Jeffrey Kripal, the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University and author of The Flip, speaks in an excerpt from Pinchbeck's online course The Future of Consciousness. He recounts writing the 2018 book after his Chronicle of Higher Education essay Visions of the Impossible, and describes the flip as the moment when a scientist, engineer or physician trained in materialism has an anomalous experience and reverses the order of priority, taking consciousness as primary. He then reads a short paper laying out a set of what he calls wagers rather than certainties, centered on a dual-aspect monism in which consciousness and cosmos are two expressions of one reality. He invokes Schrodinger, Bohr, Pauli and Jacques Vallee's Forbidden Science.
Guest: Jeffrey Kripal
In brief
- Kripal argues that the philosophy of materialism is separable from the practice of science, and that scientists who abandon the former report that their work does not suffer and may improve.
- He treats paranormal events such as precognitive dreams and telepathic impressions as temporary collapses of the subject-object structure rather than as neurological errors or superstition.
- Kripal presents his position as wagers or hypotheses rather than certainties, leaning toward a monism in which reality has both mental and material aspects because human subjects split it in the act of knowing.
- He says he wrote The Flip using engineers, physicists and physicians rather than classical religious texts because his largely STEM students at Rice dismiss premodern sources as scientifically ignorant.
- He argues that modern science generated rather than eliminated new spiritual literatures, pointing to near-death and psychedelic writing and to the quantum philosophy that began with Schrodinger, Bohr and Pauli rather than with the counterculture.
- Kripal calls on the humanities to adopt historiography that could treat precognitive phenomena as historical facts, and rejects pure objectivity and pure subjectivity as half-truths.
Full text
thank you for inviting me um to this event I I'm here um to speak about a book called The Flip um which in the American Edition is subtitled epiphanies of mind and the future of knowledge and that's really what I want to talk about it came out in 2018 um I wrote the book because of a of an editor named Erica Goldman just to kind of give you some background I think I think the background of the book is very significant I wrote an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education called visions of the impossible and it really dealt with what I think most people think of as paranormal phenomena precognitive dreams and telepathic experiences and near-death experiences this kind of thing and I wrote it in what's essentially the New York Times of the higher educational world and Erica described herself as a um a skeptical of of all of these materials but she couldn't find anything in the essay she could disagree with and so she she pushed me to write this book which I wrote I wrote for her it has five chapters and it kind of goes through where I think the philosophy of mind or what lots of people are saying now about Consciousness where where it's at at the moment and how how paranormal experiences are really relevant to this this area um and so that's why I wrote the book and I also wrote the book because it's about scientists and engineers and medical professionals by the way my my student students at Rice University are primarily stem they're not they're not studying history or philosophy they're studying science or technology or engineering or mathematics and it took me a while I've been here since 02 so I've been here 22 years it took me a while to realize that if I use a lot of classical religious texts these young people immediately dismiss them because they say in their head something like well so and so didn't know their science or their evolutionary biology or their physics and so they had they say these ridiculous things and so what I did in the flip is I called on computer scientists and engineers and physicists and I showed that they have the same kinds of experiences it it doesn't matter it doesn't matter whether you live in the 14th century or the 21st or now the 21st I guess you still people still have these sorts of experien and people still can think with them and what I mean by the flip is that someone like an engineer or medical doctor is trained in a materialist physicalist mode of thinking that everything is essentially dead matter that works through mathematical relations and can be measured and Quantified and manipulated and they have some kind of experience it might be on a psychedelic it might be a near-death experience it might be that their sister just telepathically knew instantly when they were in an accident but something in their lives flips them and they then take this position that Consciousness or subjectivity is primary and the material world is actually somehow emanated from that that subjective or or mental or conscious IM viewed reality and they realize that their science and engineering doesn't suffer at all in fact it might get better um so they realized that the the science or the engineering is not the same thing as the philosophy of materialism to to kind of put it in a nutshell they realize that there's different metaphysical interpretations of reality and that they really matter um and and that they depend on one's States Of Consciousness and if you've had the virtue or the the UN virtue of entering an altered state you know that reality is not maybe what the rest of people think it is and that that's really the basis of the flip um what I want to do today is I want to read you a very short paper um and as I think some of you heard me say earlier I I learned early on in my career you know like 30 years ago to read papers and not to talk like this because I want to put some C certain ideas on the table um and so I'm going to just read you these four or five pages and then we can can open it up uh and have a conversation with with Daniel and and everyone who's online here okay so let let me let me put these ideas on the table and then we can talk about them these are essentially bets or Wagers that I learn to call them in other words they're hypotheses I do not have certainties there is one very general ontological or metaphysical wager about what reality is like and then there are four more specific ones that are more speculative and perhaps for some of you a bit more wild my most General intellectual wager is that the total reality or gestal gleaned or intuited from comparative mystical literature which is my own specialty strongly suggests the Consciousness and the cosmos are two modes or expressions of the same fundamental reality manifesting in us as knowing and experiencing subjects the world is one with a capital O although it becomes two in our experiences when we split up that reality in our knowing and sensing that is when we become human subjects and are socialized into various reigning worldviews and identities and so what I'm trying to say here is that reality appears to be have both a mental and a material Dimension to it because we are who we are we're we're the ones splitting up reality and reality that interiority and that that exteriority are the same are the same basic basic reality we don't do this consciously or intentionally much less do we do this as individuals we do this by virtue of being born into a specific body language family and community and becoming socialized subjects or persons who know physical objects that is who split the world up into two basic dimensions of experience again the mental and the material the cultural and the natural maybe this is why I'm so I guess so suspicious of personal immortality I think the person is is part of this the splitting up reality always remains something other or more and its ground but it also becomes all of the things Egos and cultural worlds that we know and believe up here reality is one but it is also and really becomes two in short I lean strongly to some sort of monistic picture in a dual aspect mode I have employed this antology and my published work to understand what I call the impossible as a meaningful collapse of the subject object epistemological structure that is as a temporary revelation of the dual aspect monistic nature reality let let me explain that I take paranormal experiences very seriously because I think these are moments in a human life where the subject and the object are collapsing so people are experiencing the environment as reflective of their inner states and their inner states are somehow um affecting or or or emanating the physical reality and I think those are very significant it is my opinion or my wager that such paradoxical phenomena are anything but philosophical Pluff or neurological blips they're not they're not accidents they are important signs on the forest floor pointing to a cosmos that is profoundly connected that is One World in which something like precognitive dreams become entirely possible this partial or complete collapse of the subject object known partly and Darkly in impossible events and were fully and directly and full-blown mystical experiences points to one what I want to call the future of knowledge so I think this is the future of knowledge that the Consciousness and the cosmos are the same thing if such a future of knowledge strikes you as too friendly to the gorilla of religion in our living room allow me to remind you that modern Science and Technology have not somehow eliminated modern people's spiritual sensibilities quite the contrary they have been wildly productive of new spiritual ideas and expressions think the near-death or psychedelic literatures or the ever increasing literature on the philosophy of quantum physics which would not have happened without the advances of biomedical technology modern chemistry and of course quantum physics itself so I think I think modern ways of of being spiritual in fact rely on the sciences and the Sciences have not eliminated people's spiritual potentials nor would have such modern literatures the Psychedelic and the near-death literature happen without the central role of the scientists themselves the quantum philosophy literature for example was not born in the counterculture in the 1860s or by New Age enthusiasts in the 1980s it was born at the beginning of quantum mechanics and founding figures like Schrodinger bour and poy each of whom saw the profound philosophical parallels not identities that resonate between these different forms of human experience and expression the mathematical and the mystical so all these all of these Quantum physicists rodinger bore and pal turned immediately to Mystical and parapsychological literature for parallels up here in human experience for the quantum base of reality down here as it were the religious imagination and its powers then have always been at work behind the secular scenes within a kind of esoteric History of Science a Forbidden Science as the computer and information scientist jacqu fet has named The Venture in his published Journal it is time to acknowledge this Fuller history of science science not as imagined or proclaimed by a few Elite dogmatic physicalist but is actually practiced and lived on the ground and in the metaphysical closet it is also time for the Humanities to adopt much more radical modes of historiography and human being models that are in tune with what we are currently suspecting about the nature of Space Time that it is that it can bent and curved even turned back on itself the time does not flow in Just One Direction can you imagine what a writing of history that took precognitive phenomena as historical facts might look like can you imagine what we might look like I pretend no pure objectivity here indeed philosophical reason I have already hinted at I would deny both the autonomy of a purely objective material realm and consequently the ideal ideal of objectivity as such as an adequate final stance I don't actually believe in pure objectivity objectivity is a Hal truth so is subjectivity I speak just below or just above both out of a clear conviction that the future of knowledge will come when we are able to see through both as temporary effects of our own existence as subjects perceiving an apparently objective world and move out of this splitting into a more fundamental ground that preceded our own existence and will remain long after we as little egos are no more the face we had before we were born to invoke a Zen riddle my present thought spins out of this double denial of the subject and the object as it takes up the faceless face of the paradoxical impossible understood now not as some kind of superstitious detrius to leave behind much l as much less as the stuff of tabloids and rumor but as a temporary collapse of the subject object split that we and the physical Universe seem to be need I add that such a collapse is no small thing that it is the sign still rejected of the very future of knowledge which is also to say the future of us
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.