The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained

This is an incredibly lucid book that brings an important—yet often overlooked or derided—aspect of human experience to the forefront: The encounter with high strangeness. Here we are talking about UFOs, aliens, ghosts, elves, gods, angels, demons, and any number of other cultural descriptors (historical and contemporary) used as an attempt to understand and integrate (or dismiss) these encounters. Rather than try to reduce these kinds of experiences to a simple materialist or psychological context, while also not accepting religious or mythic frameworks at face value, Whitley Strieber and Jeff Kripal offer a new way to examine the unknown that honors both the past and present and yet goes beyond both. This is not just another book that offers “the answer” or even “an answer”: Strieber and Kripal offer a way to ask questions that allows a conversation to open up to serious and intelligent dialog on this difficult and confusing topic. It's way to examine the stories we live by and reconstruct them in a new light. This work addresses the believer, the skeptic, the curious, and the debunker without falling into the conversational dead-ends that such positions can lead to. Quite frankly, I believe this is a foundational text for cultural conversation and intellectual inquiry for the next several decades. It is THAT important.While it is an “intellectual” book in that it invites deep thought, the profoundly human nature of the experiences examined make the book very accessible to a wide audience. The synergy between these two authors works well—Strieber, a very articulate and thoughtful writer in addition to being one of the most famous of “abductees”, goes back and forth with Kripal, a professor of comparative religious studies who brings academic rigor and methodology to the conversation. Together they are able to clarify and call each other out, which leads to the most promising framework for discussing the unknown I have encountered to date. It goes far beyond “alien” and takes a step into the depths of the mystery of what it means to be human.In many ways I have been using—and living—the approach Strieber and Kripal present for much of my adult life but had not yet articulated with such clarity. For this effort I am personally very grateful. It's one of those rare books that I feel I can hand to people and, if they take it to heart, may change and enrich the way they live in the world. It is a book that can create common ground for addressing this profound—and profoundly complex—aspect of our human experience.The one major criticism I have of the book has been echoed by others and has to do with structure rather than content. The final chapter of the book communicates important points and feelings from Strieber; however, it doesn't quite feel like it should have been the final chapter. Rather, it feels like it should have been somewhere in the middle, or that there should have been one or two more chapters following to “bring it all home”. Really, it's a minor quibble that doesn't take away from the rest of the work.Get this book. Share this book. Talk about this book. And, most importantly, take the chance to talk about these—perhaps your own—experiences in this new light.

I have come to this fantastic(al) new book as a long-time fan of Jeffrey J. Kripal. I have been reading and re-reading his corpus of books for the past five years or so, honing my own interpretive and comparative method through the prism of his works, being that his primary focus of interest intersects directly with mine, namely, the wide-ranging field of 'paranormal phenomena,'--mystical experiences, alien contact, telepathic and non-local psychic events, and the magical potential of the hermeneutic method itself. I can say without question that this book has helped clarify my ideas on these and many other topics of personal concern, acting in many ways as mirror through which to gaze and reflect upon my own experiences, beliefs, and soul.The image oh-so carefully cast upon this particular mirror is not only mine, however, but also that of Whitley Strieber.I had never read one of Strieber's books upon picking up The Super Natural. I of course knew who he was, having been the subject of an essay in one of Kripal's previous books, Mutants and Mystics. Regardless, I was most certainly not prepared for the level of intimate detail and sheer strangeness that Strieber offers here, giving the reader a panoramic, 3D view into his heart and psyche, as well as into the Alien itself. The bravery it must take to put such notions and ordeals to page must be monumental, and for that Strieber is to be commended.The book moves in alternating chapters, Strieber offering subjective, personalized accounts of his mysterious, super natural life events, with Kripal weaving a context and methodology for interpreting these events, putting forth an objective balance for Strieber's amazing tales. Ultimately, by following the guidelines laid out by Kripal over the course of the book, the subjective-objective perspectives begin to blend and meld, transforming into an experience which encompasses both the subjective and the objective, the material and the spiritual, the rational and the imaginal,, the scientific and the magical. This is not a book of either-or, but of both-and, or, as Kripal puts it, learning to sit with the dichotomy in question and allowing gnosis to arise from within that tension.The primary step necessary for achieving such a gnosis arrives through an understanding of The Human as Two, an idea (or, better yet, a reality) Kripal has explored in his previous works. Here, however, he offers concrete tools for examining this naturally-supernatural way of being human, the tools themselves being comparison, phenomenology, history, hermeneutics, erotics, saying away, the traumatic secret, energetics, and saying again, each of which is laid out in great detail in the book. By undertaking this comprehensive methodology one has a framework through which to understand their deeper and higher potentials without falling prey to an absolutist mentality, social convention, or dogmatism, be it scientific, religious, or New Age.I will certainly read this book again in the near future, as it is, in my view, a template through which facts are transformed into experiences, knowledge is transmuted into gnosis, and the human is re-cast as the Alien.