High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies

This is jaw-dropping scholarship, eminently readable despite a healthy dollop of some French post-structuralist theory (which Davis makes more lucid) that, more than any book I've ever seen - and will probably ever see - makes the case for re-aligning our ideas about how to think about the "mundane" and how totally weird our existence is, right where you are sitting now.A prominent "skeptic" once titled his book How To Think About Weird Things, but he was wrong: High Weirdness is how you think about the weird.In Berger and Luckmann's classic sociology of knowledge text, The Social Construction of Reality, they make the point that the sociology of knowledge needed to consider anything "taken as knowledge" if we want to understand not just Others, but ourselves. By reading the entire oeuvres of his weirdo generalist "garage" (Davis's term) intellectuals (which alone must be 150 books, plus massive numbers of ephemera, interviews, archival material, etc), and combining the rigorous scholarship of the PhD thesis, PLUS a desire to engage a much wider reading audience than fellow PhDs, Erik Davis has given...I'll speak just for myself here...an encyclopedia that will lead me down an inexhaustible number of labyrinthine avenues of sheer weirdness. And let's face it: it's gotten pretty damned weird, and will only get even more so.I read every word. Closely. The footnotes are a blast. His reading hypermultidisciplinary reading is astonishing. Davis's own humor lightens the load and his awe at the worlds he's immersed himself in for over 30 years is palpable. He is THE great scholar of occulture, but he also wonders if the world's culture has exacted a heavy price for not paying attention to this stuff; his subject matter has been marginalized by "serious" academics for so long (now they're joining him, as he notes near the end), but is it too late? Davis: "It is as if civilization made a sorcerous pact with petroleum genies, and the debt is now coming due."Read Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick. I hope you already have. Then read Erik Davis, the one person in the world most qualified to flesh out the implications of their works and their exceedingly bizarre experiences in California in the 1970s. How did 1970s weirdness in California affect our entire culture? Read this. Because nothing has ever been the same, and it will only get weirder. For everyone.

i spent formative years taking these three dudes very seriously. i was an avid disciple of Robert Anton Wilson, absorbing "Prometheus Rising" and "Quantum Psychology" like they were proper full on guidebooks for life, and my own art was deeply influenced by "Illuminatus!" (i once produced a live action version of the Principia Discordia for instance). i spent hours and hours and hours listening to Terence McKenna raps on cassette, and while i never quite caught the 2012 rush, i was giddily excited to have my own DOS copy of the Timewave software just in case. and i brushed up against PKD almost exclusively via "VALIS", "Radio Free Albemuth", and the snippets of the Exegesis you could find at the time, and absorbed his "is it christian or is it gnostic" vibes directly into my own work.all this is to say that i could perhaps be described as the ideal target audience for this book, and allow me to offer the proverbial three thumbs up. it is no surprise to fans of Erik Davis that the scholarship is dizzying and off the charts excellent. you also get an excellent cast of supporting characters, too; detours with Tim Leary, Aleister Crowley, and H.P. Lovecraft in particular are entertaining and illuminating. and i'll do a poor job trying to characterize one of the key theses of the book, but i'll try anyway - the notion that you can take hallucinatory or psychedelic or visionary experiences at face value while retaining access to your inner skeptic is powerfully represented by the tactics and techniques of McKenna, Wilson and PKD. it's well worth this in depth study to be concretely reminded of what these renegade philosopher-mystics accomplished (and didn't) in their unique adventures beyond the limits of consensus reality.

Erik Davis is a master of the weird. An endless font of insight and strange history in fine quality paperback. Eye-opening and powerful even if you don't care about the 70s or psychedelia. This is important and readable scholarship with profound insights for our present and future. Consciousness is the next frontier, as vast as space, and one which we've only hardly begun to explore. The "hard problems" of that topic are made accessible, profound, thrilling, and culturally relevant in the pages of this brilliant Wyrd opus. Fuel for the road ahead.

A great account of how the experiences of Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger, Philip K. Dick's V.A.L.I.S, and Terence McKenna's in the 1970s shaped them.

Very interesting read.

Well, usually anything relating to psychedelics catches my attention, and usually I'm fond of reading nearly anything on the subject. This book however, I had go give up halfway. For me it seems more like something that was meant to pass as a phd thesis than to intertain a curious reader. So, yeah, not for me...

Gran bel libro, elegante, arrivato prestissimo

This is a fascinating piece of history of times within (my) living memory (of course, if you can remember it, you weren't there:-)Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson are all of interest - I have read at least 20 of Dick's SF and other books, and was involved in the production of a stage version of Anton Wilson (and Smith)'s Illuminatus! Trilogy, although I'm not very familiar with Terence McKeena's work on integrating the Hallucinogenic with a post-enlightenment view of how the objective universe actually works.The book is pretty much a PhD dissertation, plus plus- very readable (I found) and well cross-referenced and sourced, with plenty of back story. The author is not afraid to take the three subjects' work in its own terms, and at face value, for the purposes of exposition and discussion. However, it is clear that behind all this, there's a very healthy degree of scepticism. This is very refreshing as it leads to a great deal of honesty and precision reporting of the thinking at the time, without unnecessary revisionism about the flakiness of it all.If you are into the real 1960s alternative culture, even just out of interest, but especially if any of it impinged on your life, I recommend this. Others may find the subjects tiresome, although perhaps, not the writer&writing.