Knowledge and Experience: A critique of Balagangadhar's response to Jeffrey Kripal
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[Knowledge & Experience: A critique of Dr. Balagangadhara’s response to Jeffrey Kripal] Dear Dr. Balagangadhara I am hesitant to bring up this old piece of writing. I read it only recently and discovered subsequently that it is well known to people who are otherwise familiar with your work. It deals with certain issues that I have been trying to grapple with. I have not read Jeffrey Kripal’s book. I am more interested in the personal journey you describe, and in particular, I want to take up the argument that you construct in the course of your response to his book, which is based on the contrast that you set up between the way science ‘preserves’ the experience while producing new knowledge and the way Jeffrey Kirpal’s explanations ‘transform’ the experience divesting it of its original significance. You describe your bewilderment when you were told that the ‘linga’ actually means penis. You also describe your discomfort with your friends holding your hands once you had been exposed to public displays of homosexual love in Amsterdam. A barrier was created between you and your earlier experience s of reverence and friendship by the insertion of this new ‘knowledge’. You find this ‘knowledge’ spurious because it distorts a nd denies your genuine experience. The explanation came actively between your experiences and you and prevented you from describing or reflecting on your own experiences. I think, first of all, that it is not just the nature of explanation, which prevented you from accessing these experiences. If someone tells you anything, you don’t believe it or you do not necessarily take it seriously. It is the authority of these explanations that trouble you and others. The explanation is authoritative because it is western (or American), scientific, rational, modern. If it were not authoritative it would have no power to ‘transform’ your experiences. A person who does not accept this authority would ignore these explanations or respond by knocking off a few teeth of the one who suggests such explanations. This also explains the transformation of your experience of friendly handholding in public. There were no explanations provided by anyone in this case. What you perceived in Amsterdam transformed your experience. The new knowledge in this case was your own perception, and your experience of another culture. The effect on you, however, was completely opposite of what happened to those western travelers’ experience of another culture who interpreted Indian religious practices in the light of their own theological prejudices and preoccupations. How a knowledge claim affects us depends on the relationship that we have with that knowledge claim. I would argue
