This is the Vedanta Temple in San Francisco as pictured in The Visionary State: A Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape by Erik Davis and photographer Michael Rauner. It was my birthday last week and Tom Matrullo kindly gave me this amazing book as a present. It includes many forms of high weirdness as practiced on the left coast, and will be an invaluable aid to my ongoing research. While Davis is far more reverential than myself -- at least toward certain spectra of the rainbow of mystical mythemes and cultural aberrations he covers -- some of his chapter headings do sound especially intriguing: Theosophy and its Discontents, The Rosy Cross Parade, OC Superstar, Space Brothers, Sci-Fi Gnosis, and so on. But the whole is much more than the sum of the parts. Visionary State is the ultimate coffee-table book of hyper-syncretistic spiritual seekery.

We get a good look at the conventional stuff, such as the California missions, the Hare Krishnas, Theosophists and their forebears, and the beat/Zen/hippie/nature devotees who have helped give California its much-deserved reputation as a place well-suited for and hospitable to spiritual experimentation of all kinds.

Davis also presents the darker side of spiritualism ... including Charles Manson, Jim Jones and the Heaven's Gate suicide cult. And he gives ample attention to the psychedelic movement, ranging from the early mescaline experiments of Aldous Huxley in the 1940s to the invention of recreational drugs such as STP and Ecstasy that he attributes to research pharmacologist Alexander Shulgin, who, he says, still experiments in a cluttered lab in the hills above Lafayette.

from: Exploring California's spiritual scenery
source: Contra Costa Times, 27 August 2006
via: HighBeam™ Research