Printed in the Spring 2025 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "How to Think Impossibly: An Interview with Jeffrey Kripal " Quest 113:2, pg 12-17
By Richard Smoley
Jeffrey J. Kripal, who holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, is one of today’s most intrepid explorers of the implications of psychic and spiritual research. His works include The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities and Esalen: The Religion of No Religion. His most recent book is How to Think Impossibly about Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (University of Chicago Press), which discusses the need to accept the fact of paranormal experiences and how to deal with them intellectually and theoretically. Following is an edited version of a Zoom interview with him (the original can be viewed on YouTube).
Richard Smoley: In How to Think Impossibly, you argue that mainstream thought and mainstream science have disregarded, denied, and sneered at all paranormal experiences. You’re saying that at this point we ought to take these things seriously, at least phenomenologically. That is to say, people are really having these experiences, and we need to know what they mean, both to those people and about what they may be telling us about reality.
Jeffrey Kripal: That’s a good summary. I’m also trying to say that these phenomena clearly mean something: they’re trying to get our attention. They’re happening for reasons that we don’t know, but we’re being called to interpret them and tell stories out of them. That’s the deeper argument of the book. But you’ve got to take them as actually happening—as part of our reality—before you can even get to the second stage.
Smoley: It can be dangerous to do that academically. You discuss the case of the late John Mack in some detail, who did exactly what you’re recommending. He was a professor of psychiatry at Harvard. He did a lot of research on first-person UFO encounters and abductions. And he did something that was close to impossible at Harvard: he almost lost tenure. This shows what a witch hunt this kind of investigation can launch.
Kripal: I know a bit about the John Mack case. John did address these phenomenological accounts in a direct way. He was a psychiatrist at Harvard, as you mentioned, which means he was in the scientific or medical world. I’m in the humanities or the study of religion, which nobody cares about, basically, and they don’t think we know anything anyway.
I think part of John’s scandal was that he was saying these things in the heart of the medical, scientific community. He was challenging not just his peers, but the materialist worldview in general. I think that’s why he was literally put on trial: they did try to take his tenure away. They did try to fire him. The university ultimately pulled back from that case, but the impact certainly stayed with him and with the community.
That was the 1990s. This is the 2020s. Thirty years have gone by. The world is certainly not healed or in a great place at the moment, but it’s in a different place when it comes to these phenomena, including UFOs, or what they now call UAPs [unexplained aerial phenomena].
I also think it’s different that someone like myself is in the humanities and not the sciences. I think there’s a politics of knowledge in place: a physicist or a chemist has a much harder time saying these things during their careers. They tend to say them after retirement, when there are no more consequences. Before then, there might be severe consequences in terms of grants, promotion, and tenure.
I’m often asked, how do you deal with all the pushback? My reply is always, what pushback? I don’t get a lot of pushback. I strongly suspect that intellectuals— certainly in my own world—are in the closet on this subject. They’re not resistant to the fact that these things happen or to the call to interpret them differently. They’re afraid of sounding like the tabloids, so they don’t speak about this topic. It’s ignored.
I think there’s actually a lot of support for this conversation, but it tends to be behind the scenes: “It’s OK if Jeff says those things; Jeff’s weird anyway. But I don’t want to say those things, because I don’t want to stand in front of the curtain and not get promoted or not get the grant.”
Smoley: There’s an enormous amount of discussion today about intellectual freedom on campus. You’re basically saying that the strictures on intellectual freedom in the academic world are much more pervasive and much more enmeshing than is generally acknowledged. Would you agree with that?
Kripal: First of all, I’m a real promoter of intellectual freedom. I think it really exists on the campuses, and I think it’s part of who intellectuals are. I don’t think it’s perfect, and there are all kinds of strictures on it, some of which are good, some of which are probably not good. It’s like any other social space. There are ways to speak and there are ways not to speak. But there tends to be more freedom in the academic space than in the public space, the religious space, or the political space.
In my own field, the study of religion, most of us began in religious communities, where we did not feel the intellectual freedom to ask the questions we wanted to ask. So we backed into the only institution that would have us: the academy, where we’re encouraged and rewarded to ask those questions, and sometimes even to answer them. So I would say, it’s not a perfect world, but it’s pretty darn good.
Smoley: My impression of mainstream Anglo-American philosophy is that it is almost totally in bondage to secular materialism. I have a degree in philosophy myself, although it’s forty-five years old. I never got a sense that there was any intellectual freedom among philosophers to discuss these things. They’re like annoying little brothers running after science, saying, “Hey, we’re scientific too!” Could you comment on that?
Kripal: At Rice University, we don’t have any religious affiliation, and we’re not here to promote religious views. But I do think there’s more freedom to ask these questions in a department of religion than in a department of philosophy. I think you are spot-on about Anglo-American philosophy, but I don’t inhabit that space. I’m in a discipline that’s much wilder and frankly, much freer than Anglo-American philosophy.
Smoley: It’s a funny little impasse we’ve gotten to. Philosophy was alive and interesting when it was a bunch of Greeks wasting time in the marketplace. Now that it’s all professorized, it’s almost completely dead. It’s my impression that academic philosophy is not taken seriously, even in mainstream thought.
Kripal: I started out my intellectual career in a Catholic seminary, and we were all required to minor in philosophy if we didn’t actually major in it. The history of philosophy and the history of theology are very intertwined. I personally think religious studies is philosophically rich and astute, but really complicated, because we tend to look at religious experiences that involve altered states and human agency in a way that is not normally taken into consideration in a philosophy department. It’s richer than that in the study of religion.
Smoley: Let’s go on to something philosophical. The viewpoint that you’re espousing in your book is what you call dual aspect monism. Could you say a little bit about that?
Kripal: It’s tentative: I hold out that ontology lightly, as it were. But I do think it helps explain a lot of the material.
Essentially, I’m suggesting that one’s worldview informs what one keeps on the table and what one takes off the table. Secular materialism essentially takes everything off the table that I’m personally interested in. Then it says, “I can explain everything on the table.” My reply: “You can explain everything because you just took everything off.”
In the philosophy of mind, there’s something we call the hard problem of consciousness: how do you explain consciousness or mind in a materialist worldview? How do you start with little bits of matter and get to mentality or subjectivity? Of course you can’t.
There are all kinds of philosophical solutions to that question, one of which is dual aspect monism. It essentially says that the world is one. There’s a monism behind the curtain, as it were, but as human knowers, we split reality into a mental and a material dimension. In itself, it’s not so split. It’s one reality.
This philosophical approach is called dual aspect monism, because ontologically, things are one, but epistemologically, things are two. The mental and the material are both split off from this deeper unity.
I like dual aspect monism because there are many situations where the material world corresponds perfectly with the mental world. That can be explained in a dual-aspect monistic worldview, because they both split off from the same thing. We can talk about that in a pretty rigorous way with dual aspect monism. Secular materialism is also a monism, but it’s a material monism: the mental world is simply an emergent property of a deeper material reality.
Smoley: Many of the ideas you advance in your book can be found in the world’s esoteric traditions. How can they inform the understanding that you’re talking about?
Kripal: I think the experiences that I discuss in the book occur in all cultures at all times. This deeper reality, this one world, is being accessed in these experiences. But those experiences are always mediated or translated by the imagination, which is informed by the human knower and cultural traditions like the Kabbalah, Advaita Vedanta, Sufism, or the Christian mystical tradition. There’s going to be a lot of complexity and nuance and differences, which are primarily due to the human beings through whom this one world is mediated.
I’m not a perennialist in the sense that I think these religions are all tending towards this one world. I think religions tend towards their own goals, which are conflicting. But I do think human beings have experiences of this one world. Whether these individuals lived in the first century or the twenty-first, their experiences are all expressions of the same reality. So you’re going to see both similarities and real differences.
Smoley: One thinker you mention often in your book is Henry Corbin.* Could you talk about his work and how it has influenced your own thought?*
Kripal: Corbin was a French scholar of Iranian mystical thought who died in 1978. To capture the sense of this middle world, he used the word imaginal. It’s not imaginary, but it’s not purely physical either. It’s a world where the spiritual world mediates with the physical world and creates spiritual forms.
Corbin was a docetic Christian thinker, by which I mean he did not believe that God truly became a human being: the humanity of Christ was a seeming, a kind of show or display; it wasn’t real.
Frankly, that limits Corbin for me. He wants to separate the monotheistic truth of things from the human flesh, from history, and from all of the things that I think we are as well. I see his concept of the imaginal as an attempt to relate monotheistic transcendence to fleshly immanence. Christian theology did it in a very different way. I’m not voting on one or the other. But I do think that the docetism is a limitation for Corbin.
Smoley: This discussion makes me think of the concept of imagination in Blake and Coleridge. Blake seems to be saying some things that sound very much like Corbin, such as that imagination is true perception. How do you see the connections there?
Kripal: In my book, there’s a whole section on Romantic poetry and Blake and Coleridge. They had a very different conception of the imagination than most of us do today.
I once hosted a seminar, and I asked everybody to come with two things: a story of something exotic or extraordinary that happened to them, and a theory of the imagination to make some sense out of that exotic event. Pretty much everybody came with an exotic story, but no one came with a theory of the imagination.
Today I think we lack a strong theory of the imagination. We think of the imagination as the imaginary, as hallucination.
We have lost the sense that it might be a feature or a function of consciousness or mind, and that these visions might be mediations or translations of something very real. We just don’t go there. We either go to literal belief and concretize these visions, or we go to the debunking strategy and call them hallucinations. Or we don’t think about them at all.
Smoley: So according to theorists like Corbin, there is imagination as conventionally conceived, which is fantasy, daydreaming, and so on. Then there is an imaginal world that’s not imaginary: it’s an objective world on a different plane. Experience of that is as objective on that level as physical experience. Is that more or less accurate, according to your understanding?
Kripal: I think that’s Corbin; I’m not sure that’s me. I’ll give you an example that explains why that doesn’t work so well. People who have had near-death experiences talk to me, and they’ll tell me about their apparition of the afterlife, and—to use their language—it’s more real than real. But these experiences are all different. Every single one of them is different. So I cannot personally sign my name to visionary display A, because then I can’t sign my name to B, C, D, E, or F. In other words, if I literally believe any one of those displays, I’m locked out of every other human experience of that reality.
I think there is an afterlife. Consciousness does survive the body; I have no problem with that. But I think near-death experiences are forms of the imagination that are mediating some other reality. How that’s happening, I don’t know, and I don’t think anybody else knows. I don’t think we have a model of that.
Smoley: I find the contradictions among near-death experiences a little bit less troubling, because let’s take India: Any number of people go to India. Some people go to one part, some people to another part. Some people love it; others hate it. But there’s still an India there; the fact that everyone’s perceptions of it are very different doesn’t invalidate the other perceptions.
Kripal: Yeah, but the afterlife’s not like India. You and I can both go to the same city in India and see the same things. We could come back and talk about what’s on a particular street.
When you talk to near-death experiencers, though, some are one-life models and some are multilife models. Well, which is it?
Some reincarnation models are very different than one-life models. Sure, there are ways to coordinate them if you want, but they sit in tension. I just want to admit the tension. I don’t want to explain it away, as saying the afterlife is one thing and everybody’s having a different experience of that. They’re experiencing different realities, coming back, and claiming very different things about the human soul, about what a human life is, and what the end is.
That’s where I’m going with this. It’s not a solution; I don’t have a solution. I just want us to have a conversation.
Smoley: I think we could both agree that probably no one has ultimate answers, and the people who think they do may be the most dangerous ones of all. One of the things that most struck me in your book was a postmortem quote from John Mack. Apparently some medium called up his shade, and he said, “It’s not what we thought.” What do you make of that?
Kripal: I think John saying, “It’s not the extraterrestrial hypothesis.” He doesn’t say that, I know, but you asked me what I thought; that’s what I think. With the abduction material, most people go with the extraterrestrial hypothesis. I hear John saying, “That’s actually not what’s going on.”
I certainly think that the extraterrestrial hypothesis is not what’s going on. It’s a modern mythology; it’s a frame, a mediation.
For example, the role of souls in these abduction experiences is a major one, and I think the abduction experience is very much about the life of the soul and the afterlife.
It reminds me of two moments in the modern literature that fascinate me. One is when an alien spacecraft appeared to one Officer Sherman in Nebraska. The alien got out of the craft and said something like, “We want you to believe in us, but not too much.” To me, that’s wisdom.
The other moment is when anthropologist Michael Harner talks about a shamanic psychedelic trip he went on, and he met the dragon beings that supposedly control space and time. He came back and told his teachers about that. They said, “Well, that’s what they always say.”
To me, that sense of humor and that sense of “don’t believe what you believe” is the key. It’s frustrating for people who want to hold on to a particular belief or worldview. But it’s precisely what I mean by the phrase “how to think impossibly.” You’re stepping out of your belief system. You’re stepping out of your worldview in order to look back and think about it in a more reflexive way.
Smoley: We’ve been talking about UFOs in terms of human encounters, but then we have to deal with aerial phenomena. Pilots are seeing these things flying alongside their craft. One day NASA seems to believe in them, and the next day NASA doesn’t. How would you comment on this?
Kripal: There are a number of ways to read that. One is to say that a lot of physical things happen in the history of religions: objects materialize; people fly. So it doesn’t surprise me that you have these physical traces.
That’s one option. Another is to say that premodern religious experiences may be experiences of something that’s ultimately physical. Now technology has advanced to the extent where we could actually see these things, when we couldn’t before. But they were always there.
It’s strange. Beings come out of the sky and do things to human beings: that’s called religion. That’s also the UFO phenomenon. I think there is a profound connection between humanity’s religious experiences and the civilizations that they formed around them. Today it’s what we call UFOs or UAPs. That is not to say that our modern mythology is true and the premodern mythologies are false. I think that’s the mistake people fall into. They think, “We have it now. These are beings from some other star system, or spacecraft.” No, that’s just your Cold War sci-fi mythology at work. That’s not actually what’s going on here. There’s something else that’s more profound than that—and, frankly, weirder.
Smoley: Thank you. Let’s go on to something completely different. An early book of yours is about Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, which has been very seminal in promoting new thought. I wonder if you could talk about it. You’ve obviously studied it very deeply, and you know a lot of the major players.
Kripal: Esalen is essentially my spiritual home. I’m still involved in the place. I sit on the board and help guide the institute.
Esalen, as an institute, was founded in 1962, and it became one of the epicenters of what later became the counterculture. Esalen became a place where a lot of teachers came to teach their teachings and try them out on individuals.
Esalen became famous for its promotion of what became known as human potential, which refers to abilities or powers of the human being that aren’t really developed yet, but that manifest in particular moments. Esalen became famous for developing techniques and teachings that could cause these human potentials to show themselves.
Pretty much everyone in this spiritual world was there in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties. It really was the place to be, and it’s still very active.
Smoley: The human potential movement seems to go back and forth, sometimes not very clearly, between two poles. One has to do with developing human potential, or, as the Theosophists say, the powers latent in man—that is, we already have these powers; we just need to develop them. Sometimes they seem to talk in evolutionary terms: these powers are something we’re going to evolve. It’s not always clear what they’re talking or thinking about in this regard. Could you clarify that a little?
Kripal: The short answer is no. Who is the they, Richard? Certainly Michael Murphy, founder of Esalen, has an evolutionary, esoteric worldview. There’s no question about that. But Aldous Huxley, another seminal figure, didn’t. Huxley didn’t think evolution had anything to do with these human potentials. It just depends on whom you’re talking about.
Among other things, Esalen has been about uniting the sciences and spirituality and trying to figure out if evolutionary biology had something to do with these human potentials—and if we could combine them in some way.
By the way, physics was big there as well, including quantum physics. There was a whole series of meetings about the physics of consciousness in the late seventies and early eighties, and they were really influential. So I think it depends on the science and the individual you’re talking about.
Smoley: Apparently I irritated Michael Murphy in my review of his book The Future of the Body for a magazine I edited called Gnosis. I suggested that his model of evolution was more Lamarckian than Darwinian, which, in today’s discourse, is fighting words. But it is, you know: if you’re developing your own evolution, you’re acquiring characteristics. This is not random Darwinian mutation, right?
Kripal: Right. I think your Lamarckian comments are actually pretty faithful to contemporary biology. We’re talking about epigenetics now, and the role of culture and practice in evolution. I think there’s probably an opening in modern biology there.
When people have some experience of the ultimate meaning of life, some kind of cosmic consciousness, they’re going to understand it as the pinnacle of human evolution. If they live in an evolutionary worldview, they’re going to place that at the end of the evolutionary track, not at the beginning.
I’m very sympathetic to that move. I don’t live in the Catholic worldview of Dante and my medieval ancestors. I’m a modern person. I live after Darwin and after Freud. I live in the big bang. I assume that we live in a universe that’s about fourteen billion years old and has been evolving for that long. If I were to have an experience of God, I’m sure I would place it as the goal of evolution as well. I think that’s where these evolutionary esotericisms come from: people experiencing altered states and drawing conclusions from them based on the natural science of the day.
Smoley: Since this is an interview for the Theosophical Society, could you give me an objective outsider’s impression of the Theosophical Society, past and present?
Kripal: I like to joke that if you walk down any alley, you’re going to find Mme. Blavatsky or Emanuel Swedenborg. The Theosophical tradition has been incredibly informative in shaping modern spirituality—far more than people outside the Theosophical tradition generally realize.
Today, of course, the Theosophical tradition doesn’t have a massive presence in modern thought or institutions, but it once did, and it shaped a lot of what we still do today. I have a profound appreciation of its historical influence, but also a recognition that it is no longer a major cultural force, as it once was.
Smoley: I think for people today in the Theosophical Society, there’s a sense of, “What happened, and what can we do to get that back?”
Kripal: I went on a tour for my Esalen book after it came out. The question I was asked the most was, “How do we do this again?”
In other words, how do we have the counterculture again? My reply was, “You don’t.” The zeitgeist, the features that made the counterculture, were specific to that time period, and this time period is different.
I’m a historian of religions. All of these movements them go away at some point, and then other movements come up. That’s just the nature of the history of religions.
I’m just a teacher, and my concern is always one of legacy. How do we pass teachings on to the next generation? How do we pass wisdom on? How do we pass the truths of one generation on to the next?
Institutions sometimes get a bad name, but they’re really important for passing truths on. I work at a university. It’s been around for 100 years. Hopefully, it’ll be around many more hundreds of years, and it does what it does because of its stability and its history. I think religious traditions are a lot like that. They can do things that other cultural forms can’t.
Young people today often will describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. I think it’s a kind of moral placeholder. They don’t like what religion has done to their friends, usually along gender or sexuality lines. But I think that view is rather naive in terms of institutional stability and what they’ll do with their children, or their children’s children spiritually or religiously. Those are big questions, for which we often don’t have good answers in this esoteric or spiritual space.
Smoley: To make the matter personal, how do you convey your knowledge and values to your students? What do you try to bring out in them?
Kripal: I do that every day in the classroom; that’s my personal answer to this question. I also write books, and books are amazing things. They work on souls whether you’re there or not, and even whether you’re alive or not. That’s why I put so much effort and time into books. They’ll be there after we’re gone.
I also try to impress on my students that religion is not about sitting in a hard pew and believing something. You no longer believe. It’s about altered states, and it’s about human beings trying to institutionalize these altered states and turn them into culture.
Smoley: What are you working on now?
Kripal: I’m working on a book on physics. I want to know why people turn to those models today to make sense of their spiritual experiences. I’m not writing a book about physics: obviously I’m not a physicist. But I’m writing about the cultural reception, or the history of how people use physics to talk about their spiritual experiences.
Physics has a kind of elite status in our world that the study of history or literature or religion does not. I think that’s part of the answer. Moreover, quantum physics is very weird. It doesn’t make any sense, so it can be used to talk about things that are weird or that don’t seem to make any sense. That doesn’t mean that they’re the same thing, but it might mean that they’re related. Of course, we have not created culture or poetry, or religion or philosophy, out of quantum physics. We’ve created them out of Newtonian physics. I think that’s a big problem.
Smoley: How do you see religion in America evolving and developing over the next couple of generations?
Kripal: I don’t know an answer to that. I think it could get pretty bad. I don’t have a rosy picture of things. I think religion has essentially been taken over by fundamentalists, and I think that’s a very bad thing—in a moral sense, in a political sense, in a cultural sense.
But I also think the opposite move—the secular, reductive, debunking move—is equally fundamentalist. The two feed each other. If you’re going to deny all spiritual or religious dimensions of the human being, you’re going to push people into fundamentalism. I see those two poles as very much related. Both of those options are nonstarters. I think they’ll take us down a very bad path.
What I’m trying to do—and what I hope a lot of us are trying to do—is create some kind of third space in the middle. It’s not about literal belief. It’s not about materialist debunking. It’s about trying to talk about the spiritual components of the human being in a sophisticated way.
* For a discussion of Henry Corbin, see Rasoul Sorkhabi, “Henry Corbin’s Discovery of the Imaginal Realm in Sufism,” in Quest, summer 2024.