#Supermind picture series#

I’m going back to my adolescence with this one, so that explains the comic book/sci fi frame. One is in sort of a humorous, autobiographical response, which this is my mid-life regression book. There’s two ways I talk about the questions I think you’re asking there. The comic book angle and superhero angle is there but you’re really trying to pull together a lot of stuff, aren’t you?ĭr.

I mean, we’re talking about spiritually transformative experiences, UFOs, alien abductions, consciousness, past lives, materialistic science. But I wonder sometimes if the comic book/science fiction angle-I know that’s interesting to a lot of people-but if it somehow takes things in a different direction. And I have to say that the book is great. I’ve heard several interviews you’ve given on the book and there’s always this angle of the comic book fan or the science fiction fan, which might make our little dialogue here today. You know, it’s interesting that you mention your involvement of a comic book fan. So it all kind of came together.Īlex Tsakiris: That’s great. He happened to be a comic book fan from his youth onward. Jeff Kripal: Well, we thought long and hard about all those issues and the press responded with a lot of resources and a wonderful artist named Michael Brehm who did all that. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, you don’t read this book you get into it like a warm bath. Of course it’s well-written and beautifully written but the artwork, the graphics, the illustrations-even the page layout. The first thing I just had to mention about this book and get it out there in hopes that other people will experience it, is that it’s just an absolutely beautiful book. Jeff Kripal: Thanks for having me back again.Īlex Tsakiris: Well, it’s just my pleasure. He’s back today to talk about his latest, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal. He was a very popular guest when he joined me last year to talk about his excellent book, Authors of the Impossible. Jeff holds a chair in Philosophy and Comparative Religion at Rice University in Houston. The experience is essentially one of being split in two where part of the human being is outside of space and time and part of the human being is in space and time.Īlex Tsakiris: Today we welcome back Dr. A lot of them are very clear that when they have these paranormal experiences they were not in their normal sense of self or their normal psyches.

#Supermind picture series#

Jeff Kripal: The book came out of a series of interviews and readings of artists and authors who create these forms of popular culture. Maybe you want to expound on this idea of “human as two” that recurs in your writing.ĭr. I mean, we’re reading this book in this here-and-now-reality and yet we’re exploring this very different reality. You have to find some other way to get out of the box.Īlex Tsakiris: Right, but the paradox is that that’s what we’re required to do. You can’t think yourself out of a box with the terms of the box. They actually become really interesting and powerful experiences to take into consideration. But once we just open up the paradigm, then they make actually a good deal of sense. So I’m simply pointing out that those sorts of experiences are dismissed or ignored because there’s no way to fit them into the reigning paradigm. What happens to human beings all the time is that they have these sorts of extraordinary experiences that do seem to take them outside of their context, outside their bodies, even outside of space and time which is how my artists and authors talk about it today. The reigning culture is this scientific materialism that essentially argues that we’re only matter and that we can never get outside of our bodies and the particular historical context in which we find ourselves. Jeff Kripal: Basically what I’m trying to get out there is that the thoughts we think and the worldviews we inhabit are determined by our cultures. Science that insists not only that the paranormal doesn’t exist, but that it’s impossible.ĭr. During the interview Kripal discusses how science and culture affect our worldview:Īlex Tsakiris: It’s also interesting how you used the term “Trojan Horse” because one of the themes of the book is this indictment against science as we know it. Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with Rice University Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought, and author of, Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, Dr. Interview with author and Professor of Religious Studies examines how paranormal experiences have fueled the work of famous science fiction and comic book authors.