Jeffrey Kripal

I do understand the anger that people feel when they read Jeffrey Kripal’s and other people’s assessment of Indian traditions. If someone were to come up with a similar distortion of my own cultural heritage, I would probably feel the same. However, I do feel troubled when people end up calling Kripal a “cheat’’, a “spiritual bandit” or begin to speculate about hidden ‘agendas’. My problem is not …

Let us begin in a very intuitive way and ask ourselves this question: where do we encounter ‘cultural differences’? In human contacts, of course. What kind of human contacts? In inter-individual contacts. That is, we see (or sense, or intuit or whatever) cultural differences in our contacts with individual human beings. You do not meet ’the western culture’ but individual Americans, Germans, …