The word “daimon” has several possible meanings, but in relation to possession and exorcism it refers to a particular type of autonomous or autonomous-feeling force in the psyche that influences or, in some cases, dominates a person’s thoughts, actions, and feelings.
Tag: psychedelics
What is real, anyhow? Erik Davis on visionary experiences and the high weirdness of the seventies counterculture
Last night I digitally stumbled across this: High Weirdness: Visionary Experience in the Seventies Counterculture It’s Erik Davis’s senior thesis, written as he was pursuing his Ph.D. in religious studies at Rice University, and submitted just last fall. You’ll recall that I mentioned Erik’s study of this same high weirdness last year (and that he…
Interview with James Fadiman: The Daemon and the Doors of Perception
Dr. James Fadiman Just published and now available here at The Teeming Brain: my interview/conversation with Dr. James Fadiman, one of the pioneers of transpersonal psychology and modern research into the spiritual and therapeutic applications of psychedelics. This has been a long time in coming, for reasons that I explain in the interview’s introduction. The…
Teeming Links – July 18, 2014
William Binney, the ex-NSA code-breaker and whistleblower, says the NSA’s ultimate goal is total population control: “Binney recently told the German NSA inquiry committee that his former employer had a ‘totalitarian mentality’ that was the ‘greatest threat’ to US society since that country’s US Civil War in the 19th century.” “New research finds having a…
NPR does LSD
A bottle of LSD from a Swiss clinical trial for end-of-life anxiety in cancer patients, circa 2007, conducted by Dr. Peter Gasser, sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. Ladies and gentlemen, the ongoing incursion of the new psychedelic research renaissance into the mainstream American mediasphere has officially reached critical mass. Behold NPR: Today,…
Teeming Links – August 27, 2013
Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net Today’s opening word simply has to go to Ben Godar, who, in a marvelous little piece for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, offers exactly what we’ve all been frantically (if unwittingly) yearning for during our past two decades of seeking total fulfillment in cyberspace: Are you tired of being in…
Cannabis and Cthulhu: Dr. Sanjay Gupta wakes the Old Ones with his marijuana metanoia
Okay, please pardon the ludicrously sensationalistic title. But seriously, is there anybody who hasn’t heard about this yet? On the slim chance that there is, here you go. This is Dr. Sanjay Gupta speaking, who, as we all surely recall, is not just a media personality but someone whose medical opinion carries political clout, as…
Book Review: ‘The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness” by Alan Watts
Alan Watts has long been one of my foundational philosophical influences. I think his writing style, famed for its almost preternatural lucidity and grace, has also influenced me by giving me a model to emulate. “Nobody could write like Watts, nobody,” Ken Wilber once observed in an interview for ReVision: A Journal of Consciousness and…
The new psychedelic renaissance: Science, psychology, and the sacred
It’s not that you, and I, and all of us, don’t already know that the consciousness revolution is back on, and that the psychedelic research that was aborted in the 1960s has now returned with a vengeance, and that it’s not just the medical and scientific aspects but the general cultural effects of the whole…
Homer, Tolkien, and the ontology of visionary states in a materialist age
In his new book The Shamanic Odyssey: Homer, Tolkien, and the Visionary Experience, English professor, writer, and classical guitarist Robert Tindall, writing with psychology professor and transpersonal psychotherapist Susana Bustos, “Weav[es] together the narrative traditions of the ancient Greeks and Celts, the mythopoetic work of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the voices of plant medicine…