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GSAPS Psychedelic Book Club (September 15) – High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
September 15, 2023 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm PDT
Welcome to the GSAPS Psychedelic Book Club!
Please join us Every Third Friday of the month, from 5pm-6:30pm Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) | 8pm-9:30pm Eastern Standard Time (EST).
Featured reading for September 15, 2023
High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies
- Davis, Erik. High weirdness: Drugs, esoterica, and visionary experience in the seventies. MIT Press, 2019. (Amazon) (Audible)
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In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America’s leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences.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.
Upcoming Reading
- Hatsis, Thomas. The Witches’ Ointment: The Secret History of Psychedelic Magic. Simon and Schuster, 2015. (Amazon) (Audible)
- Holland, Julie. Good chemistry: the science of connection, from soul to psychedelics. HarperCollins, 2020 (Amazon) (Audible)
- Muraresku, Brian C. The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name. St. Martin’s Press, 2020. (Amazon) (Audible)
January 19, 2024
- Leary, Timothy, Richard Alpert, and Ralph Metzner. The psychedelic experience: A manual based on the Tibetan book of the dead. Citadel, 2022. (Amazon) (Audible)
February 16, 2024
- Shulgin, Alexander Theodore, and Ann Shulgin. PIHKAL: a chemical love story. Berkeley: Transform Press, 1995. (Amazon) (Audible)