When John Muir, a wilderness mystic and founder of the Sierra Club, wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” he was reflecting on his profound relationship with California’s pristine alpine wilderness. But Erik Davis posits something further. In his kaleidoscopic history of spiritual California, The Visionary State, Davis proposes that Muir was also making room for an innovative, new “rootless tradition.” California dreaming, it seems, has it own dream logic.

Yesterday the blogosphere erupted with links to an exceptionally touching autobiographical radio piece by Howard Dully, who in 1960 became first patient in the US to receive a transorbital lobotomy. He was a 12 year old boy.

It’s an entirely unique experience, to hear a lobotomy victim share his story. To feel the delicate honesty of a voice that finally assembles the courage to research his tragic past. A secret history that he has, for 40 years, been afraid to address. At the forefront of his saga are the feelings of inadequacy, for obvious reasons; a struggle that haunts him every day of his life.

In today’s online edition of The Independent, Gary Lachman expertly deflates The Occult Tradition, a new book released in the UK by Tel Aviv University historian David S Katz. As Lachman combs through his contentions, he invokes a small but wonderful list of prominent occultists from the last 150 years (including Rudolf Steiner, Aleister Crowley, GI Gurdjieff, C G Jung, Henri Bergson, William James, Isaac Newton, Daniel Dunglas Home, Eliphas Levi, and Madame Blavatsky). In doing so, he paves the way for a smart, level-headed critical engagement with the material. From the review at The Independent—

An argument has been made, quite soundly, that an ethereal, gnostic impulse historically impels the development of groundbreaking information technologies. Two citations for this assertion spring immediately to mind: Erik Davis’ wonderful tome, Techgnosis (see the earlier ‘seed-crystal’ essay), and Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book which details Alexander Graham Bell’s desire to speak with the dead.

Last year’s tsunami claimed 300,000 people’s lives. However, the Moken – or sea gypsies (explore National Geographic’s interactive feature on them) – of Thailand, have a tradition which warns that when tides recede far and fast then a man-eating wave will soon head their way: so they should run far and fast. Last December they did – and survived. (Full story at The Observer.)

Few places upon this vast web detail the epic journey of a young Steve Jobs and his spiritual pilgrimage to India. It would, then, elude the pervasive simplicity of these few whispers, which could be said to parallel his design savvy and perhaps the inner nature of reverie, to ruminate any further. Here then are a few rare pearls:

Deeply philosophical, Jobs was determined to study and experience, first-hand, the last vestiges of spiritualism and existentialism from that recently bygone era… when Jobs was 19 years old, he set off to India… to visit the Kainchi ashram and Neem Karoli Baba, a popular Indian holy man, to study under the master in hopes of learning something more about life iLife.