Events
Sexuality and Spirituality with Jeffrey Kripal
May 14 2010
EVENT DETAILS
Saturday, May 15
10:00 AM - 5:00 PM
CIIS Main Building
$135 (Includes Friday Evening Lecture)
6 CEUs (MFT, LCSW, RN)
ABOUT THE WORKSHOP
The Greek philosopher Plotinus wrote of nous eron, a transcendent level of mind that is intimately related to the energies of eros. The idea goes back to Plato, who wrote of sublimated sexual desire as the burning wings of philosophical vision. In this lecture and workshop, Jeffrey Kripal traces the mystical as the erotic and the erotic as the mystical through Roman Catholicism, tantric Hinduism, Sufism, Kabbalah, the lives of religious scholars, the gospels, early Christian gnosticism, the human potential movement, the psychical research tradition, and most recently, American popular culture and the superhero comic book.
Kripal explores the initial enthusiasm for ascetic Asian religious traditions among American spiritual seekers and the subsequent shift to the erotic "countercultures" of Asia: the tantric traditions of India, Tibet, China, and Japan. Finally, he examines the study of sexuality and spirituality in three different domains: Western mysticism, psychoanalysis, and parapsychology.
ABOUT THE PRESENTER
Jeffrey Kripal, PhD, holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, where he is also chair of the Department of Religious Studies. He is the author of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion; Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism and Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism; and the forthcoming Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred.
