Kripal Interview in RD

From Religion Dispatches:

Laycock: Can you succinctly explain your theory of why impossible things happen and have always happened?
Kripal: Because this is what a human being _is_. The human being experiences "the impossible," because the human being, everywhere and always, is not the culture and history of the place and time. We exceed and exhaust our historical conditions, each and every worldview, _no matter what it is_. This is also what I mean by the "Human as Two." I don't mean there are two substances. I mean that _we are the splitters of reality_. We cognize, perceive, and imagine that there are "subjects" and "objects," but this is an illusion created by our very existence, by our very cognitions, perceptions, and imaginations. Reality is actually One, and until humanists can say that, we will not be heard. We will be ignored. And we should be.

I missed that Jeffrey Kripal had a new book out last summer, How to Think Impossibly. His career-long project on investigating the real versus the experienced is fascinating. This means talking a lot about the supernatural, though I often take his perspective as a means for making sense of persistant erroneous data of any kind. Sometimes the things which make the most sense logically are just not human enough for people to enjoy, or understand, or accept. Achieving the humanity in a project is really the goal, by which I mean the feeling of being alive.