[Erik Davis' Figments] More Stuff!

[anna balint]

  Hey folks

  Just wanted to let you know that I uploaded a bunch of newish articles to
  the site, including two chunky pieces on psychedelic Buddhism and the secret
  connection between Rene Descartes and the Matrix, the latter of which takes
  some Techgnosis ideas about the "spiritual machine" forward.

  Nothing about the war.

  Stay tuned for a major site redesign!

  Enjoy!
  Erik


  The Paisley Gate: The Tantra of Psychedelics
  An essay from Zig Zag Zen that offers a tantic reading of psychedelics in
  American Buddhism. "No-one's logging any numbers, but I suspect that a
  healthy chunk of self-identified practicing American Buddhists keep at least
  occasional dates with the writhing, world-rending void lurking in the heart
  of psychedelic hyperspace. But I also suspect that, if asked to render
  judgment on such activities, most dharma teachers would deliver a fat thumbs
  down."
  Synthetic Meditations: Descartes in the Matrix
  A meditation on who we are when the reality around us is a virtual
  illusion."A staple of science fiction, where it was deployed with greatest
  sublimity by Philip K. Dick, the "false reality" set-up has become an
  increasingly common theme in Hollywood, from The Truman Show to Dark City.
  But I would also like to suggest that the "False Reality" set-up attempts to
  narrate a fundamental split in consciousness between consensus reality -- or
  in Lacanian terms, the Symbolic -- and the capacity of the human mind to
  disengage from the immediate claims of that reality."

  The Church of VALIS
  [warning: sometime the server it lives on is sleeping]
  A Quicktime video of the sedond half of a perfomance-lecture devoted to
  Philip K. Dick. The perfomance occured in December, 2002, as as part of
  Laughing Squid's Tentacles Sessions in San Francisco. Here we see a 3D
  holographic recording of Brother Lance, of the Huntington Beach Church of
  VALIS, delivering a sermon on "Saint Phil vs. the Media Archons."

  Riding the Limit
  An essay on limits. "When you arrive on the shores of full designer reality,
  that nest of infinite parameters glimpsed by psychonauts, VR visionaries,
  and Singularity-watchers, what do you do? Where do you go? What organizes
  desire in a frictionless hyperspace?"
  Shamanic Verses
  A review of drug books: Marcus Boon'sThe Road of Excess, Daniel Pinchbeck's
  Breaking Open the Head, and Dale Pendell's Pharmako/Dynamis. "Though we do
  it more than we admit, many of us have little interest in making deliberate
  pacts with chemical sprites. But for those rare psychonauts who hear the
  call, the secret garden can only be explored by nibbling and sniffing your
  way through it."

  Delanda Destratified
  An old, pre-millennium conversation with Manuel Delanda, robot historian,
  filmmaker, and Deleuzian desconstructor of the space-time continuum. "The
  mouth as an organ is completely stratified in nature, in the sense that it
  is connected to food chains, which are the most stratified form of life.
  Then the mouth goes through a bifurcation point, and, for instance, birds
  begin to sing to mark their territory. A mouth that had been completely
  stratified into taking in stuff that gets shat out becomes capable of making
  expressive noises."