Parapsychology

Dr. Stan Krippner was influential at the beginning of the MRU saga through his mutual relationship between Ostrander and Schroeder and Dr. Carl Schleicher. Some say he secured the translations of large portions of the Soviet research, acquired the schematics for Kirlian photography, and generally supported other MRU players in a variety of ways, including publication in his popular parapsychology books, among the first of their genre of infotainment.

This psychologist and professor of psychology is still (2007) an executive faculty member of the Saybrok Graduate School in the Bay Area. He was honored by the establishment of an interdisciplinary chair for the study of consciousness. Prior to this, he was director of the Kent State University Child Study Center, Kent OH, and the Maimonides Medical Center Dream Research Laboratory, Brooklyn NY. Dr. Krippner appears as a speaker at many conferences, festivals, and cultural events, including the recent 100th birthday of Albert Hoffman (2006). He has spent decades investigating the field of human consciousness, conducting research in such areas as dreams, hypnosis, shamanism, and disassociation, often from a cross-cultural perspective, with an emphasis on anomalous phenomena that question mainstream paradigms. By "pushing the envelope" of orthodox models he has provided new models of individual and group experience, often classified as pathological, but actually representing different worldviews, paradigms, belief systems, and mythologies

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 Iona Miller served for years together on the Asklepia Foundation 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.

At Saybrook, Krippner designed many of the courses in the consciousness/spirituality concentration. 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. 

A leader in the Transpersonal Psychology movement, he has spent the last several decades investigating the field of human consciousness, conducting research in such areas as dreams, hypnosis, shamanism, and disassociation, often from a cross-cultural perspective, with an emphasis on anomalous phenomena that seem to question mainstream paradigms. He is an author and a contributor to several books on altered staates of consciousness, dream states, and parapsychology including Extraordinary Dreams, Varieties of Anomalous Experience: Examining the Scientific Evidence and The Psychological Impact of War on Civilians: An International Perspective. He is the author or co-author of over 900 articles, chapters, and book reviews appearing in scholarly or academic publications.

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.

Stanley Curtis Krippner (1932-)

Psychologist and writer on parapsychology. Krippner was born on October 4, 1932, at Edgerton, Wisconsin. He studied at the University of Wisconsin (B.S., 1954) and Northwestern University (M.A., 1957; Ph.D., 1961). After completing his education he became the director of the Child Study Center at Kent State University in Ohio. Such interests were reinforced by contacts with parapsychologists J. B. Rhine and Gardner Murphy during his undergraduate and graduate years. While at Kent Krippner visited Rhine at Duke University and began to conduct parapsychological experiments with the children with whom he was working.

An internationally known humanistic psychologist, Krippner has explored dreams, altered states of consciousness, and paranormal phenomena for many years. His interest in such things began as a teenager on a Wisconsin farm: "When I was about 14 years of age, I had a very dramatic sense of my uncle's death at the very time that my parents received a phone call announcing his death. The effect of that was quite electrifying. Also I was an avid science fiction reader and an amateur magician, and all of these interests coalesced."

In 1964 Krippner left his position at Kent State University to become director of the Dream Laboratory at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York. With Montague Ullman and, later, Charles Honorton, Krippner spent ten years in a systematic exploration of dreams, including in dreams and other altered states of consciousness. Interest in consciousness studies in the early 1970s led him to explore psychedelic drugs, yoga, meditation, and other means of altering consciousness.

He also established contact and nurtured relationships with European colleagues, and in 1973 he became the first parapsychologist to become vice president for the Western Hemisphere of the International Psychotronic Research Association. He chaired sessions of the Psychotronic Congress in Czechoslovakia in 1973 and in Monte Carlo in 1975 and became editor of the international journal Psychoenergetic Systems.

In 1973 Krippner became a faculty member of the Institute for Humanistic Psychology and more recently the director of the Center for Consciousness Studies at Saybrook Institute in San Francisco. Krippner has been recognized as one of the most outstanding leaders in the parapsychological field. In 1973 he became president of the Parapsychological Association and the following year began a tenure as president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. He also serves as editor-in-chief of Advances in Parapsychological Research: A Biennial Review. He has written extensively on parapsychology and related consciousness and psychological subjects.

Sources:

Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

Krippner, Stanley. Dreamworking: How to Use Your Dreams for Creative Problem Solving. Buffalo, N.Y.: Bearly Ltd., 1988.

*******
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.