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

by Erik Davis

For Latour, a fact is neither an unmediated avatar of objective reality nor a purely manufactured chunk of human culture. Instead, facts are the lively end results of complex, and often tedious, processes of mediation and translation between different modes of existence. To establish biological knowledge, let's say, certain features of a bacteria colony need to “pass” from a petri dish to a measuring instrument, then to a computer database where the resulting data is processed, and from there into a journal article whose argumentation and references survive various institutional pressures and processes, including perfectly political ones. If the passages between these different modes are successful, something extraordinary appears at the end of the assembly line: a fact, a strange kind of entity that is both fabricated through material and social processes, and yet is rendered autonomous and commanding through that very process.

Here we should recall Timothy Melley's insightful argument that modern conspiracy theory hinges on the experience of “agency panic.” Agency panic is what happens when the individual's enjoyment of autonomy gives way to a fearful suspicion that one's actions and beliefs are being controlled by external forces. In the face of this, conspiracy theory attempts to “defend the integrity of the self against the social order.”16

This defense, which attempts to protect and preserve autonomy, also depends on a corresponding—and arguably perverse—attribution of agency to the social order. To protect the self, the theorist must make society more of a self as well, and an insidious one at that. Aspects of society that sociologists might call “structural forces” are animated and combined with older notions “of a malevolent, centralized, and intentional program of mass control.”

Wilson too became caught in a story that, though partly ghostwritten in his own hand, still came from beyond. And it was not one that he entirely liked. It remained for him, somehow, to pass on to Kripal's final stage: Authorization, in which the act of reading the paranormal writing us becomes the act of writing the paranormal writing us.

The French Catholic phenomenologist Jean-Luc Marion characterizes the encounter with such beings of religion by contrasting the sacred icon to the pagan idol. The idol, he argues, is all about our gaze: in holding and fixing our gaze on the level of the visible, the idol sustains our selfhood and its egoic grasping, and therefore acts as a “mirror, not a portrait.” In contrast, the “icon does not result from a vision but provokes one.”40 The self who encounters an authentic icon is no longer the owner of its gaze; instead, the icon confronts us with an “invisible gaze that subverts us in the measure of its glory.”

In this sense, the Exegesis follows the postmodern logic of the “information revolution” that the scholar of religion Mark Taylor limns in his work on network culture. According to Taylor, one marker of the network era—which, as we will see in the conclusion, basically begins in the seventies—is that information reflexively turns on itself, forming “feedback loops that generate increasing complexity.”

Bender came to realize that the telling of these stories was always also a retelling, part of a mutating narrative that was motivated in part by an expectation of interpretive uncertainty. Some mystics “seemed resolved to let the ‘final’ interpretation stand somewhere in the distant future: as such, their experiences remained open for interpretation and even for the possibility that a previous ‘experience’ might be determined in the future to be not an experience at all.”

This hypothetical opening toward the future—whose modifications were engendered partly through the reflexive character of writing itself—became, in some sense, the very substance of the revelation. “Mystics sought the experience yet-to-come, which held the possibility of resolving unsolved mysteries or creatively unsettling other previous interpretations. Daily life was thus always possibly revelatory.”

Bender's insights help us understand the psycho-spiritual logic of Dick's endless hypotheses, and they cast light as well on Dick's obsessions with temporality and “orthogonal time.” After all, the refusal or impossibility of interpretive resolution extends the enigmas of experience into both the past and the future, subtly interleaving the time of the event with textuality itself. This renders the process of exegesis at once interminable and ecstatic, a pharmakon both poisonous and intoxicating.

Like Scheherazade with her fables, Dick often wrote his Exegesis deep into the night, night after night, and he did so in part to stave off the “death” or permanent loss of contact with 2-3-74.

Abruptly awakened from sleep by an alarm, there is always a gap, a little abyss, between the noise and the cognitive crystallization of a familiar world.53 This abyss may free us, but it provides no foundation. As the Fall's Mark E. Smith put it, “the only thing real is waking and rubbing your eyes.”54

These local examples of compare-and-contrast underscore the central importance of comparison to the seekers and psychonauts of the seventies. The sort of pattern recognition associated with comparative religion, made popular by innovative and visionary thinkers like Jung and Eliade, went wild once it entered the feverish occult milieu that nurtured McKenna, Wilson, and Dick. Comparison here is not just a theory or ideology—it is a pragmatic procedure, one that mobilizes conceptual and symbolic resonance in order to increase the ontological charge or “believability” of any particular image, notion, system, or event.

Less than an argument, but more than a mere juxtaposition, “Coincidence?” is used to forge patterns rather than clarify cause. By establishing such associations, the dynamics of resonance can power up further synchronistic possibilities even if the resonances themselves are biased or forced. This also suggests that the comparisons that undergird seeker or esoteric culture are intrinsically related to the logic of conspiracy thinking, which also helps explain why all our psychonauts wrestled with paranoia.

The danger with such thinking is not necessarily the web itself—which in some ways is not so different than the patterns and conjunctions uncovered by historians and academic comparativists—but lies rather in the absence of skepticism about the glue that holds such patterns together.

The sort of hard pranking represented by Operation Mindfuck has now become an ordinary tool of politics, publicity, and self-promotion. With their deployment of Pepe the Frog in the run-up to the 2016 election, the alt.right promulgated “meme magick” with a familiar Discordian mix of tactical nonsense, anonymous authorship, politicized media, and arcane esotericism.

Today we must penetrate, navigate, and play the game of reality as never before, even as it plays us to the hilt. These are archon times, my friends, and grappling with high weirdness may paradoxically be a kind of mental health regimen.

The weird that saturates culture today is present often through its memetic banalization, like magical sigils serving as corporate logos. After all, much of the material in this book—garish genre fictions, strange psychedelic drugs, occult arcana, esoteric rituals, conspiracy theories—is now thoroughly mainstream.

A deep familiarity with psychedelic phenomenology is simply a good skill to possess in an era of memetic struggle, of virtual realities, of archon stratagems.

It is not for nothing that global warming is often referred to as global weirding. The planet is not just getting hotter; it is growing more turbulent and unpredictable, more tricksy, and more defiantly wayward. Humans helped make this mess, and humans (or some of them) understand that fact, but tragically—ironically—we seemingly can do little about it. This creates a deeply uncanny condition of tortured knowledge and zombie-like inertia, as we collectively run the mad genius of petrochemical modernity into the dead and dusty ground. It is as if civilization made a sorcerous pact with petroleum genies, and the debt is now coming due.