In this episode of "Reality Check," Ross Coulthart sits down with Jeffrey J. Kripal, the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University and host of the new six-part series "Archive X: Unexplained Phenomena." Kripal oversees Rice's Center for the Impossible, formerly the Archives of the Impossible, a collection that holds the papers of John Mack and Jacques Vallée among more than a million items on telepathy, near-death experience, abduction and precognition.
The conversation opens with the nonverbal autistic children of the series' first episode and the place they call the hill. Then, moves to the abduction account of Karin Austin, the artist Andrew Paquette's dreams of disasters that later happened and Kripal's argument that the brain is a receiver of consciousness rather than its producer. Coulthart puts the harder questions to Kripal, including why a nonhuman intelligence would block a witness's memory, whether a future human civilization is behind the encounters and what to make of Christian arguments that the phenomenon is demonic. Kripal's answer runs through all of it, that these experiences cluster around trauma and love, that they have happened for millennia and that the task is to listen before reducing them to any worldview.
SOCIAL TAGS:
Ross Coulthart
X: @rosscoulthart https://x.com/rosscoulthart
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Jeffrey Kripal
Substack: @jeffkripal https://jeffkripal.substack.com/
Website: https://jeffreyjkripal.com/
#telepathy #abduction #nonhumanintelligence
CREDITS
Host: Ross Coulthart
Executive Producer: Andy Gipson
Editorial Producer: Meagan Medick
Producer: Will Tomasi
Research Producer: Rob Jones
Editor: Anthony Diasio
On "Reality Check," NewsNation Special Correspondent Ross Coulthart takes a fact-based approach to tackle everything from unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs) to mysteries often missing from the headlines.
More Reality Check: https://www.newsnationnow.com/podcasts-newsnation/reality-check-with-ross-coulthart/
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CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro
3:07 Has the Phenomenon Increased?
4:59 Non-Local Consciousness
6:16 The Telepathic Autistic Children
12:15 The Hill
18:23 Becoming Superhuman
19:58 Karin Austin's Abduction Account
28:38 The Future Human Hypothesis
31:50 Andrew Paquette and Precognition
39:28 Trauma and the Thinned Veil
44:47 Unreliable Space-Time Sensors
49:20 Ross's Esalen Experience
51:26 The Demonic Interpretation
52:38 The John Mack Archives
56:22 Gnosticism and the Nag Hammadi Texts
