“What prevents the UFO and alien topic from becoming culturally acceptable is that we lack a framework for understanding it or giving it meaning. It remains unpresentable, unfathomable. If we are going to assimilate it - and perhaps even neutralize the implicitly threatening aspects of it - we must develop…
7 posts in
Jeffrey Kripal
”Transhumanists like myself, who encourage shedding our biological limitations in favor of becoming technological gods, are broadly secular.” —Zoltan Istvan In a previous piece I laid out an overview of orthodox Christian theology with a view to exploring transhumanism as fundamentally rooted (though unconsciously) in that Christian mythos. There’s…
This piece is a followup to an earlier piece exploring the alien abduction phenomenon. In that piece I argued that the alien abduction phenomenon has never truly been taken seriously as a form of trauma and for that research to deepen and grow it needs to be more seriously study…
How might an ontologically flooded and trauma-aware lens approach the topic of the (so-called) alien abduction phenomena? That’s the question this piece seeks to answer. There’s a number of complex terms in that short sentence so first some context setting is important. I say so-called alien abduction phenomena…
"Psychic phenomena present a suitable allegory for this Other. Like the Other, these abilities are wholly intangible, yet—in a variety of experiments and anecdotes—possess the capacity to act upon our physical environment." --Joshua Cutchin. Thieves in the Night: A Brief History of Supernatural Child Abductions Wisdom traditions throughout…
The unofficial motto for the city of Portland is "keep Portland weird"– a unique weirdness was hilariously captured in the show Portlandia. The argument of this piece is that Portland is a microcosm of the macrocosmic whole. In other words, existence itself is weird, very weird. I’ve explored notions…
In a previous post I examined the concept of ontological flooding, a term coined by paranthropologist Dr. Jack Hunter. Paranthropology is an anthropological study of paranormal phenomena. Ontological flooding is a crucial term (maybe the guiding term) for this site. At the end of the previous post I mentioned Hunter…