This video is about this book,
the Super Humanities by Professor of Religion and Philosophy,
Jeffrey J. Kripal The Super Humanities is about the fact
that as humans, we've always had superhuman
or supernatural capabilities, but perhaps out of fear
of who we really are, we've fenced off that part of ourselves into stories
that we then regard as pure fiction. We have shoved things into entertainment,
into science fiction, into superhero comics. So we can somehow, I suppose, deal with it
and or entertain ourselves. But those those myths
and that pop culture has a very serious foundation. According to Jeffrey Bible, it is time for the humanities
to become the super humanities. It is time for science to start
acknowledging the fact that paranormal sci or mystical type experiences
that people have might be real, not only subjectively real
as an experience that people have, but that is in the end,
an illusion of the human mind, but as something that is objectively real,
that is a claim on reality. I wrote this book on the human potential movement
in the U.S. based in California
in the sixties and seventies. And I talk to all these people
and they were telling me crazy stories. I mean, just things
I knew there was no way that could happen. I mean, people were talking
about what we now call UFO contacts. They were talking about alien abduction
and they were talking about dreams of future events
that played out in perfect detail. I mean, just a whole gamut of stuff. And I realized that these people
were telling me the truth. And I also realized that we,
as scholars of religion, had no way of really understanding what was going on. All we could do is write it off. I think the humanities today really want to talk about everything
in terms of society. And I think it's it's fair and truthful to about 99% of our experience. But that other part of the human
condition, that 1% or that percentage of a percentage actually ends up
meaning pretty much everything. What about that 1%
where, say, the magic happens? If the humanities would really want
to study that with an open mind, that would imply a metaphysical debate. And he points to a blind spot in academia. You don't you don't do metaphysics. You don't do metanarrative. That's the basic point of the postmodern
turn, is that metaphysics are hegemonic and they essentially control people. And so we don't talk about
what reality is. We we talk about
how our knowledge is ordered or how power is constructed
or how words work. The zero point is this physical ism
or this this materialism that is never questioned
according. To cripple materialism
has colonized reality in a sense. I talk about decolonizing
reality and I'm like, Look, you can't pretend you're being diverse
and then turn everybody into a good Marxist
because that's your metaphysics. That's European Marxist criticism from the 19th and 20th century. If you're really going to be diverse,
you have to take these other ontological claims as claims on reality. A central figure in cripples book
is the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Superman was actually inspired
by Nietzsche's notion of the ubermensch. His philosophy
about the next phase in human evolution. Now, in mainstream academia,
Nietzsche is right as the philosopher who declared God dead and basically told us that it's up to us
humans to come up with our own morals. In analyzing Nietzsche in this way, he's very much put into this 19th century
materialist framing. According to Geoffrey Tripel,
this is a misreading of Nietzsche. Check the people who only talk about the naysayer
and the reductionist and God is dead. Who exactly are they reading? Because they're not reading the Nietzsche
I'm reading the Nietzsche
I'm reading is talking about the uncanny. He's talking about deification. He's talking about ecstasy. How super was his ubermensch vision? I mean, how close does it get
to the real Superman vision? I don't think he meant it metaphorically. I think he was referring
to an actual physical super species that existed in the future. Of course, Greipel distances himself
from the fascist misinterpretation
of nature's ubermensch theory. Instead, he's
talking about the late, crazy Nietzsche who made metaphysical claims that go way
beyond the stoic self-improvement interpretation of his theory
that nowadays is fashionable. Instead, that late true
Nietzsche, one could argue in a sense, didn't declare gods dead at all,
but very much alive, just not in the sense
of any organized religion. Look, the reason God has to die
is that so superhumans can live. We have to start
projecting our own divinity and our own immortality
outside of ourselves. And this is what Nietzsche
was objecting to. He objected to religion
not because of its extreme claims. He was saying something much more extreme,
much more outrageous, frankly. He objected to religion
because it made people weak. Crapo convincingly shows in his book that many of the foundational thinkers
in the humanities like Nietzsche, Jacques, Derrida, Chopin, Hauer or William
James, had a very open mind when it comes to metaphysics, to ontology,
and that they arrived at many of their important ideas,
not only through scientific reasoning. Some of the most significant individuals
in the history of humanities came to their ideas
through altered states. We make the mistake of thinking these
people thought their way to these ideas. They did not think
their way to these ideas. We have to take seriously these ideas
as coming from outside the individual. I really love this conversation
with Jeffrey Gribble, who wrote, I think a brilliant and important book
that I would have loved reading when I was still in college
in the humanities. And I thought it best to start our
conversation exactly where crap starts. His book, namely
with Superman and Clark Kent. I hope you enjoy it. If we take that Clark and Superman metaphor. So basically
you are saying that in humanities we have been focusing only on our Clark
and our human capacities. Right. Whereas we are also Superman. Is that the way to put it? Yeah. I mean, I use the Superman,
Clark Kent mythology to talk to my grad students
who basically want to come and do a Ph.D. and be Superman or Superwoman and essentially what I tell them
is, you can't do that. Superman actually never gets a job. Nobody ever hire Superman. People only will hire Clark Kent. And so you have to master
these skill sets. You have to go to the daily planet
every day. And you have to pretend that you're
just a human being, even though deep down, you know you're not. And that our historical materials suggest
that's suggests we're not. We're not just we're not just Clark Kent. We're not just human. But the human aspect is really important. And that's the humanities, as they said
today, it really focuses there
on social criticism and that kind of reductive analysis of of human experience,
which I think is crucial. And so when I talk about
the super humanities, it's it's not meant to dismiss or deny
the humanities. It's it's to embrace them, but also talk
about what they're not talking about, what we're looking away from,
which is which is the superhuman, which is also part of our histories
and a part of our cultures. And so that's really
what I'm trying to get at in this book is, is a kind
of both and not an either or. Yeah, that that's totally clear
throughout throughout the book. But to focus a bit more
before we dove into the your your claim
that the humanities have always been the super humanities in a sense,
if we now focus on the humanities and on that sort of. Clark And the human aspect,
just clarify clarify it. We are talking about you are your body,
you are your brain. The mind is what the brain does. Is that how you would sort of frame that? Or what are your words to sort of. Well, I mean, that's much more
of a natural science perspective. I mean, certainly in the humanities,
everything is reduced down to society. You know, you are your identity. You are you're in your body
or what we call embodiment is really a function of your place
in society and how you are perceived and and language and culture and history
and all these things. And so we,
we really do think about the human being as a essentially a body
and an identity in a social system. And that's perfectly accurate, actually. And I think it's it's fair and truthful to about 99% of our experience, maybe more. But that other part of the the human condition, that 1%
or that percentage of a percentage actually ends up
meaning pretty much everything to the people who have those experiences. And those are the events that really shape
human culture and history and civilization. And and so, again, that's what I'm trying to say. I think that I think the humanities today really want to talk about everything
in terms of society. And the notion that you're the brain
or the body, I think is a very natural science kind of attitude. And it fits into this. You are your society kind of kind of idea. So they're very much a piece and the humanities is very much
following the natural sciences. You know,
it really wants to be a science as well. And it's trying to do
the reductive explanatory thing as well. And it does so from a sort of physical based or materialist ontology. But what strikes me is
that it is not aware of its own ontology. Right, or it doesn't seem
to critically reflect on it. Could you just sort of. No, of. Course. Thoughts? Of course.
It doesn't have one answer. I mean, come on. I mean, that's that's the zero point. Is this physical ism or this
this materialism that is never questioned. And and I shouldn't say never. Of course, it's question this question
in philosophy in particular, but I think historians and anthropologists
and scholars of religion just often assume
that physical ism or materialism is true. And it's not
questioned, it's not called into question the way other other ontologies or ontological commitments are. You know,
my joke is we can make refrigerators. Therefore, materialism is true. You know, it doesn't follow at all. It's a non-sequitur. But I think that's exactly
how people think. They they confuse the successes
and usefulness of technology and science with the truth of materialism. And you. Right. That sort of we have to catch up, right. That what sort of science now for the last
100 years has been telling us, I mean, and then I think you refer mainly to
to quantum physics, and that, ironically enough,
the humanities have been telling us, right, until a certain period in time that we now have to
do some catching up, right? Yeah, I think I think the scientists
have to catch up with science, too. I mean, I you know, I have quantum
physicist friends and, you know, the thing that quantum physics will tell you is
there is no such thing as matter. I mean, deep down, it's
not it's not matter. And so it's not just
that we're working with an old ontology. We're actually assuming
a kind of 19th century materialism that was kicked out of the out of the out of the camp of science
and physics 100 years ago. But it's still, again, remains,
because it's just so darn successful and and and omnipresent
that it goes unquestioned. Hmm. And to dove a bit into sort of
what you mean when you say the super, right, the super, the aspect sort of the experiences
people have or the capacities we have as humans, just to sort of share
some sort of what are we talking about? Well, so essentially
the argument of the book is that some of the most significant individuals
in the history of humanities came to their ideas
through altered states. And these were extraordinary states. These were precognitive dreams. These were out-of-body experiences. These were near-death experiences. These were psychedelic states. These were mystical experiences induced by any number of things, including psychopathology and
and probably brain cancer. I mean, there's a whole range of things
that could induce or catalyze these altered states so that the ideas
come from these altered states. And then they are
written out in texts or books, and they kind of enter
the mainstream of the humanities. And we make the mistake of thinking these
people thought their way to these ideas. They did not think
their way to these ideas. That's that's nonsense. Frankly. They were given these revelations. And, by the way,
they often use the word revelation. And these are not religious people. Hons. They use the word revelation because the idea or the vision was given to them outside, outside their own autonomy,
outside their own mind, as it were,
and it's forced on them in a just, completely convincing way. So that's really
what I'm talking about is, is we have to take seriously these ideas
as coming from outside the individual. And this isn't something
they reason toward or create a logical syllogism
and work their way toward. That's that's just silly, frankly. And what is you names
like numerous examples in your book. And that's what I always like about
also your previous book. There is such a thorough research
in sort of these fringe people and of course
big names as well in the humanities. But if you have to give an example of
of what you just sat, one that spoke most to you
in your research and writing your book, and what is the first that comes to mind? Well, probably the first is Schopenhauer or just because he's he's so central
to the history of philosophy. But if you actually read Schopenhauer,
it's very clear he had a lot of precognitive dreams
and a lot of mystical states. And he took for example,
he took Indian mystical thought extremely seriously
because it resonated with his idealism. He he saw very clearly
that they were getting at some of the same things he was
he was saying the other person
I always turn to is Friedrich Nietzsche. I love talking about Nietzsche
because he's received in the academy in his naysaying or his negative modes. You know, he's he's always perceived
as deconstructing something and, you know, God is dead, which he, in fact, said,
and that's very much a part of nature. But it's it's all of this
naysaying is towards this, you're saying. And these states of deification
and ecstatic states of becoming one with Dionysius
or the Christ or the Buddha or whoever that he clearly had as well,
particularly towards the end of his life. And those just get written off as, Oh, that's just madness, or That's just nature
being nutty or crazy. And I'm like, No, that's, that's Nietzsche. That's, that's, that makes total
sense to me because you can see those same altered states
and those same claims of deification in, in other figures
that that we call mystical writers. And so William James is another example. Gloria Anzaldua is a is a wonderful kind
of postcolonial queer example. Amitav Gosh is a contemporary writer
that writes a lot about these states. I mean, my argument is
you can go virtually anywhere, including to someone like Jacques Derrida
and just see the superhuman everywhere. If you just open your eyes
and are willing to talk about the superhuman and not just endless social,
social conditionings and social states. Yeah. And I notice that you mentioned Nietzsche,
of course. And I think good to zoom in a bit on him
because of course we know Nietzsche for for his notion of the ubermensch
and the superhuman. I was just wondering, you say a lot of interesting things about this in your book. How is his notion read in the humanities, in the mainstream humanities, the notion of the ubermensch
and how should we read it? Well, first of all, it's not read. You know. It isn't even read. No, the argument is, oh, that's just this tangential, crazy idea
he had towards the end of his life. It only appears a couple of times
in his published books. Let's just ignore it, you know,
or the eternal recurrence of the same. Oh, that's just a metaphor. It's about taking responsibility for one's life
and one's one's choices. No. Those were were conclusions. He came to because of a mystical
experience he had in August of 1881. We know when he had it.
We know where he had it. He had it. Sils Maria up. Up in the air. Up in the Alps. And, you know, his his notion of the superhuman
of the ubermensch. He claimed to have seen the superhumans,
the coming superhumans. It wasn't
it wasn't just an abstract idea he had. And he linked it
to to Darwinian evolution, because Darwin had recently, you know, written in 1859,
Origin of Species. So and nature wasn't a Darwinian,
by the way, he thought he thought Darwin and randomness was, was fairly
paltry and puny as he liked to say. Kleiner So he, his notion of the Superman was this ecstatic vision
he had of the future of the species. And it was central
to what Nietzsche was about, how it was received. Unfortunately, what happened
is he fell into essentially a coma or a state of of of brain cancer or madness since about 1889, January of 1889. And his sister,
who whom he profoundly disagreed with, by the way, took his ideas
and sold them in a in a sold them metaphorically to people like Mussolini
and Hitler and and the people who would, you know,
kind of take over fascist Europe. And so it was really the ubermensch
and Nietzsche who gets picked up
by German fascism, really. And and that's why it's largely rejected, certainly in the European context. There was a different reception
of Nietzsche in the States. The American Nietzsche was not at all
like the European nature. And Nietzsche gets linked to things like sexual activism,
some gender activism, racial activism, a kind of Jewish intellectual ism. To Superman himself, the guy in the blue
tights and the red cape. I mean, that all comes from nature. So there is a what I'm trying to say is there are different
ways is to pick up nature's ubermensch. And what we've focused on
are the really bad ones that, in fact, did did help create really, really bad,
horrible things in particularly in Europe. But that's not nature. Nietzsche was basically gone,
you know, in 1889. He's not responsible for that. His sister is. Yeah. It's absolutely true
that especially in Europe, we link it. We link it with fascism. Fascism. That's just what you do in college. It starts it. But I'm just very curious because the
how super was his ubermensch vision? I mean, how close does it get
to the real Superman vision or did he mean it
more metaphorically than we think or. I don't think he meant it metaphorically. I think he was referring to an actual physical super species that existed in the future,
and that would essentially take over or overcome, as he said, the
the ordinary human species. He you know,
Nietzsche was really disgusted with European humanity. He thought it was near lipstick. It was without
goal, it was without meaning. And his his whole project was to overcome this European nihilism. And he felt that the coming ubermensch
or the coming superhuman species was the answer to this. It was how we would overcome the nihilism that we were stuck in. You know, in the late 19th century. So and it wasn't just the ubermensch,
by the way, that the European intellectuals rejected. It was the soul, it was the supernatural,
it was the paranormal, it was the occult. It was all kinds of categories
that they themselves invented, by the way. It was all European intellectuals
who came up with these ideas in these categories. And that all gets kind of conflated with with German fascism in in Europe and then just gets rejected outright. And what I'm trying to say is
that did not happen in other cultures. And the super natural or the occult
or the paranormal is not dependent
in any way on what happened in Germany. It's a universal human potential
or attribute, and it gets picked up and talked about and integrated
or not integrated in very specific ways. Yeah,
I think this is just very interesting to share with people
because people have this, I think, materialist interpretation
of how Nietzsche meant that, right? Like just just a physical,
stronger species because that's sort of the fascist lens that we look at
is Übermensch notion. But you are saying he was talking
about the paranormal, the by the power of mind of consciousness,
etc.. Right. Yeah. I mean if you if you actually read nature and you don't just read about him,
I mean, this this is a shock to me. I mean, I spent my whole professional
career reading about Nietzsche shamans. I do, you know, I didn't read nature
and I read Freud. I was I was very much a Freudian. And I love Freud. And I was schooled
in psychoanalytic thinking. And so I was that was my kind of go
to social reductionism, by the way. And I'm still completely there in some sense. But nature. No, I you know, he was just
one of many figures I didn't read. And then what happened
was a number of my graduate students, their lives were in one case saved
and in other cases completely turned around by simply reading
Friedrich Nietzsche. And I was stunned by that,
to be really honest. And I was like,
Wow, something's going on here. I think I better read this, this author, and I read it, and I was like, Who are these people reading? I mean, I mean by these people,
I mean, who are the people who only talk about the naysayer
and the reductionist and God is dead? Who exactly are they reading? Because they're not reading the Nietzsche
I'm reading the Nietzsche
I'm reading is talking about the uncanny. He's talking about deification, he's talking about ecstasy, he's
talking about precognitive dream. He's talking about all the things
that I'm very familiar with that come out of these modern
paranormal literatures. And he was making really extreme claims
about willing backwards and how time repeats itself
and a future super species. I mean, these were these were ideas
I swam in in the 20th century. And I just assumed, oh, this is Teilhard
de Chardin, this is Sri Aurobindo. You know, maybe this is Alfred Russel
Wallace, maybe. I had no idea
it was all there in Nietzsche and in a way that was really nuanced and really sophisticated and really critical of what I would call institutional religion or piety. And so. Yeah, because if we then if everything
you were saying right now, if we then sort of reread his is whole idea
of God is dead, he means then of course the God exterior to us, the
the God we created that is not us. Right. But he's not sort of saying the divine
is that or to the transcendent. Yeah. I mean, my you know what I say in the book
is, look, the reason God has to die
is this so superhumans can live, we have to start
projecting our own divinity and our own immortality
outside of ourselves and then bowing down as if we're some kind of servants
or slaves to this monarch and the sky. This is this is bad. This is really bad. And this is what Nietzsche
was objecting to. He objected to religion
not because of its extreme claims. He was saying something much more extreme,
much more outrageous. Frankly, he objected to religion
because it made people weak. And, you know, as a scholar of religion, I'm like, yeah,
that's true. That that that that's true. That happens, you know? So I was like,
Oh, he's one of us, you know? But he's like this really extreme version of us
that's in which you can kind of see see yourself in a in a in a new way,
I think. Yeah. And what I like also, of course,
your book goes all over the place, right? Like back
you go to Egypt and then you trace sort of the whole notion
of of the superhuman or the transhuman and within sort
of the fringe of religious traditions, rights are you name for antisemitism
and narcissism. It has been always kept alive. Right? So that's maybe nice to just share
with people that the whole idea of the of us being superhumans has been sort of
at the core of many traditions, not just and then later, of course,
of course, got lost
in the mainstream of those religions. But it has always been that. Right. That's sort of what I sort of. Yeah, I mean, I, I talk about religion as legitimate science fiction and I, you know, by that I mean the German sociologist
who's whose name escapes me right now. I'm sorry. It always escapes me. But they were. No, it wasn't Faber. It was a contemporary sociologist
of religion. Writing, writing. Actually,
when I was in graduate school, I'll think of his name. We can we can edit this. But his basic argument was, look, religion is about superhuman powers
and it's about accessing those superhuman powers
through ascetic practices, through extreme ascetic practices
that do things to the body and the mind and actualize these potentials. And then these prodigies
that we call saints or mystics then become the core
or the carriers of the tradition. And the whole tradition is about obtaining superhuman states of mind and body. And then, of course, as things go on
and in the modern world, we project that superhuman status further and further away from our self
into some kind of external deity. But that's precisely, again,
what I think the humanities are trying to criticize
and are trying to become aware of. So I don't I don't think personally we can be humanists without taking seriously
that human beings have always had had access to these superhuman states
and have always tried to access them. I think that's part
of our part of our humanity. And you don't have to convince me. But I mean,
if you have to convince your skeptic, uh, like radically skeptic colleagues
in the humanities because you, you sit on a sort of a that's
how I see you sitting on sort of this pile of empirical evidence
in favor of this idea of the superhuman. And, I mean, how established this is and how is it that we in human justice
deny those facts, so to speak? Well,
first of all, I, I do sit in the margins of of the humanities,
at least in the States. I really I admit that
and I talk about that a lot in the book. I don't want to present
the super humanities as this is what, you know, schools of humanities
think and say. It's not exactly
not what they say and think. But my argument is, look, it's
embedded in the texts we revere
and the people we teach everyday. So it's encoded into what we're doing, even if we're not admitting that. And I just I want humanist intellectuals to just be more aware of what it is
they're doing and to just read the people that they claim they revere
and that they're thinking with. Because I'm I'm very confident that if you read those people carefully
and you and you dig down into their lives and into what produced those texts,
you're going to find these states. You're going to find them
every time. Yeah. And to just, again,
zoom in on the onto super and on the ubermensch, if we so would that mean that we can all acquire
these transcendent states and the capacities
that then maybe can be endowed upon you? I mean, clairvoyance, precognition,
just sci fi stuff, the X-Men stuff,
because it is a bit how I read your book. It's like almost this, you know, there's
this we are in a X-Men movie in a sense. It is. It is X-Men stuff. The X-Men mythology is true, haunts. I mean, it's just true, but the X-Men mythology is derivative, comes out of these historical experiences
that have been going on for millennia. You know, I, I wrote a chapter
once in another book called The X-Men Before Their Time and the X-Men before
their time was pretty much everyone. I mean, it's pretty much the history
of religions. And again, we've forgotten that. And we've shoved things
into entertainment, into science fiction, into superhero comics. So we can somehow, I suppose, deal with it
and or entertain ourselves. But those those myths and that pop culture has a very serious foundation,
which is us and our. And our ancestors. Yeah. And Nietzsche would add
and our descendants, you know, because for nature
and I think for a lot of, a lot of the experiences I work with
influence doesn't just come from the past and the present, it also comes
from the future into the present. You know, time is time is a block and it's all happening
all at once, essentially. And and I think this is one of the keys to the super humanities, is that you you definitely think you're definitely
have a historical consciousness. You think about how things are shaped historically in the past,
but you also have a future consciousness. You, you,
you're willing to entertain influences that might in fact be
from the other direction, from the future. Hmm. And no, it's just distance is maybe,
maybe a personal side note. But interesting, your book opened sort of it opened my eyes again to sort of the the, the,
the person background I have versus Cathars Catholicism
where of course I'm brought up with the show LA Day
and it's just sort of the New Testament scholarship that you also critiqued
that sort of has sort of, uh, took the super away or tell you
that it's not about the super right. You just, you have to believe there
once was a super and that is Christ. And then, and then you can move on
instead of seeing this all story as sort of something that you could also
be or acquire in a sense. And it just never occurred to me to reread the Bible as,
uh, looking at these miracles as stuff that might have really happened, which I mean, if you say that to me
a couple years ago, that now that's crazy. Now I get behind that literalist belief. But in a sense you are opening the door
right to literal, literal interpretation of these religious stories, which you call
sort of legitimate science fiction. Well, I'm not yeah, I'm not sure. I'm opening the door to literal readings,
because a lot of the miracle stories, of course, are exaggerated
or fashioned by many generations and different social context. But I certainly am trying to open the door
to these things did happen. There's a core truth
to the miracle stories that is really important,
that actually generated the charisma and the initial energy of this particular new religious movement
that eventually became Christianity. You know, my own conversion to this was I was trained
probably much like you were hands that anything miraculous or supernatural
sure was legendary and was a later addition to the tradition
and was some kind of power play. Somebody was claiming this to gain
some kind of power, you know, usually of an institutional
or political form. And then what happened was I wrote this book on the human
potential movement in the U.S. based in California
in the sixties and seventies. And I talk to all these people
when I was writing that book and they were telling me crazy stories. I mean, just things
I knew there was no way that could happen. But I knew that happened. I knew they were trying to. Just to give an example. Well, here's an example. So a woman, for example, is giving birth to two her first child, and she feels this intense pressure
in the bottom of her spine. And she essentially has
what I think we would day today call a kundalini awakening. And she ends up leaving her body
and watching herself from the ceiling, have have this child. And it just blows her away
because she has no context for this. She thinks she's going crazy and she ends up finding a man named Joe
Campbell who helps her, you know, integrate this through this language
of kundalini and yoga and all this. And and it suddenly starts
to make sense to her or doesn't suddenly it gradually makes sense to her. I mean, people were talking
about what we now call UFO contacts. They were talking about alien abductions. They were talking about dreams of future
events that played out in perfect detail. I mean, just a whole gamut of stuff. And I realized that these people
were telling me the truth. And I also realized that we,
as scholars of religion, had no way of really understanding what was going on. All we could do is write it off. And I also realized that if these people are having these experiences in 2005, they could have had them
2000 years ago and in Palestine or in the Mediterranean world, in fact,
they obviously did. So it made me rethink
the history of religions that it's not based on a series
of illusions or hallucinations or wild claims, that it's actually
based on a set of actual human experiences that then, of course,
get mythologized and exaggerated and ritualized and institutionalized
and all the ways we know. But that there's a core
or there's a core truth there that that frankly shocked me,
but also liberated me as a as a kind of intellectual
trying to understand what religion is, because otherwise we just reduce religion
to too bad politics. Right? I mean, it's just it's
just it's just a bunch of people. Just who has become sort it's
becoming boring to even to just read it in that way. Right. That that sort of poll
went through the Greek world and attributes all these capacities
to Jesus just to sell the story. Right. That's the sort of the cynical sort of and there might be some truth to it,
but there has to be something. And that to me. Jeffrey, I'm just curious
if you are familiar with if he was also part
of that human potential movement or if even if you ever met Ram Dass,
Richard Alpert it was sort of
I at a moment became sort of obsessed or just listening to his lectures. And he told a lot about his guru in India,
I think Karoly Bhabha or and those were like biblical miracles stories that's just beyond
precognition that no, you materialize food out of nothing to deal like Jesus and coming from, um, Richard Alpert, how he told it just, I just had to take it serious in a sense
that this, maybe this stuff is happening
and it's happening now. Well,
I think you can just remove the maybe I mean, this stuff is happening
and it does happen. And let's let's talk about it. Let's integrate it into our theories
about what's going on. Let's stop let's stop
pretending that it isn't happening. Because, of course, of course
it's happening. And, you know, with Richard, I,
first of all, never met Richard Alpert, but I knew a lot of his friends,
by the way. I knew them personally. And, you know, one of the real catalysts
of that whole scene was psychedelics. And of course, we're in a kind
of psychedelic renaissance right now. But I think I don't think I'm pretty sure that if you removed the psychedelic catalyst,
you wouldn't have a lot of these events. And it doesn't mean that the events
can be explained by the psychedelic. I'm not I'm not I'm not making that argument,
but I am making the argument that you need you need catalysts often
to induce these states. And Richard Porter, who became Ram Dass,
of course, is very clear about the role that the psychedelics
played in his early spiritual life. And it was very much a part of the human
potential movement, by the way, that I was studying as well. It wasn't the whole thing by any,
any stretch, but it was it was certainly in the mix. It's very interesting
that to make that bridge to the psychedelic renaissance,
because what I'm now sensing, I, I visited a conference in the Netherlands. We have this sort of international
conference on psychedelic research, which really brings together sort of the whole research
community, international community. It's, it's a great event. And I noticed how much there is
now openness to speak about the mystical experiences
that substances induce. But there is also a very strong hesitance to go into sort
of the ontological implications of that. Right. And then this brings me back to your book. We there's a lot of talk about William
James. Of course, but sort of the James that you again
like to say just one part of James, because he himself was open
sort of to the ontological implications. Right. Just nice to hear your thoughts
here. Yeah. I mean, again, William
James is another one of these humanists that we all read, I suppose, in graduate
school or undergraduate school. And, you know,
I got I read a lot of William James. I read them all through graduate school. Nobody ever told me ever that he was an avid psychical researcher and that he spent days and weeks
and months with mediums and psychics and no, no, we we were not told that we we were given the respectable William
James, the you know, the William James, the pragmatist, William James, the author
of The Varieties of Religious Experience. We were not given the William James that
actually lived and existed and and thought and I think again, once
if you read enough into James, what you realize
is this guy's sucking on nitrous oxide. Where is he getting nitrous oxide
for one thing, like, come on. I mean, he's
clearly doing this on purpose. He's clearly
altering his own consciousness. And he had this great
he had this great story, which I love. It was after
he had in imbibed some nitrous oxide. And he said, Hegel
finally made sense to me. And then the nitrous oxide wore off and Hegel
no longer made sense. And I'm like, that's it. That's
that's what I mean by the super humanities is that these texts that we read
are themselves altered states and they make sense in, in altered states that they can induce
or that we can induce in ourselves. But they may make very little sense
outside those altered states. So I think James is a kind of exemplar
of what I mean by the super humanities. He's he's read and used in the humanities,
but he was actually interested in the superhuman,
a word he used, by the way, all the time. He used it constantly,
particularly towards the end of his life. And again, we just don't
we just don't hear about that way. And James. Just just to just to clarify
for people who are not familiar. So the pragmatist, James told us to sort
of take these experiences seriously, but you just see how they sort of, uh, what effect they have on individuals
or society, right? And whereas
that's only the pragmatist approach. But you can also take sort
of a more metaphysical route to say, what are these experiences
telling us about the fundamental nature of who we are? Well, in towards the end of his life,
he went there. You know, he he wrote ontologically,
he wrote metaphysically, and he didn't claim to know the truth of things, but he sort of he sort of landed
on what we would call a panpsychism he really landed on a kind of cosmic mind that sort of dribbles
itself into horns and. Jeff And so we're like little we're like
little bubbles or a bernardo would say we're altars of this larger cosmic mind that was like pure William
James towards towards the end of his life. And he concluded that
because of his decades studying mediums and psychics and mystics,
you know, I mean, this was really his his sort of final conclusion
before he die. He died. And I think 1910 is when he died. But he was really going
there towards the end of his life. Yeah, that's an end to your mentioned Panpsychism. And, and I was reading,
of course, your book also with sort of the the metaphysical sense
from the Essentia Foundation. So sort of the idealism in there. And it struck me that so much is just like
in plain accordance with like hardcore analytic idealism in a sense,
but curious to hear your thoughts here. But they'd be nice to also
just share the sort of the whole lineage, because you start with ancient Egypt and Romanticism. You of course go to to Plato
and then sort of scholasticism in medieval periods,
and then we get to can't shop an hour. But it seems to me
like one big idealist story until the 19th century, and then we took sort of a different route. I think so. I think you're right, Hans. I think I think the
the fundamental position of philosophers and mystical writers
before certainly the 19th century was idealism or some form of idealism. Of course,
there are different forms of it. I think after the 19th century,
with the rise of materialism and in the 20th century with the rise
of computer modeling of the mind and a kind of reductive neuroscience,
you idealism essentially gets
exiled as, as we all know, but it's still popping through the floorboards
in the 20th century. It's still obvious to people who are
having these kinds of altered states. And then in the 21st century, of course,
it's I think it's kind of on a comeback. I know it is largely because of Bernardo Castro,
by the way. So I'm not I don't generally identify
as a as an idealist Hons. I identify as a dual aspect modernist. But I think that is an idealist. I mean, I, you know, in my in my weaker moments
or maybe they're my stronger more so like I think God is just idealism
for the masses. I really do. I think it's just a way of talking
about idealism, but not really owning it and projecting it outwards
and dual aspect. Monism basically just says that what we experience is mental is also material,
and what we experience as material is also mental because the mental
in the material arise from some common kind of super source
which is neither mind nor matter. So to me, that's a
that's a form of idealism really, even though it's it's a little different,
I suppose, as well. And I like that model because it helps me keep more things on the table. I, I like models that keep thing
on, keep things on the table. And I don't like models
that take things off the table right? So when somebody has a profound synchronicity, in other words,
something happens in the material world that corresponds perfectly to something
happening in the mental world. To me, dual aspect monism instantly authorizes that when someone says, Oh, that can't happen,
that means nothing. That's an accident. I'm like, Well, that,
that's just that doesn't jive with what these people are saying. Or when someone says, Oh,
you can't have a precognitive dream or you can't know what someone else's
mind is. Yeah, but these things happen. So it's I object to models
that take things off our table and I want to embrace models
that keep things on. But I don't know which models. Correct. I guess. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. And in some sense I'm not sure it matters
which models are correct as long as we keep
all those things on the table. Yeah. And but that's something different
than saying that you're agnostic. Right. But I found interesting how you critique
sort of that agnostic position that sort of we see nowadays. I think, for instance, in psychedelic research that people
there are not many people who will identify as a materialist
because they see the but going towards sort of saying, I'm
a bad cyclist or an idealist is also way. So they they take this sort of pragmatic attitude of saying, I'm agnostic. And you critiqued that writing your book,
you say that's not a position or. Yeah, I. Mean, it is a position. But there are different
forms of agnosticism, some of which I really like
and some of which I'm very critical of. If if someone's agnostic
because they say that the fundamental nature of reality
is unknowable, I'm like, okay,
I get that, that, that's, that's what we call it, apathetic,
understanding and mystical literature. And that makes a lot of sense to me. But when someone says I'm agnostic
about X, Y or Z, what they really mean
is I'm not going to take a position. And my critique of that is, well, you're just the dial's
just real reset to materialism when you say that you
you can be as agnostic as you want, but really what you're saying is
let's let materialism be and let's pretend that it's okay
and that it works when it doesn't. So stop being agnostic,
stop being like that. You know, you can be humble and and admit you don't know the answer,
but you can't be completely agnostic because it's, it's, it's a non position
and it just, it's materialism in disguise
is I suppose what I'm trying to say. Not many people are sort of identifying
in the humanities as being like hardcore materialist,
but they'll use different words. For instance, in the psychedelic community
day of the same, they're talking about naturalism, right? Because it sounds a bit
softer than materialism. But when you hear them out,
it's just a materialist position. So it seems to me
that we are already in a paradigm shift. How far away are the super humanities? The humanities are pretty far. They're they're way behind. I'll give you an example. I mean, this is a funny example. I have a dear friend,
Eric Wargo is his name. And Eric writes
about precognitive dreams mostly. And he he theorizes this block universe and he makes the argument
that he's a materialist. And the reason he's a materialist
is that for him, a precognitive dream is your future physical brain communicating
with itself back into the present. So there's just there's no physical space
between this brain and my brain. Tomorrow it's the same brain. And I just tease Eric. I'm like, Well, Eric, look, if you're
a materialist, then I love materialists. I mean, it's
a wonderful form of materialism because you keep you keep precognition
on the table, you don't take it off. So that's a form of naturalism,
I suppose that I can certainly embrace and certainly use. But naturalism again, to me it's kind a cop out, to be honest, Hans, because for one thing,
there is no such thing as nature. There's no such thing as matter you don't solve these problems
by just saying I'm a naturalist and that everything's material
because nothing is material. Even things that look
material are not material. So it's like, come on, let's, let's, let's come up with new words
or or someone will say, well, I mean, this is a new materialism. I'm like, well, it's still a materialism. Just can't
can't we come up with a different word? Can we come up with a different category
and not just add a new two to something or a neo, you know, and pretend everything's
okay now when it's just not. I think it's a sign that sort of we are a sort of a
the anomalies are popping up. Isn't this like classic goon, if you will,
the nature of scientific revolution so that when these anomalies happen,
people will invent sort of these new words just to not sort
of having to integrate these anomalies. Yeah. So I think something like that is at play,
but I wanted to talk also about you with about what you call the immunological response after humanity's rise when it comes to what do you mean with that,
and what are the sort of core aspects of that sort of, well,
logical response. Yeah, I just mean the way humanists normally respond to these claims
or these experiences. I, I think, I think the primary
immunological response is to ignore them, you know, simply not to talk about them,
to pretend they don't exist. And that's actually very effective because. Then you can spend all your time
and energy, you know, talking and writing
and teaching about other things, but they don't go away
because you ignore them. And people who have
these experiences are really frustrated and they're really shocked
because they don't fit in to these natural material models
that people keep assuming are adequate. I think the other immunological response
to these claims is the European response that
oh well, the ubermensch equals fascism, you know, that
that's that's an immunological response. But again, it's simply not true. But it's certainly true
enough in Europe in the 1930s and forties. So I think there's a lot to work around or to work through and
I think there are real moral objections. The essential moral objection
in the humanities to all of these states is that they take us away from real social
criticism and real moral activism. They take us out of the world,
out of the social world, and they place they place value and meaning in
some other dimension or some other realm. And they they don't
result in in the critique and the and the changing of moral values. Okay. Well, that's a real objection. That that's serious. And I understand that. And that's why the super humanities
always includes the humanities. It always includes this what I call
the prophetic dementia and this critique of class and race and gender
and sexuality and environment. Those are really important components to what I
what I call the super humanities. Yeah, this is a very, very strong point
you make in the book. We could also say it goes bye bye by the name of of spiritual bypassing. Right. That you just you
you do sort of your psychedelic trips and all your sort of breathwork
and your yoga, but you don't change the world
and you just buy books about
I mean, you don't have to go to sort of the caricature of that,
but that's quite a strong critique. And I find it sort of even is tragic in a sense, because it by by sort of that
that no more of a spiritual bypassing. We do not take seriously the potential
that all of this has forced social change. Right. And justice. Right. I mean, there's there's two ways
I deal with that in the book. I you know,
I also talk about moral bypassing just because one as what just because
you focus on the spiritual and bypass the moral doesn't mean you can only focus
on the moral and bypass the spiritual. It does one. Bypassing doesn't resolve another. It just creates a different focus
and a different set of values which might be good
at a particular moment. But the deeper the deeper move happens is that I personally think that what a paranormal event is, is
when a social system is not working properly
and there's some kind of human suffering or some kind of social injustice
that is embedded in the system, and it's that disjunction
or that not working that then manifests as the haunting
or the paranormal experience. And so if you actually
look at the history of moments when the paranormal was was, was really evident,
at least in American history. These are moments of radical social change and these are moments
of radical social critique. And so I, I personally think
that focusing on the paranormal is itself a kind of social activism, is itself
a kind of moral activism. But I do understand that
it doesn't have to be and that it can lead elsewhere. And I suppose my response is, so what? Let let's some people focus on the social
and let other people focus on the paranormal. And we're good. Now, not
everybody is going to be interested in the same thing, nor should they be. But let's do it all. Let's just do one of those that that's really my response. And it comes out of my own
Catholic background, by the way, I I'm very aware
that in the history of Catholicism, there was this big debate
in the medieval church between whether the proper Christian life
was the monastic contemplative life or whether it was
the active life of charity and good works. And of course, different religious orders
were founded with different emphases, and there was never
any resolution of that question. It was just this tension in the tradition
and of course, the life of contemplation is important, and of course,
the life of charity is important, but you can't do both at the same time. You've got to do one or the other. And so different communities can focus
on different charism, as it were. And I really think of the humanities
in this sort of Catholic sense, I guess that, look,
we have different disciplines, we have different departments,
we have different intellectuals. They can do
and should do different things. Yeah, that's that's very realistic. I think in your sort of it and you call
that also the human asked to write. Did you unpack that a bit. Yeah I talk about the human is to a lot and I think sometimes it's confused
that I somehow think there's some kind of transcendent floating
balloon, you know, called the soul. And then there's the body and then there's society
and isn't it a bummer kind of thing? I don't think that at all. I, I don't even think
there are two things. On the other hand, I do think that most of our lives
are lived in a social framework and we live in relationship
and we have to negotiate different moral values
in a particular social system. And that some of us,
when we get really ill or when we're about to die
or when we take a psychedelic, we have these experiences of deification
and cosmic transcendence. And I think both of those things are true. And so that's
why I keep harping on this illness, too. It's not to say just focus
on the transcendent cosmic experiences. Say, No, you are both of these things. So be both. And maybe in this life,
99.9% of your attention should be focused on the social
and the the ethical and the moral. But that other percentage,
that's not social. That's probably not moral in the way
you think of it. It's probably not embodied
in the way you think of it. It's something else. And and so that's really what the Humanist two means is that most of our lives are spent in this social context,
but that there are always these sort of superhuman ultra states
that are that are important to you. And it's interesting
that you just a moment ago said that it seems
as if these states present themselves more at crucial
times in sort of the human history. Would you say that we are at such time
at this moment in history? I think so. I mean, so I wrote I wrote this book
about the human potential movement. And this was still when people read books
and when people still went on book tours, by the way. And I went on this book tour, and the number one question I got was,
how do we do this again? And and the question really was,
how do we do the counterculture again? And my response was, I don't know, but my response was,
you can't do it again. You know, you just
the zeitgeist is disguised. But I think we're moving into a psychosis
today that is very fraught. If you talk to young people, in particular in the classroom,
they're very they're very disturbed by political polarization,
at least in the U.S.. I'm thinking about the U.S. here. They're fraught
about political polarization. They're fraught about the environment,
the fraught around gender and sexuality and race, the fraud
around a lot of things. And I think what
you see again in the U.S. is some of this at least is manifesting,
frankly, in the UFO or UAP phenomenon that that is in Congress
now of all places. And that means it's in the military,
and that means it's in the intelligence communities. So these these sort of classical paranormal issues are entering the mainstream in a way that I find fascinating. And I to me suggests
that we're in another kind of period of of of radical social transition. And I think we are. But I don't claim
to know where that's going or whether that will go well with you. It reminds me, I've been reading
you have just just just started reading during this year. But wasn't that you also thought
of the UFO sort of suppressed
content of the subconscious? And I mean, how do you see that then? I mean, how do you what do you make of
that metaphysically, Jeffrey? I mean, then, then the nonhuman anomalous. So Jung wrote his his flying
saucer book towards the end of his life, I think it came out in 1958. And if you read that book and I've read it,
I read it carefully. What's fascinating about that book is that he cannot determine
whether the flying saucer is is a physical thing
or a spiritual or psychological thing. And his conclusion is that it's both. He calls it sacred, and it's a central argument
is that the flying saucer mythology in the 1950s
was a kind of planetary poltergeist. It was a kind of haunting
that was a part of the Cold War, really. And I think he was right
about that, actually. And I think today that Cold War mythology doesn't work
so well. The alien invasion narrative,
as I call it, doesn't work very well. And I think you're starting to see that
in some of the movies like a rival breaks with that, by the way. But I think in Congress and the military,
the U.S. military today, they're still caught
in that that Cold War narrative. And so you have lots of language
about threats and you have lots of language
about shooting things down. And it's just it's a terrible mistake. You don't shoot UFOs down, by the way. It's like shooting down souls. It makes no sense. But I think it's really important
that that conversation is happening and that it's it's
at least in our public media in some way. It's super fascinating. I've not gone very deep into the rabbit
hole, but it's just fascinating
how it now is sort of entering. It's a rabbit hole. It's a rabbit hole inside a rabbit hole. It out little. I mean, it's oh, but you cannot study the UFO or as they want to call it,
the day of the UAP without engaging the paranormal,
it will hit you like a ton of bricks and but people try. I find it people try to ignore. I find it just very interesting
from a metaphysical perspective because if if these phenomena seem to violate
or clearly violate and we have empirical findings that they clearly violate
the laws of physics as we know them. Just this loss of Newton
when it comes to motion. So we clearly know that that
so then to uphold a sort of materialist view upon
these phenomena is just I think it won't bring you very far
and that to me is very interesting. You go, what is it then, right? Is it in, in, in consciousness, presenting itself
to us from other dimensions, which is fascinating. You know, and to go back to Bernardo
Bernardo Castro, I mean, he one of the things I really admired about
is what really all of his books. But even early on
in his early books on absurdity and dreamed up reality,
he hits the UFO phenomena head on and he uses it as a, you know, kind of as a metaphor
or a symbol for idealism, really. And I think in a very powerful way. And really, that's what I think the phenomenon is calling
for, is is for us to really change our view of reality. At the end of the day,
I think that's what this is. It's it's a, it's a shift in worldview too
to use the Cooney in language. Yeah. And you said earlier
like the the Catholicism and your own background, sort of the monastic life versus
the sort of activist life doing charity and that you cannot do. But then we see sort of in these central
figures in history, social activists. I mean, you also in your book mentioned Martin Luther, Malcolm X
or Francis of Assisi. You seemed to do both. In a sense, how important is the super for for social change
at this moment in time? Because it seems that we really need it. We need it
sort of for justice, for for climate. All the problems we face. I think we do. I think our problems partly stem from our exclusive focus on difference. You know, everybody's
different, everything's different. And therefore, there's
nothing to to link us or to unite us. And I think we desperately need some story
that links us, that unites us. I think that's the real challenge. And I think, you know, to go back to
I apologize for talking about the UFO again, but that's a story that links us. It's something that comes out of the sky
in the heavens and it frankly doesn't care
about our borders or social identities. It just shows up anywhere. And it's just apparent in the Global South as it is the global north,
it just doesn't care. And I think that's
really healthy, actually. And so I think I see that, again,
not as the myth or the mythology or the world view of the future,
but as a way of pushing towards some kind of worldview that unites us
or connects us and doesn't separate us. And how do you just regarding there
physically, is it sort of our own subconscious? Is it is it our own higher self? Is it. How do I
explain our our dismissal of metaphysics. Know that the story these anomalies,
the UFO phenomena I mean, what is your metaphysical
take on them? Oh, I think they're us from the future. I mean, that's really what I think
at the end of the day, if you if you gave me enough beer,
you have it, by the way. But if you if you gave me enough beer,
I would say us. And I think I think
once you put into the equation some kind of time manipulation,
a lot of the manifests make a lot of sense how that's done. I haven't a clue, you know, and but to me, to go back to nature, I the, the the alien presence looks a lot
like some kind of super species. That's us from the future, frankly. And it gets demonized a lot. It's turned into literal demons
by a lot of religious people. But that's, of course, exactly
what Nietzsche thought, too. He he called himself the Antichrist,
and he praised evil because. You know, he saw it as the future. And and I. I also can't help thinking about my meat eating, by the way, I we we kill millions of animals every day so that we can consume meat, hamburgers
and steaks and things. And we must be evil to shoot cows or, you know, I go to a
I go to the veterinarian with my furry, furry house
housemate named Delilah. And what how do they understand us? You know, how how
how does this interspecies thing work? And so it seems to me evil
and the demonic doesn't really solve anything
because it's it's really everywhere. I think every species is a demon
to to another species that it consumes or relies on in some way. Yeah. And just a bit of sort
of a different theme, but, but a very important
we haven't touched very much upon Fusco, who plays also important role in your book
as a central figure in humanity's. And I'd like you quote, um, you say something about what was it you call him,
sort of a moon sort of moonlight, and that behind that moon's shines
the exploding sun of Nietzsche, which I really found funny, funny to read,
but just to summarize sort of. FUSCO For for people
who are not familiar with him, he was a guy who taught us sort of
to deconstruct things, right? And to show us
that everything is a construct. So. Yeah, I'm not of who code in scholar, but certainly the way Michel Foucault
has been received in the humanities is, is that
everything is fundamentally about power, including forms of knowledge
that the orders of knowledge or build up around privilege and
and forms of institutional power. And these lines of power
are largely invisible and unconscious. So it's not like
people are personally response able for X, Y or Z, but they're embedded
in these networks of power and knowledge that privilege
some people and a deep privilege others and if you co himself was most I think most interested in himself in his own queer sexuality and the way it did not fit in to to the norms, the heterosexual norms of of certainly European society
and Christian society. And so he thought a lot about queer
sexualities and other forms of gender that don't really don't fit in to the orders of power and knowledge. He also was very eloquent about what he called technologies, the self, which were essentially forms
of reflection and self-consciousness that developed mostly through practices of penance and Christian meditation. So he's a really, I think fuko is easily the most quoted figure
in the humanities today. I mean, he's he's just everywhere. He's he's
certainly in the study of religion. He's in the study of literature,
he's in philosophy departments. He's he's very much dominant, I would say. And religion in is stake
sort of this as sort of power and construction and yeah. Where's his metaphysics? I mean, why why
what was focus on theology? Well, to my knowledge, he doesn't talk
about a metaphysical position, you know, I mean, which is very, very much
the norm. You don't you don't do metaphysics,
you don't do metanarrative. That's the basic point of the postmodern
turn, is that metaphysics are hegemonic
and they essentially are control people. And so we don't talk about
what reality is. We we talk about
how our knowledge is ordered or how power is
constructed or how words work and the reason nature is, is Nietzsche
is that power. You know, power was really central
to Nietzsche in terms of the will and fuko inherits that really from nature. But he removes all of the what I would call all the mystical states
that were so important to Nietzsche. The person who doesn't,
by the way, is George Beti. If you read any of the tie that ties
another French thinker in the fifties and sixties predates who? KARL But we don't nobody reads George
Beti, you know, they all read Michel Fuko
And that to me another way the he the strictly
the humanities have subsumed the the super humanities and made them normal. But why was very much into mystical states
and felt that death and eroticism in particular were the the main means of subsume the the ego back into some kind of continuity
that was essentially mystical. And him he himself was an atheist
and very much a materialist, but was just obsessed
with altered states of consciousness, very much as I I'm talking about
predict in the book. I don't talk about the tie,
but I certainly I certainly could have. But we don't read beti, we read fuko. Yeah, that's interesting. And that foucauldian sort of view
on religion and in religion studies that sort of really also one of your points are of horrors, of comparative
studies, of religion. We don't, we just don't do that
in a sort of metaphysical sense that we just try to see, hey,
maybe there's truth here among these different traditions
and how could they sort of be combined? And instead we see them all
as cultural constructions in a certain cultural historical context,
right? Well, I don't yeah, I don't
I don't know how much fuko really thought about world religions
or how much she knew about them. Certainly
ancient Greece and ancient Christianity, but certainly the study of religion, at least as I was trained in it
and as it's existed in the last 30 years, has been very much
about what I call the horizontal. You. You look at religion as a function or a part of society
and how it shapes people and how the self is located
in a particular social network. You never talk about the vertical,
you never talk about transcendence or revelation. There can be no such thing. All that really all that revelation
or transcendence means
is a representation in this social system that exists on a flat,
two dimensional plane, as it were. And this third dimension of up,
just don't talk about it. It doesn't it doesn't exist. And I don't think intellectuals will say
it doesn't exist, but they certainly won't talk about it
in a way that I think we should be talking about it. I was thinking there is sort of this this
interesting stick you can use nowadays. I mean, it's all about sort
of being inclusive and diversity. And if you would
apply that to metaphysics or ontology, then, I mean, we have to be more much
more inclusive of other traditions and their ontology
in trying to understand, well. This is the argument this is the argument
horns I make in the book. Right? Yeah. I talk about decolonizing reality
and I'm like, look, you can't pretend you're being diverse
and then turn everybody into a good Marxist, that you can't pretend
that it's just a flat social plane. Because that's your metaphysics. That's European Marxist criticism from the 19th and 20th century. If you're really going to be diverse,
you have to take these other ontological claims as claims on reality, not as representations or language games
that you can play around with, but claims on reality
that impinge on your reality as well. And so the you know, the joke
I tell this is, you know, the Buddha, you know,
the Buddha taught the impermanence of all things in the nonexistence of the self,
but it turns out it was just to lower our blood pressure
and to make us, you know, get better office workers. That that's how he gets received
in this flat, flat world. And I'm like, no, that is not Buddhism. Or at least now is not the Buddhist
traditions I was trained in. They were making an argument
about the nonexistence of the self and the impermanence of all things,
including you, including me. You know, that's an ontological claim. That's a religious tradition, not this. Let's calm you down and lower your blood and make you fit better
into your own professional world. I mean, that's nonsense. He didn't fit, by the way, Buddhist. Buddhist. But the Buddhist tradition, you know,
they became monks for a reason. It was not to fit in. It wasn't to fit in. And of course, then they fit in by forming
the cultures around the monasteries. So that's another story. Yeah, but it's the term I like that
I didn't read that book, but the Mac mindfulness, right? It's the sort of taking this
into our capitalist system and then a sort of like cynical,
functionalist approach. Well, yeah,
I honestly, I know some of those people. I don't think they're cynical at all. I think they're very genuine,
but they're very much part of this capitalist social system
that we're that we're talking about. And there I don't think that
the full force, the full ontological force of Buddhism permanence or nirvana has
is is part of what they're doing. You talk about the race theory and yeah, the full richness of sort of the the, the,
the, the, the black community, for instance, and that the ontology
that they can bring sort of that that there's this danger at that
we don't take that into account. No, no, of course not. And, you know, black black intellectuals, black literary history, black religion,
it's extremely diverse. Ontologically, again, I mean, the Afro pessimism movement is a philosophical
tradition. Essentially, on one end of the spectrum, the basically says racism is systemic. It's systemic
to two cultures around the world. We're probably not going to change it. Racism is is is endemic to to human beings for whatever reason,
where on the other end of the spectrum you have something, the Afro futurist
movement in art and music and literature. And it's very much about the black body. And the black person is the
the paranormal generator of of social change
and and the future, really. And I think you get this whole spectrum
and certainly in black religions rituals like divination and possession
and ecstatic trance. I mean, these are just in the natural
kind of in the water kind of phenomena that that that I think the tends to flatten again. And I want to say, no, these are about transcendence,
these are about possession, and these are about what they say
they're about. These are not representations
that you can fit into your particular Marxist or Foucauldian
or Freudian or whatever it is, worldview. You cannot fit these into your worldview. So let them be and let them challenge
what it is you think and who you are. So I would say the same thing
about these black traditions, as I would say about the world religions, that we the real diversity
is, is ontological diversity and not just racial or gender or sexual
or or ecological diversity. Yeah, it's a very important point. And if you fantasize about the super humanity,
Jeffrey, how would that hour a day in college look like if sort of the super humanities
are too mainstream? Well, I you know,
I do fantasize and I joke. Of course, I I've also thought a lot about my my colleagues and myself
and my graduate students and why people get into the study of religion,
why people get become humanists at all. And essentially what they do
is they back into it. You know,
they they grow up in a culture of family, have some kind of question
that their family or their culture can't answer
or won't let them ask. And they back into the academy because
it allows them to ask that question. And as my joke is, look,
I've never run into a kid who grew up wanting to be a professor of religion or much
less a professor of the humanities. I mean, what is that? But if we if we called the humanities,
the super humanities, I could imagine a lot of kids
wanting to grow up and be superhumans. I mean, just I don't I don't know
Europe at all, but we just had Halloween here in the States, and every other kid
was dressed as a superhuman. It was like crazy. So I think we have a serious marketing
problem, too, to be really blunt and I guess banal about it. And I want us to start speaking in ways
that are attractive and and bring in bring in more people
into what we do. Because I think what we do
is really important. It's not just about the superhuman. It's also about history. It's about society, it's about morality,
it's about technology. It's about all the things
that human beings do. And I just I think it's cool. I think it's really cool.
Yeah, it's amazing. And I think it's what I you're
absolutely right. You don't want to become
a professor of religion. You want to become a mystical mutant. You want to become sort of the
you have, the super powers. And that's what I find
so absolutely amazing about sort of the psychedelic community
that you have an access to the states. And I think in our previous conversation,
we we discussed how in in sort of my upbringing and I've also been to an angelic churches
that the transcendent state was sort of through the grace of God
and the psychedelics are your birthright. It's just eating a plant
and it will sort of it will get you there. Right. And I really think that yeah, that was one of my questions
actually. Don't you think that the super humanities outside of academia
are very much happening? I'm not talking about the mystics, but I'm talking about,
for instance, business consulting. I seen nuns, for instance,
these communities of people who will do like shamanic work with horses,
they go to psychedelic retreats. And these are high level
CEO level people who take this serious. Right. And who really experience personal growth
through these practices. So you could say that the trance
or the superhumans are very much sort of active there, and it's just academia
that's lagging behind. I think so. I mean, again, that's my final comment
about we have a marketing problem. Of course, it's everywhere. And because this is what a human being
is, horns, a human being is a super human. And all human beings have this access. And the reason psychedelics
are so powerful, they work, by the way, they you know, they don't always work,
but they certainly work a lot of the times is is not because of God, but
because we have these these potential us and we just need the right,
you know, plant catalyst and boom, there we are. We it turns out we don't need
the grace of God or or an external deity. That's the superhuman, by the way. Again, that's nature, you know. Um, so, yeah, I, I think so. I think they're everywhere,
but they're not named as such. Of course, what the super humanities do is
they make us rigorous and reflexive about things that are happening
all the time, everywhere. And do we need a sort of different,
uh, methodology? Because of course you cannot apply empirical science in a way
if we have to take, for instance, these, the states, you have to really rely on
anecdotal stories, right? So can we sort of apply science
in the same way? So I'm not sure I understand
your question, but I think I do. I'm often heard, I think, as anti-science I'm not at all, but I want science to be science and I don't want it to make
that are not scientific. And I think science is very good about
studying in mathematics, seeing objects out there and predicting their behavior,
I think is really bad at describing internal states
of the mind or subjectivity. But I think the humanities are
in fact very good at that. And this is why I keep saying
you have to integrate the humanities into the sciences
of the sciences, into the humanities. You can't do one or the other. You need to do both. And this, by the way,
I was way I'm a dual aspect modernist because again, that material world, which is the realm of the sciences
in that mental realm, which is the realm of the humanities,
both emerge from this deeper super source. So I, I am a big fan of the sciences,
but I don't think for 1/2 that they're adequate
and nor will they ever be. But I don't think the humanities
will ever be adequate either or. The religions, you know,
and this is again a kind of hard and. Are where are you sort of on
the idea of science and spirituality getting coming together
or that they're coming this symbiosis, for instance, I talked to Donald Hoffman
and you also referred to his work in your book. Of course. And he said, I really liked that. He said sort of that
the way that religions and and spiritual teachers have taught us
about how to get to this stage or what these states are
and the esoteric language they use and the vagueness very often
is not something to be proud of, he says. Is not something to be proud of.
We have to be sort of rigorous. And then Donald wants to sort of captured
captured in math, right? He has this hope of getting outside
spacetime and finding the math. What are your thoughts there? I really like that attitude. Right. That's yeah. I don't know if it's. Yeah, love Donald Hoffman. He makes me laugh, you know,
I mean, his, his early work on, um, you know, his basic argument was that we have to stop thinking
in terms of 19th century science. You know, we have,
we have to catch up and, and realize that we don't think
what we used to think. But, you know, in his book, too,
and in his work, he draws a lot on the humanities. He draws a lot on The Matrix, for example,
which is a science fiction film. And draws a lot on Plato's Cave, which is, of course,
the classic parable of the academy. And so he I think he's using philosophy
and he's using the humanities all along. But I also think the sciences can add
a rigor and a discipline to to this fuzziness
that critiquing. I agree with that critique. But I also think I mean, you know, I talk a lot about what
I call the tyranny of clarity I think there's something about clarity that eliminates
what we're trying to get at. I think these states often appear
in apparitions and visions and profoundly symbolic states
that are very confusing. And to make everything clear and need is
to frankly erase what's trying to appear. Because I think what's happening
is one level of consciousness, trying to communicate with another. And there is no clarity. There's it doesn't. Work. There's no model there. So yeah, this and this reminds me also
about what you say about image Gilchrist's work, right? The left and right
hemisphere. You're trying the left brain. I mean, the left brain wants the right
brain to be the left brain. I'm like, no, it's not. It's just not going to do that. And so are we trapped?
Are the humanities in are trapped? That was what I wrote down sort of as
or also is a question trapped in in the in left hemisphere thinking. I think they are at the moment. Yeah, but but again, once people die, you know, people retire, things move on. Generations click over, things change
and not always for the better. I'm not suggesting that. But I my own faith, if I
if I have any faith in the future, it's in younger intellects, fools,
and it's in future intellectuals. I don't have as much faith
in older generations or my own generation because I think they're trapped
in the training of the 1970s and eighties, which I think was very
useful but but inadequate. I think the younger generations, um, I think they have different questions and I think a lot of the things
that were simply off the table for my mentors
are back on the table for them, and I think that's hopeful in the end. I think that's a good thing. I see that change
happening in your students because you you work with students, right? Daily. I do. I see that happening. You know, going back to the Superman
Clark Kent parable,
I use that to talk to my graduate students because they come to us to be Superman. They've they've had some altered state and they want to talk about
how those altered states work in history. And again, I think it's our goal
to help them be Clark Kent. But I don't want them
just to be Clark Kent either. I want them to go in the phone booth
and be Superman and Clark Kent. And so I,
I see that as a very hopeful shift that young people are coming and wanting essentially to study the super humanities. They don't they don't actually
want to study the humanities alone because why? I mean, okay, they can do certain things,
but to give your whole life to them and to to spend seven years at a school,
then you probably won't ever get a job. I mean, it takes a lot of
it takes a lot of internal oomph to do that. Again, hearing you talk like this,
it also makes me think that the humanities are subject object thinking you thinking that you can study
sort of society or a certain sort of. And whereas the Superman as you are it
and you do to to study it is to become it
or to to to to go into the states. Right. Because I don't think you're suggesting
that the Supreme Super Humanities
would be just studying these states when people because
when these students say, I want to become I want to be super Superman,
they don't say, I want to study Superman and I want to become it. Right. Well, they want to do both. They want
they want to have these altered states, but they also want to understand
these alter states. Remember, just because you have an altered state
doesn't mean you can integrate it into your life. It doesn't mean
it makes any sense, you know? And so I think what young people want is
they want both a framework in which these altered states make some sense, but
they also want the altered states. And, you know, I say that a lot. You know, one of the things I say a lot
is, look, we already have enough dots. What we need are ways
to connect the dots and form pictures. We need we need a framework
that makes these things sort of obvious and and meaningful. We don't necessarily need more dots. We have a lot
we have a lot of dots, by the way, more than will ever be able to to use. I think I'm wondering the the tension between it to write
the altered state and integrating it in one's life as being sort of
just the social creatures and us being it and the one and the boundary between the two and
and just to make it personal, I mean I've mainly through psychedelics,
I must be honest, had these, these highly altered states and of course
it's difficult to integrate them. And I keep on sort of it's just as
if you have to make this dance and ever. I want to balance it. Right. I want to I want to balance
sort of having these states integrate them and find a sort of balance. But I'm like either very much into sort of
that whole just psychedelic weirdness
or I'm very much in the human. How do you how do you see that as sort of
and how does it work for you? Well, okay, I'm going to say. Couple questions here. Sorry. Yeah, no, I've got to say something. Probably a little surprising, but I don't think integrations possible. Oh, I and I actually think that's fine. I what I'm after is plausibility. I'm after a framework
that makes these things possible. I don't they can ever be fully integrated
into one socially. That's why I talk about the human, too. And you know, when people talk to me about balance and integration and all these wonderful social things,
I'm like, Yeah, whatever. That's boring. I mean it, you know? I mean, if you want a boring life,
go be integrated. But, but
you're not going to be interesting. This is way more interesting. And I just think that's true. I think if you look at the lives of
of what we call the Saints and the mystics,
they were messed up people, but they were really interesting
and their lives were meaningful. And I don't think
they generally ever achieved integration. But so what I mean again, so I just I don't think it matters
and I don't think it's possible what I hear from experience
or to kind of go back because I'm not I've had a few experiences too,
to speak personally. Again, I've done the psychedelic, I've,
I've had the out-of-body stories, I've done all that. I know what that is.
And that's really important because it makes me sympathetic
when people talk to me. But when people talk to me, what they're most interested in
is someone who can give them a model of reality in which
what happened to them is possible. They are not looking for integration
hands, they are not looking for some kind of professional success. They're looking for a worldview
in which what they happened, what happened to them is not so shocking. You know, that's what they most want. And so I think that's what we should be
about, is intellectuals. And as people
who are experts on the world, I think we should creating a new poetics
and a new language to make what I call the impossible
possible. That's really the goal for me. Now, having said that,
let me let me add another wrinkle into this,
which you have not brought up. But I really want to bring up not every experience of the superhuman is positive, right? Sometimes the superhuman haunts us and possesses us and even harms us. Sometimes destroys us. And I want to acknowledge that and I want to work with that as well
and not shove that under the rug. We're not talking about rainbows
and kittens here. We're talking about a realm of reality
that can be terrifying and profoundly destructive to social egos and social selves. But I think that's part
of the bigger picture. You know,
when you when you study religion, one of the first things you learn is
the sacred is not the good. The sacred has this ecstatic, attractive,
mysterious quality to it. And it has this negative,
destructive, dangerous capacity to it. And both of those are the sacred. In other words,
the sacred is the whole thing. And that's the kind of vision that I think we should be after,
is that we're after the whole thing, not just a slice of it
that makes us feel good or that makes us a better person or or a better social actor. Very valid and important point, I think, and reminds me, I just read
sort of answer to Joe by Carl Jung and the whole idea
that sort of the dark side of God of our collective unconscious. Yeah, yeah. He was great on that. He was, he got into a lot of trouble
saying that by the way. Yeah. But it was very honest of him
to, you know, his basic argument was, the devil is also God, it's
the other side of God. And that's a very history of religions kind of thing to say. But it got him into a lot of trouble. And that was also I wanted to ask you how you see that sort of this union
thinking, of course. But the sort of the
he makes this plea, which I found sort of also very profound,
never thought of that. I did notice that, of course, Christianity
is very much a masculine tradition as the male archetype
of Yahweh and Christ, of course. And then we have Mother of Christ Maria,
but still not sort of pure, divine and imagine
Sophia and wisdom sort of as lacking. And that opened my eyes also sort of
to the importance of the feminine and the female archetype. I was just wondering
what you think there, but. I'm not I mean, that's a whole
nother topic. I mean I'm not a young in I think Jung's notion of the feminine
and the masculine were pretty simplistic in terms of contemporary gender theory and queer theory. I guess I'm much more a much more modern
or postmodern in that sense. I also, you know, was very much a part
of the generation that was came up in the eighties. And the question for us was, do religions that feature goddesses, are they more gender equitable, too? And I think the answer was no. I mean, that's
too simple of a of a statement. But I think the general consensus was gender in the religion. The historical religions never works out
the way we would wanted to. And with our modern values. I think that's a pretty fair statement. And I think I think when we want to go back
to a particular religious tradition and imagine
it as as reflecting of our own values and gender and sexuality,
we're just deceiving ourselves. I think those those values are our values. And they did not exist
in the historical past as such. So that's I suppose
that's a long way of answering, you know. But yeah, and it,
it also makes me think back of sort of the how I read Jung that sort
the moral we are the moral creatures it is us
that sort of have to bring sort of yeah. You know I could speak all day about young
you know I was I was in his library and locked and I have spoken to many groups
of young fans over the years. And I'm very familiar with
I've read a lot of Carl Jung. I've my sense of Jung was is that he was very well read in the study of religion
as it existed in the thirties and forties. But a lot has happened since then. Obviously it's not that
we suddenly know the truth and they did, but we think about religion
in a different way. And he was brave about being very interested
in the paranormal, for example, but he tended to dismiss
states of deification. And for example, until he himself
had a near-death experience in the 1940s and he realized these were not just states
of ego inflation, as as he would call it,
you know, before that. So I think there are many Jung's
That's what I'm trying to say. And yeah, I think we have to be careful. We talk about Carl Jung.
What young are we talking? We talk about Jung and the toes. Are we talking about Jung in the fifties
or the forties? We're talking about Johann Wolfgang Pauli,
you know, the physicist. We're talking about. You're Freud. What are we talking about here? And so I am I guess I'm just a little I'm just a little more suspicious
of Carl Jung than. Than maybe some other people. Yeah. Yeah, I thought it nice. It just closed down with also it's also a metaphor you use in our previous in our previous conversation that observed in lava and sort of how the rock cools down
and then we have to tradition and in reading your book it's as if we have to go in search of the lava out the volcanoes stuff
and acknowledge, of course, the rock and the importance of rock
because that that we can stand on. Right. Just wanted to sort of have this
and reflection with you on that metaphor. Literally,
Big Stone was the one who used the image. And the idea is, is that, you know, I guess I was became obsessed
with this metaphor after going to Hawaii and seeing that that island is literally
exploding, but it's literally on fire. I mean, there is like lava
coming out of the ground and flowing into the ocean, like, oh, my God,
this place is like talk about unstable. But but that volcanic activity creates the island and the island
eventually becomes this place of a habitation
and eventually human habitation. And you don't get the island without the
lava is where is where the metaphor goes. And what Bergson was trying to say was,
look, there's this island B tall, there's this sort of cosmic evolutionary impulse
that's in the religions, that's the lava. And it creates these social movements
that then become these civilizations, these these islands, and I think he's
basically correct about that. Again, this is the superhuman there is this superhuman lava, but it turns into stone
and it turns into island. So we then live on
it turns into the human, but we can't understand
the human without understanding that that earlier superhuman and and I do think
the superhuman comes before the human. By the way, I don't
I don't think it's the other way around. Thanks, Jeffrey. Yeah. Thanks so much. I think it's a wonderful conversation
and more than enough. Great stuff. I just am very grateful for your reading
and for your conversation. I again, I like I said,
I can tell instantly whether someone's read the read a book or not. Great. Great. Thanks so much.
