Top 10 Books of the New Edge

With the rapid rise of the new spiritual counterculture, a generation of young avant-garde writers are making conscious magazine headlines and electrifying the festival-speakers' circuit. Featuring a brutally honest look at the shadow aspects of the Self, and society at large, these books -- while often focused on healing -- are not fluffy New Age "Celestine Prophecy" reads nor "The 7 Laws of Spiritual Materialism." They are harder to define, hosting a multidimensional mix of spiritual awakening, new media activism, visionary art, punk attitude, permaculture principles, Burning Man aesthetic and Occupy ideologies.

As if exploring some quantum physics conundrum, they fuse the world of observer and observed, where the researcher flies third-eye-first into the mystical fields they are investigating. In a similar manner that LSD influenced the Keseys and Ginsbergs of the 60s, newly introduced "entheogens" (God-inducing substances), like the Amazonian shaman's brew ayahuasca and the synthesized "spirit molecule" DMT, are influencing the style and transformational arcs of these stories. Also, like the 60s, there is a regrettable dearth of female voices, something I hope changes over the coming years.

This is my "informal, unofficial, thoroughly unscientific" list of the top 10 books of the New Edge. I'm hardly an expert on this subject, but I have bared witness to some of this burgeoning literary movement over the last few years as a co-founder of the web-magazine Reality Sandwich and Evolver Social Movement. For those of you following this literary scene, I welcome you to expand and improve upon the list, adding your choices in the comments section below.

Click through to see top 10 books of the New Edge, and scroll down to see honorable mentions:

Honorable Mentions

"God vs. Gay" by Jay Michaelson
"Tryptamine Palace" by James Oroc
"The Four Global Truths" by Darrin Drda
"The Red Book" by Sera Beak
"Aya: A Shamanic Odyssey" by Rak Razam
"Star Sister" by Stella Osorojos

Elders Circle (Books by older authors who have influenced this genre)

"Supernatural" by Graham Hancock
"The Fifth Sacred Thing" by Starhawk
"The Mission of Art" by Alex Grey
"The Archaic Revival" by Terence McKenna
"Nothing in this Book Is True But It's Exactly How Things Are" by Bob Frissell
"Antipodes of the Mind" by Benny Shanon
"PIHKAL" and "TIHKAL" by Alexander and Ann Shulgin
"The Mayan Factor" by Jose Arguelles
"Be Here Now" by Ram Dass
"Ayahuasca In My Blood" by Peter Gorman
"Singing to the Plants" by Stephan V. Beyer
"The Secret Teaching of Plants" by Stephen Harrod Buhner

 

 

 

Follow Jonathan Talat Phillips on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jonathphillips

Comments

[overthemooncat]

04:54 PM on 06/14/2012

I really love a lot of these books, but having read some of them years ago, they're not exactly 'New Edge'! The self-promotion that goes along with this 'new edge' and its attempts to appeal to the widest possible (ie mainstream) audience is getting kind of boring... I agree with the Greeks.

[Leonard Levenda]

08:19 AM on 06/01/2012

The book 'Visionary State' claims to be "the first book to address the full story of 'California consciousness". I disagree. I think the first book-though a bit narrower in scope, was 'The Psychic World of California' by David St. Clair, published in 1972. I will look for 'Visionary State' to read but I think one should read St Clair's book first for a solid back ground on how California got to be such a fertile ground for what it is today.

[Henry Baum]

01:56 AM on 05/31/2012

There isn't a lot of fiction on your list. Here's mine, inspired in part by Daniel Pinchbeck's work and this movement. Free download:

http://www.theamericanbookofthedead.com/formats/

[Robyn Neal Lloyd]

10:16 PM on 05/29/2012

There are some great books on your list. I would like to add another book. It is called, "It is called, "The Book of Ernest" by Ernest Clement. In his book he shares his own experiences on spirituality and mankind's place in the universe. This book also talks about the way we are being systematically exploited and misled by our political and economic leaders. Finally someone explains it right!!!! http://www.ernestclement.com/

[Dr Idris]

02:53 PM on 05/29/2012

Well the new "gnosis " is maybe not so new. Maybe some of the approaches are. There has been an American gnosis of one sort or another for a very long time. Burroughs and Ginsberg were into Ayhuasca in the '50's and entheogenics were around too-and before that. All the '60's did was popularize-and mostly in a "bad news" way. Not a good idea to "publish" the mysteries-something the Greeks knew-and didn't. Though there is a good theory that the consistently attested fro centuries transcendent experiences at Eleusis were connected with the ritual use of an entheogenic. The Greeks were smarter than we are. They warned of the dire consequences of revealing the mystic secrets to the uninitiated. The American 'lust' for enlightenment and the "secret gnosis" has become problematic in our increasingly paranoid, no longer "fluffy" new age, Philip K Dick like "reality". Though of course it is a lucrative "hustle" for some people. But that is also as American as Apple Pie. Johnny Appleseed was a head". And Melville in the "Confidence Man", basically a metaphor of America as a floating gambling casino, a Mississippi Riverboat, has a really funny section in which a Transcendentalist Emersonian type starts talking about Proclus. Neoplatonism as a hustle. Who said mysticism is not practical!

[Jonathan Talat Phillips]

05:02 PM on 05/29/2012

I think it's pretty helpful that the early Gnostic texts can now be found on Wikipedia or earlychristianwritings.com. Maybe that was one of the problems -- they were so under-ground that eventually the dominant power structures would destroy them. It seems now that a lot of these mystery traditions -- yoga, Buddhist meditation, plant medicines -- are now reaching a wider audience. Perhaps we are waking up more as a collective species.

[yakin]

08:57 AM on 06/26/2012

ah, very perceptive of you my friend. spirituality isn't *a* hustle, its THE hustle. watch revolver, guy ritchie's film that explains my point better than I have time or space to.

are you a hutler yourself? if you are, you're not a very good one. the best hustlers know that the perfect con is one in which everyone gets something they want, & when it comes to spirituality, well. I can tell you from experience that what you get is worth everything you own multiplied by a large number ; )

[Dr Idris]

12:03 PM on 06/26/2012

"Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you can't beat. The mark inside" William Burroughs

[whirlpool]

01:50 PM on 05/29/2012

The obsessions of traditional religion are bad enough but a revival of the drug saturated and hedonistic 60s in the guise of the "spiritual" is the last blasted thing we need.

[Jonathan Talat Phillips]

05:00 PM on 05/29/2012

A significant portion of these books actually discuss how one can overcome hedonistic tendencies and personal addictions through sacred medicines like ayahuasca and iboga. These aren't party drugs with strobe lights (ie: acid tests), but sacraments held in ceremonial settings with a strong focus on healing. I think we all are looking back at the mistakes of the sixties and having a more integrated, safe approach.

[whirlpool]

05:44 PM on 05/29/2012

I hope so.  I have studied shamanism at least in an intellectual way to understand the petroglyphs I have found in eastern Oregon.  It seems the shamans of hundreds or thousands of years ago conducted trance flights while engaged in the deprivations and isolations nature offers--use of natural hallucinogens was only part of the equation.  These were connections with the beauty and terror of nature that I don't think we can begin to appreciate although the crucifixion/resurrection cycle of Jesus the shaman as depicted in the literature of the Bible comes close.  Thanks for the reply.  

[Cultureternal]

11:51 PM on 07/11/2012

There’s so much wrong about that statement, I don’t really know where to begin. The first and foremost point probably being the idea that Professor Ronald Siegel at UCLA, a former government drug expert and now someone who has studied addiction and the use of intoxicants probably in greater detail than anyone else I could cite at the moment, has put forward. His book, ‘Intoxication: the universal drive for mind-altering substances’, states very clearly that our use of consciousness-altering substances and our desire to transcend our (ordinary) states of consciousness and to be intoxicated, is a what he calls our ‘fourth primal drive’. It’s something that we have done ever since we have been able to make sense of anything, for thousands and thousands of years and we’ve done this by watching the animal kingdom and then by going and mimicking it. Therefore, we watch monkeys get drunk and reindeers eat mushrooms, so on, and so forth. We’ve repeated, replicated, and modelled this behaviour and refined it down, until today, where there is ‘a pill for every ill’. Yet, at the same time, we remain in a bizarre, twisted paradigm of denial and delusion, where if a pharmaceutical company sanction the use of a compound, that’s ok, but if the same compound is on the street, then that’s not. It’s completely schizophrenic. The first thing we have to do is to admit that all of us do this in some way, or another. ~ Charles Shaw, Exile Nation.

[whirlpool]

09:21 AM on 07/12/2012

Nonsense.  I don't need any substances to become intoxicated with the love of nature or the love of a woman.