Phillips Jonathan Talat - The electric Jesus : the healing journey of a contemporary Gnostic

Every cultural scene needs good personal narratives. Jonathan Talat Phillips Electric Jesus raises a proud flag for the post-modern Burning Man and techno psychonautic era. However, Phillips also seeks for more than just a flashy escape hatch from the burdens of a materialistic or pop-cultural corporate worldview. The Electric Jesus is about the quest for true Gnosis as much as it is about the crazy costumes we wear along the way. This book is sure to be one of those that defines the psychedelic resurgence that has been recently constellated by Reality Sandwich and the Evolver Social Movement.

Adam Elenbaas, author of Fishers of Men: The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest

Entertaining, celebratory, burning, reflective, and electricbut definitely not for the faint of heart or hard of head. With tales of sex, drugs, elves, and Jesus, this memoir romps through the hinterlands of body and soul.

Sharon Gannon, co-founder of Jivamukti Yoga and co-author of The Art of Yoga

Jonathan Talat Phillips discovers Gnosis, transforms himself, goes off the deep end, and somehow stays grounded in the material world. I enjoyed reading The Electric Jesus, a lively and well told story.

Jeremy Narby, author of The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge

A moving tale of a journey into places most of us dont even know exist.

Gary Lachman, author of Politics and the Occult: The Left, the Right, and the Radically Unseen; bassist for Blondie

In this vividly written and deeply personal memoir, Jonathan Talat Phillips, cofounder of the Evolver Social Movement, travels through the key stops on the current countercultural railroadBurning Man, ayahuasca sessions, kundalini awakenings, MDMAand winds up in unexpected places, thoroughly off the tracks, seeking planetary transformation on a new scalea classic heroic journey, bringing out of his own darkest places a gift not for himself but for his people.

Stephan Beyer, author of Singing to the Plants: A Guide to Mestizo Shamanism in the Upper Amazon

Copyright 2011 by Jonathan Phillips. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout written permission of the publisher. For information contact Evolver Editions c/o North Atlantic Books.

Published by Evolver Editions

Evolver Editions publications are distributed by
North Atlantic Books
P.O. Box 12327
Berkeley, California 94712

The Electric Jesus: The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, call 800-733-3000 or visit our
website at www.northatlanticbooks.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Phillips, Jonathan Talat.
The electric Jesus : the healing journey of a contemporary Gnostic /
Jonathan Talat Phillips.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-58394-343-4
1. Phillips, Jonathan Talat. 2. Spiritual biographyUnited States. I. Title.
BL73.P55A3 2011
200.92dc23
[B]

2011016868

v3.1

There is light within a person of light,
and it shines on the whole world.
The G OSPEL OF T HOMAS

For Jade, Rena, and my family,
and the healing weve undergone together

T HE STORIES IN THIS BOOK REALLY HAPPENED , although I still find a few of them difficult to believe. I changed several names and details, however, to protect the privacy of friends and acquaintances.

H UMANITY IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY is locked in a struggle between the past and the future.

Specifically: Are the patterns set during the past two thousand years going to continue to dominate us and define our thoughts and behavior in ways that no longer serve us? Or are we going to break free and embrace the next stage of our evolution?

There can be no certainty as to the outcome. Evolution may seem unstoppable, but the status quo we are struggling to evolve from is supported and defended by such huge political and ideological forces, and by such vast institutional inertia, that it is by no means certain we will be allowed to move on.

Nevertheless, who can doubt that a new kind of humanity is beginning to emerge in the twenty-first century?

These new humans recoil from the growing power and intrusion of the large, centralized State into their lives and believe they are capable of finding new ways to cooperate with others that dont depend on State supervision, regulation, or taxation.

These new humans do not feel any special allegiance to the nation or country they happen to have been born inand thus do not automatically feel closer and more connected to a fellow human being if he or she happens to have been born in the same country. Their primary identification is not with their national gene pool but with others of like mind, wherever they find them in the world. It follows that the new humans are acutely aware of the absurdity of war and of the artificial and constructed nature of the fear, hatred, and suspicion used by States to justify wars of all kinds.

These new humans see the sterility of politics and economics, where the choice currently seems to be between some form of free-market capitalism and some form of socialism. From the new humans point of view, both systems are essentially the same, being rooted and grounded in materialism and in the unproven assumption that reality is confined to the realm of matter. Socialists and capitalists argue about how the spoils of that realm should be divided, and who should do the dividing, but both are so focused on the primacy of matter that they ignore any possible spiritual dimension entirely, even scoffing at the very concept.

Of course, the spiritual dimension is supposed to be the province of religionisnt it?

Not for the new human, who feels alienated from orthodox religion and does not accept that the priest, the rabbi, or the mullah should be the exclusive intermediary between us and the divine. The new human hungers for direct, personal spiritual experience and is willing to go to great lengths, using ancient techniques of ecstasy devised by the shamans and yogis of prehistory, to seek it out. Such techniques, which amount to an archaic spiritual technology, include meditation, dance, controlled breathing, the practise of austerities, and the ingestion of traditional visionary substances such as psilocybin mushrooms or ayahuasca (as well as their more modern synthetic analogues, such as DMT and LSD).