Expanding Mind

A couple months ago I started listening to Erik Davis' Expanding Mind podcast. I've been a big fan of Erik Davis since reading Techgnosis in college; I sent him a copy of Axis Mundi Sum when it was published (I got a copy of his chapbook on Burning Man in return), and I've known about Expanding Mind for a while, so I'm not sure why I didn't check it out sooner. These days I don't worry too much about coming to something late, though, as it seems like I find things (or they find me) when the time is right—and conditions are certainly ripe for the fascinating, friendly, intense conversations Davis has with his guests.

Some time ago I noticed that I didn't seem as curious about the world as I'd used to be. A lot of things I'd been into, or wondered about, had fallen by the wayside. This is a typical developmental process, as we outgrow or discard some interests in favor of others, and with age we (usually) start to figure out that the world is too vast and complicated a place to keep tabs on as much as we might so desire, which forces us to reduce the scope of our attention. And yet I find this process, which I suspect is more conditioned than it is natural, rather stifling, since for most people it never stops. As wild and unpredictable as the world can be, humans are really good at ignoring it in favor of locking themselves into increasingly restrictive patterns, and through those patterns, we come to view the world and our existence therein as smaller, safer, more mundane, less pregnant with meaning, than they actually are, or can be. Which is perfectly understandable to a point—who doesn't want or need a reliable degree of safety, certainty, and comprehensibility?—but at some point the pattern tightens to the point of inflexibility, and you're stuck, often without even knowing it.

Erik Davis' conversations with folks on Expanding Mind are a wonderful way to break those patterns, as is his writing. His/their discussions of religion, psychedelics, science, high weirdness, the occult, music, pop culture, and all the ways in which such things intersect and intertwine are consistently thought-provoking, as well as thoroughly enjoyable. (As one of the guests on Expanding Mind recently noted, enjoyment is a crucial component of consciousness practices. If awakening, or clarity, or whatever, is nothing more than a chore, then why not stay mired in samsara?)

What I find especially valuable is that neither Davis nor his guests are credulous true believers: they may be practicing sorcerers, meditation teachers unaffiliated with any particular tradition, esoteric musicians, scholars of Gnosticism, or scientists pursuing the outer reaches of psychedelic research and therapy, but there's never that sense of "holy shit, these people are up their own ass" you might get on AM radio or Facebook. There's a healthy skepticism (not in that tired-ass Dawkins/Harris/etc. sense, mind you), intellectual honesty, and connection to modern critical frameworks that makes you eager to hear everything they have to say, even if it's completely fuckin' out there. And out there, caro leitor, is where it's at.

I mean, I find magic(k) fascinating, and I've been meditating for a decade now, but it's way easier for me to think about things like ghosts, egregores, 氣/qi, and hoodoo as psycho-social phenomena and practices with potentially tangible (and very real aesthetic) effects than to say "oh yeah, that shit is 100% real", just as I can look at more mainstream theologies and appreciate them without imbuing them with what, to me, is the mark of death known as certainty. Erik Davis is more or less on the same page, albeit far more informed, well-spoken, and cooler than yours truly, so if any of this sounds interesting, check out Expanding Mind and his writing, a couple decades' worth of which can be found at techgnosis.com. 

All right, dudes, that's it for now. I was going to get into some other stuff, like meditation, but I'll save that for another time. I gotta get dinner started, so I'll just sum up by saying that Erik Davis rules, and that I wish I'd run into him when he was at Rice, because having a beer with him at Valhalla would've been all kinds of rad.


"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." -HST




Your pal,
DAS

15 years!

Yesterday marked the 15th anniversary of this blog. Never imagined I'd keep at it this long, though there were long dry spells in there, and I never figured it'd metamorphose into a blog mostly about translation. I wonder what the next 15 years hold.

Thanks for reading, folks, and keep supporting what's left of the old(ish) World Wide Web!