Erik Davis looks at the world a different way. He’s a novelist and writer, and has his PhD from Rice University. His most recent book, High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies is out now.
He stopped by Mission Daily to talk about his writing, how being weird has opened the doors for new possibilities, and how he thinks we can go about saving the world.
He knows the reality of where we are but also knows we don’t need to stay there.
“We don’t live in a psychedelic place. That’s one of the mistakes that new agers and hippies made, is ‘Oh, I get the vision, and then I try to live there by dropping out and not doing anything.’ Well, no, that’s the same problem as the stray who doesn’t want to look at it at all. We have to become much more flexible and Huxley said, ‘Amphibious,’ where we’re operating as intellects in a technological society. But we have some envisioning of how to drive this thing in a way that is going to make a much better life for more people, and be able to deal with their legitimate desires to have a washer/dryer, entertainment on their phone, etc.”
His most recent book came out of personal experience and his work in religious studies – particularly the space he calls “psychedelic intelligentsia.”
“[California] was a very interesting place to be because, in the early 2000s when I started to go to conferences and started to write more about the psychedelic scene, I became interested in it as a kind of intellectual place that was very multidisciplinary. You’d have botanists, and poets, and crazy people, and religious visionaries, and criminals. It was just a very interesting zone to be in, and so I took up a sort of space there, and now with the renaissance of interest in research in psychedelics, everything’s changing not unlike in the ways we were just talking about how subculture has changed. Everything is much more visible.”
He drew heavily from his religious studies.
“One of the motivations I had in the book was to write about psychedelic experience through the lens of questions about religious experience, but when I was coming to think when do I want to write about, it was really clear to me I really wanted to write about this period of time, the 1970s, and particularly the 1970s in California, or at least through the eyes of people who spent a lot of time in California. One of the reasons for that is one thing that’s happening with the psychedelic Renaissance, is that there’s a quite strong attempt by multiple actors, both researchers, journalists, and apologists and new forms of healers, to sort of erase and disrupt the connection between the counterculture, which was so over the top in so many ways. Not just radical, but also kind of crazy, sometimes a little degenerate, bizarre, not necessarily about healing particularly. Most people who were taking psychedelics in the 1970s might have been part of a larger spiritual search, but any given experience was probably more about ecstasy and exploration and pleasure and exuberance and transcendence and insight and wisdom, and all these other motivations, rather than the emphasis on healing and medicines that we have now.”
He wants us to know the true origins of the psychedelic movement.
“Part of the reason I wrote this is because it’s one of the more intellectually-engaged books about modern psychedelic experience that’s been written for a while, and it’s time to intentionally go into this larger discourse and remind people of a couple of things. One, that these people who were doing freelance research in the 1970s, while not exactly scientists, were intellectually rigorous people who were really thinking and playing and experimenting with what the meaning of this stuff was, and the kinds of results they had, the kinds of experiences, the kinds of ideas and writings that came out of it offers a nice balance, and a ballast through the kind of contemporary hype, which I think threatens to go a little bit too far. We not only need to remember our ancestors, you know, just the way that people turn to indigenous cultures and sort of admire the way that teachers or teachings are passed down through generation to generation, there’s a sense of ancestry and transmission across time and tradition, that in the West there’s also a tradition. It’s just that it’s a tradition of bohemians and poets and scofflaws, and degenerates, and all this weird kind of steam of marginal exploration that I think we also have to take seriously.”
There’s hope for the future, though he’s not sure what that looks like.
“Zizek says, ‘It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.’ And that’s true. We’re all bought into that one. And yeah, we can see that everything’s so disruptive, the stories about who we are, beliefs about the future are so liquid, even though some of them are becoming quite racist and ‘traditionalist’ and nationalist and populist. It’s like pulling against this science fiction possibility with some hope we can imagine a world where these technologies are able to deal with a post-capitalist reality… In a way it doesn’t matter [how we do it], but our ability to even start to think that way requires imagination. It requires us to genuinely embody an incarnate possibility in a way that we’ve all just been terribly beat down. Even though we know everything’s changing, we’re also almost all radically pessimistic about the future. There’s no hope. There’s no way out. All these things are going to happen. The game is up. It’s just a house of cards. All this way of being. And it might be true, but at the very least as we flame out, to have a kind of revivified imagination, and not just an individual telling a story or writing a science fiction, but a way that we re-imagine what it means to relate to each other, to build collaborative efforts, to be inspired at our ability to move between these worlds.”
To listen to the rest of this interview and hear more insights from Erik, check out the full podcast here.
