Prof Speaks on Mysticism, Meaning of Religion

Not quite conforming to the clichéd image of Madonna’s Kabbalist followers, a crowd of religion experts and spiritual enthusiasts shuffled into Sulzberger Parlor Monday evening to listen to a lecture, delivered by Rice University professor Jeffrey J. Kripal, on the rise of Asian mysticism in American culture.

Organized by Barnard religion professor John Hawley, Kripal’s talk focused on his new book, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, about the California community that exemplifies the ties of the counterculture to South Asian faiths.

“I’m spiritual but not religious,” Kripal said, quoting the commonly expressed sentiment that one may embrace the principles of a geographically distant faith without actually practicing it. The truth, Kripal said, is that there is a “deep American metaphysical tradition.”

Kripal discussed the origins of a movement—rooted in the ideas of Emerson’s Over-Soul—that evolved into a 20th-century exploration of transcendentalism by John Steinbeck and Henry Miller and eventually culminated in the counterculture of the late 1960s. Kripal used the non-profit Esalen association in Big Sur, California as a lens through which to interpret this phenomenon, speaking about the “psychedelic term,” “banned literature,” and the “erotic basis of the religious experience.”

While Esalen—an academic entity predating the era of hippies and free love—was by no means a child of the counterculture, Kripal emphasized its place in the chronicles of alternative institutions. Esalen, which once provided a serene environment in which to break barriers between the Soviet Union and the United States, currently strives to forge warmer bonds between American and foreign Muslim leaders.

The mystical mindset is profoundly “American because it encodes in a theological form one of the core principles of the Constitution: separation between church and state,” Kripal said. “The academic world is indebted to counterculture.” He added that “the academy has manifested its own counterculture and mysticism.”

Though Kripal traced the beginnings of the ’60s religious craze to students’ responses to established intellectual ideals, he predicted that such a movement could not easily reoccur. The “symbiosis between the energy of the youth movement with the intellectual punch” won’t reignite in the near future, he said.

The presentation stemmed from Barnard’s participation in the Ford Foundation’s Difficult Dialogues initiative, a series of lectures at 43 colleges and universities that in this case drew the link between academic freedom and religious pluralism. Hawley hoped that Kripal, whose earlier works—aimed at pursuing “something in truth”—ultimately elicited criticism from the American Hindu community, would speak to students about the distortion of original academic intents.

Audience members lauded the presentation for its photographic and narrative depiction of Esalen and the religious undertones in alternative American culture. Erika Dyson, an American studies graduate student specializing in early 20th-century religious groups, was impressed with the “interdisciplinary work performed by Kripal,” as seen in the fact that he studies Eastern religion, yet wrote a book about American alternative movements.

scott.levi@columbiaspectator.com