The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained Hardcover – February 2, 2016

“A vast and hidden experience spreads among the people, its power concealed behind the same sort of wall of denial that Rome once erected against Christianity, which was also derided, ignored, and persecuted, as most religions are during their early emergent periods."-Strieber (73)In The Super Natural, Jeff Kripal, scholar of religion at Rice University, and Whitley Strieber, an author famous for his narrative depictions of his own encounters with the numinous in forms which have come to define UFO and alien contact literature, collaborate to offer novel insight into what many would consider to be the heart of religion – that is, religious experience. Rather than treating Strieber’s accounts as literally factually true, as evidence of concrete alien contact – which to his dismay was the standard manner in which his work was received – Kripal applies the lenses of comparative religious history and the study of mysticism. Kripal’s own background in these areas is considerable – he began his academic career studying Indian tantra and famous mystics such as Ramakrishna (see his 1995 Kali’s Child) before becoming somewhat of a scapegoat for fundamentalist Hindutva frustrations (along with his graduate mentor, Wendy Doniger, see Rajiv Malhotra, “Wendy’s Child Syndrome”). Following this period he began to reflect on his own mystical encounter with a tantric goddess during his fieldwork, as well as the mystical states haphazardly entered into by countless other religious studies scholars. He has written on this topic in Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom and Authors of the Impossible, and has also further explored popular culture as a site of religious expression, in works such as his Mutants and Mystics. The most salient contribution by Kripal involves the application of the tools of religious studies – comparison, making the phenomenological “cut,” historical contextualization – to Strieber’s considerable accounts. He rejects both what he calls the modernist tendency to project the present onto the past – the view that earlier religious encounters were in fact, concrete alien contact experiences – and the religionist fallacy of reading the past into the present – pigeonholing encounter experiences into the narrow boxes of orthodoxy or heresy. The significant divergence of Strieber’s experiences from the standard interpretive schemas of religious institutions and even from what is considered appropriate to study in religious studies, rather than implying that they have no religious significance, represents a challenge to traditional orthodoxy, both religious and academic. As Kripal writes, “I have decided that if we, as scholars of religion, cannot take this (contemporary) 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." (8)As for the experiences themselves, they range in content from invisible and visible presences and figures such as short blue trolls and alien goddesses, floating balls of plasma or light, the dead or recently deceased, to electrical phenomena and technological implants (which Kripal deftly compares to shamanic initiatory insertion of magical stones or crystals into the adept). They are not at all limited to Strieber alone – following the publication of his accounts in Communion (1988) he and his wife Anne received hundreds of thousands of letters from others with similar reports- although he is aware of his unique relationship to them. Further, the encounters with these super natural beings were not merely hallucinatory. Strieber’s most shocking account describes what was essentially a rape, complete with anal probes (a description he regrets having shared publicly due to the extreme amount of ridicule it has produced), which occurred in 1985 and initiated his ongoing engagement with the super natural. He writes, "I found myself surrounded by odd and menacing figures. I’d felt that I was being carried, then manhandled, and then I was in what I initially thought was a tent. It was full of distinctly nonhuman creatures, some of them capering stick insects, others squat, frog-faced trolls who were a deep iridescent blue. As a sometime horror novelist, I was initially delighted by this useful dream. But when I tried to wake up, the horror became real. I heard a softly robotic female voice repeating over and over, “What can we do to help you stop screaming?” (27) “It’s not nothing,” Strieber reflects, commenting on the usual reductionism of such states to merely subjective fantasy. “Something happens and it is not confined to the mind. It isn’t hallucinatory. Neither, however, is it real in the same way that we are real, not exactly." (27) Veering towards a perennialist view similar to Huxley’s “mind at large” (or earlier religious conceptions such as oversoul (Emerson), overmind/supermind (Aurobindo), buddha-mind or buddha-nature, etc.), Strieber asserts that, “Whatever is happening, it is not ‘all in the mind,’ or if it is, then, as I have said, the mind is not all in us.” (289)This paradoxical relationship between the super natural and the human mind forms the basis of Kripal and Strieber’s thesis. Similar to Carl Jung’s understanding of externalization and projection, the authors here acknowledge the human dimension of these encounters, that they are indeed imaginative creations, but rather than being merely so, they are also active agents in allowing the transcendent dimension of reality into our lives and our experience. The psychological is the prism or doorway through which the super natural finds its expression. One sentence, taken from Strieber’s Communion, perfectly captures this sentiment: “The enigmatic presence of the human mind winks back from the dark.” (vii) In this way, “belief might act as a kind of psychic portal through which other beings can enter our world.” (43) This is not merely speculation, but indeed is corroborated by the study of accounts of mystics throughout history and across many cultures. It is also something I have personally experienced – the sense of personal involvement in creating and participating in the super natural phenomena (retroactive and actively) is undeniable. It involves traumatic psychic opening up to the fullness of oneself and of reality far beyond a social scientific materialistic reductionism and retrieves, in dramatic and profound fashion, a comparative enterprise involving the extreme numinous states of humanity, collectively, as a necessary practice to understand ourselves and what is happening in these states. This is consistent with Kripal’s accounts of scholars of religion as “closet mystics” whose scholarship is a way to make sense of their own transcendent experiences (I confess, I am guilty here). As Kripal states on his Rice faculty webpage FAQ, "I want to help write into existence a New Comparativism, one that can take what has been taken off the academic table over the last few decades (the sacred, the supernatural, the miraculous, the magical, or what I call simply “the impossible”) and put it back on the table again, not to return us to the beliefs or simplistic rationalisms of the past, but to re-enchant the field and make it magical and miraculous again."

This book is about a shamanic postmodern tantra of alien communion.I loved this book and I was a little disappointed toward the end as well. Basically this book alternates chapters by Whitley Strieber and Jeffery Kripal riffing/reflecting on each other’s thoughts. The subject is primarily Alien contact experiences.Strieber talks mostly of his own experiences, the development of his though on the experiences and how he relates this to Kripal’s concerns.Kripal brings different frames that he thinks will enhance the conversation. Many of these frames are implicitly used by Whitley and other writers of anomalous experiences but often implicitly, by making them explicit we gain greater control over the kind of story we make, the kind of study we undertake.Of the multiple frames Kripal introduced I found the following six most useful:Comparison "if we collect enough seemingly anecdotal or anomalous experiences from different times and places and place them together on a fair comparative table, we can quickly see that these reports are neither anecdotal nor anomalous. We can see that they are actually common occurrences in the species. They are part of our world. They are ‘natural,’ as we say, even if each of them is also rare with respect to any particular individual, and all of them are ‘super,’ that is, beyond how we presently understand how this natural world works.”This is basically the first step anyone takes when getting interested in any anomalous/rare experiences, search through history and see how common it is, what variations there are.Phenomenology: Though this is a complex philosophical movement, in this context it is simply the practice of engaging/inquiring with experience as it “appears” and temporarily putting aside how it might relate to the “objective world.” As Whitney says: “I am reporting a perception, not making a claim, and there is a world of difference between those two approaches.”“This practice will enable us to be faithful to what actually appeared and is being reported without immediately believing or dismissing it. Making the cut [using phenomenology] will free us to talk about the impossible without it sounding impossible. [Kripal]”Historical contextualization: Kripal argues for the usefulness of contextualizing anomalous experiences while arguing against a prevalent tendency in the academy to using historical contextualization to explain away the possible universal significance of all meanings/truths.Kripal makes a glib and amusing reflection: “I do not think it is too much of a simplification to suggest that the entire history of religions can be summed up this way: strange super beings from the sky come down to interact with human beings, provide them with cultural, technological, legal, and ethical knowledge, guide them, scare the crap out of them, demand their submission and obedience, have sex with them(often forcefully), and generally terrorize, awe, baffle, inspire, and use them.”He further argues against reducing myths to misunderstood science or apparently advanced science [UFO] to simply older myths. Instead we should keep the tension between these two reductive tendencies and allow each poll to inform, enrich and challenge our stories.Hermeneutics (interpretation): He focuses mostly of two aspects of hermeneutics, its suspicious enactments which look for hidden meanings and the feedback loop of understanding between subject who understands and the objects of understanding. This loop is not stable but endlessly influencing and changing each poll.“I am thinking of films like The Never ending Story(1984), Stranger than Fiction(2006), and the Adjustment Bureau (2011)…the story revolves around a protagonist engaging his own life as a fictional story being written either in this world or in another, seemingly by someone else. As he reads and interprets the text of his life, however, he discovers that its story or plot changes. He discovers the circle or loop of hermeneutics. He discovers that as he engages his cultural script as text creatively and critically he his rereading and rewriting himself. He is changing the story”He also spends a lot of time talking about the origin of the idea of the imaginal [both as symbolic and empirical forms). This is very interesting but a little too complex to talk/quote about in a review.Erotics: Kripal argues for the centrality of the erotic in this study, the erotic from Plato’s Eros, to Freud’s Libido to Tantra’s energies and transformations. Here he recounts his own interesting experiences in India with the “goddess Kali”. This also lays a bridge for his sympathetic reading ofWhitley Strieber. “ What was Whitley Strieber’s crime? What did he do that was so wrong…..Not only did he speak s secrets in public, but he spoke reverently and fearfully of a divine presence that was feminine, that broke and rode him like a horse…by doing so, he spoke of a presence at the very heart of the unconscious of the religious West, a presence that has been repressed and denied for three millennia. He spoke of Her.”Traumatic secret: Here he writes about how trauma can often be a breaking open into both madness or/and transcendence. Near death experiences, traumatic abuse, violent accidents and alien encounters are often described by people as moments of breakage from a social/egoic trace into greater numinous[awe full reality] space.“It is only a thought. I do not know. I want to be very humble here and stress the complexities…Still, here is the thought. If the ego is ready to let go, then it will be more likely to experience an encounter wit the sacred Alien or Other as extremely positive, as redemptive, as ecstatic. If, on the other hand, the ego is not ready to let go of itself, then it will be more likely to experience an encounter with the sacred as extremely negative, as terrifying, as destructive.”My only criticisms of the book are some of its looseness with terms toward the end.There is a lot of imprecision in the use of the word mystical. All anomalous experiences get packed into the tent of mystical experiences at times which is not helpful. Whitley’s experiences are not the same as Meister Eckhart’s of the Godhead. I understand how interpretively they may be using similar devices [Hermeneutics] but the phenomena they talk about is vastly different in my opinion. Also mystical practices are concerned with stable changes of states and character, while altered states are not necessarily so concerned. There is some overlap but I think it has to be spelled out much more clearly to be knowledge enhancing and not just mudding the water.Also some of the riffs on the physical sciences and quantum physics are cringe worthy. I think the perspective is important but just like Kripal brought a sophisticated humanities perspective, you need a sympathetic scientist [there are a few] to really get any substantive insights from the scientific viewpoint.Anyway, I only talked about some of the frames that are explored much more in depth in the book.For anyone with an interest in Ufo’s, paranormal studies, or religious studies this is highly recommended. If you don’t have an interest in any of these three why did you read this review?

Very disappointing on the whole. I have read all of Whitley Strieber's books. He is a very good writer but this book is a mess. Please make your mind up, Whitley. Can you say, once and for all, if what you have experienced is actually real (implants, rape, meeting small people, etc.). If you cannot categorically sya that it is real, all of the complex theorising and possible explanations are only interesting up to a point. The level of complexity in Strieber's and Kripal's explorations of the alleged bizarre happenings is also a little embarrassing. When all is said and done, this book has not convinced me of anything other than the writers' shared obsession with big words.

This is an important book, giving a different approach and way to think about all the strange things that happen in our world but are ignored by the mainstream. It may be challenging for those who are not comfortable with a shift in their worldview and are happy with the status quo, but it's time to wake up!

An amazingly detailed and painfully honest look at subjects which the mainstream scientific community generally prefers to ignore, backed by multiple testimonies and jaw-dropping volumes of evidence. Worth every penny of the price because it goes to work on the timeless questions of exactly what it is to be human, where we might fit in the cosmos and whether contacts with the 'super natural' are a prelude to new evolutionary directions.

Unless you're thoroughly into this subject matter you won't really get into this book. Wish I hadn't got it.

A game changing look at the paranormal - highly, highly recommended.