jeffrey j kripal
first intro via michel bauwens tweet about his book: the flip
[disclaimer: adding this note after reading book – appears kripal thinks the flip will come thru ed/humanities.. which to me is a form of people telling other people what to do.. so either (to me) not a legit flip.. or .. his flip is just a tweak in sea world.. dang]
then googled to get above video from this tweet [https://x.com/NewThinkAllowed/status/1511383480168497160]
notes/quotes from 1 hr video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orHqdj6Jbgc]:
4 min – one works where one is.. i’m a prof/nerd.. so going to talk from the academy.. and talk about how to mainstream these talks in gut of american/research uni.. i feel most comfortable when i’m speaking to that.. i know where all the lines in the sand are.. and i know the knee jerk responses intellectuals give to these topics.. none of which are convincing/plausible.. but they are what they are .. and they have to be answered.. so i try to answer them.. i do speak the language of the humanities to other people in the humanities.. that’s really my project..t
6 min – turn in 70-80’s had necessary/positive effect on academy.. but now destructive/negative.. no objective truth.. don’t correspond to anything in reality.. all language refers to other language.. all caught in webs of words/meaning.. never escapes own web.. can show that any politics/ideology is constructed.. but on other side of equation land in neolistic/meaningless universe.. and people are naturally disillusioned w that.. now movements trying to move toward a diff world view where it’s possible to get closer to truth and real world.. i think that’s the paranormal
8 min – (from flip) rice uni very much a stem uni.. what most students/parents want studied.. so most students are stem young people.. so when i use religious material they quickly dismiss them.. ‘they didn’t know their science’.. so what i’ve done over the yrs.. abandoned using traditional religious sources and used extraordinary experiences of med drs and engineers and physicists.. that takes away the knee jerk responses..t. not only is this an physicist but he’s a noble laureate.. so start to have to face the facts that these people have these experiences and they do change their minds
11 min – one of the things i’ve found with these experiences with scientists is their science works just fine afterwards.. they realize that actually you don’t need materialism.. materialism is not science.. science is a method .. a way to come to know the world.. and materialism is an interp of the science.. when scientists abandon this materialist interp for something much more vitalistic, alive, consciousness based.. their science stilll works fine.. to me that’s a big take away.. it’s a both/and .. it’s not and either/or argument.. it’s this flip we’re talking about … a both/and conclusion..t
13 min – so yeah.. you just can’t make the argument that these people don’t know their science..
15 min – takes us back to the humanities convo.. where.. science is actually not the best method to get at a lot of these experiences.. it’s the meaning being communicated by the timing/sync/magic of the events that speaks to the individuals.. these are not sci categories.. sci don’t talk about meaning.. but people in humanities do all the time.. use the tool that actually fits the job at hand.. i think we’re pulling out the wrong instruments a lot of times
16 min – sci usually ends up studying very small modes of significance.. where the really big robust paranoral stuff happens during death, illness, danger.. and it becomes a story.. not something you can recreate in a lab.. unless you’re really immoral.. but these events are very common in natural life/death.. why i think humanities are very powerful and sci often the wrong tool
18 min – one of things you hear a lot ‘as if i was in a novel/movie’.. reporting on a profound sense of caught in a story that they themselves are not writing.. and i think we all are.. i think that’s what a culture is.. a story you were born into.. you didn’t write it.. but you have to suffer it.. often the story doesn’t go your way.. i think we’re all in stories.. i think that’s what religion is.. that people live inside of until they don’t.. i think that’s where we are.. until they’re in a problem
20 min – i think a lot of this paranormal is about waking us up to.. we’re in a story.. and maybe we don’t want to live in it anymore.. and maybe we don’t want another story.. that’s where i go with all of this.. t
22 min – i think people assume questions have been answered and science is our answer.. but that’s not true and they don’t know that.. t
23 min – i think one of main responses is apathy.. much hard to deal with than someone who says i’m spiritual but not religious.. and in some ways people who are intensely religious are the most rewarding to work with .. because they have the most is at stake.. you’re going to have a convo.. truly passionate atheists are the same way.. it’s the young people who are apathetic who i find the most difficult.. i think they’re at a point in life, 18 or 19, where these are just not relevant questions.. you gotta live life for a while to come up against the tougher questions.. and some people are just too busy
kierkegaard busy ness law.. norton productivity law.. et al
30 min – i think history is really weird.. i think it moves in both directions.. and i think humans tap into those we don’t understand.. sometimes the coincidence becomes so coincidental.. something is going on and i think it’s something we don’t understand
32 min – i think we think nothing that goes inside us has anything to do w what goes on outside.. i think what’s special about these in sync events is that that doesn’t go on any more.. and that just baffles us.. breaks down notion that subject has nothing to do with object.. just totally violates how we think the world works
35 min – if dependent on your id.. you might find these experiences as epic or awful.. depends on person
36 min – find often there’s serious trauma somewhere in person’s life that opens them up.. something significant about being split open
38 min – [mishlove: if do w/intent.. there are forces out there that want to help you].. i don’t think intention/will only works in one way.. i think we backwards and future it.. i think what we call causation is really complicate..
40 min – escotologies are nasty to everyone that is not in that group.. near death experiences also nasty.. this cause that has an end.. we assume it goes forward.. rather that ‘pulls us toward itself’.. if we think of very dangerous ways ‘end of world’ has been used in civ’s of all kinds.. so i’m very drawn to escotological visions..
42 min – i’m saying humans not fully conscious of selves.. have capacity of reach but also capacity to do negative things.. once move into argument that human isn’t just body.. life becomes richer and more complex
43 min – flatland was offering a math model of transcendence.. also using it to do social critique.. that’s where i would want to go with this.. people are making a lot of conscious critiques of society w the transcendence
45 min – i think a lot of our political/social problems are functions of our really bad metaphysics.. people assume that they are their stories/labels.. when people flip.. they realize they are not those stories.. but they are not the same thing as their story.. profound political consequences.. t but i’m not so naive to think that religions/cultures/nation-states won’t fight back.. so that’s what that last ch is about.. the moral/political implications of the flip but also the ways they will be resisted.. t so not just a game.. not just academic.. the ideas people have actually matter a great deal
48 min – there is something really subversive about higher ed.. and humanities.. to sciences.. i say .. try studying living human beings.. that’s hard.. because we ourselves are embedded in the study.. it’s really flippy.. and the stakes go way way up
or perhaps we let go of study ness.. aka: thinking we have to know things.. graeber can’t know law et al
49 min – hermeneutics means interp but it doesn’t actually.. it means being aware that they way you interp the text/culture/story but it will also change the interpreter.. that was sort of basic before heisenberg
50 min – [on word paranormal] this is where i get crabby.. people say shouldn’t use word paranormal.. then i ask what do you think we should say.. then they describe what they meant when they coined the word paranormal.. this is where i get crabby.. people aren’t aware how sophisticated a word it is.. coined in 1903 by a french psychologist paranormal.. he was clearly riffing on the english supernormal.. what they meant by it.. they were resisting the category of the supernatural.. ie: agency from outside natural world that intervenes and creates a miracle.. that is not what they meant by paranormal.. they meant some aspect of the natural world which we didn’t have any understanding of.. this is natural world behaving in ways we don’t understand.. para just meant to the side of..t it didn’t been beyond or outside of .. as word gets abused in 20th cent.. meaning something like supernatural romance.. a complete debasement of the frankly.. academic word..
52 min – the other think i get a lot is that the paranormal is normal.. and i just say.. no it’s not.. if someone has a paranormal experience .. it might be the single most significant experience that ever happened to them.. they’ve forgotten the other million things in their life and they remember that one thing.. it’s paranormal precisely because it stands out.. it’s trying to communicate something to the person and to communicate with someone you have to get their attention and you have to do something
beyond defn’s.. myth of normal ness et al..
53 min – and to communicate with someone you have to get their attention and you have to do something really wild usually.. and i think that’s what paranormal phenom are doing.. they’re trying to get our attention.. wake us up.. to call them normal is to reduce them again.. to something we understand.. and we don’t.. so stop saying that.. not normal and not supernatural
yes.. for whales in sea world.. we need to wake up.. but i don’t think legit free people we need ‘attention grabbers’.. because just listening to itch-in-the-soul is enough
54 min – i just want to gag because of countercultural baggage in words.. that’s why ie: psychedelic, ufo, et al.. are great words.. ‘you’ve got to use the bait fish want and not the bait you want’.. need to use words that draw people in.. not words that are so technical safe that they don’t draw people in.. nothing safe about this stuff
even deeper.. ie: lanier beyond words law.. rumi words law.. et al.. need idiosyncratic jargon ness.. to let go of language as control/enclosure et al
56 min – i think you can give too much power to skeptics, debunkers.. i don’t actually think there’s a counter position to some of this stuff.. wastes a lot of time and sucks up a lot of oxygen..t **people ideologically committed to material world view are really not that interesting.. that’s not thinking.. same with believers.. if someone can predict what you’re going to say.. t
**graeber unpredictability/surprise law
58 min – i tried not to make everything about politics.. but i think these experiences have political/social implications
59 min – ie of someone w near death experience.. can’t be slotted in cultural contexts where they make sense.. (can’t be put in our labeling)
marsh label law et al
1:00 – i think that’s one of its points (paranormal seems to defy all rational systems).. that’s why i’m very much against explaining 1\ can’t be explained 2\ we’re more than our explanations.. i don’t think we ever remove that illusiveness.. t
naming the colour ness et al
1:01 – (on always finding a metastance that resolves the paradox) i just don’t believe that.. ‘the tyranny of clarity’ a critique of the enlightenment.. argues.. whatever life is it’s not clear and if you make it clear you’re clearly not talking about whatever life is.. the idea that we can make sense of things is itself a kind of tyranny and a mistake.. t
huge.. tyranny of clarity
naming the colour ness.. the death of us.. marsh label law.. graeber unpredictability/surprise law.. et al
again 0 intellectness as cancerous distraction (thinking we have to know) we can’t seem to let go of.. there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
1:02 – years ago i would say .. if we just think about it long enough we’ll figure it out.. and now i’m like.. no.. that’s not going to happen.. the more someone tells me their story.. the less sense it makes.. and i know when they’re telling me for the story for the first time they’re only telling me the parts that are presentable and make some sense.. and if they tell me more.. it gets stranger.. it never clarifies.. always becomes stranger
1:03 – (on making up stories to protect ourselves).. yeah.. but on the other hand.. it’s trying to talk to us.. so we should be listening and we should be talking back.. it’s trying to have a conversation.. and i think it is us.. not jeff or jeff.. .some really weird/cosmic/collective being is trying to communicate with us.. it’s calling us out of our dysfunctional beliefs/reasons/world-views.. and calling us towards other reasons/beliefs that are better.. not complete/perfect/final.. but better..t if that’s not that case.. i don’t know why we’re talking right now.. i don’t know why any of us are doing this.. why..
need 1st/most: means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_J._Kripal: Jeffrey John Kripal (born 1962) is an American college professor. He is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas. While chairman of the Religion Department at Rice, he helped found their “GEM” program, with a doctoral concentration in “Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism”. His work includes the study of comparative erotics and ethics in mystical literature, American countercultural translations of Asian religions, and the history of Western esotericism from gnosticism to New Age religions.. As a result of criticisms like Malhotra’s, Kripal was among a group of scholars receiving death threats and physical attacks from Hindus offended by his portrayals. He shifted his research focus away from Hinduism afterward, claiming, “I stuck with it and responded as best as I could for about six or seven years. It just wore me down after a while. At some point I felt like it wasn’t worth it anymore, that it was starting to affect my health. I couldn’t go anywhere, any conference or anything, without having to deal with the thought police, as it were.
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be you. 