Thinking Impossibly: Jeffrey Kripal on the Strange Experiences That Shape Human Life

Professor Jeffrey J. Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University in Houston, Texas. For more than two decades, Jeff has been on a mission to help people “think impossibly.” As a historian of religion with a comparative focus, Jeff has come to the conclusion that one of the most common threads across religions that binds diverse groups of humans across cultures is the mountain of weird, unspeakable, anomalous experiences that challenge existing worldviews and are therefore rarely taken seriously within the academy or beyond. That’s what makes these experiences “impossible.” They shouldn’t happen, and yet they do. Constantly. Throughout time and across cultures, to people of all ages, sexes, races, and creeds. These impossible experiences include things like encounters with ghosts and aliens, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, precognition, and much, much more.

Jeff is convinced that these experiences genuinely do happen to people; what they mean is another story. And that’s exactly the point. Jeff believes that understanding and accepting the reality of these experiences is the key to telling a new, better story that our species desperately needs: a story that is not confined to a strict sense of materialism that says consciousness is fully reducible to matter. Through his recent endeavors like the massively popular annual “Archives of the Impossible” Conference, and an upcoming docuseries that will air on AMC starting October 1, 2026, Jeff has helped countless experiencers of the impossible flourish by giving them a platform to share their stories. For Jeff, learning to take these experiences more seriously and think impossibly is simple: “Listen,” he says. “Just listen to what these people are actually saying.”