Secret Body

Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions

Jeffrey J. Kripal

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226491486
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Over the course of his twenty-five-year career, Jeffrey J. Kripal's study of religion has had two major areas of focus: the erotic expression of mystical experience and the rise of the paranormal in American culture. This book brings these two halves together in surprising ways through a blend of memoir, manifesto, and anthology, drawing new connections between these two realms of human experience and revealing Kripal's body of work to be a dynamic whole that has the potential to renew and reshape the study of religion.
Kripal tells his story, biographically, historically and politically contextualizing each of the six books of his Chicago corpus, from Kali's Child to Mutants and Mystics, all the while answering his censors and critics and exploring new implications of his thought. In the process, he begins to sketch out a speculative "new comparativism" in twenty theses. The result is a new vision for the study of religion, one that takes in the best of the past, engages with outside critiques from the sciences and the humanities, and begins to blaze a new positive path forward. A major work decades in the making, Secret Body will become a landmark in the study of religion.

Mysticum

The vague and fleeting intuition with which a writer on religions often begins first appears to me, at least, as an unidentified flying object hovering about my materials: a UFO, for short. As a glimmering origin of a piece of religiohistorical writing, this intuition appears as neither a mirror nor a lamp but has something of the properties of both. . . . It is the act of reporting on these unidentified flying objects—trying to point them out to others, to convince those around us of their existence—that may be the most crucial event in changing our own understanding of their reality. Once publicly described, they become less unidentified; as their identity becomes established, they are less liable to fly away.

DANIEL GOLD, AESTHETICS AND ANALYSIS IN WRITING ON RELIGION

The initial inspirations of my thinking and writing, then, were three: the psychosexual crisis of anorexia, the discovery of the unconscious within a psychoanalytically savvy monastic seminary, and the comparative erotics of mystical literature, first applied to my own Christian tradition, then to a Hindu Tantric saint, then to the Western monotheisms as a whole. Once the first crisis around the anorexia was resolved through the second psychological awakening, I could turn to the third, comparative erotics, which is what I did for two decades (roughly 1985–2005). The figure who towered over all of this was Freud, even if my own ontological leanings were anything but Freudian.

By the time I was finishing The Serpent’s Gift toward the end of this period, I felt like I had answered to my satisfaction most of the questions with which I entered the field—those around male sexual orientation and comparative mystical literature. I felt closure. I am sure this also had something to do with the biology of middle age and the natural waning of testosterone levels, that is, I am certain my early work on the erotic was itself erotic, a sublimation of the sexual into the textual. As these natural bio-energies waned, so did my interest in this particular subject. For all of these reasons, I felt done with all of that, intellectually, spiritually, and biologically.

It was around this same time that I began turning from the study of historical traditions and figures to the study of the contemporary ones via a decades-long engagement with the California human potential movement. It was here, in the present, that I began to encounter story after story of exotic anomalous experiences, from the parapsychological to the ufological. These in turn began to change how I read my historical materials. Confronted with the exotic in my friends, readers, and acquaintances, I could no longer simply brush aside the anomalous in my historical sources as “legendary” or as “mythical accretions.” I also became extremely suspicious of the oft-heard charge that so-and-so is “exoticizing” a particular historical text or recorded experience: “Uhhmm, it is exotic.” The comparative logic was a simple one: if such-and-such exotic thing could happen in Palo Alto, California, or Yahoo, Nebraska, in the 1960s or 1970s, why on earth couldn’t it have happened in first-century Palestine or nineteenth-century Calcutta? And what does this mean for the study of religion?

This, in a nutshell, was the “What if?” thought experiment of the second half of my published body of work (roughly 2005–2015). “Mysticum” treats this material, which, very generally speaking, has focused on the nature of consciousness as a presence and power that is not in the final analysis reducible to Enlightenment rationalisms, mechanical materialisms, neurological correlations, or even the limitations of space-time (read: history). Looking back now, I would say that I was attempting to reimagine and reenact transcendence for the study of religion. I wanted to give the discipline a vertical dimension and so “lift it off the page” from its present two-dimensional Flatland, something like Dan Gold’s UFO hovering off the page that requires our hermeneutical engagement and intellectual labor to become real.

The next five books—Esalen (2007), Authors of the Impossible (2010), Mutants and Mystics (2011), Comparing Religions (2014), and The Super Natural (2016)—look quite different than the first three, and, in many ways, they are. For example, with all five I made a conscious effort to cross over into a broader readership, to write for more people. I had wearied of writing for fifty people in the world, twenty-five of whom hated me.

Still, I was also very aware that my mind continued to work like it had long worked, that is, dialectically or ouroborically against the dualisms of our cognitive software. Whereas I had once written to collapse the binarism of “sex and spirit,” I was now writing to collapse the binarism of “mind and matter.” If my first three books went after the deep-seated Western assumption (drawn from the Garden again) that “sex is sin,” my next three books explored the Darwinian cosmology that, actually, “sex is selection” and, ultimately, the driver of human evolution, which—I could not shake off the intuition—appears to have something, maybe everything, to do with consciousness.

My thinking and writing were returning again and again to the same themes and ideas, no matter what I wrote about. It was as if I were a spy satellite orbiting some distant gnostic planet. I began to suspect that my choices about what to look at were hardly random or accidental. It was not so much that I was choosing the subjects. It was more that the subjects were choosing me. The Human as Two took on yet another layer of meaning: it now served as an extremely accurate description of my experience of the creative writing process. I was not writing. I was being written. By whom or what I did not know.

Somewhere around 2008 or so, I think at the encouragement of the literary critic Victoria Nelson, I read about Philip K. Dick’s experience of Valis, his name for a kind of cosmic mind that beamed into him in the winter of 1974 and through whose plasmic pink light he came to understand his entire writing career as a kind of occult evolutionary practice leading up to the Valis revelation he called simply “2–3–74” (for February and March of 1974, when it shone in). My own experiences were much humbler and quieter than Dick’s (thank God), but the sci-fi master gave me a new language and a new confidence through which to express my own little Valis event, as it were. I began to suspect that I had been “reprogrammed” that Night, that something very real and very knowing had been downloaded into this Midwestern townboy. I decided that the best thing I could do was let it speak. I removed as many of the self-censoring academic filters as I could. I stepped aside and let go. And why not? Whatever this presence or thing was, it was way smarter than me. And it was on a roll.

9

That Other Night

The Future of the Body and Evolutionary Esotericism

Tantric traditions resonate with contemporary cultural theories in conceiving embodiment as integral to human identity. They do not, however, celebrate the status quo experience of the human body. For them, rather, the ordinary experience of the body is an extremely limited and inadequate realization of much greater possibilities. . . . [One text] proclaims that all that is observable (drisya), that is, the universe is one’s body.

DAVID PETER LAWRENCE, THE TEACHINGS OF THE ODD-EYED ONE

Michael Murphy, the cofounder of Esalen Institute, called me late one night in the early summer of 1998, at the very nadir of the Kālī’s Child affair. He had just finished the last page of Kālī’s Child in a San Rafael restaurant, armed, as he likes to tell the story, with a glass of red wine in one hand and a cell phone in another. He was ecstatic about the book, primarily for its focus on the Tantric teachings of Ramakrishna and the manner in which these expressed a panentheistic vision of the Self as divine and the material world as the energetic radiation (shakti) or vibratory emanation of this same transcendent Consciousness (chit). Here, the entire universe is indeed one’s true body, as David Lawrence captures the core teaching of the Tantric traditions above.

Cosmic body or no, though, Mike was also calling very late, as it did not occur to him that there was a three-hour time difference between our two coastal time zones. I remember the call at around 11:00 in the evening, but others push it toward midnight or even later. In any case, it was late. To mythically mark the event, Mike often calls himself “Nightcaller” in our conversations, a humorous allusion to one of my favorite X-Men characters: Nightcrawler, a über-pious Catholic teleporter who happens to be blue and looks a lot like a traditional demon but is not (hey, I can relate).

If one were to measure the eventual effects of this single call during “that Other Night” on my spiritual and professional lives, the mythicization seems more than appropriate. Through that late-night call and the countless conversations that followed over the next two decades, Mike effectively pulled me out of the emotional foxhole that I was hiding in and eventually set me on a new path, one that would come to shape, really define, the second half of my body of work.

Never underestimate the power of a friend in a foxhole.

I first visited Esalen at Mike’s invitation the week after Thanksgiving in 1998. Many other invitations and visits followed. A few years later, around the turn of the millennium during and just after the one-year stint at Harvard, I began to engage in a long-range historiographical project on the place and the human potential movement that it had helped birth. I would work on this project for about seven years. Esalen (2007) was the eventual result.

As I slowly began to realize, Esalen and the human potential movement are powerful examples of my earlier thesis that comparativism and mysticism are historically, psychologically, and philosophically linked. This is almost ridiculously obvious in the history of Esalen. Both founders (Michael Murphy and Richard Price) were inspired by Frederic Spiegelberg, a professor of comparative religion at Stanford University, whose comparativism was founded on his apophatic notion of the “religion of no religion,” which was in turn inspired by his reading of Latin medieval mystical theology and a cosmic experience of his own as a young man in a wheat field (more on this below). Esalen, in short, was inspired by a professor of comparative religion whose comparativism was deeply linked to his mystical life—a perfect exemplum of my earlier theses in Roads of Excess and The Serpent’s Gift about the intellectual generativity of the mystical experiences of scholars of mysticism and the apophatic and mystical roots of “comparing religions.”

ESALEN BODIES

There were other previous conclusions at work in the Esalen project. The “body,” for example, remained central to my thought, but it was now morphing, shape-shifting, mutating. The body now overflowed any and all ordinary notions of embodiment that we find in the academy or the biomedical world. The human potential literatures are replete with various esoteric notions of the body’s cosmic energies, geo-spinal alignment, sensory awakening, memories “buried” in deep tissue and organs, the consciousness of cells, and, of course, the various “subtle bodies” and chakra systems of Tantric yoga that had migrated into Western culture in the twentieth century and, in turn, were transformed there—largely, it turns out, at Esalen—into their present New Age forms.1

To take just one example of such esoteric bodies, the Reichian “orgone”—so influential and so generative in these human potential worlds—is believed to be present in the human body, but Reich also believed it to be present in the microbiological world, the atmosphere, and even the stars. Indeed, he even saw the orgone at work in the UFO phenomenon.2 In the end, the orgone is cosmic, not simply sexual or instinctual, and it is anything but a metaphor, as the libido became in classical psychoanalysis. The idea also possesses mystical roots in a transcendentally tinged sexual experience Reich had as a young soldier with an Italian peasant girl in 1916: the mystical as the erotic, or the erotic as the mystical, or just “orgone.”

I did my best to treat all of these different notions, but I was especially drawn to Mike’s vision of “the future of the body,” mostly, I think, because of a common Tantric lineage that we both shared. My relationship to Mike and Esalen flowed directly out of Kālī’s Child and the Tantric teachings that it attempted to describe and interpret for the contemporary reader. Mike’s lifework was inspired by the Bengali spiritual teacher and philosopher Sri Aurobindo, born as Aurobindo Ghose (1872–1950). Ghose was immersed in the same Shakta Tantric streams of thinking and practice that Ramakrishna was, except that he had added Darwin and Nietzsche to the mix, utterly transforming their ideas in the process.

Indeed, as his two-volume Record of Yoga makes more than obvious, Aurobindo was deeply involved in various yogic practices designed to access and develop the siddhis or “superpowers” of the Tantric yogic traditions: capacities known in the British psychical research tradition (with which Aurobindo was familiar) as telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, levitation, and clairvoyance. Astonishingly, Aurobindo provided hundreds of Sanskrit names, distinctions and nuances for each of these abilities and attempted to perfect them for himself in his Pondicherry ashram room. He also theorized them within a grand evolutionary vision and looked for a common species-wide metamorphosis that he wrote about under the banners of a descending Supermind and a coming Superman.

Mike has pursued the siddhis in his own way in Big Sur and the Bay Area for over a half century now, mostly through the hosting of hundreds of symposia on topics like the physics of consciousness and the personality’s potential survival of bodily death. Most of all, though, he has sought to support a community of practice that might function as a catalyst for some broader cultural acceptance, integration, and stabilization of these superpowers. Like Aurobindo recording his super practice of the siddhis in his ashram room, Mike is not just interested in talking or thinking about such things. He is also interested in people doing them.

ESALEN AND THE X-MEN

It is an interesting autobiographical fact: I tend to self-censor myself at the end of a book project, but then I inevitably use this same censored material as a kind of “seed” for the next book project. Unknowingly, I began this practice when I self-censored the original foreword to Kālī’s Child (on that Night) but then developed it into my second book: Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom.

The same thing happened at the very end of the Esalen project, this time with an appendix. I originally wrote an appendix entitled “Esalen and the X-Men: The Human Potential Movement and Superhero Comics,” in which I played out the striking similarities between Michael Murphy’s vision of Esalen and the mythical figure of Prof. Xavier and his private school for young mutants in The X-Men comic books of my youth.3 The similarities are difficult to miss. Both figures think and live out of a vast evolutionary vision of humanity’s secret supernature. Much like Prof. X, Mike has long sought out and nurtured the supernormal powers and thoughts of real-world X-Men and X-Women wherever he can find them (and invite them). The two American stories, moreover, began within a few months of each other: in late 1962 (Esalen) and early 1963 (X-Men). It was as if the West Coast was putting into actual practice what the East Coast could only imagine. An American mysticism (the Esalen Institute) and an American mythology (the Xavier Institue) answered one another, co-inciding across the country on the two opposite coasts.

Once again, I would take this text out of the book for which it was originally intended, and once again it would reappear as a new book: Mutants and Mystics. The original appendix became ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Opening: “You Should Write Fiction”
• CORPUS
• MYSTICUM
• MEUM
• Closing: What the New Sacred Is (Not)
• Airport Afterword
• Appendix: The Gnomons
• The Method of All Methods
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index of My Brain
• Gallery