He Studied Every Religion, This One Came Closest to Truth

ELI5 / TLDR

A young seeker who has witnessed an Orthodox Christian miracle but refuses to convert sits down with Jeffrey Kripal, a Rice University historian of religion, and grills him for two and a half hours on the same question: if every tradition has its miracles, its saints, and its claims to ultimate truth, how do you choose? Kripal’s answer is that you don’t. None of the orthodox religions have it right; all of them are partial; the closest you can get is non-dualism — the Buddhist, Hindu and Daoist intuition that there is no separate God out there and no separate self in here, just one thing splitting itself into two so it can have a conversation with itself. The miracles are real. The interpretations are not.

The Full Story

The seeker arrives, having seen too much

Jonathan Bi opens with a confession most modern hosts wouldn’t make. Two years ago he watched an Orthodox icon of the Virgin and Child ooze oil for fifteen minutes in a church in Taylor, Pennsylvania, while a priest anointed everyone in the room with it. He did not convert. His Christian friends were upset. His reason was odd: witnessing one genuine miracle made him take all the other miracle traditions more seriously, not less. If the icon was real, then so was the Tibetan rainbow body, so were Hindu apparitions of Kali, so were Sufi visions. He calls his problem “equipollence” — borrowing from the ancient skeptic Sextus Empiricus. Two opposing claims that can’t both be true and can’t be told apart from outside.

My problem with religion is the exact opposite of many moderns. They don’t think there’s anything here. I think there’s too much here to decipher.

His guest is Jeffrey Kripal, who has spent his career as a historian of comparative religion — and who, Bi thinks, has given the most honest response yet to this puzzle.

Kripal: welcome to the club

Kripal’s first move is to agree. He grew up Roman Catholic in the American Midwest where the line was that miracles only happen inside the Catholic Church. Once he started reading comparatively he discovered that miracles happen everywhere, all the time, in every tradition we can see backwards in history. So the question stopped being whether to be religious and became how to be religious.

His diagnosis of the orthodox traditions is that they are partial. They each give their communities something real. But none of them is ultimate. He uses Plato’s image of the cave: every religion is a set of shadows projected on a wall. Genuine, useful, often beautiful shadows. But shadows. He tells his graduate students they have no business studying comparative religion until they have lost at least two worlds — meaning that if you’ve only lost one, you’ve probably just jumped into another (Eastern Orthodoxy, secular scientism, whatever) and now think that one has all the answers. When the second world starts to crack and you hesitate before jumping into a third, that’s the moment you become an intellectual.

Good luck. You’re not going to find a tradition that has all your answers.

Why orthodox claims don’t persuade him

Bi presses: maybe the Christians just got it right. Maybe everyone else is a demon or a “lesser revelation” — the post-Vatican II move where other faiths are downgraded but not damned. Why is Kripal so sure that’s wrong? Kripal says he has heard those answers his whole life and they don’t move him. The Buddhist masters say the same about Christians. The Christians say the same about Buddhists. They each have an explanation for why the other guys also have miracles (demons, lesser revelation, black magic). The fact that the explanation exists doesn’t make it true.

He half-jokes that if anyone is closest, it’s probably the Buddhists — the non-dualists who refuse to externalize God or essentialize the self. But this is a hunch, not a creed.

Believing too much

Kripal’s signature phrase here is “I believe too much.” It catches Bi off guard, because in academic religious studies the standard posture is skepticism. Kripal’s stance is the opposite. He thinks Jesus probably did appear to people. So did the Buddha. So did Nagarjuna. He has met levitators, talked to mediums, witnessed the Stargate-program remote viewers’ archives at Rice. He thinks pre-cognition is real. He thinks “we made up God” — and he means it as a religious statement, not a debunking one. What he refuses to do is privilege any single community’s interpretation of these experiences.

He has a useful distinction: belief is believing backwards. When you say “I believe in the Resurrection,” what you are really doing is signing your name to someone else’s altered state from two thousand years ago, as filtered through that person’s culture, language, and political moment. Why, he asks, would you do that? Why ground yourself in a Greek-grammar interpretation of a Jewish carpenter’s experience instead of in the human experiences happening around you, right now, all the time?

Why are you giving so much authority to a bunch of texts written thousands of years ago? Why do you have to have everything rooted in the Bible for goodness sake?

The Bible isn’t what people say it is

Bi asks for an example. Kripal — trained in biblical studies, having read the whole thing in Greek — picks family values. He says the New Testament is anti-family. Jesus tells his followers to hate their parents (Luke 14:26) and praises men who become eunuchs for the kingdom of God (Matthew 19:12). A copy editor once tried to tell Kripal the eunuch passage didn’t exist. It does. He thinks a lot of religious claims fall apart the moment you read the actual text without the institutional filter on top.

This is also why he isn’t impressed by the standard “but the Bible is unique” argument. Even if every miracle in the Bible happened exactly as written, he says — what’s the big deal? Resurrection happens all the time in pagan religion. Empty tombs and dematerializing bodies are routine in Tibetan Buddhism (the rainbow body). Eternal life is everywhere in Daoism. Forgiving sins by absorbing someone else’s karma is what tantric masters do. “I and the Father are one” is a standard claim from Indian mystics. The Christian uniqueness argument requires you to be unfamiliar with everyone else.

Who, then, was Jesus?

Kripal’s reading is striking. He thinks Jesus was a real historical figure who had some kind of experience of divinity, but that even Jesus didn’t fully know who he was. There’s a Gospel passage where Jesus asks his disciples Who do you say that I am? — and Kripal takes this as not rhetorical. He thinks Jesus was co-constructing his own identity through the answers he got back from his followers. The famous passage Bi reads from one of Kripal’s books frames Jesus as someone who came to or constructed his self-understanding “in the mirror of his followers’ answers.”

This is more radical than the standard historical-critical position, which says the early Christians made up the divine Jesus. Kripal is saying Jesus himself didn’t have a stable self either — and points out that none of us do. We all wake up not quite sure who was telling the dream.

His answer to the larger question — was Jesus God? — is “yes. We all are. So are you. So am I.” Deification, the experience of becoming or recognizing oneself as divine, is universal. The Christian doctrine of theosis (humans becoming God-like through grace) has parallels in Vedanta, Sufism, Daoism. He once gave this answer in a debate with an evangelical scholar. They were not expecting it.

Faith versus gnosis

Kripal quotes the comic-book writer Alan Moore approvingly: Faith is for sissies who dared not go and look for themselves. Magic is based on direct knowledge. This is gnosis — the old Greek word for direct, experiential knowing, as opposed to faith (assent to someone else’s report) and reason (logical inference). Bi pushes back: isn’t your trust that human experience can grasp ultimate truth itself a kind of faith? Yes, Kripal admits. But it’s a faith rooted in what people actually report happening to them, not in a text written somewhere else by someone else two thousand years ago.

The distinction matters because Kripal is making a specific philosophical claim: human beings have access to ultimate truth through their own experience. That’s the realist core of his work. He thinks consciousness itself is the door, not any particular book or church.

Why he isn’t a “heretical Hindu” either

If non-dualism is closest, Bi asks, why not just call yourself a heretical Hindu or Buddhist? Kripal’s answer is dryly funny — because they won’t have me. He can’t perform the devotional submission those traditions require. He admits he is “hopelessly democratic and individualist and Western,” constitutionally unable to sign over his intellect to a guru. He sees this as a tension in his own position, not a virtue. He even jokes that he doesn’t believe in himself — meaning he is convinced by the Buddhist arguments that the self is a grammatical and cultural fiction, even though Jeffrey Kripal the professor obviously also exists. He calls this the human two — both layers true, neither ultimate.

The case against materialism

Bi opens a second front: the scientists. Kripal’s objection is not that science is wrong but that it is incomplete, and that most popular materialism is still 19th-century mechanism dressed up. He has two main moves.

First, philosophical: the scientific method begins by splitting subject from object. The whole machinery presupposes the dualism that mystical experience claims to dissolve. So science can never reach the place where the split itself comes from. Even mathematics is mysterious in this regard — Einstein famously said the most miraculous thing about the universe is that it’s comprehensible at all. Why does pattern in the brain map onto pattern in matter? Why does the inside correspond to the outside? Pythagoras already noticed this two and a half thousand years ago.

Second, empirical: there is in fact a vast literature of careful psychical research dating to the 1870s — telepathy, precognition, mediumship, near-death experiences, reincarnation memories. The Stargate remote viewing program at SRI. The reincarnation files at the University of Virginia. Most of it is dismissed by mainstream science as anecdote, fraud, or hallucination — words Kripal calls “rhetorical bad words” used to take things off the table without explaining them.

You’ve taken things off the table so you can explain everything on the table. But the only reason you can explain everything on the table is you’ve just taken off what you can’t explain.

His favorite case is precognition — people experiencing the future in detail, sometimes years in advance, sometimes with timestamps. He gives the example of Barry Windsor-Smith (a young Marvel comics artist living outside London in the early 70s) seeing a vision of an office in New York in great detail; three years later he’s standing in that exact office with the same traffic jam outside.

The phenomenon that hides

The hardest part of Kripal’s view is also the most slippery. He thinks the phenomena resist scientific study. Take them into a controlled lab and they shrink, fade, or fail to show. Bi pushes hard here, and rightly: this looks suspicious. Kripal offers three overlapping explanations.

The first is trauma. Real precognitive saves happen at four in the morning when a mother dreams of a chandelier falling on her crib. Lab settings strip that away. You don’t go to the North Pole to prove zebras exist.

The second is that the phenomenon is alive and conscious — it’s not an inert object. Studying it like a corpse on a slab insults it, and so it goes silent. Kripal thinks paranormal phenomena are essentially semantic and organic — they mean things, they have purpose, they communicate. They’re closer to a person than a particle.

The third is the phenomenon camouflages itself because we are not ready. Some of this Bi calls a non-falsifiable theory and Kripal does not really deny it. He admits at one point that he isn’t sure what evidence would convince him that there’s a personal God outside us — even an alien spaceship of octopus-aliens, he says, would just be life on another planet, still part of the one. Bi catches him moving the goalposts and Kripal half-grins and concedes.

Dual-aspect monism

Kripal’s positive metaphysics is borrowed from Carl Jung and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli: dual-aspect monism. The view that mind and matter are not two substances but two faces of one underlying thing — Jung’s unus mundus, the one world. Most of the time we live inside the split (mental over here, material over there). But occasionally something cracks and we get a synchronicity — an outer event that mirrors an inner state with no causal link between them. Or a person on a deathbed psychedelic trip says I am the universe, there is no death. These moments, Kripal argues, are not just heightened versions of ordinary consciousness. They are glimpses of the layer underneath the split.

This is why he says paranormal phenomena are crucial: they’re physical and mental at the same time. The icon really oozes oil (matter) but the oil also means something (mind). It only makes sense if the two domains share a common root.

He grants that he prioritizes the experience of unity over the experience of duality on faith — because the people who have had it come back saying this is what life is for. He believes them. He calls this his “gnostic realism.”

The cost of looking

Bi raises a darker question. Almost everyone in Kripal’s books — the mystics, the abductees, the levitators, the mediums — does not end well. They are persecuted, they go mad, they kill themselves. Kripal calls this the traumatic secret: trauma seems to be a frequent (not necessary, but frequent) door to these experiences, and the experiences themselves often produce more trauma. He gives the example of Elizabeth Krohn, struck by lightning in 1988, who developed precognitive abilities and wanted them to stop — because every dream she had was of a plane crash or an earthquake. Pre-cognition, like the mother and the chandelier, exists for evolutionary reasons. It tracks danger, not happiness.

So Bi proposes a different framing: the red pill / blue pill choice. If everyone who takes the red pill ends up depressed and everyone who takes the blue pill is fine, maybe Nietzsche was right that truth itself has to be judged by its effects on life. Kripal once wrote an essay called The Purple Pill arguing that what most thoughtful people actually do is take a little of both. Investigate; live a normal life; don’t pretend the conventional doesn’t matter; don’t pretend the ultimate doesn’t either. Clark Kent and Superman. He calls this the human two again.

The interview ends without conversion

Bi asks what one should do practically. Kripal’s advice is roughly: have compassion. Take experiences seriously without taking their interpretations as final. Don’t dismiss; don’t submit. He admits he failed at being a mystic — tried, didn’t have the constitution, eventually accepted his role as a writer who authorizes the space for other people’s experiences. His own famous mystical event happened in Calcutta in 1989 in a moment of illness in a foreign country — and he believes, in retrospect, that the experience downloaded all his future books into him. Writing, for him, is the practice. The mystical practice.

Bi ends still uncertain. Kripal ends comfortable with uncertainty. They both end agreeing that the orthodox traditions are partial and that materialism is incomplete, but with very different temperaments about what to do next. Bi is going to keep grilling each tradition for internal contradictions. Kripal has stopped grilling and started listening.

Key Takeaways

Equipollence problem (Sextus Empiricus): the seeker’s bind isn’t that any one religion is wrong; it’s that mutually exclusive orthodox claims are evidentially indistinguishable from outside.
“Lost two worlds” rule: Kripal’s bar for being a real comparativist. If you’ve only lost one, you’ve usually just jumped into another. The hesitation before the third jump is when intellectual life starts.
Believing backwards: belief = signing your name to someone else’s altered state from the past, filtered through their language and politics. Trust your own and your contemporaries’ experiences first.
The biblical case studies that don’t fit popular Christianity: Luke 14:26 (hate your family), Matthew 19:12 (eunuchs for the kingdom). New Testament is closer to anti-family than family-values.
Deification is universal, not Christian-specific. Theosis in Christianity, atman-Brahman in Vedanta, fanaa in Sufism — humans realizing or becoming the divine is everywhere.
Apophatic vs cataphatic: apophatic is what-cannot-be-said-of-God (Eastern Christianity, Vedanta, Daoism); cataphatic is positive description (most popular Western religion). Kripal sits firmly apophatic.
Gnosis vs faith vs reason: three epistemic modes. Faith = assent to someone else’s report. Reason = inference. Gnosis = direct experiential knowing. Kripal claims to operate from gnosis grounded in many people’s experiences.
Dual-aspect monism: Jung/Pauli’s view. Mind and matter are two faces of one substrate (unus mundus). Explains synchronicity, paranormal phenomena, and the comprehensibility of nature in one move.
The phenomenon hides for three possible reasons: (1) trauma is what triggers it and labs strip trauma out; (2) it’s conscious and won’t be studied like an inert object; (3) it actively camouflages itself because we aren’t ready.
The traumatic secret: trauma seems to be a frequent door to anomalous experience. The experience often produces more trauma. Mystics, mediums, and abductees rarely end well.
Wild talents, not trained ones: the robust paranormal phenomena (chandelier dreams, knowing the moment a grandmother dies, levitation under religious ecstasy) come unbidden. The trainable ones (lab remote viewing, statistical telepathy) are statistically real but undramatic.
Anecdote, hallucination, fraud, sleep paralysis are described as “rhetorical bad words” used to take experience off the table without explaining it.
The purple pill: most reflective people don’t choose red or blue — they take both. Investigate and live normally. Conventional and ultimate, Clark Kent and Superman.
Writing-as-mystical-practice: Kripal’s own claim that the 1989 Calcutta Kali experience “downloaded” his future books, and that writing is itself a paranormal activity — inspiration arriving from outside or from later in time.
Politics as marginality, not ideology: Kripal’s progressive politics flow from his intuition that marginal people (queer, trans, paranormal experiencers) are closer to reality, not just morally important.

Claude’s Take

This is one of the better long-form religious conversations I’ve come across. Score 8. Bi is unusually well-read and asks exactly the questions the host is supposed to ask but usually doesn’t — pressing Kripal on whether his model is falsifiable, whether trauma-based epistemology is convenient, whether the moves are circular. Kripal is generous enough to admit when Bi catches him. The interview earns its length.

The strong part of Kripal’s view is the destruction work. The point that comparative religion makes naive religious exclusivism untenable is well-made. So is the point that 19th-century materialism cosplaying as 21st-century science is shaky. The reading of Christian theology as Greek-language interpretation of a Jewish-mystical experience is honest and historically grounded. He clearly knows the texts.

The shaky part is the constructive metaphysics. Dual-aspect monism is a real philosophical position with serious defenders, but Kripal’s version leans heavily on the claim that the phenomenon resists study — and Bi is right that this is dangerously close to unfalsifiable. When pushed for what would convince him there’s a personal God beyond the human, Kripal admits he can’t think of anything. That’s not a small concession. It means his view is held with the same kind of intellectual closure he criticizes in orthodoxy. He just calls it gnosis instead of faith.

The phrase “it’s us” — meaning that the source of all religious phenomena is some larger humanity-shaped consciousness — is poetic but does a lot of unearned work. Why human-shaped? Why not life-shaped, or matter-shaped, or just shaped? Kripal’s answer (because that’s how it appears to us) is fine but it slides past the question.

Where the interview is most valuable is when Kripal talks about what he isn’t — not a mystic, not a believer, not a relativist who thinks all traditions are equally true. He thinks the non-dual traditions are closer than the monotheisms. He thinks paranormal phenomena really happen. He thinks consciousness can access ultimate truth. These are substantive, falsifiable-in-principle claims even if they’re hard to falsify in practice. The “purple pill” framing — investigate without disowning ordinary life — is the most usable thing in the conversation.

The light deduction is for occasional looseness around the edges (the unfalsifiability problem, the slightly too-convenient benevolence claim, the unanalyzed move from “phenomenon is camouflaged” to “phenomenon wants to communicate”). But Bi himself flags most of these in real time and Kripal more or less admits them. That kind of intellectual honesty is rare.