Quotes from Erik Davis

It would be nice to begin the journey with who we are. But "who we are" is a house of mirrors, a tangled knot, a great and terrible Oz that in the final analysis may consist of nothing more than, well, nothing. The self, I am afraid, may be more of an onion than a fruit, and "who we are" is the skin we shed.

One important consequence of this approach is that the meaning or full activity of a drug can only be worked out and constructed in practice. A drug's effects, in this view, aren't discovered, but nor are they purely invented. Instead, they are enacted.

you need to crack open the mundane casing of ordinary technologies and trace their archetypal wiring. Then you might find yourself, if only for a moment, tapping into the electromagnetic unheimlich. The spirits speak: in the information age, you are never at home.

Psychosis, it seemed to some, was in the air. One unhappy host played Phil a copy of Marshall McLuhan's 1968 LP The Medium is the Massage, an audio collage inspired by the resonating global echo chamber that McLuhan believed formed a new electronic form of "acoustic space." When the recording began, Dick clapped his hands over his ears and screamed, "Turn it off! Turn it off! It sounds like the inside of my head when I go mad and have to go the hospital.

On the one hand, there is a booming industry surrounding yoga, self-help, and spiritual tourism, while on the other, traditional religions seem polarized between fanaticisms of all types and vapid, consumerist banalities of the "I'm spiritual, but not religious" sort. The continued, tired debates of science on one side and religion on the other serve to muddy the waters even more.

Binswanger's vision of this pathological but visceral gestalt deeply influenced Dick's construction of the various idios kosmoi in his works.65

In an entry from late 1979, Dick writes Heuristics is right on. The closer you get to reality the closer you get to (and to seeing) process. Q isn't "what is (esse)?" but "What does?" […] replace each "is" with "does" and ontology vanishes. All you have is a perpetually perturbed reality field! With a self-producing vortex.12

Delve far enough into Metal, and you'll find environmentalists.

Psychokinesis

suggestion: anomaly is a characteristic of the real. Whatever