I’m a fan of Jeffrey Kripal, the Rice University religion professor, who is a little bit crazy and a lot brilliant. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, he makes a provocative plea for the formal, scientific study of paranormal realms of human experience.

Did you know that Mark Twain had an eerie dream that prophesied his brother’s  funeral weeks before his brother died, and had written about it? Did you know episodes like that happened to him a lot? I didn’t. Kripal says you don’t have to work hard to find stories like that in the experience of ordinary people (I’ve had a few), but scientists and academic researchers refuse to take them seriously as worthy of investigation. He concedes that it is nearly impossible to reproduce such experiences in a lab setting, and speculates as to why:

There is no trauma, love, or loss there. No one is in danger or dying. Your neighborhood is not on fire. The professional debunker’s insistence, then, that the phenomena play by his rules and appear for all to see in a safe and sterile laboratory is little more than a mark of his own ignorance of the nature of the phenomena in question. To play by those rules is like trying to study the stars at midday. It is like going to the North Pole to study those legendary beasts called zebras. No doubt just anecdotes.

Context matters. Methods that rely on or favor extreme conditions are employed in science all the time to discover and demonstrate knowledge. As Aldous Huxley pointed out long ago in his own defense of “mystical” experiences suggestive of spirit or soul, we have no reason to deduce that water is composed of two gases glued together by invisible forces. We know this only by exposing water to extreme conditions, by traumatizing it, and then by detecting and measuring the gases with technology that no ordinary person possesses or understands. The situation is eerily analogous with impossible scenarios like those of Twain, the wife, and the Swedish seer. They are generally available only in traumatic situations, when the human being is being “boiled” in illness, stroke, coma, danger, or near-death.

We build the Large Hadron Collider to subject matter to extreme conditions so we can study its properties. How can we be so sure that certain properties of human consciousness that tend only to manifest themselves under conditions of extreme emotional pressure aren’t genuine, even though we cannot reproduce them in a lab?

Kripal says that the materialist lens distorts the academic study of religion, which is allowed to examine all the things religion is, except what it is essentially:

For example, individuals have been seeing dead loved ones (or loved ones about to die at a distance) for millennia, which suggests strongly that experiences like those of Twain, the widowed wife, and Swedenborg are very much a part of our world and not simply constructed by culture. Such comparisons are deeply suspect these days, mostly because they end up suggesting something at work in history that is not strictly materialist—like a mind that knows what is going to happen before it happens, or a departed soul that appears to his sleeping wife.

In the same vein, we are told, again quite correctly, that religion is about power and politics, or economics, or patriarchy, or empire and colonial oppression, or psychological projection, or the denial of death, or—now the latest—cognitive templates, evolutionary adaptation, and computerlike synapses. And ultimately, of course, what religion is really about is nothing, since we are nothing but meaningless, statistically organized matter bouncing around in empty, dead space.

In the rules of this materialist game, the scholar of religion can never take seriously what makes an experience or expression religious, since that would involve some truly fantastic vision of human nature and destiny, some transhuman divinization, some mental telegraphy, dreamlike soul, clairvoyant seer, or cosmic consciousness. All of that is taken off the table, in principle, as inappropriate to the academic project. And then we are told that there is nothing “religious” about religion, which, of course, is true, since we have just discounted all of that other stuff.

Ultimately this comes down to the mystery of consciousness. Is the mind the same thing as the brain? Or does mind exist in a field around the subject, and use the brain as its transmitter? The former implies materialism, but the latter is true only if strict materialism is untrue, or at least incomplete. How will we ever know if we don’t allow for the possibility that consciousness has an immaterial basis? Read the whole essay. The radio model of consciousness presented at the end is fascinating to think about.