As Kripal notes early on, “It all comes down to how one believes, not whether one believes.”That's the side where Kripal lands. He's a contextualist. As a professor of comparative religion, he brings some rigor by interjecting theories around Strieber's explicit adventures. Yet his take on religion verges on the humorous.
Kripal says, “I do not think it is too much of a simplification to suggest that the entire history of religions can be summed up this way: strange super beings from the sky come down to interact with human beings, provide them with cultural, technological, legal, and ethical knowledge, guide them, scare the crap out of them, demand their submission and obedience, have sex with them (often forcefully), and generally terrorize, awe, baffle, inspire, and use them.”
Hmm, not my God.
But I am a sympathizer for Kripal's approach at times. We often need to make sense of the sporadic mysteries of the cosmos. Yet, as Gödel notes, we are going to be either consistent or complete (not both). Kripal sides with the complete, and throws in some tools to help cultivate our notions.
As he says, “It is very easy to claim a theory of everything if you get to decide what that everything is.”
Kripal finds Henry Corbin's idea of the imaginal useful in this context. That is, there is the empirical/material world and there is the intelligible/rational world. In between is the imaginal world, and this is the space were imagination and symbols coexist.
Strieber, on the other hand, is the “ordinary man appearing in the middle of an otherwise completely fantastic narrative.” I can't say for sure what has happened to Strieber, but I came to believe that something has happened. And this is nub of the book. Are such experiences Real or all in the head? As Kripal notes, “Plainly, whatever is happening, it is not "all in the mind." Or, if it is... the mind is not all in us.”
Surprisingly, Strieber's take is more humble than expected. He acknowledges his experiences may not simply be real aliens from another planet: but maybe plasma-like energy, something from another dimension, glowing orbs of spiritual bodies, or possible trauma induced trances.
But he doesn't dismiss it as all mind-stuff, as he has some empirical evidence to back his experiences: implants, injuries, other witnesses. Something is real, but we are also somehow playing a part in it in a quantum-like way.
(He also notes a story where a military General believed that the US government avoided disclosing their knowledge of UFO sightings because “obscure laws of physics might prevent them from entering our reality without first convincing us that they were real, and that official admission might be the tripwire that would enable them come through.”)
Ultimately Strieber counters Kripal's contextualism with some essentialism. There may be an ontological grounding to all this. We aren't just purely creating our Reality, but possibly co-creating it through our interpretive instruments along with a Creator. And that could be the Real that matters — all else is up for grabs in this mysterious story.
All this leads to Kripal believing we need a new story: one that is aware that it's still a story. He ends with a Philip K. Dick quote that concludes, “we are not the artists but the drawings.” To me, the idea of being drawn seems to look back to some older story that may still have its place in our day.