Hereinafter are some notes and comments from and about the self-professed “possessed” professor Jeffrey Kripal’s essay The Traumatic Secret: Bataille and the Comparative Erotics of Mystical Literature (if you are interested in hearing his own possession story—and how he is a-okay with it—see here.
Kripal refers to “trauma as a psychological correlate or catalyst of the mystical state of consciousness” and yet, that “it does not follow that the mystical life so catalyzed is ‘nothing but’ a symptom of the earlier sexual trauma, any more than a life transformed by a near-death experience of transcendence and Light is ‘nothing but’ an expression of the car accident or open-heart surgery.”
Now, everyone knows that “you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20) which we know from the fact that good can come from evil. For example, the pain of muscle fiber literally ripping during a weight-bearing exercise results in bigger, stronger muscles.
However, there is a very, very long history of weaponizing our natural reaction to various forms of trauma. For example, the CIA’s MK experiments such as MK-Ultra whereby alter personalities/identities were created via dissociation due to trauma and then hidden behind amnesia walls.
Kripal quotes his buddy Whitley Strieber as stating, “Had I not as a child been brutalized by whoever this was, I don’t think that I ever would have been able to perceive the visitors” (Whitley Strieber (Solving the Communion Enigma: What Is to Come)—for more, see my Whitley Strieber’s Traumatic Initiation.
Aldous Huxley elucidates it thusly:
“Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason for supposing that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen; and yet when we subject water to certain rather drastic treatments, the nature of its constituent elements becomes manifest.
Similarly, nothing in our everyday experience gives us much reason for supposing that the mind of the average sensual man has, as one of its constituents, something resembling, or identical with, the Reality substantial to the manifold world; and yet, when that mind is subjected to drastic treatments, the divine element, of which it is in part at least composed, becomes manifest.” (Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1962), v-vi)
Kripal plays off of this in noting:
“We could easily switch scientific metaphors here and make the point even more contemporary. Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason to suppose that matter is not material, that it is made up of bizarre forms of energy that violate, very much like spirit, all of our normal notions of space, time, and causality.
Yet when we subject matter to certain drastic treatments, like CERN’s Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, then we can see quite clearly that matter is not material at all.
But—and this is the key—we can only get there through a great deal of physical violence, a violence so extreme and so precise that it cost us billions of dollars and decades of preparation to inflict it.”
In application to human trauma, Kripal writes:
“Whitley Strieber…is as blunt and frank about the sexual and even rape dimensions of his abduction experiences as he is about how his later adult encounters with subtle beings, whom he calls simply ‘the visitors,’ were somehow related to a horrendous physical trauma that he believes he suffered on a military base as a young child (as a subject in an experiment).”
In passing, I will note that the quite disturbing 2004 movie “Mysterious Skin” is premised upon alien abduction experiences as a result of sexual abuse—as a way of escapist dissociation form the trauma.
Likewise, the 2016 movie “A Monster Calls” and the 2017 “I Kill Giants” both feature children who have experiences with giants that are not real but are byproduct manifestations brought about by trauma: both are about children dealing with a terminally ill mum.
The way that Strieber puts it, “physical and sexual trauma can ‘crack open the cosmic egg’ and so reveal a ‘hidden reality’ of unimaginable scope.”
Kenneth Ring elucidates:
“My argument begins with the proposition that a history of child abuse and trauma plays a central etiological role in promoting sensitivity to UFOEs and NDEs [the “E”s refer to “Experiences” and the “ND” refer to “Near Death”]. My second assumption…is that growing up under such conditions tends to stimulate the development of a dissociative response style as a means of psychological defense….
By doing so [that is, by “tuning out”[this bracketed statement was by Kripal]]—and this is my third assumption—he is more likely to ‘tune into’ other realities where by virtue of his dissociated state, he can temporarily feel safe regardless of what is happening to his body. In this way,…dissociation would directly foster relatively easy access
to alternate, non-ordinary realities.” (Kenneth Ring, The Omega Project: Near-Death Experiences, UFO Encounters, and Mind at Large (New York: William and Morrow, 1992), 144)
Jeffrey Kripal notes, “there are some definite patterns in comparative mystical literature” such as “Bernini’s Saint Teresa…moaning in mystical ecstasy. Or in orgasm. Or both” and “erotic patterns generated by male sexual orientation and religious desire, the privileging of homoerotic structures within male mystical literature, and the exiling of male heterosexuality as heretical within the same.”
Kripal references, “a series of links…between childhood and early adult trauma, mostly of a sexual nature, and the saint’s later and most remarkable ability to dissociate in almost any context in order to enter various, extremely positive ecstatic modes of consciousness and altered states of energy.”
Furthermore, “Another pattern…I have never quite named, but I would like to do so now. I want to call this pattern within my comparative erotics the traumatic secret.”
For example, “a history of sexual trauma can and sometimes does help create the psychosexual foundations of a great mystic.” Yet, he elucidates “an ontological reason, a psychological reason, and a moral reason” that “such a traumatic secret has generally remained secret.”
One is that such experiences are “are literally ‘beyond
Language’ and ‘beyond culture’ and so ‘unspeakable’ or ‘secret.’”
Another is that the experiencer is “vaguely aware of the connection between the earlier trauma and the later mystical event.”
Jeffrey Kripal notes that Georges Bataille wrote, “Nothing binds me to a particular religion…I have to pick my way along a lonely path, no tradition, no ritual to guide me, and nothing to hinder me, either. In this book of mine I am describing an experience without reference to any special body of belief, being concerned essentially to communicate an inner experience—religious experience, as I see it—outside the pale of specific religions.” (Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1986))
Kirpal took the words right out of my mouth in commenting thusly on this, “His was a religion of no religion.” Not being bound to a particular religion means being firmly bound to his very own manmade religion made in his own image. Thus, it is not accurate to claim “no tradition, no ritual” since the traditions to which he holds are his own, the rituals his own, etc. and they most certainly guided him as anyone’s worldview does: “religious experience, as I see it indeed.
Jeffrey Kripal observed, “Bataille sees the Hegelian dialectic as essentially mystical in structure and intent.” This make a lot of sense considering the context. The Hegelian dialectic is, to put it simply: 1) thesis, 2) antithesis, 3) synthesis. Thus, it may be weaponized thusly within the MK-Ultra context: if you want to create an alter personality/identity then you subject someone to trauma (thesis), the person have been designed to react in a self-preserving manner via amnesia within which personalities/identities are housed (antithesis), and thus, you have created personalities/identities that can be called up via, for example, post-hypnotic suggestions (synthesis).
Kripal observes that “Bataille observes that transgression derives its power from the taboo, that the transgression does not remove the taboo but suspends, completes, and transcends it.”
I seem to recall that a little while before Bataille observed that, Paul the Apostle wrote:
“I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7).
An example that is offered is that “sexual taboos must not be misunderstood as simple superstitions. We cannot get rid of them, as our humanity depends on them” for, for example, “the construction of a social order.” You can very plainly see that today within the USA which his literally falling apart culturally by the utter disregard of sexual taboos—and the turning one man and one woman (yes, male and female) in a committed marriage into a taboo.
Kripal, only somewhat cryptically, references that “some of these ecstatic states were explicitly connected to what the saint himself [the 19th c. Hindu, Ramakrishna] described as a kind of haunting of his bowel movements and the related fashion in which he described the path of Tantra as the ‘dirty path,’ the path of the latrine. One can enter the house of mystical experience, the saint pointed out, through many means. The front door works, but so does the back latrine…Ramakrishna’s dogged insistence that the House of Mystical Experience can be entered through something as horrible as a Latrine.”
Many, such as black magickians, have picked up on this uhm, well, backdoor to enlightenment (actually endarkenment), the haunted bowel movements and such (I feel bad for that ghost). For example, Michael Aquino, former priest of Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan who went on to establish the Temple of Set, wrote the following regarding to the legal battle between another military man, US Army Maj Grady McMurtry, and Kenneth Grant regarding the legitimate chartered of the US Grand Lodge of the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO):
“While sitting in the courtroom watching Judge Legge preside sternly over the slug-out, I couldn’t help wondering if he had any idea he was ruling on which group had legal claim to anal sex as the supreme religious sacrament in the United States” (Scroll of Set, Vol. XII no. 5, Oct. 1986 AD).
The band Led Zeppelin just got right to the point by titled one of their albums “In Through the Out Door” which is probably more marketable than, say, “We Love Sodomy.”
Kenneth Ring also notes something I covered in Whitley Strieber: A Complex Messianic Complex? which is that “extremely common move in the alien abduction literature, that such traumatically transformed individuals may well represent ‘the next stage in evolution.’”
Jeffrey Kripal tells us that “Ramakrishna, by the way, was similarly mystically transformed, in an ocean of Light, amidst a suicide attempt, probably for very similar psychosexual reasons” and he specifies that the attempt was via “a knife” which knowing Kripal’s mindset, is specified so as to invoke a phallic symbol.
In his book Kali’s Child (and Kripal claims to be possessed by the black blood false-goddess Kali), he refers to “uncontrollable bowel movements” and that there ‘were texts that talked about ghosts connected to the saint’s bowels, sexually aggressive ‘mothers,’ holy men stripping a little trusting boy desperate for a father figure, village women worshipping this same little boy as their mythical lover…a boss whose ‘demonic’ presence could send a young priest into prolonged states of unconsciousness, and a phallic guru whose unexplained departure was connected with half a year of more unconsciousness and some very bloody bowels.”
He also references “Ramakrishna’s rejection of Tantra” (which was not a “categorical rejection”) “as the latrine of the house.” Ironically, Kripal also relates the tale of how comic book author Grant Morrison also became possessed in India, like Kripal himself, whilst engaging in Tantric rituals, see here.
Lastly, “The Master’s body, like his mind, was continuously expelling the world out through his bowels.” Well, so, okay, wow.
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