One familiar gesture pairs the Buddhist doctrine of momentariness (kṣaṇikavāda) with Husserl’s phenomenology of internal time-consciousness; another declares the two incompatible because Husserl rejects the punctual now-point the kṣaṇa affirms. Both fail. Husserl retains the momentary phase—Hua X §39 speaks of the “primal sensation” and the “actual momentary phase” of the flow—while denying...
Jeffrey J. Kripal’s ten monographs—from Kālī’s Child (1995) to How to Think Impossibly (2024)—have done as much as the work of any single American scholar to put mystical, paranormal, and altered-state experiences back at the center of religious-studies inquiry. Wouter J. Hanegraaff (2008), in the most theoretically substantive review article devoted to that work, has charged that Kripal’s...