ENTAUS

T he great (perhaps under-read but notoriously difficult) philosopher Gilles Deleuze once remarked that all truly great thinkers have really only one thought, which becomes a kind of pathological obsession throughout their lives, to which they return again and again. Because I am too close to these issues, I cannot judge the greatness or not of Jeff Kripal; I’ll leave that assessment to others (which in any case is not something appropriate on which for me to opine). But there is an idea to which Jeff returns time and again. Or it is an intellectual-spiritual movement from which his thinking has emerged, and to which it constantly returns, like a comet entering and leaving the firmament? I mean the human potential movement, yet one more subcurrent of the 1960s Great Reaction against the conservativisms of modernity. The 20 th century grew up under the specter of oppression, as it became clear in what ways “Progress” (that fateful moniker of the age) was purchased, at what cost advan...