New Realities recorded on January 24, 2012
Summary
Alan Steinfeld interviews Jeffrey Kripal, author of a book on the relationship between superhero comics and mysticism. They discuss the idea of a “super story” in Western culture, where popular culture reflects deep esoteric and mystical truths. Kripal suggests that paranormal experiences and the superhero mythos are manifestations of a greater, “supernormal” aspect of humanity that we are gradually evolving to understand and integrate.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities. This is Alan Steinfeld. Each week on this program I explore what I feel is a kind of new direction in our popular culture, a new way of understanding reality, and an evolution of consciousness. So tonight’s guest is part of building a new direction for culture. He is the Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University. He is also the author of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, Authors of the Impossible, and this amazing new book that I’ve just spent the week or so reading, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, Jeffrey Kripal. Thank you for being here. You know, the book is quite an overview of, I would say, popular culture as told through the eyes of the comic book industry, but not just limited to that. It’s sort of hard to sum up what the book is about. How would you sum it up?
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, the book is about what I call a super story that I think has been developing for about 150 years now. By the super story, I mean it’s a kind of grand mythology that Western culture has been producing through popular culture, starting with early proto-science fiction in the 19th century, moving through pulp fiction in the 1930s and 40s, science fiction 50s and 60s, and then layered on top of that all of the superhero comics and how that all intertwines with various mystical and alternative religious movements in the 19th and 20th centuries. So it’s about that super story and what it looks like if you step back and look at all of those stories, not individually, but as a whole, as it were.
Alan Steinfeld
I thought it was a fascinating read and all the different characters and people that you bring and highlight. I was surprised, especially in the comic book world, that they were so mystical and spiritually minded, because my reading of comic books was superheroes that just had these strengths and abilities that were more physically based. I did not realize there was this mystical element to it. Of course, I was maybe too young to even appreciate that.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, you’re right. I mean, most of the superhero storylines are in fact about things blowing up and hitting each other in the face. It’s a pretty basic plot line designed for adolescent boys. But the genres come so far, and even in its early days, it had writers and artists who were just steeped in this sort of metaphysical and occult lore, and that’s really what the book is about, trying to mine those gems out of that mountain of storytelling.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, you do, and you take a real gnostic, esoteric point of view, I feel, in the sense that you keep coming back to this idea of the super story, and in the sense that there’s something writing us, or the people you highlight sort of say there’s this bigger story that this level of reality is really just the tip of an iceberg of a huge underworld occult that’s happening around us and through us and beyond us. Is that fair to say?
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, that is fair to say. I mean, one of the things I do is show how in case after case, when you look at these professional artists and these professional writers, that when they report having some kind of spiritual experience or paranormal experience, as they usually put it, it’s as if they’re caught in a novel. It’s as if they’re being written. It’s as if they suddenly realize they’re embedded in a kind of cosmic movie of some kind. And so it’s that sense of being caught in a story that you’re not really writing, that you’re in some sense being written, that fascinates me so much because I think a lot of these paranormal events are about that. They’re about that kind of broader and deeper creativity that is working through us. We’re not exactly doing it, it’s in some sense being done to us.
Alan Steinfeld
Other people like Eckhart Tolle have even said, life is living us, we’re not living life. And so I think it’s such a strong identification in the West with our ego-based nature that we’ve forgotten that mystical position that probably most of humanity has lived by.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah. I’m a big fan of Eckhart Tolle. I totally understand what he’s saying there. That’s a very common trope in mystical literature.
Alan Steinfeld
So I was surprised to hear that you were actually a professor of religion because your perspective seems to be way beyond classical, fundamental religious points of view, whatever religion that would be, and a much broader spectrum. How do you integrate your religious teachings, as a teacher of religion, I suppose at Rice University, with this bigger picture of what’s really going on in the super story?
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, I’m not a teacher of religion. I’m a historian of religions. I don’t teach a particular religion at Rice. Rice University is a secular research university. We don’t promote any religion. We teach young people how to think about religion in comparative, historical, and critical ways. So in fact, being a professor of religious studies requires one to step out of any particular religious worldview, at least for a time, and to apply an even lens to all religious systems. And by all, I don’t mean four or five. I mean the hundreds of thousands of religious systems that we know something about in human history.
Alan Steinfeld
I appreciate that perspective. In a way, you could have even written this book, instead of using comic books, you could have used it as an overview of the history of religion with all the mutants and mystics that were involved in those stories.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, and of course, that’s what I did in my other books. I mean, this is the sixth book I’ve written. The first three books were primarily about Hinduism and Catholicism and Jewish mysticism. The fourth book was on the human potential movement in California and the counterculture. And the fifth book was on the paranormal and the psychical. And so this is just, I just happen to be looking at popular culture here, but I’m still asking the same questions that I’ve asked in all the other books, too.
Alan Steinfeld
So what keeps hitting me over and over again, and also through my own experiences, is that there’s obviously a world that we only glimpse. And that seems obvious from the people you highlight, that they glimpse it off and on and then they create these artworks or writings. And then there’s this normal daze that comes over us. My question is, are we always going to be split between this higher state of consciousness and these glimpses of paranormal, or do you feel we are evolving towards a unity where the paranormal and that superconscious will be more of our everyday world?
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, of course I don’t know the answer to that. My hope is that the human psyche is gradually evolving to a place of fuller integration. My own sense is that in a previous era, when human beings would have encountered gods or demons or something, those would have been experienced as completely other, as somehow in the environment, as objective things out somewhere in space time. And I think what’s happened to us in the modern world is we’ve begun to realize that those things, those experiences are very real and very important, but they’re probably some manifestation of us. They’re probably human in some in some basic way. And that to me is already a kind of integration. We’re no longer so schizophrenic, as it were, that we’re trying to put our psychic world back together. Now we haven’t got there. We happen to be living in a moment that denies completely those levels or dimensions of the human being. But that’s what I find so interesting about these popular cultural materials, is they affirm that level or that depth in very dramatic and quite colorful ways.
Alan Steinfeld
I think you come closer to it than anyone I’ve read in sort of moving humanity up the scale to integration. There was that book I read, Daimonic Reality.
Jeffrey Kripal
Patrick Harpur.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, great book, but he seems to have more of a fine line between those daimonic or the visionary worlds and the human everyday mechanisms.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah.
Alan Steinfeld
And I think what you’ve just said there, and in this book, that there is hope that this evolution of the psyche will welcome an integration of things that we have yet to understand. Right.
Jeffrey Kripal
And again, I have to frame that as a hope. It’s not something I know. But my gut sense again is that all of these sorts of experiences are somehow us, but it’s an us that’s vastly greater and vastly more interesting than we tend to think of in our secular culture. So when I say they’re human, I don’t mean they’re mundane and banal. I mean they’re superhuman. They’re super normal, to use the language of the book.
Alan Steinfeld
And it seems like in the spiritual literature and channeling literature and the whole New Age that has come and gone, there’s this idea of the divinity within us that we are becoming, in a sense, superheroes. That may be a fantasy, but it was a sort of aspect of popular culture in the 80s that I still hold on to.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, yeah, that’s of course an ancient theme. It’s what I refer to in the book as humanism too. And the way that’s usually framed historically is that there’s a divinity inside us, or there are particular human beings that are actually gods in disguise. So there’s Jesus as the incarnation of God, or there’s the avatars of Hinduism, or the Buddhas of Buddhism. There’s certain human beings in the world that in fact are much more than human. And I think what you get with the superhero mythology is a kind of distant cousin of that where we all have this secret identity, as it were. We’re all Clark Kents walking around pretending to be ordinary, but we’re actually on some level Superman. And so that’s an ancient, ancient mystical intuition that in our own world has become a pop cultural genre.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, it’s become pop, but it is true, part of the Gnostics were aware of that and maybe some other mystics, but they pretty much said that, that we’re all the Christ as it were.
Jeffrey Kripal
So I agree with you, my personal belief and why I do this program and search out people every week is that we are evolving towards this holism, this way of integrating that divine aspect of ourselves and living it somehow. I don’t know how it will show up as a cultural phenomenon because our culture is pretty much based on this idea of more and less, and haves and have nots. But my hope is for this evolution to occur. I think we are building towards something. I mean, you highlight in the last chapter Whitley Strieber’s life, in a sense. And he’s someone who has no doubt, he’s lived these other realities. And I’ve met Whitley and I’ve interviewed him, and I don’t doubt that his reality is… maybe not exactly what he says it is, but it’s something.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, even he would say that. He knows that what he experienced isn’t exactly what’s there. It’s filtered through his literary imagination. But he also knows that there’s a “there” there, that something is in fact being transmitted through the images and through these experiences. And again, that’s kind of the theme of my book, that the imagination in some rare cases, like that of Whitley, is not just spinning out fantasies, it’s actually mediating or translating some other reality into images, into stories, into plots.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, and you do mention art being a vital aspect of that. I agree. I think the artists have been able to tap into those other worlds and without getting it tangled up in speech, been able to portray it to others that then sense a greater reality that is all around them.
Jeffrey Kripal
Right.
Alan Steinfeld
Like the work of Alex Grey, do you know his work?
Jeffrey Kripal
Oh, sure. Yeah.
Alan Steinfeld
I think Alex does that very well. Of course, Alex doesn’t hide the fact that it was stimulated by some psychoactive substances.
Jeffrey Kripal
Right.
Alan Steinfeld
I think there may have been a place for that, but I think there’s something seems to be awakening in everyone. And I don’t know if it’s the common mythology of 2012, but we do seem to be perceiving more and more subtle realms. More people are talking about psychic experiences, and something seems to be emerging. Do you notice that, or is it not in the academic world, maybe just because I’m so caught up in that scene, that’s all I’m seeing?
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, I think that’s there. I think that’s been there for quite a while. I mean, there was certainly an almost apocalyptic sense in the 60s and 70s too, that the old order was ending and a new order was beginning. And I’m sure that’s present now as well. My own sense as a historian is that’s often been around, and it’s an important part of human religious experience. So whether there’s more or less of it today, that’s really hard to say. I don’t know how one would measure that.
Alan Steinfeld
I just think in seeing the literature and the bestsellers or whatever. If this other realm really exists for humanity and that we are beings capable of it, do you feel, not to get into conspiracies, that we’ve been kept from this? Do you feel we’ve been kept from that part of ourselves purposely, or is it part of our natural evolution to become more conscious?
Jeffrey Kripal
I am not a fan of any kind of conspiracy theory, to be really honest. I think conspiracy theories require far too much intelligence and organization on the part of things like government. And I belong to lots of different organizations through life, none of which were capable of these kinds of conspiracies. So I just don’t think organizations are that sophisticated. I don’t think we’ve been kept from it by any kind of organization or being. I think it’s more a natural limitation of our human development, just kind of where we’re at in the cultural and evolutionary chain, as it were. You know, it’s sort of like a six-year-old child isn’t kept from knowing what a 14-year-old knows or a 24-year-old knows. He or she just isn’t cognitively capable of knowing it yet. And I sort of feel that way about these sorts of spiritual and metaphysical subjects. It’s not that someone’s keeping us caged or keeping us ignorant. It’s that we just don’t have the cognitive or spiritual chops yet to really understand these things. And my hope, and again it’s a hope, is that we will, and we’ll essentially grow up, we’ll mature. And what only a few people like Eckhart Tolle know now, lots of people will know in the future. Probably never everyone, but it will become more and more common.
Alan Steinfeld
I think that’s my point of view, that it’s starting as a movement. If you just take popular culture, sort of “occupy your mind and spirit” type thing that’s been happening since the 80s. And a lot of it’s been very fluffy and unreal, but some of it has been key changing worldviews.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah. And I think even the stuff that’s been fluffy has often been very genuine and very sincere. People move into these alternative religious worlds because the old ones don’t work anymore. And I think we have to acknowledge that and we have to really honor people for leaving worlds that don’t work anymore. And if they end up creating something that isn’t immediately sophisticated or satisfying, that’s okay. You know, we’re all trying, we’re all in the same boat here as it were.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, it’s true, and you demonstrate through a lot of the people you mentioned in the book, a sort of evolution of their own consciousness. One of the people that stand out for me is Alvin Schwartz.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah.
Alan Steinfeld
Can you talk about him a little bit, because he was probably maybe the most fascinating person you mentioned.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well Alvin, Alvin by the way just passed away a couple months ago, so we’ve lost Alvin since the book appeared. In fact, I don’t think he probably saw the book, so… Alvin, to just kind of tell your listeners, Alvin Schwartz was actually an aspiring novelist in the 30s. And like many novelists, could not make a living doing that. So he essentially became a comic strip writer. And he wrote a lot of the Batman and Superman strips in the 40s and 50s. And he hated it, by the way. He hated writing superhero stuff, it was kind of humiliating to him. He eventually then left that world and got into screenwriting and did a lot of documentaries for the Canadian government, a lot of science stuff. But in the 80s and 90s started to return to his comic writing because he began to notice all of these strange coincidences in his life around the Superman and Batman characters. And in the last 20 years he wrote two memoirs, one on Superman and one on Batman, which are really not memoirs, they’re really metaphysical manifestos. And he interprets Superman essentially as a pop cultural trope for the spiritual life, where again, that we all have this secret self, this Superman self that is outside of space and time and is therefore immortal and infinite and in some sense all-powerful. And yet we have to live in the world, we have to live in the daily world of language and work as Clark Kents. And so his later end-of-life manifestos are really reflections on what human identity is and how we can use a fantasy, a comic like Superman or Batman to think about that.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, he’s very deeply metaphysical. He goes into some quite altered states and taps into some beings and entities.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, he has an experience with a channeled being named Ray. He reports all these extraordinary coincidences. He talks about all of these things in those last two books. Alvin was a sweetheart and he was, I never met him physically, I corresponded with him at some length. He was a very gracious, very lovely man. He lived into his mid or late 90s actually, so he lived a good, good life.
Alan Steinfeld
And towards the end of his life, was he glimpsing these other realities more?
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, it appears so. I mean, he doesn’t say that, but he clearly has a kind of… well, his writing clearly shows a metaphysical turn late in life, whether he’s having more or less of that than he did in midlife, I don’t know, but it certainly appears that way from the outside.
Alan Steinfeld
I’m just curious about you personally. It seems like almost the writing itself, writing these books, might be a sort of spiritual practice for you to tap into other realms. Do you have something that reminds you of this other part, this Superman part of you?
Jeffrey Kripal
Well again, remember, I spend my life, I’ve spent my life studying mystics and I’ve been steeped in their work and their literature for 30 years now. So that’s my worldview, is this mystical literature. And writing for me, my basic practice is in fact writing. I think writing and reading, we grossly, grossly underestimate. I think they’re essentially magical practices that alter who we are and how we think and what we can perceive. And I’ve had some of my most fantastic experiences, you know, writing essentially, where weird things happen around the process of writing. So for me, this model of the paranormal as an experience of being written is not just a description of other people, it’s also a kind of confession, I suppose.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, I’m glad you said that because you do keep coming back to this: that we are being written by this divine part or this higher self, whatever we want to call that part, that in a sense we really are. This is the illusion, you know. The Clark Kent identity is illusionary.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, and that’s what’s so extraordinary about the Superman myth, is you know, Superman is who he really is. Clark Kent is a pose, it’s a mask, as it were. And whereas with a lot of the other heroes, you know, they’re really some normal person and then they play the superhero at night or in some other fashion, but with Superman as it’s been pointed out many times, including by Alvin Schwartz, he’s actually Superman, and Clark Kent is the mask.
Alan Steinfeld
I think there’s some truth to that. I think that’s a profound truth actually about human nature, is that yes, we’re all persons, we’re all egos. You know, the word person comes from the Latin for mask. We’re all masks, but we also all die, those masks go away, those egos go away. And if we’re to believe the religious traditions, something else persists, some other kind of Superman self. And so that’s what I’m trying to get at in the book.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, I get that, and you do get at that, and it’s very colorful the way you do get there, because you’re giving a context to something people ignore, like comic books, and showing the importance of our cultural evolution and opening up to new realities, really.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah. Well, that’s the goal.
Alan Steinfeld
You point out the importance of this culture that sort of conditions the emerging youth from the 30s on, in a sense. It’s been part of our subculture, it’s almost part of an education.
Jeffrey Kripal
Right. Yeah, it originates in about 1938 is when the superhero genre comes online, but again it’s older than that. You know, when I write about this Alan, I’m not just… it’s not just historical. I mean, I actually think we have superpowers. And you know, of course we don’t crawl on walls and fly to the sun and back as I like to say. But human beings do routinely know what’s going to happen before it happens. They do have out-of-body experiences. They do have these sensations of flying. I think those things are very real, very human, and that we need to we need to own up to that.
Alan Steinfeld
Oh absolutely. I have an interview I did with Russell Targ where I’m remote viewing right on camera, getting the target that he had.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well Russell of course appears in the book too, doesn’t he?
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, Russell’s a great guy. You know what I felt from people like Russell, particularly, he was a good transmitter. I was able somehow to tap into his thoughts easier, maybe because he’s a practiced sender or something, but it was very easy for me to realize that superhero part of myself in his presence.
Jeffrey Kripal
Right, because he he really believes in it as well.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, and there’s something, I guess that you don’t include here, but in a sense, the understanding of the field, and maybe you do refer to it in some ways, but we live in a kind of field of energy that I think that there’s an awareness that we pick up from the field about what’s really going on. I mean, Rupert Sheldrake talks about that, and Lynne McTaggart.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well I don’t talk about the field, but I do talk a lot about radiation, right? This trope of altered states of energy that people report constantly, and that’s part of this notion of a field, I think.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah. I do like the way you go through the developmental process of this book in the seven chapters that you create, which is in a way a sort of spiritual path, in a sense.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well no, it definitely is. It’s a kind of hero’s journey where, you know, you start out and you travel and there’s a journey, there’s a there’s a series of conflicts or battles, and then you come back to realize that it that it’s you finally.
Alan Steinfeld
And that’s exactly sort of the way you take the reader through the book, you know? And you know, you’re right. I never thought of it, but reading and writing are mystical experiences. They’re almost telepathic. I am getting your thoughts in my head through these images on a page. It’s almost hard to explain that.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, you know, this is something that Stephen King once pointed out. He wrote a little book called On Writing, and it’s a beautiful little book on how to be a writer. And he says exactly what you just said. He says, you know, I can put down on a piece of paper my thoughts and my emotions and my state of mind today, and someone can pick up a page 40, 50 years down the time stream, and they can recreate virtually exactly what I’m thinking and feeling and seeing. And he says, if that’s not telepathy, I don’t know what is. So there’s something incredibly strange about writing and reading that we really don’t understand, I think because it’s so common. We take it for granted, when what’s actually happening is fundamentally weird.
Alan Steinfeld
It is, yeah, I agree. I mean, I think the case what Stephen King just mentioned only works as far as a similar culture and worldview. If I was to have a different worldview I might not relate to those words in the same way, I would create my own meaning. That may have been his super-conscious intention on another level, but…
Jeffrey Kripal
Well that’s true. And again remember that that’s faithful to a lot of the narratives around UFO encounters, that there’s a kind of telepathic link set up, but they don’t always understand what’s being communicated to them, because the presumption is the cultural difference is too great. So even in these sorts of paranormal encounters, that notion of different cultures and having to to be translated is is there as well.
Alan Steinfeld
I think you make that point, in the last pages of the book you say we are a non-dual system of consciousness and a culture evolving itself in loop after loop. But consciousness needs culture to know itself as and in us, just as culture needs consciousness to exist at all. So you’re saying there’s the local culture and there’s the universal consciousness, and I think that’s exactly what I was trying to say.
Jeffrey Kripal
That’s right, that’s exactly what I was trying to say. And there’s a kind of loopy connection there. It’s not as if we ever have access to that universal consciousness as it really is, we have access to it, but it’s always mediated by our local culture. And it’s not a matter of either/or, it’s a matter of both/and.
Alan Steinfeld
So we need the culture and the culturally based ego in order to interpret what the cosmic consciousness is saying.
Jeffrey Kripal
I think so. I mean, Alan, if we didn’t have the ego and we didn’t have culture, you and I could not be having this conversation. Every word were using is a cultural code. And so culture allows us to communicate with one another, it allows us to have awareness at all as an ego. But I don’t think any of that would be possible if there were not this this other form of consciousness behind it all driving it. I don’t think you can just create an ego or a person out of nothing. Consciousness has to be there to to do that.
Alan Steinfeld
And that’s what we are, essentially. Not just you, but many of the Eastern religions say we are that consciousness, the ego is this game, illusion, mask, persona that we’re pretending to be in this embodiment.
Jeffrey Kripal
That’s right. That’s the basic idea.
Alan Steinfeld
But then let me ask you, if we are that, and I haven’t heard a good answer from anyone, why did we incarnate? What were we here to learn?
Jeffrey Kripal
Right, so this is the basic question that no religion can answer. This is what we call theodicy. If we’re already perfect, if we’re already God to use the Asian model, why in the hell did we have to, you know, why are we having to be Alan Steinfeld and Jeff Kripal now? What did we do wrong to deserve this, right?
Alan Steinfeld
Or not wrong.
Jeffrey Kripal
And so the version of that in the West is, if there is a God and this God is an infinite being of love and power, then why do we suffer? Why do we die? Why do we have to be here? And you know, Eckhart Tolle’s answer to that is we can’t know, there’s no way to know that. He essentially says, I don’t have an answer, and I don’t think we can have one. What Ramtha says, and I studied with Ramtha the channel, he says we come in so God can know itself. Like if we are just consciousness, we don’t really get what creation is, we don’t… you know, we could paint the painting, but until you are in the painting, you’re not realizing the true value of what it’s all about.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, that’s a version of what I say at the end of the book, is that consciousness needs culture to know itself, right? That’s basically a version of the ego’s necessary so that consciousness can be aware of itself. If there’s no ego, if there’s no culture, there may be pure consciousness, but it hasn’t reflected back on itself. It hasn’t done that double loop yet. Again, I don’t know, I mean Alan, I’m as confused and as humble about this as anyone. These are just guesses, of course.
Alan Steinfeld
No, I’m not saying you know, and I don’t think anyone can absolutely say this is how it is. But your educated guess, for me, is valuable because you’ve looked into this, you’ve researched it, you’ve done work on your own psyche and consciousness. So it’s just curious and maybe someone listening will get a spark of inspiration because of whatever insights you’ve had or I’ve had. So it’s not that we’re here to know, we’re here to play.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, I know I’m happy and I think they’re more than guesses. I think educated guesses, particularly when they’re backed up by sort of intuitive hunches, are usually on the right path. They may not be entirely correct, but they’re heading in the right direction.
Alan Steinfeld
And not only that, all the people you highlight on some level have an insight into this other realm. And they’re not related to each other. They come out of it from many, many different perspectives, yet what you really bring out together is there is a metaphysics to these mystics and mutants. There’s a similarity in a kind of otherworldly worldview that seems to be happening.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, that’s correct.
Alan Steinfeld
So if these people who have had insights can get a glimpse of the landscape of the other, then there’s something I feel that we can learn and listen and in a way almost hold to be true.
Jeffrey Kripal
Right, we can sort of triangulate it, right? If you get enough angles on the same thing, it appears to be the same object and the object’s probably really there.
Alan Steinfeld
Yes, absolutely. But these only plant seeds until we have the experience, you know? The teachings I’ve been to say you can learn all you want, but it’s not wisdom until you have the experience of it. So I think that’s the most value in a book like yours, is you’re giving people an opportunity to go down a certain road so perhaps the experience will come to them.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, that’s the hope.
Alan Steinfeld
And you’ve had experiences. I mean, you don’t really go into it in this book, but you… anyone who’s on this path to find out has had… seek and you will find. And absolutely, I’ve had out-of-body experiences, I’ve had deep meditations where I transcended the personality. So do you want to talk about, you have that experience in India. I know it’s a separate book, but you’ve had experiences that pointed you in the way of awareness.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, that’s right. I think most people who write about mysticism or mystical literature have had some kind of mystical experience, and that’s certainly the case with me. You know, scholars aren’t just eggheads, we’re not just talking heads, we’re human beings too. And we’ve been out of our body and we’ve had anomalous experiences, and we’re simply trying to use the tools of our trade to understand these things. So absolutely, I mean I open this book with a brief description of an experience I had in Calcutta in 1989, which involved some extraordinary anomalous energies that entered my body in a kind of dream state and took me out of the body actually. And I relate that experience of being zapped essentially or radiated to a lot of the superhero myths, and a lot of the biographies of psychics and mediums whose careers often begin with some kind of similar radiation or zapping.
Alan Steinfeld
Maybe that’s why comic books and superheroes are so popular, because deep down we know it’s true, that it’s real.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, that’s the thesis of the book, you just nailed the thesis. That’s exactly what I say in the introduction, is that my sense of why these genres are so popular is they’re intuitive hits on our real super nature.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. And I think writing this book and Whitley’s books and I think what is really happening is that we are restructuring the culture so these aren’t kept in the closet, these anomalous experiences, that they are talked about, that you know, you could be a scholar and a mystic and why not?
Jeffrey Kripal
Right, and of course that’s the other reason that these experiences appear so often in fiction and fantasy now, is because that’s the only place we allow them to appear. Right? I mean we don’t allow scientists and politicians to get up and talk about their mystical experiences, but we’ll allow all of that in a superhero film or a work of fantasy. And basically what I’m trying to do in all my recent work is to authorize people to speak about their experiences and not to just always retreat into fiction or fantasy, but to talk about these things as fundamentally real.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, and that’s what we’re coming up against. This is why Whitley Strieber has had such a hard time. And even Dennis Kucinich when it came out that he saw a UFO, he totally downplayed it, but 80% of the country believes there are things out there, but you know there’s this kind of schizophrenic culture we have that laughs at it and is secretly open to it.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well that’s exactly what I’m saying, is when Dennis Kucinich just mentions it in a political debate, his run for president’s over, essentially. Right? He gets laughed at. Lots of scientists, by the way, have had these experiences, but they won’t talk about them, for the most part, because if they do they fear for their reputation. So there are very, very clear censorship mechanisms in place, people know about them, and they essentially don’t talk about these things because of that. So you know, we’re just trying to talk about it in a smart, intelligent, sophisticated fashion so that other people can talk, that’s all.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. I mean, I wonder what it is going to take because you say and other people say that this needs to be a slow integration, especially the UFO reality. What do you think it will take? Just hundreds of years of books like this and people like Whitley coming forward, or is that your guess, or what do you think?
Jeffrey Kripal
No, I don’t, I mean, I don’t know Alan, I’m… my suspicion is is that we’ll have to integrate this somehow into our sciences, somehow into our educational system. We’ll have to integrate it into our public culture in a way that is healthier and more subtle. And I’m not advocating that we just believe everything and that we be literal about it, but that we learn to treat these subjects in a way that is much more nuanced and much more like a dance and much less like, you know, a kind of fundamentalism or a pure debunking. Those are unhealthy reactions I think.
Alan Steinfeld
No, you’re right. People like Dean Radin and Rupert Sheldrake, they’re actually doing experiments that prove psychic phenomena is real.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, well Dean’s one of my heroes. If only all scientists were like Dean we would be living in a different world right now.
Alan Steinfeld
But like Einstein says, it’s the theory that decides what can be observed, so Dean’s open, but other people come in, they look at the same data and don’t see what Dean sees as possible. So I do think it’s changing, and I think this… the other aspect of this whole discussion is that perhaps we are being assisted in ways that we don’t see. Maybe the vibration of the earth itself is increasing, so we are opening up to new ways of thinking. Does that sound like a…
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, I mean, I think that’s a religious way of framing the question. Again, I think it’s ultimately us, and basically what you’re suggesting there is that we need help from the outside, and I would certainly acknowledge we need help from outside ourselves as egos, as persons, but I suspect that help will come from some other part of us. But again, that’s just my own worldview. I would love to be helped by a god or a craft landing in my backyard, but you know, so far that hasn’t happened. So we have to help ourselves, as it were.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, and you also say those things are us anyway.
Jeffrey Kripal
Right, I really believe that, yeah.
Alan Steinfeld
So even if they were to seemingly get help, I mean, how… I mean I look at crop circles a lot, every time they come out, and that seems like something is in our backyard, suggesting other ways of looking at geometry, at least.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, man, crop circles totally baffle me, that is… I… that’s just over the top in terms of my abilities to understand, I just don’t know, I mean.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, yeah, it looks very familiar, doesn’t it? It looks like math.
Jeffrey Kripal
I love them. I could look at them all day. I mean, they speak to another part of my consciousness, you know.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. So I’ve been in crop circles. I’ve been to England. I’ve stood in some very complex designs, and you think, first of all, you can’t see what they look like on the ground, and I don’t know how anyone in the middle of the night could make something so complex.
Jeffrey Kripal
Right. And so let’s just say hypothetically that they are a sort of help from some unseen part of ourselves. You know, it feels like we are being directed, if… I mean if that’s a hypothesis, but…
Jeffrey Kripal
Right, and if that’s us, that’s one heck of a us, isn’t it? I mean, what would it take for a psyche to create a design like that in a wheat field? I mean, that’s incredible if that’s us.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, if it’s not us, though…
Jeffrey Kripal
Then it’s even weirder, yeah, I know.
Alan Steinfeld
It’s still us though, right? I mean on one level it’s just us because you’re saying, in a way all consciousness, whether it’s extraterrestrial or whatever, is actually us, because consciousness is that place.
Jeffrey Kripal
Right, I’m trying to suggest that consciousness is not human. That it’s a mistake to equate or conflate consciousness with the human. That essentially consciousness is transhuman, and so, you know, when I say it’s us, I don’t mean it’s human. I mean we’re not entirely human either. I’m trying to expand our vision of what the human is, I suppose.
Alan Steinfeld
Well you are, you are. And nothing is more suggestive… you talk about sexuality a little bit, and that’s of course very human, but just like reading and writing, there’s things happening to our subtle physiology within sexuality that is in a way unexplainable.
Jeffrey Kripal
Right. Yeah. Yeah, well sexuality is a big part of the book too, that, you know, that’s something we really don’t understand either. I mean, talk about a mysterious force in our lives, and a force that creates life itself, and of course we know all about genetics and all that, but we really, we really don’t know what sexuality is. We know how it works, we know the chemistry of it, we know the genetics of it, but we really don’t know what it is. And so that’s why I think in the comics, it essentially becomes a superpower so often.
Alan Steinfeld
And you feel like that when you’re charged with that energy. In a way you feel superhuman.
Jeffrey Kripal
Right, and that’s why, that’s why the comic books is the genre of 14-year-olds, is because they’re right in the middle of puberty, they’re right amidst the superpowers themselves.
Alan Steinfeld
And all those sexy, tight-fitted goddess superheroines, right? They’re dressed up…
Jeffrey Kripal
That’s right. Those bodies aren’t ripped for nothing.
Alan Steinfeld
They’re very sexy, right?
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah.
Alan Steinfeld
So I mean, what it comes down to is, like you point out, we have elements of these superpowers, we have elements of our expanded psyche, we just have to embrace it as a larger culture to reach for a greater consciousness that we are. That’s what you’re saying.
Jeffrey Kripal
That’s exactly right, that’s what I’m trying to say.
Alan Steinfeld
And you do say that through your many stories and illustrations. It seems like… oh we have a phone call coming in. Do you want to take a question?
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, I just, I have nine minutes, Alan.
Alan Steinfeld
You have nine minutes. Okay. I think there was a… is there a question for Jeff there on the line? No, no, that’s me telling you that Alan.
Alan Steinfeld
Oh, you’re just telling me that. I just read it quickly. Okay, well if there is a question, we just have a few minutes. I think we only have about four minutes left in this interview. So what are you working on now, Jeff? If you want to say, I’m just curious, because I really enjoyed this book.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, right now, I’m actually working on a textbook of all things, on how to compare religious systems and how to think about religion in a better way than our culture practices at the moment. So I’m basically trying to write a how-to book on how to think about religion and how to try to engage these extraordinary experiences that human beings have all the time in a more nuanced way. So that’s what I’m doing.
Alan Steinfeld
Does religion really have any validity in light of the metaphysics you talk about? Why do we even need to go there?
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, I don’t think the question is religion yes or no. The question is how are we going to be religious? I mean, I think the very idea that there’s more to the human being that meets the eye and that we have a kind of Superman self or a hidden divinity is itself a religious statement. It’s a religious idea. And so the religions are incredibly valuable to the extent that these are the historical records of people’s experience of this super nature. They become destructive and dangerous to the extent that they take themselves literally, or that they claim to speak for all humanity. That’s when they become very dangerous. And so what we try to do in the study of religion is we try to teach people how to think about religion in ways that are sympathetic to these claims in some way, but can resist these absolute claims, these dangers. I mean I think we have to see religion is a sort of like a fire essentially, and we have to learn how to use the fire and not be burnt by it.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. So the dogmas and the sometimes habitual rituals of these cultures that are fundamental…
Jeffrey Kripal
Right. It’s very murky in there when you try to separate some of the ceremonies and rituals of a religion from the metaphysical teachings of a religion.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, yeah, it is murky, and that’s why you need the professional study of religion and you need textbooks. It’s like any other form of knowledge, it’s not simple and you need to be trained in it. And so that’s what we do, you know, that’s what I do in the classroom all the time.
Alan Steinfeld
But also, how do… I mean, you also have to be trained… just curious because if you’re saying mantras and you’re saying it sort of dogmatically, there’s also ways of saying mantras that open up different parts of ourselves to other experiences too.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, that’s right. And by being trained, I mean as an academic discipline. There are ways to think about religion that are very nuanced and are capable of being critical and sympathetic at the same time. And there are other ways of talking about religion that are very unsophisticated and very naive and dangerous. And so again, that’s what we do in the academy, is we try to teach people how to think in nuanced ways and not in simplistic and historically ignorant ways.
Alan Steinfeld
So that’s what you’re really in charge of at Rice University there, this kind of overview of this department.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah. That’s what we’re about, is teaching people how to think about religion.
Alan Steinfeld
And how much do you include this other realm of this metaphysical realm, the comic books and UFOs, Whitley Strieber? Is that, because in a way it’s all part of the same thing.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, I include it in my classes when I teach on modern religious movements and American culture, it’s all there. It of course wouldn’t be in a class on ancient Judaism or New Testament or something. It just depends on the class.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. But it does seem, and this is just to kind of sum up everything, that there’s something new emerging, there’s a new, it’s not even a religion, but you could call it a religion, this new esoteric story that’s coming online for our culture.
Jeffrey Kripal
Well, again, that’s my personal hope, Alan. And I happen to think that, but you know, we’ll see. That’s up to people like you.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, that’s what I’m doing every week, you know, just trying to…
Jeffrey Kripal
Well keep doing it.
Alan Steinfeld
Well I am, and I’m fascinated by the mutants and mystics I’m meeting all the time.
Jeffrey Kripal
Right, right.
Alan Steinfeld
I interviewed this guy, David Anderson, who says he has a time machine.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, but he has the physics to back it up, so he says, so… You know, and of course, what’s reality today, cell phones, computers, would have been a fantasy a hundred years ago.
Jeffrey Kripal
Right.
Alan Steinfeld
So well, thank you, Jeffrey. I really…
Jeffrey Kripal
Alan, thanks for having me on, I really appreciate it.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, I think what you’re doing is great and the levels you’re bringing people to in the popular culture is important because you’re giving a context to something people ignore like comic books and showing the importance of our cultural evolution and opening up to new realities, really.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, well that’s the goal.
Alan Steinfeld
So thank you, Jeffrey, Jeffrey Kripal. And Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. We’ll do it again with your next book.
Jeffrey Kripal
Thanks, Alan.
Alan Steinfeld
Do you have a website, then?
Jeffrey Kripal
I do. You just go to, it’s just kripal.rice.edu. k-r-i-p-a-l.rice.edu.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay, I’ll put that on there. There’s no www.
Jeffrey Kripal
Oh, okay.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay, and people can find you at Rice University?
Jeffrey Kripal
Right, they can find me through the Rice website too.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay, thanks. I look forward to perhaps meeting somewhere.
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, that’d be fun, Alan.
Alan Steinfeld
Are you ever in New York?
Jeffrey Kripal
Yeah, occasionally. Yeah.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay. Thanks. Thanks for everything. Thanks for taking the time.
Jeffrey Kripal
Okay, thank you Alan. Well, good night.
Alan Steinfeld
Good night. This is Alan Steinfeld for New Realities. If you want to reach me go to my website, newrealities.com.
