Episode 39: The Challenge of the Paranormal, with Jeffrey J. Kripal

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2019

⏱️ 62 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"The world is not simply composed of physical causes strung together in strictly materialistic and mechanical fashion," writes Prof. Jeffrey J. Kripal in his seminal book, Authors of the Impossible. "The world is also a series of meaningful signs requiring a hermeneutics for their decipherment." This, in a nutshell, is Kripal's position vis à vis the fact of paranormal experience, a fact that he has explored in numerous works of scholarship over the last 25 years. For Kripal, whether we see supernatural entities as beings from other worlds or creatures of the human imagination is secondary to the question of whether they merit serious philosophical thought and consideration. On that point, he says, "it's not an option to be neutral." JF and Phil had the honor of sitting down with Jeffrey Kripal to discuss the super-natural, the sacred, and the reasons why these categories remain as vital now as they ever have been. Header image: "Artist's Impression of the Mothman," by Tim Bertelink, Wikimedia Commons. REFERENCES Jeffrey J. Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred, The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, The Super Natural: Why the Unexplained is Real (with Whitley Strieber), and Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks it Empowers Us All (with Elizabeth G. Krohn) Stanley Kubrick's The Shining Wouter Hanegraaff, historian of hermetic philosophy John Keel, The Mothman Prophecies Graham Harman and Eugene Thacker, philosophers J. F. Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande The X-Men (Marvel Comics) Special Guest: Jeffrey J. Kripal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Specter Vision Radio.
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an art and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:21.9	For more episodes and to support the podcast, go to Weird J.F. When I was very young, I was friends and neighbors with a little girl my age named Christine.
0:56.8	Her dad, I think, was a firefighter. One of my earliest memories is of going camping with that
1:02.7	family. I was about three years old at the time. There are actually two memories, two scenes that
1:09.0	have stayed with me from that trip.
1:16.3	The first is of sitting in a rowboat while my friend's dad silently rode us across the lake.
1:20.1	The second is of that morning when I awoke in their tent.
1:25.5	My friend and her parents lay huddled together asleep a few feet away from me.
1:30.2	What's strange is that they weren't human. They looked like apes or more accurately, like members of a hominid species that hasn't walked the earth for
1:36.5	two million years. Homo erectus, maybe. I was terrified, but I couldn't look away. Slowly, as I watched, they reassumed human forms,
1:48.0	and then they were just people again. It was a hypnagogic experience, a hallucination,
1:55.0	but also, oddly, a vision that made Darwin's theory of evolution perfectly palatable when I was introduced to it a few
2:02.5	years later. But then it also gave credence to stories I would later hear about werewolves,
2:09.1	skinwalkers, and other shapeshifters. Fantasy or not, the experience seemed to be telling me
2:15.3	something about the world, namely that all things were
2:18.5	possible.
2:20.3	The memory is what it is.
2:22.2	I can't change it.
2:23.7	Nor can I dispel the feeling that it was somehow paranormal in nature.
2:28.5	Maybe you have a memory of the sky and stored somewhere in a trunk at the back of your
2:32.5	mind.
	...

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