An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson.A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, 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In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America's leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis 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.
The book focuses on three people who were, well, highly weird.—
RAWIllumination—
With prose as fluid as his subjects' beliefs regarding consensus reality Erik Davis brilliantly dissects three otherworldly experiences and in doing so makes clear how “a decentralized and postmodern nation—the nation Americans still live within, even more fractiously—became codified.”
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Lit Hub—
Davis isn't looking to hack your common sense. Instead, he's asking the reader to question the rigid hierarchies of their perceived realties.
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Happy Mag—
