Companion interviews -

He Studied Every Religion, This One Came Closest to Truth:

The Secret Religion of Nietzsche | On Mysticism:

1. Homosexuals have privileged access to God.

2. Orthodox religions (e.g. Christianity, Hinduism) favor sublimated homosexuality over active heterosexuality.

3. Many of the great religious leaders themselves were queer.

These are the surprising claims of my guest, Rice professor Jeff Kripal. Jeff grew up Catholic and went to seminary but had to leave because, as a straight man, he was alienated by the overwhelmingly homoerotic environment.

Jeff then dedicated his early career to investigating the unlikely bedfellows of mysticism and homosexuality and found the same pattern again and again not just in Christianity, but Hinduism, Sufism and every major mystical tradition: whenever a tradition elevates celibacy it attracts homosexuals who would otherwise be persecuted in society. These homosexuals would, in turn, transmute their sublimated homoeroticism into spiritual practice and form the vanguard of the religion. This is Jeff’s reading of not just religious followers but religious leaders like Jesus and Ramakrishna themselves!

While I struggle to get onboard with the extent of Jeff’s conclusions, his explanations helped illuminate a puzzle I’ve been pondering for a long time: what explains the overwhelming creative contributions of homosexuals?

• Why does pederasty pop up in every elite culture including our own (Hollywood, SF, British boarding schools)?

• Why is this group, less than 3% of society, so dominant in creative fields such as academia, media, and technology?

• Why are homosexuals overrepresented in positions of power, while being persecuted in almost every pre-modern society?

Even if I remain unconvinced about the full extent of Jeff’s otherworldly thesis, his arguments have given me great insight into homosexuals’ secular creativity.

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What We Cover:

00:00 1. Introduction

11:38 2. Why Mysticism Selects for Same-Sex Desire

21:06 3. A Queer Reading of Jesus

32:47 4. Why a Sexless Jesus Won Out

41:27 5. Jeff’s Encounter with a Hindu Diety

53:30 6. Mysticism as Hedonism

1:04:07 7. Plato on Love, Sex, and Divinity

1:07:40 8. Sex Runs Through the Supernatural

Johnathan Bi: Do you see any homoerotic patterns in traditional Islam? My guest, Rice University professor Jeff Kripal, is going to argue for a homoerotic reading of religion. That there’s a special connection, not just between sex and divinity, but specifically homosexuality and divinity. In fact, Jeff’s claim is that in most religions, it is sublimated homosexuality that is orthodox and encouraged, whereas active heterosexuality becomes marginalized. In the Christian context, Jeff not only believes that most of Christian monasticism must be explained as sublimated homosexuality, but also that Jesus himself was queer. Now, I know this is a deeply scandalous claim, so let me just emphasize that, and this is true for all of my interviews, but especially for this one, my guest’s views are not my views, okay? I can’t be both a libertarian capitalist like Joe Lonsdale and a democratic socialist like Alex Ohanian. I can’t be both a Catholic like Dave O’Connor and an atheist like Brian Leiter. I don’t invite guests on because I fully endorse their views, but because they have something revelatory and illuminating to teach us. And what I think is revelatory in this interview are two unintuitive connections between number one, the erotic and the divine, that sex and divinity, sex and God are somehow deeply intertwined. And number two, between homosexuality and inspiration.

Johnathan Bi: If you’ve ever wondered why homosexuals are so disproportionately represented in positions of creativity and power, be it art, media, finance, religion, technology, then Kripal’s theory will begin to give you an answer. If you want to be invited to online and in-person lectures, seminars, and events that I host across the world, then please join my email list at johnathanbi.com to be kept up to date. Without further ado, Jeff Kripal. Your homoerotic Jesus sounded ridiculous until I read the Bible in the actual Greek. Because you said in your book that the beloved disciple was laying on Jesus’s chest. And so I checked John 13:23, which is that line. And this is what the English, this is the new revised standard edition says.

“One of his disciples—the one whom Jesus loved—was reclining next to him” - John 13:23”

Johnathan Bi: And I’m like, what the hell is Jeff doing? He’s just lying. And then I looked at the Greek:

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What motivated the founding fathers to build America? Fame. They wanted fame.

“The love of fame” declares Hamilton in the Federalist Papers is “the ruling passion of the noblest minds.” He likely had Washington in mind writing that.

Similarly, Franklin confesses in the beginning of his autobiography that it may look like he’s writing it out of vanity… and he is! Because vanity “is often productive of good to the possessor, and to others that are within his sphere of action… it would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity.”

Of course, the type of fame that the founding fathers were after is different in kind from the fame most of our contemporaries are chasing. It is not just to be known, but to be respected by those whom you respect for accomplishing noble deeds. And I think we need to re-legitimize the desire for this kind of “fame” as a spur to attempt great deeds today. Our society advises us to “stop caring what others think” — while this is a good antidote for the clout-chasers of today, our blanket rejection of “vanity” veers too far in the other extreme. The task should be to discern what types of fame is worth and not worth pursuing.

In this interview, you will learn about the psychology, history, and blindspots of the American founding from one of its most respected commentators, the legendary UT Philosopher Thomas Pangle.

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1.1 Washington’s Love of Fame

Johnathan Bi: Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers that the love of fame is the ruling passion of the noblest minds. Hamilton was obviously Washington’s aid and you speculate he might have had Washington in mind there. Tell us about Washington’s love of fame.

Thomas Pangle: It was a strong part of his makeup, his personality. But I think he was very clear about the fact that the love of fame correctly understood is the love of being famous for admirable qualities, not just being well-known.

Johnathan Bi: Smith said that in the theory of moral sentiments, we not want to only be sympathized with, but sympathizable.

Thomas Pangle: Yes.

Johnathan Bi: In order to — that is to say we want the good recognition but also to be good. So you’ve kind of qualified the fame part. The part I still have problem with in what Hamilton said is ruling passion. That’s where someone like Plato would disagree with him, right? The noblest minds, their ruling passion — they might still want recognition, but their ruling passion is reason. Is that a theoretical difference between Hamilton and Plato?

Thomas Pangle: Well, right. I think Hamilton has a somewhat too overly two-dimensional concept. I don’t think he’s thought it through in the way I think probably Washington had. That you don’t want just the fame of everyone thinking you’re a terrific person. You want a sense and that confirms my own judgment on myself. Another way of putting this I think is that for someone like Washington, and I think he saw this very much in the figure of Cato, Cato is concerned with fame, but he’s concerned above all with being the kind of person he wants to be and getting confirmation of that through the fame.

Johnathan Bi: The great man’s desire for glory is a bit odd because he desires it from usually lesser men. One philosophical manifestation of this is the master-slave dialectic in Hegel and for our audience, the master fails to get the kind of recognition that he wants even after he defeats the person and renders him a slave.

Thomas Pangle: Precisely because he’s made him a slave. And a slave cannot give the master the glory that he desires.

Johnathan Bi: Is the great man tragic in this way as well?

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Two years ago, I witnessed a Christian miracle, but I did not convert.

Not because I thought the miracle was fraudulent — I think it was genuine — but because of the existence of other genuine miracles in competing religious traditions. Even more frustrating, these traditions give the same unconvincing explanations of the others’ miracles: demons, fraud or, at best, lesser revelations.

Christian holy men tell me Buddhism has been hijacked by Satan. Buddhist monastics tell me Christ is a Bodhisattva for a lesser civilization not ready for the ultimate truth. I don’t find any of these answers compelling. So how is one to decide between competing religious claims?

This is the burning question that has motivated my seeker’s journey for the past few years and my guest Rice University’s Jeff Kripal has given me the most compelling response yet. After two years of talking with every religious scholar/practitioner/monastic I could find, it is this interview that I find most convincing by far. He figured it out.

Now let me be clear, what I find so compelling is less so Jeff’s answer, and more his method. Jeff takes seriously 1. the miraculous claims of all orthodox religions, but also 2. the modern critiques of those religions: biblical criticism, science, Freud, Feuerbach. And last but not least he also integrates 3. the contemporary supernatural: near death experiences, remote viewing, UAPs, telepathy, reincarnation research.

Jeff is the only religious scholar I know who not only takes these three seemingly incompatible spheres seriously but has integrated them into a unifying theory. And if you are at all curious about the religious question I cannot recommend Jeff’s work enough for both scholars and seekers.

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What We Cover:

4:07 Against Western Monotheism

33:58 Against Eastern Religion

52:50 Against Materialism

1:23:11 Fraudulent Miracles?

1:31:52 Dual Aspect Monism

1:49:47 The Historicity of Miracles

1:55:39 The Ethics of Mysticism

Companion interviews:
- Uncovering the CIA's Secret Weapon: Psychic Spies:

- The Secret Religion of Nietzsche | On Mysticism:

Johnathan Bi: Two years ago, I witnessed a Christian miracle, but I still did not convert. I didn’t convert at the time, not because I thought it was fraudulent. I think the miracle was genuine, but because of the existence of other genuine miracles in competing religious traditions. But they can’t all be right. So who has the ultimate truth? I’ve been tortured by the question of which religious tradition has the right God ever since. And my guest, Rice University’s Jeff Kripal has given me the most compelling response yet. After years of talking with every scholar of religion I could get my hands on, it is these sets of interviews that I find most compelling by far. And if you are at all curious about the religious question, I cannot recommend Jeff’s work enough for both scholars and seekers. If you want to be invited to online and in-person lectures, seminars, and events that I host across the world, then please join my email list at Johnathanbi.com to be kept up to date. Without further ado, Jeff Kripal.

Johnathan Bi: So, Jeff, I come to you asking for advice as both a scholar and a seeker. And to give you a bit of backstory, I was raised Protestant, like many teenagers, grew away from the faith. And in college, I was working through personal suffering, this worldly suffering about desire. The classic growing angst of a teenager.

Johnathan Bi: And I got into two religious traditions, René Girard’s Catholicism, who problematized desire socially, and certain sects of Tibetan Buddhism who problematized desire ontologically and phenomenologically. And my first foray was to solve just worldly problems, okay? So I wasn’t really interested in the metaphysics, the next world, but what it did do was it convinced me that there was something here. This is not as the modern scientists or materialists say, just complete voodoo, right? Now, my second foray into religion was actually about last year when I read one of your colleagues, Carlos Eire’s book on They Flew, on a historical argument for levitation that I couldn’t find a materialist explanation for. And because of that, I actually witnessed an orthodox miracle myself. So it’s this icon, orthodox icon, yay big of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. It’s in Taylor, Pennsylvania. And it oozes oil, myrrh, infinitely, and I saw it do that for 15 minutes as the priest or the father took it out and proceeded to anoint everyone in the room with it. And my metaphysical worldview was completely blown out of the water. And then to much of my Christian friends’ chagrin, I did not immediately convert to orthodoxy because I felt like that was the wrong conclusion to draw. Witnessing this one miracle gave a lot more credence to the other miracle traditions that I was familiar with, right? Whether it’s the Buddhists, Hindus.

Johnathan Bi: And I feel like my problem with religion is the exact opposite of many moderns. They don’t think that there’s anything here. I think there’s too much here to decipher. And my problem, I framed it as what Sextus Empiricus calls equipollence. It’s not when I think a tradition like Christianity is wrong, it’s that there’s an opposing and mutually exclusive orthodox claim that I can’t determine between. And so my problem is not whether to take a leap, it’s whither to take a leap. So that’s the problem I’ve been stuck in. What do you got for me?

 1. Against Western Monotheism

Jeffrey Kripal: Yeah, welcome. Welcome to the club. That’s my problem. I believe too much as it were. One of the things that I grew up Roman Catholic in the American Midwest and the claim was always that, well, the Catholic Church is right because miracles only exist in the Catholic faith. And that’s just not true.

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Modern man avoids danger and, as a result, lost his vitality. Nietzsche:

“The secret of realizing the largest productivity and the greatest enjoyment of existence is to live in danger! Build your cities on the slope of Vesuvius! Send your ships into unexplored seas! Live in war with your equals and with yourselves!”

Modern man is instead a creature of comfort: his dreams are limited to a slightly bigger house, nicer car, better vacation, and to make a few extra bps at work. His physical timidity is mirrored in his intellectual life: don’t be offensive, stay within the Overton window … For Nietzsche the willingness to embrace physical dangers is a precursor to embrace the (much more important) intellectual dangers:

“I greet all the signs indicating that a more manly and warlike age is commencing, which will, above all, bring heroism again into honour! For it has to prepare the way for a yet higher age, and gather the force which the latter will one day require, - the age which will carry heroism into knowledge, and wage war for the sake of ideas and their consequences.”

In this brief musing I will trace out how danger has been eradicated from modern life through Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu culminating in the American project.

Companion interviews:
- The Secret Religion of Nietzsche | On Mysticism

The CIA ran a psychic spy program during the Cold War. I got my hands on the original documents … and was blown away by what they achieved. Science has no way of explaining this.

Project Stargate is a program that lasted over two decades which used remote viewing to gain military intelligence. Viewers sit in a dark room, are given nothing but an anonymized reference number — a hash corresponding to a military target — and try to psychically “tap into” the target. They draw out whatever sensory signals they receive to be analyzed later.

I thought this was all voodoo nonsense, a complete psy-op, until I spent a few days digging through the original, declassified files now housed at Rice university. The amount and accuracy of successful “hits” were uncanny. The personnel leading the program were secular physicists. This is not something that can be explained away by sheer chance.

What’s even weirder is that the Soviet Union and China had (have?) their own psychic military units! Behind the well-known spy battles of the Cold-War was a secret game of psychic espionage and counter-espionage.

But the Soviet Union were communists, and communists are materialists. How did a materialist superpower legitimize starting a psychic division within their intelligence apparatus? They disliked even psychoanalysis for not being “materialist” enough. It turns out that there is a heated and fascinating philosophical debate about how remote viewing actually works, and even key leaders of the program on the American side remained materialists, convinced that there was a “physical” explanation. This is why Stargate is worth investigating today, for the philosophical “payoff” on fundamental questions of ontology.

In this episode, I will take you through the highlights from the original documents of Stargate and, more importantly, discuss what this means philosophically for the world we live in.

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What We Cover:

2:12 The Best “Hits” from Stargate

9:36 Is Stargate a Psy-Op?

12:04 Why Christians Shutdown Stargate

15:01 Is Remote Viewing Nature or Nurture?

18:26 How Consciousness Influences Matter

21:07 How the Army Chose Remote Viewers

26:23 The Materialist Explanation for Remote Viewing

30:18 Remote Viewers Could See the Past

35:08 Why was Stargate Declassified?

So Stargate ran all the way from the ‘70s. It was terminated in ‘95, and then it was declassified in ‘95. So it’s not like I was able to infiltrate the CIA headquarters and get these material. These are all publicly available. I’m sitting at Rice University right now. These are housed in, what is called, the Archives of the Impossible. They’re available upon public request. Anyone can come and just see them.

So this is how one of these remote viewing sessions worked. Okay. As a leader of one of these sessions, you sit down with the remote viewer that was selected through the U.S. Army, and you start with one of these worksheets. And here’s what you do. You provide an anonymized reference number to the target, which could be a military base, a location, and your remote viewer tries to psychically tap into the target and sketches out and records all kinds of sensory input he or she receives, before analyzing it later. Which I know sounds really crazy, but wait till you see the results. I know you’re dying to see some of the actual hits, some of the best examples of remote viewing, and that is found in box 12, folder 3.

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Reference Texts + Affiliate Links:

- Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue: https://amzn.to/44twNVb
- Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Effectual Truth: https://amzn.to/4phinje
- Viroli, Machiavelli’s God: https://amzn.to/49FZAtf
- McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy: https://amzn.to/43QiNVq

Companion interviews:
- You Need More Danger In Your Life | Machiavelli Explained:

- This is How I Fell in Love with Machiavelli | Q&A:

- Power Will Cost You Everything, It’s Worth It:

- The Forgotten 11th Commandment | Princeton’s Maurizio Viroli on Machiavelli's God:

- Why You Must Acquire Power at All Costs | Harvard’s Harvey Mansfield on Machiavelli:

America violated the freedom of the natives in order to build the freest nation in history. According to Machiavelli, this is not hypocrisy; this is necessity. Be it Rome, Ancient Israel, or Persia, all great nations are founded by ruthlessness: there is no other way.

This is the interpretation of the great Machiavelli scholar Leo Strauss who writes: “America owes her greatness not only to her habitual adherence to the principles of freedom and justice, but also to her occasional deviation from them. [Machiavelli] would not hesitate to suggest a mischievous interpretation… of the fate of the Red Indians… there cannot be a great and glorious society without the equivalent of the murder of Remus by his brother Romulus.”

Strauss brings in Machiavelli to combat two dominant views on America’s founding. The right wants to whitewash and hide this founding murder: they blame disease; they point to how “backward” the natives were; they want this period of history hidden in textbooks to preserve America’s pristine moral image. The left, on the other hand, seeks to expose and guilt: they tear down statues; denounce their ancestors; and want this injustice seared into the minds of each American.

For Machiavelli, both sides are equally misguided, and for the exact same reason. The right buries its head in the sand and ignores the brutality. The left implicitly assumes that it could have been otherwise: that you can build your shining city on a hill, preserve the original city, while everyone sings kumbaya. Both voices are afraid to own up to the true cost of freedom. Machiavelli writes: “there is no secure mode to possess [a city] other than to ruin them. And whoever becomes patron of a city accustomed to living free and does not destroy it, should expect to be destroyed by it.”

It is tough and ruthless men, willing to violate their deepest principles, who get you to a state of strength where you can actually realize those principles. As the saying goes, tough men make peaceful times. But Machiavelli thinks that people living in peace tend to forget this. Because peaceful times are so easy, you delude yourself into thinking that toughness was never needed. So you either whitewash like the right or denounce like the left. Peaceful times make weak men. And so, to not let weak men make tough times, Machiavelli’s role as teacher is to constantly remind you of the treachery of founding and the true cost of politics. If he were writing a textbook on American history it would be filled with acts of America’s ruthlessness — not to be denounced but to be imitated — just as his books are filled with ruthless Roman leaders for his fellow Italians to learn from.

In this lecture, you will learn about the terrifying things you need to do to build a free, equal, and lawful society. And, as always, I will withhold my own opinion and critiques for the end after a charitable reconstruction.

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Topics we cover:

0:50 America’s Founding Murder

11:03 The American Case for Technology Theft

18:29 Why Machiavelli Loves the Vulgar

35:56 Machiavelli Really Dislikes the Elites

46:58 Why co-CEOs Never Work

59:43 Wokeism is the Capitalist’s Best Friend

1:18:35 Corrupt People Cannot Be Reasoned With

1:21:08 My Own Views on Machiavelli

America is the land of freedom. She’s the protector of self-evident rights. In my mind, there can be no doubt about America’s genuine achievement in world history. How then, do we make sense of her founding? Of the systematic elimination of the natives’ freedoms whose rights were not so evident? America’s founding act violated her most deeply held principle. How do we make sense of this? This is the paradox that the great Machiavelli scholar, Leo Strauss, introduces to help us tease out Machiavelli’s central political insight. Principles need to be violated in order to be actualized. It’s not hypocrisy, it’s necessity. For Strauss, as for Machiavelli, the modern left and right are both deluded about America’s founding. The right wants to whitewash, whereas the left wants to denounce; but neither own up to the actual cost of doing politics in the real world. In this lecture, I will withhold my own opinion and critiques for the end, but not before explaining the terrifying cost of building an equal, free, and lawful society, according to Machiavelli.

1. American Founding

1.1 American Founding: Geography

I quote to you, the great Machiavelli scholar, Leo Strauss,

“Machiavelli would argue that America owes her greatness not only to her habitual adherence to the principles of freedom and justice, but also to her occasional deviation from them. He would not hesitate to suggest a mischievous interpretation… of the fate of the Red Indians… there cannot be a great and glorious society without the equivalent of the murder of Remus by his brother Romulus.” - Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli

So I’m going to save, as always, my personal reservations... And believe me, there’s a lot... Towards the end of this lecture. And we’re going to start just by trying to understand the most charitable interpretation of Machiavelli. And we’re going to do it by unpacking Strauss’s example here. So what is he gesturing at? This mischievous interpretation of the founding of America. Up to 90% of the Native Americans were wiped out in the first phase through contact of disease alone. Think about ten of your best friends and family. Nine of them dead. And then came a brutal, centuries-long, westward push. Massacres, war, fraud, contracts that were agreed to, but blatantly violated. By the time the frontier closed, only a sliver of the native population was still surviving. And it was not much better for those who survived. Families were confined to reserves, children were ripped out of those families, forced into boarding schools, punished for practicing their own religion, speaking their own language, until the native way of life was all but eliminated. Why does Strauss think Machiavelli would highlight this fact of founding? Is it to condemn America? No, not even close. We can tease out what Machiavelli would say about America’s founding, as Strauss suggests, by seeing what Machiavelli has said about the founding of Rome.

Rome, too, was founded on at least two crimes. The first crime, Romulus literally killing his brother Remus. The second crime, Rome subjugated, colonized, enslaved her way to greatness. And the way she did it was absolutely treacherous. Machiavelli tells us when Rome was just a small city-state, what it did was it forced... It invited the city-states around it to become her junior partners. You get to keep all of your ruling class, you get to keep your laws, most of your property, your language, your religion, but you listen to us. And what Rome commanded her junior partners to do, was to go further out and subjugate the people in further regions. So not as inviting them as junior partners, but getting them in as subjects. Killing off the ruling class, taking their land, enslaving some of them, absorbing others as citizens. And when Rome’s junior partners collected enough subjects for her, Rome turned on those junior partners, with the very subjects she got, and subjugated everyone until Rome ruled alone. Blatant fraud is the heart of Rome’s greatness. This is what Machiavelli tells us. And a not too dissimilar strategy was used by America in her expansion. And the most infamous example of this is the Creek War.

In the Creek War, Andrew Jackson, as general, was fighting against the Creeks. And one of the pivotal reasons he won, was because he allied himself with the Cherokee tribe, the Cherokees, who helped America defeat the Creeks. A Cherokee leader even saved Andrew Jackson’s life. Andrew Jackson called the Cherokee, My dear and faithful friends. Now, Andrew Jackson becomes President, and he pushes through the Indian Removal Act, which would exile the Cherokee from their native land... His own allies who saved his life... It would exile them from their native land that they’ve been living for centuries, and push them west. What makes this even more treacherous is that the Cherokee at this point, had done everything they were supposed to do to assimilate. They adopted a written constitution modeled after the US’s constitution. They created a written alphabet. Many of them even stopped practicing their own native religion and rituals, and converted to Christianity. The Cherokee literally had treaties with the American government recognizing its sovereignty. So the Cherokee, again, they did everything they were supposed to do. They fight this legally, not through terrorism. They fight it legally. They take it to the Supreme Court. It’s a bit nuanced, but eventually the Supreme Court sides with the Cherokee. They recognized the Cherokee’s authority, over what Jackson said. What does Jackson do? He ignores the Supreme Court. He does an under-the-table deal with an illegitimate group of Cherokee leaders, get them to sign over the land in an illegitimate treaty, and use that as legitimacy to exile them from their land. This resulted in the infamous Trail of Tears, where the Cherokee were exiled from their native land. A quarter of them died on the journey as they went out west. Why did they go out west? Because the government told them: west of the Mississippi, native land forever.

Machiavelli’s lesson about the founding of Rome is this: Rome could not have been the free state par excellence, a beacon of freedom inspiring all the great nations that have come since, if she actually respected the freedom of others. And if you are going to conquer, if you are going to go to war, I quote to you Machiavelli,

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Johnathan Bi: Your true potential is higher than you can possibly imagine. It is literally superhuman. But modernity is suffocating that potential. Whether it’s the materialists, the religious, or the technologists, they’ve trapped you squarely as a herd animal. This is why you need to learn to not fit in, to not be normal, to give up health and maybe even sanity if you want to realize this superhuman potential. This is the seductive invitation of my guest, Jeff Kripal, who’s gonna give us a mystical reading of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch. Now, Jeff himself is a scholar of mysticism who had a transformative mystical experience while researching Hinduism in Calcutta as a young man. As you’re gonna hear in this interview, Jeff came face to face with the erotic presence of a Hindu goddess as a grad student decades ago. He literally had an experience with divinity and has since been wrestling with his experience through his writing. Jeff’s ambition is for his writing to engender similar mystical states in your life, to realize your superhuman potential. And he sees the same mystical inspiration and impulse in Nietzsche. Jeff’s claim is that Nietzsche must be read primarily not as a political, philosophical, or literary thinker, but as a mystical and religious one.

Johnathan Bi: And he thinks this is true for all the great thinkers. They are all mystics inspired by their own supernatural experiences. What you’re gonna hear in this interview, then, isn’t just a new way to read Nietzsche, but a new way to read the entire canon as mystical. Jeff is mounting nothing less than a Copernican revolt against the materialist worldview. If you want to be invited to online and in-person lectures, seminars, and events I host across the world, then please join my email list at johnathanbi.com to be kept up to date. Without further ado, Jeff Kripal.

1.  Nietzsche as Mystic

Johnathan Bi: Who is the Ubermensch for Nietzsche?

Jeffrey Kripal: The Ubermensch is the future human. It’s where humanity is evolving or transitioning toward. And we are a transitional species, not just a transitional person, but a transitional species.

Johnathan Bi: We are to apes what the Ubermensch is to us.

Jeffrey Kripal: That’s the image Nietzsche used, of course, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, that we’re on this tightrope and when we look in one direction we see the ape and when we look in another we see the Ubermensch. And we’re sort of in the middle of this. We’re on our way, as it were. But Nietzsche was not a Darwinian in the sense that he didn’t think that this was a random process, that there was some role here, some central role for the will, as he called it. And so it’s unclear how we get to the Ubermensch or to the superhumans, but again, it has something to do with culture, it has something to do with will, it has something to do with intending it. I suspect there’s certainly time travel that goes on in the Nietzschean text. So it’s, I think it’s an occult or an esoteric practice that produces the Ubermensch.

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Companion lectures and interviews:

Masters vs. Slaves | Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality Explained

You’ve been reading Nietzsche completely wrong.

He wasn’t an atheist. He was a mystic.

1. His great work, Zarathustra, is a religious text inspired by a mystical experience in Switzerland.

2. Nietzsche had a precognitive dream that shaped his metaphysics: as a young boy he dreamed of his dead father rising from the grave and taking his infant brother … who soon fell ill and died.

3. People read his claims that he was “Buddha” and “Dionysius” as madness. Yet those are his most profound statements.

4. He hated not Christ but Christianity.

In short, Nietzsche is spiritual but not religious.

This is the claim of my guest Rice University’s Jeff Kripal who will give us a mystical reading of Nietzsche’s Übermensch.

Jeff himself is a scholar of mysticism who had a transformative mystical experience while researching Hinduism in Calcutta as a young man. Jeff witnessed the erotic presence of a Hindu goddess as a grad student decades ago, and has since been wrestling with his experience through his writing. His ambition is for his writing to engender similar mystical states in your life and he sees the same mystical inspiration in Nietzsche.

These interviews with Jeff have been the most transformative I’ve ever done since starting this project. As a religious seeker I haven’t found a contemporary scholar who is able to tie together classical religion, the great books, and new age spirituality in one philosophical framework quite as Jeff has.

What you are going to hear in this interview then isn’t just a new way to read Nietzsche, but a new way to read the entire canon as mystical. Plato, Dante, Homer, Fuerbach, James, Hegel we’ve been reading all of these thinkers completely wrong as we have with Nietzsche. Jeff is leading nothing less than a Copernican revolt against the materialist orthodoxy of the humanities.

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Topics we cover:

2:42 The Übermensch Will Replace Humanity

7:38 Great Thinkers are Divinely Inspired

11:30 Nietzsche is a Mystical Thinker

16:09 Why Most People Misread Nietzsche

35:22 The Evidence for Prophecy

54:21 Holy Men Are Egomaniacs

1:18:33 Nietzsche Loved Christ but Hated Christians

1:30:04 Why Books Engender Mystical states

2:07:37 Why The Humanities Have Failed

2:23:05 All Philosophy Is Disguised Mysticism

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