Archiving the Impossible, and What is God?An Interview with Jeffrey J. Kripal

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Archiving the Impossible, and What is God?

An Interview with Jeffrey J. Kripal

This is an excerpted and edited summary of an interview from the October 2025 issue of The Sun magazine that I found interesting and “hits the nail on the head” in many respects, coming from an unusual perspective and vocation. The interviewer is Derek Askey, and the person he is interviewing is Jeffrey J. Kripal, a professor of religion at Rice University, who, in addition to teaching a certificate program called “GEM (Gnosticism, Esotericism, and Mysticism)”, also maintains the “Archives of the Impossible”. The title of the interview is RADAR AND REVELATION: JEFFREY J. KRIPAL ON ARCHIVING THE IMPOSSIBLE.

The introduction explains how Askey discovered Kripal. Askey had been at a retreat at the Esalen Institute and was searching in the bookstore for a book about the history of Esalen. The proprietor suggested Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion by Kripal. Askey was impressed with the book and started reading other books by Kripal: Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred; The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge; and How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else. In a nutshell, Kripal approaches these subjects with as open a mind as possible, using the metaphor of “keeping things on the table” instead of a modern tendency to dismissively sweep things off the table without a second thought.

Askey: What are the Archives of the Impossible?

Kripal: It’s eighteen collections here in Woodson Research Center. I started in about 2014 with a man named Jacques Vallee, who asked me to help place his papers and files at a university archive. [He was the model for the French scientist in Close Encounters of the Third Kind]. Jacques is very suspicious of all of the theoretical models offered for UFO’s, and he thinks long-term research is really the most adequate response to the subject – and that can only be done at a university.

Askey: Can you explain the disclosure model, which you also refer to in your writing as the “Cold War invasion mythology”?

Kripal: The disclosure model is basically that the government – specifically the military and intelligence communities – has some secret knowledge of the UFO phenomenon, and it’s time for them to disclose that information. It tends toward a more material interpretation: that these are aviation technologies and military threats.

As a historian of religion, I don’t interpret UFO phenomena literally. I can’t help but see the moral anxiety and end-of-the-world panic expressed by them. But that doesn’t mean I think these encounters don’t happen. It just means I think it’s more complicated than a materialist explanation. We think in these binary terms: the material world, which is real, versus the spiritual or mental world or visionary world, which is not real but somehow hallucinatory or fake.

Askey: And you reject that separation between the two?

Kripal: Personally, I don’t find it helpful. I think the imagination often functions as a way in: as a kind of translator of this other, greater reality. Yes, it’s imagined. Yes, there’s this historically constructed component to it, but constructed out of what? There’s something coming through, as well as something being created.

                  Our belief systems take things off the table. The more we keep on the table, the messier that table gets. Sometimes it starts to look absurd, but if we take something off the table, we cannot know any more about it or what it might teach us about ourselves. People will say, “Oh, that’s a hallucination” or “So-and-so didn’t have that near-death experience.” They just keep taking things off the table until they can explain everything on it.

Askey: What makes you suspicious of certainty?

Kripal: We’ve been certain many times in the past and turned out to be completely wrong. People who are certain scare me. People who are uncertain are often very funny and playful. To me that’s what a true intellectual is: someone who doesn’t take their own beliefs or throughs too seriously.

Askey: I would describe someone who is comfortable with uncertainty as enlightened.

Kripal: I’d say that person is “reflexive,” because they can recursively question their own beliefs and ideas. That, to me, is what we should be doing.

                  Religion itself is a complicated social institution that’s constantly changing. People don’t always realize that, because our lives are so short. We’re like ants at the bottom of an oak tree. We think the oak tree’s always been there, but it hasn’t. It was once a seed, then a sapling, and then a young tree, and then an old tree, and one day it will die and rot, and other trees will come up.

Askey: Many people who take psychedelics say they don’t induce hallucinations but instead provide a glimpse of reality that is more accurate than our day-to-day perception. Why is it only ever a glimpse, and why do those glimpses evade logical interpretation?

Kripal: One quick answer is that if we were given more, it would destroy us. To exist as an embodied social ego, we can’t be fully exposed to that reality. I don’t think of the body and brain as producing consciousness; they mediate it. So what I look for is moments in that brain-body connection where there’s some kind of gap or tear. I call it the “traumatic secret.” Psychedelics can provide that very reliably, but so can emotional trauma, sexual trauma, war, erotic experiences, or ritual meditation. There are a lot of ways that human beings can alter their state, which is how to get access to those glimpses.

Adkey: Is that to say you see our perceptual systems as reducing what is really there so that we might exist day to day? What might be the reason for that? Why shouldn’t we be able to perceive things as they truly are?

Kripal: To me, this is the biggest question of all. As human beings we presume we can know reality as it is. I don’t think we can. But I think some human beings sometimes experience reality as it is, and those experiences tend to be supersensory and nonrational. They tend to take the person into an entirely different realm that can’t be understood by reason and can’t be sensed and can’t be thought about. This is why I think mystical literature is so important: because it’s evidence that human beings do have these experiences. But that doesn’t mean they’re sense-based or based in culture.

                  And the idea that consciousness is not produced by the brain but is somehow extended into the universe – that keeps a lot of things on the table, including precognition. Whereas the idea that the brain produces consciousness takes a lot of things off the table and makes them impossible by definition. We need models that allow us to consider more things. Regarding precognition, the idea that the future has already happened is common in physics. It allows for the possibility that people do have these precognitive moments. But it's an objectionable model in a lot of religion and philosophy, which understands precognition more as prophecy. Our ancestors had religious models to help them think about these things. We now have scientific models that I think we should also be using – without dismissing the experiences of our ancestors, but recognizing that their explanations are bound by their culture. As are ours, but we clearly know stuff that our ancestors didn’t.

Askey: Going back to psychedelics for a moment: Some people who ingest DMT describe the realm that the drug takes them to as being familiar. They’ll say it’s “home” and will describe the beings they encounter there as entities with whom they’ve had a previous relationship. Some even describe these entities as “family”. Do you think these entities are just another part of the self that’s hidden from our conscious self?

Kripal:  I do. When people have UFO experiences or DMT experiences or near-death experiences, to me it’s always ambiguous whether it’s a separate entity or the otherworld or the afterlife they encounter, or whether it’s some aspect of themselves. I suspect it’s the latter: that some part of us is tapped into this much greater reality that we’re not able to explain. Our ancestors expressed it religiously through their belief systems. We probably express it differently today, but whether it’s us or it’s not us is a real question. And I don’t mean that reductively, as I think the furthest part of “us” is really a kind of cosmic presence.

Askey: I’d like to quote someone I suspect you might disagree with, the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Does it mean, if you don’t understand something, and the community of physicists don’t understand it, that means God did it?...If that’s how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.”  Do you foresee an end point in which scientific knowledge eliminates Tyson’s so-called ever-receding pocket?

Kripal: No. I don’t think that at all. I don’t know Tyson personally, but a lot of scientists seem to have a very naïve view of God. They think people believe in God as some kind of person in the sky. It’s the God-of-the gaps argument that he’s referring to: God is whatever scientists can’t explain, and the gap is getting smaller and smaller. But it’s getting larger and larger now, with dark matter and dark energy. W went from knowing almost everything to knowing almost nothing within a few decades.

                  It might not be God. It might be us. I don’t know if Tyson has really read or pondered people who have thoughtfully written about this, but I think he’s dealing with stereotypes.

Askey: What is God?

Kripal: I’ve been very informed by comparative mystical literature, in particular a medieval mystic named Meister Eckhart. I think that what most people think of as God is created through worship and ritual and belief in scripture. It’s my belief that God is much more nondual, and not some other. That subject-object division just collapses. It doesn’t even make sense anymore to talk about divinity and humanity. It’s all one. Or, at lease, it’s not two-however, you want to talk about it.

                  The joke is that mystics and nihilists both talk about nothing; one of them just capitalizes it. I capitalize it, because I think Nothingness is also a kind of presence, one that is extremely positive and powerful and not at all nihilistic. The tragedy of a lot of modern thought is that it has essentially deconstructed, correctly, our belief systems, but then it’s literally left us with nothing, lowercase n.

Askey: Do you think it’s better to have a society that is spiritual but not religious?

Kripal: I do think it’s better. That’s the ideal of American democracy, going back almost 250 years. But that’s not where we’re at right now. The “spiritual but not religious” demographic is popular among young people, many of whom have disaffiliated from organized religion. But when people get older, they tend to desire community and tradition, and they return to whatever their inherited traditions are. Will that be the same in the future? I don’t know.  Maybe it’s going to get way worse. Maybe people are going to be more religious and believe everything their religion tells them about themselves, which I think is the cause of violence and death and cultural conflict.

                  The kind of weird phenomena that we’re talking about disconnect us from institutional religion, but they connect us on a spiritual level to the broader world or the universe.

Askey: You write, “Traditional religion or conventional science will never get us to a solution or resolution of impossible phenomena…Th problem is that we think we can ‘believe’ or ‘think’ the truth at all.” I’m interested in your two qualifiers; traditional and conventional. Do you see religion and science ever evolving to the point that they could help us arrive at the truth?

Kripal: I hope so. We need to learn from both but not be bound to either. It’s up to us what we do with these traditions. I don’t say that naively. I’m just a guy from Nebraska who grew up asking questions about his cultural and social surroundings and not getting any answers. From adolescence on, I never felt a part of the culture I was in, and I expressed that alienation through religion. I was really pious as a teenager, but I used Catholicism and the New Testament to distance myself from the culture. I was also anorexic. So I was suffering psychosomatically, spiritually – in every sense – and I became deeply religious as a way to try and cope.

                  My conversion to intellectual life came through psychoanalysis and the realization that there was something called the unconscious. That was mind-blowing. Human beings are driven by something they’re not even aware of? But it made so much sense and opened up my world in a powerful way. So I backed into the academy and the study of religion because I wanted to ask questions, and I happened to get rewarded for that there. There’s a part of academic culture that values deep questioning, but there’s another aspect that resists it. I sit in that paradox every day when I come to work. Higher education is not valued by the broader American public, but it is valued internationally; people from all over the world come here. So it’s a powerful part of American culture that has a lot of benefits, but it’s certainly deconstructive to local communities and local cultures.

Askey: How so?

Kripal: I joke that the greatest conspiracy theory of all time is the humanities. If you want to be suspicious of everything for the rest of your life, just study the humanities. [Laughs.] You will never believe anything again. And I say that with affection. I think local communities and their cultures are deeply mistaken about the absoluteness or the universalism of their beliefs. Pushing back against those beliefs is the power of the academy, but it’s also why intellectuals are rejected.

                  If you look at authoritarian regimes through history, among the first people they go after are intellectuals, because the authoritarians know they are the ones standing in the way of absolute authority and power. The intellectuals just don’t buy it. The problem with the academy is that it’s too often only deconstructive. It doesn’t recognize that local communities and culture also are mediums, or ways that affirm this sort of vertical dimension, which has been framed as “transcendent: or “transcendental.” I think the academy is very good at discussing the horizontal dimension – explanations that are social, political, historical, biological, and so on- but it’s very bad at discussing the vertical dimension.

Askey: You said that we’re not asking enough questions, or maybe not the right questions. What’s a question you want people to grapple with?

Kripal: Kimberly Engels, a philosopher at Molloy University, talks about the ethics of contact: how contact with nonhuman entities can transform our ethical beliefs. That’s a good example.

                  We think the divine is all good, and the demonic is all bad. But what if they are the same thing? In a lot of these experiences, you see something that is deconstructive, but you also see something incredibly cosmic and redeeming in some way. How can we imagine those two things together and not apart? I think a lot of our moralizing around these impossible experiences is misplaced. 

                  I don’t think we’ve asked these questions enough. By that I mean we don’t have departments of the impossible or schools of the superhumanities. We academics do everything on a kind of banal or depressing level, and then wonder: Why are we being ignored? We’re being ignored because we’re boring! [Laughs.] But human beings aren’t boring. They’re really interesting. They’re fantastic. It’s just that we turn them into boring social egos and identities, and then we argue about that.

                  I don’t want to call it a mystery, but the culture produces us too. Yes, it produces these religious beliefs and these scientific certainties, but it also produces this questioning. So I don’t feel separate from culture. And I don’t think the academy is either. I think impossible phenomena can be a part of the culture laughing at itself. And there is a kind of transcendence to this kind of laughing. You can’t laugh at something unless you’re outside of it.

Ashkey: That calls to mind the idea that we are the universe observing itself.

Kripal: We are the universe observing itself, but the universe is really big, and it’s not limited to our particular cultures or religions. I mean, we need to have those, but they are just one expression of this much bigger cosmos.