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Whitley Strieber and Jeffrey J. Kripal team up on this unprecedented and intellectually vibrant new framing of inexplicable events and experiences. Rather than merely document the anomalous, these authors-one the man who popularized alien abduction and the other a renowned scholar-deliver a fast-paced and exhilarating study of why the supernatural is neither fantasy nor fiction but a vital and authentic aspect of life. Their suggestion? That all kinds of "impossible" things, from extra-dimensional beings to bilocation to bumps in the night, are not impossible at all: rather, they are a part of our natural world. But this natural world is immeasurably weirder, more wonderful, and probably more populated than we have so far imagined with our current categories and cultures, which are what really make these things seem "impossible." The Super Natural considers that the natural world is actually a "super natural world"-and all we have to do to see this is to change the lenses through which we are looking at it and the languages through which we are presently limiting it. In short: The extraordinary exists if we know how to look at and think about it.… (more)
User reviews
Kripal adds to the mix in this book by taking a professorial view of his vast knowledge of religions and belief systems. Chapters are juxtaposed with Whitley's views and topics followed up by Professor Kripal's commentary on the same. It leads us down many paths and intrigues but the answers as always are left unanswerable at this stage, and maybe that is as it always will be.
As is typical in these matters the believers will get there "aha" moments and the debunkers will get there "aha" moments in all of this exchange. In my case I was left with not much of either. Some of the ideas Whitley concludes with were thought provoking to me and somewhat congruent with my take. As such that our science and technology is still vastly primitive to the truth, if there is such a thing. Our Einstein based physics I have often felt will eventually be proven quite off the mark but is adequate for what we can grasp for now. So I did take away some positives in reading this book and am glad I did. It's just there remains so much left unexplained. And maybe that is as it should be because it leaves the door open for many more theories and books to be spawned.
I wasn't entirely sure what to expect with this book, but it ended up being pretty good. Some parts were pretty long, but overall I enjoyed this book and I would probably read it again. I would recommend it to those