Jeff Kripal with Dana Sawyer Transcript

Jeff Kripal with Dana Sawyer Interview

Summary:

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Jeffrey J. Kripal. I’ll just read the bio first. Jeffrey holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, where he chaired the Department of Religious Studies for nine 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. Jeffrey is the author of seven books, including “Comparing Religions, Coming to Terms,” “Mutants and Mystics, Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal,” and “Authors of the Impossible, the Paranormal, and the Sacred.” He specializes in the comparative study and analysis of extreme religious states from the ancient world to today. His full body of work can be seen at, well, I’ll put the URL on the website. I actually interviewed Jeff about a month ago and we had technical problems which were pretty much irreparable. And also, I think he and I both felt that we hadn’t really nailed it, I did at least. I felt like I hadn’t really sort of gotten deep enough with the guy or asked the appropriate questions or whatever. So we decided to redo it and I decided to bring in my friend Dana Sawyer, whom I interviewed on this show several years ago. Dana and I have known each other, as we were just saying off-camera, for 40-something years. Dana is a full-time professor of religion and philosophy at the Maine College of Art and an adjunct professor of Asian Studies at the Bangor Theological Seminary. He is the author of numerous published papers and books, including Aldous Huxley, a biography, which Laura Huxley described as, “Out of all the biographies written about Aldous, this is the only one he would have actually liked.” And he’s also just finishing up a book about Huston Smith, which is going to be a large, copious volume of information, right Dana?

Dana: That’s it, that’s it. We’ll talk about that another time.

Rick: And the reason I brought Dana in is not just because of his qualifications as Jeffrey’s peer in the academic world, but because he and Jeffrey are good friends and Dana is thoroughly familiar with Jeffrey’s work, having read all of his books and having been the one who actually recommended that I interview Jeffrey. So I thought it would be really appropriate to have him be a co-interviewer on this particular episode. So where shall we start? Usually interviews involve a certain amount of biographical background, and I don’t know if you feel inclined to go through much of that, Jeffrey, but you think it would be helpful just for people to get a sense of who you are and how you ended up where you are?

Jeffrey: I think it is helpful, actually. I’ve always found that if I embed the ideas in a narrative it makes a lot more sense to people. So, I don’t know, how much do you want?

Rick: Oh, you know, just the crib notes.

Jeffrey: Okay.

Rick: Cliff notes, I guess they call them.

Jeffrey: Yeah, so I’ll do the short version. So I grew up in Nebraska in a small farming community and went to a Catholic seminary for my undergraduate training, a Benedictine monastic seminary, where I was exposed to basically the philosophy of religion, history, theology, comparative religion, and psychoanalysis, among other things. And that’s really where I got really interested in thinking about religious belief and religious behavior, sort of beyond what it appears to be. I became really interested in the deeper dynamics that drive religious people to do what it is they do and to believe what it is they believe. I was there four years. I came out of there with a lot of serious questions around male sexual orientation and male mystical literature in particular. So the first half of my work, the first three books, are really all about that. They’re really about trying to understand why male mystical literature looks the way it does, particularly when it employs erotic language or erotic rituals, to talk about these states. And so that’s the first three books. And then somewhere in the early millennium, I basically decided I had answered those questions, at least for myself, and I wanted to move on to other things. And so the next three books, beginning with the Esalen history and then the two books on the paranormal, were really about not so much understanding the relationship between sexuality and spirituality any more, but understanding the relationship between the mental and the material, particularly as those things tend to break down in extreme states that people call the paranormal. And so I became interested in that, particularly in an American context, particularly with popular culture. I’ve also thought, I think, fairly seriously about what comparison is and why it’s so problematic for so many people, and how the scholar of religion often inhabits what I call a Gnostic epistemology. In other words, a way of thinking about religion that is neither about belief nor about reason. It’s about something else in between and beyond those two things. So that’s in a nutshell. I mean, I’ve been teaching now for 20, 21 years. I’ve been at Rice for 12. I taught at a small liberal arts college for nine years before that. I taught at Harvard for a year. So I mean, it’s a pretty typical academic track in that sense.

Rick: Okay. And Dana, when you first recommended Jeffrey to me, you referred in particular to The Serpent’s Gift, and you said it was a book which had totally blown you away. And Jeffrey is referred to by a number of thinkers and interviewers and so on as a real sort of groundbreaking, edgy guy. So what was it that, what is it in a nutshell, Dana, that particularly excites you about Jeffrey’s work and that inspired you to have me interview him?

Dana: Well, and Jeff will relate to this, in academia there’s kind of a shutdown on talking about paranormal events or psychic events or beatific events, and yet at the same time at conferences there are always groups sitting at tables who are sharing ideas about exactly those sorts of things. And a lot of people, you know, they’re not out of the closet yet about it, but they have had such things happen in their life and they don’t talk about them. And Jeff talks about them, he talks about them very openly and in depth. And so that was one thing that was exciting to me, was to hear somebody not only in academia, you know, and Rick, you described us as peers in academia, well most certainly not. Jeff is head and shoulders above me in terms of the work he does and all that. It just happens to be a fact. And is much better known, and for good reasons, he’s a talented writer. But anyway, sorry to make your ego have to deal with that. But now we get down to the part that really excited me, that when you would find people who would entertain metaphysical ideas in their exploration of world religions in academia, it tended to be almost exclusively about the enlightenment experience or some apprehension of God on a noetic level. And nobody was really talking about telepathy or precognition or psychokinesis or the ramifications of exploring those things. It was almost as if those academics who talked about metaphysics had come out of a Vedantic tradition of, you know, accepting Patanjali’s idea that better to not put any attention on miraculous powers, the siddhis, because they can only hold you back from the ultimate paranormal experience of what Huxley called the “unitive knowledge of oneness with the absolute ground of being.” And so it almost shut a kind of door that – are you relating to this, Jeff?

Jeffrey: Yeah, you’re on a roll, Dana.

Dana: People just really didn’t want to revisit that and say, “Well, what if we did talk about the paranormal abilities and psychic events and precognition? What if we did talk about those things? What might they reveal?” The word “wonder” is very much related to the word “wander,” because when you wonder, you wander outside the boundaries of what people have been considering. And Jeff was wondering and wandering, and that was very exciting to me, and I know it was to some other academics. You know, holy mackerel, he’s going to talk about this stuff and launch some really interesting theses, and I’m sure that some of his theses about paranormal abilities and psychic events and their import will come out as we have this conversation. But anyway, that’s what got me all excited when I first read Jeff.

Rick: It’s funny that Patanjali would be construed as discouraging siddhis, and he devoted a whole chapter of a four-chapter book to talking about them and explaining how to do them. And also when we read mystical literature, or religious literature, from the ancient to things like “Autobiography of a Yogi,” they’re just full of miraculous things. That seems to be, it almost seems predominant, and you almost have to look more carefully to appreciate the transcendent basis of those things. Jeffrey?

Jeffrey: Well yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of levels there. I mean, we talked about this last time, there’s sort of this, the religious traditions speak with forked tongue here. I mean, there’s the “pay no attention to the miracles, but now let me tell you all these miracle stories.” You know, I mean there’s really a double message going on. But in terms of the Academy, what Dana’s getting at is, really since the middle of the 19th century, what made a scholar of religion was someone who rejected miracle, who rejected magic as superstition, or as magical thinking, or as simply impossible. And what I had to confront with that work was, particularly with the Esalen history, I was talking to people whom I knew well, who I trusted, who I knew weren’t lying to me, and they were essentially telling me miracle stories. And I realized at some point that if these things are happening in California or New Jersey or Nebraska or Chicago now, then they damn well could have happened in first century Palestine or fourth century BCE India. And so it really changed, for me, how I think about history and the text, and it just opened up a whole other way of looking at religion, that of course is traditional in some sense, but in another way is not.

Rick: Do you think the aversion to miracles has anything to do with the materialistic mindset that I suppose came in with the Industrial Revolution and still predominates most of Western science?

Jeffrey: I think it has everything to do with materialism. And in terms of the Academy again, the ultimate criterion of truth in the worlds Dana and I move in is very simple, and it goes like this, “The truth must be depressing.” And you can say anything, and as long as it’s depressing it will get a hearing. You can reduce ecstasy and enlightenment to historical context, to social forces, to neurobiology, now you can reduce it to cognitive schemata in the brain, evolutionary psychology, you can say anything as long as it pulls it down. But if you try to affirm that, “Well, gee, it does look like human beings are having some access to something transcendent, something really not material,” then that’s deeply problematic because it bumps up against this scientific materialism that is really running the culture at this point, as far as I can tell.

Rick: Yeah, it threatens the whole paradigm.

Jeffrey: Well, the irony is it doesn’t threaten the whole paradigm, all it really threatens is the adequacy of the paradigm. I mean obviously I’m not challenging and none of our colleagues are challenging the usefulness of science or what it can do in the world, which is all sorts of things. What we’re challenging is that it can explain everything, which it can’t, you know. And the way it explains everything is it has this table, it puts all these things on the table that it can manipulate and measure and replicate and explain, and all the stuff that it can’t replicate or measure or explain it puts under the table and says they don’t exist, or calls it anecdotal or something. And of course that’s just a magic trick, that’s sort of dishonest from my perspective. And really all I’ve tried to do is take all that stuff that we put under the table in the wastebasket and put it back on the table and say, “Look at this.” Not that that’s the whole truth either, but that when you put that stuff with all the other stuff it changes how we look at the whole table again, I think. So that’s really, that’s really the simplicity of the method.

Rick: Want to chime in here Dana?

Dana: Well I think one thing that I would say there that is very much agreeing with Jeff is that if you look at the scientific paradigm as it is right now, whenever something like a paranormal event bumps up against it, then it gets immediately thrown in the circular file that, “Well that just isn’t possible.” You know Bertrand Russell once said, “What science can’t prove, mankind can’t know.” So as soon as you’re dealing with something that a certain paradigm of science can’t prove or can’t explain, then it gets discarded as an anomaly that is irrelevant and is dismissible, instead of saying, “Well, if these events can in some way be empirically proven to exist, then we need a bigger paradigm. We need to explain the world, not in an unscientific way necessarily, but in a broader, wider boundaries on what the scientific explanation is.” And the culture in general is unwilling to do that. I’m sure there would be people that would watch this interview and say, “Oh yeah, Bertrand Russell was right, what science can’t prove, mankind can’t know,” and yet they will claim that they love their wife, and science can’t prove that. And they will claim that the painting on the wall behind their couch is beautiful, but you know, I can see squiggly lines in red and green, but point to the beauty. There’s no way to quantify those things. So I don’t think we even have to go to the paranormal, even inside the “normal” world, the paradigm doesn’t really work, or it’s incomplete, maybe is the way Jeff described it.

Jeffrey: Yeah, but I think with the paranormal stuff, the problem is particularly acute. You know, and this is why I’m fascinated by the paranormal, because it presents a philosophical conundrum for this materialistic worldview. And basically the problem is that most robust paranormal events occur in traumatic situations. Somebody is dying or in danger or is very ill or in a coma, and in normal circumstances, like the three of us are presumably in at the moment, nothing strange is going to happen because our egos and our bodies and brains are healthy and keeping the rest of the world out, as it were. But when that body-brain container gets cracked open, all this other stuff comes pouring in. And this is why I think it’s so hard for the sciences, because essentially what the debunkers want to say is, “Well, show me a robust paranormal event in a controlled laboratory.” Well, what you’ve just done there is take away all the conditions in which such a thing can happen. It’s like me saying to Dana, “Dana, I don’t believe that there are stars in the sky, and you have to prove to me there are stars in the sky, but I’ll only look up between noon and 3 in the afternoon.” Well, guess what? He’s never going to prove to me there are stars, ever, no matter what he does. And so you’ve removed the conditions. Or if I say to Rick, “Rick, prove to me there are zebras, but you can only do that on the North Pole,” well, you’re never going to do it. So this is how this works, and why these spontaneous accounts are so important is that that’s where trauma happens, that’s where these things appear in a very robust, very meaningful fashion. But these aren’t things that science can study, these are things that humanists and anthropologists can study. And that’s part of my argument, is we actually have the goods here, and we need to claim that.

Rick: I know in your book you talk about how a lot of the psychic research has been done at places like Duke University, where bored sophomores are paid minimum wage to sit and look at squiggly marks on cards, and it doesn’t produce very much. But I would suggest that the psychic thing and related things should be seen more as a long-term experiment, rather than something which can just be verified in a weekend’s study at a university. And by that I mean, over the course of decades of spiritual practice, sure, trauma can trigger these things, but also they can occur in healthy people who are not being traumatized, who have subjected themselves to rigorous spiritual practice, and for whom such experiences begin to become normal and commonplace. I have several friends who routinely see subtle beings all around, all the time, and yet they hold down jobs and raise families and do totally normal stuff. If the average person were to step into their consciousness and see the world as they see it for five minutes, they’d be flabbergasted, but that’s normal for them because they’ve cultured that ability over time.

Jeffrey: Right, I think you’re absolutely right, Rick. The literatures though that I work with are really just ordinary people who aren’t meditating two hours a day. They’re just ordinary folk and these things tend to erupt very suddenly, usually through an illness or an accident or something, and it really does change their lives. And it often points them towards some kind of meditation or spiritual practice, by the way, it often has those effects.

Rick: Yeah, we’ve all heard about people who are dying who see loved ones coming to them or beings coming to them or so on, and usually it’s probably written off as some sort of shutdown of the brain taking place, but I think there’s something real going on. Dana, sorry about that, go ahead.

Dana: Well, just in your book on Esalen, Jeff, when you’re talking about Mike Murphy and the future of the body and that sort of thing, Esalen is a testing ground for techniques that can develop other aspects of what we are, the more subtle aspects of what we are, bringing those through a particular practice or method, bringing them to the surface. Maybe they happen in traumatic situations, maybe that’s why shamans often traumatize themselves to catalyze these things, but at the same time, in your writing you’ve suggested that we’re moving in a direction, that there is a kind of evolution going on of revealing more Gnostic and noetic dimensions of what we are, self-actualization.

Jeffrey: Yeah, I mean of course the inspiration for Esalen was Huxley, you know, and this notion of human potentialities. And yeah, that is my worldview. And Esalen is very much about nurturing and stabilizing these human potentials that are otherwise not actualized or unconscious. And what’s interesting about the parapsychology literature too is, much of it argues that most psychic functioning actually is occurring all the time, but on an unconscious level. And we’re sort of constantly sending out feelers a few seconds into the future and a few feet or yards into the environment, and this is what helps us stay alive when we are still in the forest or when we’re out on the highways. And we’ve all had these experiences where you react to something before it actually happens. So I mean, I think these things have adaptive and evolutionary purposes, I don’t think they’re just frosting. And I know they’re not just illusions, they’re extremely common.

Dana: I think it’s a common noetic potential that a lot of people, a lot of my students for sure, have an intuition that I’m more than I think I am, or I’m more than I’m being told I am. There’s more to me than fits inside this worldview that I’ve been spoon-fed by my culture. I think it’s an attraction to Harry Potter books, you know, “I don’t want to be a muggle any more, I know I’m not!” I think that there’s certain people, and because I teach at an art college, I think a lot of artists maybe have that noetic potential.

Jeffrey: Yeah, and again, that’s why I don’t think these things are just frosting on the cake. I mean, if for example someone wakes up at 3 in the morning and knows instantly that his father has just passed away, you know, 500 miles away, so on one level that’s poignant and deeply meaningful, but on another level it clearly shows that the mind is not the same thing as brain. Because that’s impossible if mind equals brain. Brains in that skull, sleeping in that bed, cannot in any way know that dad has just passed. But if mind is not in space or time and filtered or reduced into brain and body, then it makes perfect sense that you would know such a thing, because you’re bound to that person through these entangled bonds of love and affection, and the mind is not just in the skull. So to me these have deep philosophical implications that are really, I think, mind-blowing, if we can just follow them.

Dana: I do too. I mean I think they’re mind-blowing for us as individual human beings, and definitely mind-blowing for the way that we’ve been seeing the world and how limitedly we’ve been seeing the world.

Jeffrey: Yeah.

Dana: Very exciting stuff. And I love, you know, and tune me down Rick if I’ve had too much coffee and I’m breaking in too often, but one thing that I really like in your work, Jeff, is this idea about the imaginal mind, and that we, you know, out of that longing and out of that psychic potential that we have, lots of people have been trying to draw a picture of what it looks like or tell a story about – I’m trying to describe reality, I’m using fiction to do it, but well, I mean you can describe this better than I can. I remember when you’re talking about in Authors of the Impossible, this hermeneutics of the impossible, that there are the level of realization and authorization. Maybe talk about that for a moment.

Jeffrey: Right. So, yeah, so I think, when I talk to people who have had these experiences, two of the phrases – well, there are three phrases that come up over and over again. And the first one is, “It was like a science fiction movie.” So they turn immediately to science fiction, because it’s the only register that even comes close to the weirdness of it. But the other thing they say is, “It felt like I was in a movie or I was a character in a novel.” And it struck me, listening to those stories long enough and many enough times, that we actually are all caught in a novel or a movie, right now, called “culture” and “religion” and “language.” None of us individually wrote American culture, we didn’t write the English language, we didn’t write the sort of storylines we’re born into and we understand ourselves in. And often we don’t even like them, they don’t even work for us. Sometimes they’re destructive, depending on the individual. And I think what a paranormal event is, the realization aspect is understanding that we’re caught in such a movie or a novel, and understanding that at a very gut level, and having the paranormal event then call us to author a different story, a different narrative of who we are and what we want to be. And so I think that’s what the paranormal is about ultimately, it’s not about just weird things happening. It’s about weird things happening showing us, A) that we’re caught in a story someone else wrote, and B) inviting us to write a new one, both individually and together. And I think that’s what a lot of people are doing right now. You know in the Mutants and Mystics book, basically what that is, is a series of studies of professional artists and writers who create popular culture, and by so doing just do a complete end-run around everybody and go right to the imagination, which is where they have their real effect. And I think that’s why people say, “God, it was like science fiction,” you know, because that hits deep.

Rick: A couple of thoughts come to mind. One is, we’ve all heard the notion that we use only a small portion of our full potential, you know, 5% or whatever, and so what would our society be like if we were all walking around using 90% or even 100% if that were possible theoretically? I presume that all kinds of things that we now would consider miraculous and unbelievable would be commonplace and we’d take them for granted. And societies, cultures often, they always do adjust to what becomes commonplace, you know, 150 years ago, the things we take for granted now, this conversation, jet planes, so many things would completely blow people’s minds. But another thought, well, you want to respond to that one before I go on?

Jeffrey: Well, it’s actually more fantastic than that even. I mean, the 5% is an interesting figure because, of course, that’s what physicists say now. That’s all we know about everything. All of physics, all of mathematics, all of science, it turns out, only applies to about We don’t have a clue. And so, they call it “dark energy” or “dark matter,” which just basically means we don’t know.

Dana: We don’t know what it is, we don’t talk about it.

Jeffrey: Right. So yeah, I mean, I think we’re living in a sliver, you know, we’re living in a sliver of reality.

Rick: Well, that brings to mind a couple of other things. Oh, did you want to say more? I’m sorry.

Jeffrey: Well, I guess the other thing I would say about that is, we’re living in a sliver of reality, we’re living in a cave, but maybe we need to. You know, this is what I think a lot, you know, I mean, if you have a spouse and you’re raising children, I mean, could we live with each other if we were swimming in an ocean of mind all the time? I don’t know. I mean, I think we may be limited for a reason. So that’s just a thought, it’s just a doubt. It’s a thought I have a lot, actually.

Rick: I think we are, and I mean, if you’ve ever dropped acid, you realize that, “Oh, I couldn’t live like this all the time,” but that’s because it’s so abrupt. However, you know, if you have practiced spiritual disciplines for decades, you begin to integrate and acclimate and become accustomed to states of consciousness and be able to function in states of consciousness which you wouldn’t have been able to manage had they come upon you suddenly.

Jeffrey: Right. Yeah. Go ahead.

Dana: Well, what I wanted to say, Jeff, is that when you talk about authorization and you talk about somebody like Philip K. Dick saying, “Okay, the stories I’ve been told aren’t really working for me, so I’m going to tell a bigger story that makes sense to what I’m intuiting is true,” in a noetic, psychic kind of way, then I guess I’ve in a way answered my own question, do you see authorization as a paranormal ability that some people have, you know, I don’t know, a knack for the imaginal?

Jeffrey: Well, yeah, I don’t know if I want to overuse the word “paranormal,” but if you talk to people who are truly creative, particularly writers and artists, what they will always tell you is, “It wasn’t me.” Right? That’s the essence of creativity, is stepping aside, having the ego step aside and having something else come through. And I think, you know, in a previous age people would use religious language to describe that. And what I like so much about the artists and the modern writers is they’re essentially describing a religious experience, but they’re not being literal about it. They’re not claiming, you know, they’re not setting themselves off of a prophet or writing a new scripture, they’re saying, “Wow, something came through and I turned it into art. I didn’t turn it into a truth that you now have to believe, and if you don’t, X, Y, and Z will happen.” I mean, this is the problem with religion in general, is that it’s essentially a story that we’re asked to believe literally, and the beauty of the modern scene is we essentially have a whole plethora of religious worlds, but we don’t have to believe them literally. We can appreciate them as true fictions.

Rick: I’ve always felt that, ideally at least, the founders of religions weren’t just espousing a bunch of beliefs, but they were pointing to an experience which they wanted people to have, which would substantiate what they were saying. But then, you know, lacking that experience, especially as time goes on and whatever the founder of the religion was actually teaching is distorted and diluted and lost, all we’re left with is what they said, which can only be taken as a set of beliefs if you don’t have a means to experience what they were saying.

Jeffrey: I think that happens, Rick. I’m not so … I don’t want to give a free pass to the founders either, or the prophets. I think they were being sincere and genuine, but they were living in a different age and had different assumptions about the world, which are no longer our assumptions. And this is part of the dilemma of being a modern person, trying to think about religion, is you think about things differently than these historical figures did.

Rick: Yeah, but I think, you know, wouldn’t you agree that probably all the major religious founders were having a profound experience? They weren’t just philosophizing or being metaphysicians. And somebody like the Buddha, for instance, did say, “Don’t believe anything just because you hear it. Even if I say it, take it on your own experience. You have to actually have the experience of what we’re talking about here.” We could give a ten-hour lecture on what an apple tastes like, but it’s not going to do it for you the same as biting into an apple.

Jeffrey: Right. Yeah, I mean, this is a huge issue. You know, take Jesus, for example. I think he probably had some experience of being one with God. I think that’s probably very accurate to say. But he concluded from that a lot of things, at least in the Gospels, that I don’t want to sign up to. You know, there’s some pretty nasty stuff in there. So again, I think this is our dilemma as modern people, is we can appreciate and honor these past religious experiences, but I don’t think any of us can honestly sign on to what these texts and traditions ask us to sign on to. I mean, I can’t.

Rick: Well, you have to take them all with a grain of salt, also. I mean, probably in Jesus’ case, nothing was written down for a couple hundred years, and then who knows who remembered what, and then it was actually written down, and then it went through various translations, and it’s like that party game where you whisper something in someone’s ear and it goes around the room and it’s completely different by the time it gets back to you.

Jeffrey: Right, but you just articulated a very modern view of religion, which is kind of what I’m suggesting. So it leaves us, you know, what I’ve tried to say in my work is, we can’t look to the past for answers, and they’re clearly not working in the present. So we have to look to the future and write another story together, and we have to be willing to be deeply critical of these traditions, and deeply appreciative at the same time. And we have to have this conversation, and we’ve just begun that conversation. I mean, that conversation has been going on maybe a hundred years, maybe 150, depending on … and really only in the West, until very recently. And so I think, you know, this is another part of my project, is not to let people forget, at least in the study of religion, that what we do is deeply problematic to most of the planet. I’m very aware of that. And I see that in my students every day. I mean, you know, I just wrote this textbook, it’s called “Comparing Religions,” but the subtitle is “Coming to Terms.” And what I mean by that is, if you compare religions fairly, it comes with tremendous cost to any traditional religious view. It also comes with cost if you have a scientific or materialist worldview. It comes with cost no matter what your worldview is. And I don’t think that we’ve come to terms with the fact of religious pluralism, and what that really means about religion in the modern world.

Rick: Dana, you want to chime in here?

Dana: Well, I totally agree with that. In “Mutants and Mystics” there was one place where you say something like, “We still haven’t found a story big enough to accommodate the human soul,” and I think that’s exactly right. We’ve got our traditional stories and the religions. The traditional religions, we’ve all come to a place of realizing there were personalities who were way-showers, but there were also a lot of gatekeeper personalities, people attracted to hierarchy and power and structure and fundamentalism, for lack of a better word, and that for a lot of us, that story doesn’t work any more. And then the story of strict scientific materialism is a story that doesn’t work any more, and I think especially for people in our generation, the boomer generation, who looked at the way the world through other lenses and found that in some cases they were more descriptive of our experience and promising of what we could be. And so we are looking for a bigger story. I think that’s exactly right.

Rick: Speaking of lenses, I’ve been prompted over the last few minutes to bring up that metaphor that both lenses and filters, and I’ve heard you use the filter metaphor, Jeffrey, that in terms of lenses, if a lens is meant to zoom in and out to a great close-up or a great distance, and yet the lens gets stuck, then it can only see the close-up, for instance. And most of the people in the world, I think, are like lenses that are stuck, where they’re sort of perceiving a certain sliver of the full range of what’s there, and they don’t have the flexibility to fathom all the different strata of reality at will. And then the filter thing, you were mentioning culture a while back, we’re also every single one of us is a filter. And this kind of points to the notion that there is some deeper underlying reality, and it gets distorted as it sort of filters through our nervous system and our individual structure, and ends up being just a kind of a faint glimmer of what it is in its pure state. And there was something I was reading last night from an interview you did, Jeffrey, where you’re talking about perennialism and constructivism, and if I understood it correctly, it was the issue of whether ultimately mystics experience the same fundamental reality, or whether their experience is determined by culture. And I would maybe say both/and to that, that inevitably there’s going to be some cultural influence on how they interpret their experience, and Dana and I have had this argument, but I would also say that ultimately, if there is, as physics tells us, a fundamental underlying reality, and if human nervous systems are so wired as to be able to tap into that experientially, then everyone is ultimately getting down to the same thing, however it might be colored by their culture, or however the differences might come out in their language.

Jeffrey: Yeah, I very much take a both/and view too, Rick. I think the shaping aspect of our creative minds is probably more powerful than we imagine. You know, my perennialist friends think I’m a constructivist, and my constructivist friends think I’m a perennialist. And they’re both right, because I see, I think it is a both/and.

Dana: You know, the thing is, it’s sort of like, for me, going back to Rick’s lens moment here, that some people – let me back up just one step – Plato’s experience of the moon and my experience of the moon get filtered through our backgrounds and our personalities, but there’s a moon up there. And so sometimes constructivism goes so far that every experience is mediated by culture to the point where it’s almost a claim, “There is no moon up there!” And I would say the same thing is true of an experience of what Eckhart called “the ground of being,” that some people say that it’s impossible that there could be a ground of being, but it becomes more difficult if you feel like you’ve experienced the ground of being. If everybody’s deaf and you’ve heard a symphony, then it’s hard to shut up about it. That doesn’t mean that – certainly you’re going to interpret that experience in terms of what a limited mind exposed to a limited range of ideas can possibly make of the experience. So there is definitely spin being put on it. I mean, if you start from the place as a fundamentalist Christian, that whenever I see a miracle, if it is not a miracle that it is claimed to be in the name of the Christian God, then it’s the sin of simony or it’s from Satan, well, you might have experienced something authentic or witnessed something authentic, but you’re definitely appropriating it in a way that’s very disputable.

Jeffrey: Yeah, I think, the way I think about these things, the modern NDE or near-death experience is a really, I think, useful tool here. There certainly is commonality across modern near-death experiences. On the other hand, if you look at them and you compare them to medieval or ancient accounts, there are tremendous differences. I mean, hell, for example, seems to have more or less fallen away, although you do occasionally see it. And then with the NDEs too, the truth is that those are extremely controversial, not just among materialists but also among believers, because they challenge belief systems. There is really no correlation between belief and having an NDE. People of all types have them all the time. But they’re also shaped by the imagination, and again, I don’t think it’s an either/or, this is what you were suggesting, Rick, I think it’s a both/and. But I think it’s really complicated. The thing I always remember here, there’s a beautiful line in Philip K. Dick’s journals where he’s recounting a dream he had, and he heard a voice in the dream, and the voice said, “Someday the mask will come off and you’ll realize the truth as it really is.” And then Dick says, “And the mask came off and I realized that I was the mask.” And I think that gets at the problem beautifully, is the ego. I mean Rick and Dana and Jeff, we are the filter, we are the mask that is filtering and reducing and shaping the light of mind or consciousness, and we can have an experience of that light, but not as Dana or Rick or Jeff. You see, there’s a dilemma there, you can have the experience and I’m absolutely convinced human beings have it all the time. Meister Eckhart is a good example. But Eckhart is very clear, his line was, “There is no Henry or Conrad there,” right? There is no ego there. And so I just want to sit in that tension, in that dilemma that I think is a very real one. So I mean I agree with everything that’s been said here. It’s as if the human being is caught between these two forms of mind, and just by being a human being you’re both-and at the same time, and you can never quite land.

Rick: You can land, I would say, but you have to be both-and in order to function as a human being. I mean if there were no vestiges of ego whatsoever, you’d just be, you know, you wouldn’t be able to function, you’d have to be spoon-fed or whatever. And so the Vedic tradition has this concept of leishavidya, that there needs to be a faint remains of ignorance in order to function, no matter how highly enlightened you may be. And they use the example of a butter ball that you’ve had in your hand and you throw it off and there’s still some greasy surface on the palm, but you have to have that in order to function.

Jeffrey: Yeah, that’s nice, that’s nice. I always try to retain my greasy surface. I don’t have to do that, it’s really easy.

Rick: Ladle on a little lard every now and then.

Jeffrey: And so, David, to you I would say, “And you are the greasy surface.”

Rick: And that thing you said about Maestro Eckhart saying there is no Joe or Shmo here, whatever the names were, you know, as you know the Gita says, “The self realizes itself by itself.” That’s the realizer. So it’s not like, because obviously, think about what we’re talking about, can the individual human ego sort of step apart from and realize something that’s not even an object of perception?

Dana: Yeah, right, right. One of the things that I think is interesting in this part of the conversation is, it’s a very powerful and wonderful place to sit with, as we’re trying to tell this bigger story, can the story ultimately even be told? It’s such a gigantic story that when you try it, it can be told in so many ways, with so many – it’s like the infinite Grail quest story, that Joseph Campbell said, “Ultimately there’s the monomyth.” We really are only telling the same story, but it’s so gigantic we can tell it in more ways than could ever be counted. And so on one level you feel this sense of absolute unmappability of our Gnostic potential. I remember one time in India, in Rishikesh, sitting with a Swami who was a friend of mine, an old, old, old man, and we’re sitting with a group of Swamis who were talking about the many qualities of the absolute reality. And so people were raising their hand and they were saying, “It is pure consciousness, it is unbounded, it is limitless, it is pure bliss.” And they made this list and made this list, and this old friend of mine is basically sleeping through the whole thing. But since he was the senior Swami, at the end of the talk somebody said, “Swamiji, is there any word ” – and this is happening in Hindi – “Swamiji, is there any word to ultimate reality that we have forgotten?” And he kind of looked up and pretended he had been listening and said, “No, no, quite complete, you’ve done wonderful, that’s really good.” But he started to go back to sleep and he said, “Oh no, one word you have forgotten.” And the word was ‘ajeeb,’ and ‘ajeeb’ means in Hindi ‘sneaky.’ The ultimate reality is very sneaky and if you think you’re going to get a real grip on it, you know, it’s bigger than all the words you can ever put on a board. So you know, I’m really down on that, I’m really with that idea that it’s unmappable on some level, how wonderful to keep celebrating the story and the attempt over and over. But another aspect of Jeff’s work that I’ve really liked is the ownership, not only of our limitations as relative beings, individuals, the three of us here, you know, one of the stories we tell is that we’re really just the absolute looking out through three sets of eyeballs right now, having a conversation with itself. And to go to the place of saying that the physical being is not – what am I trying to say? The absolute is big and grand and wonderful and you’re just a little bug, you’re just a little worm who can’t do anything and your body is stupid and it’s evil and it’s holding you back and the sooner you’re dead the better because it’s going to be some cosmic event. You know what I’m saying is that I really like the Tantric celebration, that the physical and the metaphysical are profoundly intertwined and that inside of this big one mega-story that the absolute needs to be celebrated but so does the relative, so does the physical aspect of our being. And a lot of people in our culture, in my opinion, even if they think they’ve switched over to being Hindus or Buddhists or something like that, I see them carrying forward so much of their disdain for the physical body from their, in many cases, Christian background. I don’t know how you guys feel about that, but that celebration of the relative as simply the bleeding edge, literally in many cases, of the absolute, that even those words separating them are a wrong-minded story, a wrong-minded iteration of the story.

Jeffrey: Yeah, the Tantric stuff has been really important to me over the years, as you know. That was what my early work was all on, was Bengali Shakti Tantra, and it’s really never left me. That’s the both-and, Rick. It’s another version of the both-and. I’ll tell you a funny story that kind of hits home here though. When I finished the Esalen book, it’s this big old doorstop of a book, and the first page speaks to Dana’s story. There it is, so the first page of it, yeah, actually you have the hardcover, so it’s in that book. The first page is an epigram from Nagarjuna that famously says, “There is not the slightest difference between samsara and nirvana. There is not the slightest difference between nirvana and samsara, or reverse.” And that’s what the text said when I sent it off to the printer, but when it appeared on my doorstep, “Dana, can you read the epigram now? What’s it say?”

Dana: “There is the slightest difference between the world and nirvana. There is not the slightest difference between nirvana and samsara.”

Jeffrey: And so I said, “Oh my God, somebody censored me, somebody manipulated me.” I called my editor and I said, “Did you guys have this typeset in India?” And he sort of sheepishly admitted that they did, and I said, “Well, I think some offended typesetter just screwed with this.” And sure enough, there it was in full glory. But it speaks, it’s a minor thing, it’s a funny thing, but it speaks to Dana’s point about how people have such a hard time with that tantric affirmation of samsara and nirvana being the same thing. Here there is now the slightest difference between them, and I think that’s a struggle that we continue to have, not just with Christians in the States, but with Hindus in India as well. I think it’s a real challenge.

Rick: Well, regardless of your tradition, if you regard God as being omnipresent, that means that there is nothing you can possibly look at that is not saturated, permeated on every level with that intelligence that we call God. And therefore, it sort of speaks to your quote, the whole universe is not some sort of accident, if you look at it that way, and all these life forms that are experiencing so many things are experiencing them apparently, if we want to anthropomorphize, because God wants to have a multitude of experiences. And when we get to the human level, probably the same is true. I mean, obviously human beings go through a multitude of experiences, so do we really need to shut that down at any point in order to really realize God?

Jeffrey: Yeah, I mean I grew up Roman Catholic and there’s this tradition in Roman Catholicism in that part of the world where you put a crucifix over your bed. And I mean, talk about a double message. I mean, this is the bed in which you’re having sex with your wife and there’s a naked dead guy hanging on a cross over it, looking at you by the way. Well, what does that mean? And nobody ever of course said what it meant, that was just the practice, you put a crucifix over the bed. Okay, so that’s problematic I think, and there are hundreds of examples like that, I think we could probably tell stories like that all day.

Rick: Dana?

Dana: Well, you know, one direction that I’d like to take the conversation in is back to this imaginal. I find that fascinating. Plato talked about the intellectus, that there’s some aspect of mind that isn’t reason as we usually think of it, isn’t intellect as we usually think of it, but that gets these profound hunches from time to time. And you feel like it’s partially what happens when you’re in a lecture and somebody’s talking and you’re having that “ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, that’s it, he’s got it, he’s getting it now.” There’s some aspect of mind that reaches out and apprehends, and then if it wants to express it, Joseph Campbell said that myths and metaphors were symbols, were the language of the soul. And so when it gets framed, then maybe the aliens have strange bug eyes, and that’s a story that makes sense to us now in a way that maybe a story about Krishna and Arjuna don’t. I don’t know, there’s something in that realm of like, what is that imaginal ability? I think in our culture, I guess where I’m going with this, is that in our culture we tend to think of imaginal stories as romantic in the negative sense, and it’s just an entertainment that guys that can’t get dates involved themselves with, you know, “Oh, you’re home reading comic books all the time,” or “You’re reading science fiction,” or “You’re reading mythology,” you know, we denigrate that. And we even say, “Oh, that’s an old myth,” which implicitly puts the pejorative on the term. But so much in Mutants and Mystics you’re talking about this imaginal sense. Also Authors of the Impossible. So it would be interesting to hear what you think the imaginal is, and what you think imagination is.

Jeffrey: Right, so I think there are two separate issues there. The reason that the imagination is so important to me is I think it’s the best way to resolve this problem of religious pluralism. So this is the first level, is why are there so many religious systems, why are there so many different gods and mythologies? You know, one easy answer to that is, well, there are these other realms of mind and consciousness and they can’t speak to egos directly, so they speak in pictures and they speak in stories, and this is why you get all these different stories in different cultural periods. And so, positing some kind of imaginal basis to religion and to religious storytelling allows us to explain the commonalities and the differences, I think, fairly effectively. But there’s also this deeper problem of, you know, the imagination…

Dana: So if you say, “Oh, you’re interpreting this text wrong implicitly because you’re interpreting it literally instead of interpreting it as an allegory or a metaphor.”

Jeffrey: Yeah, but behind that is a deeper question. We tend to think of the imagined as the imaginary. It’s just fancy, it’s just bullshit we’re thinking up. The imagination just spins daydreams and fancy, but again, that’s often true. But if you talk to artists and writers and religious visionaries, that’s not always true. They’re often getting stuff from this other form of mind, from God or from the unconscious or whatever your language is, and it’s coming to them in picture form, and often in story form, and they’re not doing it. They are not coming up with these pictures, they are not telling these stories, some other form of mind is in them, and their sense is, “This is the only way the fisherman can speak to the fish.” You know, there are two forms of mind here, and one cannot communicate to the other directly, so it has to speak through these mediating pictures and stories of the imagination. And then there’s the even more radical situations, and you see this in the parapsychological literature over and over again. The story I always tell is Mark Twain. Mark Twain has a dream one night and he sees his brother Henry in a metal casket on two chairs, with a bouquet of white flowers with a red flower in the middle. And it’s so realistic, he wakes up and he starts to take off to the dead room to see his brother, who he sure just died. And Henry’s not even dead, Henry’s right there. Well, two weeks later, Henry is killed in a boiler explosion on a riverboat, and Twain walks to the dead room and there’s the exact thing.

Dana: Image.

Jeffrey: Exact! Down to the exact detail. And all that’s missing is that bouquet, and as he’s sitting here staring at this scene remembering his dream, a woman walks in with a bouquet of white flowers with a red one in the middle and sets it on his chest. So there you have a very good example of the imagination creating a dream two weeks before the event. So clearly Twain was in touch with something. Twain was in touch with an event two weeks and hundreds of miles down the space-time continuum, and that event, that knowledge was being mediated through his imagination. So there the imagination is in touch with the empirical, physical reality. And this happens over and over and over again. And if you talk to the visionaries, they’ll say this, they’ll say, “Look, I knew I was dreaming. I knew my brother wasn’t there. I knew my husband wasn’t standing at the end of the bed, but I also knew that this had really happened and that my husband was dead or my brother was dead.” They know both at the same time. And that’s what I mean by the imaginal. I don’t mean just a nice daydream. I mean something that you are seeing in your mental space that is being given to you by another form of mind that cannot speak in English or in mathematics, but can show you pictures as if it were some kind of psychic movie projector, and they’re true, they’re accurate. So I think that’s what I mean by the imaginal, is that sort of double sense. And sometimes the pictures are mediating another world or another being, and they have this fantastic mythical quality, and sometimes they’re mediating an event in physical space-time and they’re very precise and they’re very exact.

Dana: Yeah. What’s interesting about a lot of those imaginal events where, you know, here’s this capacity of the mind and it’s cognizing something or, you know, grokking something, so it puts pictures with it. But what’s interesting when these stories get told to us – so in one way it’s a capacity of mind like the intellectus that has a certain ability to apprehend, but when it comes to the imagery that it uses to tell the story, it’s interesting how often imagery – we respond to it because it does, what, access a certain menu of archetypes and symbols and …

Jeffrey: Right.

Dana: You know what I’m trying to say?

Jeffrey: Yeah, from our culture.

Dana: Yeah, that we have this sort of stockpile of archetypal information on the hard drive of the human psyche that certain stories, when we hear them, they’re coming to us as a product of somebody’s imaginal tendency, but they also trigger it in us. They make us – I mean, if you’re reading those science fiction stories, it’s not just a good story sometimes. I mean, sometimes it is, but I remember when I read “The Mind Parasites” by Colin Wilson, he’s giving me a certain way of understanding the limitations of my own mind, because my own mind is limited. I’m going, “Holy mackerel, I’ve got this too, man! I’ve got mind parasites!” You know what I’m trying to say?

Jeffrey: Right, sure, yeah.

Dana: It resonates inside of us, it resonates.

Jeffrey: Yeah, I mean, the other way of talking about this is through dimensions, and this goes back to Edwin Abbott’s “Flatland,” which is well over a century old now, and the basic thought experiment was, “What would two-dimensional beings on a flat piece of paper, how would they interact or understand a three-dimensional being entering their two-dimensional space?” And of course, the answer is, the three-dimensional being would have all the powers of a god. So all you have to do is extend that to four or five or six dimensions, and you’re in the realm of everything we actually see in the paranormal and the psychical literature. That’s exactly what it looks like. I don’t know if that’s what it is, but it’s an easy thought experiment that teaches us that the human brain in our normal cognitive capacities have been built to work in three dimensions, or four if you count time. They’re just not set up to understand outside of that.

Rick: At least with their 5% capacity. I think they have the potential to understand the others, but it’s just usually not developed in most people.

Jeffrey: Yeah, you know, Eckhart, I once thought maybe the dimensional stuff was just modern, and it just goes back to “Flatland,” but Eckhart, I’ve been reading a lot of Eckhart, Eckhart has this wonderful point in one of his sermons where he says, “When the light of God shines on a man and eliminates space and time,” actually eliminates space and time, he said, “It’s like a man painted on a wall, as if you would peel the man off the wall and he would suddenly be in the room.” And so that’s Flatland!

Dana: Yeah, yeah.

Jeffrey: But that’s 14th century!

Dana: Oh, that’s wild, huh?

Jeffrey: You know, so that to me suggests that the experience is not limited to modern culture, and that a lot of these things we look at in the past are hyper-dimensional, as it were.

Rick: One thing that came to mind when you were telling the Mark Twain story, which I think pertains to a lot of this, I mean, obviously millions of people have experiences like that, and always have. Mark Twain happened to be someone that became world famous and had a lot of influence on people with his writing, but I also think of Spielberg and Lucas, and even getting into comic books, all those writers that generations of kids have grown up reading. And you were saying earlier how the persons often feel like, “It’s not me who’s doing this.” Whenever a blockbuster movie like Close Encounters or something comes out, I’ve always felt like, “Wow, there’s just some deeper intelligence that wants to popularize a particular understanding in the culture, and the director or the creator of this movie is serving as a conduit or as a channel for that intelligence, so as to shift collective consciousness to this deeper reality.” Any thoughts on that?

Jeffrey: Well, that’s basically the thesis of the Mutants and Mystics book, Rick. I mean, basically what I argue there is a lot of the artists and authors who created those storylines had had these experiences. And instead of trying to prove them up or down, they just turned them into art. And then the art then enters public culture and then informs the experiences of other people and you get this loop between what I call “consciousness and culture” that starts to generate an emergent mythology, a new mythology.

Dana: Loopy thinking!

Jeffrey: Yeah, the best example I have here is something Whitley Strieber once said. Whitley was talking about his own abduction experiences by what he calls “the visitors,” most people would call them “aliens.” And Whitley basically said, “Look, I know that what I saw during those abduction events was informed by the bad science fiction movies I saw as a kid in the 1950s, I know that. But something was really there and it was coming through and my brain was creating those images to deal with what was there.” He said, “So, what we need to do now is make better science fiction movies so that future people can have more positive abduction events.” And I just thought that was freaking brilliant!

Dana: That is pretty cool.

Jeffrey: It’s really cool.

Dana: It goes to what I was talking about, is that if we broaden the story to the point where your brain isn’t saying, “Every time I see something unusual or an anomalous paranormal event I don’t have to say, ‘Oh, it’s not of God, so it’s from Satan.'” I don’t have to, you know, I’ve got a better story to make sense of the full panoply of human experience.

Jeffrey: That’s essentially what Whitley was saying, basically, “Let’s tell better stories so that future people can have better experiences.” And he’s not suggesting that there’s nothing to the experience, note that, it’s not just fancy. What he’s arguing is that the experiences are always mediated by the imagination, and so that we need to get better, we need to create better imaginal film and books so that we can have these experiences in a more creative and productive way. And I think that’s basically right, I think that’s correct.

Rick: And what I’m suggesting, I think maybe I kind of made the point, but if planetary consciousness is evolving rapidly, that it’s not just through human effort or limited human intelligence that it’s evolving, but there’s actually some larger intelligence that’s guiding and orchestrating, at least this is my particular flavor of it. And like, take ETs for example, I mean, are they going to land on the White House lawn? No, they’d probably get shot to ribbons if they did. So they make crop circles, or they go through people like Whitley Strieber or something to communicate in very strange ways, but in ways that would not freak out human psychology too severely, but at the same time would adjust it by increments to the point where something more profound or dramatic could happen without freaking people out.

Jeffrey: Well that’s one argument actually in the ufological community, that that’s what this is all about, is a kind of preparation, a kind of symbolic preparation.

Rick: And I’m just using UFOs as a case in point, because I think that spirituality is much more than that, but I think that’s part of the picture, part of the stew.

Jeffrey: Yeah, I love UFOs, I’ve written a lot about UFOs. I think in some ways UFOs are part of the problem in the sense that they feed into people’s materialism, that they can only imagine the transcendent in the form of a machine. And so science fiction then becomes a kind of machine version of spirituality or religion in some ways, where if you look at a lot of the UFO encounters, they’re actually spiritual encounters, they’re people encountering conscious balls of light and being taken out of their bodies and shown basically having an NDE experience. They very much have this occult or spiritual or mystical dimension to them, but I just think our culture is dumb around those things, and all it can do is imagine a machine.

Rick: Well, you know, just the other day Bill Nye, the science guy, had a debate with that guy who runs the museum in, oh, wherever it is, Tennessee, that claims that the world is 6,000 years old and people were riding dinosaurs, and there’s still a major portion of the population that thinks that way. And so …

Jeffrey: I’ve got to say, though, it’d be cool if we were riding dinosaurs.

Rick: It would be cool, yeah.

Jeffrey: That’s a good one. I think we should go with that one.

Rick: I don’t know if you can trust them, though. They’re so lizard-like, they might just turn around and snap your head off.

Dana: You mean you guys don’t ride dinosaurs?

Jeffrey: You guys are behind the curve.

Rick: So, go ahead.

Dana: Intelligence, when you talk about, and I think that’s a juicy place, because when you conceive of the sacred, you know, the traditional Western God above and the Hindu-Buddhist God below kind of concept, that, is there a sentience there? You know, if we say that we are a moment of the Absolute expressing itself in division and diversity like waves on the surface of an ocean, is the ocean sentient in the way we think of sentience? Is it rising in waves on purpose, is it directing the tides and all that kind of thing, if I can extend that metaphor? And is it a case of panentheism, where if we realize ourselves as ocean, if we realize we’re ocean, then we can start directing the tides, and we become in a sense the fingertips and eyeballs of the sacred, and we start manipulating the design. You know, this is very much the way that Friedrich Schelling believed, he believed that’s what’s going on.

Rick: Well, if Jesus walked on water, how did he do that? He was manipulating the tides, literally.

Dana: Oh yeah, right. What I’m going after is synchronicity, that we all have these moments where you feel like, “Oh, this is not only happening to me, but this is supposed to happen to me, and I’m meeting this person. How coincidentally, exactly when it’s most useful for me to meet this person.” Those moments, and I remember Jeff, you talking about, I’m only barely remembering it, but something about the X-Men, and you found a piece of jewelry that had a big X on it or something. And you had this kind of moment that I’m trying to describe, but everybody has them, you know, profound synchronicity. And sometimes the further a person walks down the “right path,” so to speak, they feel like these moments are accumulating more quickly, or they report that they’re kind of seeing through a design, that there is a plan.

Rick: And some people perceive every moment as divine play, that there’s this sort of scintillating intelligence in every supposedly dumb object, and that the whole thing is just this beautiful orchestration.

Dana: Sort of Leela.

Rick: Yeah, exactly. That’s not just hypothetical, I mean, that’s many people’s profound concrete experience.

Dana: But there’s actually several different thoughts in there. I’m just wondering where you stand on that, Jeff. Is there a directing intelligence? Is it sentient in the way that we think of sentience? How do you feel about that?

Jeffrey: Well, I mean, your entire description in question is really, in some sense, rhetorical. That is my worldview. You described it very well, very eloquently. I do think that mind is not produced by local brains, I think it exists in its own dimension, and I think it becomes particularized in us. And I do see things like synchronicities and paranormal events as what I call “signals of the non-dual.” In other words, there are these little moments in which we realize that the inside is the outside and the outside is the inside, and that we are the world in some sense. Now I do of course think a lot of our experience in the world is not, we’re not in control of it as egos, but I do think there’s an intelligence behind it. I’m not a Darwinian, and I think what we’ll see even in evolutionary biology over the next few decades is a move away from that strict Darwinian randomness. I mean, people are already starting to break with that. Tom Nagel, just the latest case of someone who just said, “You know, this really doesn’t make any sense,” and it really does look like there’s something behind this. And so yeah, that’s my worldview Dana, I mean I could have signed on to everything you just said there.

Dana: But is it an intelligence like the computer we’re all using right now, that’s very smart, smarter than us in terms of its ability to recall information and cross-reference it, and yet it doesn’t know it’s doing it? I guess I’m trying to say, that’s where I’m going. Does the intelligence know that it’s intelligent?

Jeffrey: Yeah, I think so. I don’t claim to know what that cosmic mind or that mind at large thinks or knows of itself, but I don’t think it’s like a computer at all.

Rick: It’s conscious. Computer isn’t conscious.

Jeffrey: Yeah, I think the computer language is a very dangerous language. It’s where cognitive science goes now, where everything is a computer, but what’s always left out is the fact that conscious beings created those computers. And the computer analogies are all based on a materialist model again, that if you could just create a sophisticated enough computer it would suddenly become conscious. And I just don’t believe that. I don’t believe consciousness is created through circuitry, I think it pre-exists any kind of neurological or techno-circuitry. So I don’t claim to know the mind of God, Dana, but if I had to sign onto a worldview it would be a panentheistic or a panpsychist universe in which the physical cosmos is alive and is intelligent and is evolving us to know itself. That’s essentially what … now that’s a wager, I don’t know that. But yeah, I’m not a prophet, I’m not a mystic in this sense, but that’s what it looks like to me, having swam in this ocean of mystical literature for the last 30 years, that’s where I would put my chips.

Rick: So in other words, that’s what all the prophets and mystics have been saying throughout the ages?

Dana: No, I don’t think they have, Rick. I mean, some of them have been saying something like that in their own mythical and cultural terms, but again, I wouldn’t identify my worldview with a pre-modern or a traditional one. I’m happy not being traditional.

Rick: It sounds very familiar to me though. I mean, consciousness creates the world, consciousness is fundamental, we are instruments through which consciousness can experience itself, and so on and so forth. I mean, that kind of notion has been around for a long time.

Dana: A long time. No, you’re absolutely right. It’s just that it’s been around in a lot of different places in a lot of different ways, and it often comes with a lot of other stuff that I just don’t want to sign on to.

Rick: Sure, well, like the band said, “You take what you need and you leave the rest.”

Jeffrey: Well, in a lot of traditions it’s been heresy. I mean, in Vedanta it’s been the story, the mainline story. But talking in this language got William Blake in a lot of trouble, it got Jacob Boehme in a lot of trouble. You know, Jacob Boehme was a panentheist, saying, “We’re denigrating the physical and we shouldn’t be doing it,” that, “We’re actually God’s mind expressing itself in the physical world,” and these were not ideas that the mainline Protestant church of Boehme’s time was really willing to …

Dana: Well, and they’re still heretical, they’re deeply heretical right now, vis-a-vis our materialist culture. They may be more heretical now than they ever were, it’s just that we’re not going to be physically persecuted for holding them because we live in a different kind of society.

Jeffrey: Yeah, you might not get tenure.

Dana: Well, that’s … yep, yeah, I know. For young guys you’ve got to be careful of that.

Rick: And again, it’s because most people in our society live on the crust. It’s like people on a frozen pond arguing about what’s down under the ice, without being able to swim down there and see for themselves or send down a camera or anything. So there’s all kinds of debates and wars about what’s down there, or if anything’s down there at all. So there’s just this dearth of experience, but the mystics have been divers, they’ve been people who have plumbed the depths of the pond to whatever degree they were able. And obviously some of them come back with different stories, but there’s a lot of agreement.

Jeffrey: Yeah, I agree, Rick. The problem of course is that the mystics are always outnumbered.

Rick: They are, but the tables are turning, I think. There’s like this epidemic thing going on.

Dana: I like your optimism, Rick.

Rick: Well, I see it, you know, I mean all the time, all the people I talk to, and a lot of those people are people who hadn’t even done any spiritual practices or anything. They put a tie on their shoelaces one day and all of a sudden the heavens opened up, you know, and it took them years to figure out what was going on. Eckhart Tolle is a famous example, you know, he was just depressed and almost suicidal and had a little thought about, “Who is it that I can’t live with?” Next morning he woke up and everything was different. So there’s this kind of a mass awakening as far as I can tell, but you know, I’m not a historian so I don’t know how common this might have been a thousand years ago, but it really seems to be happening now.

Jeffrey: Well, I share your optimism, Rick, or your hope anyway. I mean that’s why I do what I do. You know, I think each of us serves that, you know, in our own ways. I mean that’s why I get up in the morning. I’m just a little more jaded, I guess. I don’t know, you know, you turn on cable news and you get a very different take on things.

Dana: Well, you know, taking on this piece about trauma creating breakthrough, you know, there’s the old saying that utopia and apocalypse will coincide. The trauma of us driving ourselves to an environmental crisis of extreme proportions, maybe that’s going to be the trigger that breaks the cosmic egg open.

Rick: That’s what Elisabet Sahtouris says. I interviewed her a couple of weeks ago. She’s an evolution biologist and she cited a number of examples of how crisis is a catalyst for rapid evolution, you know, examples from nature. Of course, you don’t want thermonuclear war, that might be a bit of a setback, but just enough catalyst.

Jeffrey: Well, you know, I grew up in the 70s, probably like you guys, and that was the nadir of the Cold War. And I honestly, I grew up in Nebraska surrounded by missile silos, and I honestly didn’t think I’d live to see 40. I didn’t think we’d be here right now. So you know, I mean, things are better now. I mean, people forget that even with all the 9/11 stuff, I mean, that was nothing like an exchange of thousands of nuclear missiles. I mean, there was just nothing like that. There’s not even any way to express the horror of that. And we’re not living with that fear now, at least.

Dana: What gives me some real optimism is that we can have these conversations, and that these conversations are common in my experience too, Rick. You know, that there’s not a … what am I trying to say? John Nadir was talking about religion and … and you talk about it, Jeff, in the Esalen book, “America and the Religion of No Religion,” that you’re not saying that no religion in the sense of no dogmatic, hierarchical, patriarchal, top-down, get-in-line-little-man kind of religion, that there’s a certain kind of set of non-negotiables that have come out of American culture, like the sovereignty of individual choice, that I have my mind and I’ll make up my mind about what my spiritual journey is going to be, and who I should be paying attention to. You know, sometimes you get criticized for coming down hard on gurus, and people will say, “Oh, you don’t believe that people should follow gurus,” and I say, “No, I think you should have at least 25 gurus.” You know, if you have lots of gurus, then they’re all going to tell the story differently, and their stories aren’t going to all line up with each other, and you’re going to have to make up your own mind, and you’re going to have to live with differences, and that’s going to be really healthy for your journey. That’s the way that I see it. So I agree, you know, if you go to Esalen or if you go to Omega Institute or Kripalu today, people are telling a lot of very different stories, and they don’t all line up with each other, but how wonderful that there are these venues, and Rick, I see Buddha at the Gas Pump is one of those venues, where the ideas can be explored and people can talk very authentically with each other, and the viewer is really empowered to say, “You make up your mind.” I find a cause for optimism in that, that people are questioning the strict materialism of our culture, and that we’re not going back to a pre-modern, “Oh, okay, well then I’m going to go to where metaphysics is allowed, which is the church or the synagogue, and those are my only options,” that no they’re not, there are lots of options.

Jeffrey: The way I put that, Dana, is comparative religion is not a multiple-choice question. “Oh, I guess it was Hinduism,” or “I guess it was Islam,” or whatever your A, B, C, D is. No, it’s deeper than that. The honest, an honest struggle with the questions today leads to new answers that don’t fit into any of the old boxes. And the other thing, and actually guys, I’ve got to go, but the thing I want to end with is something I always look for, and that is humor. I think we need more humor around this, because I think humor is a humble form of transcendence. I think if you can’t laugh at your worldview and at your deepest-held convictions, then that’s a danger sign. And so that’s what I always look for, I look for humor. And I think that’s in the traditions as well, you know, this trickster figure that keeps showing up everywhere. Dana was getting at this earlier, with “the real is weirder and trickier,” and I guess you sneaky?

Dana: Sneaky, yeah.

Jeffrey: Sneaky, I mean, that’s that humor popping through, and that’s what I look for.

Rick: Good, well you have to go, so I’ll make concluding remarks. Before I do, I just want to throw in one quick point on the optimism thing, which is that, you know, look at all the predictions, which were far exceeded by what eventually came to pass. I mean, predictions in 1950 about what computers might possibly become, predictions in the mid-1800s about what transportation might possibly become. I mean, there was a guy who said that we couldn’t go 40 miles an hour in a train, that speed would kill us. So people have a hard time envisioning the future, and that’s why science fiction is so much fun. But generally speaking, people kind of have this innate assumption that the world as it is now is probably pretty much the way it’s always going to be, and time and again they’re proven wrong. So we could very well be on the verge of some kind of societal phase transition that would be quite abrupt, and that would render our world far more heavenly and delightful than what we’re seeing now.

Jeffrey: I’m with you, man, I’m with you.

Dana: I’m willing to hope that.

Rick: All right. So to make some concluding remarks then, thank you both very much for participating in this conversation. I’m glad it worked out the way it did and that we were able to include Dana. I’ve been speaking with Jeffrey J. Kripal and Dana Sawyer, and I’ll include bios of them both on the page for this interview on batgap.com, Buddha at the Gas Pump. If you poke around on the site there, you’ll also find an alphabetical list of all the interviews I’ve done, a chronological list of all the interviews I’ve done. Go on to the other stuff menu and you’ll find some interesting stuff. There’s a donate button, which I appreciate people clicking if they feel inclined. It makes it possible to do this show. There’s a place to sign up to be notified by email each time a new interview is posted, so feel free to do that. And there is a link to an audio podcast, so that you can just listen to the podcast and not have to sit in front of your computer for a couple of hours every week. So again, thank you guys, and thanks to all who have been listening or watching. Next week my guest will be Kristin Kirk, speaking of people who see subtle beings. She apparently sees them quite routinely and yet is very down to earth and genuine and has really been delightful to listen to over the last week or so, cross-country skiing in the woods, listening to her audios, getting ready for the interview. So look forward to that. So see you next week.