrate in some fashion—which is to say that these events are mediated by the ‘imagination’ … a function or dimension of consciousness as such. I believe we should not believe the literal contents of such imaginal productions or movies, but we should nevertheless watch and listen to them with great care and attention as moments of contact, communion, and communication with the real…. I mean to refer to a presence that is cosmic, everywhere, everywhen, because it is nowhere and nowhen.”
This, then, is the flip: the flip to a kind of monist pantheism. The brain is in the mind; the mind is not in the brain. And there is only one Mind. Says Kripal, “The flip makes the impossible possible.”
So where does this leave us? I can only say where it leaves me.
On the one hand, Kripal’s critiques of materialism and reductionism are quite appealing. “Rare, indeed, is the human civilization that believes that there is only insentient matter, and that all forms of sentience are accidental byproducts of this dead stuff… That is how conventional science works—by rendering reality into two and then ignoring one whole side of it.” Yes, I thought to myself, this is what I have experienced, and what I believe. And Kripal’s not-quite-Vedanta dual-aspect monism does offer a way to understand the “impossible” experiences in my own life.
On the other hand, it is 2025. Is materialistic science really the enemy anymore? Are the people destroying our civic society too rationalistic, or not rationalistic enough? My country is about to be governed by a coalition including Christian Nationalists, conspiracy theorists, anti-intellectual populists, and anti-science wackadoos (together with kleptocrats, plutocrats, and others, of course). I grant that in the ivory tower, there may be too little respect given to the paranormal and the mysterious. But that ivory tower is soon to be under siege by latter-day barbarians.
Obviously I don’t mean to suggest that Kripal finds common cause with this coalition of the wretched. He is clear, in How to Think, that it is absurd to take any one iteration of reality at literal face value. He insists on a Both/And (a favorite value of mine as well) including both left-brained, scientific, critical inquiry and a right-brained openness to the sacred and the poetic. And one of Kripal’s points is that, to some extent anyway, elite and popular cultures’ marginalization of the sacred has contributed to the resurgence of revanchist traditionalism in political, cultural, and religious forms. Maybe an integration of myth, magic, and the “impossible” into the Cathedral might yet play a role in our society’s eventual renewal.
But I wonder. I wonder what role Kripal’s post-secularism plays in a society governed by pre-secularism, or incomplete secularism. I wonder not just about the theocrats but also about the conspiritualists, the horseshoe-populists, the psychedelic-Trumpists, the neo-traditionalists, the increasing legions of people who seamlessly weave an embrace of the occult with a politics of cruelty. I love the boldness, weirdness, and sheer bravura of How to Think Impossibly. But beyond the very elite cloisters Kripal calls to account, I wonder where it leaves us.