California has long been famous for its diversity, its eccentricity, and its prophetic influence on popular culture. It’s also been an incredibly fertile climate for spiritual and religious movements, ranging from freshly invented sects and pastiche movements to venerable Eastern traditions that found their way to the wider world through California’s shores.

Marrying text and image, THE VISIONARY STATE presents a visually enchanting and intellectually compelling exploration of this spiritual renaissance and the “California consciousness” it represents.  Ranging from televangelism to Neopaganism, UFO cults to Zen bootcamps, acclaimed culture critic Erik Davis weaves together the threads of California’s religious history into a strange and vivid tapestry. Michael Rautner’s haunting, iconic photographs are seamlessly integrated throughout the volume, grounding its many stories in places, buildings, and sacred sites.

The experience of writing and photographing the destinations in this book proved to be a transcendent experience itself. When shooting this photo of Harbin Hot Springs (right), photographer Michael Rauner says, “Harbin, Esalen, and other clothing-optional hot springs in California's consciousness communities generally prohibit any photography near the bathing areas, for obvious reasons. … They made a rare exception to their ‘no photography’ rule for me. I have been going to Harbin for almost a decade, and knew I needed to shoot in the winter when the sun was low and the fig tree outside had no leaves to block the sun coming in through the stained glass. I worked alongside one of the Harbin residents who was maintaining the pools. We would close the pool for about five minutes, wait until the last person soaking left, then take photographs and open the pool again.”

When photographing Leonard Knight’s Salvation Mountain (right), Rauner was put to work. “I became an instant fan of Leonard, and stayed to work for him for a few days and slept on a stack of hay bales in the cathedral-like museum beneath his fantastic car tire trees. I kept wanting to work, he kept wanting me to take photographs and help spread the words of the mountain. Leonard climbs tall and rickety ladders with giant hay bales and incredibly heavy buckets of clay. He is very tough, but incredibly kind and the clay, he says, keeps his hands smooth.”

Explore these two chapters in this excerpt. 
http://www.chroniclebooks.com/visionarystate/

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