High weirdness : drugs, esoterica, and visionary experience in the seventies
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

A study of the spiritual provocations found in the work of Philip Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, this book charts the emergence of a new psychedelic worldview out of the American counterculture of the seventies. These three visionaries changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experience reality - but how did their own writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America during one of its most surreal eras? In this book, the author - America's leading scholar of the strange - examines the writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own extraordinary, life-changing experiences along the way. The author maps the uncanny lattice of culture and consciousness that characterized America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social change. What results is a new theory of the weird that illuminates the seventies, while providing for a renewed engagement with reality during our own highly weird times.