The Superhumanities by Jeffrey J. Kripal

What would happen if we reimagined the humanities as The Superhumanities? If we acknowledged and celebrated the undercurrent of the fantastic within our humanistic disciplines, entirely new cultural worlds and meanings would become possible. That is Jeffrey J. Kripal's vision for the future--to revive the suppressed dimension of the superhumanities, which consists of rare but real altered states of knowledge that have driven the creative processes of many of our most revered authors, artists, and activists. In Kripal's telling, the history of the humanities is filled with precognitive dreams, evolving superhumans, and doubled selves. The basic idea of the superhuman, for Kripal, is at the core of who and what the human species has tried to become over millennia and around the planet.  After diagnosing the basic malaise of the humanities--that the truth must be depressing--Kripal shows how it can all be done differently. He argues that we have to decolonize reality itself if we are goin