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Joseph Tracy's avatar

Reluctant to ask this but do you or anyone you respect, not like The Rose of Paracelsus. I have only listened to the readings via The psychedelic salon and to be honest it is leaving me flat and I am surprised by the warmth of its reception. Partly the pace and reading is bothering me but I can usually get past that and am reluctant to purchase something that I am so disenchanted with. The essence of my non-enthusiasm is the scattershot absence of plot connecting characters and I really don't give a fuck about how clever and pretty these aimless harvard undergrads are which is all he seems to be saying . In fiction, action engages and description without momentum easily grows tedious. Maybe it begins to move and cohere and engage but how long does this take?

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Justy's avatar

Dear Dr. D,

I listened to a Podcast recently who's guest, Michael Scott Alexander, wrote a book called "Making Peace with the Universe: Personal Crisis and Spiritual Healing". To sum up his thesis, respectfully, it could be called "the illuminated midlife crisis". He connects the post-30-year-old personal terror, followed by major spiritual and psychic awakenings of significant religious, philosophical, and artistic figures (William James, Buddha, Hamid Al-Ghazali, Mary Lou Williams....).

The connection he lands on apparently is one between the major spiritual traditions and the contemporary therapeutic process. Haven't read his book, but listening to his interview I thought about High Weirdness, which I did read, and how you make a personal crisis connection betwixt your three subjects. I plan on re-reading High Weirdness to see if maybe you actually mentioned the midlife-crisis-iness of it all, but it struck me that it's a thread that perhaps opens Exegesis, Cosmic Trigger and Archaic Revival to an even wider comparison. Does a clever mind that hit 40 and also traveled through chapel perilous end up writing Cosmic Trigger, while a materialism-addled simpleton finds a gray hair and buys a sports car, but both are expressions of something similarly archetypal?

There's so much contextual uniqueness to the Wilson/Dick/McKenna experiences that maybe the fear of mortality creep is cast in shadow. Or maybe I zoned out the part where you frame that in High Weirdness already.

Also, I noticed how much I've related to your weaving a narrative of transition struggle and reconciling the past in to, first, the final episodes of Expanding Mind, and now the Burning Shore. I'm in midlife, so I appreciate hearing that sentiment from your voice amongst the far out subjects I've been grokking from you since before my gut started expanding.

Thanks, and is there something to the above?

Sincerely,

Lower Back Pain in Los Angeles

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