Excerpt from Kripal's presentation on September 1, 2024. Sign up for the course to watch the full video!

Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, where he also hosts the Archives of the Impossible collection and conference series. He co-directs the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and sits on numerous advisory boards in the U.S. and Europe involving the nature of consciousness and the human, social, and natural sciences. Most recently, Jeff is the author of The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities (Chicago, 2022), where he intuits an emerging order of knowledge that can engage in robust moral criticism but also affirm the superhuman or nonhuman dimensions of our histories and futures; and How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (Chicago, 2024), which thinks-with experiencers of the extreme toward a future form of theory that does not separate the mental and the material. He is presently working on a three-volume study of paranormal currents in the sciences, modern esoteric literature, and the hidden history of science fiction collectively entitled The Super Story: Science (Fiction) and Some Emergent Mythologies. His full body of work can be seen at jeffreyjkripal.com. He thinks he may be Spider-Man.