Mod+ Jeff Kripal MSU lecture

Listened to this today. What a great discussion. Glad to have been introduced to Gordon White via this forum (and of course the podcast now)!
Yes, I enjoy Rune Soup. It's nice to see there are more and more of these really interesting podcasts being made. Where Did the Road Go?, Rune Soup, and Radio Mysterioso are favorites of mine.
 
I think it pays to be cautious when approaching Strieber and Kripal. There aren't any snippets I can offer here, but Jasun Horsley has, in my mind, offered a comprehensive alternative viewpoint that has certainly changed my thinking on lots of stuff. He has written a book length piece on Strieber that is published here: https://auticulture.wordpress.com. His podcast does a deep dive. Best to start at the beginning and listen sequentially. http://auticulture.com/liminalist/.
I read some of Horsley's blog. Not impressed. It was kind of like having someone who could only understand the literal meaning of words critique a book of poetry.

I think if someone wants to know if The Super Natural has any merit, they should just read it for themselves.
 
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Well I deleted my post because I feel this discussion might be a violation of the Mod+ designation.

If you want to make another thread to criticize Kripal/Streiber that might be better.
 
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http://literalmagazine.com/the-super-natural/

Never mind the remarkable contents of The Super Natural, the fact that two such authors would write a book together is remarkable in the extreme. Strieber, while building a passionate following for Communion, his many other works and esoteric podcast, “Dreamland,” has also attracted widespread ridicule for his memoirs which go beyond retailing his perceptions of his abductions by “the visitors” to adventures, both in and out of body, with orbs, hair-raising magnetic fields, blue frog-faced trolls, and the dead. Nonetheless, Kripal, as one steeped in the literature of the world’s religions, identifies Strieber’s Communion as “a piece of modern erotic mystical literature,” and indeed, “nothing less than a litmus test for his own academic field:

f we, as scholars of religion, cannot take this text seriously, if we cannot interpret it in some satisfying fashion, if we cannot make some sense of this man’s honest descriptions of his traumatic, transcendent experiences, then we have no business trying to understand his spiritual ancestors in the historical record. We either put up here, or we shut up there. I decided to put up.”
 
Well I deleted my post because I feel this discussion might be a violation of the Mod+ designation.

I don't think we need interpret MOD+ so strictly - it is really there to handle more extreme dogmatic (and usually repetitive) discussions. I'd encourage people who have deleted items to reconsider. Remember that I can view what you wrote despite the deletion, and I can't see why this discussion should not continue. In fact, I would quite like to respond to Far.From.Here's long post!

David
 
I don't think we need interpret MOD+ so strictly - it is really there to handle more extreme dogmatic (and usually repetitive) discussions. I'd encourage people who have deleted items to reconsider. Remember that I can view what you wrote despite the deletion, and I can't see why this discussion should not continue. In fact, I would quite like to respond to Far.From.Here's long post!

David
We moved the discussion to another thread, but FarFromHere didn't want to continue.
 
Altered States and Paranormal Narratives with Jeffrey J. Kripal

....I have a complex relationship to neuroscience and neuroscientists. Conventional neuroscience is ideologically committed to what we call “eliminative physicalism,” basically the philosophical position that there is only matter. That is, they think that we are only tiny dead things bouncing around and forming slightly bigger things, and bigger things, until you get to “us.” They think we are biological computers, basically zombies with computers perched on top. I think that this bizarre position is more a reflection of our present fascination with computer technology and spiritual vacuousness than it is an adequate model of the brain.

But there are other neuroscientists who are breaking with this physicalism and offering other models. I am thinking of the neuroanatomical reflections around the left and right brain hemispheres of writers like Jill Bolte Taylor and Ian McGilchrist. I find their work so helpful for thinking about so many things, including how our culture privileges only left-brain cognitive styles. Still, I have a great deal of faith in neuroscience as a science (as opposed to a materialist interpretation or ideology). I also know that philosophers of mind are moving away from physicalism into the exciting new (really very old) models of panpsychism (very shamanic) and consciousness as a fundamental feature of the cosmos (very mystical)....
 
I think that is the best interview with Jeffrey Kripal, that I have heard. He seems to have given up on a certain academic obscurity (which maybe he needed to protect his academic position). Everyone should listen.

David
 
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Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal is one of our biggest heroes. When Tarek Al-Ubaidi, host of the Austrian podcast CROPfm interviewed us for a show about our approach to magic and suggested that we invite Dr. Kripal for that as well, we immediately jumped at the chance. The show aired on May 12th, 2017 on CROPfm and featured snippets from our inspiring talk with him; this here is the whole thing. We discuss how the paranormal is about reading, writing and meaning, the role language plays in affecting physical events and the paranormal as a signal from the collective mind for telling a better story – in a word, what we’d call magic. It’s about spirituality, sexuality and creativity and, ultimately, how to live in a better story. 0:00 Intro 0:54 The connection between UFOs, pop music and reading Conan comics 8:58 The Super Story as meta ritual and how stories shape reality 14:29 Paranormal experiences of comic book writers Doug Moench and Grant Morrison: precognition or reality creation? 20:37 Death, Eros and out-of-body-experiences – Jeffrey’s sleep paralysis in Calcutta 30:10 Wilhelm Reich, UFOs and libido as the secret of life 36:43 Rudolf’s awakening out-of-body-moment and the need to lose at least two world(view)s 42:42 Whitley Strieber on reflexivity: How we experience what we write and read about 48:30 Our collective responsibility concerning the numinous and future revelations CROPfm: http://cropfm.at/ Our interview on CROPfm with excerpts from this talk with Dr. Kripal: http://cropfm.at/cropfm/jsp/past_show... Dr. Kripal on CROPfm about Whitley Strieber and the Super Natural: http://cropfm.at/cropfm/jsp/past_show... Mythomagie: http://www.mythomagie.at/
 
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