Words For What Is Beyond Words

Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions by Jeffrey J. Kripal. University of Chicago Press. 478 pp.

Jeffrey J. Kripal is a religious writer like no other I’ve ever read. He grew up as a Catholic in Nebraska, for instance (there are Catholics in Nebraska?) He was devout, actually entered a seminary to become a priest. Before that, however, he had somehow gotten the idea that to become holy was to deny his sexuality, so for a time he put off puberty by becoming anorexic, lost weight to the point where he weighed 125 pounds. He overcame his illness through psychotherapy and left the seminary to become a religious historian, made his doctoral dissertation on Ramakrishna into a book entitled Kali’s Child. That book became immediately controversial in the East because he pointed out that “Ramakrishna’s particular from of erotic mysticism was homoerotic in structure.”

As soon as I read that, I thought, of course it was. That explains so much about the man, who was surrounded by male idolators all his life, who took a consort at one point but never had sex with her. Christopher Isherwood must have been biting his tongue the whole time he wrote his book on Ramakrishna. Any mention of sexuality would have ended the project right there.

Partly from his experience of writing about Ramakrishna, Kripal created the first of what he calls his Gnomons, brief epigrammatic statements that sum up a period of work for him.

“Heretical Heterosexuality. Whereas male heterotic forms of the mystical generally become heterodox or heretical, sublimated male homoerotic forms generally become orthodox.”

That was a head scratcher for me when I first read it, and I’m not sure I entirely understand it now. It does catch one’s attention.

Kripal himself identifies as straight.

It was also while he was studying Ramakrishna that Kripal had an extreme kundalini experience, though he was apparently not practicing yoga or meditation at the time. That led to another of his Gnomons, and for this one he has plenty of examples.

“Resonant Comparisons. The works of scholars of comparative mystical literature are often catalyzed by the mystical or anomalous experiences of the intellectuals themselves.”

But it was a couple of other gnomons that captured my attention, and caused me to buy his book in the first place.[1]

“The Erotic Mystic. There is a profound connection between the mystic and the erotic.”

“The Amoral or Transmoral Mystic. There is no necessary or simple connection between the mystical and the ethical.”

Again, with both of these statements, I thought Of course! I saw the connection between the mystical and sexual years ago, and wrote a book about it. As far as the Amoral or Transmoral Mystic, I’ve always suspected that what Kripal says here is true, that the Divine we encounter in mystical moments is an overwhelming force of creation, not concerned with the niceties of behavior. The multiple scandals around Eastern religions suggest that might be true. That is not to suggest that ethical behavior isn’t important. But people can have deep experiences of the divine that don’t influence their behavior at all.

The gnomon that is most important to Kripal’s thought is an early one which at first glace seems almost banal, but which he comes back to again and again.

“The Human as Two. Each human being is two, that is, each person is simultaneously a conscious constructed self or socialized ego and a much larger complexly conscious field that normally manifests only in nonordinary states of consciousness and energy, which the religious traditions have historically objectified, mythologized, and projected outward into the sky as divine, as “God” or introjected inward into the human being as nirvana, brahman, or located in some sort of experienced paradoxical state that is neither inside nor outside, as in the Chinese Dao or the American paranormal.”

This seemed when I first read it to be reductive, as if he’s saying God is all in our heads. But it soon becomes apparent that isn’t what Kripal means. He sees Mind as something vast, in fact infinite, not a function of the human brain. The brain is a filtering device to help us take things in.

“The Filter Thesis. Mind exists independently of the brain, into and by which it is filtered, transmitted, reduced, particularized, and translated through all of the neurological, cognitive, linguistic, cultural, and social processes that we have identified in the humanities, sciences, and social sciencies. The filter thesis does not require that we deny any of these hard-won knowledges—only that we “flip” our interpretive perspective and see these processes as reductions rather than complete productions of consciousness.”

Perhaps you can see him homing in on his final (of 20) gnomon.

“The New Sacred. Consciousness as such is the new sacred.”

The Secret Body itself is a summing up of Kripal’s work, though he does not seem anywhere near the end of it (and he’s not old, born in 1962). He’s searching through it as if to see a pattern, a figure in the carpet. I would say that one emerges. And it does so eventually by considering some things I wouldn’t normally read about, the paranormal, telepathy, even—God help us all—UFO’s.

When I bought the book I thought I would skip all that, read through the initial section on mystics and drop the book when things got too weird. But Kripal has some fascinating thoughts about all these phenomena; he sees them as the divine breaking into ordinary life, the kinds of events that are reported routinely throughout the Bible. (Just as an example, he cites the book of Ezekiel—which my brother, who is reading it in Hebrew, recently told me is “the most astonishing book in the Bible”—in which Ezekiel is visited by what sounds like a UFO. My brother concurs.) Kripal even has a theory that it is people who have suffered some trauma who are particularly susceptible to such visitations.

“The Traumatic Secret. The paranormal event or altered state of consciousness appears to be ‘let in’ through the temporary suppression or dissolution of the socialized ego, which was opened up or fractured (either at the moment of the event or earlier in the life cycle) through extreme physical, emotional, and/or sexual suffering, that is, through what we would today call trauma. The trauma here is the trigger, but not necessarily the cause.”

Many of the examples of paranormal events that he mentions, incidents of telepathy, near death experiences, people foreseeing an event in the future, remembering previous incarnations, are remarkably convincing, and reported by people that we don’t think of as nutty or notably religious, like Mark Twain, Roger Ebert, Barbara Ehrenreich.

I must confess I was eventually worn out by this text. As you may have noticed, Kripal is not averse to academic jargon, and he loves long sentences and the sound of his own voice. His work is extremely personal in one way and oddly impersonal in another; he doesn’t tell us if he now practices a religion, or engages in a spiritual practice. But this book is heady stuff. It’s words, words, words.

Yet there were many places where I thought: I’ve always suspected this was true. I bet lots of people suspect it’s true. But nobody has had the nerve to say it. Reading this book genuinely expanded my religious view of the world. And there’s a section on the sexuality of Jesus that has to be read to be believed (or not believed. What’s hard to believe is that the man wrote it).

I admire Krispal for his nerve. Nerve in writing about religion is no small thing. But I also think that what Kripal is ultimately writing about is beyond words (and using many many words doesn’t get us any closer). It can’t be written about. It has to be lived. We should all remember that, after a final experience of the divine, Aquinas thought his writing was so much straw.

[1] I found this book in the old-fashioned way, browsing in my favorite bookstore and stumbling across it. I’d never heard of the book or of Jeffrey Kripal. I sat on a couch in the store reading the book with some fascination, and violated my number one rule for book buying these days: never buy a book on the first viewing. Many of the books sitting around unread on my shelves were purchased in a burst of enthusiasm. At my age, I have to ask myself: am I really going to read this in the time I have left? I began reading this book the night I bought it.