Episode 008:
Erik Davis
A Psychedelic Sangha
Episode 008:
A Psychedelic Sangha
Today we meet Erik Davis, award-winning journalist and author, most recently, of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies.
Erik guides us in an imagination-based open awareness practice that for him is about cultivating a very specific kind of watchful attention. This turns out to be the perfect setup to discuss one of Erik’s specialities: the defiantly unclassifiable weirdness of psychedelic experience.
We explore the ins and outs of the current psychedelic revival, the heretical nature of psychedelics as “practice,” even the possibility of the Buddha himself being a psychonaut. Can we scale-up psychedelic use for the mainstream? Do we even want to? And down we go, into a highly entertaining rabbit hole.
Erik’s 16 minute practice begins at 8:36 and ends at 24:22.
Links:
One of the ways that psychedelics can feed meditation practice is that meditation practices can be dry or sad or lonely. And there's a way in which psychedelics... encourage a kind of enchantment with emptiness. There's a juiciness that comes into the picture.