Appropriately enough, in the week I spoke to Erik Davis, early July, the Stella Maris Gnostic Church left their base in Cartegena, Columbia and disappeared in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range. It is said they sought salvation from an alien spacecraft. By early October, nothing more had been heard of them. Discussion immediately turned to such matters ufological:

Heaven's Gate, although they didn't use the word Gnostic, were a totally Gnostic group - it amazes me how much the Gnostic and metaphysical mythology can sit alongside technology. Of course the UFO is the central object of the technological unconscious in the modern world, and the fact that the religions and cults that have grown up around UFOs have such an emphasis in many different ways - it's not just the idea that there's this transcendent technology from the cosmos that's going to save us and take us somewhere else, it's also the communication, the whole idea of channelling. Even if you take a fairly mainstream channelled text, say The Starseed Transmisisons, there's a lot of Christianity in there, but the central message is extremely Gnostic - this is a game you've been playing, and you must wake up and find yourself, discover what's really going on before this great apocalyptic transformation occurs. I find that to be one of the most potent myths, or ideas - myth is a bad word to use because it implies you think it's untrue - more like a mytheme, a notion that speaks of some other kind of truth than newspaper or scientific truth - it's remarkable how persistent that theme is.

Yes, a strong Gnostic theme has run through UFO lore, especially since the '80s - Bob Lazar and John Lear referred to alien documents describing human beings as soul "containers". Many of John Mack's abductees also, under regression hypnosis, found themselves to be alien souls trapped in human bodies.

Yes, the whole "walk-in" idea too. One reason that I think Gnosticism is so appropriate is that it gives a mythological, religious framework for a certain sense of alienation. It's partly about being fragmented individuals at the start of the 21st century, with all this technology, with all the normal mechanisms for maintaining human life pulled out from under us. It's also an alienation arising because the simple definitions of being a human being are changing so radically. But the other thing is that this alienation is also very ancient - it's not about the social structure, it's about what it means to be a mind in matter.

Once we were apes, doing ape things, then suddenly a mind appeared, pointing to things and going "Woah, I am not that, I am not this." Once you get going on that process, which is a very important part of spiritual development, you encounter a certain kind of detachment from the world. I'm very interested in how that goes both ways - it can became incredibly dualistic, alienated and violent, or can open up to a much richer way of looking at the world. So I'm very sympathetic to certain strains of Gnostic thought - I'm very attracted to certain UFO ideas because they serve as a kind of container for those notions. Starseed is like a cosmic self-help book on one level, and on another it's like a Gnostic myth.

Dualist themes seem to run through a wide range of paranormal phenomena and mystical traditions - another interesting technological spin is provided by the remote viewing fraternity. It's a high-tech form of astral travel.

Yes, one interesting thing about astral travel is that when the Theosophists first developed that particular language, it was at the same time that a number technological revolutions were happening. Though of course, they're drawing off very ancient practices and ideas, being a disembodied soul moving through the realms of imagination, goes back to Palaeolithic shamanism. They had the new worlds of electricity and electromagnetism opening up, and that gave them the language of vibration, which we are now used to hearing as part of New Age terminology. In many ways that's a response or compliment to the new model of the universe that preceded James Clark Maxwell and Michael Faraday's experiments. Previously in the 19th century they were really materialist, they were just atoms in a void, which co-mingle to create bodies - that's all. But with the new electric world, there's a whole part of the cosmos that's unseen, waves of vibration that aren't really matter. Suddenly, in the midst of this highly materialist cosmology, in the most scientific way possible, there's an acknowledgement that this invisible world exists. Now we're quite used to it - right now our bodies are being bathed with every radio signal in the immediate area, and we don't care.

Also, the notion of the astral double - another very old idea - gets constantly reformulated. I think there's a relationship between this notion and the introduction of photography and, to a lesser extent, phonographs. We reach a point where technology can externalise these aspects of ourselves that we see as being inside our, so throwing up the question, where are the boundaries of the self? These kinds of ghostly reflections were a powerful influence on many spiritualists. Some people thought that this was how God maintained the world, by projecting an image onto a photographic plate. I think the astral body is am occult way of taking advantage of that new ambiguity, saying, hey, let's play with that, let's move into this new world of amorphous boundaries of the self and take control. So it does seem that kind of motif is unavoidable, and remote viewing is just another form of that - mirrored in contemporary discussions of telepresence. Where is the presence in a system like that? Am I present in that robot body that I'm manipulating at the bottom of the ocean? No, I'm both here in my control booth, and there. Part of me is projected and moving through the robot. In a way RV is a perfect response to such new technological situations.

What led you to the Gnostic model?

Philip K. Dick. When I first read Dick, his work really spoke to me, I felt like this was my teacher. It was that close to certain altered experiences I'd had, the way I think about things. My interest in technology was always coloured by the things that Dick talked about and the form that his madness took certainly had a visionary power, even on the most materialistic level So for me the Gnostic model became an interesting way to organise lots of stuff.

Can you talk about your PhilDickian experiences?

Hmmmm, interesting! I've had very PhilDickian dreams. I had one where I was going to meet him and interview him, and the meeting fell through and he was really angry on the phone and difficult to deal with. Then we finally got together and he was weeping and talking about the children suffering in the world. He was very powerfully sad. It was around that same time I had a dream where I was just in a house and there had been a kind of quasi-conspiracy lead-up to it, with a network of people initiating me into something I didn't know. There was a figure of an old woman in the room and the figure started to speak: "Ohhh, the suffering of the world, oh the great misery that's upon us." It was kind of like the old, wounded mother, not the crone figure, but all the burdens that people carry in the world. Then I thought, where's this voice coming from? I looked at the figure and noticed that there was a wire leading from it into the wall, so I reached down and pulled it out to find a microphone there. I wrenched it out of the wall and put it up to my ear and a voice said; "Stop, go no further or you will be terminated!" I woke up thinking, damn, I got too far into dream world, into the world of control! I'd got into the Matrix!

Another time, when I was a kid, aged about 14, I had a lot of weird of experiences, I was meditating when suddenly there was a voice in my head. It was an androgynous voice saying, "God is love, we are part of the universe, there is peace here," that kind of thing. It felt like it was a kind of automatic message machine, non-human, maybe I was picking up a signal, a satellite relay of a message of universal love. Then it just stopped and I was really freaked out.!

In Techgnosis you discuss how new technologies are often swiftly put to more esoteric uses - spirit photography, Tesla seeking out Martian radio signals - have you discovered any examples of the Internet being used in such a way?

It's funny, there's nothing quite as explicit, though, and it's a finer distinction, the Internet is now a place that these ideas can now live and be affirmed in some way. Although alternative phenomena have always been promoted through every form of media, there's something about the Internet that allows these things to become more real, because they exist within environments that support them. Through links they generate information micro-worlds that fortify each others' world views, in that sense I think the Web has played a profound role in spreading the interest in odd phenomena. The X Files too arrives alongside the Internet, so people can explore these ideas so that, say, the alien meme ends up everywhere, from TV ads to rave flyers. There's a remarkable advertisement in San Francisco for a 24 hour gym, which has a picture of an alien and says: "When they come, they'll take the fat ones first." There's a recent book, Hollywood vs the Aliens (Bruce Rux, Frog Ltd, Berkeley, CA) which suggests that Hollywood SF cinema has been a working to get us primed for the alien reality - and in the same way the Internet too is seen by some as a tool for propagating these memes.

Yeah, the Internet also acts a hermetically-sealed dissemination ground for ideas that don't actually exist anywhere else, the EQ Pegasi hoax and chemtrails panic for example.

With all these weird ideas, what I always look for is, if you tacitly move into this world, what does it help you see that you didn't see before? If it helps you see something interesting about the way worlds work or minds work, then it's worth hanging around, even if you ultimately think that it's all bunk. UFOs are very much like this - I hang around UFOs on a regular basis because they tell me interesting things about the way the world works, the way science works, the way people construct their own realities on this level. To me, you really need people who are literalists to push the vision as far as it will go, but the allegory always points to something else that's going on, that you can never fully bring into being. We live in largely mundane worlds; the moment these fringe materials become a vehicle for escape they're no longer interesting, but they inspire different ways of examining our condition, and help to bring our attention back to what we are.

What people concentrate on, for most people, doesn't matter, so they pour hours into Quake world or TV world -as long as they don't go off and shoot anyone it doesn't really matter. But work like that at Princeton University, measuring fields of human consciousness - for example when lots of people focus their attention on sporting events - suggests that it might actually matter what we think about. I think the world of the archetypal imagination, the dreamtime, the astral plane, shamanic space, the imaginal realm, whatever you want to call them, these places are partly sustained by human consciousness. We're constantly building these worlds on the fly, so it's not like these worlds are real, they're constantly changing and reflecting our imagination as we move through ordinary life. Then you look at the way people are imagining things in this new world, how technology allows certain kinds of imagination such extraordinary power. I think we've lost the tools to navigate these worlds the old-fashioned way, we're almost rending the physical body, spending more and more time in that kind of aetheric space, with no idea what we're doing, and the fact that this is going to have real world consequences is kind of obvious.

So do you think we're struggling to keep up with our own developments? Is technology overtaking human consciousness?

Well, I think consciousness is a multi-dimensional force, and the world of the popular imagination, the dream world of gods and spirits is being dominated by the culture industry of images and information. The technology that supports that is vampirically drawing attention and energy to sustain itself in a way that you might consider demonic. But I think that there are finer layers of awareness and consciousness that are actually being expanded, at least within some groups, by technologies that are showing us how our brains, and so reality, works and is maintained.

Might the Internet be developing a consciousness of its own?

Sure, you run across that idea all the time amongst hardcore information culture people. It's interesting because it's one of those moments where the more rational and technological you are, the more you end up thinking weirder thoughts, like: What is the mind after all? Merely the product of this meat machine. And while the Internet is nowhere near as sophisticated as the human brain, the idea that consciousness can emerge in a system of information processing of sufficient complexity is perfectly reasonable. Really it's one of those ideas that you can't avoid in this new world - and it's a very interesting one. I'm waiting for the day, and I have little doubt that it will come, where something happens and the word spreads, and there was some behaviour, some phenomenon, some event of this kind that occurs within the Internet, that nobody can explain. The feelings and reactions that people have to that will show the extent to which we've come to accept, and fear, that there's some kind of mind emerging there. Perhaps it's nothing more than a product of our mutual minds - you can speculate endlessly this way.

Do you see the development of a technological overmind?

I'm more interested in the what other people think about these things, but yes, I think the notion reveals our desire to feel connected on a global ecological level. To give the concept an active form, one that we can actually have a relationship with. Of course the whole world has always been interconnected, and everyone depends on the world around them, but we tend to feel that we're outside of that, that we're individual subjects, that we have control over nature. So it's almost like a return of the repressed - we want that back again, we need it back if we're going to deal with sociological and ecological problems. So this myth becomes a way of grappling with that.

Are we headed for an ontological crisis of some sort?

Yes, I think the developed world is due for some very weird reactionary forms. Enthusiastic schizo symptoms - an increasingly mean and selfish form of Darwinism, saying we're just selfish genes trying to compete in a hostile environment. Such old ideas we be recycled in even more pernicious forms. I think that we're going to find ourselves relating interpersonally with machines, whether or not they're actually alive or conscious in a way that scientists can debate about, we're going to be interacting with things that have those qualities.

That's going to change the way we're going to experience life and other people. We're already seeing this happening with kids' toys - Furbies, Tamagotchis etc. Toys and dolls have always been a kind of gateway the uncanny, they've always been important in literature and mysticism. They point to a certain fear and excitement, an ambiguity around the idea of artificial life. As those things become more interactive and alive, we're just opening up that world. I don't think we ever overcome some of our most profound childhood perceptions, so it won't surprise me if people who have grown up in that world become used to more sophisticated interfaces, that may have a banal purpose, but have a semblance of personality.

I think we'll come to meet future artificial intelligences in the personae of animated characters, on a pop culture level. These, and perhaps ultimately some kind of new technologically-based consciousness will become important ways in which many people figure out the world. And with them too will come fear - even the relatively unsophisticated Furbies caused all sorts of panics, about whether they were recording conversations. There's an element of animism in technology now that's going to increase - in scientists exploring artificial life, kids interacting with intelligent dolls, in the relationship between ecology, technology and the environment - it all comes down to a growing element of animism, throwing us back to being Palaeolithic man living in a world of animated nature.

Where does a new technology-based spirituality leave the disenfranchised?

What the many thousands of people who work, use and study the new technologies and the cultures around them know is so far removed from the proverbial half-traditional, half-globalised farmer in India, China or Africa. It's interesting to wonder how much we're being sucked into a certain hyper-technological millennial obsession that's actually totally detached from the life-experience of most of the people on this eExercising the ghosts in the machinearth. That it might end up having a religious dimension doesn't surprise me, that those with access to that edge might feel they have some kind of Gnostic insight, secret access that other people don't have. That this may become another dimension of social tension is extraordinary. It could also be very dangerous.

Techgnosis by Erik Davis is available from Serpent's Tail.