Jeffrey J. Kripal: The Wonder of Esalen
By Donna Freitas -- Publishers Weekly, 3/21/2007 8:26:00 AM
“All of my books are about sexuality and spirituality,” Kripal began. This chair of religious studies at Rice University is explaining why he chose Esalen—the eclectic spiritual retreat in California’s Big Sur region—as the subject of six years of research and his most recent book, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Univ. of Chicago, April). “I started out in a Catholic Benedictine seminary, where I became interested in the relationship between sexuality and celibacy. But then I realized there was no way to be a heterosexual male in Catholicism—you need a divine feminine for that.” Kripal turned to Tantric Hinduism and wrote his first book, Kali’s Child (Chicago, 1998), about homoerotic mysticism in the life and teachings of Ramakrishna.
The book was controversial, to say the least. Kali’s Child was effectively banned in India. But it was this same project that eventually led Kripal to Michael Murphy, Esalen’s founder. “In 1998, he had just read Kali’s Child,” Kripal told RBL. “He called me out of the blue one night around midnight and invited me out to Esalen for a symposium.”
Kripal said what he discovered there was “an American mysticism that allowed the body and spirit to form a unity of erotic and spiritual energies. At Esalen, the Western religious traditions’ rules about a male divine didn’t apply anymore. The divine is anything at Esalen. There is no creed. There is no orthodoxy. If anything, it’s a pantheistic worldview which opens up hundreds of possibilities for images of divinity.”
Kripal has theories about why Esalen escaped the orthodoxy and concerns about heresy he finds so unfortunate in religions like Catholicism and Judaism. “Esalen was born during the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements, so it integrated these into its history and intellectual life. All of the battles you see going on today in Western traditions are passé there,” he said. “Every tradition has a skeleton in its closet, but at Esalen the skeletons are hanging in the living room and everybody is laughing at them.”
Kripal’s next book is about superheroes and the occult. That may seem a departure from Kripal’s work so far—but think again. Not only is Kripal looking at connections between mystical ideas and superpowers, but he’s convinced the popular new television show Heroes is based on Esalen. Fans of the show, Kripal believes, will be fascinated by the parallels.
