This podcast episode explores the stories that help us understand our reality, our place in that reality, and how humans both cling to and challenge these same stories. Jeffrey Kripal has been a keeper of many extraordinary stories, and as a professor of religion, he is positioned to question the stories that we believe serve us, but the reality is that we often serve the story. This conversation is anchored in Dr. Kripal’s newest book, The Flip, wherein he challenges many of the assumptions of materialist science and posits that the sciences are not wrong, but that they are incomplete and therefore we need a change in our worldview. His arguments are well articulated and well informed by many scientists, including neuroscientists and physicists, who have, as a result of their research into reality, moved away from the materialist worldview into an approach to reality that chips away at many of the assumptions in which many of us have been educated – for example, the fact that we don’t really know what matter and consciousness are in the first place. Really.

From Jeff’s book:

A “flip,” writes Jeffrey J. Kripal, is “a reversal of perspective,””a new real,” often born of an extreme, life-changing experience. The Flip is Kripal’s ambitious, visionary program for unifying the sciences and the humanities to expand our minds, open our hearts, and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the culture wars. Combining accounts of rationalists’ spiritual awakenings and consciousness explorations by philosophers, neuroscientists, and mystics within a framework of history of science and religion, Kripal compellingly signals a path to mending our fractured world.

Bio:

Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor 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 is the Associate Director of the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where he also serves as Chair of the Board. Jeff is the author of numerous books, seven of which are with The University of Chicago Press, including, most recently a memoir-manifesto entitled Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions(Chicago, 2017). He has also served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Macmillan Handbook Series on Religion (ten volumes, 2015-2016). He specializes in the study of extreme religious states and the re-visioning of a New Comparativism, particularly as both involve putting “the impossible” back on the academic table again. He is presently working on a three-volume study of paranormal currents in the history of religions and the sciences for The University of Chicago Press, collectively entitled The Super Story.

http://jeffreyjkripal.com

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Band of the week: Chomsky

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