Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others…

by Brown, David Jay

  When Rebecca McClen Novick and I began working on this book the Web hadn’t even been developed yet, and today it’s a ubiquitous part of almost everyone’s lives. Kids born after 1990 have been raised on the Web, with virtually all of human knowledge available at their fingertips. The human genome has been decoded, and stem cell therapies are being developed that promise to dramatically extend the human life span. Cell phones, email, and video conferencing have completely changed the way that we communicate, and Google has changed the way that we find information. In fact, almost every day new scientific discoveries and technological developments are being made that dazzle our senses, improve our health, and stimulate our minds.

  What undreamed of new technology will soon be a ubiquitous part of everyone’s lives, we can only guess. With quantum computing, nanotechnology, advanced robotics and artificial intelligence emerging on the horizon, the future has never looked brighter--or bleaker, as the potential for self-destruction and ecological disaster is also accelerating at breakneck speeds. Never before in human history has there been so much cause for both hope and alarm. We are living in a world of increasing uncertainty, and each day brings new reason for both celebration and concern. The brighter the light grows, the darker the shadows become.

  In his book Critical Path, Buckminster Fuller points out that the time that it takes for human knowledge to double has been logarithmically decreasing since the beginning of recorded history. Time becomes compressed as the accumulation of information speeds up, and more and more happens in less and less time. According to technology expert Ray Kurzweil, this acceleration of accumulated knowledge is leading us into a technological “singularity,” where computer intelligence surpasses human intelligence, nanotechnology will make almost anything possible, and future predictions beyond that point become meaningless. This idea dovetails with late ethnobotanist Terence McKenna’s notion that the acceleration of novelty in human history is leading us to a mathematically-determined point of “infinite novelty,” where our imaginations will eventually become externalized, as our minds turn themselves inside out. That is, if we don’t destroy ourselves first.

  Understanding this rapid acceleration of technological progress, and the hopeful indications that consciousness itself is also evolving in more expanded, more intelligent, and more spiritual directions, was a large part of what motivated Rebecca and I to do this book and the interview collections that followed.

  How It All Began

  Terence McKenna was the first person that Rebecca and I interviewed for this book, as well as the first interview that either one of us ever did. It was 1988; I was twenty-six years old and Bek was twenty-four. We drove to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, where Terence was giving a workshop, and met him at The Big House. We went to the top floor of the building, and sat down on fluffy pillows, in a circle with several other people on the rug. When we began our interview, Terence lit up a big fat joint of strong sinsemilla, laced with generous amounts of hashish, and passed it around.

  It was a good thing that Rebecca and I were properly prepared for the interview, and had all of our questions written down on paper, because after just a few tokes off of Terence’s super-powered doobie, we were hardly able to speak, and just barely managed to read our questions off of the paper. Thank Heavens for tape recorders. Meanwhile, Terence, who smoked quite a bit more than we did, couldn’t possibly have been more verbally animated and eloquently articulate. Terence was a master of language--the most compelling storyteller that I ever met--and cannabis seemed to fuel his intellect and imagination.

  And so began the journey that became this book, which started my interview career. After Mavericks of the Mind was published, I completed another book of interviews with Rebecca--Voices from the Edge (Crossing Press, 1995)--and then went on to do two more collections of interviews on my own--Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Mavericks of Medicine (Smart Publications, 2006). Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune of being able to interview some of the most brilliant and accomplished maverick thinkers on the planet--Jerry Garcia, Noam Chomsky, George Carlin, Albert Hofmann, Kary Mullis, Edgar Mitchell, and Jack Kevorkian, to name a few. I’m currently working on a new collection of interviews, largely about psychedelics, which is almost complete--as well as a book about what I’ve learned from doing over twenty years of interviews and thirty years of psychedelic exploration.

  Meanwhile, Rebecca went on to write Fundamentals of Tibetan Buddhism (Crossing Press, 1999), and Portraits of Tibetan Buddhist Masters (University of California Press, 2005). She also co-created the heart-wrenching documentary film Strange Spirit: One Country’s Occupation, which is about the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, India, where she now lives and writes for The Huffington Post.

  Asking the Big Questions

  One of the pioneering interview styles that Rebecca and I helped to develop--besides working as a man/woman team--was to ask the big philosophical questions, and interact with all these brilliant iconic geniuses as though we were one of them. This is not to say that we were actually at their level of super-cognitive capacity, but for the sake of doing this book, we audaciously assumed that we were their intellectual equals.

  In Magical Blend magazine Jerry Snider described our interview work like this, “What sets the work of this gifted team of interviewers apart from the crowd is...the unique alchemy of their own interaction...As interviewers, Brown and Novick are often as radical as their subjects. Rather than just ask questions, they insert their own favorite causes into the interview, often steering their subjects into areas they have not previously ventured. Part of the joy...is watching the team of Novick and Brown volley their own ideas and insights off their larger-than-life subjects, and seeing which ideas land where. This provides an entertaining continuity to an otherwise diverse group of interviews.”

  We were wild kids on an incredible adventure. Although we didn’t get stoned with all our interviewees, we did visit and spend time with all of them--after carefully doing our homework, and studying a good portion of their work--so that we could gain their trust, and then intelligently engage them in the fringes of far-out thought. Rebecca and I helped to pioneer this “gonzo” interviewing style, and we asked the questions that nobody else was asking in interviews--philosophical questions that emerged from our late-night, cannabis-fueled discussions about the nature of reality, and from our occasional magic mushroom trips at Rebecca's off-the-grid cabin, nestled in a magical secluded mountain area south of Santa Cruz known as Last Chance Road.

  We were surprised that nobody had really queried people about these questions in interviews before, and we were largely interested in the questions that were emerging from our psychedelic explorations together: How did consciousness arise? What happens to consciousness after death? How will humans evolve in the future? What is the nature of God? What inspires creativity? How is technology effecting human evolution and human consciousness? These were the questions that we asked everyone that we interviewed, combined with personal questions about their work, and questions about one another’s work.

  One of the key things that Rebecca and I set out to do with these interviews was to foster interaction and exchange between our interviewees, so as to create a more inclusive perspective, that combined their viewpoints into a larger whole. This was the single most important goal of this book, and we tried to synergize what we believed were the most important messages emerging on the planet--because we wanted to help try and save the world.

  Conversations for the New Millennium

  The people that we chose to interview for Mavericks of the Mind, as well as the companion volume Voices from the Edge, and the two additional interview books that I did on my own--Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse and Mavericks of Medicine--are all groundbreaking artists and scientists, writers and thinkers, who helped pave the way toward exciting new paradigms with fresh revolutionary perspectives.

  Although they h
ave all made incredible contributions as individuals, collectively they achieve something even greater--a synergistic perspective that transcends their personal limitations. Mavericks of the Mind offers a glimpse into this greater wholeness by linking together ideas and concepts of those interviewed. This interconnecting thread that runs through the interviews demonstrates that the visions expressed--which stem from divergent points of view--are extremely complementary with one another, and this provides us with tremendous inspiration and hope.

  Since the initial publication of this book, technological advancement has progressed to the point where William Gibson’s science fiction vision of cyberspace--a globally-linked, computer-generated electronic world--has become an everyday actuality for many people. With the growth and development of the Web, the late media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s concept of a global village has become a pulsing planetary reality.

  The interviews in this book are more relevant today than they were when the book was originally published, and I think that they are still ahead of their time. Psychologists have recognized that a common problem in predicting future human progress is that people tend to overestimate change in the short-term (especially when they’re younger), and underestimate change in the long-term (as they grow older). But what is considered “long-term” grows shorter and shorter every year.

  Who would have guessed just thirty years ago during the Cold War that, not only would the Berlin Wall crumble and the rigid Soviet and Eastern-Bloc nations dissolve, but that--via the Internet--a truly global, electronically-linked community would emerge that knows no national boundaries? It may be that these nations actually collapsed partially as a result of the Internet and other communication technologies, which allowed uncensorable dogma-disrupting information to flow freely through their “Iron Curtains.” China, the Arab nations, and other countries with xenophobic governments have been desperately trying to censor this global information flow from their populations with less and less success.

  I suspect that conceptual boundaries between people will continue to dissolve, and more sophisticated and more sustainable cultural systems will develop before we collapse into chaos. The goal of our interviews was to help catalyze this process, to bring together the most important people, ideas, and resources regarding the evolution and expansion of consciousness-- not only for the sake of organizational convenience, but also to help form an integrative perspective that transcends that of each individual.

  Pathways to New Possibilities

  Doing this book lead to a series of public events and fascinating projects. Rebecca and I hosted a series of lively roundtable discussions, where we brought together some of the people from this book and had them debate various philosophical topics in front of an audience. This style of roundtable table discussion that Rebecca and I utilized, where various experts from different disciplines debated controversial topics, was later popularized by Bill Maher. Being on stage with Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Robert Anton Wilson, and other heroes from my youth was an incredible honor and a tremendous amount of fun. These discussions--staged at UCLA and the University of California, Santa Cruz--were unusually prophetic, and have tremendous relevance to the circumstances of the world today. Excerpts from these historic events are included in this edition of the book.

  The interviews from Mavericks of the Mind have been translated into Japanese, Czechoslovakian, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, and German. An award-winning Web site (www.mavericksofthemind.com) was created out of the book by Joseph Wouk--son of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Herman Wouk, and author of Google LDN. Joe designed the Mavericks of the Mind Web site after reading the book, and then relocating himself and his family from Israel to Northern California, in order to be closer to the community of people that Rebecca and I interviewed.

  My interview with British biologist Rupert Sheldrake in this book lead to years of fruitful collaboration. I worked closely with him for three years, doing the California-based research for two of his books--Dogs That Know When Their Owners are Coming Home and The Sense of Being Stared At--and we coauthored three scientific papers together. The second book of interviews that Rebecca and I did, Voices from the Edge, lead to my collaboration with ex-porn star Annie Sprinkle, and we taught a series of workshops together about the science of combining sex and drugs.

  In addition to including the UCLA and UCSC roundtable discussions, this edition of the book also contains new photos, new artwork by Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, an additional interview with Timothy Leary, and links to internet resources so that one can learn more about the interviewees, and new directions for human evolution.

  The Future Evolution of the Human Species

  Ten thousand years ago, on the southern tip of Africa there lived a species of human-like primates that were about our size in height, only their heads were much larger and their faces were much smaller. They possessed brains that were around thirty to thirty-five percent larger than human brains--with a frontal cortex approximately fifty-five percent larger--and faces that were around a fifth smaller. They were more highly evolved than us in the sense that, compared to us, they were more neotenous.

  The term “neoteny” refers to the mechanism in evolution whereby a new organism evolves from an existing species by retaining juvenile or larval characteristics into adulthood. The result is a sexually mature organism with juvenile appearance that goes on to become a new species. Neoteny--also know as “pedomorphosis”--can be seen in many animals, and it is a common occurrence in the domestication of animals as pets. This is why, for example, dogs resemble juvenile wolves. According to evolutionary biologists, vertebrates evolved in this way from invertebrates, and amphibians in this manner from fish. Humans tend to resemble young, relatively hairless apes. With this evolutionary trend in mind, isn’t it interesting that many of the descriptions of extraterrestrials--in both the alien abduction phenomenon and in science fiction films--often resemble young human children, or even human embryos?

  Advanced extraterrestrials are often envisioned in science fiction, and reported in alien encounters, as having unusually large heads, big eyes, rudimentary noses, and small faces. These descriptions almost sound as if they could be in an intuition about ourselves in the future--or, perhaps, a memory from our past. The faces of these creatures bare an uncanny resemblance to those of a species that has already evolved and perished (or vanished) on this planet. We have abundant fossil evidence that almost exactly this type of advanced primate lived in a region in South Africa known as “Boskop” between 30,000 and 10,000 years ago.

  The “Boskops,” or Homo capensis as they are known in anthropology, had much bigger brains than we do, and they were less ape-like than we are. According to neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger in their book Big Brain, the Boskops likely had cognitive abilities that far outperformed our own. They probably had much greater intelligence than us, and because their frontal cortex was so large, they were also probably smarter than us in precisely those areas that we we generally consider unique to human beings. They likely had a highly developed language, more advanced intellectual abilities, and a more sophisticated imagination. Their potential for science and art must have been staggeringly enormous, and one can only wonder what kind of spectacular mental abilities their superior brains were capable of.

  Physically, the Boskops looked very different than us. An adult human face covers three/fifths of a human head. The face of a Boskop, with it’s large cranium, had a face with very large eyes that covered only two/fifths of its head, much like that of a three or four year old human child. Although the Boskops were probably much more intelligent than the human species, they’re gone, and no one knows what happened to them. They’re considered a scientific anomaly, like crop circles and psychic phenomena, and are rarely discussed by anthropologists. Did savage humans--our barbaric ancestors--slaughter their more peaceful, big-brained, doe-eyed cousins? Or did these super-brained geniuses evolve beyond us and just take off and leave? I like to think that they
escaped into outer space, or a higher dimension, but I realize that the more likely explanation is that we drove them into extinction.

  Wherever they are, I miss them. I wish we had them here to help guide us through our present planetary crisis. I wish that Rebecca and I had been able to interview a member of the Boskop species for this book. Their absence, perhaps, serves as a warning. Our civilization is much more fragile than it often appears, and we might not be as smart as we think, so these are crucial times where integrated intelligence and new ideas are greatly needed.

  Ever Onward and Upward into the Great Beyond

  After Mavericks of the Mind was published, Rebecca and I spoke with Timothy Leary again before he died, and that interview is also included in this edition of the book. On his deathbed he told us with a smile that he was “thrilled and ecstatic” to be entering the mystery of death. Timothy died in 1996. Then Allen Ginsberg passed on in 1997. Nina Graboi followed in 1999. Terence McKenna in 2000. Oscar Janiger and John Lilly in 2001. And Robert Anton Wilson and Laura Huxley in 2007. We miss these brilliant, brave, and bold mavericks who have passed on, but rejoice in knowing that their courageous messages of hope, and their optimistic visions of a better world, continue to live on.