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

  RMN: Why did Regardie want this to be included?

  ROBERT: General Semantics is a system that is very useful in clarifying your thinking. If you understand the rules of General Semantics, you're more or less immune to most of the errors that are chronic at this stage of civilization. One of the rules of General Semantics is avoid the is of identity, which is a rule I just broke when I said "General Semantics is..." It's very hard to avoid the is of identity in speech. We all use it all the time. I'm getting pretty good at avoiding it in my writing. Whenever you're trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with my thinking? Why can't I get to the bottom of this? Why am I confused about this problem? Write it down and take out every "is" and reformulate it in some other way. You'll find that your thinking has been tremendously clarified.

  It's like the celebrated problem in quantum physics in the 1920's. The electron is a wave. The electron is a particle. Those two things contradict each other totally, which led to a lot of physicists saying that the universe doesn't make sense, the universe is irrational and so on. If you reformulate it without the "is" of identity, there's no paradox at all. The electron appears as a wave when we measure it in certain ways. The electron appears as a particle when we measure it in other ways. There's no contradiction. There are a lot of other ideas in general semantics that are equally useful in clarifying thought.

  DJB: That's one of the claims of the recent technology of brain machines. What experiences have you had with them, which ones do you find the most promising and what kind of potential do you think they hold for the future?

  ROBERT: The most outstanding experience I've had with a brain machine was with the first one, the Pulstar. I had an out-of-body experience which registered as flat brain waves on the EEG, and that fascinated me. That was the first objective sign I had ever seen that something was going on in out-of-body experiences besides heightened imagination. I don't see much difference between a lot of the brain machines around. Some are demonstrably inferior, and out of charity I won't mention their names. Some claim to be very superior to all the others, but as far as I can see, most of them function pretty much the same.

  At present, I'm more interested in the light and sound machines than I am in the electro-magnetic machines, because there is some legitimate cause for concern that sending electro-magnetism into your brain too often may not be good for you. The whole field is growing very fast. There's a bunch of tapes put out by Acoustic Brain Research in North Carolina. They use only sound, but they combine it with subliminals and Ericksonian hypnosis in a way that I find very effective. They're using sound at the same frequencies that you find in the electro-magnetic machines, or the light and sound machines.

  The Graham Potentializer does seem a little more powerful than any of the other machines, but I wouldn't guarantee it because I haven't had enough experience with it yet. What T want to see is more controlled, double-blind studies of these machines, because everybody has their own anecdotal impressions, but we don't really know yet which are the best. Which wave forms are the best? We don't know that yet. Why do some people respond better to one than to others? We don't know why. There's a lot mure to be learned and I'm very eager to see more research.

  RMN: Do you think that the use of brain machines requires an accompanying discipline?

  ROBERT: I suspect so. One manufacturer told me that the return rate is about fifteen percent. I think these machines are much easier than the biofeedback machines, but they still require some discipline. I think they require some previous experience with Yoga, or Zen, or some consciousness-altering work. You need some kind of previous experience or you just won't know how to use the machine. I don't think the machine really works as an entrainer unless you practice between sessions, trying to revive the state without the machine. A lot of people can't do that, they just assume that the machine will do all the work for them, which is kind of like thinking that you just get in the car and it'll take you where you want to go.

  DJB: The potential of nanotechnology seems far more vast. How do you think it's development will affect human consciousness in the future?

  ROBERT: I haven't thought much about that. That's an interesting question. It's going to change everything. Nanotechnology is a much bigger jump than anything else on the horizon. It's bigger than space colonization, bigger than longevity. It's a million times bigger than the industrial revolution. It's going to change things so much that I can't begin to conceive how much; but everything's going to get dirt cheap. The ozone layer will get repaired rapidly. We could create redwoods as fast and as many as we want, and then there's star-flight. I don't know; it's just a whole new ballgame, and it leads directly into immortalism.

  DJB: How about new ways to alter the brain?

  ROBERT: Oh, of course. Eric Drexler, in his book on the subject, talks about constructing micro-replicators that, if you let them loose in the body, they run all over the place, inspecting every cell. If it's not functioning properly they go back, get information from the main computer and repair it. You can obviously do the same thing with brain circuits. It'll probably replace psychiatry. Nanotechnology is so staggering, we can't think about it without hyperbole, and it's coming along rapidly. The Japanese are spending fantastic amounts on that kind of research.

  RMN: What do you think about the idea than many inventions are actually rediscoveries of technologies that have already existed in the past?

  ROBERT: That's always seemed very implausible to me. There are some cases--the steam engine was discovered in Greece and forgotten until Watt rediscovered it--but I doubt that there are many. Most things weren't discovered until they could be discovered, until there was the time-binding heritage, or until the information accumulation had reached the necessary level. This is why you have so many cases of parallel discovery in science, where in five years three people patent the same thing in different countries. As Charles Fort said, "It's steam engines when it comes steam engine time."

  RMN: What if there were times when the information had accumulated but not the political or social climate necessary to appreciate it? Libraries have been burned and knowledge chased underground by authoritarian forces.

  ROBERT: Well, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should remain silent."

  RMN: A lot of people feel that technology is at odds with their ecological thinking. What do you think is the evolving role of the science of Ecology.

  ROBERT: The first book I ever read on ecology was way back in the forties. It was called The Road to Survival. I've always been fascinated by ecology because I'm fascinated by whole systems. That's why Bucky Fuller fascinates me. He always starts with the biggest whole system and works his way down. I've written a lot of satirical things about pop ecology because I think a lot of people have got on the ecology bandwagon who don't know their ass from their elbow about science, and it's turned into a kind of late Christian heresy like Marxism. It's become a new blame game, where people go around laying guilt trips on other people. Guilt is very fashionable in Western civilization.

  Albert Ellis said the most popular game in Western civilization is finding and denouncing no-good shits. I found that so impressive I've incorporated it into a couple of my own books. Every generation picks out a group of no-good shits. In the Victorian age it was adolescent boys who masturbated, and now it's cigarette smokers. There's always got to be some no-good shits for people to denounce and persecute, and to the extent that ecology has degenerated into that, it arouses my satirical instinct. But of course the science of Ecology itself is tremendously important, and the more people who know about it, the better.

  RMN: The methods of science and art are beginning to achieve some wonderful things together. What do you think created such a chasm between the two disciplines in the first place, and why do you think they are now merging?

  ROBERT: Science and art. Now what created such a chasm between them? Why the hell did that happen? I think I'm going to go back and blame the Inquisition. Science had to fight an u
phill battle against the Inquisition and this created a historical hangover in which scientists had acute hostility to every form of mysticism, not just to the Catholic church which had been persecuting them. I think that rubs off onto art, because there's something mystical about art no matter how much you try to rationalize it. If you get a bunch of artists together talking about where they got their creativity from, they sound like a bunch of mystics.

  Then there was the rise of capitalism. I'm inclined to agree with Karl Marx about that, that every previous form of society has had different values, a hierarchy of values. Capitalism does tend to reduce everything to just one value--what can you sell it for? And as Oscar Wilde said, "All art is quite useless." The value of art depends on who's manipulating the marketplace at the time. It's spooky. Art is the Schrodinger's cat of economics.

  All of a sudden, an Andy Warhol is worth a million, and nobody knows how that happened. Then it's somebody else the next year. Picasso never paid for anything in the last twenty years of his life. He just wrote checks which never came back to his bank. People saved them because they knew that the signature was worth more than the sum of the check. They knew it would be worth even more in twenty years, and so on.

  Somebody asked a Zen master, "What's the most valuable thing in the world?" and he said, "The head of a dead cat." The querent asked "Why?" and the Zen master said, "Tell me it's exact value." That's a good exercise if you're into creative writing. Write a short story where the hero's life is saved by the fact that he could find the value of the head of a dead cat. It could happen. Everything has a fluctuating value.

  In capitalism, everything gets reduced to it's immediate cash value. Citizen Kane, to take one egregious example, is generally considered one of the best films ever made. It lost money in it's first year, so Orson Welles had extreme difficulty for the rest of his life getting enough money to make other movies. Yet Citizen Kane made more money than any other movie made in 1941, if you count up to the present, because it gets revived more than any other movie. But the bankers who own the studios aren't interested in profit in twenty years, they want profit next June. They want Indiana Jones not Citizen Kane.

  RMN: So, if the areas of science and art are merging it indicates a move away from the capitalist perspective.

  ROBERT: Yes. I think information theory has probably done a great deal to bring science and art back together again. Norbert Weiner invented the basic equation for information at the same time Claude Shannon did. That's another example of things happening when they're ready to happen. Weiner explained information by saying that a great poem carries more information than a political speech. Information is the unpredictable. As we come to realize the value of the unpredictable, the value of art has become clearer.

  You go through a museum and you look at a Leonardo, a Botticelli, a Rembrandt, a Van Gogh, a Cezanne, a Picasso, a Klee, a Jackson Pollock, and it's obvious the value of each of them is that they weren't copying one another. If Van Gogh were copying Rembrandt nobody would give a damn for Van Gogh. He had the chutzpah to paint his own vision. Somebody having their own vision instead of just repeating an earlier one in a different style--that's information. Information is the new and unpredictable, and information theory led to the computers which fascinate artists. Computers have opened up whole new areas of art.

  DJB: Information is the unpredictability of a signal, but it's not quite chaos or randomness. It carries a message.

  ROBERT: Yeah. When unpredictability gets too high, information turns into noise. That part of Shannon's theory involves very complicated mathematics and I'm not sure I fully understand it; I just more or less intuitively follow it. There has to be an information redundancy ratio where the highest grade of information is diluted with repetition.

  DJB: Because it's so unpredictable one can't relate it to anything.

  ROBERT: Yeah. Originality frequently looks like chaos until we learn how to deal with it, until we find the redundancy in it.

  DJB: Have you had any experiences with lucid or conscious dreaming?

  ROBERT: I've had a lot of lucid dreams, but I can't think of anything that's particularly worth discussing. I'd like to learn more about it. It happens spontaneously sometimes. I have a very rich hypnagogic and hypnopompic life, like Philip K. Dick. William Burroughs told me that his characters all manifest as voices in hypnopompic reverie before they have bodies, or names, or anything else. Robert Shea, an old friend of mine who's a scientific materialist of the most rigid sort, really blew my mind by admitting he hears his characters talking. I suspect all writers do. I think the difference between a writer and a channeler is that the channeler has found a way to make more money out of it than most writers ever do.

  DJB: Synchronicity is a major theme that runs through most, if not all, of your books. What model do you use at present for interpreting this mysterious phenomenon?

  ROBERT: I never have one model. I always have at least seven models for anything.

  DJB: Which one is your favorite?

  ROBERT: Bell's Theorem combined with an idea I got from Barbara Honegger, a parapsychologist who worked for Reagan. She wrote a book denouncing Reagan, Ollie North and the whole crowd, giving inside dirt about what she discovered while she was at the White House. Long before Barbara became a controversial political figure, she gave me the idea that the right brain is constantly trying to communicate with the left. If you don't listen to what it's trying to say, it gives you more and more vivid dreams and if you still won't listen, it leads to Freudian slips. If you still don't pay attention, the right brain will get you to the place in space-time where synchronicity will occur. Then the left brain has to pay attention. "Whaaaat!?"

  DJB: What do you think happens to consciousness after physical death?

  ROBERT: Somebody asked a Zen master, "What happens after death?" He replied, "I don't know." And the querent said, "But you're a Zen master!" He said, "Yes, but I'm not a dead Zen master." Somebody asked Master Eckart, the great German mystic, "Where do you think you'il go after death?" He said, "I don't plan to go anywhere." Those are the best answers I've heard so far. My hunch is that consciousness is a non-local function of the universe as a whole, and our brains are only local transceivers. As a matter of fact, it's a very strong hunch, but I'm not going to dogmatize about it.

  DJB: Could you share with us any experiences you might have had communicating with what you thought to be extraterrestrial or non-human entities?

  ROBERT: I've had a lot of experiences with what could be interpreted as extraterrestrial communications. They could also be interpreted as ESP, or as accessing parts of my brain that are normally not available, or as contacting a non-local consciousness that permeates everything. There are a lot of different models for this type of experience. I got fascinated by the extraterrestrial model at one stage in the early seventies, and still, every now and then, it makes more sense to me than any of the others.

  Other times the non-local model makes more sense, which is a development of Bell's Theorem. This was stated most clearly by Edwin Harris Walker in a paper called The Complete Quantum Anthropologist. He developed a mathematical theory of a non-local mind, to which we can gain access at times. It's a complete quantum mechanical, mathematical model to explain everything that happens in mystical and occult experience. That makes a great deal of sense to me, especially when I found that Joyce was using the same model in Finnigan 's Wake. I think it also underlies the I Ching. I explain this at length in my book Coincidance.

  DJB: How do you see consciousness evolving into the twenty-first century?

  ROBERT: It staggers my imagination. I get about as far as 2012 in my future projections, then I can't imagine beyond that. So much is going to change by then.

  DJB: What do you see coming along up to 2012?

  ROBERT: In Leary's terms, I think about one-third of the West now understands the neuro-somatic circuit, and some techniques for activating it. I think that's going to reach fifty to fifty-one percent pretty
soon--and that will be a major cultural change. I think more and more understanding of the neuro-genetic and meta-programming circuits are coming along.