The Religion & Culture Web Forum
Commentary Footnotes
April 2007
From Altered States to Altered Categories (and Back Again):
Academic Method and the Human Potential Movement
By Jeffrey
J. Kripal
J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Religious Studies
Rice University
1 Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
2 Wade Clark Roof, Spiritual Marketplace: Baby Boomers and the Remaking of American Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Christopher Partridge, The Re-Enchantment of the West, Volume 1 (London: T & T Clark, 2004); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, From Emerson to Oprah (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).
3 Michael Murphy, The Future of the Body: Explorations into the Further Evolution of Human Nature (New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 1992).
4 Jeffrey J. Kripal, Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, second edition).
5 My source here is multiple conversations with Murphy on his memories of Tillich’s visit, particularly a conversation I had with him on 1 April 2004.
6 For this story, see John Marks, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate”: The CIA and Mind Control (New York: Times Books, 1979). Marks would later come to Esalen, have a series of life-changing experiences there, and dedicate his life to peace-making. He went on to found Search for Common Ground, the world’s largest conflict resolution NGO that specializes in political reconciliation and creative public policy initiatives.
7 For this painted charm, see Kripal, Esalen, figure 26.
8 Ernesto De Martino, Primitive Magic: The Psychic Powers of Shamans and Sorcerers (Bridport, Great Britain: Prism Press, 1988), 63. For Eliade’s reference to this text, see Mircea Eliade, Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 146-147. Eliade’s answer to Rocquet’s question of whether similar “transhuman experiences that we are forced to accept as facts” had happened to him is worth quoting: “I hesitate to answer that” (ibid., 147).
9 This essay was only recently translated from the Romanian by Mac Linscott Ricketts for Bryan Rennie, ed., Mircea Eliade: A Critical Reader (London: Equinox, 2006).
10 Jeffrey J. Kripal, “Remembering Ourselves: Notes on Some Countercultural Echoes of Contemporary Tantric Studies,” in Journal of Religions of South Asia 1/1, forthcoming.
11 This category, although developed independently, nicely mirrors Catherine Albanese’s notion of the enlightened body-self that came to define American appropriations of yoga.
12 I defined and developed my own uses of the term in Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) and developed it further in Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
13 See Charles Tart, “States of Consciousness and State-Specific Sciences,” Science 176 (1972): 1203-1210; and Altered States of Consciousness (El Cerrito, CA: Psychological Processes, 1983).
14 Ioan P. Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).
15 Ioan P. Couliano, “System and History,” Incognita, 6. See also his “A Historian’s Kit to the Fourth Dimension,” Incognita 1 (1990), 113-29, and his Out of This World: A History of Otherworldly Journey and Out-of-Body Experiences, from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein (Boston: Shambalah, 1991).
16 Couliano, "System and History," 9.
17 I derive the image from Michael Murphy’s occult novel, An End to Ordinary History (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1982). For what one might call the standard Esalen reading of UFOs as modern religious phenomena, see Keith Thompson, Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1991).
18 This group has recently published a massive record of its work as Edward F. Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Adam Crabtree, Alan Gauld, Michael Grosso, and C. Bruce Greyson, Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology of the 21st Century (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
19 The situation is complicated here, and in sometimes surprising ways. Take reincarnation theory, for example. Such a theory relativizes and radicalizes the contextualist/constructivist paradigm to the extent that it posits a type of human consciousness that is not bound to any local culture, language, or religious system but that is, at the same time, profoundly influenced and shaped by all previous cultural, linguistic, and religious experience. In a sense, then, reincarnation theory is more contextualist and more constructivist than our contemporary social-scientific models, which restrict these local influences to a single life-cycle.
20 I have developed this line of thought further in my The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). See chapter 3, “Comparative Mystics.”
21 David Haberman, “Religious Studies 2000,” The Lester Lecture on the Study of Religion, Department of Religious Studies, University of Colorado, 1999.
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