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.
Just on your opening paragraph: Acknowledge our shared humanity? I don't think you have grasped what Islam is Eric. There is no kumbaya moment where they join hands with the marxists and trans boys. The Dems, American insta-witches and activists have been pulling the tail of the tiger and this is the inevitable reaction, you get resurgent Christianity and that's going to mean adopting a smarter approach. But thinking that Islam is on your side? Suicidal.
Loved all of this and twenty years ago would have NEVER believed a lot of evangelicals would go for psychedelics. It's weird how they can find passages in the the NT that support this, innit?
RILLY good news for me: Adam McCollum, philologist, and:
>Adam is co-editing the whole 4T series, whose tasty forthcoming volumes include texts by Porphyry and Evagrius, as well as Adam’s own translations of a bushel of Arabic texts on cannabis from the 13th through 15th century, when Islam first encountered the plant and started feasting on its powers, though not without stirring up the inevitable backlash.<
A new Porphyry seems most welcome!
Maybe McCollum will shed some light on RAW's "sufi method" of writing that was also claimed by Leary, David Jay Brown and a few others in that ambit: you write straight or stoned, then edit in the mind you weren't in first, then do iterations of this. I've written to maybe nine Islamic Studies scholars and they won't even respond on this. I suspect RAW and Leary made it up but used "Sufi" to make their approach sound more esoteric. (Hey, I do it too, though I discovered it all on my own. I bet you use this Method, too.) I've scoured at least 30 books that academic libraries will loan out that might have revealed the goods, mostly Sufi stuff. Feel like I'm drillin' in a dry hole. I've found plenty about hashish coded as "wine" and writing poetry; what I'm looking for is some Sufi (or a group of them) who were explicit about using this method.
A friend of mine who's studying Ibn Arabi with some "cool" Islamic scholars gave me email addresses for a couple of these knowers. It seems that, if it's true, maybe you don't talk about it with infidels? The last scholar who responded told me to read Hakim Bey. I said I had: all of Bey and most of PLW. There's nada there. Bupkis.
And yet it seems plausible. I mean, if feels like it could have an actual Sufi origin. Like Leary got the idea from some visiting Islamic scholar who visited Millbrook. Maybe?
Hoping McCollom will come through here. Anyone out there in Erik Davis Land know more about this?
I also waded through the transcript of the Conrad Flynn interview, and as I said on Bluesky, “I am paraphrasing slightly, but ‘Nick Land was interesting until I learned about John C. Lilly’ did actually get an appreciative chuckle out of me.” My ultimate takeaway was that Flynn’s not dumb, but his scholarship isn’t quite as rigorous as one would hope.
Man, I admire your stoic surrender of that about which you can do shit, but losing all those Expanding Minds has to sting. I've been going through many memories made of paper recently and letting cubic yards of it go. I'll drag plenty of them into the next chapter of my life and I'm promising myself to linger over them from time to time, hoping some shape will emerge from the flood. Or maybe not. As I ache with unexpected nostalgia for moments and relationships I didn't always appreciate, explore fully, or get right, another voice tells me to just have some fresh experiences, to move on and do better, instead of succumbing to the twilight years cliché of living in the past, with all its inadequacies and missed connections.
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.
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.
Wow, an epic rambling in this edition + I'm on the linked mailing list now.
Burning Shore reliably revivifies my spirit, once again!
Cheers, Jim
techno-satanic-panic. for those interested in the positive potential of AI from a consciousness expansion lens check out this book. the author is a long time psychonaut and AI researcher. he coined the term AGI- artificial general intelligence https://www.amazon.com/Consciousness-Explosion-Technological-Experiential-Singularity-ebook/dp/B0D7S8MVW4/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2WDQKYF93Y70P&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.KS9hLMAcvxOxHxO3QnA1dJULVwy6DKLYRGQ70BLkKh0zco1UieCgctVINEdP0taTOjYPH0fUxhx18BzkKWf04i7ziMy9ctIhMI8SUJbWLLyUuSz0gmwXOzMXvGceqORtvLXSXztqNAmUo7tZK9svQHvjwG3201tiA6VW3oWSmvQuIhfKDGyvxJnZIuSVFJbuW_oCNxR3vKRFJStyHSvnLXZg0VH73K3kEz494aEewf0.TK4Ayr1S0GD_xK0z3y_Y8zScAh4sBpspQ6OVem7XLKA&dib_tag=se&keywords=ben+goertzel&qid=1761757151&sprefix=ben+goe%2Caps%2C139&sr=8-1
Just on your opening paragraph: Acknowledge our shared humanity? I don't think you have grasped what Islam is Eric. There is no kumbaya moment where they join hands with the marxists and trans boys. The Dems, American insta-witches and activists have been pulling the tail of the tiger and this is the inevitable reaction, you get resurgent Christianity and that's going to mean adopting a smarter approach. But thinking that Islam is on your side? Suicidal.
Loved all of this and twenty years ago would have NEVER believed a lot of evangelicals would go for psychedelics. It's weird how they can find passages in the the NT that support this, innit?
RILLY good news for me: Adam McCollum, philologist, and:
>Adam is co-editing the whole 4T series, whose tasty forthcoming volumes include texts by Porphyry and Evagrius, as well as Adam’s own translations of a bushel of Arabic texts on cannabis from the 13th through 15th century, when Islam first encountered the plant and started feasting on its powers, though not without stirring up the inevitable backlash.<
A new Porphyry seems most welcome!
Maybe McCollum will shed some light on RAW's "sufi method" of writing that was also claimed by Leary, David Jay Brown and a few others in that ambit: you write straight or stoned, then edit in the mind you weren't in first, then do iterations of this. I've written to maybe nine Islamic Studies scholars and they won't even respond on this. I suspect RAW and Leary made it up but used "Sufi" to make their approach sound more esoteric. (Hey, I do it too, though I discovered it all on my own. I bet you use this Method, too.) I've scoured at least 30 books that academic libraries will loan out that might have revealed the goods, mostly Sufi stuff. Feel like I'm drillin' in a dry hole. I've found plenty about hashish coded as "wine" and writing poetry; what I'm looking for is some Sufi (or a group of them) who were explicit about using this method.
A friend of mine who's studying Ibn Arabi with some "cool" Islamic scholars gave me email addresses for a couple of these knowers. It seems that, if it's true, maybe you don't talk about it with infidels? The last scholar who responded told me to read Hakim Bey. I said I had: all of Bey and most of PLW. There's nada there. Bupkis.
And yet it seems plausible. I mean, if feels like it could have an actual Sufi origin. Like Leary got the idea from some visiting Islamic scholar who visited Millbrook. Maybe?
Hoping McCollom will come through here. Anyone out there in Erik Davis Land know more about this?
I also waded through the transcript of the Conrad Flynn interview, and as I said on Bluesky, “I am paraphrasing slightly, but ‘Nick Land was interesting until I learned about John C. Lilly’ did actually get an appreciative chuckle out of me.” My ultimate takeaway was that Flynn’s not dumb, but his scholarship isn’t quite as rigorous as one would hope.
Are you studying the Jesus Freaks for a book? Have been wanting to do a deep dive myself after seeing RAW mention them. Got any good book recs?
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/
Man, I admire your stoic surrender of that about which you can do shit, but losing all those Expanding Minds has to sting. I've been going through many memories made of paper recently and letting cubic yards of it go. I'll drag plenty of them into the next chapter of my life and I'm promising myself to linger over them from time to time, hoping some shape will emerge from the flood. Or maybe not. As I ache with unexpected nostalgia for moments and relationships I didn't always appreciate, explore fully, or get right, another voice tells me to just have some fresh experiences, to move on and do better, instead of succumbing to the twilight years cliché of living in the past, with all its inadequacies and missed connections.
I'll be your connection, man!