Last night I digitally stumbled across this: High Weirdness: Visionary Experience in the Seventies Counterculture It’s Erik Davis’s senior thesis, written as he was pursuing his Ph.D. in religious studies at Rice University, and submitted just last fall. You’ll recall that I mentioned Erik’s study of this same high weirdness last year (and that he…
Tag: counterculture
Waking up from the nightmare of economics
If you, like me, are consistently struck these days by a kind of unpleasant, inverted sense of numinous awe at the spectacle of economists still occupying major positions of mainstream power and respect in our culture instead of walking around in hairshirts and beating their breasts with heads bowed in unbearable shame, then Columbia University…
The Occupy movement as global insurrection and revolution
Leave it to Daniel Pinchbeck to provide a predictably excellent statement of what the consciousness movement could or should be doing relative to the worldwide Occupy phenomenon. I heard a few days ago that he was scheduled to address the assembled protesters in New York City. This new and short piece at Reality Sandwich is,…
Art and Spirit vs. Corporate Dystopia: Can the enemy’s tools be used against it?
In our present greed-fueled, corporate-consumerist global dystopia, it’s common for artists and subcultural or countercultural thinkers to reject the present order not only in principle but in practice. They (we) are so disgusted and discouraged by the socially, culturally, spiritually, and ecologically destructive nature of the all-dominating system that we’re driven to the edge of…
The 1960s Redux: In our new age of apocalypse, is the consciousness revolution back on?
For the past few years, I’ve had a mounting sense that the abortive consciousness revolution of the 1960s and early 70s may have come back from the dead, riding on the wave of apocalyptic sentiment that’s been washing over us all since the late 1990s. Sometimes a new datum, or something that I interpret as…