
MS: I want to ask you about the structures of storytelling. I'll put this topic in the context of an example from your own work, and a question about part of your writing process.
Mutants and Mystics lays out its story as being in seven parts. On the one hand, the “super-story” that you’re telling in that volume, is something you’re analyzing as being an emergent cultural myth, so you’re saying it’s there already, it’s already in a collective mind, perhaps, or in multiple people’s minds. [See footnote 1.] But you’re also crystallizing it, doing something creative, by framing it as a story. When you are focusing on a new project, and you’re coming up with a structure, or an argument, or a narrative, do you have a sense of that as emergent in an intuitive way, a sense of the form intuitively, before you start breaking it down analytically?
JK: So I do now. I would say that I didn’t at the beginning, when I was a young man. You know, I’ve written probably nine or ten books now, and so it’s not my first rodeo. And I know that books have lives of their own, by which I mean the finished book is never the book I imagined writing in the beginning. I actually don’t know what I’m doing in the beginning, but I know something will take shape if I just stick with it.
And the way I work, which I think is important, is I get up every single morning at 4, 4:30 or 5, whatever time it is, and I either write or I read to write for two to three hours. And I do that every single day, you know, ostensibly 365 days out of the year, every year. I never, ever stop.
And if you do that, your mind and your body basically give up and say, “Okay, Jeff’s gonna make us do this thing for two to three hours, and then we can go do whatever we want, but he’s going to do this first thing in the morning.” And so what happens is that the mind essentially is set up or primed in a way to produce something over many weeks and many months and many years.
And I also—this might sound a little weird, but I actually also believe that the books already exist in the future. And that what real creativity is, is tapping into a kind of time loop or a kind of zone, in which you’re working toward something that already exists, and it’s sort of arcing back and influencing your ideas in the present, and there’s this kind of creative kind of zone you get in. I really believe that.
And trance is really important to me. And by trance, I don’t mean extreme trance, I mean a very mild kind of trance, in which you kind of get into a writing zone and you get into that zone consistently. And if that trance is broken, it’s gone, it’s gone for the day – goodbye, no more, you might as well go do something else. But because it’s early in the morning, it’s very seldom broken, because there aren’t a lot of distractions at 5 in the morning.
MS: And that kind of tapping into that time loop that you’re describing, is that for you another way of describing quote-unquote channeling?
JK: Well – I’m not a channeler, I don’t channel books – I really do write ’em, I really do think ’em, it is labor. But I think channeling is a form of creative inspiration that is related to what a writer does or a scholar does, but I think it’s a different process and I certainly don’t claim to have those capacities.
MS: There are stories that seem so right. I had the experience recently, reading another book of yours, The Super Natural, when you tell your colleague’s story of “The Honey Jar.” [See footnote 2]. And that story just landed for me as having this magical structure and timing. Do you feel that the paranormal is inevitably involved in that feeling of rightness, of locking in?
JK: It often is. It’s not always – I think my favorite stage of writing is towards the end, when things are more or less done and you’re polishing, and you’re coming up with connections that connect things in interesting ways. I mean, sometimes there are synchronicities or there’s something paranormal going on, but I don’t count on those, and they’re not often.
And you know, Dale [Allison] – if you listen to him tell the story, he’s extremely puzzled by it. And I’ll say things to him, ‘Well, that’s you, Dale, there’s something really special going on there,’ but – there’s a kind of disowning of it that’s part of the process.
I think creativity is like that – this notion that it comes from somewhere else is not literally true. I think it comes from us. But this experience of it coming from outside of us, I think is really important.
MS: I’m almost wondering where the binary is, not that this is necessarily an answerable question, between these things. I’m not trying to present everything as grandly mystical. But if that book is there in the future, and you’re locking into a space where you’re drawing some of it back to you as you’re writing toward it too, that in itself involves a kind of organically unfolding process. So it’s hard to say where the distinction would fall between that and something more explicitly paranormally influenced.
JK: Yeah, so – I think of books that way because it helps. It helps my creativity and it helps my process. If you gave me enough beers and asked me if I really thought that, I would say, ‘Yeah, I actually do, I do think that – it’s not just a metaphor.’ But the creative process is not dependent on that being more than a metaphor. Maybe I’m tricking myself. But it works – my point is, it works. And so I’m actually quite content with it.
And I also am good friends with a guy named Eric Wargo, who writes a lot about precognition and literary creativity in a number of other writers, and Eric has taught me a lot about creativity and literature and precognition, particularly precognitive dreaming. And I happen to think Eric’s right about pretty much everything he writes. And so he has really helped me hone how I think about my own creative process.
There is no binary, that’s the thing that Eric’s helped me with. Who’s producing this? – is it this future self that has produced the book, or is it the present self that’s working toward the future self? There’s no privileging of any of those selves or any point in that space-time network, it’s all one thing. It’s a loop. And so ultimately, it’s coming from nowhere, it’s not a binary at all, even though of course it is experienced as binary. That’s why I write so much of the Human as Two, is because I think our experience is often a binary experience, but I don’t think it’s truly binary, I think that’s our experience.
MS: Let me zero in on the role story plays in one of your main arguments. Premise is, story can have magical power. And you state in different books that certain phenomena, in your thinking and telling, are really stories, crossing a barrier between the imaginary and the imaginal, becoming tangible or seemingly tangible. When you talk about stories, what do you mean exactly by the term “story”?
JK: Yeah, so let me give you a couple of examples.
When Joseph of Cupertino floated or flew, it was usually in a very devotional context, in early seventeenth-century Italy: he was in love with Jesus or he was devout to the Virgin Mary, he had some kind of very religious notion. There was a religious story that was driving these physical phenomena of him floating or flying.
When Daniel Douglas Hume floated in Victorian England in the late nineteenth century, it was not the Roman Catholic story that was behind his levitations. It was about spiritualism, it was about early science, it was about doubt and skepticism, it was a different kind of cultural story that was driving that physical phenomenon.
So that’s what I mean by the story – the story produces the physical phenomenon in question. But it also, please note, limits what can happen. I actually think religious belief enables impossible things to happen, but I also think it puts the dampers on other impossible things. So does secularism, so does physics, so does – anything. Any worldview, any story we want to inhabit, is going to allow certain things to happen and is going to suppress other things from happening.
So I guess what I mean by a story is something really, really basic to the culture in question – it’s the water the fish are swimming in, and they don’t know it’s water.
So to give you another example, when I hear people tell me their paranormal stories, what I often hear is culture. And I think culture is working in these experiences in very dramatic and very anomalous ways, but it’s it’s still culture that’s doing these things. I don’t know how culture is doing that. I suspect it has something to do with the nature of mind, but I actually don’t know that.
So to get to your question, what I mean by story is essentially culture: what are the fundamental beliefs and possibilities that are given in a particular cultural narrative?
1. In Mutants and Mystics, 2011, Kripal argues that the popular religious imagination has framed a seven-part story about humanity's future, apparent in both comic books and highbrow occultism, that suggests truly open-ended potential for what humanity might eventually become. [Return].
2. In The Super Natural, 2016, Kripal recounts an anecdote by a colleague of his, Dale Allison, who one day washed off the lip of a honey jar and set the jar on a counter to dry, before turning to his cabinet to take out a tin of flour. As Allison was taking the tin from its shelf, he felt it grow heavier in his hands and dropped it in surprise. When the tin hit the floor, its lid came off. Allison saw something inside the container and cleared away the flour to find the honey jar he had just placed on his counter, which – when he looked over – was no longer where he had put it. Allison tells the story himself in Encountering Mystery: Religious Experience in a Secular Age. [Return].