This podcast episode explores the stories that help us understand our reality, our place in that reality, and how humans both cling to and challenge these same stories. Jeffrey Kripal has been a keeper of many extraordinary stories, and as a professor of religion, he is positioned to question the stories that we believe serve us, but the reality is that we often serve the story. This conversation is anchored in Dr. Kripal’s newest book, The Flip, wherein he challenges many of the assumptions of materialist science and posits that the sciences are not wrong, but that they are incomplete and therefore we need a change in our worldview. His arguments are well articulated and well informed by many scientists, including neuroscientists and physicists, who have, as a result of their research into reality, moved away from the materialist worldview into an approach to reality that chips away at many of the assumptions in which many of us have been educated – for example, the fact that we don’t really know what matter and consciousness are in the first place. Really. From Jeff’s book: A “flip,” writes Jeffrey J. Kripal, is “a reversal of perspective,””a new real,” often born of an extreme, life-changing experience. The Flip is Kripal’s ambitious, visionary program for unifying the sciences and the humanities to expand our minds, open our hearts, and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the culture wars. Combining accounts of rationalists’ spiritual awakenings and consciousness explorations by philosophers, neuroscientists, and mystics within a framework of history of science and religion, Kripal compellingly signals a path to mending our fractured world.