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

Abstract

Reviewed by: High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies by Erik Davis Matt Southey erik davis. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2019, Pp. 544. Erik Davis's most recent book, High Weirdness is a journey through the works of three authors: Terrence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson, and Philip K. Dick. Davis effectively situates all three of these prolific authors within the weird religious milieu of 1970s America by analyzing three of their mystical experiences: McKenna's psychedelically motivated trip to the Amazon, Wilson's Cosmic Trigger experiences, and Dick's revelations in February and March 1974. Davis draws on philosophers such as Bruno Latour and William James to demonstrate that "the reality" his subjects explored was not a single thing, but an ontological plurality. Importantly, Davis argues that his authors were writing at the beginning of what he calls "network society," presaged by the techno-mystical swirl of 1970s America and then technically realized by the internet. In High Weirdness Davis's methodology is "weird naturalism," the tracking of anomalous events and experiences "not as signs of a 'separate reality' but as manifestations or mutations of this one" (11). Davis sees these authors as concerned with the immanent world rather than a transcendent one. In brief, all three authors experienced and wrote about religious encounters with strange entities which the authors tended to perceive as extraterrestrial intelligences. These authors also participated in religious practices which were often technologically revised versions of older esoteric traditions. Ultimately what ties these authors together is a sort of science-fiction aesthetic that makes religion and technology deeply relevant to each other. McKenna, for instance, saw psychedelics as a "psycho-technology" that allows humans to have a guaranteed mystical experience; no more meditating for years in a cave, just up the dosage until something happens. The authors were all deeply [End Page 475] American in their combination of a global religious awareness combined with knowledge of modern science. After experiencing several anomalous/mystical events around February and March 1974 ("2-3-74"), Dick began writing an enormous journal that has been called his "exegesis", due to his spiritual reflections. Davis's work with Dick's exegesis is particularly interesting since he clarifies many misunderstandings surrounding it. Davis was one of the editors who worked on The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick with Jonathan Lethem and Pamela Jackson, and so he is able to shed light on some of the particular twists and turns of the massive corpus. A compelling case is made that Dick took part in the burgeoning hacker culture when he urged a Vancouver audience to "build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that'll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities" (286). Davis emphasizes the networked, or "netweird," world of the 1970s that drew from a huge smorgasbord of religious traditions and remixed them under the DIY ethos of "whatever works." Modernity made the spatial and temporal barriers to knowledge moot: Americans could now listen to a Tibetan teacher in the afternoon, and pick up an English translation of the I Ching at a bookshop right after. Miles of ocean and thousands of years of history were no obstacle to the accelerating availability of knowledge. Davis is right to note that the effects of this information overload were not always beneficial, as each of the authors toed the edge of psychosis, or in the case of Dick, went right over. Davis does not shy away from this point: the superabundance of information and reality-altering technologies have epistemically damaged the body politic. High Weirdness therefore often reads as an autopsy report on our contemporary condition. For example, Davis notes that "these days, it is Wilson's earlier portraits of warring conspiracies, memetic mind control, and chaotic reality breakdown that are proving … prophetic" (403). Nevertheless, the book still carries a conviction that it is important to wrestle with these strange currents and that it might even be good for one's mental health to do so. Davis calls his three writers futurists who "did not reflect the timeless 'Be Here Now' grok sought by many psychedelic mystics and spiritual seekers of...