Erik Davis and post modern Gnosis

Erik Davis, Philip K. Dick editor and PhD journalist of the bleeding edge: an interview

Erik Davis: Tech Magus and Uncanny Scribe, Philip K. Dick’s posthumous editor breaks down alien encounters, technology and “High Weirdness.”

“She said ‘Jesus had a twin that knew nothing about sin’/

She was laughing like crazy at the trouble I’m in” — Sonic Youth

Erik Davis was the co-editor, with Jonathan Lethem and others, of the 2011 published and edited version of Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis, the “out there” Californian science fiction author’s effort to account for whatever happened to him when he started receiving overwhelming visions in the one-month period he called “2-3-74.” For years Dick, who died fairly young in 1982, seemed to have the ontological certainty he had been contacted by something intelligent but more than human in suburban Orange County starting in February, 1974. Mental illness is not in short supply in this world, and Philip K. Dick certainly, to anyone with clinical training and a familiarity with human dysfunction to say nothing of Dick’s own troubled life, had mental health issues. Nevertheless, many reasonably sane human beings perceive a resonance in Dick’s accounts of what happened to him, in both his fiction and his obsessively kept journal. There is a sense, looking at the man who was poor most of his life, but is now posthumously making a fortune for his children due to the Hollywood screenplays that have been spun from his weird novels, that he was truthfully in touch with something. Something that went beyond mere private psychosis. Seekers and scholars from the greater world beyond the US border objectively agree with this. If Dick would be dismissed in his own country as just a science fiction hack, not a real “literary” writer, he is admired and studied globally in a way few American authors of his generation are, particularly by non-English speaking nations and intellectuals. And Erik Davis is as good a source as any to attempt to begin to the crack the bottomless enigma of the meaning of this eerily resonant author.

Starting out in Berkeley before moving to New York, Erik wrote TechGnosis, an exploration of “weird naturalism” as it has existed in the fin de siècle of the Twentieth Century and Millennium. He moved on to get MIT to co-publish his latest work, the subtly subversive, exceptionally learned, but spooky and strange exegesis of his own: High Weirdness. High Weirdness, clocking in at 408 pages minus the 100 page bibliography and footnotes, is a book that examines not only the economic and technological changes of the under-examined 1970’s in the United States, but also the under-examined evolution of counter culture from the Mod and flowery Sixties, to the deeply paranoid and dislocated Seventies. Chiefly he does this by focusing on the very bizarre experiences of four seminal literary and “edge science” psychonauts of the period, and their literally mind blowing experiences: Philip K. Dick, Terrence and Dennis McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson. The four approached the possibilities opened by the era by suggesting that if Utopia were possible, it would take a lot of work, and that humanity, such as it was, was still a way off from that fabled land and, in fact, may even be headed in opposite direction. At the same time all four, in their consciousness pushing explorations, seemed to encounter an existential, supra human “Other” that they could not account for, nor discretely define, and were able to write about skeptically with discipline. All of them plunged their readers into very frightening, dangerous — and liberating — places that they themselves had explored, trail marking heaven, hell and Elsewhere with descriptions such as chapel perilous, VALIS or mythological landscape. Rod Serling territories that could be either the Great Outside, the Great Inside, or both. They did so while mapping uncanny experiences while maintaining something resembling scientific agnosticism.

Erik Davis as a “counter culture” journalist with a PhD, has documented psychedelics, indie rock bands and gone from the continuum between hippy and punk to serious academic with a disciplined approach to the age old question of “what is real?” Cliché? Only if you seriously can say what is real. My own explorations and reaching for that goal is a work in progress for myself and, personally, I am always grateful for a helping hand. And robust philosophical/psychological inquiry into the problem of mind and human existence has utility in a world that seems to be methodically being replaced by a hologram through information and entertainment saturation. Maybe asking what is real has become, and perhaps always was, a political issue. And maybe we need to be concerned with how much of what is represented as the “political” in the United States is a smoke screen hiding what we should be worried about, beyond the clown circus of political parties and Instagram mud slinging.

I met Erik Davis at Artist Television Access in San Francisco where he was showing and film on, and lecturing about Occult Rocketeer Jack Parsons. Later I would meet him at City Lights Bookstore and he consented to an interview in early summer 2019 at Atlas Café in San Francisco. Interview by Joe Donohoe

S: I believe we’re about the same age more or less. I was in the punk scene but went to a few raves. I met Terrence McKenna once when he did a spoken word bit at the Brainwash Café, not too long after he published Food of the Gods. I think there may have been fifteen to twenty people present. The same person who turned me onto Robert Anton Wilson also introduced me to Philip K. Dick at the tail end of the Eighties. Between these three there is a sense that each one contacted something, an Other, whether you want to call it “God,” an alien intelligence or the Collective Unconscious. Your book High Weirdness delves into the weird experiences of Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson and Terrence McKenna, all three of whom had mind blowing encounters with the “Other” in the early 1970’s and wrote about it. All three of whom were based in California. In writing about these three you are very careful with your conclusions and come at it from a method of academic discipline. You were also an editor on the published version of Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis. That must have been crazy.

ED: That was crazy. It was a wonderful opportunity. I worked very closely with Pamela Jackson. Jonathan Lethem was friends with Dick’s daughters and had gotten them agree to publish the material. They had a resistance to doing so. When Phil died Tim Powers told everyone who had access to the manuscript, that they needed to hide it. If people read it raw they would have thought Phil was crazy. The document had to be controlled because it was a crazy document. But Lethem persuaded everyone to publish and they packaged a large selection of it for this book deal. Lethem picked Pamela to be the main editor. I helped her and had certain tasks that I was responsible for. The whole process was really wild, almost like triage. How were you going to edit this huge document? What parts were you going to include and what parts were you going to exclude? How do you check for mistakes? If we had been properly funded by a university it would have taken years to do, but the result would have been tighter. There are definitely errors in the work we finished. Recognizing the enormity of the whole task, I’m kind of impressed with what we pulled off. The decision of what to select was an amazing challenge. Why include this passage and not this other one? How much of the total batshit crazy stuff do you include? There’s a lot of it that is batshit crazy, and if you want to keep an accurate representation of the source you had to keep that stuff in. Or do you just select for those passages that are sane? Or passages that were philosophically and intellectually cogent? There were a number of different criteria to go by, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

S: There’s a Gnostic connection between the Eastern Churches and the Western Protestant churches that skips the Catholics in the middle. You have traditions of outsider mystics in both. Dick in some ways seems a Protestant mystic. There’s a connection going from Milton to William Blake to Immanuel Swedenborg right up to PKD. I bought a biography of Milton written by a professor at Arizona State and, this surprised me, there is a Philip K. Dick quote right after the title page.

ED: Interesting. I think that connection has some truth to it. You can see this if you look at Protestantism’s political radicalism and the Gnostic quality to Protestant dissent. In the Protestant position there is supposed to be a direct connection to God established, without the mediation of a church. That becomes a topos for visionary literature. Blake is a singular visionary, but he’s also in the current of Protestant dissent.

There’re a lot of aspects of the Eastern Church that are very powerful. Orthodoxy has preserved the most mysticism of all the flavors of Christianity, I think. It has some powerful ideas about how to become “God-like” and has almost a guru structure with monk teachers and their students. There are some very beautiful ideas about how the Holy Spirit operates. The art is amazing and the whole idea behind icons is, that if the artists adhere to certain rules of production, the icon becomes a portal to these spiritual forces. Aesthetically it’s a very beautiful church.

S: Elaine Pagels told me that she met PKD at the Episcopal Cathedral in New York City. He told her he was a “Gnostic Christian.” She added that he was a very strange man.

ED: No doubt. The interesting thing is with Dick he made a distinction between “Gnostic” and “Christian.” There are “Gnostic Christians” and historically what we mean by “Gnostic” is a kind of Christianity. In the Exegesis he’s always saying: “No, no, I’m really a Gnostic. No, no, I’m really a Christian.” It’s another one of the tensions for him. But I think that captures his attitude better than most things.

Dick wasn’t a psychedelic guy. He wasn’t a tripper — he only did acid a few times — but he a had a few occasional extraordinary experiences that were very influential in his life and thinking. These experiences could be hellish but they weren’t all bad, but you find recurring motifs like the Latin language, Greek.

S: The craziest aspect of the story of PKD for me is his friendship with the Episcopal Archbishop of Northern California Jeffrey Pike. Pike ended up disappearing into the Judean desert in Israel. He seems to have come to the conclusion that Christianity was a mushroom cult of some kind — there is a lot of scholarship concerning mushroom cults in the Mediterranean from around the time of the appearance of Christianity. Dick incorporated that story into his last novel. People don’t know that much about the crazy, psychedelic priest Bishop Pike.

ED: No, he’s not well remembered because he kind of unraveled in the end — at least on the outside. He bailed his position as Anglican bishop, took up with a younger woman and kind of lost it. Joan Didion wrote a very biting essay about him in The White Album where she uses him as an exemplar of the foolishness of California. Dick sort of did that too. A close reading of The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which centers around a Pike like figure, supports that critique. That’s a very interesting book, though I didn’t talk about it in High Weirdness since it wasn’t written in the period I was focusing on. Timothy Archer is a very moving, sad book. In a lot of ways, the novel critiques both Pike’s enthusiasms and Dick’s own speculative madness.

S: At least one woman has told me that Angel Archer is a convincing female character, and Dick was usually awful with his female characters.

ED: Dick clearly had a troubled relationship with women. He had multiple failed marriages. He clearly did beat women on occasion, which is a reprehensible thing. He had a very weird relationship with his mother. He was obviously a deeply troubled man. But the role of the feminine Savior, the Sophia figure, the Linda Fox character in Divine Invasion and Angel Archer in The Transmigration of Timothy Archer are really remarkable in the way his strengths as a novelist compensated for his excesses as a mystic or seeker. What you want from a novelist is for them to be able to crate empathetic portraits of people they are not. I think that Timothy Archer is not just Dick making a good novel, he uses the novel as a means to heal his own excesses as a mystic crack pot. He had a capacity to empathize with other people, while seeing the dark side and being realistic. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is a very “realistic” novel.

S: The book opens up when John Lennon is killed. I remember that.

ED: Me too.

S: And the novel describes the news coming in over car radios, and how depressed everyone all over the Bay Area is. That was the final dirt on the grave of the Sixties in 1980, and he captures the mood perfectly.

ED: He does. It’s so interesting thinking about him. He was a number of different people. I don’t say he had “multiple personalities” because I don’t diagnose people, but at the very least there is a diversity of literary expressions he makes in all these texts, both fiction and non-fiction. There is always a different angle on whatever position you’re looking at. There’s always another side.

S: He had some sort of insight. A quote like “reality is that when you stop believing in it doesn’t go away” is hard to disagree with. Both Dick and Robert Anton Wilson refused to hold dogmatic views about their weird experiences. They left open the possibility: “I might be mentally ill.” They both insisted something happened however. They asked Socratic questions of themselves about their experiences. McKenna, Wilson and Dick, you point out, were never “hippy dippy.”

ED: Right. That’s super important. They weren’t naïve believers even when they contemplated outlandish possibilities. They had respect for philosophical doubt. They also had an interest in technology. They didn’t buy a simple Utopian view that technology was going to make the world better, but they were not anti-technology, the way a lot of the hippy side was. They were resistant to that. Especially Terrence McKenna. I got to listen to him reading his “Crypto Rap” which he wrote in the 1960’s. It was a document that never got published, but I got to read it for research. It was very explicit. He says it’s not about “back to the land.” He was interested in an archaic revival, returning to something very ancient, but he didn’t think we would get there by resisting technological advancement and going backward. He thought we would get there by going forward. He had a McLuhanesque, science fiction sense of apotheosis. The four, including Dennis Mckenna, I write about were very science fictional, and not just in that they were interested in a specific literary genre. They were “science fiction” in a deep way. They thought about culture in science fictional terms. That was always a part of the hippy counter culture as well, but not a part people pay much attention to now.

S: A lot of hippies were into Tolkein, and Tolkein created this bucolic fantasy that goes to this mystical time when people were good or they were evil. Sixties era British science fiction and fantasy writer Michael Moorcock thought that was a reactionary fantasy. His fantasy was about a junkie albino with a vampire sword who prays to demons. Moorcock edited a British science fiction magazine, wherein he discovered and promoted JG Ballard, who had been educated as a physician and had an interest in Surreal painting. Ballard’s theme was technology, whether you wanted it to or not, was warping the human psyche. God has to manifest in Dick’s vision in the form of broken technology, or junk culture. I think that’s why Philip K. Dick was so appealing to the arty end of punk rock.

ED: The punk rock connection with Dick was really interesting. And even tracking the idea of broken technology or noise is fascinating to follow in his work. Dick was depressive so he has that quality, that association with depression anyway, where you’re very aware of all the entropy around you. You have an acute awareness of all the dust in the room and how nothing really works that well. The whole machinery of civilization looks like this clanking, wheezing, junk contraption. You even look like that to yourself. But there’s also a feeling that he had a metaphysical sense that if God was to enter this world, it would not be in the way that you would expect: a majestic mountain top, a beautiful statue as an idol — because that’s just a cheap trick. A cliché or a con. God is going to come through in the cracks.

S: Dick did not live in the wilderness. He did live in West Marin which is still very beautiful and rural, but not in the back woods where you see raw aspects of nature manifest.

ED: There’s very little nature in Dick. Even if sometimes he lived in very beautiful places like West Marin County. When you read him you never get lyrical descriptions of the natural world.

S: You get descriptions of dead nature. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep people buy mechanical animals because the real animals have died out. The forests are all gone. Nutrition comes from factories and there’s no nature anymore.

ED: Or in A Maze of Death. They’re on a jungle world but as they look closer they see there’s little machines everywhere. He never let himself have that Transcendentalist Nature Moment. I think that’s a really important thing about his imagination of the cosmos.

S: You write that William S. Burroughs has more mentions in the Exegesis than any other contemporaneously living author.

ED: As far as I can tell yeah.

S: So there was a connection between Burroughs and Dick?

ED: I don’t know if Burroughs ever said anything about Dick, though I’m not an expert. I have this theory about Beats in that everyone has their own Beat. Anybody in the underground or counter culture has a Beat icon. Maybe this is more true for men than women. There is the one you most identify with. There are people who are Ginsberg people. They’re big and loud and goofy and exuberant. Kind of bullshitty, but sort of visionary and fun to be around. And there’s the hipster, dark, alcoholic but sweet and sensitive souls — the Kerouac people. I’ve always been a Burroughs person — almost against my inclination, because he’s not as much fun, but you don’t get to choose your guy. I think Dick really respected Burroughs. He respected the language is a virus riff and the concern with control. In a lot of ways Dick is wrestling with the same problem and I think Robert Anton Wilson is too, in a different way. Dick is dealing with recognizing that our consensual reality is partly, maybe predominantly, a control system. How do you break out? Is it through total destruction? Is it through transgression? Dick’s Christianity is very eccentric, and that’s why the Gnostic component is important to empathize. In conventional Christian terms, he always identified with the oppositional church, the counter cultural church. The church as it existed in the Roman Empire, when they were oppressed. They were the underground. They had to communicate through secret signals and they had to outwit the Empire. It’s always that aspect of Christianity that I find most interesting. Of course that’s not what we usually look at. What gets looked at is after Christians seized power, when they became Rome.

S: Dick does seem like St. Paul in a way, who he greatly admired. Like Paul his reputation keeps expanding since he died. Paul could write in eloquent Greek and wrote the earliest texts of the Christian New Testament. Dick’s stuff has spread like Paul’s. He’s having a global literary influence, far eclipsing people like John Updike, or Norman Mailer, who were the officially endorsed Great Writers of their generation. Roberto Bolaño, the Chilean iconoclast who wrote 2666 about the serial murders of woman factory workers in Ciudad Juarez, thought that Dick was one of the few significant American authors of his generation. Ursula K. Le Guin, who was Dick’s pen pal, compared him to Borges. There’s a cult reverence for Dick in Germany, Japan, France and South America.

ED: I’m about ready to re-read The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch as I haven’t read it for a while. I think about it in purely prophetic terms. I can read it as just a straight up prophecy. I noticed this a long time ago, but I think it’s been proven to be true. The liberating potentials of both media and altered states of consciousness, or what could be called paranormal powers, are degraded by commerce as much as possible. This is true of the idea of precognition. Dick concerns himself less with how such a thing would work in the real world, and more with the observation that if precognition existed, it would immediately be drawn into capitalism and competition. It would become weaponized. Yet more of the system reinforcing itself. It’s not oppositional. It’s not supernatural. It’s merely another human capacity that becomes weaponized. And I’ve been thinking about that as I’ve been watching how altered states, in general, have been drifting out of this counter cultural or New Age world into the mainstream. In the counter culture everyone is initially fascinated with the visions and psychology, while the mainstream is “whatever.” Then something happens, concepts that were strange become more familiar and acceptable. Corporations become concerned with mindfulness. The business culture starts asking what are psychedelics? And as these things come into the mainstream, they are weaponized in order to shore up the status quo. I keep flashing back to Three Stigmata. I don’t want to live in the world of Three Stigmata. It’s an awful place. But we kind of are living in that world now.

S: The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is difficult to summarize. It’s a strange book that I didn’t understand when I first read it. But as time goes by it makes more and more sense. The book, in addition to being an early Sixties text about synthetic consciousness and global warming seems, now, very predictive. In our world there is the Internet where you indulge in these pornographic video fantasies and it’s Palmer Eldritch’s fake Heaven, but in reality this thing seems more like a private hell where you realize you are completely isolated and alone, except for the creepy spying presence of Palmer Eldritch, a corporate tycoon who has become a demiurgic god, spying out your dirty fantasies and feeding off them. In opposition you have the somewhat more humane technology of Leo Bulero, but that also is kind of a mess. Bulero offers an illusion to bored, depressed earth colonists on Mars, based on a drug and Barbie dolls. Bulero’s illusion however, unlike Palmer Eldritch’s, is a group experience that won’t take your soul. By the end of the book Palmer Eldritch has possessed almost everyone. Everyone has his mark.

ED: And we’re lost. One of the things about that book is it’s amazing but also frustrating. At some point reading it you ask where you are in the story. You want to get back to the final thing but the novel doesn’t go there.

S: Have you read Hypostasis of the Archons?

ED: Yes I have.

S: That’s where the blind, idiot god demiurge has to be corrected by the feminine deity Sophia. A Gnostic wrote that in the Third Century, or thereabouts. It’s so much more interesting than straight Christianity.

ED: It’s an amazing text. In 1985 I lived in Berkeley in the Barrington co-op, which you may have heard about. At that time it consisted of the dregs of counter culture: dealers, heroin addicts and weird psychedelic freaks and pagans. It was a creepy, amazing, weird place that eventually got cleaned up. That’s when I first started reading Philip K. Dick, Robert Anton Wilson and Aleister Crowley. After getting turned onto this stuff I went to Yale. Harold Bloom was a big figure there and he talked about Gnosticism as the model of literature. So I started to read about Gnosticism, and I started to read the Nag Hammadi texts in 1986-1987, and I thought: “Fuck! This is the same shit that Philip K. Dick was talking about.” I also was reading Baudrillard, and theories about simulation and simulacrum, and the loss of the real. I acquired a way of understanding this rush of technology that we’re constantly bombarded with. So for me, a triangulation of ancient Gnosis, Philip K. Dick and a critical theory of media formed a core of my whole trip. There’s stuff in High Weirdness, particularly the Dick stuff, that goes back to the Eighties.

S: There was a focus in the Nineties on stuff I don’t think was explored as much in the Sixties and Seventies. In the Sixties there was a lot of interest in Eastern religion and culture — though now there’s all this questioning about whether it’s “okay” for Europeans or westerners to cultivate eastern practices coming from a lot of the college students. But in the 60’s and 70’s, heads focused on Taoism, the I Ching, Buddhism. In the 90’s there seemed to be a focus on western esoterica: Kabbala, Gnosticism, European paganism or Wicca. It seems like the three psychonauts you look at were western occultists.

ED: Yeah. They were all more western than eastern. They did have influences from the east. Wilson was influenced by a humorous approach to Taoist and Zen perceptions. Dick was very interested in the I Ching and some Taoist approaches. Terrence McKenna put a lot into the I Ching predicting the Mayan apocalypse that was supposed to happen in 2012. Overwhelmingly, however, they were westerners in their outlooks.

S: Robert Anton Wilson trained with Grady McMurtry who trained directly with Aleister Crowley, so there’s the Thelemite influence. And like the McKenna brothers he sampled psychedelics as a tool. What struck me about Wilson is when he talks about “reality tunnels.” It reminds me of Plato’s parable of the cave. People see shadows on a wall and never realize that what they are looking at is merely shadows, because they’ve never seen the real things that are casting the shadows. They don’t even conceive of a greater world because they’ve never been allowed another perspective. It’s only obvious what you weren’t seeing after you see it. Wilson predicted what is now apparent, looking at social media with its endless obsessions with celebrity impropriety, and everyone dividing in irreconcilable ways over their political opinions. People are occupying different realities. They are becoming tribalized and weaponized.

ED: There’s really prophetic stuff in Wilson. As I was writing High Weirdness I really wanted to understand the 1970’s, and where all this weird stuff was coming from. With Wilson I kept on thinking: “My God. This is so relevant now.” Both the problems he saw and the visions he had, his sense of how “reality constructs” work in the “real world.” I got into how these terms apply now, in 2019, towards the end of the book. The system has figured out how to manufacture reality tunnels. It can set them off against each other and use these “tunnels” as a form of entertainment by building social conflict out of them. These in turn divide people up. There are so many elements of our human psychology, and the media environment we occupy, that feed off each other, and produce a plunge into a self referential world that doesn’t allow for any kind of language of diplomacy. It’s getting harder to step outside of your view, or empathize with the other side, or mediate between different positions. I find it very disturbing because I’ve always wanted to mediate between the different reality tunnels. I was influenced by Wilson saying that you ought to subscribe to a magazine that has an opposite political view to your own for a while, in order to challenge your own reality tunnel. It’s almost like it’s forbidden to do this now, to have that kind of capacity. You’ve betrayed your tribe if you do that. The whole structure of the culture in all these different ways has been tribalized.

S: To me it’s almost like a precursor to Balkanization.

ED: Like a further stage?

S: Yeah. Where you have open war between different groups because of cultural differences and competition for territory and resources. There used to be a lot of gang war between groups with military policing keeping it contained in poorer neighborhoods. That’s probably still happening but you get shielded from the blunt of it in San Francisco. It is probably still like that in Richmond, parts of Oakland. It was like that in the Mission years ago. I’m very concerned with how much tension between groups seems to be being cultivated. With the McKennas in Invisible Landscape, I noticed that no matter how weird the book becomes it starts out reading like disciplined, sourced with peer reviewed information, scientific writing. Then it becomes a Dr. Strange comic book with Steve Ditko multi-dimensional art.

ED: That’s what I call weird naturalism. You’re committed to a scientific, realistic, materialistic understanding of the world, but you allow it to get to a place where things are actually kind of weird. Instead of seeing it as “There’s a whole other level of reality that science doesn’t understand” you go “Let’s see how far we can push this into something else.” So the “weird” becomes another aspect of a naturalistic view rather than a whole other reality.

S: In the edition of Invisible Landscape I’ve read there’s an introduction by Dennis McKenna where he talks about why he and his brother went to La Chorea, Columbia, where William Burroughs had gone over a decade earlier. They set out to ingest psychoactive plants and fungi. He writes that they were really concerned with the ecological problems that were happening in the 70’s, with deforestation and loss of arable soil, overpopulation, and the seas becoming polluted — all things that are being documented now. All the eco-catastrophe that the hippies were worried about is happening. There are micro-plastics saturating Monterey Bay.

ED: Not to mention the plastics in our bodies. One of the reasons I wanted to write about the 70’s was because I think that there is a dark truth that I don’t think we acknowledge. Our world now is more of a product of that time period than any other. We have a multi-cultural world but driven by a consumer debt economy. There is a tolerance for multiple types of lifestyles as long as everyone is invested in consumer capitalism. The beginnings of the Internet happened then. A lot of the environmental concerns arose in the early 70’s. Much more than the 60’s. The first Earth Day is 1970. You have the figure of the terrorist emerge in the media. There are hijackings, the Red Brigade and people getting murdered in the United States by terrorist organizations. So we have the idea of the terrorist as someone outside the system and capable of introducing violence randomly. This creates a reaction to that. There is a concern with surveillance. Movies focused on paranoia like Francis Coppola’s The Conversation (1974). Looking at the movies, listening to the music of the 70’s, there is a general sense of drift or sadness or despair. You see an appearance of a lack of connection in the general culture. There is no real overarching narrative defining different groups and people don’t seem sure what to do. At the same time there was this exuberant, hedonistic drive happening. There was a popularization of meditation, yoga, mysticism. Back then it was guru cults, now it’s yoga studios and it’s more mainstream. But there are so many similarities with these times. There is a mirror quality and I look at the 70’s to kind of see where we are right now in the 2000 and teens.

S: I interviewed David Talbot who wrote Season of the Witch about San Francisco in the 70’s. In a way he was approaching the 70’s as a period of time that was comparatively unexamined contrasted to the 60’s. The 70’s were very weird, particularly in California. If the seminal bands of the Sixties were the Beatles and the Stones, the key bands of the 70’s were Bowie and Zeppelin, with Black Sabbath and the Stooges in the back alley. There were a lot of serial killers floating around in California in the 70’s.

ED: Yeah there were a lot of serial killers floating around. Inside the counter culture too. Manson wasn’t a one-off. There is something that was released. You almost have this sympathy for the conservative “silent majority” folks because if you do uncork societal inhibitions there is a strange darkness that can come out. I think punk rock attempted to navigate the continuation of a counter cultural position — the call for a different world — while acknowledging that when you do that you let loose a lot of heavy stuff that you have to recognize. You can’t sweep everything dark under a hippy carpet of love and light. At the same time you don’t react by trying to suppress it all. You try to keep the space open while you’re more honest about the dark and difficult side.

One of the things I did mention in the book that I believe was important was how Nixon took the US off the Gold Standard. Once you take off the Gold Standard then money is floating free and the fictional nature of money is more obvious. As long as money is linked to something discrete with an actual mass it has an actuality. The value of gold is a human agreement, it’s not something set in eternal stone, but money being a symbol of gold roots the meaning of money in the material world. When Nixon took the country off the Gold Standard this process of global finance starts, aided by the new network technology. The network society also begins in the 70’s and you start to have this cybernetic, capitalist system. Money becomes based on more and more abstraction, and easier to manipulate.

S: You write about McKenna seeing language as a solid structure while tripping in Colombia. Also Dick and the McKennas, in their separate stories, kept trying to imagine a solid state machine with no moving parts, completely integrated and operating on a cosmic level. All of these individuals were based in California and had their experiences within the space of two years.

ED: And there were other events with Timothy Leary and John Lilly — there was clearly something in the air then and what that was, for me, the biggest enigma. Many individuals had perceptions of alien contact. In the case of the three I focused on they retained skepticism but they had that perception. There was also this wide spread understanding that technology was developing to where it would change everything. Not all of these recorded experiences involved drugs. I drew on post modernism in my book a lot, not as a philosophical movement but rather as a phase in culture that got articulated by certain intellectuals. That also started in the 70’s. The 1970’s is where the phrase “post modern” comes from. It’s where post modern thinkers gain currency. This grows in the 80’s. This is regardless if you think post modern thinking is good or bad.

S: Foucault was lecturing at Cal Berkeley around this time.

ED: Yes he was. Something is going on at multiple levels and you can use spiritual or psychological language, or technological language, to describe the historical transformations in culture that were happening at this time. There was also some type of mythological engineering going on. The story of human potential, or the stories about alien contact in California, involves some sort of desire for a myth to take root that deals with alien contacts and human intelligence.

S: The four (including Dennis McKenna) that you focus on minutely documented their experiences with attempts at scientific or artistic discipline. Many people tripped, lost their minds, but produced nothing. The McKenna brothers laid out their theories ranging from Eliade’s data about shamanism, to the holographic theory of mind, to applying quantum models to cellular respiration (which wasn’t done in medical school in the 70’s but is done now), to the interface of psychoactive compounds with neural DNA. Then they documented the practice of what they tried in Colombia. Robert Anton Wilson did similar in Cosmic Trigger. In the Exegesis I believe Dick documented everything that happened to him.

ED: Because the McKenna’s, Wilson and Dick all left texts we can look closely at them. That’s not to say that discovery is only about reading texts but through those details, through that specificity, you can set in motion larger questions about experience, and what is it these men encountered. There was clearly an alien contact archetype that was in the wild, in the morphogenetic field, collective unconscious, whatever language you want to use. There was some sort of collectively perceived figure that they each found their own ways to. It was from different directions, but that you can recognize shared features between each description.

S: Out of all of them Dick had this tortured psyche. Where he lived in northern California is surrounded by beautiful nature and culturally liberal, but internally he was at war.

ED: He was tortured from the get go. It was written in the cards. It wasn’t just his family structures, his problems had neurological origins. He was not neuro-typical. There’s a description in Rickman’s biography where Dick is in high school and he’s talking about experiencing profound depersonalizations. His whole sense of space time is melting and he’s feeling like an alien. It sounds like a bad trip and this is happening to this kid. So he ended up being treated and entered into this psychiatric world right away. He was given drugs and absorbed psychiatric language and the worldview. Right from the start he is given all these drugs and he never really found the ground again. Digging into the life of Philip K. Dick I developed a lot of sympathy for him. He didn’t have it easy.

S: A psychiatrist at SF General pointed out to me that there’s nothing romantic about mental illness. It’s a deeply disabling condition. In nursing school I read about the presentation of “poverty of thought” and didn’t quite get it until I observed it in a patient.

ED: I don’t know that term. What is it?

S: “Poverty of thought” is one of the clinical presentations of schizophrenia — which is really seven or eight different diseases. With poverty of thought not much is really going on in your head. You can have repetitive, obsessive ideas that you will recite over and over again, perseverating these ideas that are often paranoid or persecutory in nature. I don’t think Dick had that. I don’t know if what he had can be defined based on the evidence. He definitely had amphetamine psychosis at one point. It does seem like something happened to him that is not common. Maybe something neurologically similar to what happened to Paul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus. Paul could have had a stroke.

ED: There’s a whole body of work now on that subject. This book came out of a PhD program and it was good to go back to school and hear what people were talking about. I was studying religion and there are a lot of questions around religious experience. What is it? What does it mean? A lot of this stuff was boring. Typical academic arguments about language and blah, blah, blah. But some of it was really startling. We’re beginning to see a place where people are turning to material psychology, like the language alterations produced by a stroke, to look at these figures like Paul. This pisses off all the theologians who can’t even look at this, but there’re good reasons to explore that area, the area that concerns the brain wiring side of altered states of consciousness. I don’t think it tells the whole story, because what comes through in the encounter the individual experiences can’t be reduced to just a biological level. Regardless, the physical level is a key part of the experience.

S: Robert Anton Wilson writes about how what he appreciated about Aleister Crowley’s system was that Crowley did not insist on literalism. That meant all the language of paganism or medieval Judaism or Christianity was applied to obtain certain results or effects in perception or space and time. That did not mean that angels, demons or gods had an objective reality. Crowley was, in many ways, a jackass, but he had some insight and some method for controlling his own mind. He also believed he had some kind of contact with some kind of Other: like Wilson, Dick and McKenna. There was no insistence on what that “Other” was. There is a term you use “Unknown Totality” in your last chapter. You end up not wanting to put a period on these Gnostic encounters and experiences.

ED: I’ve noticed that some people become really arrogant about their explanations. Or they become very identified with their explanations and get into arguments with other people holding other interpretations. That kind of argumentation never interested me. What I’m interested in is all the different tools that let us sneak up on the mystery and peer through the bushes. We’re always looking at it from a different angle and only get part of the elephant. You either get the tail, the torso, the trunk, pieces here and there. I want to proceed with a great deal of humility and openness about what the elephant actually is. This is not just an intellectual tool for me. Reality is ambiguous. I have to be careful when I’m navigating situations of tremendous confusion and lack of clarity. One temptation is to fall into a too cynical or critical view. Another is to embrace the mystery so much that you end up being so open minded that your brain falls out, and you just go along with whatever’s happening. I want to navigate a middle path, where you’re respecting your critical intellect, but you’re also respecting that we don’t really ever know everything that is going on. This is especially true now where there has been a break down of consensus, when there is profound epistemological confusion, and we’re going to have to navigate through it. It’s not going to get better before it gets worse. The only way through is through these kinds of skills — having the ability to be open to multiplicity but also having tools at hand that enable you to analyze, make decisions, filter information and recognize where people are coming from. Using these tools to move forward is really the key. That’s what I’m doing in the book and that’s why it’s so dense. I’m bringing all these pieces together that I hope people can use to move forward with these discussions.

S: In Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous he describes Gurdjieff putting these two men into a trance. Two very different men. One is a hip, urbane extrovert who goes to the theater and has read all the latest novels, he’s the life of the salon and the party. The other guy is this quiet, shy hick. Under trance the city slicker gets really quiet, won’t say anything. They ask the country bumpkin what’s wrong with the other and he says: “He has nothing inside.” They ask him why he’s talking and he says: “Because you asked me a question.” Finally the city slicker is asked if he has anything at all that he’s thinking of and he says: “I’d like a peppermint.” Gurdjieff points out that there are country people who have a profound sense of being, what he calls “essence.” What they lack is sophisticated urban socialization and lateral mind development, what Gurdjieff calls “personality” or what is given by society. What some city people lack, in contrast, is substance beneath the style.

ED: I’m aware in myself when the city slicker side of my mind is starting to roll. If I’m reading something on line about a new movie coming out I get very excited about it, and feel on top of it, but then I realize: “Dude this is actually not what is going on.” That sense of hipness is very seductive and I think very much a part of how the Internet works, of what the Internet taps into. The Internet has allowed that urban mind to be democratically accessible to all. You plug in and immediately there’s information overload and immediately you’re a hipster and you’re on top of the flow, or trying to be. I think it has led to a further decrease of “authenticity” or whatever you want to call the self that has to be developed along side the more intellectual social self. There is a plague of “knowingness” or “being in the know” as a stance or position that people take.

S: You talk about hypnagogic states between waking and sleeping as hallucinatory or altered places of perception independent of drugs or alcohol. This is where you hear little clipped phrases, hallucinate a bit.

ED: In terms of Dick’s experiences, if you read his Exegesis and letters, most of the messages he received were through hypnagogia. He wasn’t just going to sleep and having these things happen, he actually practiced getting into these states and using those words and images that came to him as a means of interpreting what was happening to him overall. So he got this feedback loop going where he got words and images from the unconscious, and used them to understand what the visual and linguistic information he was receiving might mean. This is a real interesting example of how hypnagogia is part of this esoteric, occult, psychological exploration. Philip K. Dick took it all the way to the bank.

S: I had to look up the word noetic reading your book: “of the mind.”

ED: William James uses that term.

S: There is a supra rationalism in Greek that comes through in PhD level writing. You seem to be applying the rational technique to something that transcends reason.

ED: The trap there is believing that you’ve found the explanation that answers all your questions, or at least the position you want to defend, which is what most scholars do, or you try to explain the mystery in those rational terms and create speculative possibilities. There are tons of this stuff today. You can forward a position like: What if there is a matrix of informational possibilities and aliens are the interface? You can go on and on and on. That’s not very interesting to me and it rings kind of hollow. I’m more interested in getting close to the cliff edge and get to the point where you’ll fall off, but you hold on and see what you can see.

S: So you embrace a fine line?

ED: Very much. Like PKD I do find myself asking what’s wrong. What’s wrong with the human deal? Evolutionary psychology has a certain answer. Animals developed specific traits for survival and as technology started rolling those traits got magnified but separate from the environmental problems they were supposed to solve, and in fact became problems themselves. Aggression got magnified. This provides a particular solution to the question of what’s wrong, but it’s hard to take that to other levels. It’s very hard when you find people that are really militant and they have a pet political idea about what’s wrong with current civilization. A lot of people are looking for THE explanation. They’re looking for the source of the Myth of the Fall: the serpent, the apple. Like take someone who hates sugar. “Sugar is a poison and it leads to slavery and colonialism.” In a way they’re right. Sugar is a big part of the problem. We’re addicted to it. It’s not very good for us. It helped create colonialism. But that’s just one part of the story. There’s a desire to find these things as sign posts to where the Fall happens. So I ask myself where does it begin? If we go by the evolutionary model 100,000 years ago we were all in small bands of hunters and gatherers. Sometimes we’d get attacked by tigers, but mostly we’d do okay. People lived healthy lives but not for that long. Perhaps their lives were rich nevertheless. Then along the way something happens. Was it agriculture? Was it the construction of cities? Was it the development of states or religion? There’s something that gets this whole thing going, this system that people feel they are oppressed in, that Robert Anton Wilson is very aware of, as is William Burroughs. At some point this statist, hierarchical thing gets going with religion, mind control and militarism. It’s the same thing that occurs over and over again through different transformations.

S: So you get Philip K. Dick seeing the first century Roman Empire in 1970’s Anaheim.

ED: That’s part of what’s behind the time collapse in Dick. To him there is some kind of archetypal “Black Iron Prison.” This is an archetype of power and control machinery that is somehow embedded in human history and it keeps recurring in a way that’s not purely a function of history. If you think about today, where are we in relation to that? There are so many potential prisons that lay on the horizon.

S: In some ways he’s looking at the same problem that Marx does but from a more psychological and spiritual perspective than an economic or mathematical one. A lot of people are being brutally exploited and spied on. Dick, in analyzing this, does go to madness, but he’s able to reel it in to write reasonably coherent narratives. In Valis he sort of sees the Soviet Union as the Byzantine Empire and the US as the Western Roman Empire that have divided up the world between them but are essentially the same thing.

ED: How would Dick pattern recognize the global situation today? He had developed during the Cold War, and his views were conditioned by the political realities of the Cold War. In some ways he saw ahead. As with the McKennas he had a sense of looming environmental catastrophe. In his last writings he saw the environment as the “Wound” of the Savior that is coming.

S: I’ve read negative critiques of Flow My Tears the Policeman Said in regards to a sex and drugs fetish subculture that is part of this dystopian world Dick imagines. This subculture was seen as a caricature but it totally reminded me of S&M fetish club scenes in San Francisco in the 90’s, which spilled over into the rave and drug scenes. Alys, the sister of the police general Felix is queer identified and in an incestuous relationship with her brother, who is the chief enforcer of this police state. Already, to me, that is an understanding that feels real in regards to authoritarian regimes. I don’t find Dick’s portrayal to be homophobic but Alys is definitely hypersexual and sort of crazy. In the book she takes a dissociative drug that warps the objective reality around her. She’s taking the drug because she’s already tried everything else.

ED: We now have these heavy, heavy psychedelics that had been very esoteric in the culture of the Sixties like DMT. DMT was around in the Sixties but it wasn’t part of the central discourse. If you read the underground magazines, listen to song lyrics, look at the popular stories, people don’t talk a lot about DMT. Those that did talk about it didn’t like it. But it was used by the Dead, by Leary, Alan Watts tried it. But it was almost too much for that phase of psychedelic culture. While some people treated it with great respect — as it should be treated — other people had a more plunge in hedonistic approach to it, which they applied to everything. A pedal to the medal attitude which, in a way, I respect. Kind of a punk rock approach, but it also shows how far out we are in the present in playing with the knobs of consciousness to find out what happens. The history of ecstasy/MDMA or “Molly” is really reflective of the past five decades of drug culture. It has been a therapy tool and used in the gay clubs, then it became illegal and became a party drug, and now it’s being looked at as a medicine again.

S: I can relate to the McKenna brothers wanting to go to Colombia and trip balls to find new solutions. I don’t think they were necessarily that successful, but they did have this sense, articulated very carefully by Dennis, that they had met with an alien intelligence that gave them the “keys to galactarian citizenship.” So is there any hope? Because I think we need back up.

ED: I don’t know about the hope thing. I can look to my mind and what it sees and what it reasons, with all the trends, and where we are going, and it’s pretty hard to see a way out. Then I look to my heart and my friends and relationships, and my feelings about the world I live in, and yes, I live in a pleasant place so it’s easier to do. There’s a resiliency there even if not entirely rational. So I have a mixed feeling with the hope thing. I have the spirit of it if not the content. What does it mean to even muddle through this life? I’m definitely invested in the things that I think are most important. If the world is going down what are your priorities? If I end up in a miserable situation, dying in a hospital bed or on the street, which will happen whether the world collapses or not, what will I confirm on my way? Some people go hardcore survivalist and gear up. That’s where they put their energy and that may be the rational thing to do. But for me it’s about communicating what’s important in the face of inevitable death. How can we work on inoculating ourselves against the toxicity of various negative situations? This is a design problem. It’s also a spiritual problem, a communication problem. Am I optimistic about it? Not particularly. Do I think it’s worth doing? Yes. Because I find the connections I make with other people who are interested in these things seem to point toward a collective immunological response that I’m happy to be a part of. You can be a being of Hope even if you don’t have “hope.” That’s something I find powerful. For me, as someone who grew up with post modernism, which can be unnecessarily dense sometimes, the existential position is existence proceeds essence. I look more at Camus than Sartre. In the “Myth of Sisyphus” you have to imagine Sisyphus being happy. To me that’s what hope is right now. Pushing the rock up a hill that will just roll back and crush you is a type of affirmation.