Like most readers, fellow Disinformation contributor Jeremy J. Johnson and I are both big fans of author Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal (Mutants & Mystics and Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred).
We caught up with him recently to discuss Philip K. Dick’s precognition abilities, global shamanic culture, synchronicity, and a new documentary Supernature that he has in the works.
JJ/BR: Dr. Kripal, it is an honor to speak with you. Graham Hancock, Rak Razam, Jeremy D. Johnson and I have recently come up with the concept of entheodelic storytelling. It signifies the archaic revival narrative and gives definition to a new movement of art that is influenced by the usual subjects; altered states, the evolution of consciousness, entheogens, occultism, paranormal phenomena, shamanism, and metaphysics. This also seems to be entangled with what our friend Rak has called the “global shamanic resurgence.”
In recent mainstream media we have seen a more positive view of entheogens as psychedelic medicines slowly infiltrate the mainstream. In Aronofsky’s blockbuster Noah ayahuasca acts as a sacred tea that enables prophetic visions. In The Fountain, the main character Tom engages in meditation and tai-chi in addition to maintaining a healthy psilocybin regimen. In Hannibal, everyone’s favorite evil doctor of psychology administers psilocybin on national television in order to help a patient deal with blocked psychological trauma.
Psychedelic shamanism is obviously a prominent theme in Grant Morrison’s 90’s masterpiece The Invisibles, and next to Patrick Meaney’s equally excellent book Our Sentence is Up, your analysis in Mutants and Mystics is the best analysis I’ve seen on Morrison’s ouvre.
In addition to this, other authors such as the mythologist John David Ebert, have explored metaphysical and mythological analysis of comic books in Tiny Humans, Giant Worlds: Adventures in the Universe of Graphic Novels.
Why do you think there has been such a sudden influx in mystical themes dealing with consciousness altering substances in art? What are your thoughts on the rising popularity of global shamanic culture?
JK: Well, as a historian of various metaphysical currents in American history, and particularly in the counterculture, I can tell you that none of these enthusiasms are really new. They were all robustly present in the 1960s and 70s. What is new, perhaps, is a certain sophistication or “turning of the wheel,” to use a Buddhist phrase (no doubt inappropriately). I also think that we are seeing a renewed influx in such practices and interests because of the deadening effect of scientific materialism and secular culture. It is my own view that human beings are, by nature, spiritual beings. They are not just meat puppets. This spiritual aspect of human nature is not being addressed adequately in the culture, if at all. Indeed, it is being aggressively denied. So people give up on elite public culture and go to popular culture, to comics and graphic novels, to film and to the psychedelic sacraments. Where else are they supposed to go?
The idea of synchronicity is something that is explored in two of your own books Authors of the Impossible and Mutants and Mystics. Could you talk about how synchronicity relates to altered states?
Synchronicity was coined by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung in deep conversation with Wolfgang Pauli, the great quantum theorist. A synchronicity signals a moment when an event in the physical environment corresponds eerily well to an event in the psyche, as if the two were connected or expressions of some deeper One World, which is what Jung and Pauli thought. They called this deeper substratum the unus mundus, literally the One World. Altered states of consciousness and energy, of course, are also often defined by a profound sense that everything is connected, that the mental and material worlds are the same world, that there is a deeper or occult reality behind, within or below this apparent one, that what you see is NOT what you get. In my own work, I describe synchronicities as “nondual signals,” that is, as expressions, often very playful, of a level of reality that is nondual, that is both mental and material at the same time. This level of reality cannot speak to us directly (since it is beyond language), but it can send up signals, as it were. And it does.
Right. Henry Corbin and his biographer, Tom Cheetham, have also explored the imaginal plane in some depth which is always worth re-reading from time to time. Have you heard of the Mandala Effect? What do you think the implications of overlapping multiple timelines are for artists who may become conscious of the multiverse?
No, but I am familiar with the idea from the writings of Philip K. Dick. If an artist or author has such an experience, as Dick had in abundance, the implications are massive for both the worldview and creativity of the artist or author in question. I mean, if creativity is about connecting familiar things in new ways, overlapping time-lines would be one extremely dramatic expression of this. I think precognition and memories of previous lives are somehow expressions of this as well. If my sources mean anything, time isn’t what it seems to be.
It seems that the overall thrust of storytelling influenced by metaphysics is that it is post-ironic, and that it is meta “meta-fiction”, meaning less self conscious and more informed first by altered states, rather than simply playing around with the tropes in the history of literature. I would also say that after a recent influx of post-apocalyptic narratives we are now moving more towards post-dystopia stories, or tales that tend to see the future as dominated and controlled by spirituality, and not the other way around. I think this trend is also a direct reaction to equally brilliant post-modern authors such as Thomas Pynchon and the late David Foster Wallace, at least they are some of the most well known proponents. What do you think?
I hope so. I am very tired of the dystopias and the relativizing irony and objective distance. I am reminded here of one of my intellectual heroes, Aldous Huxley. Every American high school kid reads his dystopian novel BRAVE NEW WORLD. But no one reads his utopian novel, ISLAND, which was his last novel, which was his final spiritual testament, and which he wrote to answer BRAVE NEW WORLD point by point. Why does no one read ISLAND but everyone reads BRAVE NEW WORLD? Why are we only attracted to the dark and destructive? I tease my colleagues in the academy with a “revelation” I received a few years ago. Do you know what that was? I figured out the ultimate criterion of truth in the academy. Do you want to hear it? Here it is: “The truth must be depressing.” If you say something depressing or deconstructive, you are an intellectual. If you say something positive and constructive, you are a dilettante and a dreamer. And God forbid you say anything hopeful or ecstatic. Why is this? Oh, please do what you are doing. Please move us on.
Agree on ISLAND, definitely one of our all time favorites. Rak has done a lot of recent work with the scientist Dr. Juan on using neuroscience to validate and map the experiential charts of inner planes. You also have an interest in this. Could you tell us a bit more about that?
I have a complex relationship to neuroscience and neuroscientists. Conventional neuroscience is ideologically committed to what we call “eliminative physicalism,” basically the philosophical position that there is only matter. That is, they think that we are only tiny dead things bouncing around and forming slightly bigger things, and bigger things, until you get to “us.” They think we are biological computers, basically zombies with computers perched on top. I think that this bizarre position is more a reflection of our present fascination with computer technology and spiritual vacuousness than it is an adequate model of the brain.
But there are other neuroscientists who are breaking with this physicalism and offering other models. I am thinking of the neuroanatomical reflections around the left and right brain hemispheres of writers like Jill Bolte Taylor and Ian McGilchrist. I find their work so helpful for thinking about so many things, including how our culture privileges only left-brain cognitive styles. Still, I have a great deal of faith in neuroscience as a science (as opposed to a materialist interpretation or ideology). I also know that philosophers of mind are moving away from physicalism into the exciting new (really very old) models of panpsychism (very shamanic) and consciousness as a fundamental feature of the cosmos (very mystical).
There is kind of a doom gloom face of the global ecological crisis, which indicates that modern fictional stories simply do not matter. On the other end of the spectrum, Lewis Mehl-Madrona has suggested that everything is a story, and of course Joseph Campbell often suggested that there is a potential to be the heroes of our own narrative.
Do you believe that utilizing sacred narrative in fiction can be used as a means of combating what you call what Graham Hancock calls frankenstein civilization and the endless consumerism of predatory capitalism therein? Do you think fiction still has the potential to be subversive in that sense of de-conditioning people from the prominent mainstream view of our materialistic account of history? Or is it all a bunch of illusion and hyped up nonsense?
Our environmental crisis is partly (not completely) a function of some pretty bad stories, like materialism again. I mean, if we are only matter, why does anything really matter? Why not use up the environment? We need a new worldview, which will never stick without a new story. We desperately need new positive stories of the human spirit that can embrace all we know about the cosmos through the sciences without adopting conventional science’s anti-spiritual interpretations. This is really what MUTANTS AND MYSTICS was all about—an emerging mythology, a meta-mythology, a Super Story.
Could you tell me about the forthcoming documentary Supernature coming out? When will it be released? How did that all get started?
My friend Scott Jones is directing the film. It is an adaptation and crystallization of my history of the human potential movement, ESALEN: AMERICA AND THE RELIGION OF NO RELIGION. It began with Scott’s enthusiasm for my work and the way it addressed his own existential dead-ends. “Supernature” is neither the traditional supernatural nor, certainly, the scientific nothing. Supernature is meant to signal a kind of evolutionary spirituality that sees the human as a cosmic expression of a living conscious universe, a human nature endowed with extraordinary capacities that have yet to find any adequate cultural expression. We intend this film to be one such cultural expression, as are your art and storytelling.
We are still working on the film as we try to find resources to get the technical work done.
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