Hello, everybody. Welcome back to psychedelics today, a weekly podcast exploring the science and culture of the emerging psychedelic field with your host, Kyle Buller and Joe Moore.

This is your first time tuning in. Welcome to the show. Happy to have you here. So today on the show,

we are joined by Eric Davis. Eric is an American journalist, critic, podcaster, counterpublic intellectual,

whose writings have run the gamut from rock criticism to cultural analysis to creative explorations of esoteric mysticism.

He is the author of Technosis, Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information, The Visionary State, A Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape, and Nomad Codes, Adventures in Modern Esoterica,

and also the book High Weirdness, Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the 70s.

And this is the book that we end up chatting about on the show.

So a little bit about the book, it goes through the work of Philip

K. Dick, Terrence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, and kind of capturing some of the new age

spirituality, psychedelic spirituality that rose out of American counterculture in the 60s. And, you know, the work and impact that these three authors had,

and also some of the weirdness that kind of came out of this era as well.

And in the psychedelic world, like some of the stuff that we get into is around Terrence and Dennis' story of La Chirera.

And just how weird that experience got.

If you've ever listened to Dennis talk about that experience, really interesting him to reflect on it.

He really covers that story in the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.

So if you don't know too much about that, and you should definitely check out Dennis's story there,

recounting the event that happened down at La Chirre, but also kind of the madness that came out of that,

too. And in this podcast, we kind of talk about that, as well as kind of walking the tightrope here

between madness and kind of mysticism.

Really interesting topic, right?

The balance between a possible spiritual emergence or budding psychosis.

You know, it's a tightrope, as Eric would say, and very fine balance. So yeah, we get into

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