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Jeffrey Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. Jeff is back for his second episode on Pulling the Thread, as our first conversation was one of my favorites—and, as turns out, yours too. Jeff’s work and mind is focused on putting the humanities and science back together, arguing that both offer different sets of language to describe the same phenomena. He writes a lot about the metaphor of the table—namely, that you reach certain conclusions when you insist on taking most things off of it, particularly things that you can’t explain but still exist. He maintains, and I agree that our experience and universe become rich when you refuse to take things off the table, and instead of limiting your knowledge set to what’s easily explainable, try to think with—his term—people in other fields to understand what’s present. This was the focus of the last book we discussed, The Flip, which explores the lives of scientists who had otherworldly experiences that only the mystics had language to explain. And it’s the focus of his newest book, too, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else. Yep, we talk about aliens and time travel and everything in between.
MORE FROM JEFFREY KRIPAL:
Jeffrey Kripal’s First Episode on Pulling the Thread: “When Spirituality and Science are the Same”
Jeffrey’s Website
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
ELISE:
Okay. First of all, I still just want to come and sit at your feet and be your PhD student and go through your library and ask you questions. Well, now I want to go, can you talk about the Impossible Library?