September 04, 2019   |   0 comments

Erik Davis discusses his book High Weirdness – Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies.

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A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality, but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America?

In High Weirdness, Davis – America’s leading scholar of high strangeness – examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. He explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America’s West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality. We ask ‘What is real?’, ‘What is normal?’, ‘What are facts?’, ‘What is truth?’ and find that reality is unstable and that the world is considerably more malleable than it at first appears.

Bumper music:
Cliff Martinez ‘Traffic OST’
Tangerine Dream ‘Asteroid Agenda’