Stanley Krippner, PhD

Stan Krippner first caught the public imagination with the publication of his groundbreaking work DREAM TELEPATHY, Experiments in Nocturnal ESP (1973). He went on to do equally innovative holistic research in shamanism, consciousness, healing, creativity, extraordinary human potential, and human sexuality. This pioneer of parapsychology has travelled to every shamanic corner of the globe, mentored many, including myself, and brought the mystifying world back into the arena of general psychology, rather than a marginalized specialty.

Stan and I served together on the Asklepia Board, and spoke together for the first Chaos Conference, 1992, but our acquaintance goes back decades. He published Rick Miller's HOLOGRAPHIC CONCEPT OF REALITY. This paper was presented at the First International Congress of Psychotronics, Prague, 1973. First printing was in the journal Psychoenergetic Systems, ed. Stanley Krippner, Vol.1, 1975. 55-62. Gordon & Breach Science Publishers Ltd., Great Britain. Reprinted in the book PSYCHOENERGETIC SYSTEMS, S. Krippner, editor. c1979. 231-237. Gordon & Breach, New York, London, Paris.

Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., is professor of psychology at Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco where he designed many of the courses in the consciousness/spirituality concentration. At Saybrook, he has supervised dissertation research projects for dozens of students. He holds faculty appointments at the Universidade Holistica Internacional (Brasilia) and the instituto de Medicina y Tecnologia Avanzada de la Conducta (Ciudad Juarez, Mexico) where he helped create the certificate programs in human sexuality and in rational-emotive behavior therapy.

Over the years, Dr. Krippner has conducted workshops and seminars on personal mythology, dreams, hypnosis, and/or anomalous phenomena in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Cyprus, Ecuador, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Panama, the Philippines, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Venezuela, and at several congresses of the Interamerican Psychological Association. He is a member of the advisory board for the International School for Psychotherapy, Counseling, and Group Leadership (St. Petersburg) and has given invited addresses for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, and the Artigas Foreign Service Institute in Montevideo, Uruguay.

In 2002, making his ninth trip to Russia to attend the Tenth Annual international Conference on Conflict Resolution, Dr. Krippner spoke on children’s nightmares as a sequelae to wartime trauma. This is one of several topics dealt with in his book The Psychological Effects of War on Civilians: An International Perspective, co-edited with Teresa Mcintyre. The Special Collections at the Kent State University Library houses Dr. Krippner’s archives, over one thousand books, monographs, articles, chapters, and book reviews in English and a dozen non-English languages.

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The Epistemology and Technologies of Shamanic States of Consciousness
Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., Saybrook Graduate School

ABSTRACT: Shamanism can be described as a group of techniques by which its practitioners enter the "spirit world," purportedly obtaining information that is used to help and to heal members of their social group. The shamans' epistemology, or ways on knowing, depended on deliberately altering their conscious state and/or heightening their perception to contact spiritual entities in "upper worlds," "lower worlds," and "middle earth" (i.e., ordinary reality). For the shaman, the totality of inner and outer reality was fundamentally an immense signal system, and shamanic states of consciousness were the first steps toward deciphering this signal system. Homo sapiens sapiens was probably unique among early humans in the ability to symbolize, mythologize, and, eventually, to shamanize. This species' eventual domination may have been due to its ability to take sensorimotor activity and use it as a bridge to produce narratives that facilitated human survival. Shamanic technologies, essential for the production and performance of myths and other narratives, interacted with shamanic epistemology, reinforcing its basic assumptions about reality.

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THE CIRCLE OF SEX IN MYTHOLOGY AND FOLKLORE

Stanley Krippner, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT: According to Gavin Arthur’s “circle of sex” model, all humans fall on a continuum that allows for fluctuation in sexual disposition as well as the intensity of sexual activity. His typology of human sexual behavior avoids such pejorative labels as “abnormal,” “deviant,” and “pathological,” and introduces the terms “heterogenic,” “homogenic,” and “ambigenic” because such terms as “heterosexual” incorrectly combine Greek and Anglo-Saxon roots. Arthur illustrates his model with historical characters; or example, George V of England, the faithful husband of Queen Mary, fell at 12 noon, but Julius Caesar, known in his day as “every woman’s husband and every man’s wife,” fell into the “ambigenic category.” Sappho, the poet who lived on the island of Lesbos, was described as “three quarters homogenic” because, although she preferred Lesbian girls, she occasionally dallied with young shepherds. The writer Gertrude Stein was categorized as “homogenic” at 10 o’clock. Arthur denoted sexual intensity by putting someone in the sphere’s tropical center. Someone who has taken religious orders, however, might find himself or herself near the chilly regions of the circle. A Roman Catholic nun, who considers herself “married to Christ,” could be a 6 o’clock “heterogene." The psychiatrist, Jean Bolen, developed a model that paid special attention to the sexuality of the Greek gods and goddesses. But instead of using their sexuality as the basis for a typology as Arthur did, Bolen focused upon the deities as representing “archetypes,” “powerful inner patterns that allegedly shape behavior and influence emotions. In other words, there can be gay Ares types and lesbian Aphrodites because the archetypes they represent are broader than sexual preference. This typology may be more useful to psychotherapists than Arthur’s ingenious “circle of sex.”

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Explores anomalous experiences, such as hallucinations, lucid dreams, alien abductions, mysticism, anomalous healings, psi events and past lives. Discusses current research and theories, individual and cultural differences, methodological issues, related psychopathology, aftereffects, and clinical implications. For basic and clinical psychologists.

 

How fortunate we are to now have in one volume a comprehensive and scholarly review of the scientific evidence for anomalous experiences. The fascinating subject matter of this book includes such diverse phenomena as lucid dreaming, out of body experiences, past life experiences, and alien abduction. What makes this book different from other treatments of some of these topics is that the authors have no hidden agenda or viewpoint that they are trying to put forth. They are not trying to convince you that something does or does not exist. Instead it is an even-handed look at the available data and various competing explanations.

 

Books surveying anomalous experience have tended to come from the skeptic side of the fence and have leaned toward the debunking end of the spectrum. While they have their uses, there's always the nagging suspicion that they might not be fair to all the evidence. While this book isn't as easy reading as those of the skeptics, it really shoots at being a balanced examination of the evidence, pro and con, with intelligent discussion about where the weight of what we know falls. Each chapter tackles one anomalous phenomenon and follows a consistant structure. First, the experience is clearly defined so that we know what is and is not being addressed. Then, the actual phenomenology of the phenomenon out in the field is surveyed. Since the book is geared toward those in the psychological and helping professions, the emotional, physical, and mental aftereffects of having the experience are then examined. The range of differences between experients is presented, then issues involving psychopathology, clinical assessment, background theories, and methodology of research are shown. Each chapter is written by an authority on that specific phenomenon and they provide a summation conclusion at the end where they render their professional judgment on the topic. If you're looking for a sensational or spooky handling of the subjects, this isn't your book; but if you want a very level headed analysis of what is happening in these fields of research, you need to be familiar with this work. Even better, each chapter provides pages worth of bibliography, pro and con, on each subject.