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

by Erik Davis

“perturbations in the reality field.”

Nietzsche describes the spiritual acrobats who can rise to the call of the Overman as “philosophers of the future.”

Nietzsche is talking about psychonauts. After all, while we are used to comparing drug visionaries and mystical seekers, from another angle, they more resemble philosophers or mad scientists compelled, beyond reason but with some sense, to put themselves on the line, risking both paranoia and pathology through their anthropotechnics.

But there was no guarantee that the heart of the self was not, in the end, a void. The flip side of self-realization was the somewhat disturbing possibility—supported by Buddhism, by high-dose psychedelia, and by constructivist psychological and sociological concepts—that there is no solid or real Me at all.