A few months ago, I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and found myself less interested in the robots than in the techno-religion. I was raised Mormon, and during my mission I used to think a lot about the function of belief and how certain teachings, songs, rituals helped us override instinct and cope with the overwhelming experience of consciousness itself.
PKD’s insight, I think, is that religion is mental technology and pushed that concept to its extreme to helps us see how “religio-mental tech,” whether acknowledged or not, are more like ant pheromones. It’s not just a “reality tunnel”; it’s a direct line to the brain stem; it’s chemical. It binds the collective purpose of the ant colony through compulsion. It creates what feels necessary.
I dropped out of church twelve years ago. Did psychedelics and therapy. Then I got married, started a family, and found myself doing the unthinkable recently: going to church again.
Our church in Piedmont offered free childcare and live music for an hour. Not a bad deal to escape the overwhelming negativity in the media, social or otherwise. How many more serial killer documentaries do we need to collectively watch? The pastor’s one of the good ones—preaches the pop-psychedelic Gospel of radical love and unity. I’ve even gone to a life group, which is just so fucking crazy to me. I don’t believe in God per se, but engaging with a faith tradition gives shape to life in an addiction defined society. We’re all workaholic, media over-saturated cellphone junkies navigating a capitalistic gauntlet that wants to break down our minds and pump pure dopamine into our optic nerves. Every business model of the past 10 years now seems explicitly built around the goal of addiction and identity.
Lately I’ve been reading Naked Lunch, and the desperation in Burroughs’ cynicism resonates despite only ever being addicted to my phone, video games, pizza, and work. The “news” or “information” addiction is one of the worst that you can get sucked into at times. The more information we consume, the higher the dose we need, until we traveled all the way out and notice we have tinfoil hats on. What happens when the collective conscious and the collective unconscious transform into the broken mind of an addict? Do we all need to go to AA? Who do we surrender to now? AI?
I’ve re-embraced a sort of normcore for the time being. But I spend enough time exploring the weirdosphere that attending church feels, transgressive and psychedelic. At a recent sound bath, my mind kept oscillating between the suffering face of Christ and the peaceful face of the Buddha. I wasn’t in a state of spiritual ecstasy or antying. I was more reflecting on the power of those simple pheremone inducing images to create vastly different civilizations.
Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
I felt pretty unnerved by the Tucker Carlson interview. I thought about it for days. Many wild, paranoid statements were made (e.g, Silicon Valley building the bodies of the demons of the Apocalypse with AI). Maybe what stuck with me is the degree to which the eschatological narrative runs deep within Western esotericism, too, and we, occult-leaning folks, have to wrestle with that. The Book of Revelation continues to be projected on current events. And now, we have AI and Thiel's weird antichrist rants, and the frame gets even more entrenched.
I had been secretly hoping for your perspective on this interview and hoped you'd touch on the more "TechGnostic" themes, but it was also interesting to read about the evolving Christian position regarding psychedelics (unlike Carlson, who repeatedly labels psychedelics as demonic in the interview). Thank you for writing it!
And as for the Expanding Mind podcasts, I seem to be a lot more distraught about it than you are! I am one of these people who like to visit the archive on the regular. So many great guests on there, which has been terrible for my book-buying habit. I look forward to this issue being somewhat fixed.
Fantastic rave, Erik! Fucking Christians, eh? For what it's worth, I never yet met a satanist that didn't start out as a Christian :-). Hope you're well in these ugly times.
Man: what a banger. And this feels new for you -- the kind of exhortatory lyricism in the bravura first sentence, which is totally earned in its ever-expanding catalogue of the damned. Very nice.
So much hate and generalization of Christians and Conservatives. Psychedelics balanced me out. I used to be 100% a liberal and atheist until I used psychedelics. Then Jesus' words and some of what the Apostles preach in the NT letters made sense. Being a christian or conservative and being into psychedelics makes perfect sense. It's not a new trend. I actually thought it was more of a conservative thing because of that spiritual awakening aspect of it.
A godawful lotta ad hominems here... Look, an idea is either a good one or a bad one no matter who calls it extreme right, extreme left, or far-center. Anti-Trumpers and their ilk should be asking themselves what be the current world situation if Harris/Walz were now rubber-stamping the US DeepState aka "TheSwamp".
I loved Expanding Mind and still miss it. Back then, I thought that the evolution of consciousness would lead us inexorably forward. Now watching the demise of the fake land of the free, my eyes are open. Humanity has an excellent skill at going into dark ages and, as some think (while exploring languages in the world, particularly Europe, that near no relation to modern language families and have been replace by Indo-European languages alongside the ruins of civilisations that predate our common agricultural revolution timeline), I suspect it has happened many times before and will soon happen again. Thanks for your writing. I always appreciate how you tie things together in such a weird way
Erik, cannot express more appreciation at reading your constant probing and pocking the eschatological moodboard, bringing the entheogenic to bear on the experience of 'spiritual warriors' or what some are calling Christofascist/Christian nationalists, all soaked in AI-slop.
Being both amongst SF buffs, cultural scientific marxists-sexomarxist crowd, as well as a former dweller of the esoterica/occult crypt of the early 1990s Romania New Acropolis wave of cheap pulpy translations, I cannot but applaud you for searching communicating vessels among ideological enemies.
You are also ensuring what Whitehead's cheeky quip "the duty of the future is to be dangerous" implies that every trip involves contingency, and if not rip reality then at least crumple it more and not settle into the usual black, red, blue-pilled allotments. Similar to ensuring that what Ioan Petru Culianu called the dualist gnosis generator of the West is not hidden, but is in plain sight.
At the same time, one might say, after Naomi Klein's Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror, one might say there was constant copycat rightwing activity, but also more devious ones like intermedia altermedia mirroring and using copyleft materials to repackage them as ammunition.
I am guessing that I am one of the few non-Anglo-American non-Protestant/Catholic readers out here, and can only say that Eastern Orthodoxy seems slow at accepting or at least considering the possibility that entheogenic or psychotropic means won't suspend or compete with their hold on consciousness or the post-1989 socialist imagination. But maybe there are Orthodox monks or even nuns who have not been fully exorcised or not fallen into the general anti-psychedelic fearmongering and moralizing that seems to be the only thing bothering the authorities and sprawling security apparatus.
Anyway, they have enough power and capital to afford the best of ayahuasca, but then who needs such substances when one has the biggest cathedral in the East (yes, bigger than the Serbian or the Russians), the recently opened Cathedral of the "Cathedral of the Nation's Salvation" just in front of Casa Poporului to practically complete the biggest buildings on Earth triumvirate that also includes the Pentagon. As for the eschatological tenor of today's conservatives, I quote you in my review of the documentary Praying for Armageddon https://timespacewarps.wordpress.com/2025/07/03/2674-praying-for-armageddon-2023-documentary/.
And speaking of the Pentagon and Casa Poporului and Catedrala Mantuirii, maybe one can also speculate on the Department of War baptizing - the fact that 'spiritual wars', no matter on what plane, astral or not, tend to make militarism at home or the church at ease with the whole rearmament and arms race, a pretty demonic activity indeed. I have also noticed after 1989 how the churches (especially the wooden pseudo-village-like ones like the Maramures model) have been multiplying inside military encampments in Romania (one at the Military Academy next door and one near the former Ministry of Defense/actual Cyber warfare dept).
Blessing the army's bellicosity has been known from the past, and in Romania's case as an ally of Nazi Germany, it also endowed its unholy "Sacred War" against communist forces and Bolsheviks with a sacred air, blessings by Orthodox priests which, of course, did not stop them from committing massacres against civilians and Jewish minorities in Odessa but au contraire, made them more expedient.
I know it is a very unpleasant subject, but I am curious of your take on sacrality and rearmament, the way the Wars on Terror and St George have been mobilized or demobilized, the way, say, lysergic or Great Balls of Fire coexisted during the Vietnam War, or what more pacifist, even anti-militaristic protests based on religious conviction have existed to date.
Expanding Mind is a gem, I only found it in Feb of this year and was listening to it from the earliest episodes on pod bean. I was up to July 26 2012…:
I went through a Jesus Freak stage as a teen in the early 70's. I grew up Evangelical but was moving towards the counterculture. Most of the Jesus Freaks were moving in the other direction, from the counterculture towards evangelicalism. Somewhere in the middle our paths crossed. I then moved on into Christian mysticism, then eastern spirituality and meditation practices. I haven't come across any good books about the Jesus Freaks but the movie "The Jesus Revolution" is a pretty good portrayal. Some of them were drawn to it because of acid visions of Jesus that they had received, although most of them were against drugs of any kind, once they converted.
I was able to attend last year’s PKD series and highly recommend it to anyone considering this year’s iteration. It was actually the first PKD I’ve read and it was a great to experience the book via a communal discussion.
Way to nail the zeitgeist.
A few months ago, I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and found myself less interested in the robots than in the techno-religion. I was raised Mormon, and during my mission I used to think a lot about the function of belief and how certain teachings, songs, rituals helped us override instinct and cope with the overwhelming experience of consciousness itself.
PKD’s insight, I think, is that religion is mental technology and pushed that concept to its extreme to helps us see how “religio-mental tech,” whether acknowledged or not, are more like ant pheromones. It’s not just a “reality tunnel”; it’s a direct line to the brain stem; it’s chemical. It binds the collective purpose of the ant colony through compulsion. It creates what feels necessary.
I dropped out of church twelve years ago. Did psychedelics and therapy. Then I got married, started a family, and found myself doing the unthinkable recently: going to church again.
Our church in Piedmont offered free childcare and live music for an hour. Not a bad deal to escape the overwhelming negativity in the media, social or otherwise. How many more serial killer documentaries do we need to collectively watch? The pastor’s one of the good ones—preaches the pop-psychedelic Gospel of radical love and unity. I’ve even gone to a life group, which is just so fucking crazy to me. I don’t believe in God per se, but engaging with a faith tradition gives shape to life in an addiction defined society. We’re all workaholic, media over-saturated cellphone junkies navigating a capitalistic gauntlet that wants to break down our minds and pump pure dopamine into our optic nerves. Every business model of the past 10 years now seems explicitly built around the goal of addiction and identity.
Lately I’ve been reading Naked Lunch, and the desperation in Burroughs’ cynicism resonates despite only ever being addicted to my phone, video games, pizza, and work. The “news” or “information” addiction is one of the worst that you can get sucked into at times. The more information we consume, the higher the dose we need, until we traveled all the way out and notice we have tinfoil hats on. What happens when the collective conscious and the collective unconscious transform into the broken mind of an addict? Do we all need to go to AA? Who do we surrender to now? AI?
I’ve re-embraced a sort of normcore for the time being. But I spend enough time exploring the weirdosphere that attending church feels, transgressive and psychedelic. At a recent sound bath, my mind kept oscillating between the suffering face of Christ and the peaceful face of the Buddha. I wasn’t in a state of spiritual ecstasy or antying. I was more reflecting on the power of those simple pheremone inducing images to create vastly different civilizations.
Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Additional color on the Gen Z move back toward faith traditions: https://substack.com/home/post/p-169924250
Luckily I downloaded all the expanding mind podcasts that interested me at the time
I felt pretty unnerved by the Tucker Carlson interview. I thought about it for days. Many wild, paranoid statements were made (e.g, Silicon Valley building the bodies of the demons of the Apocalypse with AI). Maybe what stuck with me is the degree to which the eschatological narrative runs deep within Western esotericism, too, and we, occult-leaning folks, have to wrestle with that. The Book of Revelation continues to be projected on current events. And now, we have AI and Thiel's weird antichrist rants, and the frame gets even more entrenched.
I had been secretly hoping for your perspective on this interview and hoped you'd touch on the more "TechGnostic" themes, but it was also interesting to read about the evolving Christian position regarding psychedelics (unlike Carlson, who repeatedly labels psychedelics as demonic in the interview). Thank you for writing it!
And as for the Expanding Mind podcasts, I seem to be a lot more distraught about it than you are! I am one of these people who like to visit the archive on the regular. So many great guests on there, which has been terrible for my book-buying habit. I look forward to this issue being somewhat fixed.
It's all about the clicks... they will say whatever is currently clickable, but as the Zs call it, it's all slop.
Fantastic rave, Erik! Fucking Christians, eh? For what it's worth, I never yet met a satanist that didn't start out as a Christian :-). Hope you're well in these ugly times.
Man: what a banger. And this feels new for you -- the kind of exhortatory lyricism in the bravura first sentence, which is totally earned in its ever-expanding catalogue of the damned. Very nice.
Interesting article. In regards to Christians and drugs, the archaeological discovery of cannabis resins on an 8th century BCE altar at tel Arad has been gaining some attention. - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cannabis-found-altar-ancient-israeli-shrine-180975016/
This fits seamlessly with the etymological theory the Hebrew Kaneh bosm identifies cannabis - https://chrisbennett420.substack.com/p/kaneh-bosem-101-the-botanical-linguistic
And this can be seen to lead into early Christian use of cannabis and other drugs - for healing - https://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2016/10/13/jesus-heal-cannabis/
And for entheogenic purposes - https://www.cannabisculture.com/content/2016/12/20/early-christianitys-drug-fuelled-magic-rituals/
So much hate and generalization of Christians and Conservatives. Psychedelics balanced me out. I used to be 100% a liberal and atheist until I used psychedelics. Then Jesus' words and some of what the Apostles preach in the NT letters made sense. Being a christian or conservative and being into psychedelics makes perfect sense. It's not a new trend. I actually thought it was more of a conservative thing because of that spiritual awakening aspect of it.
Who is Nick land? Never heard of the guy
A godawful lotta ad hominems here... Look, an idea is either a good one or a bad one no matter who calls it extreme right, extreme left, or far-center. Anti-Trumpers and their ilk should be asking themselves what be the current world situation if Harris/Walz were now rubber-stamping the US DeepState aka "TheSwamp".
I loved Expanding Mind and still miss it. Back then, I thought that the evolution of consciousness would lead us inexorably forward. Now watching the demise of the fake land of the free, my eyes are open. Humanity has an excellent skill at going into dark ages and, as some think (while exploring languages in the world, particularly Europe, that near no relation to modern language families and have been replace by Indo-European languages alongside the ruins of civilisations that predate our common agricultural revolution timeline), I suspect it has happened many times before and will soon happen again. Thanks for your writing. I always appreciate how you tie things together in such a weird way
Erik, cannot express more appreciation at reading your constant probing and pocking the eschatological moodboard, bringing the entheogenic to bear on the experience of 'spiritual warriors' or what some are calling Christofascist/Christian nationalists, all soaked in AI-slop.
Being both amongst SF buffs, cultural scientific marxists-sexomarxist crowd, as well as a former dweller of the esoterica/occult crypt of the early 1990s Romania New Acropolis wave of cheap pulpy translations, I cannot but applaud you for searching communicating vessels among ideological enemies.
You are also ensuring what Whitehead's cheeky quip "the duty of the future is to be dangerous" implies that every trip involves contingency, and if not rip reality then at least crumple it more and not settle into the usual black, red, blue-pilled allotments. Similar to ensuring that what Ioan Petru Culianu called the dualist gnosis generator of the West is not hidden, but is in plain sight.
At the same time, one might say, after Naomi Klein's Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror, one might say there was constant copycat rightwing activity, but also more devious ones like intermedia altermedia mirroring and using copyleft materials to repackage them as ammunition.
I am guessing that I am one of the few non-Anglo-American non-Protestant/Catholic readers out here, and can only say that Eastern Orthodoxy seems slow at accepting or at least considering the possibility that entheogenic or psychotropic means won't suspend or compete with their hold on consciousness or the post-1989 socialist imagination. But maybe there are Orthodox monks or even nuns who have not been fully exorcised or not fallen into the general anti-psychedelic fearmongering and moralizing that seems to be the only thing bothering the authorities and sprawling security apparatus.
Anyway, they have enough power and capital to afford the best of ayahuasca, but then who needs such substances when one has the biggest cathedral in the East (yes, bigger than the Serbian or the Russians), the recently opened Cathedral of the "Cathedral of the Nation's Salvation" just in front of Casa Poporului to practically complete the biggest buildings on Earth triumvirate that also includes the Pentagon. As for the eschatological tenor of today's conservatives, I quote you in my review of the documentary Praying for Armageddon https://timespacewarps.wordpress.com/2025/07/03/2674-praying-for-armageddon-2023-documentary/.
And speaking of the Pentagon and Casa Poporului and Catedrala Mantuirii, maybe one can also speculate on the Department of War baptizing - the fact that 'spiritual wars', no matter on what plane, astral or not, tend to make militarism at home or the church at ease with the whole rearmament and arms race, a pretty demonic activity indeed. I have also noticed after 1989 how the churches (especially the wooden pseudo-village-like ones like the Maramures model) have been multiplying inside military encampments in Romania (one at the Military Academy next door and one near the former Ministry of Defense/actual Cyber warfare dept).
Blessing the army's bellicosity has been known from the past, and in Romania's case as an ally of Nazi Germany, it also endowed its unholy "Sacred War" against communist forces and Bolsheviks with a sacred air, blessings by Orthodox priests which, of course, did not stop them from committing massacres against civilians and Jewish minorities in Odessa but au contraire, made them more expedient.
I know it is a very unpleasant subject, but I am curious of your take on sacrality and rearmament, the way the Wars on Terror and St George have been mobilized or demobilized, the way, say, lysergic or Great Balls of Fire coexisted during the Vietnam War, or what more pacifist, even anti-militaristic protests based on religious conviction have existed to date.
Expanding Mind is a gem, I only found it in Feb of this year and was listening to it from the earliest episodes on pod bean. I was up to July 26 2012…:
Rebuttal:
https://www.christianitytoday.com/2023/11/psychedelics-drug-trials-clergy-risks-christian-gospel/
I went through a Jesus Freak stage as a teen in the early 70's. I grew up Evangelical but was moving towards the counterculture. Most of the Jesus Freaks were moving in the other direction, from the counterculture towards evangelicalism. Somewhere in the middle our paths crossed. I then moved on into Christian mysticism, then eastern spirituality and meditation practices. I haven't come across any good books about the Jesus Freaks but the movie "The Jesus Revolution" is a pretty good portrayal. Some of them were drawn to it because of acid visions of Jesus that they had received, although most of them were against drugs of any kind, once they converted.
Well said; this is a good summary of how I've felt about reality since the late 80s, when I woke up...
I was able to attend last year’s PKD series and highly recommend it to anyone considering this year’s iteration. It was actually the first PKD I’ve read and it was a great to experience the book via a communal discussion.