Excerpt: 'Visionary State'

I'm not sure how long this has been up, but I just came across an excerpt from The Visionary State; A Journey Through California's Spiritual Landscape, the 2006 work by Erik Davis and photographer Michael Rauner. If you're not famiilar with the book, this excerpt sets up the premise quite nicely, describing how Davis developed his appreciation for California's "enchanted and sometimes sacred landscape that overlays the conventional world we know":

California seekers could be said to have taken the bait that William James dangled in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, where the psychologist defined religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” For James, personal experience was the cornerstone of the religious life, rather than dogma or institution or even belief. Because of his interest in individual experience, James opened up the wunderkammer of consciousness, accepting mysticism and so-called “altered states” as valid points of departure. Experimenting with psychedelic compounds like peyote and nitrous oxide, James argued that such exalted states of consciousness had to be integrated into any philosophy worth its salt. Though James’ approach hardly exhausts our understanding of religion, it certainly helps illuminate California consciousness. Solitude, especially, is key: though California has hosted scores of sects and cults, seekers are often driven by the sneaking suspicion that, in crucial ways, they are largely on their own. In California, though, James’ “individual men” are as often as not women—the feminization and even “queering” of the sacred being one of California’s defining, and most controversial, characteristics.

If, after you've finished the excerpt, you're curious about the photography, meander over to the book's official site to peruse a sampling of images.