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Whitley Strieber

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The Super Natural: Why the Unexplained Is Real Kindle Edition

by Whitley Strieber (Author), Jeffrey J. Kripal (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Two of today's maverick authors on anomalous experience present a perception-altering and intellectually thrilling analysis of why the paranormal is real, but radically different from what is conventionally understood.

Whitley Strieber (Communion) and Jeffrey J. Kripal (J. Newton Rayzor professor of religion at Rice University) team up on this unprecedented and intellectually vibrant new framing of inexplicable events and experiences.

Rather than merely document the anomalous, these authors--one the man who popularized alien abduction and the other a renowned scholar and "renegade advocate for including the paranormal in religious studies" (The New York Times)--deliver a fast-paced and exhilarating study of why the supernatural is neither fantasy nor fiction but a vital and authentic aspect of life.

Their suggestion? That all kinds of "impossible" things, from extra-dimensional beings to bilocation to bumps in the night, are not impossible at all: rather, they are a part of our natural world. But this natural world is immeasurably more weird, more wonderful, and probably more populated than we have so far imagined with our current categories and cultures, which are what really make these things seem "impossible."

The Super Natural considers that the natural world is actually a "super natural world"--and all we have to do to see this is to change the lenses through which we are looking at it and the languages through which we are presently limiting it. In short: The extraordinary exists if we know how to look at and think about it.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

A cohesive reframing of the 'pantheon of the unknown' . . . A thought-provoking, intelligent reconceptualization of supernatural events.-- "Kirkus"

About the Author

Whitley Strieber is the author of more than twenty-five novels and works of nonfiction, including The Wolfen, The Hunger, Communion, The Grays, and The Coming Global Superstorm (with Art Bell), which was the inspiration for the film The Day after Tomorrow. His website, Unknown Country, which explores the edge of science and reality, is the largest of its kind in the world.

Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion at Rice University. He is the author of six books, including Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred, and Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Already World

They took a little hair off my head and cut my nails. I asked questions in my mind, but before I could verbalize them, they answered back very softly but directly, "We are making a new you." I asked him, "Are you like angels?" and he replied, “Not as you have been taught.”
An Anonymous Letter Writer in The Communion Letters

I am afraid of this book. There is something about it, something explosive and new. It is not a neutral book. It is an apocalypse of thought waiting for you, the reader, to actualize.

The world will not really end as you turn these pages, of course. Not the real one anyway. Much might well be lost—we hope. You should know that. But more, much more—really everything—might well be gained. In a few words, this is a book about a new world, the next world that has already arrived, that has always been here, whether we have recognized its presence or not.

In the pages that follow, Whitley and I explore the proposal that we are all embedded in a much larger, fiercely alive and richly conscious reality that is only, at best, indirectly addressed by everything that the human species has ever thought or believed. The religions, for example, have been attempts to look at and engage this conscious reality as if it were primarily concerned with us, but we don’t really know that, and in fact we cannot know that. Not at least yet.

Our proposal? To venture outside the present houses of faith without forgetting those family homes or leaving the spirit behind. To embrace science in a new way, by promoting a more generous vision of the full human experience of reality that can embrace and ponder “more stuff,” especially the wild, fantastic stuff that shouts, glows, and zaps in these pages. And, above all, to understand, to really understand that we are already and always have been living in a super natural world, that we ourselves are highly evolved prisms or mediums of this super nature coming into consciousness, and that many of the things that we are constantly told are impossible are in fact not only possible but also the whispered secrets of what we are, where we are, and why we are here. This is a book about that Already World.

To my knowledge, nothing like it has ever been attempted. Here, one of the most widely read figures in UFO and abduction literature and a seasoned (take that either way) professor of comparative religion sit down to encounter each other’s thought—seriously and respectfully. As the author of the twentieth century’s most influential and intimate description of an abduction event, Communion (1987), Whitley sets on our shared table his visions of alien spectral figures that seemed at once physical and not physical, at once a thing and a thought, at once sexual and spiritual, at once traumatic and ecstatic. I bring the practices of the professional study of religion to the table in order to explain what historians of religion have written about these paradoxical things (it turns out, a lot) and how we might make sense of them without surrendering our critical faculties and understandable skepticism. We work in tandem. We read each other. We rewrite our chapters in the light of what the other has written. In the process, we rewrite ourselves.
01
The text is at once intimate and professional, both in content and form. Whitley, far from being what he has been portrayed in the media—that is, an advocate for belief in alien abduction—reveals himself in his chapters as a questioning and self-critical nonreligious but spiritual man, telling his story as he has lived it, as a journey through unexplained but extremely powerful perceptions. I take the role of the trained comparativist, framing my responses to Whitley’s narrative through the tools of my trade. I introduce technical terms. I use footnotes. I talk history. I play the professor. I demonstrate how the modern experience of the alien coming down from the sky can be compared to the ancient experience of the god descending from the heavens, but not in the ways that are commonly accepted today: “Not as you have been taught,” as the letter writer (and now you, as the reader of that letter) is telepathically told in our opening epigraph.

Most of all, I engage Whitley’s thought as an intuitive set of comparative and interpretive practices. I demonstrate how Whitley has, all along, been offering us a most radical theory of religion and the human spirit. I make explicit the principles that are implicit in his writing and give these the names and nuances that have been developed in the study of religion over the last two hundred years. Whitley in turn challenges me and, by extension, my field with experienced realities that few intellectuals are prepared to admit exist, much less are willing to study and try to understand: things like the imagination’s ability to materialize its content in the physical environment, a home invasion and an implant, the human soul as a real form of energy that is not dependent on the body-brain for its existence, and an emergent mythology that is not entirely imaginary.

As my initial invocation of an apocalypse of thought makes clear, neither of us takes this conversation lightly. Both of us have known professional rejection, religious hate campaigns, censorship, and outright character slander for what we have sincerely thought out loud in the public square. We know perfectly well that what we think cannot be slotted into the present order of scientific knowledge and religious belief. We will not pretend otherwise.

Nevertheless, we want to speak clearly and respectfully to both the open-minded skeptic and the open-minded believer, as we think both have something important to bring to the table. And are we not all believers and skeptics at different moments? The final hope and intended result of this book is not yet another set of pat answers or clear conclusions about strange things. We have no such easy or settled answers. Our intentions for this book are more humble. We want to model a different sort of conversation about the importance of experienced anomalies, one that is more evenhanded, more careful, more intellectually generous, and so more useful.

We want to shift the conversation.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00X5936EK
Publisher ‏ : ‎ TarcherPerigee; Reprint edition (February 2, 2016)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 2, 2016
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2133 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 376 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #433,792 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #202 in Metaphysics (Kindle Store)
- #341 in Occult Ghosts & Haunted Houses
- #733 in Occult Unexplained Mysteries

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4.5 432 ratings

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Whitley Strieber

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About Whitley Strieber

I started my writing career with the Wolfen in 1979. There have followed since over 40 books during a long writing lifetime. My books the Wolfen, the Hunger, Communion and Superstorm have all been made into films (Superstorm as the Day After Tomorrow). My series Alien Hunter was a TV series called Hunters on the SyFy Channel.

In 1985 I had an experience of close encounter that frightened and confused me. I was injured by it but still could not believe that it had been a physical experience. It was just too strange. Still, I was very curious and began going out into the woods at night from our little upstate New York cabin to try to somehow re-engage. This worked, and the rest of my life began. I have become deeply engaged with the entities I call "the visitors" in Communion and my follow-on books, the latest of which is A New World.

In March of 2021, I published Jesus: A New Vision, which is a look at the life of Jesus and what happened afterward. As the scientific evidence that the Turin Shroud really is a very unusual object has grown, it seems to me that a new look at Jesus, seeing him neither as a god distant from us or as an ordinary man was essential to deepening our understanding of what his teaching means, and what his life really was.

I have a big website, Unknowncountry.com, which concentrates on the credible edge of science and reality. It is the home of my podcast, Dreamland and offers extensive social media platforms both for subscribers and non-subscribers.

Some of my books have been eerily predictive. Notable among these are Nature's End, published in 1987, which predicts the California and Amazon fires and warns about drought in the US midwest.

Then there was the Superstorm, which predicted that climate change would be much more sudden and violent than was thought in 1999 when it was published. This has proved to be true.

In 2015, my wife Anne died. Within hours, even before anybody outside of my immediate family knew what had happened, friends began calling to say that they were hearing her tell them to phone me. As this continued, it became all but indisputable to me that she really was still present. Our relationship grew into a book called Afterlife Revolution, which afterlife expert Dr. Gary Schwartz called one of the most convincing stories of afterlife communication ever written. (He wrote a foreword for the book)

In 1970, Anne and I began a meditative practice we learned in the Gurdjieff Foundation in New York. This organization was created by Armenian teacher and philosopher Georges Gurdjieff, and is based on the idea that man is not fully conscious, but that there are methods that can change this.

When the visitors entered my life in 1985, they used the same teaching techniques that I was familiar with from my Gurdjieff Work. So I work with them, also. I have been active in my Foundation work now for more than 50 years, 30 of which I have also worked with the visitors.

Although I am pretty much an outcast and a pariah when it comes to the mainstream, I lead a blessed life and consider myself the luckiest of the lucky.

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Timothy Yuen

A foundational text for cultural conversation and intellectual inquiry for the next several decades

Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2016

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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.

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Shashank

"Any sufficiently profound magical event is indistinguishable from technology"

Reviewed in the United States on February 7, 2016

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This book is about a shamanic postmodern tantra of alien communion.

I loved this book and I was a little disappointed toward the end as well. Basically this book alternates chapters by Whitley Strieber and Jeffery Kripal riffing/reflecting on each other’s thoughts. The subject is primarily Alien contact experiences.

Strieber talks mostly of his own experiences, the development of his though on the experiences and how he relates this to Kripal’s concerns.

Kripal brings different frames that he thinks will enhance the conversation. Many of these frames are implicitly used by Whitley and other writers of anomalous experiences but often implicitly, by making them explicit we gain greater control over the kind of story we make, the kind of study we undertake.

Of the multiple frames Kripal introduced I found the following six most useful:

Comparison "if we collect enough seemingly anecdotal or anomalous experiences from different times and places and place them together on a fair comparative table, we can quickly see that these reports are neither anecdotal nor anomalous. We can see that they are actually common occurrences in the species. They are part of our world. They are ‘natural,’ as we say, even if each of them is also rare with respect to any particular individual, and all of them are ‘super,’ that is, beyond how we presently understand how this natural world works.”

This is basically the first step anyone takes when getting interested in any anomalous/rare experiences, search through history and see how common it is, what variations there are.

Phenomenology: Though this is a complex philosophical movement, in this context it is simply the practice of engaging/inquiring with experience as it “appears” and temporarily putting aside how it might relate to the “objective world.” As Whitney says: “I am reporting a perception, not making a claim, and there is a world of difference between those two approaches.”

“This practice will enable us to be faithful to what actually appeared and is being reported without immediately believing or dismissing it. Making the cut [using phenomenology] will free us to talk about the impossible without it sounding impossible. [Kripal]”

Historical contextualization: Kripal argues for the usefulness of contextualizing anomalous experiences while arguing against a prevalent tendency in the academy to using historical contextualization to explain away the possible universal significance of all meanings/truths.

Kripal makes a glib and amusing reflection: “I do not think it is too much of a simplification to suggest that the entire history of religions can be summed up this way: strange super beings from the sky come down to interact with human beings, provide them with cultural, technological, legal, and ethical knowledge, guide them, scare the crap out of them, demand their submission and obedience, have sex with them(often forcefully), and generally terrorize, awe, baffle, inspire, and use them.”

He further argues against reducing myths to misunderstood science or apparently advanced science [UFO] to simply older myths. Instead we should keep the tension between these two reductive tendencies and allow each poll to inform, enrich and challenge our stories.

Hermeneutics (interpretation): He focuses mostly of two aspects of hermeneutics, its suspicious enactments which look for hidden meanings and the feedback loop of understanding between subject who understands and the objects of understanding. This loop is not stable but endlessly influencing and changing each poll.

“I am thinking of films like The Never ending Story(1984), Stranger than Fiction(2006), and the Adjustment Bureau (2011)…the story revolves around a protagonist engaging his own life as a fictional story being written either in this world or in another, seemingly by someone else. As he reads and interprets the text of his life, however, he discovers that its story or plot changes. He discovers the circle or loop of hermeneutics. He discovers that as he engages his cultural script as text creatively and critically he his rereading and rewriting himself. He is changing the story”

He also spends a lot of time talking about the origin of the idea of the imaginal [both as symbolic and empirical forms). This is very interesting but a little too complex to talk/quote about in a review.

Erotics: Kripal argues for the centrality of the erotic in this study, the erotic from Plato’s Eros, to Freud’s Libido to Tantra’s energies and transformations. Here he recounts his own interesting experiences in India with the “goddess Kali”. This also lays a bridge for his sympathetic reading of
Whitley Strieber.

“ What was Whitley Strieber’s crime? What did he do that was so wrong…..Not only did he speak s secrets in public, but he spoke reverently and fearfully of a divine presence that was feminine, that broke and rode him like a horse…by doing so, he spoke of a presence at the very heart of the unconscious of the religious West, a presence that has been repressed and denied for three millennia. He spoke of Her.”

Traumatic secret: Here he writes about how trauma can often be a breaking open into both madness or/and transcendence. Near death experiences, traumatic abuse, violent accidents and alien encounters are often described by people as moments of breakage from a social/egoic trace into greater numinous[awe full reality] space.

“It is only a thought. I do not know. I want to be very humble here and stress the complexities…Still, here is the thought. If the ego is ready to let go, then it will be more likely to experience an encounter wit the sacred Alien or Other as extremely positive, as redemptive, as ecstatic. If, on the other hand, the ego is not ready to let go of itself, then it will be more likely to experience an encounter with the sacred as extremely negative, as terrifying, as destructive.”

My only criticisms of the book are some of its looseness with terms toward the end.

There is a lot of imprecision in the use of the word mystical. All anomalous experiences get packed into the tent of mystical experiences at times which is not helpful. Whitley’s experiences are not the same as Meister Eckhart’s of the Godhead. I understand how interpretively they may be using similar devices [Hermeneutics] but the phenomena they talk about is vastly different in my opinion. Also mystical practices are concerned with stable changes of states and character, while altered states are not necessarily so concerned. There is some overlap but I think it has to be spelled out much more clearly to be knowledge enhancing and not just mudding the water.

Also some of the riffs on the physical sciences and quantum physics are cringe worthy. I think the perspective is important but just like Kripal brought a sophisticated humanities perspective, you need a sympathetic scientist [there are a few] to really get any substantive insights from the scientific viewpoint.

Anyway, I only talked about some of the frames that are explored much more in depth in the book.

For anyone with an interest in Ufo’s, paranormal studies, or religious studies this is highly recommended. If you don’t have an interest in any of these three why did you read this review?

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Margaret Churchill

A Good Read!

Reviewed in Canada on January 21, 2022

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I really enjoyed reading this book! Whitely Streiber is so courageous to share his experiences with the reader in the face of false media, government cover ups and a humanity that just doesn't understand that what he experienced IS real. Jeff Kripal's counter balance is well documented, I felt as well.
We are at a crossroads in the way we view our lives (especially through this pandemic) and what is important isOUR OWN beliefs regardless of what others may think. If I could talk to Mr. Steiber, I would say he should read about the Indigenous' 'take' on Star People by Ardy Sixkiller Clarke -"More Encounters with Star People." The Indigenouse people have known for centuries, that Star People exist . They are here and are not afraid of them; whereas the white man is because he doesn't know them in the same way. Remember what Chief Dan George said, "What man fears, man will destroy' . We need to be open to learn and accept more. Thank you Mr. Steiber and Mr. Kripal. A good read indeed!

Simon

Passabile, niente di speciale

Reviewed in Italy on October 27, 2022

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Un testo a quattro mani e due facce, di cui una, a mio parere, da dimenticare (la versione affidata a Whitley Strieber) opaca e abbastanza insulsa, mentre l'altra, condotta con più rigore da Kripal, presenta spunti interessanti e in parte anche originali, anche se in generale non c'è niente di veramente nuovo per chi è addentro a simili argomenti, e a volte il suo testo diventa prolisso e dal tono un po' troppo accademico. In sostanza, non si capisce da che parte stia Strieber o cosa voglia dire in realtà, il suo procedere è confuso e ondivago, senza punti fermi, mentre Kripal ha di certo le idee più chiare e qualche conclusione azzeccata la presenta.

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Average

Reviewed in India on July 20, 2019

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Just okay

chris caldwell

Important update

Reviewed in Australia on March 1, 2017

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A great comparative conversation between 2 realities, each accepting the possibility of the other. Experience and reflection meeting to create an arena for meaning to appear

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David Thomas

Finally, a book about 'aliens' for grown-ups

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 4, 2016

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If you are interested in the unexplained, the paranormal, UFOs then it is worth reading this book. (And as a reviewer on Amazon.com said, if you are not, why are you reading this review?) It consists of alternating chapters with Strieber recounting his experiences and Kripal providing a commentary and an intellectual framework in which to place these experiences. Both write well and with humour. I have been a Kripal fan over the years and he seems to be on a journey to somewhere - this work is perhaps a continuation of his journey. Strieber gives a detailed account of his close encounter experiences and also reflect back some of what Kripal is saying. Strieber clearly has had a hard time since he spoke publicly about his experiences, as well as having other tragedies in his life. Would you have had the courage to go public about such weird experiences in the way he has done? Not sure I would. An excellent and thought provoking book - well done gentlemen. Let's have more of it. Facey

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