How to Think Impossibly: Jeff Kripal in conversation with Erik Davis

Jeff Kripal is what happens when a scholar of religion gets bitten by a radioactive spider. In Jeff’s case, the spider was an unexpected mystical experience. This powerful encounter helped inspire a torrent of witty and mind-blowing scholarly books that wrestle with examples of “the Impossible:” paranormal consciousness, flying saucers, occult sexuality, the esoteric dimension of super-heroes, the mysticism of studying mysticism, and other topics that Jeff uses to playfully (but seriously) challenge the secular materialist foundations that still define so much intellectual culture. To help put the paranormal onto a serious academic footing, Jeff established the extraordinary Archives of the Impossible at Rice University, where he also supervised Alembic co-founder Erik Davis’s dissertation on “High Weirdness”. Tonight Jeff will give us a glimpse of his forthcoming book, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else. Then he and Erik will chat about the pleasures and challenges of studying weird things, how naturalism relates to the marvelous, and the exploding mainstream interest in occult and paranormal topics.

Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He also helps direct the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and sits on numerous advisory boards in the U.S. and Europe involving the nature of consciousness and the human, social, and natural sciences. Jeff is the author of ten single-authored books, including, most recently, The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities (Chicago, 2022), where he intuits an emerging order of knowledge that can engage in robust moral criticism but also affirm the superhuman or nonhuman dimensions of our histories and futures. He is presently working on a three-volume study of paranormal currents in the sciences, modern esoteric literature, and the hidden history of science fiction collectively entitled The Super Story: Science (Fiction) and Some Emergent Mythologies. His full body of work can be seen at http://jeffreyjkripal.com.

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