Six-week online class via Zoom
Wednesdays, September 4 – October 9, 2024
7 – 9 pm ET
$175 Patreon Members / $190 General Admission

PLEASE NOTE: All classes will be recorded for those who cannot attend live

From precognitive dreams and telepathic visions to near-death experiences, UFO encounters, and beyond, so-called impossible phenomena are not supposed to happen. But they do happen—all the time.

In this class—taught by religious studies professor Jeffrey J. Kripal and based on his new book How to Think Impossibly—we will explore the idea of the impossible not as a function of reality, but of our ever-changing assumptions about what is real.

Over the course of the class, students will be invited to think about these fantastic (yet commonplace) experiences as an essential part of being human, expressive of a deeply shared reality that is neither mental nor material but gives rise to both. Thinking with specific individuals and their extraordinary experiences in vulnerable, open, and often humorous ways, join Dr Kripal as he interweaves humanistic and scientific inquiry to develop an awareness that the fantastic is real, the supernatural is super natural, and the impossible is possible.

SCHEDULE

• Class 1. Words Are Experiences: Evolutionary Origins and the World of the Dead

• Class 2. Why They Don’t Land: Mantis, Mystical Theology, and Social Criticism

• Class 3. “That They Are Not Human”: Thinking on the Autistic Spectrum

• Class 4. The Timeswerve: Theorizing in a Block Universe

• Class 5. We Are God (and the Devil): Further Thoughts and Moral Objections

• Class 6. How to Think Impossibly: The Three Bars

Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He is the author of several books, including, most recently, The Superhumanities: Historical Precedents, Moral Objections, New Realities, published by the University of Chicago Press.