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Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions
“An academic memoir . . . addresses topics as diverse as Hindu Tantra, Christian mysticism, American counterculture, and the history of the paranormal.” —Los Angeles Review of Books Over the course of his twenty-five-year career, Jeffrey J. Kripal’s study of religion has had two major areas of the erotic expression of mystical experience and the rise of the paranormal in American culture. This book brings these two halves together in surprising ways through a blend of memoir, manifesto, and anthology, drawing new connections between these two realms of human experience and revealing Kripal’s body of work to be a dynamic whole that has the potential to renew and reshape the study of religion.Kripal tells his story, biographically, historically and politically contextualizing each of the six books of his Chicago corpus, from Kali’s Child to Mutants and Mystics, all the while answering his censors and critics and exploring new implications of his thought. In the process, he begins to sketch out a speculative “new comparativism” in twenty theses. The result is a new vision for the study of religion, one that takes in the best of the past, engages with outside critiques from the sciences and the humanities, and begins to blaze a new positive path forward. A major work decades in the making, Secret Body will become a landmark in the study of religion.“Kripal presents us with a compilation of theories, cultural references and anecdotes making up an impassioned thesis about the future of religious studies and ‘what human beings may become’ . . . For all its eccentricities, Kripal’s work is playful, engaging and original.” —Times Higher Education
688 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 14, 2017
About the author
Jeffrey J. Kripal
57 books148 followersJeffrey J. Kripal, Ph.D. (History of Religions, The University of Chicago, 1993; M.A., U. Chicago; B.A., Religion, Conception Seminary College, 1985), holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, where he serves as Associate Dean of Humanities, Faculty and Graduate Studies. He also has served as Associate Director of the Center for Theory and Research of the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.
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December 28, 2017
Jeffrey Kripal's Secret Body is rooted in biography, its tone is confessional as much as academic and it courts ridicule and rejection on every page. It will also elicit impassioned enthusiasm on the part of its dedicated readers (and it does require dedication to traverse its topics). It falls firmly within a genre of educated speculation that began (for me) with William Irwin Thompson’s early-70s classic At the Edge of History, then through the works of Ernst Cassirer, F. S. C. Northrup, Owen Barfield, James Hillman, Ioan Couliano et al. – to explore the irreducible aspect of human consciousness as it's refracted through science, history, anthropology and art, as well as those curious unclassifiable experiences that structure our interior life. Or as he puts it,
Years before Secret Body I dipped into Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism and The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion, and recognized Kripal as an explorer of a path not taken. We're about the same age, we grew up in the Bible Belt and took our faith seriously before seeing it morph into something else under the pressure of both spiritual and sexual experiences. We both studied at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago with the same professors, although by comparison I was merely visiting and he was a full-time resident. This shared history is why I plowed my way through this book with skeptical sympathy. I'm not sure I would have made the journey without it.
I've also had a few of those (I suspect common) experiences generally termed "paranormal," and here I found Kripal illuminating. I've never felt a need to expound, elevate or reduce the significance of these events; it's enough that they occurred. Kripal does. "I am arguing, in effect, that the study of the paranormal is the quantum physics of the study of religion." I think I know what he's trying to say here, but for me the equation is misguided. When someone delves into the paranormal, ufology, poltergeists, telepathy, etc. what one finds is a disturbing mess. Instead of the pure light of mystical revelation and spiritual depth, we get a welter of human horror - precognitions of disaster, memories of traumatic past lives, visions of an afterlife/otherworld that is as confused, cryptic and corrupt as anything we find in ordinary experience. What's the point? Reading these chapters I could only hope that he's right that "each individual finds after death the world in which he has believed." In that case I'll be sitting in a celestial café with a good book, chatting with whoever comes by.
Consciousness is ultimate foundation of all knowledge and experience that is itself beyond or before all knowledge or experience.His project is "a robust comparativism" that incorporates both "the historical/contextualist/reductive argument and the apophatic/deconstructive/mystical argument." That's a lot of slashes – and it's quite a ride.
Years before Secret Body I dipped into Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism and The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion, and recognized Kripal as an explorer of a path not taken. We're about the same age, we grew up in the Bible Belt and took our faith seriously before seeing it morph into something else under the pressure of both spiritual and sexual experiences. We both studied at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago with the same professors, although by comparison I was merely visiting and he was a full-time resident. This shared history is why I plowed my way through this book with skeptical sympathy. I'm not sure I would have made the journey without it.
I've also had a few of those (I suspect common) experiences generally termed "paranormal," and here I found Kripal illuminating. I've never felt a need to expound, elevate or reduce the significance of these events; it's enough that they occurred. Kripal does. "I am arguing, in effect, that the study of the paranormal is the quantum physics of the study of religion." I think I know what he's trying to say here, but for me the equation is misguided. When someone delves into the paranormal, ufology, poltergeists, telepathy, etc. what one finds is a disturbing mess. Instead of the pure light of mystical revelation and spiritual depth, we get a welter of human horror - precognitions of disaster, memories of traumatic past lives, visions of an afterlife/otherworld that is as confused, cryptic and corrupt as anything we find in ordinary experience. What's the point? Reading these chapters I could only hope that he's right that "each individual finds after death the world in which he has believed." In that case I'll be sitting in a celestial café with a good book, chatting with whoever comes by.
December 20, 2019
Jeffrey J. Kripal is a religious writer like no other I’ve ever read. He grew up as a Catholic in Nebraska, for instance (there are Catholics in Nebraska?) He was devout, actually entered a seminary to become a priest. Before that, however, he had somehow gotten the idea that to become holy was to deny his sexuality, so for a time he put off puberty by becoming anorexic, lost weight to the point where he weighed 125 pounds. He overcame his illness through psychotherapy and left the seminary to become a religious historian, made his doctoral dissertation on Ramakrishna into a book entitled Kali’s Child. That book became immediately controversial in the East because he pointed out that “Ramakrishna’s particular from of erotic mysticism was homoerotic in structure.”
As soon as I read that, I thought, of course it was. That explains so much about the man, who was surrounded by male idolators all his life, who took a consort at one point but never had sex with her. Christopher Isherwood must have been biting his tongue the whole time he wrote his book on Ramakrishna. Any mention of sexuality would have ended the project right there.
Partly from his experience of writing about Ramakrishna, Kripal created the first of what he calls his Gnomons, brief epigrammatic statements that sum up a period of work for him.
“Heretical Heterosexuality. Whereas male heterotic forms of the mystical generally become heterodox or heretical, sublimated male homoerotic forms generally become orthodox.”
That was a head scratcher for me when I first read it, and I’m not sure I entirely understand it now. It does catch one’s attention.
Kripal himself identifies as straight.
It was also while he was studying Ramakrishna that Kripal had an extreme kundalini experience, though he was apparently not practicing yoga or meditation at the time. That led to another of his Gnomons, and for this one he has plenty of examples.
“Resonant Comparisons. The works of scholars of comparative mystical literature are often catalyzed by the mystical or anomalous experiences of the intellectuals themselves.”
But it was a couple of other gnomons that captured my attention, and caused me to buy his book in the first place.[1]
“The Erotic Mystic. There is a profound connection between the mystic and the erotic.”
“The Amoral or Transmoral Mystic. There is no necessary or simple connection between the mystical and the ethical.”
Again, with both of these statements, I thought Of course! I saw the connection between the mystical and sexual years ago, and wrote a book about it. As far as the Amoral or Transmoral Mystic, I’ve always suspected that what Kripal says here is true, that the Divine we encounter in mystical moments is an overwhelming force of creation, not concerned with the niceties of behavior. The multiple scandals around Eastern religions suggest that might be true. That is not to suggest that ethical behavior isn’t important. But people can have deep experiences of the divine that don’t influence their behavior at all.
The gnomon that is most important to Kripal’s thought is an early one which at first glace seems almost banal, but which he comes back to again and again.
“The Human as Two. Each human being is two, that is, each person is simultaneously a conscious constructed self or socialized ego and a much larger complexly conscious field that normally manifests only in nonordinary states of consciousness and energy, which the religious traditions have historically objectified, mythologized, and projected outward into the sky as divine, as “God” or introjected inward into the human being as nirvana, brahman, or located in some sort of experienced paradoxical state that is neither inside nor outside, as in the Chinese Dao or the American paranormal.”
This seemed when I first read it to be reductive, as if he’s saying God is all in our heads. But it soon becomes apparent that isn’t what Kripal means. He sees Mind as something vast, in fact infinite, not a function of the human brain. The brain is a filtering device to help us take things in.
“The Filter Thesis. Mind exists independently of the brain, into and by which it is filtered, transmitted, reduced, particularized, and translated through all of the neurological, cognitive, linguistic, cultural, and social processes that we have identified in the humanities, sciences, and social sciencies. The filter thesis does not require that we deny any of these hard-won knowledges—only that we “flip” our interpretive perspective and see these processes as reductions rather than complete productions of consciousness.”
Perhaps you can see him homing in on his final (of 20) gnomon.
“The New Sacred. Consciousness as such is the new sacred.”
The Secret Body itself is a summing up of Kripal’s work, though he does not seem anywhere near the end of it (and he’s not old, born in 1962). He’s searching through it as if to see a pattern, a figure in the carpet. I would say that one emerges. And it does so eventually by considering some things I wouldn’t normally read about, the paranormal, telepathy, even—God help us all—UFO’s.
When I bought the book I thought I would skip all that, read through the initial section on mystics and drop the book when things got too weird. But Kripal has some fascinating thoughts about all these phenomena; he sees them as the divine breaking into ordinary life, the kinds of events that are reported routinely throughout the Bible. (Just as an example, he cites the book of Ezekiel—which my brother, who is reading it in Hebrew, recently told me is “the most astonishing book in the Bible”—in which Ezekiel is visited by what sounds like a UFO. My brother concurs.) Kripal even has a theory that it is people who have suffered some trauma who are particularly susceptible to such visitations.
“The Traumatic Secret. The paranormal event or altered state of consciousness appears to be ‘let in’ through the temporary suppression or dissolution of the socialized ego, which was opened up or fractured (either at the moment of the event or earlier in the life cycle) through extreme physical, emotional, and/or sexual suffering, that is, through what we would today call trauma. The trauma here is the trigger, but not necessarily the cause.”
Many of the examples of paranormal events that he mentions, incidents of telepathy, near death experiences, people foreseeing an event in the future, remembering previous incarnations, are remarkably convincing, and reported by people that we don’t think of as nutty or notably religious, like Mark Twain, Roger Ebert, Barbara Ehrenreich.
I must confess I was eventually worn out by this text. As you may have noticed, Kripal is not averse to academic jargon, and he loves long sentences and the sound of his own voice. His work is extremely personal in one way and oddly impersonal in another; he doesn’t tell us if he now practices a religion, or engages in a spiritual practice. But this book is heady stuff. It’s words, words, words.
Yet there were many places where I thought: I’ve always suspected this was true. I bet lots of people suspect it’s true. But nobody has had the nerve to say it. Reading this book genuinely expanded my religious view of the world. And there’s a section on the sexuality of Jesus that has to be read to be believed (or not believed. What’s hard to believe is that the man wrote it).
I admire Krispal for his nerve. Nerve in writing about religion is no small thing. But I also think that what Kripal is ultimately writing about is beyond words (and using many many words doesn’t get us any closer). It can’t be written about. It has to be lived. We should all remember that, after a final experience of the divine, Aquinas thought his writing was so much straw.
[1] I found this book in the old-fashioned way, browsing in my favorite bookstore and stumbling across it. I’d never heard of the book or of Jeffrey Kripal. I sat on a couch in the store reading the book with some fascination, and violated my number one rule for book buying these days: never buy a book on the first viewing. Many of the books sitting around unread on my shelves were purchased in a burst of enthusiasm. At my age, I have to ask myself: am I really going to read this in the time I have left? I began reading this book the night I bought it.
www.davidguy.org
As soon as I read that, I thought, of course it was. That explains so much about the man, who was surrounded by male idolators all his life, who took a consort at one point but never had sex with her. Christopher Isherwood must have been biting his tongue the whole time he wrote his book on Ramakrishna. Any mention of sexuality would have ended the project right there.
Partly from his experience of writing about Ramakrishna, Kripal created the first of what he calls his Gnomons, brief epigrammatic statements that sum up a period of work for him.
“Heretical Heterosexuality. Whereas male heterotic forms of the mystical generally become heterodox or heretical, sublimated male homoerotic forms generally become orthodox.”
That was a head scratcher for me when I first read it, and I’m not sure I entirely understand it now. It does catch one’s attention.
Kripal himself identifies as straight.
It was also while he was studying Ramakrishna that Kripal had an extreme kundalini experience, though he was apparently not practicing yoga or meditation at the time. That led to another of his Gnomons, and for this one he has plenty of examples.
“Resonant Comparisons. The works of scholars of comparative mystical literature are often catalyzed by the mystical or anomalous experiences of the intellectuals themselves.”
But it was a couple of other gnomons that captured my attention, and caused me to buy his book in the first place.[1]
“The Erotic Mystic. There is a profound connection between the mystic and the erotic.”
“The Amoral or Transmoral Mystic. There is no necessary or simple connection between the mystical and the ethical.”
Again, with both of these statements, I thought Of course! I saw the connection between the mystical and sexual years ago, and wrote a book about it. As far as the Amoral or Transmoral Mystic, I’ve always suspected that what Kripal says here is true, that the Divine we encounter in mystical moments is an overwhelming force of creation, not concerned with the niceties of behavior. The multiple scandals around Eastern religions suggest that might be true. That is not to suggest that ethical behavior isn’t important. But people can have deep experiences of the divine that don’t influence their behavior at all.
The gnomon that is most important to Kripal’s thought is an early one which at first glace seems almost banal, but which he comes back to again and again.
“The Human as Two. Each human being is two, that is, each person is simultaneously a conscious constructed self or socialized ego and a much larger complexly conscious field that normally manifests only in nonordinary states of consciousness and energy, which the religious traditions have historically objectified, mythologized, and projected outward into the sky as divine, as “God” or introjected inward into the human being as nirvana, brahman, or located in some sort of experienced paradoxical state that is neither inside nor outside, as in the Chinese Dao or the American paranormal.”
This seemed when I first read it to be reductive, as if he’s saying God is all in our heads. But it soon becomes apparent that isn’t what Kripal means. He sees Mind as something vast, in fact infinite, not a function of the human brain. The brain is a filtering device to help us take things in.
“The Filter Thesis. Mind exists independently of the brain, into and by which it is filtered, transmitted, reduced, particularized, and translated through all of the neurological, cognitive, linguistic, cultural, and social processes that we have identified in the humanities, sciences, and social sciencies. The filter thesis does not require that we deny any of these hard-won knowledges—only that we “flip” our interpretive perspective and see these processes as reductions rather than complete productions of consciousness.”
Perhaps you can see him homing in on his final (of 20) gnomon.
“The New Sacred. Consciousness as such is the new sacred.”
The Secret Body itself is a summing up of Kripal’s work, though he does not seem anywhere near the end of it (and he’s not old, born in 1962). He’s searching through it as if to see a pattern, a figure in the carpet. I would say that one emerges. And it does so eventually by considering some things I wouldn’t normally read about, the paranormal, telepathy, even—God help us all—UFO’s.
When I bought the book I thought I would skip all that, read through the initial section on mystics and drop the book when things got too weird. But Kripal has some fascinating thoughts about all these phenomena; he sees them as the divine breaking into ordinary life, the kinds of events that are reported routinely throughout the Bible. (Just as an example, he cites the book of Ezekiel—which my brother, who is reading it in Hebrew, recently told me is “the most astonishing book in the Bible”—in which Ezekiel is visited by what sounds like a UFO. My brother concurs.) Kripal even has a theory that it is people who have suffered some trauma who are particularly susceptible to such visitations.
“The Traumatic Secret. The paranormal event or altered state of consciousness appears to be ‘let in’ through the temporary suppression or dissolution of the socialized ego, which was opened up or fractured (either at the moment of the event or earlier in the life cycle) through extreme physical, emotional, and/or sexual suffering, that is, through what we would today call trauma. The trauma here is the trigger, but not necessarily the cause.”
Many of the examples of paranormal events that he mentions, incidents of telepathy, near death experiences, people foreseeing an event in the future, remembering previous incarnations, are remarkably convincing, and reported by people that we don’t think of as nutty or notably religious, like Mark Twain, Roger Ebert, Barbara Ehrenreich.
I must confess I was eventually worn out by this text. As you may have noticed, Kripal is not averse to academic jargon, and he loves long sentences and the sound of his own voice. His work is extremely personal in one way and oddly impersonal in another; he doesn’t tell us if he now practices a religion, or engages in a spiritual practice. But this book is heady stuff. It’s words, words, words.
Yet there were many places where I thought: I’ve always suspected this was true. I bet lots of people suspect it’s true. But nobody has had the nerve to say it. Reading this book genuinely expanded my religious view of the world. And there’s a section on the sexuality of Jesus that has to be read to be believed (or not believed. What’s hard to believe is that the man wrote it).
I admire Krispal for his nerve. Nerve in writing about religion is no small thing. But I also think that what Kripal is ultimately writing about is beyond words (and using many many words doesn’t get us any closer). It can’t be written about. It has to be lived. We should all remember that, after a final experience of the divine, Aquinas thought his writing was so much straw.
[1] I found this book in the old-fashioned way, browsing in my favorite bookstore and stumbling across it. I’d never heard of the book or of Jeffrey Kripal. I sat on a couch in the store reading the book with some fascination, and violated my number one rule for book buying these days: never buy a book on the first viewing. Many of the books sitting around unread on my shelves were purchased in a burst of enthusiasm. At my age, I have to ask myself: am I really going to read this in the time I have left? I began reading this book the night I bought it.
www.davidguy.org
June 16, 2020
This book continues my reading of Jeffrey Kripal, whose insights and speculations I find intriguing. This is my fourth book by Kripal that I've read, and each one has intrigued me. The Secret Body (2019) is unique because it serves as a summary of his work to date. It consists of a series of diverse essays with commentary about this personal and scholarly journey. As I mentioned in my review of The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind & the Future of Knowledge, Kripal grew-up in a small town in southeast Nebraska, which is the middle nowhere by most people's reckoning. I grew up in southwest Iowa, on the other side of the Missouri River, which is a fraction less of a nowhere than southeast Nebraska. (But, of course, in growing-up, one thinks of one's home turf as the Middle Earth, the Center of the Known Universe.) Anyway, that someone from such a bland background could go on to have such adventures (of the mind) as Kripal has serves as a reminder of what we are capable of in our capacities to grow and experience the larger world. Indeed, another particularly personal source of enjoyment in reading The Secret Body comes from reading about Kripal's Catholic boyhood and upbringing. I'm about nine years older than Kripal, and I grew up (in part) in the pre-Vatican II Church, an even more exotic experience than Kripal's post-Vatican II experience. Vatican II "Protestantized" the Ameican Catholic Church in many ways. (For a spot-on account of the pre-Vatican II American Catholic experience see Garry Wills's Bare-Ruined Choirs (1972).) So although Kripal missed out on what I might label "the full Catholic experience," his faith nevertheless provided a formative experience that set him on his way to his intellectual adventures. Finally, also in a personal vein, Kripal describes his visits to his home town and family in Nebraska as an adult, academic scholar of religions. These visits constitute a trip to an outwardly familiar but also alien world, almost as alien (or exotic) as his experiences with Hindu culture and religion and his investigations of paranormal experience. Kripal recognizes both the goodness of the folks who live there and their stubborn insularity that has allowed politicians--and especially the Great Orange Menace (my term, not Kripal's)--to act to the detriment of those good folks. Again, Kripal's experience resonates with me. One needn't be a wild-eyed radical (I'm certainly not) to see that many of the attitudes held by these folks "are neither [as] pure, nor wise, nor good" as they would believe, and their attitudes and decisions also hurt those of us who share this planet with them. Kripal is justly blunt but loving in his critique.
Kripal's scholarly journey provides the backbone of his book, and while it may seem an esoteric topic--well, it is. During the time that Kripal spent as a monk, he underwent Freudian psychoanalysis to deal with anorexia (disguised as ascetic holiness), and he came to the realization that the monastery was in some sense a gay institution, although homosexuality was officially condemned by the Church. Kripal describes his transformation after his successful psychoanalysis and his insight into the monastic life:
By the end of that year, the analyst, the buxom women, and I had cured the anorexia.
And I was really hungry. I ate everything in sight. I gained about seventy pounds over the next few months. I was a new man at twenty-two. Suddenly, I was also a sexual being.
The seminary community was a hotbed of psychosocial exploration, but which I do not mean anything explicitly sexual, much less genital. I mean that those years constituted a four-year initiation in the sexual roots of the spiritual life and the spiritual roots of the sexual life. The basic point is this; I came into my early psychological awakening and intellectual calling as a confused and repressed straight man in what was, more or less (mostly more), a gay religious community.
Kripal goes on to ponder the implications of all this, and he recognizes (among many things) the deep debt he owes to both Jesus and Freud for coming to a greater understanding of his world.
Indeed, these insights into sexuality became the basis of Kripal's early scholarly work, which he pursued via a doctorate in comparative religions at the University of Chicago and that he parlayed into a successful academic career (he's been at Rice University of many years now). Each of Kripal's first three books deals with mysticism and sexuality. (I've read The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (2008) and it's a duzzy--perhaps my excuse for not having reviewed it yet.) As you may imagine, some people don't like to think about the sexuality of Jesus or of the nineteenth-century Hindu mystic Ramakrishna, and Kripal has drawn the wrath of fundamentalists in both the U.S. and India for his explorations and explications. And, of course, it's all fascinating.
After becoming a persona non grata to Hindu fundamentalists, Kripal turned closer to home to explore what is often described as the "paranormal," and what he has come to term the "super natural." This takes him into the world of Esalen (the counter-culture capital on the Big Sur), comic books, and UFOs, among other topics. And if you think that these topics are far from religion, then you haven't read enough Jeffrey Kripal. With each new topic, Kripal further explores and refines his thoughts as "the human as two." In fact, he develops twenty theses that he labels "gnomons," which Kripal describes as "a short aphorism and maxim . . . that [are] "gnostic" in nature," along with other enticing associations, including gnomes, those little creatures of the earth whose statues populate our gardens with their pointy hats. These brief statements provide a series of stations or markers that provide some conclusions or working hypotheses that Kripal has arrived at during the course of his investigations. He reveals each gnomon as his account progresses. But to be clear: this is not an intellectual biography as such. While Kripal includes aspects of his personal and scholarly biography along with way, he also includes a number of short scholarly articles he's written on various topics that highlight and explore his scholarly inquires. This interspacing of reminisces with articles written along his scholarly journal works well, each perspective casts further light on the other.
As I reflect on this work, I'm struck by what a fun and exciting read this book provides. Perhaps Kripal's a little crazy, but perhaps not; perhaps his ideas are too out there; but perhaps not. I'm not sure if Kripal is chasing phantoms, and I suspect he'd be the first to suggest that the line between phantoms and "reality" is a thin, permeable line, which we can only intuit by extraordinary glances. In Kripal's persuasive view, we are "the human as two," with a whole lot going on that we as a species have been trying to understand and appreciate for our entire history. And it seems we're just getting going.
Kripal's scholarly journey provides the backbone of his book, and while it may seem an esoteric topic--well, it is. During the time that Kripal spent as a monk, he underwent Freudian psychoanalysis to deal with anorexia (disguised as ascetic holiness), and he came to the realization that the monastery was in some sense a gay institution, although homosexuality was officially condemned by the Church. Kripal describes his transformation after his successful psychoanalysis and his insight into the monastic life:
By the end of that year, the analyst, the buxom women, and I had cured the anorexia.
And I was really hungry. I ate everything in sight. I gained about seventy pounds over the next few months. I was a new man at twenty-two. Suddenly, I was also a sexual being.
The seminary community was a hotbed of psychosocial exploration, but which I do not mean anything explicitly sexual, much less genital. I mean that those years constituted a four-year initiation in the sexual roots of the spiritual life and the spiritual roots of the sexual life. The basic point is this; I came into my early psychological awakening and intellectual calling as a confused and repressed straight man in what was, more or less (mostly more), a gay religious community.
Kripal goes on to ponder the implications of all this, and he recognizes (among many things) the deep debt he owes to both Jesus and Freud for coming to a greater understanding of his world.
Indeed, these insights into sexuality became the basis of Kripal's early scholarly work, which he pursued via a doctorate in comparative religions at the University of Chicago and that he parlayed into a successful academic career (he's been at Rice University of many years now). Each of Kripal's first three books deals with mysticism and sexuality. (I've read The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (2008) and it's a duzzy--perhaps my excuse for not having reviewed it yet.) As you may imagine, some people don't like to think about the sexuality of Jesus or of the nineteenth-century Hindu mystic Ramakrishna, and Kripal has drawn the wrath of fundamentalists in both the U.S. and India for his explorations and explications. And, of course, it's all fascinating.
After becoming a persona non grata to Hindu fundamentalists, Kripal turned closer to home to explore what is often described as the "paranormal," and what he has come to term the "super natural." This takes him into the world of Esalen (the counter-culture capital on the Big Sur), comic books, and UFOs, among other topics. And if you think that these topics are far from religion, then you haven't read enough Jeffrey Kripal. With each new topic, Kripal further explores and refines his thoughts as "the human as two." In fact, he develops twenty theses that he labels "gnomons," which Kripal describes as "a short aphorism and maxim . . . that [are] "gnostic" in nature," along with other enticing associations, including gnomes, those little creatures of the earth whose statues populate our gardens with their pointy hats. These brief statements provide a series of stations or markers that provide some conclusions or working hypotheses that Kripal has arrived at during the course of his investigations. He reveals each gnomon as his account progresses. But to be clear: this is not an intellectual biography as such. While Kripal includes aspects of his personal and scholarly biography along with way, he also includes a number of short scholarly articles he's written on various topics that highlight and explore his scholarly inquires. This interspacing of reminisces with articles written along his scholarly journal works well, each perspective casts further light on the other.
As I reflect on this work, I'm struck by what a fun and exciting read this book provides. Perhaps Kripal's a little crazy, but perhaps not; perhaps his ideas are too out there; but perhaps not. I'm not sure if Kripal is chasing phantoms, and I suspect he'd be the first to suggest that the line between phantoms and "reality" is a thin, permeable line, which we can only intuit by extraordinary glances. In Kripal's persuasive view, we are "the human as two," with a whole lot going on that we as a species have been trying to understand and appreciate for our entire history. And it seems we're just getting going.
September 26, 2020
Jeffrey Kripal is one of the bravest and most creative writers in religious studies today. He tries to understand the subject under study both on and beyond its own terms. This book is part autobiography, and part contextualization of Kripal’s other books. In it he explores not only religion’s role as a part of human experience, but also as a means for understanding what is generally termed the paranormal. As the narrative makes clear, Kripal has taken quite a bit of ridicule for his willingness to consider the supernatural, but its ubiquity in human experience has him open to human potential.
The book is not always easy reading since the author is theoretically inclined and a rigorous thinker. He fully engages with deconstructionism and other approaches to the field. He refuses to dismiss, however, what sincere people have reported across the decades (and in some cases, centuries) simply to hold to a materialist paradigm. This makes for fascinating reading. Mainstream scholars tend to dismiss his work, but a significant number of other scholars believe he is onto something.
I wrote a bit more about this engrossing book on my blog (Sects and Violence in the Ancient World). As I state there, I have met the author and have had some chats with him. He’s rational, smart, and respectful. These things can be a rarity in academia, and it is a pleasure to find an unassuming, open-minded scholar asking the truly deep questions of his own field of study. It’s also a mind-blowing experience to read what the results are.
The book is not always easy reading since the author is theoretically inclined and a rigorous thinker. He fully engages with deconstructionism and other approaches to the field. He refuses to dismiss, however, what sincere people have reported across the decades (and in some cases, centuries) simply to hold to a materialist paradigm. This makes for fascinating reading. Mainstream scholars tend to dismiss his work, but a significant number of other scholars believe he is onto something.
I wrote a bit more about this engrossing book on my blog (Sects and Violence in the Ancient World). As I state there, I have met the author and have had some chats with him. He’s rational, smart, and respectful. These things can be a rarity in academia, and it is a pleasure to find an unassuming, open-minded scholar asking the truly deep questions of his own field of study. It’s also a mind-blowing experience to read what the results are.
January 2, 2024
I’m reading another one of the very few books that has literally blown my mind, extricated it and smashed it against the wall and thunked it back down into my skull. Jeffrey Kripal is a scholar of religion at Rice University. I picked up Secret Body for like three dollars on Kindle. It is already shaping up to be one of the major books on my journey. And much like Deleuze & Guattari, the other crazy dudes who have done this to me, his book does the very thing that it analyzes and describes. That the study of religion is neither faith nor reason but gnosis, a pipeline to the humanness at the core and ground of our being in the world. And that many of these religious scholars, particularly in comparative religion (but also theoretical physics), have had these mystical experiences that they tried to work out through their scholarship.
Kripal traces back his interest to his own one-time mystical experience with the goddess Kali while he was studying for his dissertation in India. This experience has not repeated for him since, but it has led him on a quest to understand human existence as consciousness telling its own story in the world. He proceeds to lay out 20 “gnoses” that sum up his understanding of the study of religion theoretically, practically, and existentially. Kripal argues that mystic experiences – connecting with the underlying consciousness that precedes physical existence – is intimately erotic but non-ethical. That is, these experiences produce a literal kind of power that can be used productively but also harmfully. He also tied these experiences to instances of the paranormal (or as he terms it, the "super-normal"). Kripal finally suggests that the study of religion itself is and ought to be based not in deposited religious knowledge nor in modernist empiricism, but the gnosis of experiencing and then reading that experience back into the historical religions of the past.
Kripal’s experiences dovetail very much with my own experiences with Kriya Yoga, with contemplative Christian prayer, and with studying the New Message from God, all in comparative fashion. I did not become a professional academic because I wasn’t particularly interested in publish or perish, or the modernist reductionism of the academy of religious studies. Kripal provides a provocative and positive creative way forward. Stay tuned for further weirdness unfolding in my life.
Kripal traces back his interest to his own one-time mystical experience with the goddess Kali while he was studying for his dissertation in India. This experience has not repeated for him since, but it has led him on a quest to understand human existence as consciousness telling its own story in the world. He proceeds to lay out 20 “gnoses” that sum up his understanding of the study of religion theoretically, practically, and existentially. Kripal argues that mystic experiences – connecting with the underlying consciousness that precedes physical existence – is intimately erotic but non-ethical. That is, these experiences produce a literal kind of power that can be used productively but also harmfully. He also tied these experiences to instances of the paranormal (or as he terms it, the "super-normal"). Kripal finally suggests that the study of religion itself is and ought to be based not in deposited religious knowledge nor in modernist empiricism, but the gnosis of experiencing and then reading that experience back into the historical religions of the past.
Kripal’s experiences dovetail very much with my own experiences with Kriya Yoga, with contemplative Christian prayer, and with studying the New Message from God, all in comparative fashion. I did not become a professional academic because I wasn’t particularly interested in publish or perish, or the modernist reductionism of the academy of religious studies. Kripal provides a provocative and positive creative way forward. Stay tuned for further weirdness unfolding in my life.
March 29, 2022
This is a compilation of Kripal’s work to date, and as such I’d recommend it for fans of his work or people to get a comprehensive look at his intellectual development. For casual readers, I would recommend his most recent book, The Flip. It’s relatively short, casual, yet deep.
January 8, 2019
Excellent. Fun frolicking and mind blowing.
January 13, 2019
Loved parts of the book. Some parts were really interesting and descriptive. Some parts were overly defensive of Kripal's work.
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January 19, 2018204.2 K9273 2017
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