Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal | The Super Natural, Religious Experience, & A Hermeneutics Of The Imagination

00:05 But the masters almost surely have a plan There's clearly maybe something there be And until you've thoroughly tested every last close-chested few Come on, you think you know where we'd be Without THC Cause' we know they're lying to us Just don't know what to bring Yeah, where would we be without THC? The highest sidechats show Great coward and company

00:52 The power of Christ compels you people. From the Sunshine State, I'm Greg Carlwood and as we roll on through another yearly cycle there is something about such times that does have us pondering the deeper questions about what exactly life is? An illusionary physical realm for fractals of one true consciousness to live out story in a spectrum of experience before reintegration with the whole? Some sort of cosmic college for universal truths we explore through many incarnations until graduation day Or might it be some kind of Gnostic prison from which we seek illumination and ultimately liberation? Whatever the case, it seems pretty clear that there's something much deeper going on than what we see on the surface. And the system itself is very content to keep us distracted from at all with the more mundane experiences of physical life car registrations bank account balances screen scrolling in highway traffic

01:43 But every once in a while, an unexplainable experience provides the ontological shock many so desperately need. A UFO sighting? A strange visitation in the night? A breakthrough psychedelic trip? An unexpected Kundalini experience? A string of potent synchronicities? Prophetic dreams or a direct download from some strange intelligent plasma? Someway somehow some get something seemingly profound for the individuals that wrestle with it But these experiences are often suppressed or even forgotten, and rarely discussed, studied and compared to the degree that they should be. Well today's powerhouse guest Dr Jeffrey J Kripal is doing his damnedest to make a dent in that!

02:23 For the uninitiated, Dr. Kripal is the Associate Dean of the School of Humanities and holds the J. Newton Razor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University where he chaired the Department of Religion for eight years and helped create the GEM Program a doctoral concentration in the study of Gnosticism esotericism, and mysticism that is the largest program of its kind in the world. He presently helps direct the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur California where he served as chair of the board from 2015 to 2020 He has also authored some amazing books such as Secret Body, Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions, Authors of the Impossible, The Paranormal and The Sacred, Mutants & Mystics, Science Fiction, Superhero Comics and The Paranormal.

03:10 The Flip, Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge. And his most recent, The Superhumanities Historical Precedents Moral Objections and New Realities just to name a few! I couldn't be more psyched to check off a big box on my bucket list... Let's get into it! The prestigious professor of the paranormal educator of the anomalous and archivist of the impossible Dr. Kripal welcome to the higher side Wow that is quite an introduction Greg Well, you got to do something to set yourself apart. There's a lot of podcasts out there if you haven't heard. Yeah I always look behind me to see who people are talking about and they talk like that but it's good yeah i like it well thank you so much for doing this it is an honor outside of maybe Jacques Vallee you might hold the record for most on-air mentions by previous guests just off the top my head Gordon White Chris Knowles Diana Posulka Joshua Kutchin and Whitley Streber

04:05 I've all mentioned you and i'm sure several others so we're checking off a big box around here today. That's nice, thank you! Yes yes and I might have stayed in college if I had found a teacher like you but one of my favorite things I've heard you say is that you would often tell your graduate students they have no business being a scholar of religion until they've lost at least two worlds And that is definitely in the lifeblood of this show. For you, I know it was a Catholic upbringing world and then a Hindu tantric world for me it was also a Catholic upbringing and then probably an atheistic world but you start to realize that maybe you shouldn't get too attached to any one world because they're all just perspectives and you actually see more by shifting that perspective more often wouldn't you say?

04:54 Yeah, that's what I mean about losing two worlds. If you've lost just one world the chances are very good you've just jumped into another one and you think it now has all the answers but when you lost 2 worlds you start to think twice about jumping into another world because as you say they're just perspectives They give you certain things for sure but they take away other things And so I think the trick is not inhabiting too strongly at least a single world, kind of moving between them. Yes, I think that's very wise in our religious lives and our political lives and so many different areas. I stopped trying to label myself with any identifier because I find that either the definition of that label shifts or my own understanding of the world shifts. So the lesson there is yeah just don't do that just be an individual looking at many different things

05:48 Yeah, my version of that Greg is I occasionally go into a comic book store like you know the present ones were like they're selling old comics and the idea is you're going to look for you know the comic or the statue whatever that is. And if this is gonna be your worldview and of course it never is and I've realized over the years There's nothing there because I don't inhabit a particular world. It's kind of open-ended." And so with this same theme, when it comes to the paranormal one of my favorite ways to explore it is to compare the different boxes we put these things in and see if we should have boxes at all like abduction experience versus occult experience or fairy folklore and Bigfoot

06:36 And this comparative approach is a big part of your work. We're well familiar with contemporary paranormal experience, but can you talk to us about the overlap with the high strangeness experiences often reserved for religious framings? I mean i got into this through the study of religion and more specifically through the comparative study of religion And the idea is that you're not assuming the truth of any particular religion. You're trying to look at them all and see what they have in common, and of course how they also differ. I guess when I encountered people's paranormal experiences or extreme religious experiences today, they struck me immediately as deeply religious and is obviously connected

07:26 pre-modern and even ancient experiences that I was trained as a graduate student not to take too seriously, you know. To see as exaggerations or legends or power plays essentially attempts to kind of acquire authority and when I encountered these same sorts of experiences in the modern world, I realized actually that these models that I was trained in don't really work and there's something else going on where I eventually landed is that, I think paranormal experiences in particular are kind of the building blocks. They're the pieces that then get built up into larger religions and civilizations and cultures so we can actually look at those cross-culturally and back through time and figure out how things were put together essentially. Yeah! That's really wise and there are a lot of things

08:22 Then i remember from the catholic upbringing just all the miracles turning into a pillar of salt glowing beans of light information downloads these things are definitely in the mix they check out of the same boxes and. I think it was Adamski's experience where his download, they said yeah we're responsible for all the religions of the world. And when i was a little younger that really resonated with me when i was still kind of in that atheistic world i was like well there's an explanation! It is all the aliens and it turns out they're maybe a little bit to that... The whole cargo cult idea? The whole UFO religion? When you have these experiences you have that shock that the world is much bigger

09:06 And for some reason, that makes people want to come to more conclusions rather than fewer. It's just odd they start to craft a box and then they're like this is the one true message and you would think that it would instead open them up and make them stand back a lot further but maybe a lot of religions are started from one of these experiences well let's talk about that I mean that's the core i think maybe what we're talking around I think there is a core there. The UFO experience and the history of religions are definitely connected, but the question is how they're related? What most people want to do is they want certainty. They want the answer right? And so they want to affirm their present mythology or worldview which in our case is science and space exploration and extraterrestrials and they wanna read that back into the past

10:07 where it doesn't really belong and doesn't quite work, it kind of works. But the other option is to take that past worldview or some form of religious belief and read into the present say oh well these are angels or these are demons or whatever I go that doesn't really work either so both those lines or arrows give us something but they also take away something and I just want to say now hold on Let's sit in the middle of this and let's acknowledge these similarities, but let's not jump into a particular interpretation or a particular worldview which is what people are always trying to do. So that's not a very popular message Greg because it doesn't lead to an answer And this worldview you were describing earlier that you're in I think I'm in as well It's pretty lonely right? I mean it's hard to build community

11:02 with uncertainty and ambiguity, and a kind of global appreciation of religion but also a global suspicion of religion. So I guess i'm just blabbing...I do think that there's something that is gained. I think it's a more honest approach. We're just trying to be honest about what we're seeing and feeling and thinking but on the other hand that kind of honesty leads to loneliness Yeah, I think that's fair to say. And I trade in unpopular opinions and messages so you're in the right spot but that is one of my favorite things that you say is looking at that context because I think part of the journey for me and a lot of people as your thinking aliens cause you grew up in this culture

11:48 And then someone says, well look at the grimoires. A lot of these experiences are similar and then you think oh maybe they're demons maybe that is the right context but you forget that all of that stuff was created in a time where they had a lot of cultural residue You're looking at your own cultural residue and saying yeah maybe the sci-fi lens is incorrect maybe the old lens is right, but they have the same problem. It's a parallel situation we need to framework that doesn't have any residue to it which maybe is not possible I'm not quite sure. Yeah I don't think its possible not to have cultural overlay or cultural residue but I think it is possible to be aware of one's own cultural overlay or residue. I think reflexivity are kind of stepping out of ones world view I think is possible

12:39 But I don't think any kind of pure model or knowledge here is something we should even be attempting. Because, I don't think it's possible I just thought of another guest who's brought you up, Dr. Jack Hunter who has done a lot of work in anthropology with this kind of stuff and that's another field just like religion where man we did a disservice dismissing a lot of this stuff all the legwork of going around the world talking to indigenous cultures and then saying oh that's a cute little superstition you have that didn't actually happen, instead of trying to find a way to incorporate their experiences with the paranormal. Which do seem to happen in greater frequency the closer

13:25 community is with nature i would say there's something to that relationship cuz you look at the indigenous cultures and they usually have the most complex systems of understanding time or understanding dream and dream world in dream language There's something there that if you live in the concrete jungle and you get this industrialized technical society, I guess maybe that roots you more in the physical rather than being out in the woods where these things just happen. They're part of the thing as is a jaguar walking near the camp to a degree even in modern times these things happen when we're in a cabin in the woods or driving down a lonely road

14:09 It doesn't happen often in Times Square, to my knowledge. But what are your thoughts on that? The relationship between living closer to nature and the potency and frequency of such experiences? Yeah I have a lot of thoughts about that. The issue i always think about here is the psychedelic renaissance and the kind of research that's going on now in mostly departments of psychiatry and universities looking at psilocybin DMT and the way they induce particular kinds of altered states, whether those states are healing or not. And those programs tend to have very practical, very pharmaceutically-oriented goals in mind. And my concern with them is that a lot of the experiences people have on these psychoactive molecules are animist in structure.

15:07 They involve things like talking animals and talking plants and cosmic experiences of deity, deification. I mean really extreme stuff that is not extreme at all if you know something about the history of religions but I don't think I know that those plants have had a very difficult history with Western or European monotheism. And I mean a deadly past. I don't mean just a difficult past. literally deadly, a colonizing. Monotheism has colonized those cultures in a really violent and dramatic way and so I worry frankly about the religious clashes that are sort of underneath this psychedelic renaissance and I worry the same thing. I think a lot of paranormal experiences are essentially animist in structure as well Gregg and you know monotheism hasn't had such a great history with magical practice either

16:12 And we forget that in the modern world. We just, you know... Oh you can go to your bookstore and buy some incense or crystals or whatever book you want but actually historically it's been pretty nasty So I think there are clashes of sort of metaphysical views going on and that this explains for me why things are resisted so dramatically even though the resistance makes no sense on the surface I mean the things people say about out-of-body experiences and UFOs and synchronicities is kind of bizarre. But it makes a lot of sense, actually if you read it as a kind of unconscious rejection over particular kinds of worldview or particular metaphysical position. Yeah, yeah!

17:04 And i've heard you talk about how the paranormal tends to shock and mark us out of our normal modes of thinking and it does do that. But im not sure that's its function or intention i think like the first time, you see a fish you might think oh so some life does breathe underwater but the fishes in trying to deliver you that message thats just an insight u get from seeing something new in your environment and your worldview expands. So I think the same about something like the grays or spirits, or a angel of concentric rings and 30 eyeballs on all that weird stuff that gets described we see them and we realize reality is bigger sort of as a by-product but is there anything more to say about your thoughts on their own autonomous goals and objectives?

17:58 Yeah, I mean we generally don't talk about that. One of the more difficult things about paranormal events is that they seem to have agency. They seem to have their own intentions which are not ours and some of these intentions or agencies are actually opposed to ours right? We call them abductions for a reason people don't have agency they don't choose these experiences These things happen to them And the difference with your fish story is, you know if that fish were to pop out of the water and start talking to you. You would have a very different experience than that fish right? I mean...you'd be like whoa! And i think thats the nature of a lot of paranormal events they're trying to get our attention is what im trying to say and they're trying to shock us out of a particular world view and i think their doing that with agency and with intention

18:56 So I don't think it's like your fish story. I think it's something more dramatic than that fair enough and agency itself is kind of hard to pin down my dreams feel like they have agency or the characters in my dreams feel like they have agency there are people who follow the Krolian line of magic and they try to experience the holy guardian angel, and those people who've done this for 30 years and they're not sure if the holy guardian angel as a part of themself or a separate being So that really is tough. It's tough to unravel I prefer to think these are autonomous separate beings because i think that's the more fun and provocative perspective rather than this is all inside my head, I don't really like that conclusion all that much and that's what we have to go on really is what's the most fun at this point because we do have a lot of questions yeah I mean...I don't think it's all in your head Greg but I don't think

19:54 You're all in your head either. This is why I write and talk a lot about the humanist too, you know? I think there's this social ego that we're enacting right now There's Greg with his hat on and his earphones and there's Jeff talking but there's also this unconscious or this super conscious field that were swimming in to use a metaphor and So people ask me all the time, well are these things separate from us or are they other forms of us? And I don't know the answer to that. But I do think they're separate from our egos from our little social selves that we're in right now and your dreams you know I used the dream as you probably know I used the dream all the time is the perfect example i mean You wake up in the morning and you're like what the hell was that about? I mean...you were not telling that story except you were

20:49 You know, there was some part of you that was in fact projecting that dream and so you split. You split into two beings during the night and I think that's similar to what happens in a religious experience or a paranormal event is we split and part of us is talking to this other part and maybe we need to believe that they're ontologically separate from us. Maybe that's something that needs to happen so that they can happen I mean, this is the irony of religious belief. Belief makes things happen—it really works! But as a comparativist, I can't believe…I'll give you a good example here. Let's say you're sick—you're really, really sick. Well praying to the Virgin Mary might really cure you

21:41 I have no doubts about that. But a UFO event might cure you, or going to the grave of a Sufi saint might cure you, or praying to Ganesh the elephant god if your Hindu might cure you—lots of different things will work! So as a comparativist, I can't sign my name the Sufi Saint or Ganesh, or the Blessed Virgin Mary. But I can acknowledge that all of those belief systems work right? Yeah and i love this kind of area because there are some people who conclude that whatever these beings are they read our beliefs and then they project our beliefs back to us That's compelling because it's then this third thing that isn't that It isn't The Virgin Mary, it isn't a angel but

22:30 I think it's partly our belief system and then partly just not having the language. So we look for a certain box, i've had people tell me that they saw A UFO morph into an angel and then heal some condition that they had And it's like yeah those are both boxes but probably wasn't either of those things exactly That's just the closest word you can find Yeah, I mean Diana Pasolka likes to talk about Ray Hernandez here You've probably talked about ray on this show You know, I mean he writes explicitly about this UFO encounter that he had and his wife experienced it as an angel. Literally as a Catholic Angel! And he's an atheist and he interpreted it or he experienced it as you know craft...a small craft in his

23:19 living room of all places. The irony of it is, it actually healed their dog! They were going to take their dog to the vet and put him down later that day and not necessary anymore you know? So huh... what do you do with that? Well, it physically healed the dog—you have to say that—but I think they literally experienced it, Greg. In different ways. I don't think these are interpretations that are imposed on the event. It's not like you have some kind of experience and then the Catholic interprets it as the Virgin Mary and the atheist interprets it as a flying saucer. I think they actually experienced it differently maybe even saw different things. Yeah, any person should be able to tell the difference between a metal craft and a fleshy winged

24:07 person, but I just wonder what determines the presentation. Well again maybe it appears as it manifests as a physical craft to someone like Ray but it manifests as an angelic being to his wife I'm not judging that. I'm just saying that's entirely possible so when people you know they'll tell me well so-and-so at a major UFO event or a marion apparition didn't see anything, i'm like so? So what? Okay, I believe that. But again the UFO event or the Marian apparition or the occult event it's not like this chair i'm sitting on that I could show you and we would both agree oh Jeff is sitting on a chair It's not like that at all! It's this event that appears in the environment That people actually see an experience in different ways And some people don't experience anything Some people are immune to it

25:05 And this is my joke with Whitley Strieber. I mean, Whitley's always saying, didn't you see that Jeff? I came to your room last night, you know, didn't you and i'm like um no...I was fast asleep! I was dead to the world and he laughs about it but it's true. Whitley sees things and experiences things that Jeff does not and that's not because those things aren't real. It's because Jeff is dull and really thick in some ways. And Whitley's wide open, and there are all kinds of holes in Whitley that things happen around him! And they really do—I've seen them. I have seen things happen around Whitley Strieber so... I think people are fundamentally different Gregg. And I think the mistake we make is we think oh everyone's like me no they're not They are NOT like you sorry

26:02 I certainly learned that a long time ago, but it's not true. Yeah i do like that you use there's a quote in the book i had from the book supernatural where you refer to yourself as energetically thick i always say energetically dense i've been saying that for years because i talk to people who have such extreme experiences and i say well i'm glad that you get a charge from the courts that you put on your desk, but I walk through a crystal shop and i don't feel anything. So I don't understand how there can be these effects. They call it subtle energy for a reason, I suppose, but you can put a lot of subtle energy in my space and I still wouldn't recognize it, I guess. Maybe that is something genetic

26:48 I think it's interesting because there is so much interplay with consciousness, but it doesn't seem to relate to openness. Because we are both clearly very open to other people's experiences and... Yeah but Greg some people are not open and like I don't think skeptics or bad people. I think they honestly don't believe that this is happening or that this is possible Am convinced it's possible. It happens all the time But I don't think that the skeptical thinker is a bad person because of those thoughts, I think They're trying to be as honest and as rigorous as possible And of course sometimes there are bad people don't get me wrong I mean people do deceive and do say things that they don't actually think but I don't think for the most part These skeptical thinkers I'm talking about like that at all. I think they're just being very honest and

27:41 and sincere about their positions, and I think they're actually right. But let me shift metaphors here Greg. I grew up...I wanted to be an NFL quarterback okay? That was my goal in life okay that did not happen okay not even close! Not even close. And your brain thanks you for that well i'm sure okay thank you Jeff for that but Why didn't that happen? Because I didn't have the skill set. I wasn't genetically gifted in the ways that produce NFL quarterbacks." I don't believe for one second, that everybody is capable of everything. That's complete nonsense!

28:27 And if you're in athletics, you know that instantly. I mean that's not—that's like 101! It's like uh duh? You know but for some reason in other realms of life we assume that everybody is capable of everything and it's just not true. The skill sets are distributed through the human population very uneven ways and some people again Whitley Strieber is a mutant He is a walking poltergeist, trust me. But I'm not, Greg. You can hang out with me and absolutely nothing will happen, I assure you." No, I agree with you. I don't think that the materialists or the skeptics are bad people or have bad intentions most of the time but we talked about belief factoring into some of this and it doesn't seem to be necessarily related to who has these experiences and who doesn't? It doesn't really seem to be a trigger if you're open to them or not

29:28 Like Whitley, he talks about trauma being a trigger that seems to be not an exact universal but very common thing that people who had childhood traumas might be experienced of this kind of stuff. There's also soul-centered healing, a whole segment of psychology that is now looking at traumas and the deeper consciousness in finding what they interpret as entity attachments and this sort of stuff results in physical illnesses to a degree. And I think that probably should be explored more too, and many of us we might even have traumas that happen you know i'd have two kids under two both were pretty traumatic birth experiences they're not going to remember that but maybe that opened them up to something wider it doesn't have to be abuses throughout you know your upbringing it could be something at day one i guess but it seems like whether

30:25 More so than belief or openness to it, one of the major triggers is trauma and that's a little scary. You don't want to think that should be a prerequisite to experiencing a gray or something? Well, So one of the things I write and talk about a lot is what I call The Traumatic Secret. And It refers to this idea but A couple things there The traumatic secret does not imply that these things can be explained by trauma. It's that the trauma opens somebody up to it, it kind of splits you open and a couple things I'll say there first of all I think that's just true when I sit down with an experiencer there are two things that I'm going to listen for one is trauma and the other is sex

31:13 and I'm just going to listen. And often they won't tell me about those two things, the first rendition of the story but the second or third or fourth, they'll come out very quickly. The other thing we have to remember is historically human beings were commonly traumatized. We didn't have effective painkillers until very recently and we tend to live a long time and we tend to dull pain in very effective ways today. That was not possible for our ancestors, so one of the ideas I'm very...I don't know if I am persuaded by but I'm very sympathetic too is that actually our ancestors had a lot more these experiences than we do. In other words

32:07 It's not that we're evolving towards greater awareness, we're more like falling. We are devolving in some basic way and I think it is because were less traumatized with modern medicine and medication that dulls us to open us up. And let me just give you a simple example take near death experiences okay? Near death experiences by definition are traumatic You don't get one until you almost freaking die, right? I mean it's bad. These are bad situations but they result in sometimes a tremendously uplifting spiritual or metaphysical situation but you don't get one without the other. You don't get a near-death experience without almost dying

32:56 Yeah, that's clearly true. Trauma? Maybe it is just one mechanism to break us open like that's the core of what we're trying to get 25 grams of psychedelic mushrooms can also break you open your body might consider that traumatic but your mind might not yeah I mean a psychedelic is traumatic That's what I'm saying That's super traumatic to your brain Well, you know the sexuality thing is interesting because that's maybe less traumatic. Although some people I don't know. Yeah depends yeah ask me at 16 if i thought it was a lot of stress and trauma involved in

33:35 sexual growth, I'd say probably. But that overlap with sexuality is a huge focus area of yours. I knew I was going to bring this up. Religions tend to make rules around sexuality or develop practices like tantra. You know if you're in the West it's like don't ever do it or think about it ever and if you're in the East it's like well let's explore this thing and of course that's not exactly a one-to-one correlation there seems to be fertility cults in early Christianity too but they certainly make some determinations around the sexuality of their congregations. And it's also clearly a huge part of many high strangeness experiences, I guess I'm pretty curious about that overlap even in the occult world they seem preoccupied with what can these sexual fluids do if you mix them together in weird ways? Why do you think there is that overlap and why might these entities be so concerned with our sexuality

34:34 So the reason I got so interested in human sexuality was not because I was a biologist or Freudian. I think sexuality results in altered states of consciousness that can be imbued with mystical and religious themes, In other words, I don't think sex is just sex. I think it can take on metaphysical meanings and can open up to other realms in a way that psychedelics say they can And historically, there are two symbolic structures that control most of mystical literature. One is orgasm, the other's death and if you think about ways to really alter a human being, orgasm and death are the two ways to do it. They're both very natural, they're both very close ones very easy to do in some ways but very hard in others

35:36 And I think what the religions have done is they've recognized that. I think the anxiety around sexuality is a different issue, Gregg. If you think about the human being as a container and you think about religion as a container then you're going to be extremely anxious around two processes that are not maybe daily but very regular one is eating what goes in the container and what comes out of the container Another is sexuality, because sexuality can produce other human beings out of various mixings and matchings that might be socially explosive by the way. And of course illness is another I guess there's three illnesses you know as things come in and out of the body in ways that are not controlled so that notion of purity and the container and The danger around sexuality I think is one thing I think the way that

36:35 orgasm and sexual desire can play into altering consciousness is related to that but it's in fact a different thing. Much more akin to psychedelics than or near death actually, then we imagine. And I know your own story of how the eating and sexuality Kind of overlapped a little bit. I know you've talked about that many times, but i'm really interested in what seems like maybe a kundalini experience? I interviewed a doctor Joanna Kiyava, and she wrote about the goddess. And she basically was reading old ancient tantric text with some people in like a group setting and then her next sexual experience that happened like it went through her body She's very convinced It was a conscious energy that moved

37:27 wherever it wanted to move throughout the body and maybe spilled over onto her partner. And then this opened up a whole can of worms as to what was the goddess all about? What is the divine feminine all about, it seems like A lot of magical mechanisms or side effects are all these things. They have ways to reach us and one of these things is sex with a female who embodies the goddess, so maybe knows a little bit about that history or does certain things and we have obviously cut that completely out of our modern culture but what do you What do you think about that? It seems like you had an experience in that realm that would kind of mirror hers from a male perspective, but it definitely seems like one of those mechanisms and maybe it speaks to why there's so much goddess worship in the past. That's just a big question! Okay let me take it into two parts first of all I think a lot of sacred sexuality or mystical openings around sexual arousal are queer and by that I mean they don't follow

38:34 the heterosexual assumptions of society. So like, for example again to go back to Whitley if you look at Whitley's experiences they're incredibly sexual but they're also very queer they don't follow a heterosexual model and they do involve a female deity or goddess figure by the way but not in always predictable ways when I was trained in religion in the 80s one of our big questions was, do the mythical presence of a goddess figure translate into a kind of gender equity in society? In other words, do religions that have models of the feminine divine, do they result in more feminist-oriented societies. And I think the answer is no. Really? Yeah. Hmm. I think if you talk to most

39:29 historians or scholars of religion, they would be very suspicious of translating a mythical system into social reality. It's my opinion now this is just my opinion that our own values around gender and sexuality are our values and to the extent we see them in anything pre-modern or much less non-western I think were largely projecting Now having said that i do think A lot of extreme religious experiences happen in and around sexuality. They can happen with women if you happen to be a heterosexual male or same-sex female, they can happen around men, they can happen alone... They can happen in any number of sexual situations that I think are baffling to our social values frankly and I think that's their power actually! That's their

40:32 Let me say one more thing, Greg. And this will kind of get to the same question I taught a month-long course once at Esalen on sexuality and spirituality and i made the mistake of going around the room and asking people to tell their story that was a mistake! I thought oh we're talking about maybe two nights of this you know there were 25 people in the room it took like almost a week and a half and everybody was bawling And there was one happy story in the whole room. One, one! And this was not an unusual room Greg I mean these were just people these were people who came mostly from American culture and not entirely but their relationship to their sexuality into their religious tradition was really conflicted it was really twisted

41:34 And so what I did as a teacher is, I tried to explain why it was conflicted. And that was healing in an indirect way because then they understood oh this is why I was so conflicted and basically what I tried to do was get them to own up to their own values around gender and sexuality and see that their historical tradition does not hold those or come from those And that's okay. I mean, that's what history...I mean that's what human culture is! It's a development it's changing its constant changing So I don't know if that helps but I think that's true and I also think people have out of body experiences ecstatic experiences paranormal experiences around sexuality That they cannot explain but this has something to do with human sexuality

42:28 Yeah, I think that's fair to say. I recall talking to George P Hanson pretty recently and we were talking about the trickster of course and taboo and how the trickster or archetypes who embody the trickster love to kind of mess with taboo and like to see people squirm it seems so in these experiences they contain a little bit of that but he also talked about this hypothesis that maybe religions started to be restrictive with rules around taboos and around sexuality because they were trying to keep the trickster at bay. The trickster and Satan are sometimes thought of similarly, and maybe there's a proximity or frequency of experiences with the trickster that happened from taboo violations so the church was like

43:22 Let's put a stop to all that. Let's make everything as vanilla as possible because we don't want these experiences popping up because that's the devil." I thought that was kind of interesting, that there could be something in there too, the rules that sexuality puts on its congregation and the notion of trying to keep the taboo violating trickster demon away from everybody cause it's just the unknown. That just scares people. Well certainly sexuality has been demonized in the West You know, the typical image of the devil comes from the god Pan or Pan. And it was very sexual by the way! So there is a fear around sexuality and what George calls The Trickster but the truth is that there's a fear around sexuality in almost any culture because sexuality is very disruptive if you let it run wild It will destroy any social system pretty quickly

44:25 And any social system, any religion knows that. And so a lot of the purity codes and a lot of the prohibitions are around sexuality and gender in any religion. It's not Christianity's fault it's not Europe's fault I mean Europe is to blame for a lot of things but actually not this. This is a human problem that exists in any culture that's going control its transmission and its meaning. You can't get anybody to go to the office if orgies are permitted on a daily basis? Well, it's not just that! It's that... If you're going to create a society particularly have to control lines of transmission. You have to control inheritance. You have to control whose children or whose, you know? So sexual possession

45:20 is a big deal, actually. You own your children in some way that this is the source of the father giving away the bride in Western culture and I know we've moved away from that but we haven't moved entirely away from sexual possession hence our conflict around surnames you know whose surname do you give to kids if both parents keep their surname? There's no solution to that, Craig. I mean you can give them both names and give them one of the names you can give him... What do you do? The genetics! I think the problem here is that genetics conflicts with our social values in a really basic way.

46:06 And I wanted to get back a little bit to the symbolism in this stuff, the meaning of these high strangeness experiences. Maybe how it ties in with dream because that's obviously a skill set dream interpretation and the symbolic language contained there But I've done more podcasts with Gordon White than anyone else, and so we started to get creative with top 10 book lists. And when we did our paranormal book list he put The Supernatural the one you wrote with Whitley Strieber as his number one and it does push the envelope in a lot of ways You write about a few different approaches or tools to use in our attempts to understand. And one of these is hermeneutics, which you write the word can be translated simply as interpretation but it's way weirder than that fundamentally hermeneutics is the art and practice of deciphering meaning and message and that really gets to the heart of things because these experiences can be so bizarre they can be tough to find meaning

47:09 And if I want to know what these beings are, what their objectives are it seems like the best pathway in could be hermeneutics or a better understanding of sharpening that mental tool to understand meaning and message and symbolism. What do you think are some of the bigger themes that are communicated there? How has your hermeneutics helped you in these experiences or interpreting them. Okay, so I'll say a couple things there first of all hermeneutics is derived from the Greek god Hermes who's a trickster figure by the way You know he's the god of language but also He's a thief and he exists in doorways and liminal spaces you know spaces in between And The basic idea of hermeneutics

48:00 I think when most people think of a religious experience or a dream, or a text they think there's a correct interpretation of it and it's just a matter of getting to the right interpretative. In other words the Bible means something let's figure out what it really means! And what hermeneutics...the philosophy of hermeneutic basically argues is that there actually is no singular interpretation of a text or an event or an experience the interpretation or the meaning of an event takes place between the interpreter and that which is being interpreted. And so there's a creative, there's a co-creative argument here. So let me take a dream... The dream doesn't mean anything Greg until you as a dreamer remember it write it down and interpret it then it means something! It takes on a meaning according to how you choose to engage it

49:03 or take an experience of synchronicity. Well, it will mean nothing until the person who has had the experience chooses to take it up and interpret it in a particular way. It might be a kind of guide or signpost on a path of life—it might be a warning! It might mean nothing at all if you ignore it So the idea of hermeneutics is much more radical than just interpretation. It's that you have a co-creative or productive role here, and the event will actually change in some sense because of your interpretation. Okay? Now—okay so that's just a nerdy professorial—that's my lecture! That's my soapbox on hermeneutics

49:54 In terms of what I think we're talking about and what we most need is a hermeneutics of the imagination. And by that, all we have today are models of the imagination that are reductive. You're making shit up Greg! you're hallucinating...you're projecting this stuff it's all in your head as you said earlier okay? That doesn't work I think what's ever happening in these different cases, it is mediating itself through the human imagination. So just because something is appearing in an imaginal form does not mean that its imaginary! Maybe it can only appear to us through the imagination? I'll give you an example...I was just home and I was at a church

50:55 And it has these eight stained glass windows, four on the west and four on the east. And when you're in that church, you actually have no access to the light itself—to the sunlight—you see the light come through these windows and it's broken up and its formed into particular stories involving Jesus on them East and Mary on the West. And those windows have a history they I can tell you about where those stories come from, how some of them are biblical and some of them are not. We can talk about the artists, the lead, the glass... we could do all kinds of things and say that's just human imagination. I'm like no! The light needs these stories to appear in this community and take on a particular meaning

51:48 and they shape their lives around these stories, and they become culture. They become human culture. So I'm trying to make a different argument here, and when you look at all these experiences whether it's of an alien gray or the Blessed Virgin Mary or the Hindu god Ganesh if you don't have a model of the human imagination in mind, you're lost! You know? Ganesha's gonna be over here, Mary is gonna be over here. The alien gray is gonna be over here." But if suddenly you have a model of the imagination that sees it as a mediator or as a translator of something else then suddenly you can take in all these different cultural experiences and you can make this argument about what's going on and it won't be reductive It won't reduce at all to what's just in your head. It'll...it'll be more like the stained glass windows in my hometown So I think that's what we need

52:41 We need some kind of model of the imagination that we don't have at the moment. All the English language gives us is this is imaginary, you're making shit up and no! No! That's not how these experiences work I agree. And it seems like the people who have the better model are a lot of the indigenous cultures who have, maybe they just have the time to sit and map these things out, but they seem to whether it's a by-product of being closer to the earth or whatever that's where I would tend to go for my more complex imaginal models, but let's drill into it a little bit. Do you see the imaginal as a

53:25 single plane, is it something inside the individual? Is it different from a spirit world or dream world per se. These sorts of things. I mean honestly I don't know... So for me a human being is a person who takes the world which is one world and breaks it up into mental dimension and material dimension we split reality And I think the imagination is that middle place in a human being where the external world can speak to this splitter, as it were and say hey you know maybe the world isn't split up like you're doing it. So it presents itself in ways that are absurd and paradoxical and trickster-like because its trying to break us out of these notions we have which are all based on our brains and our senses because we're doing what we evolved to do

54:20 survive and kill things and eat things, but that isn't necessarily how the world is. That's just what works from an adaptive stance or an adaptive situation So I think the imagination is this place that sometimes intervenes in our lives In which the world is much more complicated than that And it can't speak to us Greg It can't speak in English because it doesn't speak English And it can't speak in mathematics, it's not math. It's not science so it speaks in these stories and these weird things that show up on our bedrooms or in our bodies and it speaks the only way that they can get to us which is through the symbols of myths of our cultures you know? Right right I know you gotta get out here and a lot of your overarching material is looking to create better story and I think

55:18 This work towards doing that. I mean, we deconstructed a lot of the typical stories and talked about some things that aren't always folded in and just before we go what should people know about following your work? I know you got two big projects going on the Super Story Trilogy project ongoing until 2027 very bold and ambitious i don't know what i'm gonna be doing in 2024 even but also the archives of the impossible. Let people know what they should know about these things, archives of the impossible really special? Yeah so the trilogy is just it's me talking I mean i don't want to die So when you don't have a project when you're not writing a book You know you're just going to roll over and die I mean so I just keep putting the trilogy off into the future I suppose But I really do intend to write that trilogy And its on science fiction and paranormal and how they are related much along we were talking

56:13 The Archives of the Impossible Project is a real project. It's at Rice University, we have over 1 million documents in it and has 15 collections in it. Anybody can come and work on it and we host conferences around it and... We need help by the way! I guess that what you're allowing me to say here is please help us as in please give us resources to do this right because one of my...I'll end here One of my convictions is that Jeff or Gregor's not gonna crack this thing. This generation isn't gonna do it, probably the next generation won't do it but a multi-generational project like we have in the sciences or at a typical university I think is very effective way to do this and I really believe in multi generational projects. I really believe another people at the end of the day. Actually don't believe in myself

57:14 Because I think if you rely on an individual, you're going to be disappointed every time. But if you rely on a discipline and on a project, I think that's much more certain than I think the archival project is that. I agree. Well, Dr. Kripal this has been a real treat! I try not to take these interviews through the same old paranormal 101 basics and your approach certainly makes it easier to keep things fresh and different and i commend you for pushing the field further in several different ways take care and keep up the great work thanks Craig yeah baby christmas comes early dr jeff cripple

57:57 Certainly one of those guests on the bucket list that i've been hoping to check off. Glad i could squeeze one more of those in before the end of the year he really is something special and we didn't even get into his early work or his work on christianity because he's covered that many many times but what he's doing with the archive of the impossible, is also super special and I'm happy too get to know him This one is slightly on the short side because we were halfway through recording when he realized that a full two hours was going to bleed into another commitment he had. So, we split the difference and made it work I mean what can i really do? But we did fit in a lot and I hope we built a good enough rapport that we can do it again in the future A lot of that always has to do with feedback let him know you enjoyed this and want to see him come back

58:52 Outside of signing up for plus it's really the only thing I ever ask you guys is, I don't care about ratings reviews or likes or comments. Just tell the guests that you enjoyed their interview but when it comes to the archives of The Impossible one thing I noticed while poking around that I didn't see until after this interview was conducted was that they have Jacques Vallée field notes and everything on UFOs and paranormal but it's under embargo until 2028. I find that really interesting! First, why list it at all if it can't be seen yet? But I get the vibe that a lot of these folks are not exactly giving us the smoking gun but they're becoming increasingly less careful with their words And yes obviously we have the Pentagon report and the congressional hearings and David Grush That's all kind of in one box for me

59:49 But then also a lot of people I do respect and appreciate are dropping more hints these days and taking these conversations in different places. And that is awesome to see, and 2028 just seems like an interesting year to me obviously it's two years before 2030 there's just so much that's going to be going on between now and then culturally most likely conspiratorially And then also it seems like the paranormal Pandora's box is going to be cracked open more and more until then. I just finished Diana Pasulka follow up to American Cosmic called Encounters, another interview I hope to slide in before the end of year not much time left though

1:00:36 But I would cite that as exhibit A for what i'm saying after sitting with that book and the material in it. I feel surprisingly confident to being closer to understanding all of this than I was even six months ago, and that's because these people are opening up also we have The Anonymous Source in Paul Shatzkin's book would he have done that a decade ago? I'm not sure But the things that he said really pushed me further downfield and then people like Dr. Kripal and Diana Pasulka are carrying the ball even further I like the point that i've heard dr kripal make in other interviews, That if these ships are supposed to be beings from another planet why don't they have toilets? Or I would add food or kitchens or supplies and all that kind of stuff

1:01:24 I bring this kind of thing up fairly often in high strangeness sorts of shows, like what are angels bigfoot fairies and all these things doing when they aren't facilitating some experience with a person? Do they get thirsty or horny or bored even do they know it's Wednesday. Do they have a separate life? I don't actually think they do It's funny because when we do get some kind of footage trending on Twitter or Instagram, I'll often share it. Like that recent footage of Bigfoot on the mountainside in the rocks from the train and i share it because this is stuff in our wheelhouse! We follow this material

1:02:11 But if someone was to ask me if I thought that was authentic, I'd say not really because we just don't get footage that good and that clear. I don't know if we can sometimes you'll see orbs and there is that footage from Peru of the face peelers And you see the little guy up in a tree There's also some Chris Bledsoe stuff That's compelling but none of it's clear and I don't think it ever will be And I know that when you're looking at high strangeness stuff, the religious lens is just the paradigm of its day and now we have the sci-fi lens. But i do think this stuff has more to do with what we are as humans and this ultimate super intelligence call it God residing just outside of time in space. And I think that's why the information download is such a major part As is the mystic transformation that many people go through

1:03:09 And I would almost speculate that people who are repeat experiencers are the ones who have yet to take the reins in the way the phenomenon wants them too when it comes to their destiny. And i used to think some of these points were lame and unexciting, but I think I've turned a page on that as well! But we'll get deeper into all that when we get Dr Pasulka here again I did like this one a lot though. Obviously we got a lot deeper and weirder in the second half, become a plus member you know you like it! And i don't do ads or sponsors so PLUS is IT. It's my only reward give a little to me and get more for YOU just click the link at the top of your show notes and get the plus feed to plug into your podcasting app or sign in through the patreon and they also give you a feed

1:04:02 Or you can just listen to the full Plus show through Spotify if you're a Patreon subscriber, if that's your thing. I try to make it easy. I know that a password-protected private paid feed is never quite as convenient but I'm always searching for newer better ways to make it even easier. I don't have any incentive to make listening to Plus harder than it has to be And in Hireside News, recently we had some problems on the server that hosts all of the Hireside chats. And this problem was that the plus feed was crushing all our server resources and they bumped me up to a tier that costs close to five grand a month and that does not work for me so my web guy

1:04:50 in the short term limited the plus feed to just the last year of shows. So you can still get all the rest of the episodes in the archive on the website and download them for offline listening through whatever player has all the features you want even though the onsite player is pretty damn good and the website is mobile friendly to make it look like any podcasting app But this is just a temporary thing. We did it so I could bring the costs back down to where they were, and now we're searching for a longer term solution that doesn't destroy me cost-wise and allows us to bring the full archive back to The Plus Feed which is really just something I like personally There are many shows I listen to where when I check they basically stop their feeds around a year or two also

1:05:41 But I'm not satisfied with that, so i'm going to keep looking for creative solutions and let this be the announcement on that. You can't just hit someone with a server cost increase that's more than double what it was before and expect them to not look for a way out. But we also implemented some new tools into the signup forms So we ask for less information And its faster to fill out...I hate forms you know? Im sure im not alone And I don't wanna speak too soon, but i think if what i've been reading is correct we might be able to get rid of usernames and passwords within the next year. Have an even smoother system that's gonna take some time you know for some people the barrier to plus is the money they'll never subscribe to a paid podcast even if it's only eight bucks

1:06:33 Even if they'll go out every Friday night and pay $14 for a single drink, and then tip a server 8 bucks just for walking into the table. There's a psychology about podcasts and media that it should all be free, and that's because the corporate sponsors conditioned you that way, but regardless for some people it's the money and for other people it's the convenience. The annoyance of signing up is the thing that stops them and that's something I can probably keep trying to tweak But I've made my case, the defense will rest And with that said, I do keep forgetting to mention that I put video clips from both the Free & Plus show on YouTube

1:07:16 I don't really know what's up with my YouTube channel, probably just neglect and some sort of offense to the algorithm. But we have almost 100k subscribers which i think is pretty good for an audio only show but since my lengthy timeouts and strikes and the time that I kind of bait-and-switched shows with a pitch to get people not listen on YouTube These video clips I put up don't even get like a thousand views. I don't really care because iIdon't play the YouTube ad revenue game, but I just find it kind of curious. I think accounts that turn comments off also suffer which is why every single video tries to bait you into commenting tell me what you think in the comments or what was your favorite part etc etc they don't really care It's a view count algorithm gaming thing

1:08:08 But regardless, I'm just telling you the video clips are there. Sometimes it's nice to see the facial expressions and the little nuances that you don't get in an audio only show And as for the last episode with John Kirwan plus members rated it a 4.1 so not that bad Not on the top shelf either but man did it spark a lot of comments and a wide diversity of opinions Some resonated with john situation some thought he did it to himself and they had very little empathy. Some thought because he was a flat earther i wasted their time and owed them another episode for their money, you know you can't please all the people all the time i wasn't trying to be harsh or on empathetic too of very serious situation of family shattered by conspiratorial thought

1:09:06 I just try to push back against the general archetype that this stuff ruins your life i think that's an archetype projected from the big machine. To make you afraid to dig deeper it's like jim carries the number twenty three this is just gonna devolve into craziness and paranoia, does not have to i'm reminded of mitch horowitz another guest had a great time talking with but he had said so many disparaging remarks about the quote unquote conspiracy theorists that I pushed back a little bit and said, you know why are you saying this stuff? You can't be a champion of counterculture and then dismiss people who are skeptical of official narratives. And he gave an anecdote about how one guy or a particular small group of people were violent towards someone he knew

1:09:59 And again, that perpetuates this stereotype that we're unhinged and we're prone to violence. Not at all! I'm the most peaceful anti-war live and let live person you're gonna find and this sort of stuff makes me a better thinker not a worse one It's in that spirit and with those things in mind that I push back But then some other people thought I was just way too hard on him and specifically mean about his Christianity Well, I think Christians love to feel as though they're being attacked. It's almost part of the faith there is a weird victimhood thing there right out of the gate. I notice it all the time and i'm with Dr. Kripal! I love that phrase that we started this interview with nobody has any business being a religion scholar until they've lost at least two worlds well I feel the same about attaching yourself to any overarching ideology

1:10:56 If you were born a Christian and you're 50 years old, and you're still a Christian I don't think you've thought enough about the world. I don't think you've explored enough." I've been a Catholic, an atheist, and a liberal... ...and several other things that i eventually discarded And the lesson is to just stop attaching yourself to any ideology or label and be a free-thinking person I don't hate Christians. There's parts of Christianity that I appreciate, just like there are parts of many other things that I fold in to whatever it is I am." But when it comes to this specific interview with John and the way that I turn the combativeness dial up or down in my approach to an interview depends on a few factors that happened long before we ever get onto the air. Number one—he reached out to me

1:11:48 He asked me to be on the show. If you want to be on this show, you should know a few things about me right? Particularly that we might bump heads on this part of your repertoire if I asked him to be on the show and did the same things then i think you could see The difference but then number two I specifically told him hey man I don't care that you're a Christian anymore than I would care That you're an NFL fan But that is not what I want to talk about. So let's stick to the areas where we have common ground here, that actually relate to what this show is." And after that if you're going to repeatedly bring it up—that is your right but I'm gonna push back because this isn't a Christian show! Some of the comments were about how I need to realize I have a lot of Christians in the audience and I should bite my tongue on that stuff... well great

1:12:42 A lot of THC guests are Christians, actually. So sure Christian audience members are welcome too I don't know why again with the victimhood thing like i need to expressly welcome the Christians or they don't feel welcomed it reminds me of the old girlfriends from high school that would constantly ask Are you mad at me? Well no not yet but if you keep asking me I'm bound to eventually get there And I have to expressly say that i'm really just kind of kidding. Don't take this so seriously, another thing that the Christian audience members tend to do but yes you are welcome and you're welcome just like the Christian guests are welcome because we have other common interests! Hey, I like UFC. You could probably listen to this show for 10 years and not know about me because it's irrelevant and doesn't have a place here

1:13:37 You wouldn't know that I made over a thousand dollars on a perfectly called six-fight parlay on the last UFC pay per view. Because, I like this show to have a tight focus on what it was built around and all that said i actually really really liked John he's fun and he can have a raw honest conversation and he is the sort of character that I enjoy He makes me laugh, he's very animated when he speaks...He's great! This little rant is more about the Christian commenters and me saying, look he had the context he needed for the conversation. He was going to be having this was not an ambush we both walked away in a good mood enjoying it and I wish him well. Well that went on too long but let's take a look at the THC meetup calendar before we really start wrapping it up

1:14:31 So what do we got out there in the last couple of weeks of the year? Well, December 22nd is really all we got. And there are two events. There's one at Element Eatery in Cincinnati Ohio and the big one in Sofia Bulgaria at Canal. And that's it which I understand the holidays are more for dealing with the people you already know than meeting new ones but I hope January starts filling up Either way, go to highersidemeetups.com to RSVP to one of those events and get more details or start your own making new friends over stuff like this is a beautiful thing but with that I'm getting out of here big thanks to Dr. Kripal A national treasure if you ask me And i've done my part Your move High Strangeness Secret Keepers Alien Agenda Pushers and Closeted Non-Human Intelligence Contactors Come on out!

1:15:26 Your fucking move. From space it was falling, its light started calling It's making crop circles again Just as I was looking up it showed me all the hidden stuff And now I'm all enlightened and zen The masses is hard Silver ship circ- Now I'm not asleep Don't know where the elite got a beef to the death Now I start to wonder, now we're not the sheep that they want us to be. Got a beam to the head! Now we start to wonder, now we start to wonder of corruption and crime since the visitors set me straight. I encouraged you to go when you see the saucers glow away in the masses is hard silver shipyard.

1:16:50 We got a beam to the head, we start to wonder No were not the sheep that- Oh! We start to wonder. Oh! We start to wonder. Oh! We start to wonder. Oh! We start to wonder. You will see these things up in the sky Just as the system starts to die All spade and extra belly rate It's time we had our face Because were not the sheep that they

1:17:53 Now we start to wonder, now we're not asleep cause' we got THC. And now we start to wonder...