Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained.  Tarcher/Penguin, 2016.

“If Communion is not a piece of modern erotic mystical literature, then I do not know what it is.  I consider Whitley Strieber and his most famous text to be, in effect, litmus tests for my field.  If we cannot take this text seriously, if we cannot exegete it in some satisfying fashion, if we cannot make some sense of this man’s honest descriptions of his traumatic-transcendent experiences, then we have no business trying to understand his spiritual ancestors in the historical record.  We either put up here, or we shut up there.”
–Jeffrey Kripal, “Better Horrors: From Terror to Communion in Whitley Strieber’s Communion (1987),” in Social 

Research 81:4 (Winter 2014).

Jeff Kripal is the kind of scholar who “puts up.”  A distinguished professor of religious studies at Rice University, he rises to his own challenge in the extraordinary book called The Super Natural.  Using all the tools of his trade, the same ones he’d apply to the mystical experiences of St. Teresa of Avila in the 16th century or the Hindu holy man Ramakrishna in the 19th, he dares to tease out the meaning and implications of Whitley Strieber’s encounters with “the visitors”–usually but lazily identified as UFO aliens–at the end of the 20th.

It’s a controversial book, but Kripal is used to controversy.

When his psychoanalytic study of Ramakrishna, Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, came out in 1995, it won the American Academy of Religion’s prize for Best First Book.  It also provoked an orgy of rage in India, with two formal attempts made in the Indian Parliament to have it banned.

Of course, Ramakrishna couldn’t talk back to Kripal.  Whitley Strieber can; and in alternating chapters of The Super Natural, he does.  It’s the dialogue between these two partners, the “experiencer” and the “theorist” as Kripal puts it, that makes this book such an exhilarating read.

What is the “erotic mystical” experience described in Communion?  At its heart is something that happened, or allegedly happened, to Strieber on the night of December 26, 1985.  His bedroom in his cabin in upstate New York was invaded by one, or possibly more, small beings.  Naked, paralyzed, his arms and legs extended, he felt himself carried out to “a small sort of depression in the woods,” which transformed itself into a “small, circular chamber” above the trees.  (This is the closest Strieber comes to actually speaking of a UFO.)

While in this chamber he was subjected to a string of weird, unsettling experiences, including a sort of anal rape performed by a narrow, “gray and scaly” object.  He also seems to have first encountered the female entity, uncanny and inhuman in her appearance yet for him “the most essentially and powerfully feminine presence I have ever known,” whose portrait on Communion’s cover has given us our iconic image of the UFO alien.  She would be a feature of Strieber’s life through the years to come.

When he awoke in the morning, he remembered nothing of this.  He had only an implausible but compelling recollection of a barn owl staring at him through his bedroom window sometime during the night.  The details of his experience came back to him about a week later, spontaneously, without the aid of hypnotic regression (though that would come later).

This was only the beginning.  For the next thirty years the “visitors,” in different sizes, shapes and colors, remained intertwined with Strieber’s life.  They manifested their presence in a long string of bizarre, inexplicable events that must have been as unintelligible to him as they are for his readers.  The aggregate meaninglessness soon grows tiresome.  I want to shake off my frustration and bafflement with a dismissal like Aah, he’s nuts, or The guy’s making it up as he goes along! 

But Kripal shows me why I mustn’t do that.

These reflexive reactions, says Kripal, are “protective strategies” employed to ward off the threat posed by a book like Communion to our preconceived notions of how the world ought to work and what a human being ought to be.  (He speaks of “the public shaming of sincere and serious people … who see or say otherwise,” and since Communion’s publication Strieber has been showered with public mockery of the grossest kind.)  Yet they’re wholly natural.  To acknowledge and absorb an event, or a series of events, we have to be able to fit them into some recognizable pattern of meaning.  Strieber’s encounters resist any such patterning.

Hence the odd experience I’ve had more than once, of picking up my copy of Communion and realizing that I had no notion what was inside it.  Had I really read it?  I must have—the pages were blanketed with annotations in what I recognized as my handwriting.  But I had no recollection of what I’d read.  Only the face on the cover; that I would never forget.

Both authors make the point forcefully: if Strieber’s encounters with the “visitors” refuse to show the coherence I expect of them, the problem lies not with them but with my expectations.

I’ve long noticed, for example, that Strieber’s recollections are drenched in sex.  It’s pretty obvious; I doubt if anyone past puberty would fail to notice it.  My next step follows naturally.  What Communion is about is Strieber’s very terrestrial, very human sexual fantasies and anxieties, with a strong masochistic component.  (That “essentially and powerfully feminine presence,” he says in The Super Natural, caused him to be “dragged out of the house and essentially beaten until I realized that she was real and I was not dreaming.”) With this Freudian Open Sesame, I ought to be able to make sense of the whole string of experiences.

I can’t, so I blame Strieber.

What I ought to blame, says Kripal, is not my awareness that Strieber’s experiences are fundamentally about sex—that is beyond all question—but my implied “nothing but sex.”  In other words, I limit sex to what goes on in our fleshly crotches.  If I’d incorporated the ancients’ awareness of it as something “sacred … [with] a terrifying and terrific divinity in it,” I’d be better poised to grasp what Strieber is talking about.

“I am haunted,” Strieber writes in this new book, “by the paradoxical sweetness of many of these ferocious experiences.  One way to put it would be that I had a love affair with a goddess.  Another would be that it was an affair with an alien.  But the third way to describe it–which is, I suspect, closer to the truth–is that I didn’t know who or what my wife really was, or myself, or any of us.  I don’t know what human beings are, and, based on my own life experience, I have every reason to suspect that the form we live in every day is not our only state.”

We’re miles away from any simplistic notions of people being kidnapped by space invaders.  The UFO experience is essentially a human experience–I can stand up and cheer that sentiment–only, “I don’t know what human beings are.”  Both Strieber and Kripal suggest that we’re something vaster, grander, and stranger than we’d ever imagined.

Strieber speaks now of Anne, his passionately loved wife of 45 years, whom he lost to cancer about six months before The Super Natural came out and whose longed-for ghost pervades the book:

“Sometimes when Anne was sleeping or distracted or her face blossomed with pleasure, I would see in it a flickering shadow of the great-eyed being I’d painted for the cover of Communion.  [Actually the cover was done by an artist named Ted Jacobs, at Strieber’s direction.]  Now, I am not making a claim here that my wife was an alien or anything so concrete as that.  What I am saying is that the shadow of my wife–her life, her ways, my awareness of her body–ghosts through the experiences that I am about to describe like a sylph.”

Kripal, the religious-studies professor, believes in the truth of these experiences.  He believes, not least because he’s had one of his own.  When he positions himself as “theorist” as opposed to the “experiencer” Strieber, he’s not being entirely fair to himself.  He’s an “experiencer” too.

November 1989.  Young Jeff Kripal is in Calcutta, researching his Ph.D. dissertation on Ramakrishna.  “I had been participating in Kali Puja, a multiday cycle of festivities and rituals celebrating the goddess in her fiercest and, in some more esoteric traditions, most erotic forms.”  And it would appear that the goddess, or something very like Her, came to him in his hotel room.

“As this presence did whatever it did to me (the unprintable f-word would be entirely appropriate), the aroused state I was in became more and more intense.  It felt as if the energies were reaching down into every single cell of my body, or–if this is even possible–into every subatomic particle, each of which seemed to be humming at an unbelievable frequency. … Whitley’s description in this book of ‘being with an invisible tiger or an invisible saint’ (the double sacred) perfectly describes what I knew on that Night, tigers and saints being what they are: oh so common in West Bengal.”

This is about as strong as an endorsement as you can give, and it functions as empirical groundwork for Strieber and Kripal’s joint assault on the materialist orthodoxy of contemporary science.  Strieber is not religious in any conventional sense.  To my recollection, he mentions the idea of “god” (lower case) only to dismiss it.

Yet the materialism that equates the human being with the physical body and brain is just as false.  So Strieber’s encounters with “the visitors” have taught him.

Experiences like his, or like Kripal’s own (says Kripal, taking up the baton) can lead “out of the consensual trance of culture and religion into something other or more, something so other that it feels and seems alien.  … It is not us, not us as rational social egos anyway.  And yet it is us, as soul, as spirit. … Consciousness is not ego.  Consciousness is not culture.” 

Nor is it a product of the brain, doomed to perish with the brain.  It’s something transcendent, eternal, filtered through the brain yet unaffected when the brain turns to dust.

This explains, says Kripal, “why the skeptics are so honestly and understandably skeptical (their egos or consensual trances have not yet been invaded or broken).  It explains the utter convictions of the mystics, poets, and modern-day abductees (their egos or consensual trances have been invaded and broken).”

So where does that leave me?

Alas, with the skeptics, my “consensual trance” still unbroken, my cherry yet untaken.  Which puts me, as I read Communion and The Super Natural, in the position of a lifelong virgin doing his feeble best to understand what sexual ecstasy is all about.

And how on earth do I do that?

(To be continued in my next post.)

by David Halperin
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Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Super Natural: A New Vision of the Unexplained.  Tarcher/Penguin, 2016.

(Continued from my previous post.)

“Obviously something incredibly intense had happened to Whitley.  I never have doubted the veracity of the intensity of it. … As is the case with almost all of these kinds of experiences, they combine the quality of intense meaningfulness within the first person and a frustrating lack of external corroboration. … We can be talking about a religious experience, we can be talking about a symptom of temporal lobe epilepsy, we can be talking about a possible allergic response to common or not-so-common chemicals, or even a response to electromagnetic phenomena, one way or another.  We can be talking about somebody who’s been abducted by real flesh-and-blood aliens.  We don’t know, but my problem, as a third-person observer, who believes in the scientific method, is how to interpret it.  You can’t just deny it.”
–Dr. John Gliedman, quoted in Ed Conroy, Report on Communion (1989)

“You can’t just deny it.”  The brilliant maverick psychologist John Gliedman had that exactly right.

In the 1980s Gliedman knew Whitley Strieber well.  He knew–or at least was entirely certain–that Strieber wasn’t just making up the fantastic experiences that found their way into his 1987 bestseller Communion, many of which Strieber had confided to him over lunch long before the book appeared.  In C.S. Lewis’s famous “trilemma” of Lunatic-Liar-Lord (referring to Jesus), the second option seems ruled out.

The first also?  Is it thinkable that Strieber’s mind–his perceptions, his memories–though demonstrably free from any of the “mental disorders” defined as such by the American Psychiatric Association, nevertheless doesn’t work quite the way our (statistically) “normal” minds do?  That he sees and hears, feels and remembers things that most of us can’t or wouldn’t?

If so, does that make him crazy?  Or the rest of us limited?

Like Gliedman, I’m a “third-person observer.”  So, in a certain measure, is Jeffrey Kripal, the Rice University religious-studies professor who co-authored with Strieber the mind-bending, mind-opening book that I’m discussing in this and the preceding post.  But Kripal has an advantage over me.  Unlike me, he’s had his own direct and undeniable experience of “erotic mysticism” of the kind that suffuses Communion, immediate encounter with a cosmic sexuality “reaching down into every single cell of my body, or–if this is even possible–into every subatomic particle, each of which seemed to be humming at an unbelievable frequency.” 

It happened to Kripal only once.  The experience never came to dominate his life as it did Strieber’s.  But that one time was enough for Kripal to know that what Strieber experienced was real.  (Whatever “real” may mean.)

I haven’t had even that one experience.  Which puts me in a dilemma.  On the one hand, I want to believe Strieber, simply as the decency owed by one human being to another: not to laugh or diagnose away experiences that he or she has felt as soul-shatteringly real.

But I can’t help but disbelieve.

I don’t like the materialist scientific paradigm that Strieber and Kripal attack in their book, any better than they do.  “Matter is made up of tiny dead things. … There is no meaning.  There is no mind.  Evolution is without a goal.  It intends nothing.  It is going nowhere.  The universe is pointless.” This is Kripal’s characterization of it; and he asks, rhetorically, why anyone would want to believe such a depressing vision of reality.

He at once goes on to answer his own question: “those who embrace it do so because they think it is true.”

With good reason, I would add.  The materialist paradigm has proven its utility ten thousand times over.

If like many of us I feel compelled as a matter of intellectual honesty to think within this paradigm, I can’t believe Strieber.  The events he describes just make no sense.  In the scientific paradigm, the world and its happenings may have no meaning or intention–but they’ve got to make sense.

To this we must add a very real and troubling problem.  We know Strieber’s experiences only via his claims about them. He himself, assuming (as I do) that he’s sincere in his claims, knows them only through his recollections of them.  And these recollections show a distressing capacity to shift over the course of time.

On pages 212-213 of The Super Natural, Strieber tells the story of a strange and unsettling event that happened to him in 1968.

“That year, I was living in London and attending the London School of Film Technique, now called the London Film School.  During the summer break, I decided to travel on the Continent.  On an overnight train to Florence, I fell in with a girl.  We began traveling together.  For a couple of weeks in Florence, we had a lovely time, living together in chaste intimacy.  But then we went on to Rome, and when we toured St. Peter’s, she became crazy, stalking through the church in raging silence.  She scared me.  I was living with her in a small pensione near the railroad station.  I decided, ‘No more,’ and headed off to the pensione to collect my suitcase and get out of there.

“I went into our tiny room, threw my toothbrush into my suitcase, and started to leave.  Then I stopped.  Her suitcase was lying at the foot of the bed.  I have always been a bit too curious, and I opened it.  What I saw shocked me to my core.  In it was a nun’s habit and, lying beside it, a dry, flattened owl carcass.

“I didn’t get off the train again until I was in Strasbourg.

“The owls were gathering,” Strieber concludes, and that’s the point of his story: owls have always been mysteriously intertwined with his experiences of “the visitors.”  (The morning after his initial abduction experience on December 26, 1985, his initial memory of it was the image of a barn owl staring at him through his window.)

It’s a gripping, goosebump-raising tale, if perhaps a trifle implausible.  (When I was 23, as Strieber was in 1968, I would have had the most immense difficulty sharing a “tiny room” with an attractive young woman “in chaste intimacy.”)  But contrast it with what’s patently an account of the same incident in Communion, page 135:

“I took the train to Italy, second class.  On the train I met a young woman and we began to travel together.  At this point my memories become extremely odd.  If I do not think about them they seem fine, but when I try to put them together they don’t make sense.  I recall that we went to Rome, but that we spent a few days in Florence on the way. … For some reason, I left the young woman in Rome and dashed off on the train with no ticket, traveling almost at random.  I ended up in Strasbourg, where I saw the cathedral, then suddenly rushed to the station and grabbed another train, a local, that crept across France, ending in Port Bou on the Spanish border.”

Strieber must have written these words in 1986, 18 years after the incident occurred.  “For some reason, I left the young woman in Rome.”  After 18 years, he couldn’t remember the reason he left her.  Another 29 years later, he remembered it vividly.  What are we to say of such a memory?

Compare also the half-comical, half-shivery story that Strieber tells on pages 99-100 of The Super Natural, of how William Morrow & Co. editor Bruce Lee encountered two huge-eyed aliens poring over Communion in a New York City bookstore, with the account he gave of the same episode in his 1988 book Transformation, pages 235-237.  (And with Lee’s own version of the incident, in Ed Conroy’s Report on Communion.)  “He [Lee] watched them walk off into the afternoon crowd on Madison Avenue,” Strieber writes in The Super Natural.  “Nobody seemed in the least concerned that two aliens were strolling down the street in overcoats and hats on a warm afternoon.”

But when he wrote Transformation, Strieber knew perfectly well why they’d be wearing overcoats and hats. The incident didn’t happen on a warm afternoon in 1988, as Strieber remembered it for the 2016 book, but “on a cold, windy Saturday afternoon” in January 1987.

I need to be clear.  By questioning the integrity of Strieber’s recollections, I am not questioning his personal integrity.  I take that as a given.  But if the things that Strieber remembers having undergone are to be used to mount a challenge to the current scientific understanding of how the world works, his memories need to have a solidity that puts them beyond question.  They don’t.

Or they don’t always, and that casts a shadow of suspicion on the rest.

And yet …

There’s one monumental fact that persuades me there’s something real and important going on here, that wherever Strieber’s memories come from they tap into something deep within the human psyche.  This is the response that Communion evokes in many of those who read it, or simply see its cover.

“I bought Communion in March 1988 on my way to Los Angeles to sing at my cousin’s wedding.  I was simply glued to it.  There was a strange sense–yet a vague sense of recognition in what you were saying. … I felt drawn to the cover of Communion like a duck to water.”

“Last spring, I saw Communion in the library for the first time.  The face on the cover scared me so much that I went home. … I couldn’t understand why I was so afraid of a book.”

“When I walked past the bookstore, it was only out of the corner of my eye that I saw the cover of your book staring out into the mall.  I stopped and looked at it, not believing what I was seeing … just how close the depiction of the being on [the] cover was to the real thing.”

“Sitting right there on the kitchen stove [in 1958, when the writer was four], in front of God and all my family and relatives, was this creature that I had never seen before.  I remember pointing to the creature on the stove, and by now I had everyone’s attention.  Obviously I was the only one who could see it, which only added to the terror. … I never again saw that face staring at me, that is, until I was browsing in a bookstore a few years ago and saw the book Communion, and right there on the cover was that all too familiar face almost laughing at me.”

These are quotes from the book The Communion Letters (1997), co-authored by Strieber and his late wife Anne.  They’re extracts, selected by Anne from what Strieber estimates (in The Super Natural) to have been upwards of half a million letters he received between 1987 and 2000.  “We stopped counting at two hundred thousand, and that was in 1992. …  We have kept around thirty thousand on file.” (The full collection is not currently open to researchers, though I’m given to understand that this may soon change.)

There were others who didn’t write to Strieber, yet whose memories were triggered by Communion and its cover.  In his 1994 book Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens, the distinguished Harvard psychiatry professor John Mack–whose tragic death in 2004 we’re still grieving–tells of an abductee who “saw a face in the craft ‘looking down at me,’ and when he later saw the picture of an alien on the cover of Communion he was shocked, for ‘that’s what I imagined was looking down at me when I was nineteen.'”  Nobel-laureate biochemist Kary Mullis tells of seeing Communion in a California bookstore and realizing that this book was somehow, mysteriously, connected with his own bizarre experience a few years earlier in his mountain cabin.  He was in the middle of reading it when his adult daughter phoned.  “Dad, there’s a book I want you to read.  It’s called Communion.“

She too, Mullis’s daughter went on to explain, had undergone something uncanny and inexplicable in that same cabin.  “When she saw the book, she had experienced the same sort of vague recognition as I had.”

Very few of the stories related in The Communion Letters pose any particular challenge to 21st-century science.  Most give the impression of being unusually vivid and powerful dreams, with a few waking hallucinations mixed in.  (In the last of my quotes from that book, the four-year-old witness is surrounded by relatives, none of whom sees anything unusual.)  But they attest to the incredible resonance that Strieber’s recollections–his narration of them, the artistic rendering that appears on his cover–have had with an incredible range of men and women, who can’t be dismissed as all insane.  (Though some perhaps are, such as the author of the letter on pages 239-242.)

This resonance, unlike the memories themselves, is documented fact.

Grant, if you’re willing, that Strieber remembers events that can’t have happened, involving entities that don’t exist.  His memories remain genuinely his, genuinely shared with hundreds of thousands of others.  As such they’re vitally important, although in what way they’re important we don’t yet understand.

Attention must be paid.

Of all the merits of this wonderful book Strieber and Jeffrey Kripal have given us, this may be the most fundamental.  It pays attention.  It invites us to do the same.

by David Halperin
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