Greetings from Brazil. My flight home leaves in a week, and the new study sessions begin April 9. So it’s getting near time to sign up. There is a registration link below, but you can also just send me an email to announce your intentions.
As I said in the last post I want to stay focussed on high strangeness, the Impossible, and the truly weird for a while. It prevents us from getting arrogant, comfortable, or authoritarian.
Our primary texts for this series will be High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies (2019) by Erik Davis, who is, among many other things, a former student of Jeff Kripal, and Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences (2023) by Diane Pasulka, professor of religious studies at UNC, Wilmington. These are very different books with very different approaches. I think a wide net will help us survey the terrain.
Davis’ book focusses on three rather bizarre figures from “the seventies”—Terence McKenna, Robert Anton Wilson and Philip K. Dick. Their stories are strange reading, and I think that’s very good for us. How do we, should we, take this lunacy seriously? And this is where I find the book so useful. Davis approaches this material as a “Kripalian comparativist.” And it’s his methodological chapters that are of the most interest to me for the class. I probably don’t have anything terribly useful to add to the narratives, but I can unpack the radical empiricism on offer and help us to use it in our daily encounters with reality. It requires a whole-body approach to an imaginal cosmology.
Pasulka ranges widely from space science to biology to AI research, religion and of course, UFOs. It’s a bit of a wild ride that mostly serves to unsettle and to provide no answers at all… I strongly suspect you’ll enjoy it.
It is possible that we will make our way through both of these books before our 8 weeks are done. I SUSPECT, but cannot yet know, that the next useful task will be to tackle Bergson. Although he isn’t weird in our sense, (although his sister surely was, and that is really important) his work had been ignored for a long time because it stood so far out of mainstream philosophical thought as it developed in the early 20th century. He got brushed aside for Husserl and Heidegger and all that came in their wake. And his ideas of creative evolution and élan vital had no apparent relevance for the explosive successes in the natural sciences. I think that a look at his work through the lenses of three recent books can help us in our never-ending attempt to widen our vision of reality and the range of our experience.
Come along, it will be really exciting. And remember you don’t have to come live—just get the recordings.
Tuesdays & Thursdays — 4-5:30 pm EST
8 WEEKS: April 9 through May 30
Full tuition is $40 per week. $320 for the series. Recordings included.
Scholarships are always available.
You can register and pay by the week or the full term.
PAYMENT LINKS ARE IN THE REGISTRATION FORM LINKED BELOW
The texts are all available online both hard copy and digital. If money is an issue I will supply pdfs of the texts.
Registration will get you all the links you will need: 1. The Zoom sessions and 2. the pdfs and 3. the folder where the recordings will be located.
Links to the recordings are sent to everyone, so when you can't make it live you'll still get all the content.
Email me with any questions: tcheetham@gmail.com
FOR REGISTRATION AND PAYMENT OPTIONS PLEASE CLICK BELOW:
On the other hand, if you don’t want to click 👆the blue button above, (as some people apparently don’t like to do), then email me and we can do it that way.
Both superb books. Enjoy!
Just a wave hello!