interview about reality of "paranormal" experiences

After a recent read of Duncan Barford's latest post about the reality/unreality of spirits ( www.oeith.co.uk ), I stumbled on this interview with Jeff Kripal, who in the context of discussing his recent book about paranormal phenomena, had this to say about sacred/mystical/transcendent experiences:

NS: Must one wait for those experiences to happen? Or can one
make them happen?

JK: I am of the opinion that you can’t. This, of course, is a
well-worn trope in comparative mystical literature: The ego can do
nothing to transcend the ego. To use the Christian categories, grace is
grace. It has nothing to do with works. Or to use the Hindu categories,
karma can never get you to moksha. Liberation is liberation. Nonduality
is nonduality. It has nothing to do with karma, that is, with act or
ritual. And trying to do something is precisely what gets in
the way of anything really happening, for every conscious effort simply
reinforces that which you need to get beyond: the left-brain ego
structure. What we have in the academy are a bunch of very fine
left-brain methods that essentially deny the existence of right-brain
forms of consciousness. This is understandable. It is also kind of
silly, at the end of the day. Again, why either-or? Why not both? We,
after all, are both.

Quite a fascinating read. Check out the whole interview here: http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/04/26/reading-the-paranormal-writing-us-an-interview-with-jeffrey-kripal/

Wow thanks for posting this Ona, fascinating interview!

In another thread (Stuart Lachs is THE MAN) the conversation turned briefly to gurus like Adi Da. I mention this here because Jeff Kripal is one of the most prominent "public people" (non-followers) to support Adi Da. He wrote the foreword to the latest edition of Adi Da's autobiography "The Knee of Listening." The forward can be read online at:

http://www.kneeoflistening.com/f1-kripal.html

Man, I remember back in the late 70s I found "The knee of listening" at a bookstore at the South Coast Plaza Mall in Costa Mesa. I took it home to my apartment and just devoured it. It was like a daydream, a fantasy book -- though it all seemed very real.

I remember back in those early editions the pictures of the guy (he was "Bubba Free John" then) was of a fairly average normal-looking person. I was shocked over the years to see the evolutions of his name and his appearance.

There are a couple of stories in the book that always stuck with me (though at this point I wonder how accurate my memory is):

- the night he just became exhausted with all his seeking and let go, surrendered, and had a profound and dramatic spiritual experience.

- his meetings with the various gurus in India, especially, I'm pretty sure, Muktananda

- his guru giving him a piece of fruit to eat on his plane ride home from India and that fruit bringing on some kind of transformation, like magic or something

I remember also during this time I got a Muktananda book (I was also reading a lot of Krishnamurti, Watts, the early Kornfield books on vipassana, Yogananda (there was a Yogananda monastery in Orange County I used to visit to talk to the monks), I also took hatha yogi lessons from an Indian immigrant named "Yogi Sharma," and got my TM mantra, and visited the Long Beach zen center several times) -- anyway the Muktananda book had this vivid color head shot of the guru himself on the cover and he was staring quite intently out. Influenced by the Knee of Listening I started spending a lot of time staring at that cover, trying to connect with the guy.

One night, it worked, I felt like he felt me way over in India and the cover picture seemed to come alive for an instant. Instead of being excited or thrilled, I got very freaked out, stopped looking at the book, got rid of it the next day, and got very interested in Buddhism.

Mike-- what I really appreciate is your stubborn planting
yourself in the potent mess of here-and-now, being flat-footedly REAL and
ordinary [perhaps this is surprising, coming from me, but I see myself as like
that, too, even if I have a whole lot of '50-cent words' I like to throw
around].

The BFJ book that hooked me was NOT Knee
of Listening, with its invocation of a long line of paranormally potent
Indian gurus; it was Method of the
Siddhas, which was a sort of Mark Twain take on the whole guru thing. It
was hilarious, and wickedly insightful-- and left by the wayside as the
organization developed, unfortunately.

I have a dim, not-yet-articulated suspicion that the ordinary/extraordinary,
normal/paranormal duality is-- like the other dualities—of very limited
usefulness. That usefulness is exhausted once we’ve snapped alert and begun to
pay better attention. Chased after beyond its moment, it can be a sucking
quagmire where the path effectively ends.

So good on ya for heading in the opposite direction!

Boy! My bumbling attempts to work within the posting parameters are a comedy of errors-- our internet was down for awhile, so I cut and pasted. Voila! weird subject line...

It made for a good laugh, Kate - I was very intrigued to find out what you were going to say with a subject line like that!