How to Navigate the Weirdness with Erik Davis

The world is weird, and only getting weirder. In this set of two talks (Wed March 19 and Wed March 26), Alembic co-founder Erik Davis will wrestle with the strangeness in our midst — UAPs, simulation hypthesis, AI oracles, Whitehouse conspiracy theory, mainstream shamanism, jhana-on-demand, media meltdown, and all manner of climate chaos and apocalyptic foreshocks. There is a thread running through all of these: the apparent unraveling of consensus reality, and the mind- and resource-war for the attentional future. Taking and developing concepts and strategies from his classic book High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, Davis aims to both honestly assess our situation and to identify a few navigational tools for sanity, sense-making, and creative engagement.
The first hour’s talk will be available for streaming; the group discussion in the second half will be reserved for in-person attendees.

Tickets for the March 19th event
Erik Davis PhD, is an author, award-winning journalist, and teacher based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on alternative religion, media culture, the popular imagination, and the psychedelic underground. He is the author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019); Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica (2010); The Visionary State: A Journey through California’s Spiritual Landscape (2006), a critical volume on Led Zeppelin (2005), and the celebrated cult classic TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (1998), which remains in print. Davis’s scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, drugs, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. Davis has spoken widely at universities, conferences, retreat centers, and festivals, and has been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, NPR, and the New York Times. He graduated from Yale University in 1988, and earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University in 2015. He writes the online publication the Burning Shore (www.burningshore.com), and his next book is Blotter: the Untold Story of an Acid Medium (2024).www.techgnosis.com

Event Venue

The Berkeley Alembic, 2820 Seventh Street, Berkeley, United States