Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred

"Yes, Kripal is on the board of Esalen and wrote the best history of it. He’s a religious studies scholar at Rice University, and is one of a group of American religion scholars whose work has been really useful to me—others include Ann Taves, Hugh Urban, Erik Davis and Tanya Luhrmann, my next choice. I’d include the sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich in this group—she’s not an academic, but she’s one of the most important contemporary researchers of ecstatic experience. All of these researchers have explored the cultural history of ecstasy. They’ve studied the different cultural forms that ecstatic experiences can take at different times and different places. You can examine the deep paleo-anthropology of altered states in the culture of early homo sapiens (check out David Lewis-Williams’ The Mind in the Cave ), or ecstasy in classical culture (as in E R Dodds’ classic, The Greeks and the Irrational ), or ecstasy in Christian medieval culture (as in Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium ), or the pathologisation of ecstasy in the early modern era (have a look at Michael Heyd’s undeservedly-obscure Be Sober and Reasonable ). Ann Taves’ Fits, Trances and Visions does a splendid job of exploring the reconfiguration of ecstasy in the 18th and 19th centuries, via Methodism, Mesmerism and early psychology. And then you have researchers like Hugh Urban, Erik Davis and Jeffrey Kripal, who study the strange new forms that ecstatic experiences took in the 20th century, from neo-Tantra to UFO abductions to Silicon Valley transhumanism. “Kripal’s not afraid to discuss his own ecstatic experiences, such as making out with the goddess Kali back in the 1980s” I’ve read most of Kripal’s books and I think Authors of the Impossible is my favourite, partly because it turned me on to the British psychologist Frederic Myers. I love Kripal’s books for four reasons. Firstly, their audacity. Kripal’s not afraid to discuss his own ecstatic experiences, such as making out with the goddess Kali in Calcutta back in the 1980s, and to insist on the connection between ecstasy and eroticism. His dissertation was on the taboo connection between mystics’ sacred experiences and their sexuality—it caused a huge furore in India when he suggested Ramakrishna’s mysticism was connected to his supposed homosexuality. Secondly, his openness. He insists that to appreciate the weirdness of anomalous experiences, we need to steer between the Scylla of religious fundamentalism and the Charybdis of materialist reductionism. “He has this idea of reading as an ecstatic experience, a way of opening up to other worlds” Thirdly, he is not afraid to track the ecstatic into the swamplands of pop culture. For example, his book Mutants and Mystics looks at how science fiction and superhero comics helped to reformulate paranormal and ecstatic experiences for modern culture; while Authors of the Impossible and his recent book The Supernatural both compare UFO abduction experiences to more traditional forms of ecstasy. Finally, his books are just a great read. He has this idea of reading as an ecstatic experience, a way of opening up to other worlds. There’s something of the hammy showman about him, not unlike the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart—both enjoy astounding the reader or listener."