Jeffrey J. Kripaly

LOSING WORLDS TO THINK AFTER THEM: TRANSVERSAL REFLECTIONS FROM A COMPARATIVE CLASSROOM

In this essay, Jeffrey J. Kripal offers his point of view on the question of transversality related to his own profession (university professor of History of Religions in the United States), his research work and anomalous experiences in South Asia, his dialogue with Adrián Navigante, and his way of recapturing the heritage of the American counterculture in a period of cultural crisis and renovation.

Combining anecdotical wit with philosophical speculation, Jeffrey Kripal looks back in history to reassess his own itinerary beyond the limits of events, frameworks, and interpretations, opening a direction toward a new form of comparativism in which the old division between scholarly and artistic style, textual and pre- textual level, thought processes and writing, are not only blurred but principally surpassed.

You have no business being a scholar of religion until you have lost at least two worlds. (what I say to my doctoral students)

One often learns what one is doing in a mirror, that is, in the eyes of others. This has certainly been true of my little life. I do not know what I think until I write it out for others to read. I also learn what I think by teaching and lecturing, that is, by spontaneously saying what I have to say out loud in front of a group of people, who can then reflect it back to me–critically, appreciatively, or, more likely, a bit of both. Perhaps most of all, I learn what I think through the perspectives of colleagues, to whom I listen intently and vulnerably. Thought is dialectical, dialogical, a relationship through and through “Socratic,” as we say in the academy.

Few have taught me as much about the paradoxical practices of transcultural compar- ison as Adrián Navigante. I mean that. I am not bullshitting, as we used to say in the American Midwest. I am not exaggerating, as I suppose we would say in a more genteel code today. Here is what happened. At the end of May of 2023, Navigante invited me to The Labyrinth outside of Rome, Italy, to co-lead two private seminars with him, both on my own published work. The first, entitled “Vision and Impossible Experience” (May 26-28, 2023), was with a group of Jungian therapists in training, an event for which Navigante discussed my memoir/ manifesto, Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions (2017). The second, entitled “Whither the Superhumanities? Critical and Creative Reflections on Some ‘New Humanisms’ for the XXI Century” (June 1-4, 2023), consisted of a group of European intellec- tuals who were asked to speak to The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities (2022).

What struck me most about these events and the friendship that followed in their wake is a single word that Navigante kept using: “transversal.” He used it to describe his own deep experience and learning process in South Asian Shakta Tantra and West African Fa Divination as a poet who had grown up in Argentina, spent time in India, England, and France, was trained in philosophy in Germany, and now spends most of his time in Italy working at his new creation, the Center Interstices, dedicated to the practice of multiple worldviews, and also collaborating with a study center founded by the Indologist, musicologist, and Shaivite initiate Alain Daniélou (1907-1994). I do not think it is tangential at all that Daniélou loved men and existentially converted to what he understood as a form of Hindu polytheism, that is, he lived and loved well outside the gender, sexual, and religious norms of European society.

This profound fact was captured for me in one of the paintings of Daniélou’s residency, The Labyrinth. The painting, which hangs in the central library, features Daniélou himself sitting in a contemplative mood. He looks like a bishop (his brother was Cardinal Jean Daniélou). Some may think Alain is wearing a pendant featuring a dragonfly. It is actually a winged phallus – the erotic as the mystical. This is the history of religions – a “passing” in public, a long series of sexual orientations that were also spiritual orientations.

I hear a different kind of trans- in another word that Navigante uses to describe some aspects of my own work – “transversal.” The word is derived from the French psychiatrist Félix Guattari. It is also used today in the cutting-edge discussions of world philosophy coming out of South Korea but also implied in Chinese Confucian and Daoist thought.¹ I hear the term as a kind of place-holder, a standing-in for a future paradoxical spirituality, an existential and intellectual “sitting in the middle,” thinking across cultures and times, refusing to sign one’s name to this or that culture or practice, but also not hesitating to take initiation into this or that tradition. The spirits possess.

There is something profoundly experiential about the word “transversal,” even though it is also critical of each and every deposit of human experience. It involves not just historical or textual expertise, but also initiation, possession, and mystical experience, an actual working with the spirits and not simply talking or writing about them. Such a transversal position does not “believe,” not at least in any full or final fashion, but neither does it “rationalize,” explain, or reduce. It does something else, something for which we do not even have a good name (yet).

Indeed, Navigante will write that “the transversal reorientation is an in-between, a work of interstices, and at this early stage it can be compared to a balancing act on a hanging bridge whose anchorage, deck and ropes are distressingly unsteady.”² I suppose this is where I might differ. One of my most basic arguments, after all, is that what I call the comparative position (which bears real resonance with this “transversality”) has in fact been developed by literally hundreds of intellectuals for a century and a half now, indeed by thousands of writers around the world for millennia. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of different comparative practices. Some of them are profoundly transversal.

ALTERED STATES AND COMPARISON ARE ANCIENT AND GLOBAL

This is my deeper historical point to which I wish the present essay to stand. It is some- thing I insist on in my teaching and writing. Comparison did not begin in the nineteenth century with European philosophers and Christian colonialists. It began as far as we can see back in the historical record, and it began in altered states in individuals like the ancient Greek figures of Pythagoras and Parmenides and in complicated deposits of those altered states in texts like the Sanskrit Upanishads or the Gospel of John. The shaman, moreover, is a kind of Ur-figure here, the indigenous charismatic source and possession of nearly every kind of religiosity that came later. The shaman, diviner, or worker with the spirits is the ultimate comparative figure, even when the shaman is not “doing comparison” in any professional way.

Navigante will include many forms of knowing under the rubric of transversality, including “oracular forms of knowledge, plant-based knowledge, trance-related knowledge, mystical-hermeneutical knowledge procedures.”³ In short – divination, psychedelics, posses- sion, and interpretive revelation. In the transversal model, these cannot be explained away by our colonial reductions, to some cabinet of curiosities, but neither can they be “taken at face value.” Transversality calls us to take them all seriously but take none of them exclusively.⁴ Perhaps most critically of all, Navigante will also write that, “[a] transversal reorientation does not consist in thinking differently while keeping hegemonic presuppositions intact.”⁵

This is where his comparative approach becomes edgy, becomes critical in a contemporary theoretical sense. By “hegemonic presuppositions,” Navigante, after all, means Euro-American assumptions about the superiority of Western culture, the necessity and goodness of Christian mission, and the ultimate victory of neoliberal capitalism, Western technology, and, of course, Western science.

The poet-philosopher, I should add, also expresses collegial doubts about other aspects of my thought, particularly around what he perceives to be a relative lack of multiplicity and the mystical or apophatic dimensions of religious experience and expression that I do in fact tend to emphasize and out of which I try to theorize “religion.” His critical appreciation and poetic vision (really, a kind of poetic-spiritual orientation) caught my ear, and my heart. I wanted to learn more, to see something of what he was seeing, to say something of what he was saying. Hence this essay.

AN AMERICAN POETICS

I am not a European. I am an American who grew up in the heart of the U.S. in what is generally called the Midwest. I come from simple people – farmers and small business owners – with not the slightest inkling of what my learned European colleagues often take for granted, that is, the history of European esotericism and Continental philosophy.

I am interested in a new mode of poetics, not a set of rationalities that produced most of our prob- lems in the first place: convincing us that we are individuals and set apart from one another

I think this matters. I generally do not read German, French, and English philosoph- ical texts (although my library is filled with them – particularly Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung). I
think these thinkers are too often profoundly Eurocentric. I think Immanuel Kant, for example, was simply mistaken. The Kantian claim about the “limits of reason” is no doubt well thought out in those big books on my shelf, but I doubt very much that any of this particular aspect of his thought is based on altered states, which often goes entirely beyond what can be thought with words and reasons, anyway. Historical individuals in fact claim to know reality as it is all the time. Maybe they are mistaken. Maybe they are not. That is an open question for me, not a philosophical certainty. We also know that Kant was deceptive in print when it came to experiences that could not be slotted into his philosophy. Basically, Immanuel Kant lied.⁶

Perhaps most seriously of all for me – and this, I realize, is more of a rhetorical argu- ment, not exactly a philosophical one – I also think that we are losing the day, losing the public conversation, certainly in the States, precisely because of these philosophies and their inac- cessible languages and ideas. Too often when someone cites a European philosopher, I sigh, probably too loudly. I sigh not because I do not understand what is being said (I have usually read the philosopher in question), but because I want us to talk to people who speak common English, not turn them away with technical terms and languages they cannot speak and will never understand, much less speak.

This is the deeper reason for my constant focus on American counterculture and later popular culture, on film and television, and modes of learning that are accessible to nearly everyone. I understand perfectly well that this is my historical context. It is also, by the way, the historical context for the comparative study of religion in the States, which also began in the 1960s. “It is not about colonialism, it is about counterculture,” as I crystallize the idea. I think this rhetorical matter matters, a great deal. I am very concerned about translation and communication. To put the terms in a more literary mode, I am interested in a new mode of poetics, not a set of rationalities that produced most of our problems in the first place: convincing us that we are individuals and set apart from one another, that nature or matter is “dead,” that there is nothing after we die, that life is basically meaningless and without purpose, that all spiritual experiences are “hallucinations,” and so on. Navigante’s summary of non-Western worldviews hits home:

They don’t unify meaning towards the homogenous superordinate that characterized modern rationality in the West. They don’t define nature as a self-contained sphere of inanimate objects, nor do they consider that human beings are the only entities endowed with interi- ority; they don’t think that events are better explained by their causes, nor do they experience time as something we (as material bodies) merely occupy; they don’t possess universal truths to be disseminated, nor do they think the earth obliterates the dead. Judged from our own world-configuration, they push us to renounce many taken-for-granted assumptions about reality and relations.⁷

Here is the “gate toward new epistemological and ontological challenges that Western culture should assume instead of clinging to outdated (and counter-productive) strategies of survival.”⁸

The language is itself resonant with European and philosophical meanings. I really do care about these terms. I was trained in a discipline that was European to the core and was called, in English now, the History of Religions (in German it is known as Religionswissen- schaft). But this same European tradition taught me to read and admire Asian philosophers and scriptural texts, particularly of a Hindu and Buddhist persuasion, but also of a Daoist and Jain lineage. Put bluntly, my intellectual and religious heroes are not white. I also wrote my dissertation on Kālī, the Black One, in northeast India. I was even possessed by Her. And I mean that. I have written about that, probably too much.

And I was hardly alone. The entire History of Religions school was aimed, at the outset in the early 1960s (just before the counterculture broke), to move us past what its Romani- an-American founder, Mircea Eliade, knew as a profound and disturbing Eurocentrism. Eliade described himself as a pagan trying to be a Christian that is, as someone who was drawn existentially and intellectually to non-Christian forms of religion. He also very much wanted a “new humanism.” And he was looking for the beginnings of such a vision in India (he wrote his dissertation and early book on yoga and knew his own altered states beyond space and time through its practice), the indigenous shamanic traditions of the world (hence the first major book on shamanism, in 1951, no less), and in what he would call “magic,” “witchcraft,” and “occultism” (words that were all in the title of a late book of his).⁹ The American haters would burn a cross on his yard near the university for the latter phrase. The enflamed symbol is rife with racist histories in the States.

What am I trying to say? That I think and write in a tradition that has been “transversal” for as long as it has been around, for over six decades now. And this history of religions has its roots in other European and American traditions that go further back still (to nineteenth-cen- tury Theosophy and Spiritualism, Victorian and American psychical research, and Eranos).

COMPARING RELIGIONS IN THE CLASSROOM

I have taught an introductory course on the comparative study of religion for decades. I genuinely believe in comparison, and I use neither word (“believe” or “comparison”) lightly. I will explain why.

I have taught the comparative study of religion to a large audience at my home institu- tion, Rice University in Houston, Texas, for a little over a decade and a half (from 2008 to 2024). I taught a version of a similar course at my previous institution for nine years (from 1993 to 2002), a small liberal arts college in western Pennsylvania, Westminster College. I have also been working in the field of the history of religions since 1993. So, I have been working in the discipline for over three decades now, about whose pedagogy and implications I have written a great deal.¹⁰ I am getting old. Or mature. Or something.

At Westminster College, we called the course “Understanding Religious Experience and Expression.” Here at Rice we call it simply “RELI 101”–not very eloquent but I suppose useful enough. The course has something of a reputation or, if you want to be grand about it, lore. For one thing, it is big, really big by Rice standards. It attracted up to 275 students in its heyday, before the university initiated its first year writing intensive requirements, which instantly reduced the enrollment to around 100 or so (since the required seminars grabbed much of the humanities credit that was in fact driving the large number for RELI 101). That is where the numbers hover now–between 80 and 100.

The general demographics of the two institutions are also worth describing. Even though Westminster College was Presbyterian in its history and administrative spirit, most of our students, at least in the 1990s, were women who came from Roman Catholic families in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. We had a hard time recruiting male students. I think our numbers were up to something like 64:36 in terms of the gender norms of the time. Not quite 2:1, but close. I should add that the gender and cultural make-up of the course at Rice is completely different. The classroom attendance looks like the U.N., that is, it is very much a global commu- nity consisting of individuals from dozens of cultures and ethnicities. Most of the students are STEM-oriented, that is, come to us from the sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. The total undergraduate body is gendered in equitable and now openly transgendered ways.

About the same time that I took up RELI 101 at Rice from my colleague William B. Parsons, who had invented and grew it with the department’s alumna Jill Carroll, I was contacted by an editor at Wiley-Blackwell in Oxford named Rebecca Harkin. Rebecca asked me to consider writing a textbook on the comparative study of religion. “No way,” I answered in so many emailish words. “The world has too many textbooks on the world religions. We don’t need another.” And I thought that was that: one less thing to do. But Rebecca insisted and went further. “No, I want you to write what you want to write. I want you to come up with something different.” Well, that was interesting. And very persuasive as we continued to correspond. I agreed to proceed. So we did.
What I was thinking when I said “Yes” to Rebecca was Westminster College and an exchange I had there with another colleague, Bryan Rennie (an expert on Mircea Eliade). Bryan and I were struggling over how to teach “Understanding Religious Experience and Expression.” There were two usual ways to teach this particular class.

The first way, probably the most common, was the “world religions” model: the class goes through the big religions (usually five or six in number, depending upon one’s time and intellectual tastes) and describes them as well as one can, basically leaving all the obvious comparative questions in the students’ heads in a kind of unaddressed box, questions like, “And why do religions all over the world give different, or similar, answers to the same ques- tions?” Or “And why exactly do we keep finding stories of fathers killing sons?” Or “And where are the daughters?”

The second way to teach the introductory course is less common, perhaps way less common. It is “thematic.” One goes through the different big themes–myth, ritual, sacrifice, initiation, authority, institution, salvation, ecstatic experience, ultimate reality, and so on–and sees how the different religions answer or express these themes. One also introduces the general themes of critical theory: society, sexuality and gender, race, class, colonialism, and so on. There is not a severe limit on how many religions one can handle, since one is not really handling any. One is treating transcultural themes and critical ideas, not religions or civilizations.

Every religion is little more than a social practice, institutionalauthority, or emotional fix

It was the late 1990s. I was frustrated. I was also growing suspicious that the world religions model encouraged and sustained religious identity in ways I was finding increas-
ingly troubling. Basically, the course was encouraging the question: “And with which box do I identify?” As if human identity is a simple thing, even within a culture or tradition (or a single psyche), that can be put in a box, or a two-week conversation. Geopolitical events of ominous scope, most all involving religious identity, the specter of “terrorism,” and war were on the horizon. I remember 9/11 well. I was sitting in a Westminster classroom, watching the falling towers in a “smart-classroom,” broadcast on a gigantic screen on the wall. Religious identity itself was in question.

Not that the thematic approach was any better. I had tried out this approach in the class- room, too. Honestly, it seemed too scatter-shot and disorganized. Comparative patterns and critical theories were both inadequate for an introductory course. One could claim a certain comparative confusion and theoretical knowledge, but not much more. Or so was my conclusion.

I knew we only had four months and a single class for most of the human beings with whom we worked every week. Perhaps most seriously, I had grown existentially disillu- sioned with the introductory class itself. My joke was that we spent the entire fall teaching young people that every religion is little more than a social practice, institutional authority, or emotional fix. We reduced everything to basic mush, and then we sent them home for Christmas. I could well guess where that one was going – to a kind of confusion that would lead to a spiritual tailspin or a forced forgetting. Probably mostly the latter. This was nihilism on display, as a college course on less. It all disgusted me.

Then Bryan suggested we try something else: that we engage the existential issues more directly (the comparative questions were intense and obvious) and try to form the course around an “initiation” cycle. He was referencing the anthropologist Victor Turner and his well- known tripartite division of the initiatory cycle into three basic stages: a pre-initiation identity, a middle or “liminal” phase in which that identity is dissolved or symbolically killed, and a post-initiation phase in which a new identity can be formed. Turner, and before him Arnold van Gennep, had shown that such an initiatory cycle appears around the world. It is a strong transcultural ritual pattern, if not a universal one (I had learned never to utter that word, rather like the V-name in Harry Potter – but there it was regardless, like Lord Voldemort himself).

I liked Bryan’s suggestion, as it gave us a way of addressing the existential questions of the students and not “bracketing” them away in some kind of forbidden space that they could only explore back in their dorms (not very well) or suppress entirely, as their teachers were teaching them to do. The pedagogical key, it turned out, was the last phase–given the students a way to “put the pieces back together again.” You could tell the students that the course was going to help them define their belief systems in part one (it was) and then take their worlds apart (we did), but as long as you gave them space and time to reconfigure, even tentatively, this world at the end of the semester, they were good. So was the course. I was happy.

This is what I planned, more or less, for Rebecca and Wiley-Blackwell: a three-part textbook that dealt with the existential questions of comparison, forthrightly and complexly, refusing to deny the costs or the promises of comparison. I also planned to do the writing with my doctoral students. I just did not know enough about, well, everything. Accordingly, to prepare for the writing and co-writing, I taught a year-long graduate seminar for the Human- ities Research Center on “Comparison in Theory and Practice” in 2009. Doctoral students from Anthropology, History, and English inspired me, defined my voice. I chose three to help me with the book: Ata Anzali, who would write the sections on Islam; Andrea R. Jain, who would write the sections on Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism; and Erin Prophet, who would write the sections on new religious movements.

What I eventually conceived for Rebecca was a way of backgrounding the religions them- selves and foregrounding the comparative practice itself. I worked with the tripartite model of initiation that Bryan had suggested: defining one’s world, absolving or dissolving one’s world, and reconstituting one’s new post-initiatory world. It was all about existential involvement, questions that were also quests. It was about life. This in turn gave me a way to use the class as a kind of philosophical exercise or spiritual encounter. No more hiding. No more denying.

The textbook came out in 2014 as Comparing Religions: Coming to Terms. The textbook was re-released ten years later as Comparing Religions: The Study of Us that Changes Us (2024), now with an ever greater emphasis on altered states as the historical origins of comparison and a focus on Gloria Anzáldua and her la facultad, a “mixed” (mestiza) practice or “mestiza consciousness” that arises on the borders, in between peoples, and tries to think toward some common or shared humanity, one that is evolving through psychical or paranormal expe- riences that erupt particularly in individuals who have been traumatized because of these “borderlands.” Anzaldúa, it turns out, knew these altered states, this mixed form of conscious- ness, and these paranormal awakenings intimately and energetically. She, too, was quite liter- ally possessed by the spirits.¹¹

There was a fourth doctoral student in the mix now, an expert on indigenous religions and the theoretical questions that they invoke for the comparativist, Stefan Sanchez. It was Sanchez who actually introduced me to the work of Anzaldúa.

Both subtitles are important. I meant by “Coming to Terms” both senses of the English phrase, that is, getting to know the general categories of the study of religion, but also, and more fundamentally coming to terms in an existential sense with the act of comparison. By “The Study of Us that Changes Us” I meant to refer to the existential or spiritual components of comparison. I meant a change so deep that one is not really aware of it, until it is too late. I often joke that such a comparative faculty is a bit like the Trojan Horse. Once it is in the gates, weird people start jumping out, and it is too late.

I have learned a great deal writing the different versions and watching how people react to the first (I have not yet taught the second). A few memories stick in my mind. One was a close friend and colleague who asked me one day where the chapter on Judaism is. I am not sure what I said to her, but there is no chapter on Judaism, or Christianity, or Islam, or Hinduism, or anything else. That is kind of the point. The religions, and so religious identity, are called into question as stable essences or things.

I also remember well the general postmodern conviction that meta-narratives are somehow out; that all such grand ideas are hegemonic and colonizing; and that one cannot do comparison anyway, because rigorous thought is, supposedly, only about difference, locality, and history. Sameness is always a bad thing. Or so the story goes. As my words suggest, I confess I always found these convictions to function more like dogmas, as if Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault had become infallible gods. I kept asking my colleagues, “And why are your graduate mentors infallible?”

The postmodern ideas were extremely helpful, and I use them all the time, but they are often simply inadequate, not true enough, inadequate. For example, I could find no model of social justice that did not presume both sameness and difference. And I could not deny that some kinds of religious experience really do look alike across cultures and times. I am thinking of mystical experience, to name just one example (and there is an immense critical literature there). But I am also thinking of divination rituals and precognition, which happen everywhere and always, not just to some peoples in some cultures. One can always historicize the content of this or that mythology and ritual system, of course, but one can hardly deny that cultures always mythologize or tell stories and then act out those stories in daily ritual and life. Content is clearly relative. Function is clearly not. Nor are the human abilities.

I also discovered that colleagues continued to publish books on comparison throughout the 1990s and into the millennium, regardless of elite academics telling us that they could not do it. It was just a bit funny.

One can always historicize the content of this or that mythology and ritual system, of course, but one can hardly deny that cultures always mythologize or tell stories and then act out those stories in daily ritual and life

On one level, the academy said over and over again, “You cannot do this.” Then it just went ahead and did it, not because it is bad, but because it is good and necessary, and, well, how the human brain works. Evolutionary biology, for example, would not be, if it were not for comparison:

Darwin compared this wing to that wing, this leg to that leg. Nor would we know a thing about ecology or, for that matter, race, gender, and sexuality. Locating parts in a whole, acknowledging sameness as well as difference, is foundational to pretty much all of our crit- ical theories, whether they foreground this fact or not. These are theoretical points, however. Most of all, I came to a practical and pedagogical conclusion, which I captured in a kind of soundbite that went like this: “If you are not going to do comparison, then others will, and they will do it badly.” I think such advice has been borne out over and over again. We better well do comparison with all the critical theories at our disposal, but also realize that there is a shared and common world beyond our theories of which our students are expressions and in which they live their daily lives. These worlds have moral, social, and political consequences, moreover. They give life. And they end life. If we will not address what we share, who we are, in a global comparative fashion, other people will do this instead, and intellectuals will inevitably not like what they say.

The biblical questions in particular are intense. Because I was myself trained early on in biblical studies and had read the Bible many times, I found these texts (and the assumptions of my Christian students) to be powerful ways to show how comparison works, or at least can work. My joke at Westminster was that I could say that the Buddha was really pudgy and green (I was thinking of those Chinese jade statues), and few would flinch. There were no Buddhists in my classrooms, after all. But if I said that the historical Jesus had little to do with contem- porary conceptions of Christ, that he counseled his closest disciples to hate their mothers and fathers and castrate themselves (the gospels have him saying exactly those things), or that he was a paranormal prodigy (he was), all hell would break loose.

So I said these things, over and over again. I also say them in the textbook. I want to offend. People need to be provoked out of their comfort zone, out of their very identity. Other- wise, they will not move. They will not change.

THE ONE AND THE MANY

What I hear and read Adrián Navigante doing is writing like a gifted poet and thinking like a nuanced postmodern philosopher, emphasizing multiplicity, questioning unity as total- izing, and criticizing the Western Christian project that understood itself and its missioning/ colonizing role as a truth-system that should be hegemonic or all-defining for everyone every- where. I understand that the latter history is what is partly behind the contemporary criticism of meta-narratives and ontological truth claims.

Such an all-embracing exclusivism, of course, is also what comparison, done with enough nuance and sophistication anyway, is poised against, if in, well, multiple ways. I hesitate somewhat, since exclusivism is also a comparative practice (that is, it has an answer for why human beings are so religiously different – people outside the exclusive truth claim are just mistaken), but also because most religious systems are exclusive in some way or other, even if they do not act on this exclusivism, as European Christianity and many forms of Buddhism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Jainism, and Sikhism, to name the most obvious, clearly did. I understand that European intellectuals are responding to their own histories, but what of the imperial and colonial histories of other cultures and times in Asia, the Amer- icas, and the Middle East? What of the exclusive nature of religious truth claims in general? As I joke in the textbook, the Buddha did not come to teach that only people in north India did not have souls or could know the liberation of emptiness. He taught that everyone could, from China to California and beyond. The Buddhist teaching on the non-existence of the soul and the impermanence of all things is not a “local” thing. It is not a cultural “difference.” It is a normative truth statement applicable everywhere.

Or to return closer to home, my home anyway, when my friend and co-writer Eliza- beth Krohn was struck by lightning in her Jewish synagogue parking lot in 1988 and returned with the stunned experience that “God is unconditional love,” she did not mean the phrase in any local, historical, or Jewish way. She meant it as true for everyone for all time. She was speaking of the ultimate nature of reality, not for this or that religious tradition or community.¹² I employ these examples because they work well to demonstrate just how modern and relative the present commitments to difference and historicism really are. They themselves are relative and local, very recent, actually. To think otherwise is to not think historically in as radical a fashion as is possible (since even this historicism is historical–the snake bites its own tail). It is also to miss what is at stake in truly radical comparison–the nature of reality itself.

This is not to say that comparison done well is without a critical edge. Indeed, transver- sality is much like comparison as I encourage the orientation in the textbook and classroom, a middle space that does not sign its name to this or that culture, belief system, or ritual practice, that sits “in-between.” It might take part in such a religious construction or faith community, but it also recognizes that each and every culture or practice is a social construction and has multiple histories. It also knows about and practices critical theory from Émile Durkheim, Edmund Husserl, and Gloria Anzaldúa to Friedrich Nietzsche, Mary Douglass, Amitav Ghosh, and Edward Said. It knows more than a little about philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, sociology, and evolutionary cognitive psychology.

I struggle with the One and the Many, with unity and plurality, and I suspect that every “balance” is in fact a “compromise,” an emphasizing of this or that when both capture and express something of the truth of things. Hence I am comfortable with the postmodern critique as a critique (and not as an absolute truth-claim). I also know that other intellectuals go back and forth, including and especially William James, who wrote what is still perhaps the most oft-read book in the comparative study of religion – The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901). I take heart in the fact that James also spoke of the paradoxical presence of both monism and pluralism late in his life. He could not decide between them, but he could affirm both. And he did.

I have also directed dissertations that land on conclusions that are plural and singular at the same time. One of the most recent, on a transcultural history of the subtle body, ended with a “somatic pluralism” modeled on the “multi-naturalism” of Eduardo Viveiros Castro but also, I think, going beyond it in ontological reach and implication. The dissertation-become-book, after all, argues that the subtle body, which is also the human body, is genuinely multiple and cannot be construed as singular or monolithic. There is no single map or model of the subtle body because there is no single subtle body.¹³

THINKING AFTER RELIGION

I coined an expression in How to Think Impossibly: to think-with.¹⁴ It is admittedly a minor sort of coinage, but still. I added the hyphen to emphasize that when I think-with an experiencer, I am taking the experience seriously, which is to say that I think the experiencer is knowing something of reality as such, if always coded in the visionary symbolism of the place and time. I am not “bracketing out” the ontological shock of the experience. I am not reducing it or explaining it in some philosophical system that I happen to think is true. But neither am I asserting it in any kind of literal way. I am neither debunking nor believing. I am doing some- thing different. I am also assuming that there is critical theory embedded in the experience, waiting to be drawn out in conversation and dialogue. Hence the hyphenated phrase.

I want to use another expression here to get at what I think the transversal orientation is about. I want to write of “thinking after” different religious worldviews. I mean the expression in both senses of the English term: “after” implies both a keen listening that tracks what is being said and done as faithfully as one can, but also an abandoning or letting go. I intend both senses. And I use the adverb “faithfully” intentionally here, as there is something of the epistemology of belief in what I am trying to say. I do not generally like the word “belief,” but I also recognize that belief is a tricky thing. It may well be necessary to result in particular religious effects. This is how much religion works, after all: one fakes it until one makes it. Moreover, a particular belief may well be “true” in some cases, in the sense that there are certain things that we do not directly know, and maybe cannot know, but are nevertheless the case. And I say this in a completely non-egalitarian fashion and count myself among those who cannot know, who must “believe.”

Let me give you two quick examples.
Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche wrote a good deal about the impossible, how individuals who had not known directly what he knew could not know what he knew and so would consider it “impossible.” One of his many metaphors was how he walks about on a floor above the rest of us. Individuals on the floor below, on my floor down here, put stuff between their reality and his so as to silence the sound of his steps and give the illusion that theirs is the only floor and the true reality. But it is simply not the case.

I believe Nietzsche in the sense that (a) I do think he wrote and spoke out of a form of direct knowledge that (b) I do not possess and cannot possess. I do not, for example, have direct access to the eternal recurrence of the same or the coming future human or Superman (Übermensch). But I am convinced he did. He knew both truths. Accordingly, he spoke of them endlessly, including poetically and mythically (in Thus Spoke Zarathustra) in the last years of his life. I do not imagine for a moment that I have to had those experiences to accept those truths. I accept that Nietzsche did know and did so experience, which means that I “believe” him.

Edwin Abbott is another example. Abbott was a theological author who wrote almost 50 books, including the little but deeply influential Flatland. The little “romance” imagines what a two-dimensional entity must think, or not think, about a three-dimensional world that inter- venes from “above” it. Pretty much nothing. The two-dimensional being cannot imagine or think such an impossibility. But “belief” is perfectly appropriate. The two-dimensional being is truly justified to “believe” in the reality of the three-dimensional world, since it is so.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

I understand, then, the postmodern critique of meta-narratives and the One. I just do not accept the critique in toto, not because I do not think there is “an irrational fear of (heter- ogenous) multiplicity lying behind those constructs.”¹⁵ Of course, there is. My suspicions of the suspicion run deeper into the historical fact of pluralism again. After all, the experiences of and subsequent convictions in the One are not just behind modernity, Christian theology and mission, European colonialism, and Marxist or Hegelian thought. Such experiences and knowledges are also behind much of pagan or Neoplatonic philosophy (I mean, they even called it “the One”). Or is this the source of the idea that Platonism, this assumed separation of immanence and transcendence, this “metaphysics,” is itself the deepest problem of the West?

So why is the same experienced separation apparent pretty much everywhere we look? What about philosophical thought in India, China, and Asia in general? Or the fact that the plants
of the Amazonian basin or of the deserts of the Americas work with people from all over the world, if yes, of course, in very different ways. Again, it is a both-and, not an either-or.

Human beings experience the same things everywhere and always, ‘accidentally’. That is because we share a common world, the same planet and the same ecosystem, which is not any of our cultures, rituals, or mythologies but that expresses them all.

I simply want to affirm that similarity along with the differences, not pick one or the other. And where exactly do we stop? Do we reject particular beliefs because they cannot be slotted into what a few European intellectuals claimed in the last few centuries? I am not trying to be European or Christian here. I am observing what I hope is a much bigger chunk of the history of religions. One can reject such an emphasis on human unity, of course, but only by slicing off much of the planet.

This is why, when I wrote The Superhumanities, I spent so much time on ancient Hermetism, on Islamic thinkers in India, and invoked a modern Hindu guru as one of the exemplars of the method I was proposing: Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897-1981). The historical precedents, or realizations, of the superhumanities as comparative method are in actual fact everywhere and are in no way European or white.¹⁶ This is also why I located and owned the apophatic nature of my own comparative thought and elsewhere wrote of an “accidental perennialism.”¹⁷ I do not think the religions are pointing to such a mystical unity, or that they intend this in any kind of unconscious or implicit way. Indeed, the religions often get in the way of or actively prevent such a realization. But I do think that human beings experience the same things everywhere and always, “accidentally.” That is because we share a common world, the same planet and the same ecosystem, which is not any of our cultures, rituals, or mythologies but that expresses them all. Can we speak and write of something of that now? Can we practice it?

1. See, for example, Hwa Yol Jung, Phenomenology, Transversality, and World Philosophy (Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2021); and Hyo-Dong Lee, Spirit, Qi, and the Multitude: A Comparative Theology for the Democ- racy of Creation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).
2. Adrián Navigante, “Transversality: Questions of Method,” Transcultural Dialogues, Issue 13, May 2023, Spring Equinox, 16.
3. Navigante, “Transversality,” 16.
4. I have made related arguments throughout my life, including over two decades ago now in my second book, which was all about the mystical experiences of scholars of mysticism; and in my third book, which attempted to move beyond “faith” and “reason” to a new kind of “gnosis” in the comparative study of religion, that is, to a place of transcultural transversality. See Jeffrey J. Kripal, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); and The Serpent’s Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). These early books may not suffi- ciently embrace the critical methods of which Navigante writes, but I have tried to do so recently, particularly in The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities (Chicago 2022). I think Navigante and I are groping toward a common vision, with a whole host of other thinkers, activists, and artists . . . and, frankly, diviners, mediums, and psychics.
5. Navigante, “Transversality,” 16.
6. Immanuel Kant, Kant on Swedenborg: Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, ed. by Gregory R. Johnson (West Chester 2003).
7. Navigante, “Transversality,” 11.
8. Navigante, “Transversality,” 11.
9. These books were, in chronological order: Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1933); Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951); and Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
10. It turns out that I have been writing about pedagogy and the classroom for some time. These inter- woven themes run like red threads through my life. See, for example, Jeffrey J. Kripal, “The Dream of Scholarship: Some Notes on the Historian of Mysticism as a Dreaming Creative,” in Kelly Bulkeley, ed., Dreams and Dreaming: A Reader in Religious Studies, Anthropology, History, and Psychology (New York 2001); “Teaching Hindu Tantrism With Freud: Psychoanalysis as Critical Theory and Mystical Technique,” for Diane Jonte-Pace, ed., Teaching Freud in Religious Studies (New York 2003); “Comparative Mystics: Scholars as Gnostic Diplomats,” in Jeffrey M. Perl, ed., Talking Peace with Gods, Symposium on the Reconciliation of Worldviews, Part 1, Common Knowledge, 10:3 (Fall 2004); “Liminal Pedagogy: The Liberal Arts and the Transforming Ritual of Religious Studies,” in James Boyd White, ed., How Should We Talk About Religion? Perspectives, Contexts, Particularities (South Bend 2006); William B. Parsons and Jeffrey J. Kripal, “Psychology and Religion at Rice University: A Brief History,” Journal of Pastoral Psychology 59:1 (2010); “Secrets in the Seats: The Erotic, the Paranormal, and the Free Spirit,” for William
    B. Parsons, ed., Teaching Mysticism (New York 2011); “Understanding the Nature of Our Offense: A Dialogue on the Twenty-First Century Study of Religion for Use in the Classroom,” co-written with Laurie Patton, for Brian
    K. Pennington and Amir Hussain, eds., Teaching Religion and Violence (New York 2012); “’Comparison Gets You Nowhere!’ The Comparative Study of Religion and the Spiritual But Not Religious,” in William B. Parsons, ed., Being Spiritual But Not Religious: Past, Present, Future(s) (New York 2020); “Humanism and Higher Education,” in Anthony B. Pinn, Oxford Handbook of Humanism (New York 2021); and “Comparing Religions in Public: Rural America, Evangelicals, and the Prophetic Function of the Humanities,” in William David Hart, ed., Educating Humanists: The Challenge of Sustaining Communities in the Contemporary Era (Switzerland 2022).
11. See my discussion of Gloria Anzaldúa, her queer or lesbian postcolonial criticism, and her “mixed” paranormal comparativism in The Superhumanities, 190-198.
12. See Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal, Changed in a Flash: One Woman’s Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (Berkeley 2018).
13. Simon Cox, The Subtle Body: A Genealogy (New York 2021).
14. See Jeffrey J. Kripal, How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else (Chicago 2024). This essay is an extension of that book.
15. Navigante, 10.
16. Kripal, The Superhumanites, 68-73. See all of chapter 1 for the historical precedents.
17. See Kripal, The Superhumanites, chapter 3. See also Jeffrey J. Kripal, “The Future of the Human(i- ties): Mystical Literature, Paranormal Phenomena, and the Politics of Knowledge,” for Edward F. Kelly and Paul Marshall, eds., Consciousness Unbound: Liberating Mind from the Tyranny of Materialism (Lanham, Maryland 2021).