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: Could you expand on that?

  RUPERT: The thing is that most of us aren't at all original. We mostly take on opinions from the available variety on the market, and when you come to the question of individual destiny, you know, there's several traditional theories. One is that when we die, that's it, everything just goes blank, and so the only purpose of life is to enjoy it while it's happening. There's nothing beyond. This is the classic materialist or Epicurean view of life.

  Then there are those who think that after death we go into a kind of underworld, and our destiny is to join the ancestors, and that basically we're just cycled back into a kind of eternally cycling pool of life. This is found in traditional societies where it's not believed that things change much over time, so the ancestors are constantly being recycled among the living, and they're a living force. But people don't have any individual destiny other than becoming merged with the ancestors. So that would be another option.

  Then there's the reincarnational theories, that you're reincarnated, and that the ultimate destiny is liberation from the wheels of reincarnation. The boddhisatva ideal in Buddhism is to become liberated and then help others to become liberated. But if you don't aspire towards that end, which is the ultimate human end, namely liberation, then through karmic activities and involvement with this life you'll simply be reborn and keep being reborn until you move towards this end or goal which may take many lifetimes to achieve.

  Then there's the view you find among Christians and Moslems, which is that there's another realm after this life in which you can undergo continued development or some further destiny, different destinies, depending on how you behave and what you want in this life. So, I mean there are many choices, and that's one of the areas in which choice or freedom comes in. We choose which of these kinds of destiny we want to align ourselves with. Or if we don't think about it or don't choose, then we just fall to the lowest common denominator.

  DJB: What types of research experiments do you think need to be done that would either prove or disprove the existence of morphic fields?

  RUPERT: Well, I outline quite a number of them in my books. There's a series of experiments that can be done in chemistry with crystals, in biochemistry with protein folding, in developmental biology with fruit fly development, in animal behavior with rats, in human behavior through studying rates of learning tasks that other people have learned before. So there's a whole range of tests, the details of which I suggest in my books, which could be done to test the theory in a variety of areas: chemistry, biology, behavioral science, psychology. Some of these tests are going on right now in some universities in Britain. There's a competition for tests being sponsored by the Institute of Noetic Sciences, tests to be done by students. The closing date's in 1990. So these are just some of the tests that I'd like to see done to test the theory.

  DJB: Could you tell us about any current projects on which you're working?

  RUPERT: Well, I'm doing two main things at present. One is that I'm helping to coordinate research on morphic resonance, organizing tests in the realms of chemistry and biology. And secondly I'm writing a book called The Rebirth of Nature. It's a book about the ways in which we're coming to see nature as alive, rather than inanimate, and how this has enormous implications: personally for people in their relationships with the world around them; collectively, through our collective relationship to nature; spiritually, the way this leads to a reframing or re-understanding of spiritual traditions, and politically through the Green Movement, which is now an influential political force, especially in Europe.

  Moving from the exploitive mechanistic attitude to a symbiotic attitude, we realize that we're not in charge of nature, we're not separate from nature and somehow running it. Rather we're part of ecosystems, and part of the world, and our continued existence depends on living harmoniously with the planet of which we're a part. It's an obvious thing, this Gaian perspective, but it hasn't been taken seriously in politics. But now it is being taken seriously, and so I would say the idea of nature as alive has become a very important force in our society through its political manifestations as well as its scientific ones.

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  Singing Songs of Ecstasy

  With Carolyn Mary Kleefeld

  Few people have devoted their lives to the creative arts as passionately as Carolyn Mary Kleefeld. For over thirty years, Carolyn’s inspiring books and mesmerizing art exhibits have helped to guide us out of our mental and emotional cul-de-sacs into sublime states of mystical transcendence. Carolyn is the author of ten books, which showcase her award-winning poetry, prose, paintings, and drawings in various complementary combinations.

  Fueled by a need for creative expression and a lifelong fascination with psychological and spiritual transformation, Carolyn is the author of five poetry books that explore these archetypal themes. Her first poetry collection, Climates of the Mind, received the rare honor of being translated into Braille by the Library of Congress, a dream realized for Carolyn. Climates, as well as a number of Carolyn’s other books, have been used as inspirational texts in universities and healing centers, and commencing in the Fall of 2010, will be featured, along with the writings of seven other acclaimed women authors, in a permanent course, “The Other Half of the Sky: Eight Women Writers,” to be taught at Swansea University in Wales. Carolyn’s poetry has been translated into Romanian, Arabic and Korean.

  The Alchemy of Possibility: Reinventing Your Personal Mythology, which combines Carolyn’s visual art, philosophical prose, and poetry, and Soul Seeds: Revelations and Drawings, a collection of Carolyn’s philosophical aphorisms, including thirteen pen and black inkdrawings, from which a chapter was nominated for the 2008 Pushcart Prize, both serve as oracular tools, much like the I Ching or the Tarot. Carolyn’s most recent poetry collection, Vagabond Dawns, from which a poem was nominated for the 2009 Pushcart Prize, includes a CD of Carolyn reading selected poems, with musical accompaniment by Barry and Shelley Phillips, who have played for Coleman Barks in his readings of Rumi.

  Carolyn has also created an extensive and diverse body of paintings and drawings, ranging in style from romantic figurative to abstract expressionism. Featured in books, magazines, and a line of fine art cards, her art can also be found in collections at the United Nations, as well as numerous museums, galleries, and hospitals throughout the world, and in the collections of Ted Turner and many others, including the estates of Laura Archera Huxley and Timothy Leary. In 2008, the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art at Pepperdine University exhibited a twenty-five year retrospective of Carolyn’s paintings and drawings, and published an exhibition catalog, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld: Visions from Big Sur, with art from the exhibit and a commentary by museum curator and director, Michael Zakian, Ph.D. Dr. Zakian also selected a number of Carolyn’s paintings for the museum’s permanent collection.

  Carolyn’s painting “Neuro-Erotic Blast-Off” appeared on the cover of my first book, Brainchild, and we have worked together on many creative projects over the years. I wrote supporting material for two of Carolyn’s books—The Alchemy of Possibility and Soul Seeds—and her painting “Dionysian Splendor” was featured on the cover of the MAPS Bulletin that I edited about psychedelics and technology in 2008. Her sublimely beautiful artwork also appears on the cover of the second edition of this book.

  On September 14, 1989, in her candlelit living room at around midnight, we interviewed Carolyn at her home in Big Sur, California, which is perched on the crest of a mountain cliff (or on the tip of the “dragon’s crown,” as she refers to it), high above the Pacific Ocean. Carolyn spoke to us about the relationship between art and nature, expanded awareness and creative expression, and personal and universal transformation. Musing with us about the living secrets of nature, she looks as though she danced right out of one of her own paintings. Her eyes and smile have a luminous mystery that is also present in much of
her work. She has a graceful and elegant manner about her, and one is easily enchanted by her poetic style of expression.

  --DJB

  DJB: What was it that originally inspired your interest in creative expression?

  CAROLYN: It is the discovery of my relationship with the universe, the unknown, that propels my translation. The spheres explored radiate a spectrum of seed-images. The wilderness of the unconscious is lush with the gems of infinity. The ancient codes lie in the seams between worlds. They only await the radiance of our conscious light to be illumined, recognized.

  For example, at seven years old, I wrote and illustrated my first book entitled, The Nanose. Many years later I found out that my experience then, which was triggered by dust particles dancing in a sunbeam flooding my bedroom window, actually had its inherent meaning in my poetic translation of it, rather than in the external event itself.

  Through my impression of the dancing dust particles I had my first recorded interaction with atomic life. My art was the bridge, translating localized conception (dust particles) into atomic theory. I thus experienced intimate dialogue with the vaster universe.

  Today my reading of science tells me that the Nanose in my childhood book were monads, or cellular/atomic entities that underlie our contemporary concepts of biology and physics. Even the title Nanose essentially is the Greek word "nano," meaning very small, as in the contemporary innovation called “nanotechnology.”

  So art acts as a prescient translation from the unconscious mind, revealing the codes--the consciousness of the underlying forces of nature.

  DJB: So, it was basically a need to express powerful experiences?

  CAROLYN: Well, it was my interaction with inner experience, rather than the exterior event itself, that propelled the creative expression.

  DJB: What do you think triggered these experiences?

  CAROLYN: It is in the dynamics of discovery that innovation occurs. I also am saying that I "respond" from the inside out. Rather than having the exterior world give me its reality, I interpret the reality from within myself.

  The experiences are woven and sculpted by my particular nervous system. Those certain experiences that need to be lived as part of one's evolvement are the ones to leave the deepest impressions. These impressions imprint their design within me and are the songs that emerge in my tides of creative expression.

  Also, it is out of the foundation of my own philosophical architecture that I germinate my art, with subsequent reflection, consciousness. Out of this constant processing within me, which is my life's work, my visible art reveals the seeds, buds, blossoms, fruits, the pollen of my interplay with the unknown. Even the mistakes that are birthed instigate further invention. The propulsion of innovation wings me beyond localized sight.

  This last idea intimates the possibilities of developing "laser sight" in the future. This means to inhabit a transparency of being that is so open a system as to let radiance flood it. The vision of our futures could possibly allow us to see through the density that now blocks our vision.

  From the architecture of a new way of perceiving, we will peer from the infinite spheres and see into the gossamer connections of our electric loom of being. Our cosmic eyes will see immediately into the true laws that be. Instantaneous perception will bloom in this smoldering symbiosis. Our cellular beings will manifest our consciousness in new sight and technologies of life.

  RMN: To what extent is your work autobiographical? How do you use it as a tool by which to access, understand, and integrate your inner processes?

  CAROLYN: Being an artist, I am the translator of my experience and thus am the author of my life. Since each of us experiences something in our own unique way, everything we create is essentially autobiographical. I am at once the tool, and the work. The universe is strumming the strings of my nervous system and I record the songs. After the songs are born, either in my paintings, drawings, prose, or poetry, I study and endlessly see different perspectives depending on my own state of being, or cycle of evolvement.

  Last Fall, I gave a reading in Monterey at the Cafe Portofino titled "Art as Evolution's Mirror"--my theme being that when artists are working directly from their emerging consciousness, their art is their most honest mirror. I mean, when the work comes from the inner development of the artist, rather than from imitation. Most artists are like engineers reproducing the familiar. This type of art, from the outside in, is not the same art as art that is being created as part of an emerging consciousness. If artists are not involved in the inner consciousness of their work, they can't learn by it.

  But each of us has a unique path, and none are to be judged. It's just that for me the conscious reflection is part of the fun of discovery, so I'm blessed with this tool which shines light on my work. Symbolic poetry, which is my bridge of translation, offers a kind of insight similar to the I Ching. It reflects back to the participant-viewer or reader. It is a kind of Rorschach, revealing from the truth of the unconscious one's inner shadow.

  This way of living requires constant preparation, keeping oneself clear enough to create the space to ride the constant waves of invention. The process is one of digestion, assimilation and integration of the universal flux.

  RMN: Do you think you benefited by having a formal art training, and how have you incorporated that?

  CAROLYN: In both my painting and poetry, I learned what didn't inspire me. It served to tell me I was to sculpt my own path, sing my own unique song. "Find your own voice," as Anais Nin wrote to me while I was writing Climates of the Mind.

  RMN: How easy do you find it to be objective about your own creations, and what do you think are the most important qualities that a good critic should have in order to evaluate something from a non-biased standpoint?

  CAROLYN: There is no such thing as being objective. Every observer has a particular set of prejudices and preferences, so it isn't possible for myself or a critic to be non-biased. The most essential quality for a critic to have is to be aware of this.

  DJB: When you're in need of inspiration, where do you turn?

  CAROLYN: It depends on what cycle or season I'm in. It could range from quiet meditation in a beautiful environment, to dashing somewhere for social stimulation. It's all in my relationship to the internal dialogue that the inspiration comes. So, I will draw to me that which mirrors me. The outside inspiration comes from a projection, which later I may say "inspired me," or was the "stimulus." Actually it's the interplay of myself with that which mirrors me. The company distributing my art is called "Atoms Mirror Atoms," which reflects this idea. We are nature's forces translating, in human terms, our existence. Art is my bridge of translation. That is why art is the "international language," as it has the myriad tongues of its artists' voices.

  DJB: Are there any particular authors or musicians that have inspired or influenced you?

  CAROLYN: Yes, my first mentor was Dr. Carl Faber, then came the writings of Anais Nin. Other influences include: Herman Hesse, Rainer Marie Rilke, William Blake, Vincent Van Gogh, Marc Chagall, Gustav Klimt, D. H. Lawrence, Baudelaire, Dylan Thomas, Benjamin de Casseres, Aldous Huxley, and Mozart. Then there is the current powerful influence of my friends and contemporaries.

  DJB: How do you experience and describe the stages of the creative process?

  CAROLYN: To begin with, creative expression requires an overflow of energy. It requires me to be a canvas or open page. I offer myself as the film for being photographed by the sublime. It is always out of a random spontaneity. That is why I have paints in different areas outside as well as in my living room. I carry a pen and paper on my hikes. I draw some of my best work while in a car. As to the length of time of the stages, it varies from very quickly to a few months, or longer. Sometimes there is a fermentation or incubation; other times, the flame seems to be ignited in the darkest night.

  DJB: How do you see consciousness evolving in the next century?

  CAROLYN: Progress is painfully slow. We are still existing on a biologic
al survival level. Nature will use us as its tools to continue its galactic body. For us to survive, we will have to refine ourselves as one with this endless expanding universe. Notice that the word "universe" means united verses. When in harmony, life is a symphony of united verses; when discordant, there is cacophony.

  RMN: How do you compare the creative process involved in writing poetry with that of painting?