Scholar and author Dr. Jeffrey J. Kripal will give a lecture at the University of Lynchburg at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 23. This event is part of the Ida Wise East Memorial lecture series.
Kripal’s topic is “The Superhumanities: Altered States and the Future of Knowledge.” The lecture, which will be held in Sydnor Performance Hall, is free and open to the public.
Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. He chaired Rice’s department of religion for eight years and helped create the GEM program, a doctoral concentration in the study of Gnosticism, esotericism, and mysticism, the largest program of its kind in the world.
“By ‘superhumanities,’ Kripal refers to an expanded understanding of the scope of the humanities,” said Dr. Stephen Dawson, professor of philosophy and John Franklin East Distinguished Chair in the Humanities at Lynchburg.
“‘Scope’ describes the range of human experiences of consciousness. The superhumanities make room for altered states of consciousness that are knowledge-producing but often dismissed as paranormal or supernatural, or simply unreal, [such as a] hallucination, hoax, etc.”
These altered states, Dawson said, are far from being irrelevant or nonessential. In fact, they suggest that inside human beings there is something superhuman.
Kripal is also the associate director of the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.
For more information about this event, contact Dawson at [email protected].
The Ida Wise East Memorial Lecture was established in 1979 by an endowment gift to University of Lynchburg from Margaret East Nelson of Norfolk, Virginia, in memory of her mother, Ida Wise East, and in recognition of the lifelong interest of the East and Nelson families in the humanities. Income from the funds are used to support an annual lecture, lecture series, or seminar in the humanities.
